The Ritual Party of the Moqueado: Education, culture and identity in the indigenous society of Tembé-Tenetehara

Abstract

The indigenous people, Tembé-Tenetehara, for many centuries have practiced the Ritual Festa do Moqueado, which celebrates the passage of boys and girls from childhood into adulthood. This ritual, which relies heavily upon the traditional knowledge and wisdom the Tembé-Tenetehara people. The purpose of this research is to analyze how the Grilling Party Ritual sets in an educational process that circulates and appropriates multiple knowledge and its contribution to the culture and indigenous identity. To achieve this goal, key knowledge present in the Grilling Party Ritual will be inventoried in order to elucidate how this knowledge is circulated and appropriated during the ritual by Indians. We intend to map this knowledge to establish how to configure an educational process in order to understand their contribution to the construction of identity and indigenous culture. The survey ranks the qualitative approach and establishes ethnomethodology as its main methodological approach, using Garfinkel (2006), Coulon (2005). The data collection techniques used are connected to this investigative proposal: participant observation, interviews, field notes. The main theoretical categories used in analytical work are: education (Brandão, 2002), culture (Williams, 2011), ritual (Sagalen, 2002), identity (Giddens, 2002), and knowledge (Martinic, 1994).