The communicative nature of culture: The Carimbó Party of São Benedito, Santarém Novo – Pará

Abstract

This article reflects on the communicative nature of the popular Carimbó party of São Benedito, held annually in Santarém Novo, state of Pará, on the Brazilian Amazon. In the foreground, we think the party as a major cultural phenomenon, present in all human societies and understandable as social structure – or as what Simmel (1999) calls the social order – in their cultural and communicational dimension. In the subsequent plan, we think it as a social content, the specific variant of the social form, located in a specific cultural place and embodied by the ongoing social experience and as intersubjective dynamic at the same time cultural and communicational. We discuss this process with the support of Martin-Barbero’s (2006) and França’s (2001) notions of communicative cultural nature. The research was conducted from an ethnographic field, with participant observation and in-depth interviews. We try to think the social experience in their cultural and communicational dimension and from its endogenous dimension.

Keywords: communication, party, carimbó music, Amazon.