Pelotines in Cut Paper within the Sweetmaking Traditions of Pelotas (RS): Memory and Material Culture

Abstract

This manuscript presents the results of a study on the art of paper cutting, which was used in the past as an adornment for the individualized decoration of small traditional sweets in the city of Pelotas (RS) and is now recognized as a specific typology called "Pelotine". The study revealed that the making of these ornaments is embedded in a larger context of historical influences, mainly Brazilian and Portuguese, despite having peculiar local characteristics regarding their form and function. The study on the use of artistically cut papers for the decoration of sweets in Brazil and Portugal found that more frequently these cutouts were associated with cakes and cake boxes, highlighting the fact that Pelotines have conformed as a typology with predominantly smaller dimensions, numerically more prolific, and often arranged differently in relation to their counterparts. Pelotines were revealed as a manual work with artistic characteristics, an expression of material culture that emerged in the context of an intangible heritage. Both their formation as a tradition of manual work and the replacement of this practice using industrialized Pelotines are symptomatic of the inherent transformations in the processes of cultural transmission of intangible heritage, as the sweet traditions of Pelotas and the region continue to exist, even though some of the means, technologies, and ingredients through which these sweets are now produced, consumed, and presented to the eye have changed over this process.