Seeing Brazil Through the Place-Names Memory: Identities and Cartography in Making of Post-Colonial State (1758-1831)

This paper deals with the continuities and discontinuities of territorial delimitation practices used by Portuguese-American enlightened cartographers between 1750 and 1831. We focus on studying the transformation of the toponymy after the signature of the Madrid International Treaty and the implementation of the Directory of Indians, which was decreed by the Marquis of Pombal in 1758, and revoked in 1798. The guidelines established during Pombal's period were applied to the entire Indigenous population of Portuguese America. However, this legislation was rejected by the local elites, who judged themselves responsible for the native Indian question. After the establishment of the Portuguese court in the New World in 1808, the need to Americanize the Portuguese Crown stimulated changes in the way Luso-American territories were named. The enlightened reformist cartographers frequently expressed their hesitations between the American patriotism and the idealization of the native Indian as an element of the landscape, a local peculiarity, and a part of the tropical nature. The analysis of the cartography can lead us through different forms of territory naming, which reflect the political changes in the transition from Colony to Independent nation.

Iris Kantor a Tinker Visiting Professor at Stanford University. She is Professor of Iberian and Colonial History in the History Department at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. She obtained her Ph.D. in Social History from the University of Sao Paulo in 2002. Professor Kantor is a leading historian of Colonial Brazil, as well as of the History of Cartography and Spatial History. Her many books, edited volumes, articles, book chapters and essays cover a wide range of topics that range from the history of labor, the formation of academies of history and historiography, sociability and popular culture, the history of Portuguese and Brazilian enlightenment, the history of Brazil's native peoples, the history of science, and, presently, the history of cartography as well as spatial history.