Cartografia etnográfica das materialidades da presença negra no território da antiga República do Cunani (séc. XIX-XXI)

Abstract

In Amazonia, since the european invasion and european colonization conflicts emerged on this territory. Speciffically, the frontier zone and border limits issues between Brazil and France, in the last decade of the 19th century, culminated in a dispute for a wide and extended area between the Oiapoque and Araguari rivers, which corresponds to the current Brazilian state of Amapá. In that contested region, different human collectives, like American indigenous communities, quilombolas and mocambeiros (Afro-Brazilian traditional rural communities, historically equivalent to maroons), forced laborers and enslaved people, african and afro-descentends freedom seekers, crioulos (creole people, a regional term used to describe predominantly afro-descendants people sharing cultural elements in a wide region) from Antilhas and Guianas, poor white people, migrantes nordestinos (northeast Brazilian migrants), and also- fishers, garimpeiros (artisanal and Small-Scale Miners, "wildcat miners"), small-scale merchants and traders, smallholder farmers, soldiers, deserters, prisoners, fugitives were seeking territories of liberty and freedom. The boundary, as a political and symbolic construction, was part of the idea of an imminent nation and internal colonialist actions. Within this context, the State mobilized archaeology to document the materialities and populations residing in geographical areas that had not been officially cartographed. Consequently, like other modern sciences, archaeology became entangled with internal colonialism and racism. By participating in the construction of a national identity, archaeology produced a narrative that granted a pretense of visibility to the Indigenous past while imposing both implicit and explicit invisibility on the Black presence in this region. These spaces— namely, quilombola territories—reveal in the present day the struggles, resistance, interactions, and modes of thought activated by the agency of the material world, which diverge from the surrounding national society. As a point of convergence, this doctoral research engages with the lived experience of the village of Cunani, known historiographically as either the Cunani quilombo or the Republic of Cunani—the focal point in diplomatic and territorial debates surrounding the Contestado Franco-Brasileiro (the Franco-Brazilian Contested Territory). The primary objective of this study was to map the materialities of the Black presence within the historical territory of the Contestado Franco-Brasileiro from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Oral tradition and historical as well as contemporary archaeological materialities, deeply intertwined with the life histories of these populations, served as the empirical sources for this research. The study was guided by methodologies such as oral history, ethnography as appropriated by archaeology, and cartographic mapping to record information. As a counter-narrative, historical archaeology and the archaeology of the African diaspora emerged in alignment with a collaborative and participatory framework. The field research conducted within the quilombola community of Cunani enabled the production of multiple cartographies of materiality, structured around analytical categories such as places, objects, celebrations, forms of expression, and traditional knowledge, all underpinned by memory and oral history. Consequently, this doctoral research in the Cunani region contributes by placing the Black presence in the historical territory of the Contestado Franco-Brasileiro (19th–21st centuries) onto the chronological timeline—a presence that had been systematically erased by colonialist archaeology.