Milagres na contemporaneidade: enfrentamentos necessários para a permanência das Folias de Reis na Região Metropolitana do Rio de Janeiro.

Abstract

The miracles narrated by devotees of the Santos Reis in the Metropolitan Region of Rio de Janeiro are attributed to the power of their flags, a material object imbued with transcendental power for its practitioners. This is the main hypothesis underlying this thesis, which is structured around qualitative research, with field observation, interviews, analysis of iconographic, audiovisual, bibliographic, and documentary materiais, which together with the miracle narratives of these devout reiseiros, reveal the miracle as the main event for the permanence of these practices in contemporary urban space. Other issues that take into account the necessary confrontations for these continuities of popular practices have been addressed in this work: the paradigms that point to changes in the Brazilian religious field, in which neo-Pentecostalism is increasingly present in these peripheral territories, disputing the devotees of the Holy Kings, the necropolitics so present in the peripheries where these groups perform their rituais and the importance of hybridity in resolving conflicts caused by cultural difference. To understand the occurrences of the Folias de Reis rituais that were introduced by the Catholicism of the colonizers, we found plausibility in popular Catholicism and religious syncretism for the sacred sustainability of the tradition, especially in the exchanges of solidarity that take place between the two groups.