To Remember Captivity: The Congados of Southern Minas Gerais

O congado é do tempo dos escravos . . . Na libertação dos escravos, . . . fizeram a festa . . . Foi daí que surgiu o congado. A única coisa que eles tinham pra bater era a caixa, aonde nós temos as caixas. . . . Foram dançar pra Nossa Senhora do Rosário e São Benedito, . . . que São Benedito é o verdadeiro congadeiro e Nossa Senhora do Rosário foi a rainha que cuidava deles, protegia eles no cativeiro. . . . Disso aí criaram, né, evoluiu, e hoje o congado tem bastante instrumento.

The congado is from the time of the slaves. . . . When the slaves were freed, . . . they held a festival. . . . That's how the congado emerged. The only thing they had to play was a drum, which is how we have our drums. . . . They went to dance for Our Lady of the Rosary and Saint Benedict, . . . because Saint Benedict is the true congadeiro [congado participant], and Our Lady of the Rosary was the queen who took care of them, protected them in captivity. . . . From this they created, right, it evolved, and today the congado has a lot of instruments. (Pedro Cigano, Campanha, Minas Gerais)

Congados--or congos ¹ --are drum-based music and dance ensembles that typically perform during festivals in honor of Our Lady of the Rosary, Saint Benedict the Black, and other popular Catholic saints. Congados are common in many small Brazilian towns, particularly in the southeastern regions of the country. In southern Minas Gerais, where this project was undertaken, the most widely known myth to explain the origin of the tradition claims that congados emerged to celebrate the abolition of slavery, which was proclaimed in Brazil in 1888. Although historical records attest to the existence of such associations long before abolition, congados today are privileged sites for the construction, preservation, and transmission of black social memory.

For Paul Connerton (1989), social memory is composed of the recollections and images of the past that a particular social group considers worthy of remembering, and the way in which the past is conceptualized impacts how the present is experienced and interpreted. Connerton highlights the role of ritual enactment in conveying and sustaining social memory, arguing that the efficacy of enactment resides in its performativity; rather than simply reminding the community of its master narratives, the actions performed during rituals habituate the body to its most cherished values and categories. Every group, Connerton (1989, 102) claims, "will know how well the past can be kept in mind by a habitual memory sedimented in the body."

Connerton's basic argument is that "bodily social memory"--that is, unreflected culture-specific bodily practice--is a highly conservative force which creates an inertia in society's structures, and therefore it is commonly implicated in the legitimization of the present social order. While I am also inclined to view the body as the basic cultural substrate, Connerton does not adequately account for the complexities in the processes of bodily inscription. It is precisely because bodily automatism limits the scope for critical evaluation that the body is a site of intense struggle over the control of what gets inscribed upon it. The very physical violence perpetrated upon bodies, especially subordinate bodies, to habituate them to submissive postures, attests to their unwillingness easily to submit to inscription. Indeed, subordinate groups actively engage in countering the sedimentation of hegemonic inscription upon their bodies through bodily practices of their own. Many of the "weapons of the weak" described by James Scott (1985), such as foot-dragging, pilfering, and sabotage, have a distinct anti-hegemonic bodily base. In a later work, Scott (1990) extended his inventory of subaltern weapons to include structured forms of expression with a certain degree of public visibility. Scott focuses upon text-based expressive forms, such as folktales, song lyrics, jokes, and the like, but the inventory could--and should--also include music and dance, prime sites for the acquisition of bodily consciousness (Cowan 1990...