Nas redes dos donos da brincadeira: um estudo do Mamulengo da Zona da Mata pernambucana.

Abstract

The Mamulengo from the Zona da Mata, state of Pernambuco, Brazil, is characterized by the interaction between the audience and puppets controlled by puppeteers, that stand inside a structure called torda, that functions as a kind of frame to the performance. The puppets present passagens, short stories accompanied by a group of musicians, with the intervention of the Mateus, a character that acts as a mediator, articulating the marionettes’ lines with audience interventions. Amongst the different practitioners, there is the Mamulengo's owner, who maintains the structure of the performance, being responsible for conducting and organizing the função (the Mamulengo gathering) and paying the different performers involved in the play. The main objective of this research was to comprehend the dynamics underlying network interactions in the social production and reproduction of the Mamulengo from the Zona da Mata pernambucana, choosing, as a critical focus, the perceptions of the Mamulengo practitioners, specially the point of view of the Mamulengo owners. The investigation was conducted taking into account three different and complementary points of observation, that gave us support in the structuring of field work. A first focus of research were the trajectories of eight different Mamulengo owners. The analysis, based in an actor oriented perspective, was an attempt to recover the processes of socialization, learning and legitimation of these practitioners in the world of the Mamulengo. A second line of investigation were the Mamulengo presentations, enacted in differente contexts. Chapter II presents the ethnographic description of three different funções organized in distinct circuits of presentation of the Mamulengo. The interfaces established between the Mamulengo and the universe identified by the practitioners as the “culture” (cultura) are finally discussed in Chapter III. What is “culture” for the mamulengueiros? What is at stake when they speak about “culture”? The goal, here, is to comprehend the relations constructed by the Mamulengo owners with different mediators (cultural producers, public policy managers, researchers and others) and with different circuits of presentation, identified by them, in the interviews, as pertaining to the “world of culture”.