Festive and tourist practices in the Quilombola Community Dona Juscelina Tocantins, Brazil

Abstract

Quilombola festivals are fundamental social practices for preserving collective memory and updating ancestral know-how. They are symbolic experiences that mobilize values, affections, cosmologies and resistance strategies. In the context of the Dona Juscelina Quilombola Community, in the north of Tocantins, these festivals transcend the merely celebratory function to become devices of social agency and political mediation, articulating ways of being, acting and existing that challenge the logics of hegemonic tourism. This study analyzes the cultural-ancestral practices associated with quilombola festivals and their developments in the tourism field, in the light of Pierre Bourdieu's Field Theory, mobilizing the concepts of habitus, field and capital.  The research adopts a qualitative and interdisciplinary approach, based on interviews adapted from oral history with three Griôs and three members of the Community Association, seeking to understand the meanings attributed to the festivals and their implications for the reconfiguration of tourism. The results show that the festivals are expressions of a festive-tourist habitus of their own, forged from the circularity of rites, community synchronicity and the diachrony of ancestral memory. They not only activate collective memory and promote sociability, but also insert the community into symbolic disputes within the tourism field, re-signifying its insertion into broader economic and cultural processes. Tourism, in this context, is understood as a social field in dispute, in which different agents, capitals and interests clash. By appropriating the festivals as a form of mediation, the community reconfigures the relationships between territory, identity and the symbolic economy, positioning itself actively in the face of the challenges of self-determination, social justice and cultural recognition. The festivals thus become platforms for political vindication of community autonomy and the reinvention of bonds such as the sacred, territory and ancestry. The presence of tourists and visitors, mediated by relationships of hospitality and affection, destabilizes traditional patterns of tourist consumption and causes epistemic shifts, generating experiences of otherness and self-knowledge in visitors. Instead of being a commodity, tourism is now experienced as a social practice, rooted in quilombola cosmopolitics and anchored in the ethics of care, sharing and reciprocity. The conclusion is that the community's festivals, as structures of meaning and sociability, open the way for a counter-hegemonic tourism that values the ontological and epistemological diversity of the quilombola peoples. By highlighting the power of festivals as practices of the world, this study contributes to the construction of a critique of conventional tourism and proposes new interpretative frameworks guided by ancestry, memory and territoriality.