Notas sobre identidade nacional e institucionalizacao da geografia no brasil

Abstract

The author relates the origin of modern geography to the context of affirmation of nation-states in Europe, especially the German case. Geographical discourse emerges as a disseminator of the idea of identity, chiefly at moments of state building or rebuilding. It is as if geography, in contributing to the construction of a correspondence between state domination and the self-identity of subjects, naturalizes the notion of 'national'. The article explores these questions in the case of colonial nations, where societies and physical spaces were constructed at one and the same time. Political emancipation reinforces this process - for one reason, owing to the fragility of the representations of collective identity. This is why the notions of conquest and frontier are important in the occupation of unsettled territorial spaces. These founding elements of a nation's unity reveal the presence of a geopolitical perspective in state building. Although geography as an academic community and as a discipline should have enjoyed rapid and full development in a context like this, such was not the case in Brazil. Based on this finding, the author suggests some possibles clues as to why there is such a gulf between the dissemination of geographical discourse in the latter half of the nineteeth century and the institucionalization of the discipline, which came only in the 1930s.

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