A Manaus dos mortos: uma análise das transformações na cidade a partir de seus cemitérios

Abstract

This research aimed to analyze the transformations in the city of Manaus from its cemeteries. For this purpose the following were defined as specific objectives: describe the spatio temporal evolution of Manaus cemeteries; identify the characteristics of the cemetery landscape in different historical times; and apprehend the sociocultural influences acting in the landscape of the cemeteries, chronologically. The established time frame comprises the period from the founding of the city until the late nineteenth century, when it experienced its first major urban expansion. This is a qualitative research with essentially bibliographic and documentary characteristics, in which books, press material and official documents were used in order to achieve the answers to the proposed objective. The rescue of Manaus's history from its cemeteries is divided into three periods, determined from time frames in the city's transformation processes. The first period, called "The colonized death", tells of the first occupation by the Portuguese colonizers, in the second half of the 17th century, with a Fort established over an old indigenous cemetery, encompassing the long years of the churches and their surroundings as main Christian burial space. The second period, “Civilized Death”, presents the efforts made to establish the first public cemeteries due to the institution of the province of Amazonas. The following period, of the “Death in the Belle Époque”, refers to the last three decades of the nineteenth century, when Manaus, enriched by the exploitation of rubber, has public cemeteries as a space of monumentality and social affirmation. Keywords: Manaus. Cemeteries. City. Urban Space.