A Festa dos Montes: música, conflito e confraternidade

Abstract

This study focuses on the Festa de São Brás dos Montes held annually in February in Montes, in the Guarda District. In this event, several “maltas” (organized groups of players of drums, flutes and accordions), coming from villages around the mountain, take part in a ritual that is marked both by tradition and by reinvention. The research is based on fieldwork carried out near one of the “maltas, in 2008, having followed the construction and repair process of membranophones and flutes. In the light of the proposals of Victor Turner (2009), the study comprises the agglutinating role of ritual in which, year after year, are repeated the same collective excess practices. This study aims to inform a practice not documented by the portuguese ethnography and to discuss the role of music in the reactualization process of traditions. In this practice, the latent conflict and its resolution in the balance of power it generates, can help us understand how these men are related, within and outside the context of the event. The music allows to integrate the processes of change and adapts to modern and global time, where the process of adaptation is essential to its own survival.