The building of sports memory and the oral history in Brazil: a study of the audio collection of the Sound and Image Museum in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo city (1960-1990)

Abstract

The project aims to bring contributions in different areas of activity, with the results from this research proposal. First, in the scientific sphere, its results allow advancing the knowledge of the museum collections that were dedicated to organizing the collective memory of sports in Brazil, through series of testimonies recorded with characters related to their history. Sports practice in the country comprises a set of actors, spaces and competitive calendars that have become part of everyday, social and cultural life since the 20th century. The testimony of these athletes, among other participants in professional football and Olympic modalities, enables a range of perspectives about such events, whose political and symbolic meanings have gained projection and importance in the national imaginary over time. The oral record of such reports is today part of these collections little explored and almost unknown, so that the research seeks to contribute to the systematization of archival data lacking analysis, income and visibility. This first contribution, of a scientific nature, is in line with the second contributory point that we want to emphasize here: that of an intellectual nature. The memories narrated from the experiences of athletes and former soccer players provide an articulation between sports memory and historical time, whose sinchronic and diachronic dimension is the object of study and theoretical interest on the part of historiography. The project aims to include the practices and representations of soccer in Brazil in broader historiographical debates, such as the continuities and permanences that the temporal flow in the understanding of collective and social phenomena. Along with the intended contribution in the scientific-intellectual sphere, the technological element is also added, since the research deals with sources of consultation created based on sound devices, thanks to the use of recorders and cassette tapes in the spaces of the museums, which, in the 1960s and1970s, was the technical means capable of recording the speech of the interviewed characters. The description and analysis of the material, under this technological support, contribute to make accessible emblematic cases of the construction of a sports memory inside museums, institutional spaces of legitimation of the Brazilian cultural heritage. (AU)