The drums that echo and travel through the streets of Natal: Zambêracatu nation and te experience of being in a community
experience, community, Nação Zambêracatu.
The doctoral project devotes attention to the study of community experience da Nação Zambêracatu, Natal Maracatu-Nação. It intends: a) to narrate the cultural and religious traditions of this cultural group; to accompany the sociability networks, the friendship policy and the relations of power built in the daily life of this cultural group; and c) to discuss the reverberations of the contemporary, mediatized and pandemic scenario in their community experience, as well as in their sacred and cultural practices. Ethnographic research was used. It aimed to accompany the daily life of Natal Maracatu through participant observations, open interviews, informal conversations, the becoming-chronicler and the drift technique. Between 2020-2021, insertion in the research field took place digitally and, in 2022, in person. The traditions of the Nação Zambêracatu, because of the relationship with the Orixás, with time and with ancestry, the importance of food, the body and the matriarchy, made it possible to perceive the experience of community in moments of hospitality, in the idea of family and in the transmission of knowledge orally. Its sociability, familiarity/friendship policies and power relations are presented as in a mangrove swamp: antagonisms and divergences branch out like arboreal formations; there is a rich and plural biodiversity that proliferates in the territory, with different forms of life that build alliances and affections among themselves; there are also conflicts and disputes as junctions in a community. When the Nação drums in the streets, between the terror of colonial, racist and eugenic projects that traverse the city, resulting from perceptions by the State, civil society or by other social actors, and the joy and strength of ancestral traditions, the Nação transforms the city in candomblé grounds, making it the home of Exu. In the pandemic scenario, the body and subjectivity were limited to biomolecular, microprosthetic and digital technologies. It is in this mediatized scene, in this city of bits and pixels, where devices of visibility, surveillance and control prevail, which encourage spectacularization, the cult of performance and self-exposition, that Zambêracatu reinvented its traditions to stay alive.