G.R.O.U.P. Teams 2006-2007

The Pontos de Cultura, Brazil

The Pontos de Cultura are grass-roots organizations that utilize art forms to promote identity formation and creative expression, often within some of Brazil's poorest rural Townsend Center for the Humanities regions and urban slums. Art and popular art forms (capoeira, Caribbean-style steel drumming, street theater, hip-hop, radio programming) are the program's necessary tools, but they are part of a process that is explicitly conceptualized as community development and which involves ideas of political mobilization and engagement. Now in its second year, the Pontos de Cultura program currently has over 500 points linked by a digital computer network. (These include three Pontos in the U.S., one of which is in San Francisco.)

Professor Candace Slater is conducting research on individual Ponto de Cultura's definitions of terms such as "tradition," "popular culture" and "citizenship"-all of which are central to the Ministry of Culture's rhetoric about the program. Through fieldwork with these community centers, she is examining how the terms are defined by individual members of the different Pontos, and how they play out in everyday practice. A key question is, "What is the relationship between the often openly "traditional" art forms on which many of the Pontos focus and contemporary social change?"

As a way into these questions she has chosen three distinct Pontos in different parts of the Northeastern state of Cear, and will employ six Berkeley undergraduates to work in collaboration with each other and these Pontos. Students will work in Berkeley and in Brazil, concluding with a group meeting at one of the Pontos during the first week of August 2007, and a 20-25 page research paper.