Orixás e (meio) ambiente: a feitura de confetos no terreiro da sociopoética

Abstract

This work has as its main proposal to establish a connection between Environmental Education and the afro-Brazilian referential using archetypes and itan (myths, histories and songs) of orishas in a transversalized way. My focus is to know which (new) concepts related to the environment are produced by the searching group when I refer to orishas. For this reason, I appealed to the Sociopoetic research, which is a new method for collective knowledge construction, because in this field there is a variety of possibilities which emerge in order to produce (new) concepts concerning a generating subject by means of multiple corporal and symbolic languages developed during the workshops for the production of data. The group invited to take part in this research was constituted by university students together with teachers from state schools in Fortaleza. During the work - more specifically in the Sociopoetic workshops - I preferred to use the word surrounding instead of environment. I also made use of the metaphor of the city quite frequently during the workshops in order to refer to the environment. The idea consisted of running away from the conceptual naturalizations. It was also my intention to stimulate the creativity of the group, since we search to find the different one, avoiding the repetition of concepts already known, as the sociopoetic research suggests. I gave special attention to the orisha Eshu, since this is “the most controversial” of the orishas. Eshu is the most human of the orishas, and besides that there’s a pedagogical potential in it which may generate a multiplicity of concepts. This appeared in the results of the research when we deal with Eshu and its relation to the environment. Concerning to the other orishas, the production of new concepts was less visible. However, important relations were made with the generating subject. In this research, we have tried to value the afro-Brazilian matrix as a basic reference to think and live as deep as possible a culturally differentiated Environmental Education. I believe that this production is only a drop in the ocean, a step forward to the construction of environmental knowledge based in ancestral knowledge.