A festa e a santa: ritual religioso e festivo no município de Aurilândia, Goiás

Abstract

The present study has as main objective to investigate how the Party in Praise of Santa Luzia, held annually in the municipality of Aurilândia, a small town in the interior of Goiás, demonstrates the models of life and social organization of this community, insofar as, when observing the the way in which religiosity guides social practices, the referred party evokes the history of the place, triggers collective memory and promotes a feeling of abundance in the face of scarcity, putting people, things, narratives and the most diverse living aspects in motion. To achieve the proposed objective, we conducted a field research, using the 2018 edition of the Santa Luzia Festival as a corpus. In the course of its realization, we observed that the history of the Festa da Santa and the history of the place intertwine, forming a traditional celebration of the municipality of Aurilândia. The Feast and the Santa take on important roles in the community's imagination, since, from it, it is possible to formulate an interpretation about the community relations of solidarity, unity, as well as the tensions and asymmetries that it highlights. During the Feast of Santa Luzia, in 2018, we observed that it is configured as a memory mechanism, in which the abundance, previously experienced in the period of gold and diamond mining, takes on a symbolic meaning against the scarcity of resources, people, things and mobility. At the same time, the Festival modifies the physiognomy of the place beyond the symbolic meaning, as it also consists of a device for recreation, fun, reunions, reactivation of the economic aspect, among others. In short, the cult of Santa Luzia, in Aurilândia, unfolds in a cult of the community, in which the values circumscribed in the social ethos, triggered by the collective memory in the religious environment, are transformed into elements of collective struggle against scarcity and, for turn, against oblivion. In other words, the Festa de Santa Luzia is transformed into a social representation of the Aurilãndia community, triggering a pro-life policy, which moves a pulsating and abundant city as the establishment of a production of meaning in the “being”. Such a mechanism crosses the past and replaces it in the present, producing a temporal displacement, introducing the past into the present and the present structured from the horizon of memory. Aurilãndia translates, during the Festival, the historical narratives within the sacred environment, sacralizes the events and makes them loaded with meaning by activating the fundamental bases on which such community was constituted.