Seu canto é bonito quando tem luar: ética prático-cotidiana em quatro itans

Abstract

In this essay we start from the premise that afro-brazilian culture, the result of afro-diasporic relations, has been subalternised by the imposition of hegemonic culture with a western and modern matrix. The process of subalternisation began with the slave regime and has spread to the present day, where we see the decline of the perceptive meanings of the afro-diasporic worldview and its forms of opposition through the re-signification of the meanings of abjection. By subsuming these cultures, it ignores fundamental and constituent elements of afro-Brazilian culture that convey an ethic related, among other things, to the environment, which brings us closer to it as a community. The notion of community that afro-Brazilian culture contains is fundamental for living together organically in society and recognising nature as a constituent element of oneself. Among the mechanisms used for subalternisation, we can identify epistemological silencing and the erasure of historicity, as noted by Góes (2013) and Lourenço (2021). In this context, the itans occupy a fundamental place. They go beyond the notion of myth or story to become constitutive narratives, narratives that carry an ethic, thinking of ethics along the lines proposed by Enrique Dussel (1986). This ethics is characterised by being counter-hegemonic and communitarian. In this text, we propose, through the analysis of four itans of the Orisha Iemanjá (220, 221, 230 and 231, from the book Mythology of the Orishas, by Reginaldo Prandi (2023)), to highlight elements of this subalternised ethic that circulates fundamentally in candomblé terreiros and among their practitioners and sympathisers. Methodologically, we will use discourse analysis categories proposed by Michel Pêcheux.