A Amazônia brasileira : flagrantes de sua formação e de sua atualidade

Abstract

The author, Professor Artur César Ferreira Reis, an outstanding member of the Brazilian Historical and Geographical Institute introduces his work or the Brazilian Amazon region with excellent photographs of its formation and present-day appearance.

            He begins by reviewing the scenery, noting as its fundamental characteristics, the forest and the water masses which together constitute the fluvial basins of the Amazon and the small basins that wet the Goianian-Brazilian in the Federal Territory of Amapá. He then studies the regional geographical conditions, principally, those of the two fundamental characteristics. Next, he passes to the "primitive cultures" in which he points out the importance of the indigenous families which populated the region, attributing the contribution of cultural birth to them. In the "social nodules", he examines the human groups that gave color to the other half, pointing out their ways of living, separating them from the lines of their constitution to the activities which they exercise at present. He classifies those groups taking into account, especially, the kinds of activities that they exercise. He presents them, on the other hand, by their origin, synthesizing them consequently into two types: - the "caboclo" (Indian or mixed breed) and the north easterner. In the four epochs o! the region's historical life, the political formation process o f the Amazonian society passes in review; the first, that of the conquest by the colonizers, the religious Lusitanians, and by the northern "mamelucos" (offspring of Indian and white), who penetrated the hinterland and gave birth to the political expanse; the second, that of domination. when the Portuguese conquered the obstacles of the discovered undertaking, established the colony on a sounder basis, organized the region within political norms founded on the creation of urban centers, on intensive · miscegenation, and on land cultivation. And cattier raising; the third, that of the liberal-democratic experience, In which the Amazonians were fired with the new ideas brought out by the French Revolution, so that they fought for independence and later while under the Emperor for their political and social rights, the masses trying at that time their reclamations which brought about the state of civil war known by the name of "Cabanagem" (1834-1836); the fourth, and last era, is that of the "black gold", marked by the offensive taken against the forest in the gathering of rubber and of various other plant and animal species, an epoch o f great splendor.         In the "economic structure", the author, closing his work, portrays the basis of Amazonian production and commerce. He insists that in spite of its predatory fashion which gives the region a rustic and primitive appearance, there is, on the other hand, in view of the regional rural landscape, an energetic man who confronts nature. He praises the capacity of the Brazilian for tasks of this type.