Geografias festivas do mar e da terra: a Festa de Iemanjá e Pretos Velhos em Fortaleza - Ceará

Abstract

The research on Umbanda festivities in Fortaleza reveals a complex web of rituals, spaces, and sociocultural tensions, transforming the city into a vast terreiro (sacred space). Umbanda festivities allow us to investigate how ceremonial transits in the Feast of Iemanjá and the Old Blacks occur in the geographical space, intertwining symbolic rituals, Afro-religious manifestations, and political, cultural, and socio-spatial tensions in the Fortaleza metropolis. The central theme is to understand how the celebrations of the earth, with Pretos Velhos, and of the sea, with Iemanjá, manifest in spaces such as the Associação Pai Luiz de Aruanda terreiro in Barra do Ceará and Praia de Iracema. These celebratory rituals are investigated from a geocultural perspective, seeking to understand the religious, cultural, political, economic, and socio-spatial dynamics of the city. The research explores the tensions and impressions resulting from the intersection of field and theory, promoting epistemological, symbolic, and geographical elaborations on the religious transit of Umbanda and its festivities. The present study was only possible through the methodological intersection of geocultural, anthropological, ethnogeographical, and oral history concepts, particularly in oral accounts, allowing the understanding of Umbanda celebratory rituals in urban spaces, which manifest both in the celebration Pretos Velhos entities and in the Iemanjá festival, transforming Praia de Iracema and the Fortaleza metropolis into a vast terreiro. Thus, the thesis proposes a geocultural perspective on the rites of the Umbanda tradition in the city, understanding the corporeal, sound, and symbolic ritualities of the Iemanjá and Pretos Velhos celebrations and investigating the geocultural intersections that configure Fortaleza as a terreiro-city. Simultaneously, through these celebrations, the resistances, ritualities, and sacred geosymbols that reveal the ancestralities manifested in the Ceará territory are taught.