hometown. I detail the circumstances in which Cordel’s project strives to appear restorative only from a distance, so that it won’t fall from the good graces of certain sponsors.
On first glance Coco Raízes and other samba de coco performers work within the restorative mode. Closer scrutiny, however, raises questions regarding their status as well: How is a restorative project unsettled when musicians from previously excluded groups such as Afro-Brazilians seek social recognition through claims to local tradition that reiterate nostalgic narratives? The story told by samba de coco during the São João Festival is a readymade tale of rural homecoming. It is restorative and government-friendly, pitched in a register of premodern innocence. Yet what distinguishes it is that these particular Afro-Brazilian storytellers most likely wouldn’t have had a space to tell it in the sertão only decades before.
Popular Music and Citizenship
Lula Calixto once said that being valued as an artist made him feel like a citizen. He was pointing out that music was a means for him to become socially audible within his city and in Brazil as a whole. Lula made this comment in the late 1990s, at a moment of redemocratization and the expansion of citizenship in Brazil following more than two decades of military dictatorship. It was also during this time that the particular nostalgias evoked by Coco Raízes and Cordel performances began to resonate with a broader public. Popular music in Brazil is located at the center of these new tensions, just as it was located at the center of older narratives of racial and cultural mixture, civility, and nationalism that make up the durable samba paradigm. Social inequality persists in the postdictatorship period, but ideologies of universal inclusion, such as the notion of racial democracy, no longer succeed in blurring this inequality. For many insurgent citizens, racial democracy, carnaval, and samba have become tainted by a veneer of easy civility and accommodation to extreme social inequality, an acceptance of racial and class ambiguity that undermines taking a stand in defense of one’s rights.
This questioning of civility (and the rhetoric of the “cordial Brazilian”) is being worked out through music. As samba remains entangled with the universalist rhetoric of racial democracy, alternatives such as rap, funk, rock, and heavy metal have flourished in Brazil since the 1980s. These more aggressive musical aesthetics have come to represent an opting-out of the samba paradigm in favor of more polarized views of race, social class, and Brazilian-ness. By the mid- to late 1990s, when Cordel and Coco Raízes emerged, an impulse to reassess “deep, authentic” Brazil followed in the wake of democratization. Both bands can be seen as part of this continued reassessment of the samba paradigm, while at the same time insisting that this reworking can take place without needing to reject national and regional musical and poetic reserves outright in favor of global genres of popular music.
Many Brazilians in urban favela shantytowns and rural encampments practice what Holston (2008) terms “autoconstruction,” meaning that they build their own shelter brick by brick as they can afford it. Meanwhile, urban elites and much of the middle class have moved into fortified highrise buildings that “stigmatize, control, and exclude those who had just forced their recognition as citizens” (ibid., 281). The appeal to coastal festivalgoers of Arcoverde as a small-town getaway where they can dance samba de coco is located within this dynamic of shantytown autoconstruction and high-rise fortification. The friendly favela light of the Alto do Cruzeiro located in the sertão light of Arcoverde concretizes visitors’ desire to return not only to an idealized rural point of origin, but also to an imagined moment of civility and easy socializing across racial and class lines that is perceived to have been lost in large cities in recent decades.
Coco Raízes occupy the older homecoming narrative of São João, playing music that, despite the “samba” in samba de coco, is more aggressively stomped than gracefully swung. The group pays tribute to the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, MST) in its lyrics, while performing a genre that embodies, through dance, autoconstruction—in that stomping was necessary, the story goes, to tamp the dirt floor down after the completion of a thatched-roof mud house. In the performances of Arcoverde’s musicians, the small city has become not an escape from a cycle of autoconstruction and fortification, but rather a setting where the meanings of this dynamic are being worked out and stomped upon.
Intangible Heritage
In 2003 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) formulated a new category for preservation efforts called “intangible heritage.” The performances of the particular samba de coco musicians in this book don’t officially qualify as “intangible cultural heritage of humanity,” although the designation was given to comparable musicians playing samba de roda in nearby Bahia. Nonetheless, the story of samba de coco plays out in the shadow of this reworking of cultural preservation on the level of global metacultural decision making. The development of the new category was one of many acts that contributed to the broader contemporary shift in how folklore and heritage are now understood.
Intangible heritage draws from previous efforts to protect tangible heritage and natural heritage. Tangible heritage is cultural and nonliving; natural heritage is natural and living. Intangible heritage is cultural, like a museum artifact, but unlike tangible heritage, it is living, like a forest. The remolding of folklore into intangible heritage has led to preservation efforts with a more holistic focus, not just on the “masterpiece,” but on the “master” and his or her practices and surroundings. Yet this effort to move beyond the artifact and the museum and into the realm of protecting ephemeral cultural practices is proving to be a delicate business. It risks treating people as things to exhibit or as animals and tracts of land to conserve. Use of the terminology “carriers,” “bearers,” and “transmitters” of tradition risks implying that people thought to possess intangible heritage are passive vessels or objects rather than strategic actors in heritage productions (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2004, 58).
In this book I detail how actors in heritage productions adopt stances on and off the stage with the aim of asserting themselves as neither passive vessels nor objects. My aim is to scrape the folkloric patina off a Brazilian hinterland and examine the tangle of interests that strategically use the past, including institutions fueled by cultural nationalism, industries promoting tourism and entertainment, and the musicians themselves. This ethnographic case study begins around 1995, when musicians performing marginal-turned-traditional samba de coco gained increased access to festival stages and recording studios. Studio recordings have been turning musical practices into tangible goods ever since the advent of the phonograph. More recently, however, a tourist experience resembling the classic paradigm of ethnographic fieldwork has emerged as well. Enterprising musicians marked as culture bearers are dramatizing short-term encounters with weekend visitors. This experiential folkloric touristic production exposes the complications of preserving heritage as it creates opportunities for an outmoded genre of music to live again as a representation of itself (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998, 7).
Contemporary musicians living on the route of the 1938 Mission of Folkloric Research found that performing within genres steeped in nostalgia limited how they were received by audiences, even as it provided them with professional opportunities. Whether presenting themselves as culture bearers performing folklore or as pop innovators experimenting with a rooted cosmopolitan sound, they faced similar challenges. On both sides of a dynamic folk-pop boundary, musicians in Arcoverde reworked tradition to combat being discursively distanced from the Brazilian “here and now.” Genres of music, poetry, and theater overlapped within cultural fields, producing a sense of contemporary northeastern-ness. As Arcoverde’s musicians sought broader audiences, they attempted to rewrite the often unspoken rules underlying particular genres, such as, in this case, música de raiz (roots music), mangue beat (Recife-based mutationist pop music), and the broader música regional (regional music). Sometimes this engagement with genre involved downplaying the intertextual gaps or discrepancies between particular performances and their antecedents, and at other times these gaps were emphasized
