NAEA 45 anos: uma utopia criadora

Abstract

This paper is a personal vision of the NAEA's foundations, its purposes, its trajectory, its scope and challenges from someone who has followed its history since 1976, for 42 years, therefore. It is supported by official documents on the creation of the NAEA, and texts on its production and trajectory, written by several authors, especially from home, highlighting those elaborated by Armando Mendes. Creative utopias are guiding ideas always seeking a "light at the end of the tunnel" that even without being fully achieved stimulate the creation of new concepts and methodologies. In this context, the NAEA was conceived as an integrating institution of university doing, able to break with structures and concepts that were then anchored in positivism. In constructing this utopia, the NAEA was envisaged involving three interdependent pillars that would identify it and give it its own personality. The three pillars are summarized in the key concepts of Development, Interdisciplinarity and Amazonia. The challenge, or creative utopia, is precisely to give new contents to these concepts, and make them tools capable of approaching and transforming the Amazonian reality. After 45 years, how has NAEA been responding to this challenge?, is what is asked in this paper.