The forgotten anthropology of Paulo Freire: batuque culture as a practice of anti-racist education

ABSTRACT

Observing, listening, and feeling, according to Freirean anthropology (Freire and Nogueira, 1993), which is rarely mentioned, encourages us to seek understanding and interpretation of the reality experienced by the “excluded/included” (Martins, 1997) and sense of place. Invited to teach and learn the culture of batuque (percussive drumming tradition), in a territory obliterated from view, even though it is contiguous and close to the center of this city, rebellious voices of childhood take ownership of the story of black kings and queens in the community of Pedreira, in Jacarezinho - northern region of Paraná, Brazil. This writing communicates what it means to mobilize memories and corporealities that are subversive to attempts at silencing and invisibility through observational participation (Cardoso, 1986; Cicourel, 1975) and, as a result, what we think we are doing (Geertz, 2001).

Keywords:
Anti-racist education; Batuque culture; Territory, Paulo Freire; North/Northeast Paraná

RESUMO

Observar, ouvir e sentir, de acordo uma antropologia freiriana (Freire e Nogueira, 1993) pouco mencionada, propõe-nos buscar pela compreensão e interpretação da realidade vivida pelos “excluídos/incluídos (Martins, 1997) e a sua lugaridade. Convidadas ao ensino-aprendizagem da cultura do batuque, em um território obliterado ao olhar, ainda que contíguo e próximo ao centro desta cidade, vozes insubmissas da infância apropriam-se do enredo da história de reis e rainhas negros e negras na comunidade da Pedreira, em Jacarezinho - região norte do Paraná, Brasil. Com essa escrita, comunica-se aqui, o que foi mobilizar memórias e corporeidades que se apresentam subversoras às tentativas de silenciamento e de invisibilização por meio da participação observante (Cardoso, 1986; Cicourel, 1975) e, como resultado, aquilo que pensamos estarmos fazendo (Geertz,2001).

Palavras-chave:
Educação antirracista; Cultura do batuque; Território, Paulo Freire; Norte/Nordeste do Paraná

Introduction

They’ve already sung
They’ve already hummed
Who are you?
Who are you?
And the places say
You can’t do that here, you can’t do that here
You can’t do that here, you just can’t.

The writing of this work - still in progress and conceived as a record of the initial outcomes of an intervention experience carried out by a group of teachers, musicians, and undergraduate students in a community located beyond the university’s walls¹ - presents itself, first and foremost, as a positional stance in relation to a reality that seeks to constitute and present itself as a shared and common condition among those who carry and embody, in their corporeality, excesses as a celebration of the right to the city. Here, I address those who live in a community located very close to the center of Jacarezinho, Paraná, under conditions of social risk and/or vulnerability to physical and moral harm, given their circumstances of heightened vulnerability - above all - under the effect of deprivation of basic needs, housing precarity, and personal misfortunes due to the lack of collective infrastructure, underemployment and unemployment, as well as exposure to, use, and abuse of licit and illicit drugs.

This positional stance, undertaken in 2022, emerged from the outreach project “Maracatu Maracá - Music in the Blood, Africa in the Serum” and from the purpose of fostering an awakening to musical art through the characteristic percussive rhythm of the drums and, with it, the rhythms of meanings and significations that enable a dialogue with the history of Afro-Brazilian culture: community organization, environment, localities, memory, and black agency in the face of its daily mobilization and struggles, focusing on the valorization of the work of the cultural educator in the act of teaching-learning the baque of maracatu in areas that are privatized and deprived of access to a wide range of public and private services.

In this way, I seek to recover the condition of protagonism and empowerment of children, youth, and adults, grounded in a theoretical-practical methodological perspective in light of the situatedness of black subjectivity. That is, I address cultural production and the process of afroletramento (Nascimento, 2009) - understood as Afro-centered literacy practices - not only as an opportunity to provide access to and hands-on engagement with percussion instruments², but also as a means of encouraging learners’ commitment to, and shared meanings around, learning the foundational baques of maracatu. This process further enables the expression of the body, of singing, and of the composition of loas as both parody and mimesis of conditions of collective experience.

In “City Batuque and the Social Construction of Reality”, I address the issue of racial segregation as a concept capable of offering an understanding of the “thinnest layers” of the construction of social reality.

In “We Only Know by ‘Re-knowing,’ by ‘Re-cognizing’ Things,” I describe and interpret what it meant to sustain the first contact with the favela from the perspective of participant observation, while being immersed within it.

In the section “The Mulberry tree and the Baque of Pedreira”, I present my first encounters with children and mothers - readings and writings of reality captured through the teaching-learning process of these initial baques. I also reflect on the search for, and engagement with, on the forgotten anthropology of Paulo Freire as a methodological possibility for teaching and learning in support of antiracist education.

In “From Culture or Vice Versa: From Batuque to Generative Words”, distance and duration are revisited to consider the uses and meanings of the search to understand what teaching-learning makes possible when engage with what we believe we are doing by sharing knowledge of coexistence with drums and their meanings throughout our journey and crossings in the favela.

To conclude, in the section “In Every Corner: Broken Streets, Alleys, and Narrow Lanes,” I reflect on the use of the sung word, starting from the experience of bringing forth the first loas and toadas - traditional call-and-response sung forms within the batuque of maracatu de baque virado. From the perspective of call and response, I examine how these musical practices emerge from lived situations and articulate memory and identity.

City Batuque and the Social Construction of Reality

In Jacarezinho, based on the observed, compared, and analyzed reality under the statistical perspective of the spatial distribution of the population according to census tracts of race and color³, it becomes possible to work with the intersection of these variables and, in doing so, to engage with the notion of social stratification, taking into account issues related to access to collective infrastructure and income distribution.

Therefore, to render geographic segregation intelligible - as a terminology capable of naming, locating, and making visible that which paradoxically seeks to present itself as invisible or forgotten in the face of unequal social opportunities - means to confront a norm of convention and common practice within racial relations: a political practice and a mode of societal organization whose expressions and enactments within social movements are often associated with the insignia of identity and its stereotyping, not in terms of what we have become (Hall, 2006), but rather as a question-response posed by and within the Afro-diaspora.

Urban peripheries, or the quebrada - despite their differences across large, small, and medium-sized cities - are territories that are stigmatized and marginalized, and are likewise marked by violence and precarity (Silva, 2014; Panta, 2014; Fernandes, 2019). More than merely common, such conditions are often treated as the destined place of black populations within the city (Santos, 1995), particularly in relation to the right to housing.⁴

The phenomenon of racial segregation - although not a product of, nor exclusively manifested through, what came to be officially instituted between 1876 and 1965 with the so-called Jim Crow laws in the southern United States - is typically manifested in the separation between Black and white populations. This unequal treatment positions the body and corporeality as sites of place and circulation, and brings with it real estate discrimination as one of its most visible facets, by proposing and materializing the ideology of white racial supremacy as a way of maintaining distance and spaces of privilege. Likewise, it does not require individuals to identify as white, since “[...] it does not depend on the socially white individual recognizing or assuming themselves as white, much less on their willingness to obtain the advantage attributed to them by their race” (Almeida, 2019, p. 64).

Indeed, still following Almeida, it was racism that produced the idea of race and racialized subjects, we might add, long before both the invasion of the Americas and the very invention of the word race as a social practice. “The statute of blood purity in Portugal - which restricted access to public office, ecclesiastical positions, and honorary titles to so-called Old Christians (families that had been Catholic for at least four generations) - dates back to the Ordenações Afonsinas (1446-1447), which excluded the descendants of Moors and Jews” (Mattos, 2004, p. 9).

In Brazil, racial segregation as a social phenomenon tended to be downplayed until very recently, given that its typical manifestation does not appear to be marked by explicit efforts to separate Black and white populations when compared to the expression of such practices in the United States. However, as França (2023) demonstrates - in light of studies on residential segregation, the debate surrounding a “wealthy center” and a “poor periphery”, based on class relations and treated as an almost exclusive social marker - recently, questions have been raised regarding the absence of explicit legal protection for racial segregation in the country. According to the same author, this absence becomes in itself fundamentally important for understanding the claim of a “lack of overt efforts” to separate Black and white populations in the country in view of the socially constructed reality.

As a result of migratory processes directed toward large urban centers, geographic segregation (Panta, 2014), as a product of this social dynamic known as the rural exodus between 1950 and 1980, came to manifest itself as a social phenomenon and to undergo metamorphosis, establishing the place of the Black population in the city primarily among those who moved toward the South and Southeast regions of the country. As noted by Panta and Silva (2014) in reference to the city of Londrina as a destination for populations from the Northeast and from Minas Gerais. Likewise, in other cities in the northern and northeastern regions of the state, as Fernandes (2002) observes, Jacarezinho, since its founding in the late nineteenth century, was shaped by migration from Minas Gerais; however, with the decline of coffee cultivation in the late 1940s, the flow of the so-called “people from the North” became more intense with the institutionalization of the “sugar mill civilization”.

In the account below, a former sugarcane cutter who lived in the housing complex of the Jacarezinho sugar mill during the 1970s comments on these “people from the North,” according to Fernandes (2002, p. 101):

The world has all kinds of people, you come from a good family, your father raised you well, everyone in your house is [made up of] good people, but there are others there in the middle [of it]... that’s how it is [at the mill], there are many northerners. The northerner is kind of not well raised, kind of badly raised like that... it is not like us [who] were raised good. Parents raise their children one way others another, religiously..., there are all kinds of people on the farm. So, one has one temperament, and another has another temperament, that’s how it is: you have to know how to live among those people. One day a buddy was talking to [another] buddy like that, and I joked around and he threatened to stab me with a knife if I didn’t leave... We was in a bar, chatting and drinking some pinga and he threatened to stab me with a knife like that, if it hadn’t been for the bar owner Mr. Manoel telling him ‘‘what’s that man, the guy is talking to you and you want to stick a knife in him?’. So those people are like that. Sometimes you talk like that, you have to know how to talk to the person, joke around, things like that, sometimes they doesn’t like, [he] was still fired up, [he] was not expecting it, then Manoel said ‘be careful with him, he’s kind of dangerous’. The northerners aren’t well raised, they’re used to it back in the North... Anything they kill, they make a mess, it’s like that... The mill is full of northerners […] the administrator would send for people in Minas those Mineiros, Bahians, Pernambucans, Cearenses; all badly raised people. [They brought these people] because they’re good at cutting sugarcane and we here in Paraná weren’t raised doing that and there they are.

In light of social markers such as class, race, and gender-so powerfully captured through the lens of documentaries such as Viramundo (1965), Tem que ser baiano (1993/1994), and many other studies and records on the formation of the Brazilian working class (Gonzalez & Hasenbalg, 1982; Hasenbalg, 2005), reveal how social inequalities hold in the differences as the basis for constructing arguments, prerogatives, and justifications for convincing people to accept order and subordination as a reflection of the social position occupied and of a destiny within our cities.

With regard to the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Cardoso de Melo and Novais (1999, p. 585) observe the striking figure of 39 million migrants in search of new prospects in the major urban centers. Initially in the South and Southeast, and subsequently in other regions of the country:

They are Northeasterners and people from Minas Gerais, fleeing poverty and drought in search of a better destiny in São Paulo, in Rio de Janeiro, in Paraná’s terra roxa; later, they are those expelled from the countryside by capitalism, from all parts, including São Paulo and Paraná, now hostile to mankind; they are gauchos moving through western Santa Catarina, passing through western Paraná, some entering Paraguay, others moving further north toward Mato Grosso.

From the perspective of regional history in relation to this phenomenon, in the case of cities such as Jacarezinho, Bandeirantes, and Cornélio Procópio, this situation would be experienced by Black populations as an effect of the migratory processes that took place during the 1950s, due to both the decline of older coffee-growing areas and the formation of new coffee frontiers, following the trajectory of their expansion into what became known as Northern Paraná’s Norte Novo⁵.

Figures 1 and 2:
Households in Cornélio Procópio, Bandeirantes, and Jacarezinho, according to the distribution of the Black population by district of residence, and the Paraná/Municipality Map, according to the HDI in 2010.

Temporary crop plantations and the expansion of livestock farming also make it possible to identify a new modality of colonato as a labor regime. In Jacarezinho, former coffee sharecroppers (ex-colonos), in the face of the decline of coffee plantations, came to see themselves as “sugarcane colonos” within the sections of the sugar mill or, as those who would come to reside in urban neighborhoods under new forms and organizations of temporary labor, such as boias-frias (D’Incao, 1975). They also appear as followers of the pioneer front of coffee planting and cultivation in new lands to the west of the state (Fernandes, 2002; 2017).

For the purposes of this writing, however, in light of more recent studies that identify the periphery in large urban centers as a form of belonging and a general condition of life and identity, one might ask: does the quebrada (Rosa, 2020; Ferréz, 2005)⁶ of the municipalities mentioned, toward which migrants moved, carry the same meanings as those found in non-metropolitan regions? Do interior municipalities and their peripheral neighborhoods propose any kind of local organization or community for expressing cultural identity rooted in African heritage? What role does education play in this process from the perspective of teaching-learning and research?

“We Only Know by ‘Re-knowing,’ by ‘Re-cognizing’ Things,”

One of the major contributions of anthropology as a field of knowledge is presented under the name of ethnography, however, this achievement has not been unanimously recognized. In fact, unanimity has never been common within the field of human sciences, especially when some refer to the danger of ethnographic monographs “[…] to such an extent that a merely descriptive study of an ethnic group without any theoretical reflection would still be understood as a monograph” (Álvares, 2018, p.93). In this sense, what is at stake, therefore, regarding the status and use of anthropology is placed under such suspicion as and insofar as a social science, in light of the convention about what is to be considered science.

Geertz (1978) helps us to understand the criticism previously directed at descriptive anthropology, noting that anthropological texts deal with fictions as constructed accounts and are therefore open to interpretation through a dense description. Nevertheless, between “seeing, feeling, and hearing” while being “from within,” “up close,” and/or “from a distance” (Cardoso de Oliveira, 2000; Magnani, 1998), we would raise the question of “what to do” with such interpretations, as I have learned in my own practice as a teacher and as an educator of future teachers.

This seemed to me to both return to and recover the forgotten or unmentioned anthropology of Paulo Freire (1989), following the idea that every pedagogical action proposes an interpretation and that such interpretation takes place, first and foremost, through the “[...] challenge of the reality of the oppressed in dialogue with the analytical instruments of theoretical reflection” (Streck, Redin, & Zitkoski, 2010, p. 38). This brings us back to the epistemological questions of anthropological interpretation, now compounded by a political dimension: for, as Freire (1994) says, every pedagogical action is a political action, just as every political action is a pedagogical action.

Hence, the account that follows, although it cannot be characterized as an ethnographic monograph, presents itself primarily as an attempt at a descriptive/interpretive record of the experience of developing teaching-learning practice of ethnic-racial relations outside the classroom walls, while seeking to share the enchantment of batuque culture⁷ as a key to dealing with the idea of belonging, community organization, and cultural-political practice.

In other words, this study deals with the action capable of providing a record of the exercise of reflexivity, through the implications that involve the idea that not only what was experienced, but also the during, as act and as meaningful actions, seeking to take into account the notion of an anthropology of description, as an academic exercise and as an act that, because it is pedagogical, also constitutes a political act.

We recall that it was an invitation - to participate in what the organizers called, in 2019, “Universidade Estadual do Norte do Paraná Cultural Caravan Brings Art to the Pedreira Community” - that provided our first opportunity to encounter what we call a celebration of excess. On that occasion, as we descended, in procession, a small slope leading into the favela, accompanied by the batuque of the alfaias, the caixas, and the balancing performance of the stilt-walking clown, smiles and curious gazes from children and adults began to emerge.

Self-built in masonry, the houses in general retained the appearance of shacks when compared to the two dwellings constructed at the entrance of the community. With their large yards, finished walls, four-hipped roofs, and cars parked in their garages. How might one understand the fact that some, even with all the local adversity, occupy positions of greater social privilege within the favela?

The terrain is steep and rugged. At its highest point, there is a wall in the form of a stone rampart, about 10 to 15 meters high, separating the immediate surroundings from the energy supply company and the city hospital. From there, it is possible to see the city center just over 700 meters away, as well as a large portion of the eastern periphery and the open expanse of green pastureland intersected by the tracks of the old railway line, deactivated in 1979, delimiting the extension of the favela’s lower point. This is an area that, on rainy days, becomes flooded due to overflows from the Ribeirão Água Feia, as it is unable to drain the water and sewage it receives from the city⁸.

The row of houses has a single access point for vehicle traffic and, due to its narrowness, does not allow two cars to pass at the same time. On that day, as on other occasions when we were there, it was common to see the presence of children playing - standing on their unpaved doorsteps - amid adults’ conversation circle and the loud music coming from their homes, after all, “it is the weekend, and everyone wants some fun”.

Residents generally refer to one another by locating themselves as “those in the front,” “those below,” and “those at the back of the favela,” the latter situated along the slope of the stone wall behind the Santa Casa de Jacarezinho. “The ones in the front” occupy a very steep portion of the territory covered by vegetation; the houses there have no yards and are exposed to the risk of landslides during periods of heavy rainfall, such as those that occurred in March 2023, when one of the houses was partially buried and several families were left homeless due to the flooding of the Ribeirão.

Meanwhile, “the ones below”, as well as “those at the back”, located near the railway line and the Ribeirão Água Feia, under threat of falling rocks during that same period, remained flooded with rainwater descending from the stone slope and seeping into the floors and walls of their homes. Closer to the Ribeirão, “the ones below” - those with larger yards and animal raising - were invaded by the floodwaters, forcing some families to leave behind their few belongings. “Some years everything floods, some years it doesn’t. So, when it floods everything, God forbid. It’s water coming from below and from above, there’s no... The hard part is that we lose everything that we have. Then, when we manage to get everything again, then it comes again [the rain and the flooding]”⁹.

Established in the city for almost 60 years, the favela as we heard from some mothers, was home to around 50 families, and as we verified over the three years of the outreach project, the movement of people arriving and departures persisted and continue to persist as a common and constant situation, as observed through our records and their variation since the beginning of our percussion and storytelling workshops. That is, in 2022 there were about 52 children aged 1 to 14, 40% of whom were boys and 60% girls, with the most representative age group being 2 years old (9.6%), followed by 10 (7.7%), 7 (5.8%), and 14 years old (5.8%).

Although we did not conduct a more in-depth investigation, we suspect that many residents were, and remain, engaged in the informal economy, as indicated by the presence of a recycling press for discarded materials - paper, aluminum, metals, and plastic. The volume of recyclable materials stored in the vicinity of the press and the houses is considerable and, during periods of rainfall, ended up being carried into the Ribeirão Água Feia.

This situation caused us a mixture of astonishment and curiosity, as well as visual discomfort, given the arrangement of plastic bags, cardboard boxes, and garbage sacks paving the path left by the most recent flood, announcing what one member of the team described as “the weight of all the city’s waters falling upon the favela¹⁰” - waters that carry with them flooding and rocks rolling toward the houses.

Pedreira, amid the trees and the railway tracks that cut through it and lead into it, presents itself as obliterated not only to the senses of sight, but also as a place in which negative social experience and personalized domination reveal the manifestation of the social phenomenon of racial segregation, through inhabited space: neighborhood, sociability, and the right to the city.

Cartograms such as those presented on the previous pages, Figures 1 and 2, which show the Black population in Jacarezinho, Bandeirantes, Cornélio Procópio, and the Human Development Index (HDI) by municipality in the state, lack analysis in light of an understanding of the “finer layers of this reality”. In other words, an understanding of the pattern of racial and social class segregation in view of the proximity between privileged whites in the city as opposed to the distance from the poor: whites and Blacks - pretos e pardos - concentrated in the vicinity: peripheries, quebradas, alleys, and narrow lanes, as a product and production of social inequalities based on differences and policies of attention to social rights in the spheres of government.

The Mulberry tree and the Baque of Pedreira

Although we initially expected to hold the first workshop in the same location we had been in 2019, since we had spoken with the owner of the only local shop and explained both the reasons for and the objectives of our return. In the second week prior to our activity, however, the establishment’s owner informed us that we could not use that space, because her bar needed to remain open. Thus, given the children’s exposure to the presence of police in the favela and to the consumption of alcoholic beverages, we would have to find another location in which to carry out the activities.

From the outset, we knew we would be tested and discouraged. So the team decided, even under these circumstances, to offer the workshops on a piece of land closer to the stone wall, where there was a mulberry tree “at the back of the favela”. On that day, beneath the mulberry tree, already ripe, we became aware of the significant challenge it would be to maintain the attention of a group of 10 to 15 children between the ages of 5 and 11.

Everything was new to us as cultural educators, just as it was for the children, mothers, and neighbors who followed us from a certain distance. Curiosity and expectations were mutual, not only regarding the dynamics of teaching-learning and apprehending-teaching the batuque of the instruments, but also in relation to the team’s struggle for the children’s attention and the shock of conceptions concerning those elements that made it possible to engage with identities, from the very first moment, through the evident presence of corporeality and estrangement.

Although we did not yet know that we were dealing precisely with what Paulo Freire defines as “knowing through the body,” from that initial encounter we were confronted with this condition through reference to hair, its types and uses, as well as to how the body carries the marks of place in the form of stereotypes, including among the children themselves¹¹.

Yet if the body, according to Boff (1989), referring to Freire’s methodological perspective in addressing the favela dweller and the limits of their joys and sorrows in the presentation of “What To Do” - provides learning even in the face of the lack of basic goods and other necessities. If this is the case, over the course of these almost 12 months of meetings in Pedreira, we are left to ask, in light of the immediacy of lived experience: where would this knowledge be located, or rather, how would this knowing through the body take place? In what ways was it, or had it been, constructed?¹²

Place as a social question, from the perspective of inscription in the favela as territory, drawing once again on the writings of Sodré (1988), has led, and continues to lead, us toward a (re)knowing, a (re)cognition through and during the lived experience of our participant observations. That is, the heritage of Pedreira, understood as a metaphor and as a proposition of senses and meanings, remained, at this initial moment, marked by a condition of pronounced opacity.

The first meetings took place in an itinerant manner and across different locations, without us being able to foresee where the workshops would be held: at the entrance of the bar, beneath the mulberry tree, and later in the backyard of one of the residents. At the fifth meeting, we were asked to leave the resident’s backyard, without fully understanding why. We sought to understand this request by drawing on the following maxim: “the ‘visible form’ of the place conceals the distanced relations that determine its nature” (Giddens, 2000, p. 27).

In other words, regardless of whether the shop owner and the catechism teacher who allowed us to use the bar area and the backyard of her home - as we later came to learn - viewed the batuque of maracatu workshops and storytelling about Africa and ethnic-racial relations with approval or disapproval, what was at stake, and what we had not realized until then, was the fact that the batuque of the drums evoked the inheritances of a heritage and a worldview that directly and indirectly conflicted with the values promoted by Christian religions in their different affiliations and interests within the community.

Despite the fact that we were not aware of any of this, never explicitly stated or acknowledged, the baque of Pedreira proposed, and continues to propose, an understanding of the fact that we were disputing or placing under tension a hegemonic cultural order sustained by those who held, or continue to hold, agents responsible for maintaining the prevailing political-cultural order. That is to say, by beating the drums and bringing with us chants, dances, and rhythmic beating (batuque), we were, in effect, proposing a new territorialization within the favela by evoking another symbolic heritage, another worldview, one that does not present itself as the sole valid framework.

Furthermore, and it should be emphasized that this was done without greater academic ambitions at the time, we were starting an outreach project through which we proposed to give meaning and use to what has come to be known as the Paulo Freire method, given our purpose of being able to deal with the education of ethnic-racial relations and African history in a non-formal school environment from a perspective of reading the world. In other words, through learning that emerged from coexistence with maracatu drums, we began to conceptualize what we came to call maracaletramento as the object of my initial reflections, at the moment when I set out to read and interpret this reality, presenting this writing in its first version at the VI Brazilian Congress of Black Researchers, commemorating the 20th anniversary of Law 10.639, held in Ponta Grossa, Paraná, in 2023.

Upon returning to this writing, I was not surprised to discover that the often forgotten or unmentioned anthropology of Paulo Freire emerged as one of the fundamental aspects of his method: word-action (palavração). But, what did surprise me was realizing that this anthropological argumentation represented a rupture with authoritarianism and with tradition of debate in which, since the nineteenth century, it was assumed that the population of the country was incapable of producing significant progress. Hence the belief that “before having an educated people, it was necessary to have a disciplined people”. In other words, popular culture and the rustic man - the “simple man” - were viewed as insufficient, thus in need of literacy: “Paulo Freire’s anthropological perspective is [therefore] a point of inflection in relation to the way in which, in Brazil, the notion of reality was historically used to ‘demonstrate’ how the rustic man, when observed up close, demonstrated the intellectual inferiority of the so-called ‘simple man” (Freitas, 2019 , p.110).

From Culture or Vice Versa: From Batuque to Generative Words

One of the questions that was always present, though not always evident from the standpoint of carrying out pedagogical work with the children, was how to engage with the culture of batuque while being immersed in it. Anthropology teaches us that in these situations, “what is familiar” needs to be viewed with a sense of strangeness - as a method and technique of investigation - the anthropological gaze, beyond mere curiosity in the face of a given reality, must be directed in such a way as to undergo refraction. That is, the gaze (Cardoso de Oliveira, 2000, p. 4) must be “sensitized by possible theory”.

From this anthropological perspective, the Freirean conception of the distance of time, taking into account the lived duration of pedagogical work, invites us to reflect on the use of generative words or themes. Even though these were present in our dialogues through storytelling and through our eagerness for rhythm and the chanting of loas, they seemed to offer limited guidance in the face of the concrete challenges of reality and the outcomes of our action. This was so even as we remained aware that we were seeking to build bonds and to inscribe ourselves within the history of the community.

Thus, although we did not realize the magnitude of what we were provoking, amid looks of astonishment, even if we suspected as much, perhaps the boat as metaphor - as expressed in the poem below - may be the best translation of our journey and crossings through the batuque of maracatu:

“If my word were not refounded
I could not undergo the experience
of the refounding of the word
in absolute silence.
Culture? The boat is culture. The way of using the boat is culture as well.
it is the drum that resounds deep into the night. The rhythm of the drum.
the swaying of the people’s bodies to the rhythm of the drums
is the way the People walk, smile,
speak, and sing while they work”
(Mello, 2010, p. 319).

Following the most recent request that we find another place, and though reluctantly, we decided to occupy the main passageway at the entrance to the favela - the strip that separates the street leading to Pedreira and the commercial shops located there, a place that serves as a parking lot for vehicles on weekdays and also as a site for activities and initiatives organized by evangelical churches on weekends.

I do not recall precisely, but I believe it was after our sixth meeting that I heard, from one of the team members - following the october rains - about the situation of risk announced amid the everyday joys and difficulties accompanying the rhythm of the batuque we were creating, which due to the sunny days and the elections, such circumstances appeared almost too ordinary for us to think in terms of generative words, even though, from the very beginning, such words had indeed been spoken.¹³

It is in writing at a distance, and across the duration, of this experience that generative words and themes seem to both embody and return the meanings of their force and the force of their meanings, particularly in relation to the effort to discover what the people, and we ourselves, thought and think we were doing as we lived this community of meanings while immersed in its duration. In turn, based on education as a practice of freedom, this necessarily proposed a pedagogical perspective tied to the idea of the “awakening of dormant forces,” as a criticism of processes that reproduce an order of subordination and racial segregation.

I believe it was at that moment that the word maracaletramento - understood as the learning and the sharing of knowledge about coexistence with the batuque, the drummers (batuqueiros), and the drums - came to me as a translation of a positional stance in favor of knowledge, recovery, and recognition of maracatu as an expression of encounter and agency among Indigenous and Afro-diasporic peoples. In other words, maracaletramento as both product and production of counter-hegemonic meanings and significations in opposition to the dominance of writing and to the incomplete erasures of African traces within our Afro-diasporic history.

To maracaletrar allows us to move beyond the idea of the picturesque and the exotic under the insignia of folklorization as repression (Lopes, 2011, p. 198), “[...] as a function of the supposed superiority of so-called ‘high culture’ of European origin,” in opposition to popular uses of the ‘body’” (Soihet, 2003) and to the primacy of Black experience. It is this body that, by the third decade of the early twentieth century, became a site of spectacularization within what came to be constituted as the cultural policy of the Vargas era: cultural modernism and the construction of the centralized national state (Rubim, 2007), and more recently, in light of the cultural diversity shaped by such a body, some critics have come to describe this as cultural extractivism (Kaçula, 2025).

Therefore, in order to deal with the set of strategies for reading and writing, maracaletramento, as creation and work (Silva, 2001), allows us to think and develop, in alternative non-formal educational spaces, the education of ethnic-racial relations in favor of “strengthening an educational social movement that brings together what is symbolic and what fills the stomach, what is aesthetic and what is political, in a formative and autonomous proposal that encourages reflection on the beams and details of our memories, traditions, and desires” (Rosa, 2020, p. 22).

From our very first meeting, the children of Pedreira - their insubmissive voices invited to intone chants - came into contact with the rhythm and batuque of narratives about Black kings and queens. It was on the veranda of the community bar that the first images and stories directly related to the African continent were presented, in an effort to reclaim or propose a connection with the corporeality and historical trajectory of those who are, more often than not, alienated from such heritage¹⁴.

Africa thus emerged in the very situations in which we least remembered it, precisely because it was so deeply familiar. And because we were immersed in duration - through instruments, baques, adinkra symbols, spiritualities, and elements of nature - even though these resided within us (Asante, 1989) as pathway, as njia, as commitment to the sustenance of life, the routine of our meetings simultaneously led us to forget all of this.

During one of these meetings, bothered by the way the progression of instrumental percussion was being proposed, one member of the group of educators expressed dissatisfaction. This moment allows me to revisit and reflect upon the idea of historical consciousness as both, and as the will to, teach-learn, as well as to make sense of what we think we are doing and the reason for doing it.

“How can we teach something we do not know?” In my view, as a question↔answer to all of us, which speaks directly to the perspective of historical consciousness in its common and critical dimensions, whose feature lies in reflective practice ¹⁵ in light of what we have become.

This leads me, drawing on Schutz (1970), to propose an understanding of this experience grounded in the conception that only what has been lived presents itself as meaningful. Hence the critique presented by the member of the group of educators regarding what we were experiencing in teaching the baques of maracatu - “a practice that even we ourselves did not know about; how could we teach it?”. Allow us to approach the concept of reflexivity and meaning of teaching↔learning in the repose of time, based on the retrospective of this experience and questioning as a way of understanding the theory of knowledge, enabling us to glimpse what we consider to be the recovery of the forgotten anthropology in Freire.

Such questioning: doing without knowing, along with the judgments implicit in that very formulation, likewise, allows us to draw closer to practices of resistance undertaken by teachers in schools, as well as by administrators and coordinators of undergraduate and graduate programs. More often than not, they justify their position by claiming that they were not given the opportunity to study curricular components addressing such themes, returning us to the previously mentioned question concerning the teaching of the baque of maracatu and the lack of knowledge required to carry it out.

Thus, when I revisit here the teaching-learning of anti-racist education, grounded in the batuque of maracatu as the duration of an experience, I seek through this experience - understood as potentiality in the distance and duration of lived time - to reflect upon what we did by means of words such as listening, experience, and hope. These, within a pre-phenomenological condition, do not attain greater meaning except through what has been enacted. This, in turn, allows us to return to the idea of consciousness in Freire, both from the methodological standpoint of teaching-learning and from the perspective of his anthropology, moving from word-world (palavramundo) to word-action (palavração) and vice versa.

“Pedreira oh Pedreira
Pedreira my commune
The city only sees you…
The city only grows”
“And people say
Who are you?
Who are you?”¹⁶

Therefore, to tirar loa (to improvise a loa) often corresponds to an act of improvisation that offers itself as a didactic-methodological opportunity in favor of maracaletramento as an ethnic-racial political question. It entails engagement with a subject, theme, or issue that announces itself through the poetic inspiration of the singer concerning matters that emerge from the lived environment: the socially constructed reality and the identities of those who, in their narrative, propose to enter into dialogue, for example, with the audiences of Easter carnivals, sambadas, and Carnival proper, in relation to the Northeastern diaspora and its erasure in the northern and northwestern regions of Paraná. What is at stake are connections of affects, histories, references, memories, body and corporealities - rhythms and instruments - community of meanings.

For this reason, the loa, in its structure - verse, sentence, rhyme, and meter - as oral text and poetic genre, assumes the role of conveying the message of the groups and of the mestras and mestres of a given maracatu collective: a communication to its listeners about that community of meanings (Lima). In most cases, it narrates the life story of its tirador (lead singer) (França; Costa-Maciel), during sambadas, parades, and the opening of Carnival in Recife, as carried out by maracatus de baque virado or maracatu nação, through the way they sing, as well as a structural organization of the group of musicians - batuqueiros - which differs profoundly from the ensembles (ternos) of musicians in rural maracatu¹⁷.

The singing tradition of maracatu de baque solto, or rural maracatu, always followed the same rhythmic phases - the marcha, samba comprido, samba curto, and galope - while in maracatu nação (IPHAN, 2012), “the baque [in its polyrhythmic structure] presents itself as the manner of performing the rhythmic cell that composes maracatu music together with the toadas,” as well as through the convention of its virações. The baque virado, given the composition of its instruments - all percussive¹⁸ - and the mode of executing the rhythmic cell, not only enables the identification of a given nação through its distinctive virações or repiques, but also allows the toada to be understood as a form of identification expressed and recognized through different invocations of greeting, among others, to the deities of the pantheon of Afro-Brazilian religions.

In Every Corner: Broken Streets, Alleys, and Narrow Lanes

In accordance with our proposal to bring the baque virado batuque, I now recount what we experienced regarding the composition of toadas and the improvisation of loas, which, after reading some interviews with maracatuzeiro masters, seemed to me to correspond to the assertion that this activity is a practice of improvisation, because, as Lima (2007, p.158) points out when discussing maracatu de baque virado:

The texts of the maracatu toadas in question were possibly composed in varied situations, under the influence of a culture of improvisation, as I heard from the maracatu masters Luiz de França [Leão Coroado] and Toinho [Baque Forte] over the course of my interaction with them. Let us imagine maracatu in procession, before important public figures or even before religious leaders of its community: the creation of a loa honoring a given situation [...].

Similarly, Mestre Barachinha, from the maracatu de baque solto tradition, in an interview with França and Costa-Maciel (2021, p.223), suggests the idea of a “culture of improvisation” when composing loas and toadas:

I studied until fifth grade [...], every night I sang with my cousin Zeca Bier. My family is part of this culture, they were born into maracatu. So almost every night I sang with him. I remember arriving [...] at João Paulo’s rehearsal and asking João Paulo to write a verse for his rehearsal, and he said, “but man, you’re going to sing”, and I said, “I will. I am going to sing”.

To loar, in light of our proposal as batuqueiros, emerged as a demand during the first workshop dedicated to the construction of mineiros with the children in the favela of Pedreira. It was, in fact, there that the first moment took shape for what would later unfold in other situations. That was when I asked one of the educators in the group to compose a loa, since he is also a rapper, I assumed it would not pose significant difficulty for him.

To loar as verb and expressive act, under the effect of the “call-and-response system” - antiphony - offers us polyrhythm as an expressive feature of African diasporic cultures and of its use “during the centuries of oppression and persecution, [bringing with it] the possibility of new social relations of non-domination, of fraternity, a structure of encounters and sacralized communal moments, along with the construction of positive and dignifying self-images” (Ferreira, 2011, p. 63).

Through our perspective of teaching↔learning the baque virado batuque, in light of the dispersion of migrants from the Northeast and Minas Gerais between the 1950s to the South and Southeast as the backdrop for our interventions, singing, playing, and telling the history of one of the oldest favelas in the city presented as a form of intervention and as a means of reconstructing and dealing with the celebration of excesso, materialized with the deprivation of infrastructure and personal misfortunes taken as objects beyond denunciation, as past-present.

This perspective came to us gradually, and today I am able to understand why the loa was not presented at that moment, nor shortly thereafter, given that such an action required a deeper knowledge of and involvement with the lived reality.

Even if, in more relaxed situations and in other settings, they began to be conceived and improvised based on the idea of the right to the city and on the reality encountered in the favela, for if “even in the dump a flower blooms” (Racionais MC’s, 2002), sustaining the baque became not only an act of intervention and a disposition that went beyond singing about locality through improvised verses that come out without thinking and without realizing it, but also a way of being available for listening and for the expression of emotion, of sensations of the self in encounter with the other and the world, starting with the children’s joy and the recurring question at each reunion: “Is there maracatu today?”.

It has now been more than two years of reunions, farewells, and new encounters amid the everyday hustle here and there in Pedreira - with its railway tracks, cliffs, gravel paths, rains, downpours, floods, political promises, catechism lessons, donations from Christian institutions, visits from Santa Claus, and the curious glances of some in the face of our persistence. Almost as if asking and saying “who are we” in a city that bears the marks of its aloofness and distinction through the actions of its institutions, maintaining a room for dumping garbage and sewage, along the Ribeirão Água Feia that borders the favela.

Final Considerations

At each moment of storytelling about The Marriage of the Beautiful Princess Abena and the dispute between the Grooms: Rain and Sun, we touched on themes that moved between fantasy and reality shared by children, youth, adults, and elders, reality lived both in Africa and in Pedreira. Yet, at that time, we had not been able to perceive or recognize this.

The encounter and dialogue with the forgotten anthropology of Paulo Freire, grounded in the ideas of duration, reflexivity, and making with one’s hands, allowed us to understand the work of the cultural educator in light of the demand for the capacity to capture, interpret, and propose the pedagogical act as a political act, capable of seeing, hearing, and writing from the standpoint of local knowledge, not detached from “re-knowing and re-cognizing.” The challenge, rather than “[…] refraining from any inner spiritual empathy with one’s informants,” lies precisely in dwelling within and moving forward through engaged thinking, in favor of that which enables the continuity of teaching-learning as a practice of freedom.

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• Availability of research data:
  The entire dataset supporting the results of this study was published in the article itself.
• How to cite this article:
  FERNANDES, Antonio Donizeti. Paulo Freire’s forgotten anthropology: batuque culture as an anti-racist educational practice. Educar em Revista, Curitiba, v. 42, e98182, 2026. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1590/1984-0411.98182-T
• 1
  Over the past three years, the team has included an actress and singer, undergraduate students from the Philosophy and Pedagogy programs (UENP) and the Postgraduate Programs in Social Sciences and History (Unesp), undergraduate professors from the Pedagogy program (UENP), the Popular Preparatory Course for University Entrance Exams (UENP), and teachers from the state school systems of Paraná and São Paulo.
• 2
  At this point, we were still unaware of the idea of amanualidade as a concept that allows us to understand the relationship between consciousness and reality. This was inherited from the anthropology of Álvaro Vieira Pinto, whom Paulo Freire called a “master” [..] and [who], based on his own analytical insight, became a kind of “antidote” to the effects of the extremely violent realist tradition because it was based on the depreciation of so-called “rustic men.” (Freitas, 2019, p. 116)
• 3
  This discussion relies on data from the 2010 Demographic Census, given that the 2022 IBGE Census has not yet made such data available from a cartographic perspective, as will be illustrated later in Figures 1 and 2.
• 4
  França (2023, p. 309) observes: “Racial segregation is particularly evident among the middle and upper classes. In the metropolis of São Paulo, for example, Black and white individuals from the middle and upper classes are concentrated not only in distinct areas — whites in elite neighborhoods and Blacks outside them, in more peripheral locations — but also in areas that are distant from one another, with large physical distances separating the two groups. Finally, we also demonstrate that whites, even those belonging to lower classes, are more represented in wealthier areas of the city than Blacks. In other words, the upper strata are composed predominantly of whites, while the poor populations surrounding them are also white. Our research further indicates that, to the extent that Black and white people are residentially segregated, their personal networks of relationships and their places of frequentation are also segregated. The differences in residential locations have contributed to create barriers to Black populations’ access to higher-quality urban services and to more highly valued areas, as well as barriers on the integration of the Black population with social strata […]”.
• 5
  The statistical data from the 1940 and 1950 Censuses, the latter, in particular, when compared to the former, do not appear to follow the trend pointed out Cardoso de Melo and Novais (1998), even though they do not address the race-color variable. With regard to the concentration of larger numbers of Black (pretos) and mixed-race (pardos) populations in Jacarezinho, the IBGE data indicate otherwise: what is observed is a stabilization of this population, despite overall population growth, jumping from 24,528 in 1940 to a total of 34,405 residents in 1950. This corresponds to an increase of approximately 9,667 white inhabitants, whereas the population growth among Black populations (pretos and pardos) amounted to only 296 individuals. What could have happened?
• 6
  “‘To be’ from the periphery may, conversely, signify assuming oneself as a subject of discourses and practices, reclaiming a central position for what is termed a geographical or sociological periphery. In certain circumstances, public policies, non-governmental partnerships, grassroots communities, and media dispositifs come to operate as channels that amplify creativity, productivity, and novelty, thereby subverting the vector of subjection. In other cases, however, reactive discourses and practices may turn toward violence and destruction, including by appropriating institutional codes and configurations of the state apparatus, as occurs in organized crime. Indeed, processes of subjectivation have their own vicissitudes” (Ferrari et al., 2006, p. 4).
• 7
  Batuque culture is understood here as what Pereira (2010) defines as the reaffirmation of bonds of belonging among Africans and their descendants, articulated through song, percussion, and dance.
• 8
  For a better understanding, see the audiovisual presentation “Pedreira e o Peso de Todas as Águas da Cidade”.
• 9
  Testimony from one of the residents of the Pedreira favela in the audiovisual production “Pedreira e o Peso de Todas as Águas da Cidade”.
• 10
  One of the residents, in November 2022, told us that this was the path of the floodwater that ran close to the wall of her house and that it had flooded “the ones below” several times. When I asked another resident about the situation and the need to organize themselves to deal with it, she evaded the question, saying that the flood, a few meters from her house, did not pose a risk to her, but rather to the neighboring house below, which was in its path.
• 11
  On this occasion, the conversation about hair began after one of the children returned from having her hair combed by her mother. The conversation about “men’s hair” and “women’s hair,” in light of the strangeness of my hairstyle and the length of my dreadlocks, opened up space for dialogue about other social markers. On this occasion, we continued a practice that would happen again on other occasions: storytelling based on children’s literature dealing with themes related to African history, personalities, and ethnic-racial relations.
• 12
  It still seemed enigmatic to me […] “knowing through the body,” “the hand that thinks,” scientific knowledge as “knowing better what one is doing,” a “culture of struggles” distinct from a “culture of books,” reading as “thinking beyond the author,” and non-schooling as “cultural resistance” (Boff, 1989, p. 6).
• 13
  One of the first words I heard most often from the children was “flood”, during the first workshops in the favela, but until that moment we had no idea what that meant for those people, as we could hear at another moment from one of the residents during the audiovisual recording we produced: “Pedreira e o peso de todas Águas da cidade”.
• 14
  On this day, unaware of the drama of the weight of water in Pedreira, the reading of The Marriage of the Beautiful Princess Abena and the Dispute between the Grooms: Rain and Sun, with the Palitoches theater, brought images and representations of Africa to the favela with the colors of the cloths, as well as the black skin of the bodies and the drums playing and being heard, dancing, singing, and enchanting. We were, indeed, proposing new meanings and significances.
• 15
  “How can we teach something we do not know?” We were at the beginning of a journey and barely knew the names of the baques, their lineages, and the conventions of maracatu.
• 16
  The first loas were improvised in the heat of excitement for singing about the Pedreira favela. More recently, children have also begun to include in their loas the experiences of those who live in the favela - the “little pedrinhas”.
• 17
  Another modality of maracatu, which emerged in the early decades of the twentieth century in the state of Pernambuco, was maracatu de baque solto, also known as maracatu rural, whose main characteristics differ, mong other things, in terms of rhythm, vocal style, and geographic location. In this case, it has been concentrated in the Zona da Mata region, today, however, it is also found in the “Mata Norte, Mata Sul, the Metropolitan Region [of Recife], and even in the state of Paraíba” (Opinion No. 982/2014, IPHAN, 2014, p. 8).
• 18
  However, there are percussion groups of baque virado such as Nação Pernambuco that, when reinterpreting traditional maracatus nação, introduce wind instruments and with them the proposition of a pernambucalidade. That is, as Lima (2010, p. 23) understands it, the “patriotic” feeling and appreciation of everything that is Pernambucan. In terms of cultures, the pernambucanidade (Pernambucan identity) takes on other proportions, above all, by absording the practices and customs existing in Pernambuco, giving them the aspect of “Pernambucan identity”. Thus, the pernambucanidade transforms maracatu-nação from a practice of Black culture to a “practice of Pernambucan culture”.

• Responsible editor: Editor-in-Chief:
  Angela Scalabrin Coutinho

Data availability

The entire dataset supporting the results of this study was published in the article itself.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  15 May 2026
• Date of issue
  2026

History

• Received
  20 Jan 2025
• Accepted
  26 Feb 2025