SINCRETISMO CULTURAL NA JOALHERIA AFRO-BRASILEIRA

Abstract

Body adornment has been used as a ornament, ritualistic object, religious icon or as symbol demonstration of status and power in many different cultures. In Brazil, own visuality develops from the cultural syncretism. Thus, together with the mode of dress, the african-Brazilian jewelry acquires peculiarities derived from cultural identities that coexist. This paper proposes a look at african-Brazilian jewelry through visual representation in some works of Jean-Baptiste Debret - French painter member of the French Artistic Mission that registered objects and everyday scenes of slaves and freemen, of poor whites and aristocrats of Rio de Janeiro in the early nineteenth century. We are looking for jewelry as a historical record of lifestyles from a time and place with a social, economic and cultural local configuration.

Index Terms - jewel, arts, siècle XIX, Jean-Baptiste Debret.