Modernidade e homens de cultura: vocação cultural, religiosidade e outras ambiguidades no município de Cataguases – MG

Abstract

Cataguases: “Land of Fine People”, “Cradle of the National Cinema”, “Little Princess of the Mata”, fertile ground for reflections about a place with a kind of cultural vocation that gave birth to the Movimento Verde and was captured by the lenses of Humberto Mauro who devoted himself to establishing a relationship of genuine intimacy with the artistic universe. Recognized well beyond its own frontiers for a certain spontaneity that always impelled it towards manifestations of the cultural kind, the city has been perceived as idiosyncratic and something of a provocateur in microcosm by Brazil’s major cities. The goal of this thesis is to reveal the “Many Cataguases” that hide behind the myth of the cultural city. In the playing out of the historiography and, throughout, in the discourse regarding the cataguasense essence here is a past full of great achievements led by intellectuals and artists of international renown It is important to cast off the that somewhat sacred canopy that covers over the city’s identity. I look also at religious issues and how they play into comparisons between the modernizing perspective of the city and the idea of its unique cultural vocation. Even though it has been somewhat ritualized by the public powers and underutilized by educational institutions, the idea that Cataguases is a unique place to practice art has not lost its power nowadays. In spite of the fact that the city’s “artistic inclination” supposedly affects all of society, in fact, this same inclination is limited to individuals connected to the world of culture. The consequences of this fact explain why from the heart of the city to the rural areas passing through its periphery there is just one school of thought associated with artistic production and the artists who holds these view really play the role of an elite vanguard. Based upon an epistemological combination of anthropology, sociology and history, one of the main objectives of this study is to highlight the specifics of the narratives that enable a small part of the intellectual elite to appropriate and reinvent the discourse that translates into “Catagu(arte)”. Even today, closely linked to the Movimento Verde and the Cycle of Cataguases, the myth of the cultural vocation of Cataguases makes good common sense at home and beyond.