The aim of this study is to understand the production of Brazilian carnival in the South, focusing on ethnography reflected by the Samba Schools in recent carnival parades in the city of Porto Alegre. It analyses a cycle of materials and symbolic changes in the producing entities and their directive groups, with projects aimed to change the meanings, forms of apprehension and of carnival culture in the city, contextualizing it with the socio-historical formation of this event. The processes of material transformation and the construction of the concept of the spectacle of the Samba Schools include strategies used institutions and carnival groups to develop a carnival model that seeks concepts and values with a mercantile logic, producing a densely explored rhetoric of the spectacle. We analyze how this production of meaning engendered in the process of spectacularization is strongly related to the possibility of overcoming the stigma and the need for social prestige that pervade carnival historically, where ethnic and racial issues are also part of the context changes and of the current debates in the city.
Carnival; Schools of samba; Carnival Culture; Spectacle; Identities
