As Geograficidades e Historicidades Tradicionais Caiçaras em Cajaíba, Paraty – RJ

Abstract

On the transformations of the contemporary world and technological advances, the techniques became a fundamental element for the modern State’s instrumentalization, reaching different spatial quadrants, in which there were deep changes in the ways of life, customs, and existential people’s conceptions. The research procedure was based on the analysis of memory perception of history as a form of space reading, aiming to understand the geographies and historicities of these people. Facing the current processes of segregation and social fragmentation, generated by the accelerated forces of modernity eg forms of modernization and State hegemonic actions, the understanding of the construction of people's life scale involves the knowledge from the experiences of daily life practiced, language’s production and meanings of “their own doing”. Starting from the assumption that vertical models of implementation for conservation units bring, as a consequence, tensions and conflicts in various degrees; we claim that the "Caiçara" narratives become a “knowledge act” that has person, time, and space within certain perspectives and worldviews, which allows a greater understanding of sociocultural and environmental expressions. Within this analysis perspective, our study's object is inserted in the process of territorial disputes of meanings, in which people, marked by their ethnic and cultural differences, produce their spatialities-geographies, historicities, practices, and knowledge. In searching for the objectives, the epistemological challenges went through the processes of modernization and power relations, the transformation of cultural and historical heritages, and the imbrication of these processes in the culture, identity, and people’s daily life. The analysis dimensions include the scenarios of socio-environmental injustice arising from territorial conflicts and historical and cultural ruptures of these socially discriminated segments, seeking to give visibility to the bearers and producers of traditional practices and knowledge. We have elected, as an element for reflective analysis, the traditional Caiçara geographies and historicities and their importance on the social production of space, considering that these precepts are an important link between individuals, their communities, forms of social organization and their paths through space. For the empirical approach, the traditional "Caiçara" communities from "Cajaíba Bay" in Paraty-RJ were the object of analysis. However, it was proposed, in this study, to test a hypothesis by questioning: how the State an intermediary agent of the modernizing process, by normatizing the territory, is responsible for profound changes in power and sociocultural relations in “Caiçara” communities? We are aiming to identify the State's intervention processes by using, as an instrument of analysis and central question the vertical model for the implementation of environmental protection areas. We have searched in "Caiçara" narratives by oral history, the theoretical methodological support, seeking analytical bases in the field of Geography and Social History, on the present conjuncture.