FROM THE SAVAGE TO THE KINGDOM: an ethnography of human-goat interaction in Cariri, Paraíba.
goat; human-animal interaction; king goat festival; agency; personification.
The field of studies on human-animal relationships in anthropology goes back to the canons of science. Anthropologists such as E.E.Evans-Pritchard, Claude Lèvi-Strauss and Mary Douglas bring in their reflections the animal figure in a perspective outside human life, considered as “others” in social relations. With the ontological turn, or animal turn, in the 1970s, a new perspective emerged for anthropology that proposes to break with the nature-culture dichotomy. Based on this premise, the present dissertation describes the interaction between humans and goats, demonstrating how both species contribute to the social construction and to the dilution of a dualistic conception imposed by modernity. In this way, the work responds like an animal, which for many years was considered by the locals as a wild animal and is now honored and crowned at the King Goat Festival, the biggest national festivity, created in Cariri in the 90's. aims to investigate the insertion of the animal in the context of Paraíba, to describe the crowning of the goat, to investigate the personification of the non-human animal, to understand the non-human animal as a being that has casual agency, in addition to traversing the crossings for data collection. in the field. To carry out the dissertation, the ethnographic method was used, with its various techniques, participant observation, open interviews, photographic records and field diary, from January to March 2021, in the municipality of Cabaceira, in the State of Paraíba. Therefore, I elaborate, according to the local perception, how the non-human animal becomes a central social agent, contributing to the social, cultural and administrative dynamics of the municipality