Alimentação e patrimônio imaterial da humanidade: diálogos a partir do cuscuz no Brasil

Abstract

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary research with a qualitative approach, an exploratory process, methodologically anchored in bibliographic and documentary research that observes the traces of couscous - steamed wheat semolina - from the transit of Maghrebians/Africans to the Iberian Peninsula, until the arrival of Portuguese colonizers in Pindorama (Land of Palm Trees). From this, it problematizes couscous as Intangible Heritage of Humanity and the relationship of belonging of Brazilian cuscuz, based on cassava and corn, to this heritage based on the history of food in Brazil (Braga, 2024; Cascudo, 2011; Castro, 2022). To this end, we start from contracolonial ethical and political exercises (Confluências Afroindigenas, 2020; Santos, 2020; 2023), invoking an authorial place of embodied researcher (Messeder, 2018; 2020a; 2020b), articulated with the decolonial political-academic project (Bernardino-Costa; Grosfoguel; Maldonado-Torres, 2019). These contracolonial exercises demand extra-academic attitudes of involvement with the struggles for the defense of seeds, lands and agrarian reform, in order to preserve our food culture. Finally, we realize that cuscuz made from cassava or corn, with its origins in African/Maghrebian culinary traditions and indigenous/Pindoramic agricultural traditions, represents a fruitful starting point for exploring issues of identities, memories and resistance, as well as affirming them.