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ОглавлениеIntroduction
In 1938, when Dona Senhorinha Freire Barbosa was eighteen years old, the Mission of Folkloric Research visited her hometown of Tacaratu, Pernambuco, as part of a trek through Northeast Brazil to record folk music. Recordings of Dona Senhorinha—informant 490—contributed to a project that profoundly shaped notions of Brazilian musical patrimony. The Mission of Folkloric Research, envisioned by the celebrated modernist writer and musicologist Mário de Andrade, recorded in several interior towns in the states of Pernambuco and Paraíba, including Tacaratu, Patos, Pombal, and Arcoverde, the epicenter of the research reported in this volume.
The team of recordists brought the discs from the rural interior of the Northeast to an archive in the more industrialized Southeast, where scholars and musicians defined Brazilian musical folklore as they compiled the tracks. Composers and performers treated the melodies from Mário de Andrade’s expeditions as “raw materials,” forging a new framework of musical Brazilian-ness and contributing to the rise of samba as a national emblem. The combination of Luso- and Afro-Brazilian musical sensibilities came to celebrate cultural and racial mixture as a source of Brazilian national uniqueness. Andrade’s itineraries reinforced this particular musical mapping of culture. Within the story of samba, the Northeast serves a reservoir of tradition, while Rio de Janeiro in the Southeast serves as the site where the genre later coalesced.
The Brazilian ethnomusicologist Carlos Sandroni was pleased to find informant 490 still alive and well when his recording project retraced the route of the Mission of Folkloric Research sixty-five years later, in 2003. None of those who were recorded in 1938 had been granted access to the recordings, which had remained in São Paulo ever since the expedition returned there. His video camera rolling, Sandroni placed bulky headphones on the elderly woman’s head. Her eyes lit up as she heard the recording of her voice for the first time. Dona Senhorinha became nostalgic as she listened to the song. She was delighted to recognize herself and began to sing along, reminiscing about another singer on the recording, whose voice she recognized. After the song finished playing she began to remember other songs from her childhood. She jumped up and, despite her frail frame, managed to demonstrate the coco dance step.
The showing of the video of Dona Senhorinha was part of a weeklong meeting I attended in 2003 that gathered members and friends of Associação Respeita Januário, a nonprofit organization that Sandroni founded to support traditional musicians in the region. Dona Senhorinha and others from Tacaratu were there to watch the video of her being reunited with the sound of her youthful voice. Their presence changed the emotional tenor of the event. The intellectual register of researchers’ progress reports was eclipsed by the strong response from the Tacaratuenses upon hearing old melodies.
Dona Senhorinha’s emotional response to the recordings was to be expected. She had moved from rural Tacaratu to the capital city of Recife and thus was remembering both the place where she used to live and the era. Rural-urban migration plays a part in painting a folkloric patina on rural areas and smaller, interior towns and cities. Thus, musical fieldworkers travel to the hinterlands, where they believe traditions still endure that have faded in more urban, industrialized areas. In Brazil, with its uneven economic development, recording projects such as the Mission of Folkloric Research have represented entire regions nostalgically as repositories of heritage and folklore.
The northeastern interior region in particular has suffered extreme poverty, drought, and massive outflows of rural-urban migration in search of economic opportunities on the coast and in the Southeast. The region has been represented in popular music, literature, and film not only as a nostalgic space, but also as a space of rebellion and millenarianism, where violent bandits are celebrated for their vigilantism and maverick Catholic mystics preach the apocalypse.
Brazilians use the word saudade to express the multiple registers of nostalgia: individual and collective, universal and uniquely Brazilian. Saudade is not simply a straightforward translation of the word “nostalgia,” but rather an expression of a deep longing or sense of loss that has come to be conceived as a generalized affect of Brazilian-ness. The bittersweet yearning of saudade, described by Joaquim Nabuco as “remembrance, love, grief and longing” all at once, is often understood to be ever present in Brazilian life. The anthropologist Roberto da Matta evocatively describes saudade as “an enchanted temporality that contaminates” (1993, 34).
Cultural Rescue in Arcoverde, Pernambuco
After the screening of the video of Dona Senhorinha, researchers gave a presentation on musicians in Arcoverde, Pernambuco, a small commercial city on the edge of the desertlike sertão interior of the state. The poet, historian, and literary scholar Micheliny Verunschk and the ethnomusicologist Cristina Barbosa described how new notions of citizenship, heritage, and tourism were scraping against older notions of folklore.
Micheliny explained that when she grew up in Arcoverde in the 1980s, it was widely considered “a place without history, without memory, and without culture,” a sentiment shared throughout Brazil during the fits and starts of redemocratization during the transition out of decades of military dictatorship. She expressed a desire to discover an Arcoverde where she would want to raise her own children someday. In what she described as an “active reconquest of identity,” Micheliny learned about the history of samba de coco from Lula Calixto, a singer and street vendor widely known as a town eccentric. Micheliny described Lula as a link to an older generation of samba de coco musicians. He sold coconut candy on the streets of Arcoverde and offered to teach samba de coco to anyone who would stop and listen. He tirelessly sought out sympathetic teachers, who allowed him to teach in elementary schools. Lula considered this his calling.
Coco is a style of music and dance principally associated with poor Afro-Brazilians from the coastal Northeast, not the dry interior where Arcoverde is located.1 It is mainly found in the state of Pernambuco and adjacent coastal states. Coco consists of layers of percussion with an asymmetrical 3 + 3 + 2 pulse tresillo timeline (counted ONE and two AND three and FOUR and). Backing vocals respond with short refrains, and songs alternate between verses and rapid-fire improvised, declamatory sections called emboladas, or tongue twisters. There are myriad variations on coco. One of the most prevalent styles in Pernambuco is coco de embolada, in which two dueling tambourine players trade insults, play word games, and provide social commentary on street corners and beaches.
The recognition of coco as music that harbored the essence of Brazilianness can be traced back to Mário de Andrade, who gushed about a coco singer named Chico Antonio whom the Mission recorded in 1929, claiming that Antonio’s voice “managed to distill the quintessence of this way of ours of singing. It is a subtle nasal quality, good and sweet but with a strong bite to it, not unlike the bittersweet taste of the cashew fruit” (Andrade 1959, 378). Andrade’s writings about Chico Antonio cemented coco as part of the key musical vocabulary used in modernist explorations of Brazilian-ness. The melodies and recordings that Andrade brought back to São Paulo provided composers with the ingredients to “rediscover” Brazil musically.
Samba de coco, the specific variety of coco played in Arcoverde, is one of many Afro-Brazilian round dances commonly understood to have preceded samba, such as samba de roda in the state of Bahia, jongo from the state of Rio de Janeiro, and tambor de crioula from the state of Maranhão. The genre indexes both the more Afro-Brazilian coastal Northeast and the white and mestiço arid sertão backlands. Its repertoire overlaps with the accordion-driven forró dance music emblematic of the northeastern interior. In contrast to coastal coco, samba de coco in interior Pernambuco also varies in terms of instrumentation: the triangle and a small surdo bass drum are included, and large bombo drums are not, yet the ganzá shaker and pandeiro are present in both styles.
In her speech at the meeting Micheliny revealed that the street musician Lula Calixto had died in 1999 of Chagas disease, shortly after she finished her research with him on samba de coco. There is a direct connection between Chagas disease and poverty: the beetle that transmits the disease lives in thatched houses made of mud, but not in the sturdier and higher-cost, tile-roofed brick or cinder block houses. It is an ironic and tragic twist that a quaint, folkloric mud hut replica later served as a museum in his honor.
Micheliny noted that only after Lula’s death and the media attention surrounding it did the city formally recognize samba de coco. It has since become the “sonic postcard” of Arcoverde that promotes the city to tourists. As one of the attractions drawing tourists to visit, Lula Calixto’s family built a bar in the front part of their house and a small museum across the street. In the bar family members receive visitors and hold impromptu “rehearsals” at which the family group sings songs and encourages everyone present to dance coco. In the museum visitors are invited to learn the story of the group through an exhibition of photographs and Lula’s personal effects.
The next day, three members of Lula Calixto’s family, Assis, Iuma and Iram, stood on the auditorium stage and answered questions about the group that Lula founded: Samba de Coco Raízes de Arcoverde (Samba de Coco Roots of Arcoverde), or simply Coco Raízes. Assis, a stout, soft-spoken carpenter around sixty years old with a striking mixture of indigenous and Afro-Brazilian features, fielded questions in a clipped sertão accent. He had never written a song before his brother Lula passed away four years earlier. But after Lula was gone, Assis felt compelled to carry on his brother’s dream of sustaining a samba de coco group and began to write lyrics and invent melodies. Assis’s slender, beautiful niece Iuma demonstrated the two steps of samba de coco—the quick trupé and the slower parcela—as Assis clapped a tresillo rhythm and tentatively sang one of his compositions in this formal setting. As Assis sang lead, Iram and Iuma responded with insistent refrains in ringing vocal harmony.
Coco Raízes was not the only band in Arcoverde that had achieved popular and commercial success. When Micheliny Verunschk conducted her research on the history of popular music and culture in the city, she was helped by her friend José Paes de Lira Filho, known as Lirinha. As Micheliny recorded interviews, Lirinha learned songs and pandeiro tambourine techniques. After they finished their research, Micheliny wrote a report, and Lirinha started a band called Cordel do Fogo Encantado, playing music inspired by the styles he had learned. Lirinha wrote and sang about the Alto do Cruzeiro neighborhood where the much of the Calixto family lived, several blocks uphill from Lirinha’s family home. A large, white, cement cross stands there at the top of the hill; it is a scenic point removed from and overlooking the town’s center. Walking up the hill to the Alto do Cruzeiro became pivotal to Lirinha’s artistic development. It was where he heard the source of his inspiration and where his musical apprenticeship took place.
Before the weeklong meeting I had only heard of Arcoverde at a concert by Cordel, as the group calls itself.2 The iconoclastic pop band was influenced as much by radical, experimental theater as by local folklore. It was led by Lirinha, who sought through its performances to reappraise past cinematic and literary representations of the region as a territory of poverty, violence, and drought. Cordel’s performances were a stormy, apocalyptic experience that evoked the cinematic, mythical northeastern sertão of violent bandits and millenarian maverick Catholic preachers. The band combined the incantatory tone of fire and brimstone prophecy with hypnotic, percussion-heavy Afro-Brazilian sacred music. Cordel feverishly bent music marked as regional and traditional, such as samba de coco and reisado, so that its performances would stand up to the strident intensity and volume of a heavy metal or punk rock show. At nearly every performance the group claimed samba de coco as one of its main musical influences.
From a very young age Lirinha had been reciting popular poetry at state-sponsored contests in the sertão interior. Over time he had honed a very particular rural Pernambucan accent, and his vocal style was declamatory, occupying a space between speech and song. What began as a folklore revue eventually morphed into a visceral, screaming onslaught. Cordel became known all over Brazil in mostly college-educated and left-intellectual circles that listened to alternative commercial music released on independent recording labels. The band was lauded by critics, and its presence nationwide was growing as band members appeared on Brazilian MTV and in sertão-centered films (Deus é Brasileiro, Árido Movie). To fans and critics in Recife Cordel represented the second generation of mangue beat, a Recife-based music scene featuring a rooted cosmopolitan sound that bridged youth music and national music in the early to mid-1990s (Avelar and Dunn 2011; Galinsky 2002; Sharp 2001; Teles 1998, 2000).
Mangue beat recombined local or regional Afro-diasporic styles such as Afro-Pernambucan maracatu and coco with global pop staples such as hip-hop and punk rock. Short-lived but influential, mangue beat distanced itself from previous regionally identified musics; musicians such as Chico Science described their sounds as envenenado or poisoned, to express their disdain for traditional purism. The moves to embrace and recombine “foreign” and “local” genres within mangue beat were jarring for many in the early 1990s, since much of youth culture had maintained more of a separation between national and international styles during the 1980s. After Chico Science, the lead singer of the seminal mangue beat band Chico Science e a Nação Zumbi, died in 1997, Lirinha was widely considered the most charismatic front man from Pernambuco. Although Cordel purposely distanced itself from the mangue label, claiming its sertão heritage to be distinct from developments emerging from the mangrove swamps of coastal Recife, its fan base overlapped considerably with mangue pioneers Chico Science and Mundo Livre S/A. As Cordel’s career momentum began to build, the band moved its headquarters first to Recife and then to São Paulo and launched national and international tours.
For all Cordel’s disruptive fury, the band can be seen as carrying on a tradition. Lirinha is an important recent figure in the history of Música Popular Brasileira (MPB), because Cordel can be considered part of a lineage of “anthropophagic” popular music that dates back to tropicalismo, a late 1960s movement that sought to move away from stiff notions of Brazilian musical nationalism. Tropicalistas such as Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil from nearby Bahia rejected the easy coupling of particular musical styles with particular regions. Instead, they proposed that the ability to culturally “cannibalize,” or critically assimilate and cobble together, cultural inflows was central to the national character. The tropicalistas drew from the revolutionary avant-garde in cinema, art music, poetry, and art, as well as an array of Brazilian, Latin American, and global pop styles. They juxtaposed images of affluence and poverty, folklore and commercial pop, and experimentalism and traditionalism to create an absurdist portrait of the nation.
Lirinha’s apocalyptic, prophetic affect stands in stark contrast to the pointed but often playful Dadaism of tropicalismo. Nevertheless, both are concerned with the origins of Brazilian-ness and how these origins inform the present. This concern sets them apart from the majority of groups in Brazil’s increasingly genre-differentiated music industry, where recent ambitious attempts to sum up Brazil through popular music are relatively few and far between.
During the Associação Respeita Januário meeting, the term resgate—literally translatable as “cultural rescue”—surfaced several times as a point of contention in descriptions of samba de coco. The efforts of Micheliny and Lirinha, and subsequently of the public and semiprivate institutions Fundarpe (Pernambucan Arts Foundation), SESC (Social Service of Commerce), and Petrobras (the Brazilian national oil company), had led many to use the word. Yet Micheliny and Lirinha, as well as many others, felt uneasy about the process of cultural rescue. Some speakers expressed misgivings that cultural rescue implied that melodies must be documented because they were on the cusp of vanishing. Other members countered that there was indeed an urgency to their efforts to register traditional music before it was eclipsed by television, Internet, and shopping mall consumerism. It seemed unclear to those present at the meeting, myself included, how to proceed with studies of folklore without falling into what Tobing Rony calls the “taxidermic” mode of ethnographic representation, which makes “the dead look alive, and the living look dead” (Rony 1996, 126). Critiques like Tobing Rony’s are present when Brazilian scholars and musicians accuse those they consider purists of placing a culture in formaldehyde and denying its constant transformation as a dynamic, mutating form. One particularly memorable phrasing of this criticism was by the Brazilian anthropologist Hermano Vianna, who once argued that “rescue is what you do for kidnapped people, or people who have accidents,” not for musical genres (Gasperin 2000).
I believe that the misgivings expressed at the meeting can be understood, at least in part, as unease about the nostalgia that resgate arguably represents—what Svetlana Boym refers to as “restorative nostalgia” (2001). Boym splits “longing for home” into halves: restorative nostalgia and reflective nostalgia. Restorative nostalgia tells a story of returning to one’s origins and is tied to attempts to reconstruct a phantom home. A celebratory notion of homeland that disavows the shame and embarrassment lurking in a nation’s past is an example of restorative nostalgia.
Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, is more ambivalent and many-plotted. It is more concerned with fragments and ruins than with unity and wholeness. The themes of migration and exile are central, and the contradictions of modernity are acknowledged and explored. Reflective nostalgia is constituted by, not opposed to, uprootedness and diaspora. Whereas restorative nostalgia touts itself as truth and tradition, reflective nostalgia acknowledges itself as longing and clears a space for doubt. As Boym phrases it, reflective nostalgic can be “at once homesick and sick of home” (2001, xix).
I find Boym’s typology useful to interpret the respective efforts of musicians from Arcoverde, even though both Coco Raízes and Cordel restlessly inhabit and unsettle both nostalgias. For example, members of Cordel speak about Arcoverde as their hometown and the source of their inspiration during every performance. However, the Arcoverde they portray in their lyrics is not an idealized hometown. Instead, it is a stormy, gothic place in which a hunger riot overtakes a supermarket, and a bitter clown, his makeup smeared like blood, performs in a desperate, threadbare traveling circus on the outskirts of town.
In Arcoverde I find the two categories of nostalgia difficult, if not impossible, to pry apart. Arcoverde offers an excellent case in point of how mutually constituting these categories of nostalgia are. Over the course of this book I explore how Cordel straddled the restorative and the reflective, charting how it became entangled in a restorative project before moving toward a reflective approach to performance. I examine how its success as an “antirestorative” band nevertheless bolstered restoration by attracting fans to visit the group’s 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 or even exaggerated in the service of distinguishing groups from others considered generically related (Briggs and Bauman 1992, 151).
As the musicians professionalized, they faced an idiosyncratic play of social inclusion and social exclusion. Being placed on a pedestal as the symbolic essence of their region did not inevitably translate into the material power of cultural citizenship, in which political enfranchisement and the positive recognition of social difference are all of a piece. The musicians sustained efforts to abrir um espaço (open a space) for other, more nuanced stories of their region to compete with well-worn stories that erased modernity and cast performers in a mythic register. Yet despite their successes, as they reached audiences beyond their region the musicians continued to find themselves ensnared in and sometimes reproducing the very discourses of heritage and folklore they sought to transform. They worked toward broader recognition while fighting against being treated as “ghostly fetishes of culture loss” (Ivy 1995, 10–11), hovering between the center and the margins.
I see this book as part of a broader movement in the last decade away from polarized celebratory and anxious discourses surrounding music and globalization that were common around the turn of the millennium. I hope to contribute to the “finer-grained historical ethnographic approaches to global music circulation” (Stokes 2004, 48). This story chronicles the movement of samba de coco from local pastime to staged performance projected into national and international circuits. Throughout I focus on what happens when people and commodities move between disparate institutions for support as their music circulates beyond their hometown.
Nostalgia, in its multiple registers, remains pivotal here, as it animates these stubborn discourses of heritage and folklore that both ensnare and enable musicians. It coexists as both a personal, individual longing and a collective emotion with historical and political dimensions, as the example of Dona Senhorinha illustrates. While Dona Senhorinha’s reminiscing was personal, the context of her reaction was entangled in cultural preservation efforts. Sandroni’s fieldwork culminated in a two-CD set of new recordings, Responde a Roda Outra Vez (Answering the Circle One More Time), with extensive liner notes, whose publication was funded by the Brazilian national oil company Petrobras.
Note on Research Methods
Micheliny Verunschk once observed that it was often difficult for Coco Raízes to discern which visitors were there to adore them and which were there to write about them, learn their music, help them, or take advantage of them. I felt this when I arrived. Accustomed to daylong, weekend, or weeklong visits by journalists and fans, family members were not sure whether to treat me with the full hospitality that they reserved for short-term guests, as just another Arcoverdense, or somewhere in between. Much ethnomusicology strives to meet Hood’s (1971) ideal of bimusicality, in which a scholar travels somewhere, finds a music teacher, and spends much of his or her time becoming fluent in local musical codes. In my fieldwork, however, asking for too much musical instruction could potentially damage my relationships with musicians. As a researcher I chose to adopt a posture closer to that of a tourist or a long-form journalist than to that of an apprenticing musician, because the complications of musical apprenticeships were part and parcel of my object of study.
In this setting, insisting on musical instruction would have resulted in the musicians’ questioning my motives for learning their style. They freely gave pandeiro tips to visitors who were only going to be there for a few days. But since I was there for a year, I decided to frequent the Alto do Cruzeiro only to listen, dance, and talk, rather than make learning to play music a first priority. The same should be said about recording. Issues of intellectual property rights were fraught and bitterly contested in Arcoverde in 2004, as the feuding Calixto, Gomes, and Lopes families began to release recordings commercially. As they recorded, issues surrounding legal authorship, ownership, and royalties surfaced. Making field recordings at this time proved to be highly contested, both because the recording would be seen as an act of allegiance to one family over another and also because many of the songs one group would record could be claimed by the other family as belonging to them.
I ended up adopting a timed approach, in which certain activities that weren’t possible when I arrived proved possible before I left. Although I didn’t take formal lessons, I absorbed the melodies alongside other fans. Near the end of my research year I occasionally played songs informally with Ciço Gomes, and he was patient with my attempts to sing harmonies with him. In 2004 I was among the first generation of ethnomusicologists to be able to bring along a laptop-based studio-in-a-backpack that could record multiple tracks simultaneously. Yet all of my close readings of songs by Cordel and Coco Raízes in this book are based on audio and video recordings made by others, not my own. I was excited by the prospect of actively producing multitrack recordings with musicians, following their vision and including their input during mixdown. And I was able to do this after living there four months, but only with musicians who maintained some distance from the feud and therefore ended up less central to this book. I was able to record Reisado das Caraíbas as group members sang their songs and recounted their histories; two cowboy singers, who even recorded a stylized forró CD with me; and Helton Moura and Alberone Padilha, who spent two months in my apartment-turned-studio, recording demo CDs that they then used to launch their careers. The only musical recordings of the Calixto women that I made feature them as guest backup singers on Alberone’s songs.
An Ethnographer among Many
Conducting research in Pernambuco, I entered a field of collaboration and contestation. At Sandroni’s meeting, scholarly and artistic experts were engaging in an ongoing conversation about folklore and heritage, grounded in a long history that traces back at least to Mário de Andrade and Luís da Câmara Cascudo in the pre–World War II era. I conducted my fieldwork in Brazil during the emergence of a tourist experience dramatizing fieldwork. The broader arc of this book tacks between the cultural and the metacultural—between cultural practice and cultural management. I also alternate between the musical and the ostensibly extramusical, including museum exhibitions, television documentaries, and buildings made of mud, which all contribute to efforts to anchor a particular location as a heritage destination. My goal is to chart the twists and turns of a mutating, contemporary notion of folklore and examine how these mutations affect the everyday lives of musicians from a canonized periphery. I focus on performances of heritage within the current moment, aiming to treat folklore in a way compatible with what Rabinow and colleagues term an “anthropology of the contemporary” (2008).
Between Nostalgia and Apocalypse is an ethnography of both the expert and the ordinary, without claiming that the boundary between the two is easily distinguishable in a scenario wherein knowledge is being produced by academics, journalists, performers, and tourists. I proceed in conversation with other ethnographers, such as Carlos Sandroni, Micheliny Verunschk, and Cristina Barbosa. Beyond simply engaging with my professional colleagues, however, I came to see many of the performers with whom I worked as conducting an ethnography-like endeavor in their own right as well. In saying this, I am aware that Lirinha will most likely bristle at this accusation. To him ethnography implies a kind of cold, intellectual process that he contrasts with his warm friendships and informal apprenticeships with older poets and musicians.3 However, whatever he calls his process of gathering stories, poems, and melodies, it overlaps with Micheliny’s process and my own. In addition, culture bearers and cultural entrepreneurs Iram and Assis Calixto and Severina and Leni Lopes, who erected competing museums exhibiting their versions of the story of samba de coco in Arcoverde, are also identifiable as ethnographers, as they display artifacts and shape discourses.
As one of many observers, I work from the position of the situated and partial ethnographer complicit within a field proliferating with ethnographers; performers conducting ethnography-like knowledge production; and visitors gathering words, images, and sounds as souvenirs and newspaper copy. As an ethnographer I aim to imbue performances, festivals, and moments from everyday life with a sense of proximity and vivid detail as I move between these various registers. I am not immune to the seductiveness of a nostalgic gaze toward a past that never was. My writing sometimes dips into a nostalgic mode, even as I seek to expose the ramifications of nostalgia used to further nationalist and commercial ends.
But where there is nostalgia, there is also a sense that the present is somehow unraveling. That is to say, the nostalgic mode is not my only companion here; echoes of a turbulent, apocalyptic mode periodically erupt as well. It is within the apocalyptic mode that Lirinha whips his audience into a frenzy with foreboding talk of the end of the world, or that a bitter feud between families of musicians underscores the volatility of being received as heritage. When family members slice their estranged relatives out of old photographs with razor blades or use microphones to shout bitter accusations rather than to entertain, they do so with a violent intensity that tears the picture postcard of nostalgia.
Organization of This Book
The first half of this book begins in the 1990s, tracing the emergence of samba de coco in Arcoverde as an emblematic cultural tradition and the rise of Cordel do Fogo Encantado as mutationist pop performers drawing tourists to the city. It chronicles the moment in which public and private initiatives enshrined rural musical practices as heritage and marketed them as popular culture.
Chapter 1 illustrates the provincializing process that samba de coco underwent as a genre, as musicians in Arcoverde accrued sponsors and began to perform as heritage. I explore how a markedly Afro-Brazilian musical form became an unlikely emblem of a city within the predominantly white and mestiço interior backlands. I also establish Cordel’s initial posture of homage, which imbued the project with restorative nostalgia, a mode in which the musicians would later lose faith.
Chapter 2 explores the two museums that opened following a feud between two samba de coco families. I chart how the rise of samba de coco as a municipal emblem led to competing exhibitions of tradition. I outline how the Calixto and Lopes families documented their claims to the increasingly lucrative crown of local tradition. Focusing on the artifacts displayed and stories told in the two museums, I explore how the samba de coco families used homemade museum displays to make themselves visible (and audible) within the public sphere.
Chapter 3 explores the career trajectories of Coco Raízes and Cordel during the 2000s. Coco Raízes staged and choreographed samba de coco as the group became incorporated into Arcoverde’s São João Festival and participated in circuits of regional roots music performance. Cordel in contrast, distanced itself from other regional, traditional groups as it shifted between genres, sponsors, venues, and audiences. As the band members questioned notions of folkloric tradition, they experimented with embodying on stage the bandits and millenarian figures who loom large in the history of the region. Eschewing sanitized, reassuring celebrations of place and tradition, Cordel deployed visceral Artaudian screams and Brechtian alienation effects to evoke a history of violence, drought, and hunger.
Chapter 4 explores how Cordel and the samba de coco musicians both inhabit and unsettle nostalgic modes of representation by examining the production of a television documentary about samba de coco and the MTV video produced by Cordel. I accompany the filming of a television documentary by TV Globo and interpret how editorial choices excised modernity from its depiction of Arcoverde, distancing musicians from the Brazilian here-and-now. In the MTV video, members of Cordel make the claim that both their roots in Arcoverde and their present longing for their hometown from afar are equally central to who they are, acknowledging the weight of tradition while justifying their move away from Arcoverde.
The second half of the book is an ethnography of the events that followed the entrance of samba de coco into the circuits of state sponsorship and the music industry. I focus on the São João Festival, as well as year-round tourism, to render a portrait of Arcoverde as a canonized periphery where contemporary struggles over citizenship and social inclusion play out through musical performance.
Chapter 5 centers on the 2004 São João Festival. It explores how the layout of the festival places musicians performing as heritage within developmentalist narratives of progress. I show how the hierarchical arrangement of stages displays a movement from primitive to modern, from past to present. I outline the range of performances that took place on these stages, some festooned with palm fronds and others outfitted with state-of-the-art sound and lighting systems. The multiple roles that musicians play as star performers, party hosts, souvenir craftspeople, bartenders, and waitstaff reveal the complexity of their position as entrepreneurial culture bearers.
The ambiguous status of samba de coco musicians is also a theme in chapter 6, in which I focus on new forms of cultural tourism. Encounters with visitors attracted to Arcoverde as a cultural tourist destination play out with a push and pull of intimacy and social distance. Visitors are encouraged to dance samba de coco, as long as they can’t do it as well as the professionals. At an upscale folklore-themed restaurant, crêpes are named after local musicians. Staged “rehearsals” with visitors blur the line between outsider and insider. A samba de coco musician’s dream of building a mud house replica of his childhood home as a tourist destination unravels when he returns to the rural site for the first time in a half century.
Chapter 7 is an elegy chronicling the dissolution of Cordel and the splintering of Coco Raízes as the 2000s came to a close. Based on follow-up ethnographic research undertaken periodically between 2005 and 2013, it charts the role of Arcoverde within a changing Brazilian cultural landscape during the presidency of Lula da Silva, a Pernambucan who grew up just down the road in Garanhuns. I detail changes in the São João Festival, examine Cordel’s spectacular performance at the opening ceremonies of the 2007 Pan American Games, and describe the expansion of samba de coco tourist infrastructure as government funds sponsor the transformation of the Calixto house into a cultural center.
In the epilogue, I argue that the story of Arcoverde allows us to listen carefully to a postauthoritarian moment. It chronicles how redemocratization and the expansion of citizenship coexist in tension with neoliberal efforts to profit from tourist destinations. Both traditionalist and mutationist musical groups in Arcoverde have been reassessing the Brazilian national question during a moment of cultural reckoning. And neither those supposedly being “rescued” nor those doing the “rescuing” feel comfortable with their roles in this heritage drama. Instead, both are reaching beyond this older script and into new territory, where what it means to be Brazilian is being explored.
