Explorations around the Relationship between People and Ritual Objects in Popular Celebrations of the Three Kings in Brazil

Abstract

In this article, I propose to reflect on the social and symbolic uses of ritual objects in the context of folia de reis, a festive enterprise that occurs in much of Brazil devoted to the Three Kings, where men, women, children, young people and the elderly are intensely involved in wide webs of social reciprocities. The banner is a sacred object transported by attendants in their ritual pilgrimages, on which are fixed images of Catholic saints. Around the banner, an intense field of interactions and agencies are established. Its importance can be summed up in the belief that it holds super-mundane powers, bringing blessings and thanks to those who receive it. The mask, in turn, is used by a key character of these festivities known as palhaço. It is a markedly liminal type, comic and ambiguous, and its mask, of grotesque appearance, assumes morally negative meanings in contrast to the banner. Simultaneously objective and subjective, material and immaterial, these objects are characterized, after all, by being deeply ambivalent, realizing mediations between the natural, social and cosmic domains.