Cultura e sustentabilidade: a sociedade potiguara e um novo mal-estar na civilização

Abstract

It investigates the relationships that involve culture, tradition and sustainability in the territory of the Potiguara Indians in Brazil, starting from previous studies on the local environmental, on general ethnographic observations and specifically on the analysis of the histories of life of native people, extrapolating occasionally towards a parallel synthesis of the historical evolution of the western civilization and of present global condition, in terms of those mentioned relationships, which manifest in another dimension of the same problems observed on the micro-region of influence of the Potiguara Indians. The reflections involve, more carefully, the concepts of popular cultures x hegemonic culture proposed by García Canclini, the concept of traditional populations just as proposed by Diegues, the notion of sustainable development suggested by the World Commission (of UN) on Environment and Development and the debate between ethnic borders and identity, updated recently by Fredrik Barth, although embryonic in the social-anthropological and psychosocial thought as revealed, for instance and, somewhat, more categorically in Marx's and Freud s converging approaches, starting respectively from the economical and territorial disputes and from that of innate instinctive drives economy and their specific patterns of accommodation in the several stages of a civilization process and Norbert Elias' controversial approach assuming that of such tensions tend to be related more closely to the cultural system, and symbolic disputes. In synthesis, we ended for appreciating an extraordinary, although not so surprising, similarity between the central conditions and the derived problems of the current and effervescent Potiguara society in the search of its paradoxical civilized/traditional utopia and what could called, reviving the social-psychological intents of the Freudian maturity, the new and contusing discontents with global civilization.