A construção de Canudos e a busca pelo direito a uma cidade em os Sertões de Euclides da Cunha

Abstract

In Os Sertões, Euclides da Cunha narratively constructs the landscape of the backlands, especially of Canudos. As well as dedicating himself to categorizing and evaluating the sertanejo and, more specifically, the sertanejo who resided and resisted in Canudos. He still represents, according to what he would have witnessed and experienced in backlands of the Bahia, the relation of the sertanejo to the backlands at Canudos. For this reason, in this work, we intend to reflect how the work constructs narratively the territorial configurations of Canudos and how these configurations reveal clues of the searching of their inhabitants for the right to the territory and the constructioning of a “city” while “becoming”. To reach this goal, we composed an interdisciplinary methodology based on the knowledge demanded by the research object itself. Methodology started from the awareness of that reflection, based on a narrative, required us to deal with meanings, purposes and values of the author of the book, and of aspects built socially from it and from our own experiences as researchersas well. We chose to analise primarily the 5th edition of the book, published by Francisco Alves, in 1914, because it is considered as the definitive edition and because we understand that the meanings of the work are also revealed in its form. We treat the book as a civilizational political project instituted by the construction of a polyphonic language in several dimensions. For the analysis, we adopted the “landscape” category in the perspectives of Schama (1996) and Santos (1998); the category “territory” conceived by Saquet (2013), Raffestin (1993) and, mainly, Fontanille (2014) and category of “place” in the perspective of Tuan (2013). We are based on the “structure of feeling” developed by Williams (1979) and on the idea of “stimmung” conceived by Gumbrecht (2014). Finally, we make use of the concept of territory as a “Becoming” and inspired by the “Right to the City”, a politicalphilosophical theory developed by Lefebvre (1968), we defend Canudos as a territory that could become a “different city”. The "right to the city" is for those sertanejos, the objectification of the right to a territory, molded according to their interests, their ideals and their conditions, what would make it a "place" to call his own.