Paisagens do sertão alagoano: representações da cultura através da iconografia

Abstract

The present research aimed to analyze the resignification of the cultural landscapes of the drylands of Alagoas in a context of regional development through the iconographic representation, which permits to make visible the changes present in the environment, as well as the “permanences” that are responsible for maintaining a collective memory of the drought problems. The representations that helped to consolidate the images which are commonly related to the drylands (or “sertão”) of the semiarid and transported to the Northeast region as a whole —whether in the academic sphere, or through cultural works and the mass media—were related to poverty, drought and drought landscapes representations, consolidated, in the imaginary of people in a generalized way, as "hunger and misery" CASTRO, (1992, 1996, 1997); RIBEIRO, (1999); SILVA (2010). The Drylands of Alagoas, as well as the Northeast region, has been presenting, in recent years, a new configuration, allowing the development of the region and changes in its socioeconomic panorama. New landscapes have emerged with the transformation, presenting different culture and ways of living in relation to the imaginary created of the drylands. This study had support in the cultural geography with phenomenological base. Documentary researches and field work were done through iconographic records and interviews. To that end, we back up the studies of Durval Muniz (2011) and Geralda de Almeida (2003), who discuss the construction of the Northeastern imaginary through tragic bias, through drought, hunger and misery. Regarding the relationship between Phenomenology and Geography, the interaction between landscape and the concept of culture were based on the theoretical contributions of the French School: Augustin Berque (1994) and Paul Claval (1997); and it was also made an investigation on the constitution of the geographic science and the use of image, according to Gomes (2002, 2013) and Oliveira Jr. (2013), who discuss the visibility of the images. The analysis of the data was supported by a qualitative and bibliographic analysis of the landscape and its iconographic representations, in which both the transformations that occurred in the Drylands of Alagoas and its impacts on landscape representation were examined. The insertion of structural policies and family farming, the organization of civil society in cooperatives and the actions of coexistence provided a new way of facing life in the drylands. At the same time, new alternatives for the development of the semiarid are being planned, making the idea of coexistence emerge.