Pela outra margem da fronteira: território, identidade e lutas sociais na Amazônia

Abstract

The model that guided Brazilian Amazonia occupation and appropriation of process in the last decades was based in the belief of modernization as the only force capable "to develop" the region, with no regards to its social, cultural and political cost. This project was based in a kind of progress fundamentalism that created an imaginary where it is attributed a priori a positive role to the new and modern, as well as a negative role to the old, to the past to the traditional, justifying an ensemble of practices and representations marked for by violence and colonialism that serve to justify the subjection of local populations. Such populations and their way of life are conceived is "traditional", becoming thus obstacles to "development" and "modernization". At end of the 1980s many social movements emerge struggling against this imaginary modern/colonial emerges, which leads to question representations, speeches and constructed hegemonic ideologies on the "traditional populations". These movements fight for the affirmation of the territorialities and territorial identities as element of r-existence to this project, therefore according to Gonçalves (2001), they fight not only to resist, but also for a determined existence form, one determined way of life and production, for differentiated ways to feel, to act and think. Within this context, we can verify the emergency of different identities in Brazilian Amazônia, constructed by different social movements linked to "traditional" populations, such as indians, river-people, rubber-people, chestnut-people, quilombolas, coconut breakers etc. These populations mobilize strategically and perfomatically new identities speeches that valuing and politicizing the traditional way of life, as well as memories and cultures that had been historically suppressed, silenced and made invisible. The objective of this work is to analyze this process from a specific case, in this direction we want to understand how it has been constructed in a relational and contrastive way a marginal identity in Cametá-Pará, through a process of politicizing the river culture (which has in the river its space of reference) and the construction of a socio spatial conscience of belonging, what it has implied in the constitution of new political citizens who emerge from the fights against the forms of exploration and domination at the local level against the impacts of the modernization processes at the regional level.