Shifting Sands: Architecture, Ritual, and Myth in Almofala

Clarisse Figueiredo de Queiroz
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA
clafq@upenn.edu

This paper investigates the Church of Nossa Senhora da Conceição of Almofala as both a colonial artifact and a cosmopolitical axis in the ongoing struggle of the Tremembé people for land and survival along the coast of Ceará, Brazil. Built in the early 18th century as part of the Portuguese Crown’s efforts to catechize Indigenous populations and assert territorial control, the church was later buried by shifting dunes (Figure 1) in the late 19th century—only to reemerge when the sands shifted again and the Indigenous community collectively unearthed it in the 1940s. I argue that this material volatility discloses how the church becomes an instrument of jurisdiction through which ritual and memory authorize territorial claims. In this sense, the physical disappearance and reappearance of the church reflect deeper dynamics of Indigenous presence in the region, where architecture serves as a political, spiritual, and spatial summoner.

At the heart of this narrative is a foundational place-story: according to Tremembé oral tradition, a golden sculpture of a saint was discovered in the mangroves by their ancestors, seen as a sign from the encantados—beings described as former humans, animals, or anthropomorphic figures. In response, the community built a palm-and-clay chapel to house and worship the figure. Later, when news reached the Portuguese Crown, a proposal was made: if the sculpture were sent to be shown in court, the Queen would order the construction of a proper temple. Though absent from colonial archives, this narrative persists through memory and ritual as a sacred origin myth that grounds Tremembé’s territorial claim. It contests the view of the church as a colonial imposition and reframes the event as a negotiation—tenuous, unequal, but not absent of agency. 

Drawing on a methodology that interweaves oral testimony and archival documents, this research positions the built environment as a contested site of spiritual, political, and historical claims. Rather than a static monument recognized by the Brazilian National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage (IPHAN) in the 1980s, the church operates for the Tremembé as a gravitational center in a land always shifting; a place to root memory, a marker of identity, a node in their geography of resistance. This work is guided by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s conceptualization of Indigenous ontologies as fundamentally relational, Jens Andermann’s account of trance as a world-making praxis in devastated terrains, Arturo Escobar’s pluriverse, and Walter Mignolo’s notion of epistemic disobedience. Together, these frameworks enable an analysis of how the Tremembé disrupt colonial cartographies through re-enactments of myth and place-making.

At the core of this research is the ritual of Torém—an ancestral circular dance rooted in Tremembé cosmology and performed as an act of resistance, and reterritorialization. Drawing on Leda Maria Martins’s theory of “spiral time,” the Torém is understood here as a temporal technology that reactivates presence through rhythm and repetition. In Andermann’s terms, Torém is also a trance-space that folds bodies, dunes, and spirits into a shared field of appearance, such that the church, often viewed by outsiders as a symbol of conquest, transforms into a cosmopoietic architecture that generates other worlds and jurisdiction. The act of unearthing the church, conducted with bowls, hands, and dresses, is read as a ritual performance, aligning with Martins’ notion of the body as the axis of history. Simultaneously, Ailton Krenak’s philosophical reflections on land and interbeing foreground the need to “blend in with the landscape” rather than operate upon it—a principle at the heart of Tremembé territorial epistemologies. Accordingly, I show how “heritage” can both disembed and anchor. As cacique João Venâncio notes, the IPHAN renovation “removed the original lime plaster… floor tiles… only the appearance is the same.” This purification tracks Lucio Costa’s teleological modernist script, which privileged legible colonial/Baroque surfaces as national antiquity—stabilizing style as value while stripping local material memory. Yet the same patrimonial inscription now functions as a tactical lever in land demarcation, so the church, standardized for the canon, paradoxically strengthens Tremembé jurisdiction. 

This paper also traces the legal and political dimensions of this spatial struggle. The centrality of the church becomes further complicated when situated within the demarcation process of the Tremembé Indigenous Land, which has remained partially occupied by the transnational agro-industrial corporation Ducoco Agrícola S/A, a firm embedded in transnational coconut supply chains that stock North American supermarkets—an updated, corporate modality of extractive empire at odds with Indigenous stewardship. The paper explores how this dispute is intricately linked to extractive and agro-industrial interests that create both physical and political barriers to recognition and sovereignty. These tensions reveal how the landscape of Almofala is woven into global networks of power, consumption, and dispossession. The juxtaposition of bureaucratic rituals—petitions, lawsuits, cadastral mapping—and cosmological rituals—dance, prayer, storytelling—reveals clashing modes of place-making and truth-making. Mignolo’s critique of the modern/colonial order of knowledge is central here: the Tremembé are not only reclaiming land but also unsettling the ontological assumptions that define land as property and architecture as object. 

Ultimately, this research contributes to a counter-architectural history that reimagines the built environment as a living archive shaped by myth, memory, and collective performance. In closing, the paper urges a shift in heritage practice from monument-fixing to ritual-bearing stewardship; it calls for territorial adjudication that treats ritual and oral archives as evidentiary of presence; and it recasts architectural history so that buildings like Almofala’s church are read not as endpoints of colonial memory, but as instruments of Indigenous jurisdiction and world-making. In Almofala, bureaucratic rituals, sand, and wind may cover a land, but they cannot erase the roots beneath it. What is at stake here is not only territory, but the very ways of inhabiting, narrating, and dreaming land beyond the boundaries imposed by capital and colonialism.

Figure 1: People gathered in front of the Church of Almofala, probably on October 10th, 1898, date of the last mass, celebrated and recounted by Father Antônio Tomaz de Sales. (Brazilian National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage Archives, author unidentified, document F004121).

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