Authenticity, Consumption and Quilombola Recognition: From Neotribalism to The Consumer Society

Abstract

This work aims to understand, through a sociogenetic and psychogenetic analysis, based on data obtained through oral history, life history and participant observation, the institutional constraints that fuel the relations of consumption and cultural expressions among the Kalunga and how these affect the organization of the group around today's quilombola identity, formalized by the Kalunga ethnonym. The synchronic and diachronic prerogative adopted is that each of these Afro-descendants of the middleeast of Brazil (Goias district) intersects the collective memory that they had access to during their life experience, founded on tradition, objectified by their habitus, with the legitimated formal logic established by the globalized technical-informational market and bureaucratic-instrumental state environment. The access to knowledge and goods is done through a long-standing historical and hierarchical process (sociogenesis), established by an intricate network of controls on the cognition and volition of individuals (pisogenesis). This game of power, in turn, triggers different levels of contacts with universal values, generating a multiple and unequal symbolic environment that supports both universality and particularity, both identity and difference. This finding, however, frustrates the ideal of authenticity built by modern gnosiology, which has inspired the recognition of traditional rural communities in Brazil, since they expect to find collective units with an authentic and independent culture that affirms itself in relation to other cultures.