Festivals and Heritage in Latin America

The main objective of our research is to discuss Rio de Janeiro’s samba, its cultural matrixes and its diffusion around the world through the instruments, practices and knowledge related to this musical genre and the biggest party linked to it: Carnival. In this work, the fruit of our previous studies on the subject and the post-doctorate held at King’s College London in 2017, we will seek to address the dialogue between Brazil, more specifically about the carnival of Rio de Janeiro and its dialogue with Notting Hill Carnival, through a case study: the Paraiso School of Samba. (Author’s note: We have chosen here to insert the name of the Samba School as it is widespread in London. The literal translation into English would be: Paradise School of Samba)

In the nineteenth century, fado and samba were developed as musical genres and became popular with the advent of radio and new media in the twentieth century. In addition, under a kind of state patronage, the two styles were elevated to symbols of Brazil and Portugal with the regimes of Getúlio Vargas and Antonio Salazar, respectively. The similarities between the two genres do not stop there, both were protected as cultural heritage and transformed into a tourist resource at the turn of the millennium. This intertwined trajectory holds many similarities on both sides of the Lusophone Atlantic Ocean, and in this work, our focus is on the contemporary processes of patrimonialization and consequent transformation into a touristic resource.

This chapter analyzes how Samba, as a form of cultural expression, has been particularly developed in Colombia, exploring some facts related to the project of a group of artists who aimed to recreate the Brazilian Samba culture in Colombia, and the challenges they have encountered. This specific expression will be discussed and analyzed through the lenses of some ideas of intangible cultural heritage. Specifically, it has been identified that there is an intention to reproduce something more than a musical rhythm or a dance, but there is a purpose to revive a concept that is difficult to define and that has to do with the life experience related to Samba. This idea of the “spirit” of Samba is what it is meant to be reproduced in Colombia; however, it is important to question if this is possible to achieve, and to identify the cultural barriers that may be found in the cited process. It is also relevant to conclude if the “spirit” of Samba is real or if it is an idealistic construction, and ultimately what is the relation of this case study with the reflections on intangible heritage.

Based on a multi-situated ethnography in the Pampas region, developed on the triple border in southern Brazil between Argentina and Uruguay, we will reflect on the carnivals of the schools of samba that occur beyond the center of the country. We will analyze the social-cultural importance of the carnival in Uruguaiana (Brazil) and the consequent impacts of the festival with local politics, the tourist sector, and the economic dimension of the event in the region. The extended carnival calendar of schools of samba in the Pampas promotes a ritual time of the festival that allows for extensive exchanges and translocal negotiations between the carnivals on the border and the carnivals of schools of samba in Rio de Janeiro. The carnival circuits in the Pampas allow us to think about hybridism, globalization, and the cultural identities produced by popular cultures on the margins and beyond the borders.

This text brings an autobiographical narrative of the great interpreter, Carnival, and composer Igor Sorriso. The author tells us about his life, his discovery as a musician and lover of samba, and how his experiences were in various places in Brazil, and especially, as a samba interpreter in the great samba schools of Rio de Janeiro, such as Vila Isabel and, of São Paulo, in Mocidade Alegre. It is important to emphasize that, among his professional autobiography, Igor reveals how much he learned from his career related to Carnival: his perception about caring for his own voice, his contacts, and identifications that made him move to São Paulo, and finally, the recognition that the association/pavilion is the main flag of the Carnival, and therefore, its main patrimony.

The cultural landscape impacts our senses, our activities, interferes in decision-making, judgment, and values and in communication with the urban space. The interrelated dimensions, necessary for understanding the perception of the cultural landscape are the physical, social, and symbolic dimensions. In this article, we address the perception of the landscape in historical centers in the physical (categories: group/dispersal, integrate/segregate, attract/repel, open/close, walk, sit, and stand) and social (categories: necessary, optional, and social) dimensions.

This chapter approaches the thematic of heritage landscapes and growing world tourism practices, taking as a case study, the historic center of Seville, with special emphasis on Triana. The main objective was to identify the main cultural heritage landscapes of the historical center of Seville and the pressures arising from the touristic industry. For this, the methodology involved readings, data collection, and geographical interpretations. In the survey of the primary data on the cultural heritage of Triana, there was an ethnographic description and participative observation of the Triana festivities (Holy Week, Santa Ana festivity, Flamenco show), and for the perceptual dimension, the leaders of the Northern Triana Neighborhood Association were interviewed. In the collection of the secondary data, the identification of the cultural heritage or assets of cultural interest (“Bien de Interés Cultural” – BIC) was used through the general catalog of the Andalusian historic heritage of the Council of Culture of the Junta of Andalucía (until 2016) and the tourism data were collected in the tourism council of Seville, referring to the years of 2017 and 2018. As a result, it is noted that most parts of the cultural heritage of the historic center fit in the typology of monuments legitimized by elites from different historical periods, which receive a massive amount of tourists, and in Triana, the ethnological heritages were a landscape potential, added to its history and symbolism, equally threatened.

In the state of São Paulo, despite its more than five thousand kilometers of railroads and hundreds of stations, warehouses, and residential complexes destined for railway workers, only 12 items are listed by the Instituto de Preservação do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional (IPHAN) (Institute of National Historical and Artistic Heritage). In the list of the Council for the Defense of the Historical, Archaeological, Artistic and Tourist Heritage of the State of São Paulo (CONDEPHAAT), there are 32 railway buildings listed. The scarce number of railroad properties under the protection of the State’s preservation agencies shows the selective criteria adopted by the official policies of historical heritage preservation. There are no official statistics, but it is known that many cities claim the historical value of their respective railroad heritage, taking into account the cultural relevance, usually associated with the origin of their own urban formations. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the Brazilian and São Paulo railroad system has been in the headlines of newspapers and TV stations spreading images of abandoned and depleted stations, rolling stock depreciated by the weather and disuse, passenger cars, locomotives, and wagons rotting in urban yards. Theft of rails and poles became a routine agenda until the plundering was completed. The demand for the preservation and musealization of this type of heritage, stimulated by the bonds of affection in the imagination of a large part of the population that cultivates the railway memory, intensified in another way. The objective of this text is to point out guidelines for the musealization of open-air railway heritage, taking into account the methodological principles of museology and the distinct potentialities of cultural appropriation of these tangible and intangible assets by the populations of its surroundings with a view to the recognition of their cultural value and the regeneration of urban texture and social tessitura.

Bauru is a city located in the State of São Paulo, southeastern Brazil; created at the end of the nineteenth century as part of the territorial occupation process of western São Paulo, where coffee plantations for export, followed by the railroad, played a key role. Three railroad companies were installed in the city: Companhia Sorocabana (1905), Northwest of Brazil (NOB) (1905), and Companhia Paulista (1910). The most expressive for the urban development of the city was the Northwest of Brazil (NOB) railway company, due to its headquarters in Bauru, its size, and the significant strategic and pioneering role toward the west of the country. However, the NOB company only established its headquarters in the city due to the pre-existence of the Sorocabana Company station. The historical importance of this small construction, still existing, is its size; in 2015 a project for its restoration was proposed. There are two main objectives of this work: to draw a history about the installation of the railroads in Bauru and to present the diagnosis of conservation of the building of the old Sorocabana station, used for the elaboration of the restoration project, but unfortunately, not yet executed.

A reflection on the impacts of the social and cultural changes of the second half of the twentieth century on the daily work with heritage and museums at the Brazilian university. The proposition of the United Nations social agenda from the 1990s to 2030 created possibilities for the development of individual, institutional, and social capacities in teaching, research, university extension, and cultural actions from heritage and university museums.

This article is the result of a dialogue between the authors based on a doctoral research in History, still in progress, which has as its central object the trajectory of a museological institution called Museu do Tropeiro (Museum of Tropeiro). This museum is located in the interior of Brazil, in the city of Castro (Paraná) and is dedicated to the preservation and dissemination of the history and memory of the mules’ trade in the southern region and its social and cultural implications in the municipality and the region. This was an activity that began in the colonial period; when the need arose to transport cargo and beef animals throughout the Brazilian territory. This practice can be evaluated as a global phenomenon since the use of animals was for a long time the main means of transportation for humanity. However, in southern Brazil, this activity has developed with the peculiarity of the significant commercialization of mules. These animals were transported from the region of the pampas to the city of Sorocaba, located today in the state of São Paulo, and then sold to be used elsewhere in the country as means of transportation for people and goods. In this way, long roads were built that made possible the integration of a part of the Brazilian territory that was far from the relatively known coast. The tropeiros (or muleteers), men who drove and traded these animals, had the need to stay overnight in certain places for their own rest and for the reestablishment of the tropas (or trains). One of the main stopping points was the Campos Gerais region in the current state of Paraná, propitious for its field vegetation, the region has as its oldest administrative organization the current municipality of Castro. In 1977, when the city conquered its public museum, it emerged as a thematic museum, the first in the country dedicated to the history of tropeira activity. However, researching the institution and the subject in question, it can be seen that later on other museums, memorials and collections are established in several places in the country. Therefore, this article deals with Brazilian historiography in relation to the subject and the construction of places of memory of the tropeiro in Brazil and its implications in relation to the resonances of cultural heritage taking Castro’s museum as a reference.

A significant part of cultural heritage has been taken by a multimillionaire trafficking system, and documents from international organizations estimate that art and heritage trafficking tops the list of the biggest illicit actions in the world, just behind drugs, weapons and human trafficking, which created a well-articulated systemic grid that indicates an exponential growth trafficking pattern. Such a mesh feeds a fairly complex system. Some examples of this mesh are private collectors, museums, monuments, religious sites, archeological/paleontological sites and other private preservation spaces; illegal excavations (including underwater excavations); theft of artifacts and works of art during armed conflicts and military occupations; illegal downloading of miscellaneous properties; production, exchange and use of forged documentation; even trafficking of cultural goods, authentic or counterfeit. This whole range of actions linked to trafficking has been fought in recent decades as the life of this set of goods is increasingly in danger. This article aims to address this type of illicit trafficking, suggesting that an international art trafficking route has in Brazil one of the least studied but no less important capillary points.

This chapter aims at presenting some aspects of the concept of the archaeological preservation of the remains of material culture and the role of the archaeologists during site management planning at the archaeological Jesuit-Guarani Missions, a UNESCO World Heritage site in Brazil. Located in the southern part of the South American continent (in the state of Rio Grande do Sul), the Missions were excavated for the first time and conserved from the beginning of the 1980s. Since then, many conservation projects have been carried out at the site in an effort to obtain a more accurate method to site management planning. In this chapter, we present the recent results of site management planning at the Jesuit-Guarani Missions World Heritage site and its implications to heritage legislation in Brazil.

This paper discusses alternative forms of heritage construction and preservation related to the human occupation of Antarctica by subaltern groups and its invisibilities in the official discourses on the colonization of the continent. Our proposal associates public, digital and sensorial archaeology approaches, highlighting a more pluralistic and democratic narrative about the southernmost past. For this purpose, we used tools such as new technologies applied to archaeological research (3D laser scan, object scanner, 3D printers, drones and others). Besides, through itinerant sensory exhibits (which simulates the Antarctic environment within an inflatable dome), we seek to narrow communication channels between the archaeological and non-archaeological public. Also, we encouraged the construction of multivocal narratives on the human occupation of Antarctica.