"Brazil" is a word that belongs to the utopian toponym of medieval times, designating a dream island, land of imagined happiness. The first known record of the word is in a nautical chart drawn up in 1325 by the Genoese Angelo Dalorto, that is: the name "Brazil" already appears on maps when the Cabralina fleet was still 175 years old to see Mount Pascoal. Over time, the term came to denominate the current Brazilian territory. And the first tribal groups found here by European navigators were called "brasis". They were basically groups of the Tupi people, who then dominated almost the entire coastal façade of the Brazilian tropics, extending from Ceara to Sao Paulo. The purpose of this first program in the series is to present an overview of the Tupinambá-Tupiniquim sociocultural formation: the village organization, the belief system, the anthropophagy, the agricultural practices, the wars and parties, the astronomical knowledge, the kinship plot, life-loving and sexual, in short, to show who were those cannibals who circulated, with their myths and rites, the coastal plains of the Brazilian Land - and who, through the miscegenation and didactics of the tropics, constituted, with the Lusitans, the original "protocell" of our people: the luso-tupi protocell.
It all starts when Portugal decides to organize a national program to explore the borders of the Unknown. The key figure here is Infante D. Henrique. The cosmopolitan community gathered in Sagres, under the command of Infante, systematizes the technical knowledge available until then and goes on to improve the existing nautical technology. Lusitanian vessels then start to sail to unexplored seas by the Europeans, in an adventure whose result will be not only to transform the image of the world but also to emerge the idea and reality of humanity. Brazil emerges as a moment of this Age of Discovery. As an advanced bridge of Neo-Latin culture, in its Portuguese variant, on the western shores of the South Atlantic. At first, the systematic extra-state colonization. It is the "caramuru" period in the history of Brazil: the mameluca hamlet of Santo André, with João Ramalho, or the eurotupinambá village of Diogo Alvares, in Bahia. Then the state advances, hereditary captaincies, general government. The project of transplantation of Portuguese culture to the tropics. New technologies and new ideologies, brought from a region of Europe that was, in a way, a prototype of America: centuries of miscegenation, centuries of living with difference.
Black people of the so-called African tropical civilization appear as one of the main aspects of the winged process of building Brazilian society and culture. Engaged in the largest movement of compulsory migration to date, they began to reach our tropics in the first half of the sixteenth century. And here they brought, besides the genetic repertoire, a whole range of technical procedures and symbolic creations. Firstly, the slave trade was mainly done with sub-equatorial Africa. It is the flow of black Bantu, coming from regions of Angola and Congo. Later, some of the Brazilian traffic turned to over-equatorial Africa, to the Costa da Mina and Benin Bay, to the west side of the Atlantic, mainly to Bahia and Pernambuco, ewe-yoruba peoples from ancient Dahomey. or from the mighty Yoruban kingdom of Oio. In the program The Matrix Afro we should exhibit the strength, refinement and richness of this set of black African cultures, which fascinated the European aesthetic-intellectual vanguards in the first decades of the twentieth century.
The theme is the ethnic gestation of a new people - the Brazilian people -, constituting a process of permanent mestizaje, since the first European passed through here. From the beginning, the Luso-Amerindian mixture. The castaways and deportees begetting mestizo children in the nets or "inis" of the Tupinambás sisters. Thus are born the mamelucos or brasilindians, spreading all over the brasilian coast, to military in the "flags" or to form housing nuclei in the seafront of Rio de Janeiro or Maranhão. Then the crossings between Portuguese and blacks and between blacks and Indians. They are the mulattos and cafuzos that are multiplying by the territory conquered or in the process of conquest. Such mestizos were no longer white, not Indians, nor black. "Brazilians like Afro-Brazilians existed in a land of no one, ethnically speaking, and it is from this essential need to get rid of the nobility of non-Indians, non-Europeans and non-blacks that they are forced to create their own ethnic identity: the Brazilian ", supports the central thesis of Darcy Ribeiro. From the physical to the spiritual, it is defined in fact, and since the early colonial times, Brazil's personality as a mixed and syncretic society of the tropics, distinct from the matrices that gave rise to it.
We call Creole cultural area the historical-cultural configuration resulting from the implementation of the sugar economy and its complements and attachments in the Northeast Brazilian coast, which goes from Rio Grande do Norte to Bahia "(Darcy Ribeiro). sugarcane in the wind, the sea coves and rivers, the lush vegetation, the voduns and orishas, and the baroque northeast, with its golden churches, its colorful and shrill carnivals, its cherubim. more fundamentally marked by the presence of black African elements, forms and practices, especially after the arrival of the jejes and nagoes, who knew how to imprint their signs on the landscape they found in. At an extra-northeastern end, Brazil Creole will include Rio de Janeiro. At the extreme Amazon, the island of São Luís do Maranhão, with its strong Afro-Amerindian features, its mine drum and its bumba-meu-boi, crossing point or a transition zone between the black-bred culture and the cabocla culture that extends north through forests and streams.
There are at least two "Northeast". One is the northeast coast, which goes from Bahia to Maranhão - Northeast Creole. The other Northeast, in the words of Gilberto Freyre, is that of the "dry-sand creaks underfoot", the "harsh landscapes aching in the eyes" of the "figures of men and animals stretching almost into El Greco's figures." It is no longer the sedentary Northeast of large land monoculture, filming but the Northeast of leather and cattle culture. Northeast of whitish bones and cloudless blue. Antonio Conselheiro, Father Cícero, Lampião, Luiz Gonzaga. Northeast of the country culture. But Brazil Sertanejo is not limited to this region only. It goes from the rough to the savannah, through the caatingas. It penetrates Central Brazil, with its agricultural activities and its traditional pastoral economy, the mestizaje taking place basically between whites and Indians, with weak black participation. As Darcy Ribeiro saw it, there was conformed "a particular type of population with its own subculture, the country, marked by its specialization in grazing, its spatial dispersion and identifiable features in the way of life, family organization, power structure, typical dress, seasonal fun, diet, cooking, worldview, and a religiousness prone to Messianism.
What we usually classify today under the phrase "hillbilly culture" is something that is beginning to emerge amid the Paulista Mamluk of the early colonial centuries, who lived in poor and rustic villages, practiced "coivara" agriculture, spoke the so-called "language". "hunted Indians and pursued quilombolas. These were people who, though surrounded by the merchant spirit, led an almost tribal life of Tupi form and background. And that, from the discovery of our gold deposits, it spread from São Paulo to Minas Gerais. When the splendors of the gold of Minas Gerais fell to sporadic glows, came the stagnation - and even regression - of the south-central part of the country. Poverty culture. Equilibrium is achieved in a variant of rustic Brazilian culture, which crystallizes itself as a rustic cultural area. "It is a whole way of life that" spreads, after all, the Portuguese language, throughout the Center's forest and natural fields. -South of the country, from Sao Paulo, Espirito Santo and Rio de Janeiro state, on the coast, to Minas Gerais and Mato Grosso, extending over neighboring areas of Paraná "(Darcy Ribeiro). Basically" rustic "will still , the coffee culture and it is the expressive acts of this cultural area, stereotyped caricaturally in the figure of "jeca armadillo", that will be the theme of the Brasil Caipira program.
Here, there is no way to avoid the plural. It is impossible to talk about this cultural area about the existence of a way of life or a worldview. The distinctive feature of Brazil Sulino, in the Brazilian set of civilization, is precisely its heterogeneity. If the region is distinguished from the totality of the other Brazilian cultural areas - and since the beginning, since here the Tupi matrix was not imposed, but Guarani, which is the origin of the gaucho figure, its internal diversity is also remarkable, going from the wheel of the mate to the bilingualism of population nuclei still attached to European headquarters. Brasil Sulino shows such heterogeneity through the reconstruction of the historical formation and the display of current developments of the three main strands that make up the local panorama: the "mauta" strand, of mainly Azorean origin, being arranged in the stretch of coast that follows from Paraná to the south the "gaúcha" slope, based on ibero-guarani and the "gringo-brazilian formation of the descendants of European immigrants, that form an island in the central zone" (Darcy), where it is still possible to find the cultivation of typical European traditions and the employment of one than another foreign language as a home language.
In the rainforest area of the Amazon basin, a culture of strong indigenous base has developed. "The whole area was originally occupied by indigenous tribes with specialized adaptation to the rainforest. Most of them dominated the farming techniques practiced by the Tupi groups of the Atlantic coast, which the discoverers came across. exceptional fertility and easy food supply, through hunting and fishing, flourished indigenous cultures of the highest technological level, such as Marajó and Tapajós, which could maintain villages with a few thousand inhabitants "(Darcy Ribeiro). It was these indigenous groups who experienced the march of Lusitanian colonization, the advancement of the missionaries, the spread of nheengatu, and the massive migration of northeastern people at the time of the rubber boom. And so a new population was forged in the region - and a "sociocultural variant" of Brazilian society was crystallized, with its own forms and practices, and its religiosity "founded on the syncretism of indigenous pajelança with a vague cult of saints and dates. of the Catholic religious calendar ". It is this interethnic but fundamentally cabocla Amazon with its saints and "visions", its cities and its surviving indigenous groups that will be addressed in this program.
The fantasy that Brazil's trajectory has been fundamentally peaceful, marked by the cordial relationship between ethnic groupings and social classes, does not stand the slightest historical scrutiny. In fact, the history of violence in the Brazilian tropics begins with the bloody conflicts between indigenous villages. With the arrival of Europeans, the wars intensified, including alliances between French and Tupiniquins, fought by alliances between Luso and Tupinambás. And the fact is that the history of Brazil presents numerous (and serious) cases of armed confrontation. Blacks were the number one enemy of the slave system, contrary to popular belief. They promoted a rosary of rural uprisings and urban uprisings through centuries of slave rule. Palmares and the rebellions of the Males are glowing points of this spirit of refusal from captivity. But we also had other types of armed movements, such as the Cabanos War and the Canudos War, with Antonio Conselheiro's followers facing the Brazilian army. The Invention of Brazil program will focus exactly on this war dimension of our history.