Contemporary Popular Festivals in Brazil
Authors: Chianca Luciana 
Published: September 2024

Amidst the diverse array of celebrations that make up the festive calendar in contemporary Brazil, three stand out, drawing crowds who participate in rituals embraced by the majority of the population: the June saints’ festivities, carnival, and the public devotions of Afro-Brazilian religions. Interwoven, they dialogue with other local and national festivals by means of representations, beliefs, rituals, and practices that encompass both material and symbolic aspects of everyday life. Revealing syntheses of various social tensions and symbolic convergences, they construct original dialogues between different localities, social classes, and ethnic groups, engendering situations of considerable aesthetic profusion. The June saints’ festivals are held in honor of three Catholic saints: Anthony, John the Baptist, and Peter. These are the most popular feasts in Brazil’s Northeast Region, occurring during the winter month of June, and are celebrated as a combined ritual that connects society to cycles of agricultural and human fertility. Even when held in large cities, these celebrations retain distinct rural characteristics, featuring bonfires, food prepared with maize, traditional dance, and forró music. Carnival is also a legacy of the colonial period, with contemporary celebrations varying according to locality. Held annually during the summer months, carnival is ubiquitous across towns and cities through Brazil, with each locality imbuing it with unique characteristics in terms of duration, musical expression and dances (such as frevo, samba, and maracatu), and other forms of celebration. Afro-Brasilian public festivities are the occasional moments when these religions leave their conventional spaces of worship, the terreiros, and occupy roads, squares, and beaches at different moments, depending on the localities and deities to be celebrated. In this way, the povo de santo establish ritual moments of intense sacredness involving all society in celebrations for Iemanjá, Iansã, Xangô or Oxalá.

The various origins and purposes of these festivals converge in terms of the local civilizing process, built on conflict-ridden colonial history involving colonizing Europeans, autochthonous Indigenous peoples, and populations of African origin. In contrast to the prevailing idea that confuses the predominant feeling of joy with social harmony or integration, these three popular feasts give rise to situations and disputes of diverse kinds, since they occur in societies marked by huge diversity and inequality. For this reason, festive representations, narratives, and experiences evoke collaborations, resistances, and clashes (very often violent) among the different protagonists of past and present. As inventions of the present or as traditions gestated in the flow between the colonial past and everyday social life, these contemporary Brazilian festivals present popular resignifications of diverse conflicts over the country’s history, appealing simultaneously to the past, the present, and projection to the future, synthesizing tradition with contemporary globalized culture. This continual process of transformation produces cultural references of great originality, reinforcing differences and affirming the social diversity of Brazil, while evincing the cultural protagonism of its popular classes who participate in festivals to achieve visibility and collective recognition.