ABSTRACT This article attempts to read a text in the book O poço das marianas [The Well of the Marianas], by Eliane Marques. By perceiving it as an oriki, a text typical of the iorubá world, that pays tribute to the head. It may be written for any being: people, animals, orixás, and even for cities. I understand that, to listen to it, I need to start to thinking as nagô does. I explore this way of perceiving the world (...) through some theorists like Muniz Sodré and Leda Maria Martins. With them and others, I notice the importance of the body in African perceptions of the world and understand it is fundamental in reading or listening to the oriki, which can be done as if it was a ritual. By doing so, I find a nagô heart that mixes with the heart of the writer to reinvent itself in literature. I relate this re-creation to the Exunouveau mode of writing, a term coined by Edimilson de Almeida Pereira. (shrink)

O artigo aborda a relação entre crianças de terreiro e os seus etnosaberes produzidos no universo dos cosmosentidos do candomblé. Enquanto religião de matriz africana onde a biointeração é um dos princípios basilares, o candomblé e seu universo apresentam uma extensa gama de saberes tradicionais que são construídos e vividos no cotidiano. Compreender como as crianças de terreiro produzem seus conhecimentos traz consigo o intento de pensar a infância e seu poder criativo através de uma afroperspectiva onde a multidimensionalidade, multirreferencialidade (...) e a polissemia do saber se mostram a todo momento, nas ideias nascentes vividas, por exemplo, quando as crianças exploram o território do terreiro com a astúcia de quem conhece o que nós, adultas e adultos, não conhecemos. Na produção desenhística das crianças e nas suas narrativas é possível aprender sobre etnosaberes, cultura e ancestralidade através de itans, orikis e neolinguagens próprias dos seus universos simbólicos onde imagens e rituais didáticos unem teoria e prática, sensível e racional. Ademais, as crianças apresentam um caleidoscópio inventivo de saberes como guias para outros caminhos e possibilidades educacionais a luz das relações étnicas. (shrink)

A new line of self projection magazines that started blooming in Lagos, Nigeria, about the mid-1990s defined itself by filling almost completely every issue with photographs that depict politicians, businesspeople, sports and show business stars enjoying fruits of their extraordinary achievements on festive occasions. The magazine’s cozy coverage of the rich and famous irks a lot of serious cultural and literary critics who believe that this style resembles praise singing too closely. This paper, unlike mainline criticisms of the pictorial magazines, (...) takes praise singing to be a serious subject. Its central proposition is that the Nigerian magazine culture embraced these magazines because they have successfully translated into photography the panegyric tendency that pervades popular, self-projection arts in the underlying Yorùbá cultural environment of southwestern Nigeria. The sub-genre of Yorùbá panegyric that the magazines rework into the photographic medium is oríkì bọ̀rọ̀kìnní, or praise chants of the eminent. The paper analyzes sample issues of Ovation magazine to outline ways of placing contemporary African cultural forms in a long perspective and to propose an example of how inter-mediality operates today in popular cultures. In the concluding section, the essay proposes that a “poetic” understanding of photography, as opposed to “theatricality” and or melancholic substitution, represents the best way to think about the type of festive portraiture practiced in Ovationand its imitators. (shrink)