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Unicamp Newspaper - May 2000

Pages 2 to 4

Images and inventions of a country
Discovery or encounter, celebration or memory? The University discusses the construction of a country from the vision of scholars

JOS� PEDRO MARTINS

QWhat is the meaning of activities related to 500 years of European presence in Brazil? What are the marks left throughout history in the dominant vision of the Brazilian nation? Was the arrival of the squadron commanded by Pedro �lvares Cabral, on April 22, 1500, a discovery or a meeting of races and cultures, as the episode is officially celebrated today? The memory of these five centuries, after all, is a reason for celebration or serious reflection on Brazil's trajectory, as a basis for a real architectural project for a country worthy and fair?

These were some of the questions that the Brazil 500: Images and Inventions Lecture Cycle sought to answer or, better yet, formulate in new perspectives. Promoted by the Unicamp – Brazil 500 Years Commission and the Department of History of the Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences (IFCH), the Cycle brought together experts from the University itself and other institutions, with important works to allow a multidisciplinary panel on what the process of building Brazil has meant.

The Cycle was developed on the 14th and 15th of April, in the auditorium of the headquarters of the Instituto Agronomico de Campinas (IAC), on Avenida Bar�ão de Itapura, close to the city center. As the IFCH director and Cycle coordinator, Paulo Miceli, noted at the opening of the meeting, the purpose of holding the event in the central region, outside the University, was exactly to provide greater contact between the population and the multiple discussions that the list of actions related to 500 years of Brazil provoked in the academic community in general and at Unicamp in particular.

A different look at the official celebration of the 500th anniversary of the so-called Discovery of Brazil was the focus of the talk by Janice Theodoro, from the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences (FFLCH) at USP. The core of the "Sense of Discoveries" conference was the reflection on the dilemma caused by the opposing attitudes that one can have in relation to the 500 years of European presence in Brazil.

On the one hand, celebrating the so-called Discovery would, in his opinion, praise the genocide against indigenous peoples and black people. On the other hand, simply denying the importance of the event would be denying the very existence of a Brazilian people. Janice highlighted, on the other hand, that celebrating, etymologically, means remembering together ("co-memorare") and, from this perspective, it would be essential to remember to understand what has actually happened to Brazil and its people in these 500 years.

In his opinion, a key to trying to resolve the impasse caused by the multiple views regarding the so-called Discovery is to establish new criteria to evaluate the effects of reciprocal contacts, which were largely painful. , between the cultures of whites, Indians and blacks over the last few centuries in Brazil. The central question for Janice Theodoro is whether a culture can be evaluated by a purely economic perception or by what it represents as a "cognitive collection".

If the criterion is economic, highlights the USP professor, indicators such as per capita income would be considered when evaluating the collection of a given culture. On the other hand, if the criterion is to verify the institutional forms of organization of society related to that culture, the result of the evaluation may be different.

Taking the criterion of "cognitive collection", the speaker considers that pre-Colombian societies, in Mexico or Brazil, solved fundamental problems that modern, white and Western society has not yet addressed. Those societies, he highlighted, established very interesting patterns of relationships between men and between them and the environment.

An ingredient that Janice considers very important for analyzing a society's cultural heritage concerns how it solves, for example, the problem of supply. She notes that, in the Valley of Mexico, at the time of the great ritual celebrations, the cities received thousands of people and there was no shortage of food. Conflicts were very low. Likewise, she notes that in Canudos the followers of Antônio Conselheiro, considered a monster by the Brazilian elite at the time, also resolved the food problem in a more or less adequate way.

From the perspective of evaluating the cognitive collection, Janice Theodoro believes that it is possible to reaffirm the pride of carrying a certain cultural heritage. In the Brazilian case, consideration of the cognitive collection leads to the affirmation of the beauty of the country's typical cultural diversity.

The researcher understands that, in the current scenario of globalization, the cultural issue has become increasingly important for people, as the bankruptcy of national States reinforces the reflection about the meaning of identities. It is for this reason that he understands that the rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico, arouses so much curiosity, as what is at stake is the new form of power relationship and construction of citizenship, aspects linked to the cognitive heritage of a society. It is worth remembering, he noted, that the best-known leader in Chiapas is the Sub-Commander, not the Commander, Marcos, which already indicates a subversion of the vision of political power.

By not considering the cultural aspect, the cognitive heritage, the contact between whites, blacks and Indians, the list of official actions related to the 500th anniversary of Brazil has attracted so little attention, he believes Janice Theodoro. The moment of bankruptcy of national states, she adds, does not favor this type of event, which seems to belong much more to the narcissism of European ethnocentrism.

Stereotypes and prejudice – One of the effects of European ethnocentrism on the colonization of Brazil was the creation of a stereotype of exoticism in relation to the country and its people. This stereotype, the source of so many preconceptions, continues to be perpetuated by most international media, and even Brazilian ones, and has been historically manipulated as a way of hiding the essentially perverse nature of the process of colonization and which still leaves deep marks on the unfair way in which Brazilian society is structured. This was the tone of two other talks at the Brasil 500 Cycle: Images and Inventions.

The title of Paulo Miceli's lecture, "Imagens do Cobrimento do Brasil", already points to the sense of masking of reality made possible by the stereotype of exoticism. This disguised, sweetened reality began to be constructed, in his opinion, when the Portuguese ventured into unknown seas in the 15th century.

At the time, Miceli recalled, the planet was made up of worlds that ignored each other. The lack of knowledge about other worlds was the source of the most diverse legends and delusional visions about what was different and new. What the navigators faced, above all, were geographical ignorance and their own fears, the result of ignorance.

The first documents regarding the new Portuguese colony confirm the perception of exoticism about the new lands and their people. The famous and beautiful Map of Cantino, from 1502, for example, includes three scarlet macaws in the Northeast region, as well as details of the Brazilian flora and a long description of the "finding" of the new lands, which took place two years earlier. It is no coincidence that for a long time Brazil was also known in Europe as the Land of Parrots.

The distorted vision of the new lands and their people would last for a long time, largely due to the character of Portuguese colonization, which was basically settled in the coastal area and its surroundings. The interior was terra incognita, giving rise to various interpretations. Diogo Homem's map, from 1558, makes reference to anthropophagists and "patagões" (men with giant feet) in southern Brazil.

Geopolitical interests also influenced the creation of maps, contributing to distort the image of Brazil. A map by João Teixeira Albernaz, from 1666, shows the region of the River Plate, which in reality would belong to Spain, on the Portuguese side guaranteed by the Treaty of Tordesillas.

The same pattern of distortion of reality appears in texts about the colonial period. In the Gran Nouvel Atlas de La Mer, from 1680, by Johanes van Keulen, Brazilians are described as people "for the most part cruel, savage and man-eating", a clear contradiction to the good savage so worshiped in Europe by intellectuals such as Rousseau.

Likewise, still in 1764, in his Petit Atlas Maritime, published in Paris, Jacques Nicholas Bellin reports that "the Brazilians are cruel, vengeful and very angry, daring to the point of temerity. Those who inhabit the interior of the country are brutal, wild and man-eating, many of them are sorcerers".

For Paulo Miceli, 500 years were still not enough to overturn this image of an exotic, wild country, with beautiful nature, but sometimes monstrous, very different from European civilization. "These are stereotypes that span centuries, and that still remain", he laments. The director of the IFCH therefore considers it a huge challenge to truly discover what Brazil is, to combat the coverage that has marked the 500 years of reading its history.

A crystal clear demonstration of how the distorted vision of Brazil remains was presented in the Cycle by Regina Beatriz Guimar�es Neto, professor at the Federal University of Mato Grosso (UFMT), in her lecture "In search of borders: images of conquest in the movement for the territorialization of the Amazon". She showed some of the results of her research in the North of Mato Grosso, where in recent years there has been a huge proliferation of new municipalities, in one of the so-called new colonization fronts.

The UFMT professor argued that the interests of large colonizing companies, mostly from São Paulo, have presented the region as the new Promised Land, the wild paradise that needs "civilization" to progress. This can be verified by the names of the new municipalities, such as Nova Cana�, Novo Horizonte, Al� Brasil, which reflect the paradisiacal vision propagated by the colonizers.

However, the civilizational formula defended by these companies, laments Regina Beatriz, is that of replacing the green of forests with the green of large plantations, mainly soybeans. Instead of Paradise Lost, what migrants attracted by propaganda find in these locations is a most unjust social structure, marked by enormous rates of violence, especially in mining areas.

The UFMT professor points out that these new colonization frontiers are inserted in the context of geopolitical interests built during the military regime of 1964 and 1984 and which still remain in the New Republic. Indigenous communities, still significant in the region, as in the case of the Cinta-Larga, are suffering especially with the notion of "progress" taking place in these new frontiers.

However, cities built in the middle of the forest also suffer impacts from degradation similar to those of large urban areas in the Southeast and South of Brazil. Many of these locations are covered, for example, with smoke resulting from the burning of waste from large timber companies that are setting up shop and operating at full speed in the North of Mato Grosso. For Regina Beatriz, modifying this distorted notion of development depends on a radical change in the parameters of Brazilian society to see its own reality.

Search sources – Documents on censorship and catechesis are excellent sources of research for the rediscovery of Brazil. But there are also other very rich sources, which are beginning to be better inventoried and analyzed. These are the cases of correspondence maintained between Brazil and Europe in the colonial period, the reports of foreign travelers and adventurers passing through the country and literature itself, an ever-increasing source of ideas and lines of study for those interested in retelling the country's history. Samples of this arsenal of new research sources were given in the other three lectures of the Brazil 500 Cycle: Images and Inventions.

A unique vision of anthropophagy in Brazil is what allows, in this scenario, the reading of texts such as the story of the adventurer Hans Staden. The report was the theme of the lecture by Guilherme Amaral Luz, a student at IFCH-Unicamp: "The captivity of the unknown: Hans Staden's testimony on the anthropophagy of the Tupinamb�s".

Amaral Luz notes that, unlike most reports of anthropophagy in Portuguese America in the 16th century, Hans Staden's is not that of a cosmographer, colonist, missionary or theologian, but of "an adventurer who became a prisoner among cannibal Indians, experiencing fears of becoming a victim of anthropophagic feasting".

His main justification for writing and publishing the report, notes the speaker, was eminently devout. Protestant, the humble author, born on the banks of the river Efze in Hesse-Nassau, Prussia, claims that his story is a thank you to God for having saved him from the bloody hands of the natives of the coast of St. Vicente, serving as a testimony of faith. Despite its apparent "scientific" or "cosmographic" unpretentiousness, Amaral Luz highlights that "the veracity of the work did not cease to be legitimized by university circles at the time, as its preface attests written by the anatomist Johann Eichmann, who affirms the possibility of its use to expand knowledge of the world and its phenomena".

Hans Staden's work remained practically anonymous in Brazil for centuries. The interest in this type of report is very recent but, in Amaral Luz's assessment, fundamental as a means of building a more complete panel on how foreigners, especially Europeans, have been reading about Brazil and its people.

Likewise, the importance of analyzing correspondences between metropolis and colony is growing. This was demonstrated by the lecture "Jesuistic Correspondence", by Alcir P�cora, professor at the Department of Literary Theory at the Institute of Language Studies (IEL) at Unicamp.

P�cora emphasizes that Jesuit correspondence has been treated as a direct documentary source of events in the early days of colonization. However, in his lecture the specialist showed that the correspondence of the Jesuits living in Brazil followed standards and norms very well rooted in the literary tradition of the time, in addition to following the determination specific to your religious order. It would be important to understand the mechanisms present in the formulation of these correspondences to understand what they were actually saying.

The importance of analyzing literary production to better understand what Brazilian history has been was, in the same way, the central theme of the talk by Geraldo M�rtires Coelho, director of the Archives of Público do Par�, who spoke about "Nature versus culture: the idea of ​​civilization in A selva, by Ferreira de Castro".

Coelho commented on the book A Selva, written by the Portuguese Ferreira de Castro and which brings together the author's impressions when he lived in Pará, between 1911 and 1918. For the director of the Pará Public Archive, the The writer's view works, treating the rubber Amazon, at the beginning of the XNUMXth century, as a "document" of the extractive society.

Overall, A Selva's approach contrasts with the idyllic, idealized vision that Europeans normally have in relation to the Amazon rainforest. On the contrary, in the book initially published in Portugal, the Amazon is the scene of a hostile nature, of torrential rains and intermittent tropical fevers, in addition to being the place of very raw social relations is, far from the ethical achievements so proclaimed by European humanism and little practiced by its American descendants.

In a very symbolic way for M�rtires Coelho, the plot of A Selva ends with a huge fire in the rubber plantation, which was the source of so much exploitation of human beings. The fire of the fire, signifying the end of that exploitation regime, would be the light inside the forest, illuminating the possibility of a new beginning, pointing to reconciliation between human beings among themselves and between them and nature. This is not exactly the meaning of the Brazilian people's search for rediscovery and, why not, for the invention of a worthy and fair country, based on the construction of fi� images. Is this your reality and your aspirations?

Necessary rereading – Rereading Brazilian reality and its history will be possible when we understand in greater depth the mechanisms that made the perpetuation of distorted views about the country and its people viable. Catechesis associated with the colonization effort and the exercise of censorship, especially during the period of the Inquisition, are two fronts of research that can help clarify the agenesis of those mechanisms. This was the meaning of two other lectures in the Cycle held at the IAC, in Campinas.

An interpretation of the peculiar format of catechesis carried out in Brazil-Cologne was made by Leandro Karnal, from IFHC-Unicamp, in the lecture "The spiritual conquest in the 15th and 16th centuries".

Karnal highlighted that the time of the great navigations in the 15th and 16th centuries coincided with the period in which the belief among Catholics about the proximity of the end of the world was very strong. When Europeans arrived in America, they arrived with an interest in a rapid catechization of the Indians, as a means of guaranteeing the "salvation of their souls".

The result of this concern was, in the opinion of the IFCH professor, the application of a type of mass catechesis in Brazil. Mass baptisms of Indians took place by sprinkling, that is, by dispersing drops of water in a crowd, unlike traditional baptism, which stipulates an individualized ritual.

There was, finally, no traditional catechization, which depends on the assimilation of concepts that were certainly generally incomprehensible to indigenous peoples. "It was very difficult for a native to understand that there was a God characterized by three persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit", emphasizes the Unicamp scholar.

The consequence of heterodox catechesis was, for Karnal, that there was a generally superficial conversion of indigenous peoples. The supposed converts could say that they were Catholic Christians but, in reality, they continued to profess their beliefs and practice their own rituals.

In this sense, there was a catechization that implied the adherence of the body, not the soul. The IFCH professor understands that Brazilians inherited this attitude, which can be verified during demographic censuses in which the majority of the population says they are Catholic, "but in practice they are not he gives up his private beliefs."

As there was no adhesion of the soul, the indigenous people did not continue to attend the activities maintained by the Catholic religious during the catechization effort. They were thus treated as dispersive, indolent, inconstant by the catechizers. This is perhaps the origin of another of the stereotypes woven about Brazilians over the last five centuries and which increasingly challenge the academic community to a new commitment to interpretation.

Another vital front of research, to understand the distortions about Brazilian reality, is the gears of censorship during the colonial period. Details of how the censorship mechanism worked in an important period in Brazilian history were presented by Leila Mezan Algranti, from IFCH-Unicamp, in her lecture "Censorship of books and ideas in Brazil".

The period focused on by the researcher is that between the arrival of the Portuguese Crown in Rio de Janeiro, in 1808, until the outbreak of the Porto Revolution, in 1821, which will determine the end of censorship and the participation of the Holy Office in evaluating what could or could not be published in Portugal and its overseas colonies.

The documents studied by Leila Mezan prove that there was great concern about controlling the circulation of books in Brazil. It didn't matter, according to her, the social condition of the recipient of the books. All book buyers had to submit their requests to the censorship channels, which upon arrival in Brazil returned to being tripartite, that is, it was exercised by the civil authorities, the representatives of the Crown and the bodies of the Inquisi �������� Censorship in Portugal was tripartite, the researcher notes, until the period of the Marqu�s de Pombal government. At this time, in the middle of the 18th century, the Royal Censorial Board was created, implying a certain shake in the power of the Holy Office. When D. Maria, the Mad, assumed the throne and Pombal fell into disgrace, the Royal Censorial Board was abolished.

During the period of D. João VI's presence in Brazil, from 1808 onwards, the main censorship body was the Mesa do Desembargo do Paão, in Rio de Janeiro. If the bureaucratic structure was established, there were, however, no clear rules on how censorship should be exercised and what should be censored. In matters of politics and religion there were no major conflicts between the censors, but in moral aspects "there was shifting ground", says Leila Mezan.