This essay discusses the experience of visitors to the city of Aparecida, based on theater director Richard Schechner’s germinal text in the anthropology of performance, "Points of Contact Between Anthropological and Theatrical Thought." The methodological ‘twist’ employed here by Schechner - associated with the anthropology of Victor Turner, under whose guidance and inspiration the director developed much of his own thinking - is particularly useful in analyzing the ritual process in Aparecida, where image and pilgrimage evoke a view from the margins. However, the route followed by visitors such as those coming from the shantytown Garden of Flowers (also known as ‘Devils’ Hole’) may require another methodological move, a double dislocation of our point of observation, allowing the observer not only to look at everyday life from Aparecida, but also to look at Aparecida on the margins of the margins from the carnival fair. The article explores the ‘hypothesis’ that what liturgy and the ritual process separate in Aparecida, in order to compose an impassive image of the saint in the space of the sacred, is combined in the tension-packed images that erupt in the Garden of Flowers. Is the carnival fair a means through which popular culture allows the return of the repressed? Somatic states and forms of bodily innervation associated with experiences of shock, and which belong to the embodied history of women and men from ‘Devils’ Hole,’ erupt in the spectacle of the werewolf woman, among other figures, at the carnival fair. On the margins of the margins, shock effects produce a double estrangement - in relation to both the everyday and the extraordinary.
Aparecida; Female Werewolf; Performance; Theatre; Ritual
