The Colorful Sands of the Coast Cearense Modeled by Wise Men Hands

Abstract

The present study focused on the colorful sand crafts of the coast from Ceará aiming to know the way artisans think of crafts as survival activity and how to know passed by the tradition of a generation to another. It also seeks to identify the stimulus for creativity that appears in motives that represent artistic expressions of a past in tension between continuity and change, characteristic not only of the dynamics of culture but also market demands and the action of the man himself who has been destroying the ecosystem and, notably, the local social ecology, directly affecting artisans. Orality is the privileged way to record the experience of people with little literate but that carry the learning of an activity that has been passing from generation to generation. Memory, intuition, sensitivity and “gift” constitute the instruments both for the construction and the transmission of artisanal knowledge, teaching do by doing or showing how to do it. Memory through language and motifs produced with colored sands, establishes the social bond and, thus, guarantees the continuity of the behaviors and ways of life that constitute a culture. The researcher is nourished by looking, hearing, touching and feeling getting drunk with the experience of what the artisans lived.