“Papagaio velho não pega língua mais, não”: estuciando o jeito de falar e de fazer, o jeito de ser, no quilombo Córrego do Narciso do Meio, Vale do Jequitinhonha (MG)

Abstract

Córrego do Narciso is a rural quilombola community near Araçuaí, in the semiarid north-eastern Minas Gerais, in the Jequitinhonha Valley. In face a historical effacement of the term quilombo in the region, a quilombola reidentification by subjects occurred since 2009. If attention is also drawn to the institutional dimensions of struggles for example for water, underlying or subterranean dimensions appear in view of the apprehension of components of the collective memory in the community, in which water and the dimensions of life, death and enchantment are merged. Categories thus merged and imbricated, and mobilized in a mobile and contingent manner, are understood more in terms of what Stuart Hall understands as an articulation, open and in movement - in what also allows us to think identifications, in their fluidity and openness -, than from a reading of habitus which may conduce to a closing of identities. If there are differences between both interpretations or comprehensions, there are nonetheless approximations, as for instance in the materialist presupposition. A descentering of subjects, which appears empirically in mediated and collective practices and conceptions of agency, is propitiated, at a theoretical level, by that concept of articulation, conferring more lightness - and less substance - to the social tissue. It is thus that are interlaced, in the text, porous and consubstantial categories of experience, such as past, present and future, race, gender, class and generation, campesinity, amerindian and negro-banto, city and roça (country), water, earth and food, life and death, moral, ancestrality and matrifocality. As an objective and a leading thread, the comprehension of subjects, in their processuality of des-re-identifications, is taken as a temporary heuristic device, which also, along the research, gives rise to a certain rarefaction of the research object, now intermingled with those other and also contingent categories. Adopting methodologies of oral history, of memory apprehension, the making of drawings and maps (on paper and on earth) by subjects of different generations, the course through memory sites and the observation and analysis of ethnographic situations, the question of the subject is taken in a sufficiently open manner as to allow its unfolding and ramification in that multiplicity of questions and themes. The leading thread of the text is, therefore, the stories, memories, accounts, narratives and activities that I could listen, observe and register of inhabitants of Córrego Narciso, apprehended in a non-restrictive and non-linear manner. Estuciar, a term which composes an expanded repertoire of a rural dialect specific to the region, as an inflexion of astuciar (cunning, astuteness, artfulness), designates that vitality of a real-ficcional production-invention of the everyday practices and knowledge in Córrego Narciso. An ambivalence of de-materialization or de-structuration characterizes fantastic and enchantment components of practices directly referred to life - such as birth at home, the cultivation of manioc, the treatment of diseases and language -, in which there would be a suspension of material-normative constrainments. Estuciar denotes these experimentations, representations, improvisations and inventivities in the forms of speaking, of doing and of identifying. The quilombola reidentification is accepted and assumed, sometimes firmly, but in the subjects own terms, in such a way that maintains components of a being that is prior to that new identification, in a way in which the subjects avoid being deceived or misled, maintaining their speech forms. There is not an unconditional subscription to the institutional and instrumental logics of the should-be, but a recognition signified also as want-te-be and can-be. Thence the new political and hybrid subject that is forged is not that new. Such reidentifications are encompassed in a multiplicity of other identifications.