Reinventing the sacred in the Tocantins Amazon: faith and ancestry in the Marierrê festival

Abstract

This article examines the Marierrê festival, held in the village of Carapajó, Pará, in honor of Our Lady of the Rosary, as an expression of afro-descendant religiosity and as a site where sacred knowledge is produced and transmitted within the Tocantina Amazon. The guiding research problem is to understand how this celebration, formally tied to catholicism, reworks elements of african origin and turns them into distinctive religious practices bound up with memory, identity, and cultural resistance. The study’s central aim is to examine the interplay of faith, festivity, and ancestry, bringing to light the processes through which the sacred is continually reinvented within community experience. Methodologically, the research draws on a qualitative approach informed by ethnography and history, combining participant observation, photographic records, interviews with the festival’s guardian elders (mestres and mestras), analysis of oral narratives, and documents produced in the context of the celebration. The analysis engages with frameworks from cultural history, the anthropology of religion, and intercultural studies, situating Marierrê within the dynamics of modernity/coloniality. The findings show that the festival functions as an arena of symbolic contestation, collective memory-making, and identity affirmation, in which devotional practices are continually reshaped and given new meaning. The article concludes that Marierrê constitutes a site for the production of situated knowledge, contributing to the preservation of Afro-descendant religiosity and to the strengthening of comunity bonds in the Tocantins Amazon.