A música kuximawara: uma etnografia da música popular entre indígenas de São Gabriel da Cachoeira (AM)

Abstract

The work seeks to know Kuximawara music. Practiced among the population of São Gabriel da Cachoeira (AM), especially by indigenous people, this kind of popular music provides a symbolic environment conducive to millennial continuities of indigenous culture in the Northwest Amazon. This encounter involving popular music, cosmological narratives, personal life stories and the indigenous perspective provides the basic elements for what the interlocutors of the work suggest to be a musical-performative genre of local popular music. The ethnographic proposal seeks to assimilate this idea by trying to answer questions such as: “what is kuximawara music? where is it played? What are the customs and behaviors that characterize the group of participants in this musical practice? ” and other contextual issues. Stemming from the fieldwork obsdrvations, four months among indigenous musicians from São Gabriel da Cachoeira, mainly Baré and Tukano, I describe how my participation in the Kuximawara music scene took place. Through the activities of music producer, musician and composer, a condition that I share with the interlocutors, I carried out a series of activities together with the musicians and the audience of this scene. The main results of this process are: recording of the CD Caboclo do Rio Negro, from Ary to Ykuema, indigenous baré; the CD Bahsana a’tia, by Jack da Guitarra; participation in the Festa do Divino Espírito Santo of the community of Iá-miri; hundreds of photos and hours of live performances, performed with the aid of a six-channel portable digital audio recorder. By participating in the productive and creative process of the Kuximawara music scene, the initial questions are clarified. The music and other materials resulting from the fieldwork provide the data and facts on which the main points of ethnography are based. These data are in dialogue with the specialized literature on the subject, especially the ethnography produced on the indigenous peoples of the Northwest Amazon, the literature on Anthropology of Music in the Lowlands of South America and the academic productions of the PPGAS-UFAM study groups: Maracá (Studies on Art, Culture and Society) and NEAI (Center for Studies on the Indigenous Amazon).