Sob (re) a lona: o circo como patrimônio cultural material?

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to provide evidence of the discourses about the circus as an object, in the context of the debate on heritage. Circuses in Brazil have experienced changes throughout history, and the circus as a living, present object in the national culture has undergone resignification. By searching for what is said about circuses at a given time, we specifically studied the discourses in a documentary corpus gathered by the National Historical and Artistic Heritage Institute (IPHAN) until November, 2016, as the result of a formal request for enlisting the “family tradition” circus as immaterial heritage. In this documentary corpus, we were interested in the statements that characterize disputes and clashes involving power and knowledge, as pointed out by Foucault (2001; 2008 a; 1985; 2006; 1974) in the constitution of the circus as a discursive object. The heritage element brings the family circus to visibility, showing how it is part of different narratives and enabling the construction of a new narrative about the circus as a heritage object. Foucault’s archaeo-genealogical analysis was used as the theoretical and methodological framework, allowing us to ponder about how the family circus was an object of knowledge in different historical moments; the reasons behind the discourses present in the documents; which instances of power and knowledge have supported the statements; which enunciative functions such discourses have answered; and what effects of truth and power they have exerted on the object. We realized that statements about popular culture at different historical moments have produced discourses that refer the singularity and purity of the cultural-artistic production of the circus to the past and provide the popular element of the current circus with unspecific and inauthentic attributes of a mass phenomenon. We observed how discourses on animal ethics and on the value of a contemporary circus “doing” regarded as truth the idea that the aesthetic model, the form of economic organization and the market insertion of cultural goods by “contemporary” circuses have derived from the “evolution” of the circus production forms. Finally, we explain what has guided the realized heritage demand and the limitations in its articulation in view of the heritage policy. In the final section, we address the need to construct new narratives in the heritage debate that may encompass hybrid, dynamic, but marginalized manifestations of popular culture, and attribute to the circus knowleged owners, a place of subjects of their enunciation as heritage objects