Na “rooteza”: memória e identidade de uma prática roqueira underground no extremo Sul do Brasil nos anos 1990.

Abstract

Memory and identity are two inseparable terms. Without the first we wouldn't have the second. It can be said, in general terms, that memory cover many kinds of social processes which are conformed and articulated by a variety of groups of people. Aiming to constitute one present representation about themselves (a identity process), these groups articulate many kinds of relationships with and representations of their own pasts or traditions. These are generally organized around heritage, discourses, beliefs, ideologies and values, related or not to architecture, objects, places, rituals, commemorative ceremonies, etc. Our study was based on another kind of memory and identity articulation: through orality and individual interviews (individual socio-musical memories) we sought to comprehend how a group of subjects would articulate one memory and identity process related to what we called pelotense rock underground scene of the 1990s - a scene collectively articulated by them in the past. But we faced a problem that composed our empirical field: in today, this group is not more the same as it was in the past. It can be said that the past socio-musical group fragmented itself along the time, in the movement from the yesterday to today. In other words: we hadn’t a collective social group in the present that would correspond to the collective social group of the past. As a consequence, we faced another problem: insofar as they do not articulate a continuity of this scene through commemorative ceremonies (in the present) related with this past milieu, would we facing the articulation of a memory and identity which would correspond to a collective memory? As a form to overcome this perspective - the tradition instituted by Maurice Halbwachs -, we approached a kind of sociomusical memory and identity which had as a (re)constructing and meaning axis many recollections related to the past socio-musical practices of the interviewees. Considering music as a potential axis for (re)construction and meaning of past musical experiences, the life stories had as a focus the rock and underground experiences of the subjects. Throughout the analysis of the individual narratives we realized the emergence of ethic-emic memorial categories which were being conformed through thematic patterns relatively shared between the interviewees in (re)constructing their own experiences. Beyond that, and also in a manner relatively shared among them, such experiences were, in many moments, put into dialogue with related experiences in the present. In this way, they were articulating comparisons among yesterday-today socio-musical practices which, at the end, outlined the representations of their socio-musical identities in generational terms. Based on the dense description (GEERTZ, 2008), we studied a memory and identity process related to one kind of socio-musical past (rock and underground) which was articulated and conformed by what we understood as a temporal alterity.