Identidade quilombola: o potencial para a conservação da Mata Atlântica na Comunidade de Cordoaria

Abstract

The remaining quilombo communities can be defined as attributable ethnic groups, whose socially significant identity, signs and emblems are attributed by the social subjects themselves. For the application of constitutional rights, from art. 68 of the Transitional Constitutional Provisions Act (ADCT), the self-attribution of a basic identity is usually determined by its common origin and training in the slave or post-slavery system, naming individuals, groups or populations in the current context, to confer them territorial rights and reinvent new social figures. In the Remaining Community of Quilombola Cordoaria, we sought to identify attributes of this basic identity, relating it to the cultural and productive activities developed in the daily lives of its social subjects, which may have potential for the conservation of the Atlantic Forest biome. Thus, it was questioned: is ethnic identity a fundamental mediation for the conservation of the Atlantic Forest in the links established between rural and urban metropolitan life in the Remaining Quilombola de Cordoaria Community? Having as reference, the immersion of this rural community in the dynamics of the Metropolitan Region of Salvador with a strong influence of the urban-industrial, a qualitative research was carried out, through the collection of the quilombolas' life narratives regarding the attributes of identity affirmation and their relationship with the natural environment, which resulted in a relational narrative, articulating the material aspects consistent with traditional activities in the daily lives of these social subjects, as well as the immaterial aspects related to their cultural practices. In this case, the general objective of the research was to relate attributes of quilombola identity with potential activities for the conservation of the Atlantic Forest, in the links established between the rural and urban way of life, in the Community of Cordoaria, from the 1980s to the present day. For this, memory emerges as a fundamental instrument to reconstruct the quilombola's way of life, in time and space. The oral history method was used to capture and describe the values ​​that quilombolas revealed in their sociability practices and in their relationship with the nature in which they live. In order to apprehend and dialectically relate two epistemologically implicated references in the narrative (quilombola identity and conservation of the Atlantic Forest), it was necessary to seek subsidies in Ethnoecology, in Social History, as well as mapping the use of land and interpreting data through content analysis. In this sense, elements of community organization were detected to face local socio-environmental problems, mainly related to the maintenance of an ethno-cultural identity, as well as to the guarantee of basic resources for the quality of life (basic sanitation services, education, health, investment and assistance to rural activities, management of natural resources). It was concluded that in the Remaining Community of Quilombo da Cordoaria rurality emerges associated with the maintenance of a quilombola identity, with a strong interaction between rural traditions and urban-industrial modernity, by immersion in the metropolitan dynamics, in which the quilombola way of life form potential attributes for the conservation of the Atlantic Forest biome.