Sensivel: A study on social aesthetics, group creativity, and collective emotion

In this dissertation, a cosmopolitan ethnography, I examine the social aesthetics (behavioral and physical patterns that characterize social environments), group creativity, and collective emotion of choro music groups in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Choro (pronounced sho-ru) is an urban instrumental musical genre that originated in Rio de Janeiro in the last third of the 19th century. Through observation and participation in jam sessions called rodas de choro, as well as interviews with the musicians, I sought to understand the social dynamics of these groups from the perspective of the senses and the body. Since the early 19 th century until the present, Rio de Janeiro, a mega urban center with a distressing pulse of life, has witnessed the disintegration and emergence of a variety of social institutions and configurations; new forms of social relations, new perceptions of time and space, new housing and working patterns, and new disciplining forms. I came to the conclusion that in the context of a hierarchical, patriarchal, unequal, and highly alienating megalopolis, choro groups, through their social aesthetics and emotive bonds, perform and experience a degree of creative and relational freedom seldom encountered in the city. Choro's social aesthetics is geared towards the formation and reinforcement of strong friendship ties creating the arena for communication, conversation, and interaction between unequal social actors. Group creativity gives this arena more depth, substance, processual and participative purpose, representing the de-alienating constituent of this sphere. Collective emotion, in and through choro, inaugurates a new way and form in which to come together and experience reality, anchored by a predisposition to liberation, transformation, and transcendence, put in motion and stimulated by the intensity of the collective grooving and melodizing. In other words, choro performances allow musicians to enact an ideal society and to break free from the alienating forces of the surrounding system.