A construção da identidade territorial a partir das manifestações culturais no Vale do Taquari : etnografia dos grupos de danças folclóricas alemãs de Estrela e do 47º Festival do Chucrute.

Abstract

This dissertation approaches a theoretical reflection about the relation between culture and development, placing the issue in the context of globalization and cultural studies perspective. The initial analysis leads to a comprehension of concepts as territory and regional actors in the dynamic that exists between the global and the local/ regional. Further more, my aim is to study the concept of cultural identity, which is essential to think about the differences that distinguish and determine belongness to territories in the global society. The last part of this paper elects two cultural products placed in the territory called Taquari Valley – RS - Brazil, where they actin the construction of a territorial identity since the sixties. The mentioned cultural events called artifacts are the Grupos de Danças Folclóricas Alemãs de Estrela and the Festival do Chucrute, both created and supported by the Evangelical Community in Estrela (IECLB). These artifacts constitute cultural events inspired by representations of germanness, whose origin is placed in the time of German immigration in the Brazilian South in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. An ethnographic research has been done upon these two institutions in order to analyze how the integration among members and their performance interferes in the construction of a territorial identity in this region. The results were analyzed based on the theoretical reflections of cultural studies mainly the relation between culture and regional development.