Comunicação e cultura popular: a trajetória dos lugares através do samba

Abstract

Culture forges and constantly updates meanings, designing places according to the way individuals use them. Built by interactions on the streets, daily history acts a role in this permanent construction of representations. Those interactions transform the city and turn it into a sensitive support for communication. Our research leans over the city as support, mediator and vehicle of communication. Each city, each place, possesses a proper choreography, that the humanist geographer David Seamon (1980) called place-ballet . The daily coming and going in the city designs the spontaneous and characteristic choreography of a given place, integrating and connecting individuals. We choose to analyze two cultural moments of the city, two examples of unique urban choreographies : the Train of Samba, which takes thousands of people across the city to Oswaldo Cruz, an usually low-profile suburb, every 2nd December, Samba s National Day; and the parade of Cordão da Bola Preta, which gathers more than 100.000 people in the City Center during Carnival. These two yearly events mark the places where they happen with a special signification and create bonds between the social actors and those places. This new signification created by popular culture in our study by samba music fills the place with signs and emotions and contaminates the way we experience the world and feel the city