Reflexões sobre construção de fronteiras sociais e étnicas: levantamentos etnográficos e estudos de caso no contexto regional do Baixo Amazonas, Santarém-PA

Abstract

Considering the distincts ethnic group identity processes carried out by social groups that guide their actions in favor of self-recognition as remaining quilombo communities in the Lower Amazon region, the general objective of this work is to analyze the production and reproduction of ethnicity based on the understanding that it does not stem from empirically observable cultural discontinuities. Aware of its variation, we highlight the complex relations between ethnicity and culture through an ethnography of the political processes of territorial recognition as a quilombo based on the situational analysis carried out in the quilombola community of Surubiu-Açú, whose community association was the last to become part of the Federation of the Quilombolas Organizations in Santarém (FOQS), and in Saracura quilombola community, one of the first communities to star to recognize themselves as quilombola in Santarém, Pará, Brazil. Thus, taking into account different scales of analysis, we will emphasize the contexts of interaction where ethnic identity is manifested, whether in social interaction with other neighboring communities or with the State itself, in the claim of ethnic and territorial right. With this, the similarities present in the ways of making, creating and living observed between quilombolas and “riverside” communities, will be compared contrastively with the different processes of cultural distinctiveness. It is precisely through these processes that diacritical signals are chosen and become relevant both in intercommunity interaction and in the configuration of ethnic and political identities.