Useless landscape: memory and Utopia in Guanabara bay, from Jean de Lery to Lévi-Strauss

• Grant number: 13/06954-6
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: November 10, 2013
• End date: February 09, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History - History of Brazil
• Principal Investigator: Amilcar Torrão Filho
• Grantee: Amilcar Torrão Filho
• Host Investigator: Joaquin Sabaté Bel
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências Sociais. Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Spain

Abstract

The Guanabara Bay is a kind of synthesis of Brazilian identity and a privileged place of memory for the country's history. Even before the construction of the city of Rio de Janeiro, the Guanabara was already a space of utopia and imagination, with the failed religious colony of Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon, at Coligny Fort, which left us so controversial and contrary reports as those of André Thevet and Jean de Léry. Described by many travelers, it is important in the text of Lévi-Strauss, in his vision of a paradise lost, destroyed by deleterious cultural contact, a European civilization that vanishes and is replaced by the promise of a tropic that rises over the civilized world. (AU)