Spiral Time and Backwater Poetics: Performance, Ancestral Knowledge and Environmental Change in the São Francisco River (Brazil)
Tue, Mar 24 · 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Coble Hall, 801 South Wright Street Champaign, Room 306. Map Directions
At the intersection of anthropology, performance studies, and environmental humanities, this lecture explores how riverside communities along Brazil’s São Francisco River use storytelling, music, and embodied performance to navigate ecological and social transformations.
Drawing on long-term ethnographic research and my PhD dissertation, I focus on the poética do remanso—a backwater poetics inspired by the river’s cyclical movement that inscribes itself in the language, gestures, and performances of Ponto Chique’s dwellers.
Through the narratives and performances of Olímpio Gonçalves—a storyteller and batuqueiro—I examine how the 1979 flood is continually re-enacted as a way of giving life to the river, transforming memory into a living archive.
I also analyse how the re-presentations of batuque—a drum-based tradition—creatively connect ancestral repertoires to contemporary struggles, activating codes of reciprocity, ritual cosmologies, and a poetic language of the body that challenge linear notions of time and progress.
In doing so, the lecture reveals how Afro-Indigenous poetics produce ecological thought from the margins—offering alternative ways of knowing, perceiving, sensing, and living with the river. Minibio Pâmilla Vilas Boas is a Werner Baer Postdoctoral Fellow at the Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of São Paulo (USP) and an MA in Anthropology from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG). A former visiting scholar at Indiana University’s Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology and a member of the Diverse Environmentalisms Research Team (DERT), her ethnographic work on the batuque practices of Ponto Chique bridges performance anthropology, ethnomusicology, and visual anthropology.
She co-directed and produced the documentaries "Life is a Backwater " and "I Came from the Sand to Samba," and founded the Regional Gathering of Batuques of the São Francisco River in partnership with Afro-Indigenous and quilombola communities.
Her work examines how riverside dwellers’ poetics of embodiment and sound generate singular Cosmo perceptions from the river’s margins.