Maranhão terra de pajé: a pajelança em São Luís do Maranhão na passagem do século XIX para o XX

Abstract

The field of research on Afro-Maranese religions dates back to the beginning of the 20th century. Although the Maranhão physician Raimundo Nina Rodrigues can be considered as a precursor of this same field, the researches will only be developed in a more systematic way after the decade of 1930, with the researches of Octavio da Costa Eduardo, Nunes Pereira, Edmundo Correa Lopes and the Mission of Folk Research headed by Mário de Andrade. When we speaking about Afro-Brazilian religions in Maranhão there is an almost automatic association between this expression, the Tambor de Mina and the Casa das Minas, terreiro founded in the first half of the 19th century, being considered the oldest terreiro of São Luís and one of the oldest in Brazil. This association of ideas was built over time with the help of the aforementioned academic production, which, by concentrating efforts on the understanding of some terreiros, ended up constructing an identity of Maranhão as the land of the Tambor de Mina. The present work defends the thesis that there is a very close relationship between the scientific production of this identity Maranhão Land of the Tambor de Mina and with the little variety of research on the heterodox field of Afro-Maranhian religions. Part of this academic production is seen here as a sort of analytic continuum, that is, creating a prism by which the field of research on religions ended up observing the vast religious scene linked to Afro-descendant populations, but precluding some manifestations in favor of others. In order to corroborate the thesis here, it was based on the instigating article by Mathias Assunção, Maranhão, Terra Mandinga (2001), to propose a more contextualized approach to the history of the city of São Luís in the late nineteenth century and beginning of the 20th century. On the basis of the articles of the periodicals, it is seen that "a set of diversities of playful-therapeutic-religious practices that intersects references of different cultural traditions ... and that has in the prominence of the Negro their common denominator" (ARAÚJO, 2017, p. 70) is an expression and a religious experience with certain regional particularities that is as old as the Mine Drum, but which has not received much attention during the course of academic production and researchers.