Networked terreiro peoples: construction of an episteme of Afro-Amerindian religions in the city of João Pessoa PB in the 21st century
Re-Africanization, terreiro peoples, informal archives, digital content
The thesis, under construction, “Networked terreiro peoples: construction of an episteme of Afro Amerindian religions in the city of João Pessoa PB in the 21st century” aims to analyze how the re-Africanization process is a constituent part of the identities of terreiro peoples, in the axé houses of João Pessoa. The time frame chosen was the years 2000 to 2024, a period of occupation of the social networks of the communities chosen here, articulating these reformulations with the congresses and writings of the 1980s and 1990s, as well as the action of the federations of African cults in the state of Paraíba, which, according to the bibliography on jurema (SALLES, 2010; SAMPAIO, 2016; FERREIRA, 2011), caused several changes in the cult of the sacred jurema. Here we will look for continuities, as well as ruptures in these processes, which we understand to be alive and active in the 2000s, via social networks, and mainly in the academic production of the people of terreiros about themselves. To achieve this research, I sought to collect virtual, printed and oral sources so that it would be possible to follow the re-Africanization processes in the city of João Pessoa, and that would allow us to answer the questions posed here: how terreiro communities have registered and circulated in digital media? How is being “macumbeiro, candomblecista, juremeiro, being an axé” in the 21st century influenced by digital circulation? How have terreiro communities dealt with the transformations experienced in their traditions? How has the logic of secrecy, a basic practice in Afro-Amerindian cults, been inscribed in times when everything is confessed, everything is exposed on social networks, in search of likes and monetization of digital content? The social networks of these axés houses and/or those of each babalorixá or iyalorixá will be read as informal archives (Auerbach, 2018), spaces that circulate years of knowledge, popular and academic studies on cultures, black ethics, knowledge that constitutes a terreiro epistemology.