From the sinuosity to the mountains ranges: the dwelling of the backwood man in the Mogiana's landscape conformation image

Abstract

Between valleys, fields and hills, in a border region between the administrative governments of São Paulo and Minas Gerais, it configures a pluralistic cultural landscape, multifaceted and deeply related to the land’s possibilities. Identified by Mogiana Landscape, place of flow and convergence of many entities, between the 17th and 19th centuries, had its configuration and meaning by material and symbolic. The questions presented contribute to the understanding of the advances’ game and retreats referring to the administrative boundaries of São Paulo and Minas Gerais, up to the middle of the 19th century. The delineation of a river ravines lifestyle, gives rise to a kind of backwoods adapted to the potentialities of that land, as a consequence of a process of rooting.If at first the knowledge about the landscape was related to a lifestyle and native culture, in which the relations between matter and spirit presented themselves in an inseparable way and conferred to it a sacred and mystical aspect; in the second, with the insertion of new social agents and diluted inheritances of a Christian culture adapted to the hostile conditions of the rural areas, had its meaning linked to the legends of Portuguese medieval culture. In a third moment, through the progressive and scientistic ideals, there was the deconstruction of the first two meanings, coming to correspond to the yearnings of inspection, organization and advances in the territorial domain. The passage from the second to the third moment is also associated with the arrival of new technological contributions such as the telegraph lines and railroads- including the enactment of the Land Law, in 1850 - together, these changes end up inserting the rural neighbors  into a new dynamic, without the possibility of a return to the previous structure.