Reviewing historiographic knots: Notes on the sculptures of saint-amulets from the Paraíba Valley and their African origins

Abstract

This text consists of establishing a broader and comparative reading on devotional sculptures called "saints-amulets". For this, it is proposed an analysis on the critical anthology developed to this day on these objects, guiding the epistemological problems that led to establish, in parts, a mistaken historiography, with interpretations packed in stereotyped approaches of these sculptures produced by Africans enslaved in the nineteenth century, in the region of São Paulo Valley Paraíba (SP). In counterpoint, research on the cultural influence that the ancient kingdom of Kongo (central African region) had under the surrounding regions and in Europe, between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, attest to the borders that bring the pine knots closer to the sculptural tradition developed in this kingdom during the implantation of Catholicism by the Portuguese and disseminated by the monarchs of Kongo themselves. This historical context evidences the results of these cultural contacts between the Portuguese and the Bakongo and allows us to trace another historiographical perspective of the small sculptures of saints-amulets found in Brazil, making it possible to identify them within an expanded and significant cultural scope for understanding the circulation of an aesthetic canon.