Light and darkness

indigenous religious representations in music and painting

Abstract

We start from the analysis of two works, one song and one painting, as our objects of study: "O Índio do Senhor", by Sebastião da Costa Maciel Junior and Josias de Aguiar Teixeira, performed by singer Cristina Mel, and the historical oil painting "Primeira Missa no Brasil" by artist Victor Meirelles. The caricatured and derogatory representations of aspects related to Indigenous peoples' religions, through processes that reduce their beliefs, will be addressed as the core of our discussions. The objective of this study, therefore, is to critically analyze how the particularities, especially the religious aspects, of these cultures, rich in beliefs, rituals, and symbols, are represented in these artistic media. The importance of the research is to question what type of information has been perpetuated in the different means of cultural expression throughout history. We adopt as methodology, initially, a critical/descriptive analysis of the song's lyrics and the painting, subsequently correlating it with a qualitative analysis, of a bibliographic nature, in which Blacking (2007), Couto (2009), Florêncio (2016), Giucci (1993), Hall (2016), Laraia (2005), Panofsky (2017), Peixoto (2023), and Rosa (2016) were consulted in order to better structure the discussion and provide the necessary theoretical subsidies for the research.