«Não sei se canto se rezo»: ambivalências culturais e religiosas do fado (1926-1945)

In the period between 1926 and 1945 fado was marked by a process of professionalization and by the introduction of a commercial logic, which was accompanied by the search of a sociocultural affirmation and by its recognition as a national song. The circle of fado was then traversed by contentious dynamics, by leaderships tainted with a political radicalism and by the progressive strengthening of journalism. In this juncture, fado went through a process of latent metamorphosis. This work aims to analyse the religious elements which were recognizable within this mutation, in the discourses where fado speaks about itself as a prayer and a religion and in the different representations and opinions which circulated about it in the public sphere. The spiritual and religious dynamics also subsist in the mythology of fado and in the spaces and sociabilities which it promoted, in the deterministic nuances it transported and in the existential density it built. In the popular poetics, namely in the experiential approach where the social contrasts and emotional bonds are sang, as in the gestures through which fado expressed itself, the religious participated in the production of feelings, images and norms.