REZAR E BENZER: RITUAIS SAGRADOS E IDENTIDADE ÉTNICA EM PRUDENTÓPOLIS – PR (1990-2014)

Abstract

This research reveals the tensions and conflicts over the maintenance of ethnic identity from the transformations of the blessing rituals, social and religion practices taking as a starting point the Ukrainian descendants in the town of Prudentópolis. Such sacred rituals, which take place throughout the liturgical calendar of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church of Byzantine ritual, are practices strongly loaded with symbols and meanings. Gestures, symbols, songs of praise, celebrations and rituals of blessing water, houses, candles, boughs, food, the deceased, fruit, flowers, plantations and harvests, that take place on days which the Ukrainians consider hallowed, are part of a set of conceptions inherited by the Ukrainian descendants, and re-meant in the areas they occupied during the process of immigration. The rite presents a religious dimension because it assumes a symbolic and transcendental character, and also reaffirms the ethnic identity of its participants because it is an action, a communicative moment constitutive of a vision of the world that sustains a set of relations among individuals. In this context, both, the identity construction and the construction of difference, are defined by the social relations based on speeches and language, always immersed in relations of power. Thereby, from a conception of identity understood as tension between the “self” and the “other”, between local and global, between speech and practice, between being and not being, the present work analyses, from oral history, the reformulation and the reaffirmation of the Ukrainian ethnic identity tightened by the translations of the liturgy and the blessing rituals from the Ukrainian language into the Portuguese language between the years 1990 and 2014.