On the Razor’s Edge: Brazilian Ethnomusicology, Participatory Research and Popular Audiovisual Education at Baixada Fluminense, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Abstract

Considering the physical and symbolic violence imposed on peripheral populations and favela residents in Brazil, this article argues for participatory methodology, as it has been practiced in Brazilian ethnomusicology, as a feasible and transformative action. Initially, I present some landmarks of its trajectory. Then, I report initiatives which I have been developing within this perspective since 2011, producing research and extension projects with urban youth from communities subjected to violence, exploration, and inequalities, especially in the metropolitan region Baixada Fluminense (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil). In these initiatives promoted by our group Escuta Baixada (“Listen to Baixada”), using Popular Education and Popular Audiovisual production tools, we collectively construct self-representations and critical reflections of students, musicians, and other residents that evidence an awareness of physical and symbolic violence and its causes, produced by the economic elites. In addition, we verified the existence of –and became participants in– a political activism expressed as an affective and collaborative network of musical/cultural production, from which sectors of Baixada Fluminense’s population fight against stigmatization and for citizenship and acknowledgement of its contributions to culture. Evaluating the results and feedback obtained by our work among the concerned populations, we consider that the use of participatory ethnomusicology in the Escuta Baixada group’s work was effective in the production of relevant research/extension for Baixada dwellers’ interests and necessities.