Ritual, emotions and activist commitment: the live production of the mística in the martyrs of the forest’s pilgrimage in Nova Ipixuna, Pará

ABSTRACT

Every year, in the southeastern region of the state of Pará, actors engaged in social mobilization around land reform and environmental rights, participate in a pilgrimage in memory of two leaders murdered in an agroextractive settlement. It is a moment of intense production of emotions that together with other elements compose the mística, a local term that, in a broad sense, means the motivation for activism. I aim to describe the agencies occurring during the ritual that allow the emergence and circulation of emotions, such as indignation, revolt, joy, communion, hope, and their impact to renew the commitment among members of the community established by the mobilization. The empirical material comes from an ethnography carried out since 2014 on the activist work of the Pastoral Land Commission in the region.

KEYWORDS:
emotions; commitment; mobilization; mística