Parque Estadual da Pedra Branca: o visível e o invisível na paisagem de um território em disputa

Abstract

This research aims to address social and environmental conflicts, in the State Park of Pedra Branca – a Conservation Unit created in 1974 in the city of Rio de Janeiro. In this area live about five thousand residents, including, family farmers and inhabitants of three quilombola communities. Faced with the threat of removal, this population created strategies of resistance and permanence in that territory - adoption of collective identities, identification of places of memory, political participation in the spaces of debate of environmental policies. In this same scenario, certain brands of the backwoods of Rio de Janeiro were appropriated, resignified and officialized as tourist attractions of the park. In parallel, new elements were added to this landscape – institutional plaques, gates, venues, poles of visitation. In the middle of the dispute for legitimacy and right to territory, a third actor appears, the Transcarioca Trail – a long path that traverses six conservation units, including PEPB – expanding the debate about public use in parks. The study of the landscape, interpreted by the different local actors, makes possible the perception of the socio-historical context of the formation of the landscape of this territory, as well as the links and meanings attributed to it. Beyond of the theoretical discussion about the concepts of landscape and territory, the record of the polarity of looks and the denaturalization of interference in parks, this qualitative research is complemented by interviews with local actors, participation in events, meetings and festivals, documental and bibliographical research. The book O Sertão Carioca, published in 1936, is triggered as an important ethnographic source of the ways of life of this laboring population whose customs and customs refer to the sertão. As environmental values associate natural beauties with the idea of landscape, the dweller is identified as an invader and a threat to the conservation of this nature / landscape. In this case, rescue the social history of the massif and understand that landscape is not nature, but a social construction, is essential for the understanding of the various senses and representations attributed to this territory transformed into an Integral Protection Conservation Unit