Penduraram as letras na parede da sala : escrita e organização social no Alto Jurua

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2003

RESUMO

This work deals with the uses and meanings associated to the written language by the rubber tappers living in the upper Juruá river region, in the eastern State of Acre, in the Brazilian Amazonia. Its aim is to modestly contribute towards the study of the roles of literacy in social groups who are marginalized from literacy in literate societies. To this end, we delineate a history of writing in the region, supported by historical sources and ethnographic research, and by written texts produced by people living in the forest and who did not attend schooL The upper Juruá River region, and more specifically the Upper Juruá Extractive Reserve, is a remote forest territory, largely isolated from urban centers; The population is dispersed alongside the rivers, living in small groups of houses in the midst of the forest. Illiteracy is high, and the presence of writing in the everyday life of people is very restricted. Until one decade ago, most men in the region were rubber tappers who worked under the trade-post system, in which the monopoly of writing had an specially important role. The context of this research is the period which followed the end ofthe system oftrade-posts. One of our conclusions, deriving from our perspective from the local point of view, is that there are different meanings and different uses to literacy. We highlight the role of writing as part of the power structure; however, we also indicate how literacy has been used by rubber tappers to build up new relations with the literate world from a local point of view. Thus, we conclude that a history of the uses and meanings of writing practices and of literacy should necessarily deal with the relations between local representations and the external structures of power. In the situation researched by us, the writing practices are not part of the everyday life, and the writing skills are not orthodox. We deal with adult writers who learned how to writein several non-orthodox ways. They are thus what one could call barefoot writers, or still grass-root writers. However, those forest writers face a dilemma, which is that of trying to control a new tool to reassert their citizenship, and yet at the same time apparently confirming their subaltern position in that they write "wrongly". Our research was aIso part of an effort towards a practical intervention in this situation

ASSUNTO(S)

escrita seringueiros - condições sociais seringueiros - jurua rio rio tradição oral borracha - jurua amazonia na literatura

ACESSO AO ARTIGO

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