Performance cosplay: mito, rito e práticas (religiosas) da cultura pop

Abstract

This research analyzes the Cosplay scene and analyzes the concepts pertinent to religious language, such as myth and rite, characterizing the fundamental notions of religious experience. The goal of the investigation is to know the architecture of the ritualistic process by which the language of myth is structured as a vector mode of the cosplay experience, as well as its own phenomenal working and its dispositions in the contemporary cultural world. The methodology starts from a bibliographic-conceptual research. Throughout the research, on spot incursions into specific Cosplay events were made in order to gather approximations about the ethnographic treatment given to certain cultural practices and how they are conceptually processed. The debate about findings among researchers in the field of sociology, anthropology and theology was fundamental to the construction of the dissertation argument. In this way, it was possible to establish some of the possible approximations between the cosplay performance and the language forms of the religious experience, especially the mythic language and the ritual process. Mythical language and the notion of ritual process could be conceptualized, as well as their articulations and their approaches with non-explicitly religious expressions. It was also possible to delimit what is meant by pop culture and super adventure, to then establish parallels with the mythic language. Similarly, a dense description of the cosplay scene could be presented that made the construction of the connections between performance cosplay and the languages of religious experience empirically feasible. What was not possible to contemplate, however, within the proper time of this research was the proposal of articulation of these contents with the notions of daily religious practices, present in the studies of Daily Theology and Living Religion, which is intended to resume in future research. Of the hypotheses initially raised, most can be confirmed during the development of the research. However, there was a hypothesis raised that not only was not confirmed but also made room for new questions and new avenues of investigation. Initially, it was suspected that performance cosplay deviated from the ritual processes of daily religious practices because of the presumed absence of soteriological theme present in them, that is, it was assumed that in performance cosplay human life would not be effectively at stake, making the practice of cosplay rather a "representation" or just a "joke" in the ludic field. It was not possible to verify this assumption of detachment, at least not completely and clearly. On the contrary, what was observed were small signs of a possible religious and soteriological sense, but not in the afterworld, but in the existential way, in the inside world, indicating that further research is needed to understand these signs, if only to refute them. The bibliography on the subject and the research data allowed us to infer that the Cosplay scene - as a set of beings arranged in a certain scope of contemporary mass culture - is structured from linguistic symbols concerning the significance of the ritualistic process that, similarly, organizes the experience of religious life.