June Festival: intangible cultural heritage, memory and silencing

Abstract

Reflections on culture and social representations of knowledge include discussions on the use of concepts, sociocultural practices and the dynamics of power structures, making us remember or forget a manifestation, such as the June festival. In Brazil, the festival has undergone the act of patrimonialisation, marking its cultural value, respect for the preservation of memory and the conservation of the cultural manifestation as a national heritage. The festival carries a series of meanings and senses beyond the marking of Christianity, suggesting the affirmation of the uniqueness of part of the national territory and the preservation of community traditions throughout the country. Each place, historical context and situation organises the nuances of the festivities in a unique way, marking the differences in the territorial ethos and, consequently, affirming the processes of cultural hybridisation. As intangible cultural heritage, the festival prompts reflections on the importance of the social representation of knowledge being aligned with informational and cultural crossings, both individual and collective, thus marking the memory, identity and resistance of a people through cultural cutting. Sabbag, Rocha, Achilles and Takahashi (2023) point to classification as an operation that can organise a set of objects, things, beings and knowledge into classes, either based on logical or ontological relationships, by means of specific criteria, choosing, separating, dividing and approximating, but in an arbitrary way. In this sense, the continuation of this research is guided by the following question: What dynamics or crossings do social memories or forgetfulness produce when we classify and represent the June festival as intangible cultural heritage in systems of knowledge organisation? With this question in mind, the aim of this communication is to continue the research "Kaleidoscope of the Knowledge Organisation System: the Festa Junina cultural manifestation", presented at ISKO Iberic in 2023 in Madrid, Spain, and to take it up again by focusing on issues related to memory, information and society. Thus, based on a social, exploratory, qualitative theoretical approach, using bibliographical research as a technical procedure, this communication rethinks the June festival by comparing the idea of fragmented memory territory, admitting the complexity of understanding this concept in the face of the intersections of studies in Social Memory and Information Science. It concludes that the reterritoriality of the Festa Junina intangible cultural heritage participates in power plays linked to power structures, producing different forms of preservation and resistance, thus avoiding certain silences produced by the spheres of power.