Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses materialities of resistance in a Black rural community (quilombo) in Maranhão, Brazil. Drum beating and singing, as part of a religious festivity, will be examined as privileged forms of performing popular Catholic resistance to Pentecostal Christianity in the region.

Paper long abstract:

Challenging the collective way quilombolas -the residents of Black rural communities called quilombos- use land and natural resources, the growing presence of Pentecostal Christians is creating tensions that intimately entwine religious faith with land use. The Catholic majority of those villages communities, opposes the way converts renounce the collective way of occupying land by privately appropriating plots. While this discontent remains largely tacit, it acquires voice, sound, and physical shape in the annual, weeks-long, celebrations for the local patron-saint.

Walking through the area Catholics regard as property of the saint, and which comprises 40 village communities, the devotees carry a small figurine of Santa Teresa. While visiting each and every one of these quilombos they beat the drums of Santa Teresa and sing ditties dedicated to her.

Drum beating is a symbolic gesture that is powerfully perceived by those to whom the message is intended. An instrument widely known to be strongly disliked by Pentecostals but essential to the festa, as well as to what has come to be considered 'Black' and 'quilombo cultural heritage', the drum assumes a central and symbolic role in aggregating the Catholic community across the different quilombos, while alienating Pentecostals. Filling the space with their controversial sound, the drums of Santa Teresa become 'the authentic sound of the dispossessed … their way of saying, "I'm here, I exist, I won't be ignored"' (Hendy 2014: 143). This paper will explore some of the ways quilombola discontent is visibly and audibly manifested during this Catholic celebration.