Abstract

The samba school parades are a modality of the Brazilian Carnival. From multiple forms of expression - song, dance, percussion, allegories and costumes - they operate on principles of inversion and enchantment to tell a story in motion.

Between 2016 and 2022, a time of disruptive conjuncture in the country, I studied the presence of entanglements religious (themes) in the main parades in Rio de Janeiro. In the research, I found the intensification of references to religions, associated with national debates on culture, society and rights. The samba schools not only parade with themes of Brazilian culture, but also renew and reconstruct that culture through their performances criticism, often with religion as the common thread. To corroborate my argument, I analyze two of them entanglements of the 2020 Carnival.

religious themes in rio de janeiro's samba schools (2016-2022): festive performances and social processes.

Samba school parades are one of the main expressions of Brazil's Carnival. Encompassing song, dance, percussion, floats, and costumes, they invert everyday hierarchies and produce a sense of enchantment to tell a story in motion. This study examines religious entanglements (parade themes) in the main Rio de Janeiro parades from 2016 to 2022, a period of disruptive upheaval in the country. In these years, references to religion intensified in response to nationwide debates on culture, society, and rights. Beyond working with Brazilian cultural themes, samba schools also renew and remake that culture in their parades through critical performances in which religion often serves as a guiding thread. To support this argument, this study analyzes two entanglements from the 2020 Carnival.

Keywords: Carnival, religion and culture, ritual and symbolism, Rio de Janeiro, samba schools.

Introduction. The Carnival of the samba schools and its entanglements.

Carnival, considered the most important popular festival in Brazil, takes on different forms, with intense regional variation. One of these forms is the parade of the samba schools, sold internationally as “one of the greatest spectacles on the planet”, something “typically Brazilian”, unique and characteristic of the “national culture”. Regardless of the stereotypes implicit in these adjectives, the magnitude of the phenomenon is unquestionable: every year thousands of people participate in the parades, thousands more watch it live and millions follow it on television and video sharing platforms.

In Rio de Janeiro, the first samba schools were institutionalized as recreational associations at the beginning of the century. xx, from black communities and other subaltern groups. They are characterized by expressions of song, dance and percussion in a courtship format (Santos, 1999), like other manifestations of the repertoire of “popular festivals” in Brazil (Cascudo, 1999). Since 1932, these groups have participated in contests promoted by the press and tourism sectors (Cavalcanti, 2006: 42).

Over the years, the schools broadened their social base for the middle classes, while at the same time the parades became more sophisticated with costumes and floats. Choreographers, set designers and costume designers were incorporated. The figure of the carnavalero, the professional responsible for all the visual aspects of the parade, was born.1 The entanglement -sort of a storyline or plot- began to orient its multiple dimensions (Cavalcanti, 2006). Around 1980, Rio de Janeiro's samba schools were already spectacular, due to their wide media broadcasting and the funding of the jogo do bicho, The "mafia-like bosses are socially legitimized through the sponsorship of schools and their communities" (Santos, 1999) (Figure 1).

Figure 1. The image shows the actual volume of the festival and the Calvary float, in which Jesus crucified emerges as a young black man shot in a favela in Rio de Janeiro. Source: Fernando Grilli, Riotur Collection. Mangueira School Parade, 2020.

Nowadays, during Carnival, each samba school parades telling a story in motion, the entanglement, by means of a samba-entanglement, the music composed for the occasion, sung and danced to with the support of a percussion orchestra, the battery. To mark the continuities and discontinuities in the narrative, the members are grouped into at The costumed costumes are organized in sectors (like the acts of a play), delimited by floats. Normally the entanglement is proposed by the carnavalero and is directly or indirectly related to Brazil, its history and culture. As the festival is a competition, the parades are evaluated by judges who score certain elements and thus determine the position of each school within the annual championship.2

These schools have been considered, in parallel or simultaneously, as art, culture, popular culture, popular festivity, spectacle, tourism, tradition, innovation and, even, because of their connections with the jogo do bicho, marginality. Anthropological works such as those of Roberto da Matta (1984) and Maria Laura Cavalcanti (2006) treat parades as rituals that present dramatic and narrative versions of Brazil, versions of the self that a group represents to itself and to others.

To this extent, this article discusses how the samba schools, through the parades with entanglements religious, have dealt with processes of Brazilian society. Religion, considered a constitutive part of the national culture, has been a key to interpreting social reality. This is a twofold approach: on the one hand, a broader set of social transformations affects this popular festival and, on the other, the festival itself perceives these movements, critically thematizing the relations between religion, culture and society. The starting point is the idea that popular festivals are not just the result or the mirror of social relations: they are a constituent part of society and, at the moment they are celebrated, they act on it.

To discuss these issues, he used data from research conducted between 2016 and 2022 in conjunction with the Rio de Janeiro Samba Schools Task Force., composed of approximately twelve associations.3 Based on this work, this article initially presents an overview of the recent reconfigurations, including religious ones, of Brazilian society that impact the definitions of national culture and the set of popular festivals. It then introduces the concepts that theoretically underpin the proposed approach to the Carnival parades, namely: transgressive rituals and performances effective. The following explains the research methodology with the samba schools and justifies the selection of two parades from the year 2020. These will be presented as ethnographic examples of how religious issues have figured prominently in the Carioca Carnival and how these have been a common thread of social and cultural critiques.

Conjuncture in Brazil: cultural, religious and political reconfigurations

Religion can be linked to questions of national identity and culture, especially in countries that were formed by appealing to “religious traditions and customs” as the basis of the nation. This is the case of Brazil, a country in which national identity is considered the fruit of a historical process in which Portuguese Catholic colonialism, religions, ontologies and Afro-diasporic and native peoples' religiosities, ontologies and cosmovisions were mixed. There are other religions that were brought by immigrants, introduced by religious missionaries or created locally. Even being relevant for an important part of the population, these religions are not treated with the same weight with respect to the formation of the national culture (Menezes, 2012; Sanchis, 1997).

In the constitution of the republican state, the buildings and festive practices considered cultural heritage were mostly associated with Catholicism, even when they involved other religions, which remained invisible. For much of the century xx, In an idealized way, the idea that the cultural basis of Brazil was Iberian Catholicism, festive and popular, porous and syncretic, was hegemonic (Sanchis, 1997). The emphasis on the integrating and non-conflicting dimensions of culture, which were intended to converge for national unity, left hidden the violent and homogenizing colonial processes that produced that unity. However, at the end of the same century, social changes challenged this interpretative disposition.

After the intense struggle for democracy, Brazil put an end to the civil-military dictatorship (1964-1985) and drafted a progressive constitution, the 1988 Citizen Constitution, which affirms that the nation was formed from different ethnic and cultural matrices and guarantees “the protection of indigenous and Afro-Brazilian cultural manifestations, as well as other groups that contributed to the Brazilian civilizing process”. It also guarantees religious freedom as a constitutional principle (Capone and Morais, 2015).

Another vigorous force for transformation is the mobilization of indigenous, black, feminist, and feminist movements. lgbtqia+ that, strengthened so far in this century, have been xxi, have demanded rereadings of national history. From civilizing frameworks, places of memory and epistemologies different from those of European colonialism, they have proposed to recognize and legitimize the protagonism of subjects that were previously forgotten, thus breaking the chains of subordination.

Regarding religion, since the 1970s Brazil has experienced the decline of Catholicism and a rapid conversion of large segments of the population to evangelical Christianity, especially in Pentecostal and Neo-Pentecostal churches (Teixeira and Menezes, 2006, 2013). These segments do not recognize themselves in the consolidated cultural repertoire and struggle to include in it their practices and their versions of history and national culture (Mafra, 2011; Mariz and Campos, 2011).

In recent decades, elements considered traditional, such as civil calendars, festive events, national holidays, heritage titles, musical styles and rhythms, museum collections, medals and titles, have become the subject of controversy and disputes. There are claims that suggest that elements qualified as characteristic of culture are “actually religious” and “identitarian”; that is, belonging not to the nation, but to specific ethnic groups and, in other cases, the recognition of certain religious practices as “cultural” heritages is demanded (Giumbelli, 2018; Morais, 2018). Culture, religion and identity become contested categories in a process of mutual redefinition.

The situation has become even more complex since 2013, with the growing articulation of the right wing leading to the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016, ending 14 years of popular Workers' Party governments (pt). The presidency of Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022) represented the rise of the right wing to government, due to a coalition between the military, businessmen, Pentecostal evangelicals and conservative Catholics. His administration sought to dismantle social inclusion policies, in addition to assuming the guidelines of Catholic and evangelical conservatism in educational, moral and public health issues. During this period, cases of religious intolerance worsened, mainly of evangelical Christianity, with physical and symbolic attacks on people and places of worship of other religions, as well as accusations of idolatry, witchcraft and devil worship. Although with the election of Luiz Ignácio Lula da Silva for the period 2023-2026 the government of the pt is back, the right wing is still organized and with a lot of power.

The heated relations between religion, culture and politics also reach the samba schools. Although by their origin and composition they are linked to Afro-Brazilian religions, Evangelical and Catholic segments have increased interest in them, either for purposes of extending their evangelizing missions or to prohibit or moralize them (Gomes, 2008; Oosterbaan and Godoy, 2020; Menezes and Reis, 2017). In the municipality of Rio de Janeiro, another serious crisis arose with the election of Mayor Marcelo Crivella, an Evangelical Neo-Pentecostal bishop from a right-wing party. During his term of office (2017-2020), he adopted a stance against samba and Carnival: he cut funds in the name of investing in “child care,” in addition to creating bureaucratic obstacles so that public spaces could not be occupied (Menezes and Reis, 2017) (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Culture on parade: the float represents the Caboclo Pedra Preta candomblé entity as an indigenous doll of the Iny Karajá people, whose manufacturing technique is considered Brazilian intangible heritage. Source: Fernando Grilli. Riotur Collection. Escola Grande Rio, 2020.

The samba schools do not only suffer effects of the conjuncture, because through their parades they position themselves in the game: they produce their own theories about the country, its culture and its religions (Bártolo, 2018, 2021; Menezes and Bártolo, 2019; Menezes, 2020). In order to develop this issue and based on the theoretical references that I will present below, I will address the ritual and performative dimension of the entanglements.

Carnival, carnival and religion: transgressive rituals, performances effective

Although Carnival is considered a profane celebration, its history associates it with the Catholic liturgy. From this perspective, Carnival would be a festive period of excess and debauchery, immediately preceding and antagonistic to the restrictions of Lent which, through fasting and other forms of asceticism, serves as preparation for the ceremonies of Christ's death and resurrection at Easter (Baroja, 1979; Burke, 2010). The relationship between Carnival and Christianity seems to be structural and defined by the position and role of the festival in the Roman Catholic calendar. In spite of this same calendar, after the Protestant and Catholic reforms of the xvi, In the last few years, playful practices have been moralized and reduced, and have become repressed (Burke, 2010).

In relation to the above, Mikhail Bakhtin (1997) distinguishes Carnival from the carnivalesque, a principle of signification of the world that operates on the basis of concrete, sensorial symbolic forms and transgressive operations that mark similar events in different latitudes. For him, “the carnivalesque [principle]” results from “carnivalization”: “An act of inversion of ordinary life, which suspends [for a certain period] laws, prohibitions and restrictions, bringing together things and people that until then were organized hierarchically or separately, as [...] sacred and profane, which allows us to speak of the carnivalesque act as potentially profaning, sacralizing or even dualistic” (Menezes and Bártolo, 2019: 98).

In Bakhtin's (1997) approach, the carnival is not so much a specific festival, but the sum of various festivities and rituals that operate with inversions and contestations. In the words of Claire Tancons (2014), it would be a “sensibility of protest” that opens the way, through debauchery, to criticism and novelty.

The differences and similarities between Carnival and the carnival principle help us to understand the strength of the festival in the Americas. Despite its links to the Christian calendar, the transgressive potential of the festival allows for cosmological and ontological combinations, including those of native and Afro-diasporic peoples. These are manifestations that often take place in bodies and involve practices and aesthetics capable of articulating different forms of sacralization.4 Thus, Carnival parades - influenced by Catholic processions and African processions - allow connections with multiple expressions of the sacred, detached from the strict, normative and reformed Christian matrix.

In their parades, the samba schools combine carnival and carnival, order and disorder. From the point of view of order, its date is still defined by the Christian calendar and there are also many rules for the development of the procession, as well as criteria for the deliberation of the juries. There is also sensuality, luxury, the comic, the grotesque, the scatological, the excess, the disformed, the sweat, the sensory rapture and the emotional involvement of those who parade and the public. The complexity of the forces at work makes it possible to bring parades closer to the concept of “critical event”, in the sense expressed by Bruce Kapferer (2010: 3). For this author, “critical events” are situations that mobilize diverse classificatory systems or interpretative perspectives. They allow that, both in social and personal life, irresolvable tensions emerge and are put in relation. They are, therefore, privileged occasions for destabilizing consensus and provoking strangeness.

The idea of carnivalesque transgression as a “critical event” dialogues with Homi Bhabha's (1998) concept of “cultural translation”. This involves actions that rewrite oppressive discourses to expose their internal contradictions, endorse their structure and open space for the emergence of the new -something that can escape the mechanisms of colonial power-. Through movements that evidence contradictions, subversions and inversions, “cultural translation” generates ambiguities and hybridisms that promote the emergence of a “third space”: a structure of ambivalence open to subversion, transgression, blasphemy, heresy. There where all binary divisions and all antagonisms, typical of modern concepts, cease to be valid.

By taking into account the games of contradictions, subversions and inversions that the samba school parade activates, as a carnival festival, it can be understood as a modality of “third space” (Bhabha, 1998), propelling discursive negotiations in cultural translation. This is a liminal and ambivalent space in which the logical structures that sustain the West (and maintain its cultural dominance over the other) collapse and, therefore, something new can emerge.

The capacity to make a space for the new emerge can be associated with the idea of carnival parades as rituals. The pragmatic theories of ritual (Tambiah, 1985; Schechner, 1985; Peirano, 2001) point out that rituals say things, but also do things by saying them, an effective communicative act that produces social effects. In the case of schools, it is a communication that does not occur only in verbal language, but through the combination of multiple aesthetic-sensory forms, capable of activating emotions and perceptions, of producing forms of involvement, of kinesthetic understanding and of generating imaginaries and imaginations in the samba catwalk (Meyer, 2019).

From this perspective that associates the notions of “carnavalero”, “critical event”, “third space” and “ritual pragmatics”, I consider samba school parades as effective rituals of transgression, performances multiexpressive and multisensorial, producing versions of Brazilian culture. They operate with transgressive principles, capable of bringing to light existing social forces and patterns. Even when these patterns are conflictive, the parades allow to highlight them, suspend them and propose their critical interpretation, as well as to arouse the imagination of alternatives. The entanglements would be dynamic archives of Brazilian culture or, in the sense of Diana Taylor (2013), they would be cultural repertoires in performance, reinterpreted in each carnival. The samba schools do not only parade talking about Brazilian cultural themes, but also, through their performances, renew and rebuild the culture.

Investigating religion and culture in recent parades

My interest in religion in Carnival arose in 2015, in a project dedicated to understanding the devotion to Saints Cosme and Damião in Rio de Janeiro. To find conceptions of those saints present in several parades, I paid attention to religion in samba schools (Menezes and Bártolo, 2019). The experience was so significant that it stimulated further research.

While recognizing that in the universe of samba schools religion is present in many forms, the research focused on approaching it as entanglement, The main axis of the argument that organizes the whole complexity of a parade.5

The research methodology was based on the ethnography of the process of construction of some of the entanglements religious. For this purpose, each year, the schools were expected to define their entanglements for the following year in order to identify which ones had religious elements and the repercussion they would have in the Carnival world. The objective conditions of access to the schools were also evaluated in order to be able to follow the backstage of the creation process.

Participant observation was carried out in different spaces. Thanks to the collaboration with students, we went to the headquarters of the samba schools, sheds where the floats and costumes are elaborated, in the contests of the election of the "Samba" and the "Samba". samba-entanglement, in the recordings of CD and other events. We paraded in some samba schools and followed the scrutiny of the jury evaluations.

As for the work with documents, in addition to the analysis of academic works, we read synopses of the entanglements and their justifications for the juries. We follow the debates in the specialized media, both in print and online (on websites, social networks and video sharing platforms). We look at Carnival commentators, as they are important agents of the festival, gathering fans around them, circulating news and rumors about the quality of the work in progress, highlighting the schools that seem to be the strongest. Because reputation politics is part of the competitive game, the fermentation of expectations is a significant task.

According to specialist commentators, our research coincided with a phase of politicization in which the entanglements The emphasis was on critical perspectives, which discussed social inequalities and the impasses of the political crises the country had been facing (Simas and Fabato, 2015). Visual artist Daniela Name associated the changes to a new generation of carnavaleros-narradores that, by privileging the entanglements in the parades, subordinate aesthetics to narrative. With them, discourses have come to occupy a place “in the womb of the plastic” (Name, 2021). Our choice to analyze entanglements would be justified by its place of prominence in that context.

The compilation of data by Lucas Bártolo - a doctoral student at the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and co-responsible for the research - identified that, while in previous decades the entanglements Religious parades appeared occasionally, since 2016 there has not been a carnival in the Special Group that does not have at least one parade with religion as a central theme. Between 2016 and 2022, there were 14 entanglements (Bártolo and Menezes, 2022) This intensification continued even after the research, to such an extent that, for the 2025 Carnival, ten of the twelve samba schools in the Special Group paraded with entanglements religious.

From our field work, it was possible to confirm that, on the one hand, the entanglements of the research period contained accusations of religious intolerance, nostalgic visions of a Brazil more open to the cult of saints and syncretism; and, on the other hand, suggested the affirmation of the African, black, racialized and religious origins of the festival, with demands for recognition of those origins. In a context of cultural wars, of threats to racial equality and to policies of reparation and religious freedom, Carnival was operating as an arena for the questioning of moralities derived from modern, Christian and colonial matrices; and, at the same time, they were situated in the defense of rights. The entanglements These questions were anchored by religious leaders.

In this sense, I bring as examples two ethnographic cases of the 2020 Carnival. The cases were selected both for their heuristic value and for having been defined by the universe of the samba schools themselves as entanglements outstanding. They stood out for the theme they took on and for the excellence of the carnavaleros who produced them, who were considered skilled “storytellers”, in the sense of Name (2021).6 These are the entanglements “The truth will set you free”, created by carnavalero Leandro Vieira for the Mangueira School, and “Tata Londirá: the song of the caboclo in the quilombo of Caxias”, created by carnavaleros Leandro Bora and Gabriel Haddad of the Grande Rio School. These are entanglements whose development we accompanied thanks to the relationship we had built with these samba schools.

Neither of the two parades won, although they were widely publicized. These entanglements exemplify in different, if not opposite, ways of approaching the religious question: while the first proposes a critical reading of Christianity, updating the life of Christ as a person excluded from the centers of power and involved in Carnival, the second highlights the Afro-Brazilian priest Joãozinho da Goméia, called “The King of Candomblé”, emphasizing enchanted and transgressive aspects of his biography. Thus, the two cases are related to the poles of religious conflicts in Brazil today (Christianity versus Afro-Brazilian religions).

There are also interesting contrasts in the profile of the two samba schools. Mangueira is one of the oldest and most recognized samba schools in Brazil with millions of followers in the country and abroad, which makes it possible to speak of a “Mangueirense nation” spread over discontinuous territories. Although it is the samba school of great artists, it stands out among the carnival groups for its reputation of traditionalism and strong community ties enshrined in expressions such as “a school of roots” and “grassroots”, that is, formed by segments of the lower classes “mangueirenses by birth”.

Grande Rio, on the other hand, is considered the “youngest” of the Grupo Especial, as it was only formed in 1988, from the merger of samba schools from the neighboring municipality of Duque de Caxias in the Baixada Fluminense region (Menezes, 2020: 17). At the time of the research, Grande Rio had a reputation for parading with entanglements more focused on media issues or funded by large sponsorships, of being occupied by television and social media personalities, of being heavily funded, and of being alienated from its community. Precisely to rid itself of the “rootless” reputation, the school hired for the 2020 Carnival two young carnival goers who came to the Task Force with a reputation for skill with the entanglements cultural.

In the following, I will describe the two parades to propose a contrast as to how the religious is articulated to social criticism.

Ethnographies of religion on parade

Jesus in the Mangueira parade

It was in the 2016 Mangueira parade that Leandro Vieira made his debut as a carnavalero in the Special Group.7 In his debut, he won the championship with the entanglement Maria Bethânia, the apple of Oyá's eye breaking a long streak, as his last victory had been in 2002. The entanglement celebrated the life and work of the important interpreter of Brazilian popular music, in her 50 years of career, and the carnival man chose to take her religiosity as the axis by presenting her as the daughter of the Orixá of the candomblé Oyá (Iansã). The following year, Mangueira returned to bring religion to the samba catwalk with the entanglement Only with the help of the saint, deepening aspects of the previous parade. The devotional relationship organized the narrative, highlighting the intimacy, affection and affection between saints and devotees, in a parade that began at a baroque Catholic altar and ended at the umbanda. The Money or no money, I'll play! of 2018 criticized both the treatment given to Carnival by mayor-bishop Marcelo Crivella and the funding and management mechanisms of the samba schools themselves in their associations. At Story to lull big people to sleep of 2019, Mangueira presented alternative versions to the official history, valuing the role of popular groups in the historical process through counter-narratives in costumes and allegories, which made it the winner of the championship once again. In four years the parades created by Vieira earned Mangueira two victories and placed it always among the six best schools, which elevated the carnival man to the category of star in the world of Carnival.8

In his remarks, Vieira attributed the presence of religion in his entanglements to its cultural relevance: “When I chose to focus on Bethânia [in 2016] and to include in the tribute I paid to her the whole question of Catholic devotion, her maternal heritage and candomblé, the worship of the orixás, it is because I believe that Brazilian religiosity is one of the most beautiful pages of Brazilian culture” (Fevereiros, 2017: 8-11).

The [2017] parade was another space to implement a narrative of Brazilian culture [...] that allowed me to bring in the image of a bandeira-holder dressed as Our Lady of Aparecida and at the same time having a school muse dressed as an pombagira called Maria Padilha9 [...] If we do not have a black cultural representation of religiosity in soap operas, in the media, that allows this information to reach a wider audience [...] if I have the possibility to build this in Carnival, then it is Carnival that I am going to use as a space to implement this discourse (Vieira, 2018).

In 2020, famous and successful, the carnival man upped the ante: religion came back to the center of the entanglement based on the biblical verse John 8:3. The proposal was to reread the figure of Christ, distancing it from fundamentalist and Eurocentric interpretations and bringing it closer to theological-pastoral readings that emphasized its human and loving dimension. The idea was to bring to the parade a compassionate, joyful and playful Jesus, a participant in the Carnival. It posed a provocation: “If he were to return to Earth today and be reborn in the morro of Mangueira, would he be in a Christian church or in the samba? When embodied in the most fragile members of society, would it be a black woman, a victim of domestic violence, an abused homosexual, a transsexual or a young man from the favelas ‘crucified by the militias’?” (Vieira, 2020).

Mangueira's proposal can be considered critical in many ways. The morro is the hill, a geographical feature; but in Rio de Janeiro it also means a steep area of the city where there are often favelas, a concentration of low-income housing inhabited by black and peripheral communities. The association between samba schools, snouts and favelas the social origins of the samba are evident: in the favela In Mangueira - as in others in the city - the dispossessed who shared the territory, mostly blacks of African descent, created this unique cultural manifestation.

By bringing Christ closer to the black, poor and peripheral, the narrative evoked the theological interpretations of the preferential option for the poor, so relevant in Latin America for the liberation theology movement. Christ, as a samba dancer and a denizen of the morro Mangueira's work put, if not in suspense, at least in tension, the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, bringing the central figure of Christianity to the feast “of the flesh” without denying its sacredness. Thus, he questioned how the principles of charity and love of neighbor are really lived today, as a denunciation of Pharisaism (Figures 3, 4 and 5).

Figure 3. Jesus is reborn on the hill of Mangueira, pursued by the police. Source: Gabriel Nascimento. Riotur Collection. Mangueira Parade, 2020.

Figure 4. Among the many contemporary crucifixions are homosexuals, trans persons and indigenous people. The cross reads "Just love". Source: Dhavid Normando. Riotur Collection, 2020.

Figure 5. The queen of the Mangueira battery, Evelyn Bastos, as Jesus-Woman, with colors and accessories that refer to the Passion, while behind her, in black, the battery is disguised as Roman centurions. Source: Gabriel Nascimento. Riotur Collection, 2020.

The transgressive and daring proposal fell short in the development of the parade. The script spoke of a “carnival opera divided into five acts”: Christmas, adult life in Jerusalem, the condemnation, torture and death on the cross, and his resurrection in the morro of Mangueira in the Carnival (Vieira, 2020: 122-123). The narrative structure shows that the traditional references to the historical Jesus, although they recovered Christ as a “pariah” persecuted by the power, occupied most of the parade, contradicting the initial proposal that spoke strongly of a carnival Jesus, in the sense of Bakhtin that, although present, was slow to arrive.

Since the announcement of the entanglement, The costume has sparked controversy in the worlds of Carnival, the arts, religious studies and among religious people. When the costumes began to be disseminated, cyber-attacks against the school and the carnival man multiplied, to the point that when the pandemic broke out, some attributed it as a punishment for the alleged mockery of Christ in Carnival (Baptista Pereira, 2021). Others praised Vieira's proposal and audacity, both for the theme and for the aesthetic choices made to address it (Baptista Pereira, 2021; Menezes and Pereira, 2022).

In field work, I was at Mangueira's headquarters, at the presentation of the synopsis of the entanglement. Before Vieira began to read his proposal, the school administration asked everyone to “stand up and pray the Lord's Prayer,” which they did, giving the event a solemn, Christian tone. But Vieira did not accompany them, he remained seated. I then had the impression that there would be obstacles to follow the argumentative proposal. Christianity seemed too serious to become playful. Carnivalizing Jesus seemed to stumble at the limit of the imaginable.

On the day of the parade, I confirmed my impression. I saw Mangueira passing heavy, as if captured by the drama of the Passion. The denunciation of the rawness of reality prevailed over the euphoria of Carnival and the proposal to make Jesus a participant in the feast did not have the same force as the attention paid to his martyrdom. By associating Jesus to the many torments that mark the population in everyday life, the parade presented striking visual compositions, but with little emphasis on joy (for a similar reading, see Teixeira, 2020).

There was also controversy surrounding the drum queen, Evelyn Bastos, who represented Jesus-Woman and chose not to dance samba “as a sign of respect”. On the one hand, there was a transgressive dimension in turning Jesus into a woman; on the other hand, instead of dancing Jesus-Woman, singing and dancing in recognition of the majesty of samba, we saw a great pasista who did not dance when Jesus became Jesus. If we paraphrase Peter Burke (2010), Lent seems to have won over Carnival in this parade, in which Mangueira came in sixth place. The tension between carnivalization and the Christian sacred seems to have been too strong.

Tata Londirá in Grande Rio

Carnival members Leonardo Bora and Gabriel Haddad arrived at Grande Rio and the Special Group in 2020. In the world of Carnival they were recognized by experts, who saw in them a trajectory in the lower groups considered creative, dense and with entanglements of great cultural depth, able to mobilize references from the affective memory of their samba schools.

To reconnect Grande Rio with its community and with the traditions of samba, Bora and Haddad - in collaboration with researcher Vinicius Natal - created the entanglement Tata Londirá. The Caboclo's song at Quilombo de Caxias. It is a entanglement on Joãozinho da Goméia (1914-1971), the pai de santo (Afro-Brazilian priest) Tata Londirá, whose terreiro (place of Afro-Brazilian worship) in Duque de Caxias marked the region of the samba school. This was very important in legitimizing candomblé and promoting its growth in southeastern Brazil between the 1940s and 1970s. It also contributed to create links between religions of African origin and the media.

Dom João, as he was also called, was a practitioner of candomblé Angola or Caboclo candomblé, a branch of candomblé that connects with indigenous spiritualities. His main spiritual entity was the Caboclo Pedra Preta, an Afro-indigenous figure. Adept to practices condemned by the most orthodox religious leaders, Joãozinho was a multifaceted and transgressive figure: he was a priest who was also a great dancer of Afro-Brazilian dances, actively participated in Carnival, in samba schools and costume dances; he was a presence on television and radio programs, was a newspaper columnist and publicly recognized himself as a homosexual at a time when doing so was a great taboo. Considered powerful in dealing with spiritual forces, his house of saint in the terreiro da Goméia was frequented by political leaders, people of art and high society. Legends say that even Queen Elizabeth of Great Britain visited it (Figures 6 and 7).10

Figure 6. Dancer representing the pai de santo (priest) Joãozinho da Goméia or Tata Londirá. It should be noted that Joãozinho himself danced and paraded in samba schools. Source: Gabriel Nascimento. Riotur Collection, Grande Rio parade opening, 2020.

Figure 7. Detail of the Ancestral Roots float in the school shed, highlighting Joâozinho da Goméia's Afro-American spirituality. Source: Lucas Bártolo. Ludens Collection, Grande Rio, 2020.

In addition to presenting the complexity of the figure of a priest far from the stereotypes attributed to a religious leader by the Christian normativity - which shows that the sacred has diverse forms and conceptions -, the parade also linked Grande Rio to one of the main problems of his municipality. Duque de Caxias is a region with many terreiros, The evangelical population is larger than the Catholic population and is estimated to be on the rise.11 It is a region marked by conflicts and situations of attacks on some saint's houses and followers of African religions. 12 In this regard, the samba-entanglement stressed the importance of respect among religions and the fight against religious intolerance that gained strength throughout the carnival process.

“Hail the candomblé, Eparrei Oyá / Grande Rio es Tata Londirá / For love of God, for love of faith / I respect your amen / You respect my axé / For love of God, for love of faith / Respect my axé.”.13
Excerpt from samba-entanglement de Dere, Rafael Ribeiro, Robson Moratelli and Toni Vietnam (highlighted by Renata de Castro Menezes).

Just as the word amen operates as a greeting or a characteristically Christian response, axé is a key expression in African matrix religions, especially in candomblé, denoting vital energy and spiritual connection. The part of samba-entanglement which speaks of an opposition between amen and axé makes it clear that there is an ongoing polarization between Christian and Afro-Brazilian religions. It also underscores where the disrespect comes from: Christianity. The lyrical “I” of samba-entanglement is positioned by the Afro-Brazilian religions (mi axé), in counterpoint to the amen that disrespects.

Beyond the samba, demonstrations against religious intolerance were also present in the costumes and appeared with full impact on the float that opened the parade, which reinforced the call for respect for the axé (Figure 8).

Figure 8. Detail of the inaugural float with caboclos (spiritual entities of candomblé and umbanda) asking "respect my axé". Source: Dhavid Normando. Riotur Collection, Grande Rio parade, 2020.

On his Facebook page, Luiz Antônio Simas - teacher, writer and active participant in the world of Carnival - commented on the entanglement of Grande Rio and compared it to that of Mangueira:

In 2020, Acadêmicos de Grande Rio presented one of the most important entanglements most outstanding in the history of Rio de Janeiro Carnival [...] To talk about Joãozinho da Goméia at this time opens up a range of the most powerful and necessary reflections on Brazil. Joãozinho was the man, the woman, the gay, the trans, the black, the Indian, the artist, the animal, the tree, the wind, who presented in his trajectory the most surprising and original possibility of deciphering the enigma of Brazil. He flew like a bird beyond any religious and ontological encapsulation. And he makes everyone uncomfortable: from the hallucinated neo-Pentecostals - passing through the Cartesian doctors - to the essentialists who defend some kind of purity in the inescapable suppression of the colonial trauma. Tata Londirá is not only a symptom of Brazil. It is a solution (Simas, August 31, 2019).

And in another publication he wrote the following:

[...] the great challenge of Grande Rio is not to make the first decolonial, decolonized or similar history. That has already happened. And I think, for example, that the entanglement Mangueira's thought-provoking “Jesus of the people” could have a very powerful decolonized feel to it. I hope so. Grande Rio's step forward is a beautiful one: to create an argument about the in-colonizable: the being of the wind, of the leaf, of the drum (Simas, September 6, 2019) (available at: https://www.facebook.com/luizantonio.simas/ italics by Renata de Castro Menezes).

The strength of Grande Rio's parade was also recognized by the judges: the school finished the Carnival in second place, with the same number of points as the champion, Unidos do Viradouro; they lost only by the tie-breaker criterion.

Conclution

In this article I set out to discuss how the samba schools of the Rio de Janeiro Carnival, one of the festive modalities of great impact in Brazil, speak both of the country's culture or show aspects of it in their parades, as well as critically reconstruct it, since they are part of the social fabric. Carnival, as well as other popular festivals, not only reproduces or mirrors social relations, but also possesses a performative dimension, of doing things. In order to demonstrate this capacity for action, I treated parades as “rituals” and “performances transgressive” (by playing with the inversion and temporary suspension of roles and classificatory principles) and effective (in the sense of multi-sensorially involving the audience and participants, as well as producing effects on them).

From the bibliography, I brought the concepts of “carnavalero”, “carnavalización”, "carnivalization", "carnivalization", "carnivalization", "carnivalization" and "carnivalization".”, event critical”, “third space” and “ritual pragmatics” to understand the parades as arenas of interaction of contradictory social forces, as disputes of meaning, as circulation of critiques of ongoing processes and as gestation of new forms of perception and imagination of society.

The guiding thread of the analysis was to pay attention to religion. If some religions are attributed the role of contributing to the formation of the nation and national culture, the thematization of religion is a way to critically reflect on this same culture and society. In this sense, the religious transformations in the country, associated with constitutional changes, the struggle for rights and the growth of the right wing in Brazil, produce a combination that puts into dispute the repertoire of manifestations of Brazilian culture, which are also positioned in this quarrel.

The identification of the increase in entanglements The religious festivities in Rio de Janeiro's parades, starting in the second half of the 2010s, was interpreted as a positioning. The samba schools began to talk about different conceptions of the sacred, criticizing the reductionism of Christian orthodoxy and religious intolerance. They associate religious leaders, especially of Afro-Brazilian roots, with greater behavioral freedom, with the possibility of singing and dancing samba, of participating in the party. Moreover, they claim the Afro-religious origins of choreographies and the sound of the drums that mark the samba runway. Thus, the strong presence of entanglements The religious and racial vindication of the Carnival of Rio de Janeiro in recent years is related to processes of greater religious and racial vindication of this festival, due to the dynamics of reconfiguration of the Brazilian religious field and its society, and also to the disputes over values and moralities. In this sense, there are attempts to put carnival transgression at the service of social criticism and more inclusive social projects.

These discussions are exemplified by the two ethnographic cases of the 2020 Carnival, the Mangueira and Grande Rio parades. The entanglements of both schools link the religious to contemporary issues and criticize Christianity, mainly fundamentalism and intolerance, although they take complementary, if not opposite, forms: while the entanglement of Mangueira condemns those who do not realize that if Jesus were to return to Earth in present times, he would be on the side of samba and carnival, for that is where the most fragile in society are; the entanglement de Grande Rio shows that the sacred can manifest itself in many ways, and that is why respect for the sacredness of others is an urgent demand.

Considering Mangueira's difficulties in carnivalizing Jesus and the result of the Grande Rio school -vicechampion with a entanglement related to Angola's candomblé-, there remains the question of how the Bakhtinian carnivalesque, festive and jocular, libertine and liberating, perhaps connects better with the characteristics of the sacred of Afro-Brazilian religions than with the strands of contemporary Christianity, which are less open and porous than in its versions of previous decades.

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Video

Fevereiros. Direção de Marcio Debellian (2017). Río de Janeiro: Globo Filmes. Streaming (73 minutos).

Renata de Castro Menezes holds a degree in History, a master's degree and a PhD in Social Anthropology (ufrj). Professor at the Department of Anthropology of the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (cnpq) and the Research Support Foundation of the State of Rio de Janeiro (Faperj).