“A viagem começou”: Luís da Câmara Cascudo e a construção de uma Cultura popular alimentícia a partir de sua viagem à áfrica (1928 -1967).

Abstract

From the 1960s onwards, the potiguar intellectual Luís da Câmara Cascudo redefined his field of study between folklore and anthropology, opening space for ethnography and assuming the profile of cultural mediator. This occurred, especially, when he went to Africa, in 1963, to research the roots of Brazilian food in the African provinces where the trafficking of slaves to Brazil took place. His trip to the African continent strengthened the interests that traversed his education and intellectual activity around folklore and so-called popular culture. From this, the central objective of this work is to investigate Câmara Cascudo's trip to Africa and analyze the production resulting from this ethnographic research to understand how he constructed an idea of popular food culture. For this purpose, we based our theoretical analyzes on authors such as Jean-François Sirinelli (2003), to understand the concept of intellectual; Peter Burke (2020), to understand the idea of a polymath intellectual; and Angela Castro Gomes and Patricia Santos Hansen (2016), to understand Cascudo as a cultural mediator. As a methodological resource, we analyzed periodic sources from periodical newspapers: articles, interviews and reports about the aforementioned trip. We will also use correspondence exchanged between Câmara Cascudo and other intellectuals who produced on the topic of food, especially in Brazil and Africa. And, furthermore, we appropriated the Cascudian bibliography around the topic, namely: A Cozinha Africana no Brasil (1964), Made in Africa (1965) e História da Alimentação no Brasil (1967). All this material was examined using discourse analysis, from the perspective of Michel Foucault (2004), to understand how this idea of a popular food culture was being constructed in/by the thinking of Luís da Câmara Cascudo.