Percursos de um reconhecimento patrimonial: memórias e permanências do tropeirismo em Vitória da Conquista, Bahia

Abstract

Tropeirism is a cargo transportation system with the use of animals started in the colonial period of Brazil, which followed through the Empire and declined in the Republic. In this movement, in addition to food, letters or documentation, production animals, people, cultures, values and ways of life were also transported, which influenced the formation of many trade routes and the emergence of several cities. In order to deal with the themes of memory, patrimonial permanence, outbackness and Tropeirism as phenomena within the museological field and applied social sciences, the objective of this dissertation was to study, analyze and contribute to the appreciation and recognition of Tropeirism as a constitutive element of Brazilian cultural patrimony. As well as collaborating with the preservation and conservation of this memory, also present in the social constitution of the Northeast, as protagonized in this study, which had as its guiding axis socio-cultural preservation actions developed in Vitória da Conquista, Bahia, by the NGO Carreiro de Tropa (Catrop). From a vast ethnographic survey in documentary and bibliographic sources around the tropeirist theme, addressed by theorists from different areas, many points of analysis were possible, some of which were unpublished on this object of study. Thus, it was possible to observe that the construction of an imaginary stereotyping the figure of the tropeiro kept Tropeirism segregated, as a historical element, within economic and regional cycles of the South and Southeast axis, to the detriment of its presence also in the Northeast of the country. Finally, it was also found that this condition of erasing the image of the drover, in relation to his outbackness, compromised the formation of a Northeastern drover identity. This dissertation constitutes not only a restitution of recognition of the existence of this phenomenon from a perspective greater than that supported by traditional historiography, but which is also present in other fields, such as Communication, Patrimony and Museology, and which, in the same way, occurs throughout the Brazilian territory.