“Happiness, happiness is the state we call Bahia”: body, memory and meaning in Salvador’s carnival advertisements

Abstract

To discuss ways of discursivization of bodies in Salvador’s carnival advertisements, we intended to reflect on their meanings when crossed by the discourse of “baianidade.” Starting from the idea of body being a discursive object, we are interested in observing how the already-said staged “baianidade” come across the bodies plastered across chosen advertising campaigns, discursivizing them as diverse and placing them in symbiosis with the City. To this end, we shall turn to the theoretical framework of Pêcheux's Discourse Analysis, which provides the foundation to recognize historical remains related to the symbolic objects investigated (production conditions); to identify how the symbolic takes part in the process of formulating meanings (field of materialities); and to understand how, from the imaginary, the effects of meanings are regulated to disguise the contradictory material dimension of the interdiscursive process (subject positions).