Schutzian Frames of Apperception and the Inquisitorial Grammar in Branca Dias

Abstract I draw together history and dramaturgy through the figure of Branca Dias Coronel (Koren) (c. 1505–1589). This article offers a phenomenological reading of O Santo Inquérito , the play by Dias Gomes (O Santo Inquérito, 1995, p 83), treating it as a symbolic field where forms of violence are reinscribed—religious persecution and sensory and typificational violence. The question guiding my inquiry is whether Branca’s posthumous persecution, staged as a sacrifice, might be read not merely as the product of inquisitorial repression but as a dramaturgical condensation of silencing practices that operate at the level of the body, gesture, and sign. I turn to Alfred Schutz in Symbol, Reality and Society ( Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality , 1967, pp. 297–299), whose distinction of our different orders involved in the appresentational situation—namely, the apperceptual, appresentational, referential, and interpretational orders—provides a generative lexicon for describing the layers of embodied perception that unfold within the scene. A ritual and sensuous dimension of performance emerges, in which Branca’s body—motionless, aromatic, inflamed—figures as a living trace of a symbolic struggle for recognition and survival.