Tears of paper: Mestre Pastinha and the regimes of affects in print journalism

Abstract

Emotions, feelings and affects are socially mediated phenomena, processed in the broad theater of human relations. Journalism composes such a phenomenon, contributing to the production, reproduction and reframing of sensibilities. This article aims to reflect on the expression of emotions in journalistic material, understanding that the affects identified relate to the act of feeling an emotion, but also to the symbolic and mediatized experience of the body and its practices. In methodological terms, our reflection is based on the reading of a set of old articles covering the last years of Mestre Pastinha's life, one of the most important names of Capoeira Angola in Brazil. For analysis purposes, two of these journalistic texts are studied in detail in this article. What meanings can be constructed based on an articulation of the body, emotions and media production? This is the basic question that instigates the reflection and analysis proposed in the article. The study is based on the anthropology of emotions, taking affects as culturally conditioned records that derive first from the repertoire of a social group rather than from natural or spontaneous forces.