Between Nostalgia and Apocalypse. Daniel B. Sharp
both ensnare and enable musicians. It coexists as both a personal, individual longing and a collective emotion with historical and political dimensions, as the example of Dona Senhorinha illustrates. While Dona Senhorinha’s reminiscing was personal, the context of her reaction was entangled in cultural preservation efforts. Sandroni’s fieldwork culminated in a two-CD set of new recordings, Responde a Roda Outra Vez (Answering the Circle One More Time), with extensive liner notes, whose publication was funded by the Brazilian national oil company Petrobras.
Note on Research Methods
Micheliny Verunschk once observed that it was often difficult for Coco Raízes to discern which visitors were there to adore them and which were there to write about them, learn their music, help them, or take advantage of them. I felt this when I arrived. Accustomed to daylong, weekend, or weeklong visits by journalists and fans, family members were not sure whether to treat me with the full hospitality that they reserved for short-term guests, as just another Arcoverdense, or somewhere in between. Much ethnomusicology strives to meet Hood’s (1971) ideal of bimusicality, in which a scholar travels somewhere, finds a music teacher, and spends much of his or her time becoming fluent in local musical codes. In my fieldwork, however, asking for too much musical instruction could potentially damage my relationships with musicians. As a researcher I chose to adopt a posture closer to that of a tourist or a long-form journalist than to that of an apprenticing musician, because the complications of musical apprenticeships were part and parcel of my object of study.
In this setting, insisting on musical instruction would have resulted in the musicians’ questioning my motives for learning their style. They freely gave pandeiro tips to visitors who were only going to be there for a few days. But since I was there for a year, I decided to frequent the Alto do Cruzeiro only to listen, dance, and talk, rather than make learning to play music a first priority. The same should be said about recording. Issues of intellectual property rights were fraught and bitterly contested in Arcoverde in 2004, as the feuding Calixto, Gomes, and Lopes families began to release recordings commercially. As they recorded, issues surrounding legal authorship, ownership, and royalties surfaced. Making field recordings at this time proved to be highly contested, both because the recording would be seen as an act of allegiance to one family over another and also because many of the songs one group would record could be claimed by the other family as belonging to them.
I ended up adopting a timed approach, in which certain activities that weren’t possible when I arrived proved possible before I left. Although I didn’t take formal lessons, I absorbed the melodies alongside other fans. Near the end of my research year I occasionally played songs informally with Ciço Gomes, and he was patient with my attempts to sing harmonies with him. In 2004 I was among the first generation of ethnomusicologists to be able to bring along a laptop-based studio-in-a-backpack that could record multiple tracks simultaneously. Yet all of my close readings of songs by Cordel and Coco Raízes in this book are based on audio and video recordings made by others, not my own. I was excited by the prospect of actively producing multitrack recordings with musicians, following their vision and including their input during mixdown. And I was able to do this after living there four months, but only with musicians who maintained some distance from the feud and therefore ended up less central to this book. I was able to record Reisado das Caraíbas as group members sang their songs and recounted their histories; two cowboy singers, who even recorded a stylized forró CD with me; and Helton Moura and Alberone Padilha, who spent two months in my apartment-turned-studio, recording demo CDs that they then used to launch their careers. The only musical recordings of the Calixto women that I made feature them as guest backup singers on Alberone’s songs.
An Ethnographer among Many
Conducting research in Pernambuco, I entered a field of collaboration and contestation. At Sandroni’s meeting, scholarly and artistic experts were engaging in an ongoing conversation about folklore and heritage, grounded in a long history that traces back at least to Mário de Andrade and Luís da Câmara Cascudo in the pre–World War II era. I conducted my fieldwork in Brazil during the emergence of a tourist experience dramatizing fieldwork. The broader arc of this book tacks between the cultural and the metacultural—between cultural practice and cultural management. I also alternate between the musical and the ostensibly extramusical, including museum exhibitions, television documentaries, and buildings made of mud, which all contribute to efforts to anchor a particular location as a heritage destination. My goal is to chart the twists and turns of a mutating, contemporary notion of folklore and examine how these mutations affect the everyday lives of musicians from a canonized periphery. I focus on performances of heritage within the current moment, aiming to treat folklore in a way compatible with what Rabinow and colleagues term an “anthropology of the contemporary” (2008).
Between Nostalgia and Apocalypse is an ethnography of both the expert and the ordinary, without claiming that the boundary between the two is easily distinguishable in a scenario wherein knowledge is being produced by academics, journalists, performers, and tourists. I proceed in conversation with other ethnographers, such as Carlos Sandroni, Micheliny Verunschk, and Cristina Barbosa. Beyond simply engaging with my professional colleagues, however, I came to see many of the performers with whom I worked as conducting an ethnography-like endeavor in their own right as well. In saying this, I am aware that Lirinha will most likely bristle at this accusation. To him ethnography implies a kind of cold, intellectual process that he contrasts with his warm friendships and informal apprenticeships with older poets and musicians.3 However, whatever he calls his process of gathering stories, poems, and melodies, it overlaps with Micheliny’s process and my own. In addition, culture bearers and cultural entrepreneurs Iram and Assis Calixto and Severina and Leni Lopes, who erected competing museums exhibiting their versions of the story of samba de coco in Arcoverde, are also identifiable as ethnographers, as they display artifacts and shape discourses.
As one of many observers, I work from the position of the situated and partial ethnographer complicit within a field proliferating with ethnographers; performers conducting ethnography-like knowledge production; and visitors gathering words, images, and sounds as souvenirs and newspaper copy. As an ethnographer I aim to imbue performances, festivals, and moments from everyday life with a sense of proximity and vivid detail as I move between these various registers. I am not immune to the seductiveness of a nostalgic gaze toward a past that never was. My writing sometimes dips into a nostalgic mode, even as I seek to expose the ramifications of nostalgia used to further nationalist and commercial ends.
But where there is nostalgia, there is also a sense that the present is somehow unraveling. That is to say, the nostalgic mode is not my only companion here; echoes of a turbulent, apocalyptic mode periodically erupt as well. It is within the apocalyptic mode that Lirinha whips his audience into a frenzy with foreboding talk of the end of the world, or that a bitter feud between families of musicians underscores the volatility of being received as heritage. When family members slice their estranged relatives out of old photographs with razor blades or use microphones to shout bitter accusations rather than to entertain, they do so with a violent intensity that tears the picture postcard of nostalgia.
Organization of This Book
The first half of this book begins in the 1990s, tracing the emergence of samba de coco in Arcoverde as an emblematic cultural tradition and the rise of Cordel do Fogo Encantado as mutationist pop performers drawing tourists to the city. It chronicles the moment in which public and private initiatives enshrined rural musical practices as heritage and marketed them as popular culture.
Chapter 1 illustrates the provincializing process that samba de coco underwent as a genre, as musicians in Arcoverde accrued sponsors and began to perform as heritage. I explore how a markedly Afro-Brazilian musical form became an unlikely emblem of a city within the predominantly white and mestiço interior backlands. I also establish Cordel’s initial posture of homage, which imbued the project with restorative nostalgia, a mode in which the musicians would later lose faith.
Chapter 2 explores the two museums that opened following a feud between two samba de coco