A “reinvenção” da cultura gaúcha: na alma e na voz dos cantautores

Abstract

This analysis and research has as its theme and objective to progress in the understanding of the development process of the Gaucho culture in modern days, from a vision that has its outline in the artistic scope. In other words, through research, I pursue to examine the characteristics, the meanings and the tensions that shape this process in order to reveal what is, in fact, its own. Thus, I develop an ethnography of a ritual that is very characteristic of contemporary Rio Grande do Sul culture. However, before reaching the ethnographic description of the immersion festival to compose Taipa's songs, in order to overcome the superficiality of spontaneous perception of the facts, I chose to develop a concept of culture and two categories of emic inspiration that allowed me to articulate the level of practices, relate songs and immersion festivals with the most abstract and historical level of culture. From this, it was possible to identify in the interior of this broader process of development of the gaucho culture in contemporaneity, the emergence of a process that relates contemporaneity, singers and immersion festivals, through a problem posed by the gaucho culture regarding the expansion of its reach. As a result of this process being characterized by the reproduction of culture from its transformation, I call it cultural reinvention. My hypothesis is that the Taipa festival and its innovative creations, added to the creation of an festival of immersion by women composers, represent an answer to this problem. In this sense, the development process of the Gaucho culture in contemporary times, in regard to its artistic scope, seems to be characterized and singularized by the emergence of this process of cultural reinvention..