Oral tradition and memory as means of preserving the ritual of the drought festival Rikbaktsa

Abstract

This study approach some poetic manifestations of the voice of the Rikbaktsa people during the Dry Season Fest, a ritual celebrated annually. During the months of the ritual, which begins with the arrival of the dry season in the Northwest region of Mato Grosso, songs are sung at specific moments, myths are told by an elder watched by an audience of various ages, projecting the oral tradition as the foundation of memory in the community, which in turn has carried the ritual to the present day. The anthropological value of the ritual has already been widely studied. However, the literary value, expressed in the poetics of the voices of the Rikbaktsa practitioners of the ritual, has not yet been addressed by scientific studies - which makes this study unique. The Dry Season Song was collected on video by the researcher himself, in the Rikbaktsa language (Macro-Jê linguistic trunk) and was translated into Portuguese. The myth The First Plantations was recorded, translated and published by Pereira (1994). Both will be the corpus of this study. Based on these oral manifestations, I will seek theoretical support in Moreira (2015), Sinson (2016), Reis (2018) among others who deal with literature, oral tradition and memory. Based on this dialogue, we will address how the Rikbaktsa community has maintained the ritual of the Dry Season Fest, an ancient tradition that maintains well-defined contours, even in the face of abrupt and intermittent changes imposed after the period of contact with non-indigenous society, which occurred from the 1950s onwards.