Who we are supporting: Glimpses of Guarani Childhood
Olhares da Infância Guarani (Glimpses of Guarani Childhood): Aiming to strengthen Guarani culture while fostering respect for diversity and a dialogue between different forms of knowledge, this project sought to empower children and youth by placing them at the center of the narrative. It achieved this through audiovisual workshops conducted with the children and young people of the Tekoa Marangatu village (Imaruí, SC). Through sensitive listening and the use of audiovisual creation as a medium of expression, the group collectively produced a short film exploring their ways of life, play, and how they learn to relate to both their community and the natural world.
Who we are supporting: Quilombinho de Verão
With the Brazilian NGO Usina da Imaginação, Shine a Light is supporting 10 innovative projects to promote dialogue between children and families from diverse cultures. Today, a quick look at Kilombinho de Verão, in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul.
The concept behind the Vivências – Kilombinho de Verão e Retomada Kaingang Kógünh Mág project was born from the urgent need to create spaces that prioritize Afro-Indigenous culture, and as a response to the lack of initiatives that value Black and Indigenous childhoods and youth through the lens of their own cultural frameworks. Our inspiration draws from Kilombos and Aldeias—territories of resistance, community, and freedom. It is through this convergence that children and adolescents will be invited to immerse themselves in ancestral experiences—experiences that respect the cycles of nature, the wisdom of elders, and the knowledge that emerges from working with one's hands and feeling with one's body. This intersection is not merely symbolic; it is historical, political, and cultural. The primary objective is to provide a transformative immersive experience within the Kaingang Kógünh Mág Retomada (reclaimed territory), located in the city of Canela, for the Kilombinho community. Subsequently—within the very space where Kilombinho takes place (the Porto Alegre Historical Archive)—we will host the Kógünh Mág community.
Initially (prior to the visits), the families participating in Kilombinho will be invited to read the book: Fàg kar segsó táhn: gufo u sí ag tú—*The Araucaria and the Blue Jay: A Story of the Ancient Kaingang*. The book presents a story that has been told among the Kaingang people since ancient times—passed down from generation to generation—whenever they gather around a campfire. The tale was recounted by Chief Maurício Salvador and translated into Portuguese by writer Ana Fonseca, who crafted the final text. The legend was published in both Kaingang (the Chief’s native tongue) and Portuguese, and features illustrations by Maureen Veras. The book was awarded the "Highly Recommended" seal by the National Foundation for Children's and Young Adult Books (FNLIJ) in the "Retelling" category, and received the Academy of Letters of Rio Grande do Sul Award for the best children's book. We have envisioned several workshops for the visits—always, however, with the utmost respect and care to ensure they are conducted with the community rather than for it. We will consult with community leaders beforehand and adapt our proposal to suit the specific context and territory, taking into account the input of those who belong to that community. Accordingly, for this initial phase of the Vivências – Kilombinho de Verão e Retomada Kaingang Kógünh Mág project, we have drafted several workshop suggestions inspired by the book Fàg kar segsó táhn: gufo u sí ag tú (*The Araucaria and the Azure Jay: A Story of the Ancient Kaingang*). These workshops focus on oral tradition, ancestry, ecology, and playfulness, and are designed to take place during the visit of the Kilombinho de Verão community to the Kaingang Kógünh Mág Retomada:
1. Listening to the Earth – A Circle with the Elders
2. The Walk of Knowledge – A Sensory Nature Trail
3. Seed Keepers – A Workshop with Pine Nuts
4. Body-Forest – A Movement and Performance Workshop
5. Weaving the Memories of the Encounter
And for the visit of the Kaingang Kógünh Mág community to the Historical Archive—joined by the Kilombinho de Verão community—we propose the following:
1. Workshop: Ancestral Araucaria – Stories That Grow with Time
2. Workshop: Flight of the Azure Jay – Guardians of the Seed
3. Workshop: Weaving Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian Stories
4. Workshop: Masks of the Forest – Creating Nature Spirits
5. Weaving the Memories of the Encounter
Through these activities, participants will experience the values of Afro-Indigenous cosmologies firsthand, internalizing—quite literally, in their own bodies—the power of collectivity, oral tradition, respect for nature, and ancestral spirituality. By the project’s conclusion, our aim is for the participating children to embrace their identities with pride, feeling a profound sense of belonging and finding their individual subjectivities nurtured and affirmed. We also aim to strengthen the bond between families, the territory, and ancestral knowledge, leaving behind—as a legacy—a replicable, community-based model of living for children and youth.
Polarization and Encounter in Brazil
Kurt Shaw’s March talk to the Colorado Foothills World Affairs Council.
Talk at the Colorado Foothills World Affairs Council
Tomorrow — Wednesday, March 11 — Shine a Light Executive Director Kurt Shaw will be speaking at the Mount Vernon Canyon Club at 24933 Club House Drive, Golden, CO, at 7PM. The speech to the CFWAC is free and open to the public.
Long known for an ethic of hospitality and the virtue of the “cordial man,” Brazil has come to rival the United States for the fury and animus of its political polarization. How has Brazilian public opinion — so hopeful and unified only a decade and a half ago, turned to the rage and division one sees in a variety of political movements?
The conversation on polarization concludes with the seeds of hope, showing how afro-Brazilian and indigenous ideas of conflict as productive can offer a pathway to dialogue, and how traditions of making art together — in carnaval, in samba, music, and sport — may provide new opportunities for overcoming polarization.
Kurt Shaw studied philosophy at Williams and classics at Harvard, but his real education came from two years in Central American refugee camps and Colombian slums, where he found poor and marginalized people more compelling thinkers than many academic philosophers.
He developed the world’s largest network of grass-roots organizations serving street kids, work that contributed to the dramatic reduction in the number of children living on the streets of Latin American cities. Seeing the power of collaborative film-making with children, Shaw and co-director Rita da Silva directed the first feature film made entirely by ex-child soldiers, produced an indigenous telenovela in Bolivia, and directed the first fictional film in the Amazonian Tukano language. Their The Princess in the Alleyway, won best film of 2017 by the Subversive Cinema Society and their 2019 documentary The Other Side of the Other spent two years on rotation on Brazilian public TV.
Shaw has published many academic and journalistic articles, two novels, and seven academic books on topics ranging from political philosophy to Amazonian epidemiology, as well as producing hip-hop and pop albums. He has won a Fulbright, the Harvard First Decade Award, The Freedom to Create Prize, and the United Nations Intercultural Innovation Award. In 2022, he was awarded an Academic Visitorship at Oxford University. Over the last decade, his research has examined the roots of Brazilian political polarization in the history of Portuguese colonization, slavery, and Brazil’s complicated relationship with race, wealth, and culture, based on hundreds of interviews and dozens of films with Brazilians from all walks of life.
History hidden in a children’s game (Part 3)
A few weeks before the Children's Boi in Caieira, I participated in a workshop where Silvana Mindua, a Guarani teacher, taught a group of children and teenagers how to make a blowgun.
You kids shouldn’t forget that all toys were once a work of art or were once made to use. This blowgun, a bow and arrow: when you play with them you act out a story that comes from a long time ago. What does this zarabatana mean? For us, it was once life, our survival.
In the old days, our ancestors made blowguns for practical use. But of course kids used it as a toy: that’s what kids do. They observe and learn. Older children made blowguns and then the little ones watched; they made play zarabatanas that were also real ones.
We no longer have open land where we can hunt, but we can still hold onto the meaning of these crafts and toys: basketry, the blowgun, bow and arrow. Our traditions have become indigenous art. Indigenous toys.
For those who prefer a more European theorist, Walter Benjamin wrote something similar a hundred years ago:
Frequently, so-called folk art is merely the residue of cultural goods that renew themselves when assimilated into a wider community … it is precisely through these rhythms [of play] that we first become masters of ourselves. ( Walter Benjamin, Reflections on the Child, Play, and Education. SP: Editora 34, 2002. pp 100-101 )
In a way, what I'm suggesting here is that the Boi de Mamão is a blowgun. Colonization robbed the Guarani of their hunting grounds, but the toy survives as a way to maintain their culture and memory. The church repressed Judaism and continued to persecute the New Christians, but they hid their culture in a game or ritual they would call the Boi de Mamão. Hegemonic western medicine stripped the witches, healers, and Afro-Brazilian curandeirosof their authority, but something of that past remains alive and hidden in the Boi.
During a performance of the Boi at the Pântano do Sul school, a woman told me how she and her friends played Boi when they were children. At that time, the men of the community still practices the Farra do Boi — a traditional bullfight that was later outlawed — and in June, the children would dig up the bull's skull, put it in an anthill to clean it, and use the skull as the head of the Boi de Mamão. This childhood practice transformed the " thing " — the frightening bull whose meat was essential for the community's survival — into a toy. The bull sacrificed in the Farra is resurrected in the toy for the Boi de Mamão, just as Mateus's bull is resurrected by the healer in the performance
Some interpreters say that the torture of the bull in the Farra represents the punishments of Judas — a representative of the Jews in many forms of Catholicism. Interviews from when the Farra was legal indicate that the men who carried out the Farra described their activity as "jewing" the bull — a common word in colloquial Portuguese, but powerful in this context.
In rabbinic tradition, the great ritual of sacrificing oxen takes place during the week of Sukkot: like Saint John 's Day in Brazil, Sukkot is the harvest festival. Before the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the priests slaughtered 70 oxen on Sukkot, and their meat provided the food for the festival's barbecues.
“The Talmud observed that the number of bulls totaled 70, or the equivalent, in rabbinic language, to the number of Gentile nations on Earth. For the rabbis, henceforth, the profusion of bulls constituted a fervent prayer on behalf of the non- Jewish world… The bulls served to atone for the misconduct of the Gentiles… this ritual was elaborated not for the conversion of the Gentiles, but for their well-being. ” ( https://www.jtsa.edu/torah/the-seventy-bulls-of-sukkot/ )
The sacrifice of the 70 oxen is the ritual that guarantees the survival of the world. For the Guarani — traditional inhabitants of the coast where the Boi de Mamão is now practiced — prayer, dance, and song also guarantee the survival of the cosmos (or, in the elegant words of Airton Krenak, “postpone the end of the world ” ).
I don't want to insist that the Boi de Mamão is a syncretism between Judaism and Guarani spirituality — although I do want to present that possibility. What I want to claim in this playful text is that play in its many forms can be a way of remembering and reliving the past. In script of the the Boi de Mamão, the healer resurrects the ox. In the Boi de Mamão of Pântano do Sul, the children's play "resurrected " the skull of the ox killed in the Farra as a toy. The performance of the Boi de Mamão both gives a symbolic continuity to Sephardic Judaism and represents the great Guarani insight that play is a remnant of the past and the way to hold off the end of the world.
My unease with the Boi de Mamão when I first came to Santa Catarina, the feeling that it lacked coherence and narrative arc, only shows that I didn't understand what I was watching. I thought the Boi was a spectacle. The Boi is not a theatrical work, nor a dance, nor a musical show. It's a game — which means it's ritual, history, resurrection, and joy.
History Hidden in a children’s game (part 2)
Another example of this incorporation of local memories and concerns into the Boi, is that the healer cures the ox with the help of Saint Benedict. One of the few Black saints in Catholic iconography — and an important symbol of Afro-Brazilian cults in other regions of Brazil, such as the Tambor de Criola — I can imagine this inclusion as a way of dealing with the spiritual power and medicine of healers from the African diaspora. The most talented doctor of the South of the Island of Santa Catarina at the end of the 19th century, for example, was Batuel Cunha, who practiced at the foot of Morro do Lampião. He acquired a large plot of land there as a reward for his success as a doctor, something uncommon for Black people at that time.
Maricota exhibits the same phenomenon. After the departure of various animals from the zoo, a dancer arrives on stage, dressed as a large blonde doll. His swirling steps throw his long arms all over the hall. This character emerged from encounters with German women: blonde, tall, and lacking the graceful movement of the local women, they confused the traditional inhabitants. A traditional Maricota song illustrates this association with German food: “ She is big, a big woman; She eats rice and beans; But what does she eat to become so tall? Cabbage and potatoes.” Cabbage and potatoes are the classic foods associated with Germans in the south of Brazil: they inscribed their confusion with this new diet into the story they told in the Boi de Mamão.
But it is Bernunça, the symbol of the Boi de Mamão, that most clearly shows how this popular ritual both conceals and reveals the history of the Island. To analyze this, we have to go back to the Azoreans who came to populate the coast of Santa Catarina.
With the Spanish Inquisition, many Jews and New Christians — involuntary converts to Catholicism — fled Spain for Portugal. A generation or two later, with the arrival of the Inquisition in Lisbon, they fled again, this time to Morocco, Istanbul, Holland, Pernambuco … and the Azores. Not all the inhabitants of the Azores were Jewish or New Christians in the 18th century, but a strong Jewish tradition persisted. Synagogues, schools, and rabbis practiced somewhat secretly, but there was more religious freedom than in the urban centers of the empire. Staring in the 1750s, the Portuguese crown sent this mixed population to colonize the coast of Santa Catarina.
In interviews with various experts of the Boi tradition, they explained to me that the “Bernunça” is a mispronunciation of “renunciation.” A poem by Claudio Santoro makes the same argument.
The cry of the Bernunça baptizes,
announces.
It opens the way, opens
its mouth, tears
everything from its place,
swallows gulp by gulp,
and returns in a single blow not
what it had swallowed,
but something new,
the
fruit of renunciation.
Abrenuntio Dominum.
But what is the connection between “renunciation” and this monster in a folkloric ritual? Something that frightens and swallows?
All the children on the island know the song of Bernunça :
Olé, olé, alé olé olá,
Get out of the way, the bernunça wants to pass.
I was working when I heard about the war.
But it was only the bernunça that was coming down the mountain.
Bernunça is a fierce animal, it swallowed Mané João;
It eat bread, it eats biscuits, it eats everything they give you."
Renunciation defines the new Christian: renouncing Judaism and affirming oneself as a Roman Catholic is what opens access to the assets of the Portuguese state and its colony in Santa Catarina. The bread and biscuits eaten by the bernuça may also point to the host, the small wafer New Christians would be forced to eat to prove they were not backsliding into Judaism.
At the narrative climax of the traditional Bois de Mamão, the Bernunça, animated by several men, moves its immense mouth and pulls children from the audience inside itself. The monster swallows, incorporates. In some variations of the Boi, the Bernunça regurgitates the child; in others, the Bernunça gives birth to a little Bernunça — a new puppet where the swallowed child becomes an improvised actor. This experience inspires fear in many children — my daughter was terrified of the Bernunça — a fear that reflects the true fear of the Jews devoured by an enemy belief … and then transformed into it.
This is exactly what Bernuça represents: it literally devours Jewish children and transforms them into almost unrecognizable little Christians..
Different versions of the script used by different Bois give even more evidence that the renunciation of Judaism founds this ritual. For example, many versions play with the name Matthew, the owner of the ox. After the Herald declares that the ox "seems like something divine," the priest accuses Matthew of atheism.
The Priest [ interfering furiously ]
Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. This is sacrilege ! To say that Is an ox divine? Are you crazy? Who owns that ox? You atheist, you atheist, you atheist !
Matthew
My name is Matthew, Your Excellency, and I am not an atheist. It 's Matthew, like the name of the holy apostle.
Here we hear the echo of the legal defenses of the new Christian, accused by the Inquisition. “I’d as good a Christianas the apostles!”
When the healer performs the magic to resurrect the ox, we understand even more the Jewish basis of the Boi:
Healer
By the symbol of Solomon
Audience
By the symbol of Solomon
Healer
I bless you with the blessed candle on Passover Friday.
Audience
I bless you with the blessed candle on Passover Friday.
Healer
The sun has thirteen rays.
The moon has thirteen rays.
Jump demon to hell
For this soul is not yours.
The “Symbol of Solomon” is the Star of David within a circle; it is a symbol of Kabbalah, the system of magic and mysticism of the Sephardic Jews of the Iberian Peninsula. The “blessed candle" has an important role in Catholicism, but a candle lit on Friday is a Jewish practice, since after sunset on Friday becauseone cannot light a candle on Shabbat — and even more the Passover Candle. And finally, thirteen — “thirteen rays of the sun … thirteen rays of the moon” — is an ominous number in Christianity, but a divine number in Kabbalah, where it represents the number of gifts God bestowed upon the people of Israel.
History hidden in a children’s game (Part 1)
In the far south of Santa Catarina Island, nestled between steep hills and the blue bay, twenty small children prepare a performance for their parents and grandparents. Heads and torsos appear above colorful costumes made of papier-mâché and fabric: Bento is inside a red ox; a friend inside a toucan and another inside a vulture. There's a cowboy whose body pokes through a wild horse; a goat, and the emblematic creature of the Boi de Mamão : the Bernunça. Half dragon and half alligator with an immense mouth to devour children, the Bernunça comes to life with four girls inside it. A second Bernunça is smaller, its tail is animated by the class teacher.
A Boi de Mamão puppet… with out cat Amora playing inside it.
The "Boi de Mamão " (Papaya Ox) is a symbol of the popular culture of the coast of Santa Catarina: it's a community game (brincadeira) that brings neighbors together during June festivals, neighborhood events, and in schools. It incorporates costumes and theater with musical narratives to become a participatory and inclusive performance. Traditionally, it is practiced by adults, but now many schools or children 's community groups perform the "Boi": the "Boi da NEIM da Caeira da Barra do Sul" is one of the first performed by little kids: these are 2-6 years old.
As the centerpiece of the school festival, the Boi de Mamão drew the attention of the entire Barra neighborhood: more than a hundred fathers, mothers, grandparents, and neighbors arrived to watch the spectacle on a Friday afternoon. Some children played their roles with the enthusiasm and comedic timing of born actors; others displayed the charming shyness of some three-year-olds. Younger siblings emerged from the audience to dance and sing with their older brothers and sisters..
And while I laughed and applauded with the children's families, I realized for the first time the power of Boi de Mamão: not only as the folklore of the island, but as a way of reliving the history of Florianópolis.
If you'll forgive me, I'm going to arrive at the Boi through another archipelago, far from the southern coast of Brazil: In the Bronze Age, many communities, cities, and cultures lived on the islands and lands around the Aegean Sea. According to some scholars, the act that brought together this great diversity of cities, transforming the various peoples of the region into a unified people called Hellas (or Greece), was a poem.
The Iliad tells the story of the war waged by the peoples who would later be called Greeks against Troy: they demanded the return of Helen to her husband, a brutal war that helped to establish machismo as the ethical code of the Western world. Much more interesting than the war itself is the story Homer tells: The Iliad is a mix of many elements, languages, myths, and stories within the same epic. In ancient Greece, each city had its cultural hero or heroine, a real or mythical figure who founded the city or gave it meaning; in the Iliad, all these figures come together to participate in the same struggle. Gods and goddesses, demigods, great warriors … all in the same poem. When a city's hero entered the epic of the Iliad, that city came to consider itself Greek. The poem serves as a pre-modern constitution, marking the participation of different groups as part of a common people.
I'm not from Santa Catarina Island; I didn't grow up with the Boi de Mamão. I came from another country as an adult, and I confess that for many years, I found the Boi de Mamão a mess, a folklore without a coherent story or narrative arc. But while applauding the kids at the Caieira pre-school with their mothers and fathers, I realized my big mistake. The Boi de Mamão is the Iliad of the southern coast of Brazil: its history, its way of bringing together the new inhabitants of the Island, marking their place, and creating a demos (a people).
The narratives of the peoples who inhabited this continent before the European invasion describe many curiosities about the invaders: their clothing, their weapons, their language … but also the horses and oxen they brought on the ships. As in many expressions of Brazilian popular culture, these oxen and horses are the figures that open the show.
The Herald — playing the role of the chorus in Greek theatre — opens the performance, presenting the ox as a playful creature that “dances, frolics, jumps, rolls and is very frisky … [ It] seems like something divine." In many versions of the Boi performance — though not in the one the kids performed that afternoon — a priest comes on stage to interrupt the Herald and condemn this phrase — “something divine” — as a divinization of nature. From its very first moments, the perforce of the Boi is trying to deal with the theological conflicts of colonization, the attempt by the church to repress the spirituality of the indigenous people and enslaved Africans, who did indeed believe that nature was “something divine.”
After the argument between the herald and the priest, the playful ox falls ill and then dies from the evil eye, and the owner sends for the doctor. The doctor is unable to cure the ox — in some versions of the script, he even accuses the owner and the cowboy of getting the ox drunk with cachaça (a type of Brazilian rum) — but then a healer arrives and resurrects the animal where the doctor could not. It is not difficult to see the conflict between popular knowledge and "scientific" and European knowledge in this passage, with the public firmly siding with the healer.
The resurrection of the ox by the healer opens the field for a narrative chaos that always bothered me in the Boi de Mamão: different animals appear — sometimes gorillas, bears, and wolves, a vulture that came to eat from the ox's carcass. The children in Caieira also made a toucan in honor of a baby toucan they cared for at school. In the Boi made at another school, the Pântano do Sul school, children invented a Preá de Moleques do Sul, a small rodent in danger of extinction — it only lives on a nearby islet where many relatives fish. Next, as with all the Boi performances, Maricota arrives — tall, blonde, with long, ungainly arms. Although the figures may be interesting or frightening and their features a true work of art, they do not seem to belong to the same story as the ox.
However, for those who read the Iliad, the experience is not unfamiliar. The confusion of characters is reminiscent of the many stories of heroes waiting on the battlefield beneath the walls of Troy. It was the new animals — toucan, preá — and the creativity of the children and their teachers that showed me that the Boi de Mamão, like Homer's poems, grows and transforms. New groups create new Bois and new ways of performing the ritual. They want to add their own history: their heroes, legends, and confusions: the toucan and the preá are just small examples of a long tradition of adding the issues that bother people at different moments of history.
Little Kids play at Boi de Mamão in the village of Caieira da Barra do Sul.
The Day of Iemanjá
The neighborhood where I live in the south of Florianópolis, Brasil, has gentrified rapidly in the last dozen years: luxurious apartment buildings, closed condominiums, chique restaurants and boutiques. Last night, to my great joy, those new walls served as the sounding box for drums calling people to the beach to give thanks to Iemanjá, the orixá of the ocean.
Thousands of people walked down the main shopping street of Campeche until it opened onto the beach. Many sang in Yoruba, the Nigerian language preserved in afro-Brazilian rituals. Others clapped in the rhythm of the ijexá. Six ogans — drummers and priests in the candomblé and umbanda religions — carried a boat made of banana laves and palm fronds, filled with flowers and a statue of Iemanjá.
As the procession poured onto a beach already starred with hundreds of candles protected from the breeze by low barriers of sand, people ran to the water to throw flowers into the waves. Some — both black and white — were clearly congregants of the local afro-Brazilian religious communities, marked by their white clothes, turbans, or long strings of ceremonial beads. Many more were not: Iemanjá and her rituals have become a part of Brazilian culture that reaches far beyond religion.
The mãe de santo who had organized the procession — a religious leader whose small temple sits behind her house on a dirt road that runs up the hill close to our house — brought the ritual boat into a tabernacle on the beach, where the believers sang and prayed. Then suddenly, the boat — now without the icon of Iemanjá among the flowers — exploded from the tent and was carried down to the beach and launched into the water. Hundreds of people followed the boat into the breakers.
Drums echoed against the beach-font restaurants: a tambor de criola organized by a woman from the norther state of Maranhão; a samba de roda where young dancers would leap into the circle to compete one-on-one with fast, elegant steps. The beach became of happy anarchy of dancing, of rhythms, of children running into the water, building sandcastles, falling asleep exhausted on the beach towels their parents had brought. We ran into one old friend after another: Helena’s music teacher from when she was a little girl, a young actress from our last movie, a young man who makes huge carnaval puppets of bulls and vultures, our representative to the state legislature…
In 2026, middle class Brazil seems to have been tamed into the modern, European world, but something wonderful and magical still lies under that surface: yes, the joy of the drums and the dance, something that now seems lost in the middle class domesticity of the United States and Europe, but also the spontaneity of encounter, an unpretentious being-together on the beach where you chat with old friends or the new conversations in the procession where you make new ones. When one says “ritual” or “procession” in English — even a word like “religion” — it sounds heavy, serious, ponderous. The night’s celebrations for Iemanjá were anything but: they were playful and fun, full of laughter, young dancers flirting, children running in circles as their parents shared a beer or a cachaça.
In his “The work of art in the age of its mechanical reproduction,” Walter Benjamin famously compared a saint’s processions in an Italian village to the new art of cinema. There is only one icon of the saint, Benjamin insisted. It comes out once a year, carried through the city on a special day by special people under special rules. A movie or a photograph, in contrast, can be reproduced millions of times: it is not limited by place, community, or context. The “special” and controlled art of the saint’s icon, then, gives it a powerful aura, something unique and potent and even magical. When art becomes reproducible and easily available, Benjamin insisted, something fundamental was lost — and something gained: he saw a change for political change in this new way to live art.
I’m not part of a candomblé terreiro, but two days ago I was invited to help build the boat that would carry the icon of Iemanjá to the ocean. As I experienced the hierarchies and prohibitions of the terreiro, Benjamin’s idea of aura made even more sense: I was not allowed to step in certain places, prohibited from sitting in the chairs, permitted to use a knife to cut the palms and banana leaves only outside the temple. Then the procession to the beach, full of drums and ritual chants in a language I do not understand, felt like those saints’ ceremonies in Italian villages. Iemanjá had an aura around her.
At the same time, the procession felt new and wonderful, perhaps even magical. The singer and many drummers stood atop a trio elétrico, a particularly Brazilian kind of truck filled with top-end loudspeakers, designed with carnaval parades in mind. Drones flitted overhead, not police surveillance but the young filmmakers from the terreiro, wanting to document the amazing event they had created for the community. The boat-builders, thinking ecologically, made their ritual barque from materials that would biodegrade quickly. Not to mention that the procession went along a modern shopping street, full of bars and clothing boutiques, not the ancient allies of a medieval city.
But perhaps the most magical part of the event was also the most digital. As the ogans carried the flower-filled boat into the breakers, hundreds and hundreds of people ran after it, their cell-phones held high to record the ritual for their friends, for instagram accounts, for family WhatsApp groups. The low lights of the cell phones mirrored the candles in the beach, a pale reflection of the full moon overhead. Paradoxically, what gave the aura to the event — its sense of importance and joyful weight — was the attempt to digitally reproduce it. Social media is the apotheosis of Benjamin’s reproducible art, something with no aura at all. And yet the creation of content for social media gave the procession the aura of magic and moment that made it something different, something outside the normalcy of the day-to-day.
Spend much time on the internet these days, whether reading news or doom-scrolling social media, and you might start to despair. Last night gave me a glimmer of the reconstruction of hope.
Projects to support intercultural dialogue: #1
In South America, one of the most diverse places on the planet, indigenous cultures have developed unique practices for understanding and relating to other cultural groups (those that represent radical otherness). Rituals and exchanges of various kinds (gifts, song and dance exchanges, commensality) are spaces for dialogue, practices that create space to mark, understand, and overcome polarization in different cultures, creating possibilities and common narratives.
Shine a Light and Usina da Imaginação have collaborated to fund 10 innovative projects to promote dialogue between groups that often wouldn’t have the chance to talk. The "call for small projects to encounter the other" funds activities, rites, research, works of art, and other ways of encountering otherness.
Nonprofit Funding Exchange Podcast
Many nonprofits invest valuable time and money into messaging that never quite connects. In today's episode, Josh Gryniewicz interviews Kurt Shaw about innovative strategies for finding and amplifying the voices that inspire action and change. You'll learn practical techniques for building trust, co-creating stories with community members, and using both fictional and non-fictional narratives to reveal deeper truths that challenge the status quo and create more genuine, transformative communication.
On the Stories for Impact Podcast
Over the last five years, we’ve explored stories with countless scientists whose thoughtful research reveals the way they’re answering big questions and solving big problems. We’ve shared conversations about studies done in labs and out in the field. Well, today’s field is Brazil. The labs are crowded city streets and verdant jungles. And the big question? What happens when you stop fearing and fighting against diversity, and start exploring and embracing difference? The researchers we learn from today, anthropologists Kurt Shaw and Rita da Silva, have found their answers through play — in music, drumming, dance, martial arts, food, ritual, and shared experiences in Brazilian wise, but marginalized, communities.