1963: educação, ciência e redenção econômica em uma capital na periferia da modernidade: a Escola de Chimica Industrial na Belém dos anos 1920

Abstract

In the 1920s, in Belem (a town in Pará-Amazon-Brazil), merchants and scientists to join through negotiations and interest agreements, to the creation of an analytical laboratory with the aim of researching of amazonian natural products capable of being used in the industry and thereby inaugurate a new cycle of economic prosperity after the end of the so-called "latex cycle" (the amazonian belle époque). The laboratory of analysis, almost simultaneously became a laboratory-school for training chemists, according to a training model previously initiated in Europe and that has shaped from then on, all training systems of professionals of chemistry. This laboratory-school (which existed from 1922 to 1930) graduated nine industrial chemists and published a scientific bulletin with the results of research conducted at the institution. This narrative unfolds in the chapters of this study, which are developed more detailed reports about the actors (human and non-human agents) involved in a network, in this history: the Amazon region with its natural products and the city of Belém of Pará capital on the outskirts of modernity; chemistry, a modern science expanding in the world; diplomats, politicians, merchants, chemistry students and scientiststeachers. The analyzes conducted had supported mainly in the Sociology of Translation, theoretical tool that allows to map inseparably the assembled elements in this network, whose tessitura also contribute those derived by nature and those of society, without asymmetries. The conclusions allows verify the fertility of the approach (Social Studies about Science and Technology) in the construction of narratives about objects which, although already studied by traditional historiography, were being treated asymmetrically, without giving voice with equal eloquence to scientists, amazonian natural products, politicians and traders, resulting often in hagiographies or narratives drived by positive arrow of progress and advancing of the "wrong past" to "correct future." It is expected that stories like this, written with support in the Sociology of Translation, can shed new light on the history of the expansion of the natural sciences in the Amazon, by presenting not a story of winners (or occupation of an " epistemological emptiness"), but that one where we can see the science in action, with all negotiations, hesitations, beliefs, setbacks and recalcitrances, typically presents in a open life field, where reason and passion; knowledge and power intertwine inseparably.