‘I MAKE KNOWN THE END FROM THE BEGINNING’: Jaime Cortesão’s courses at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the processes of producing historical atlases in Brazil.

Amigos, vou apresentar o trabalho abaixo na 27ª International Conference on the History of Cartography(ICHC2017), no dia 10 de Julho às 9:15 em Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, no Multimeios Auditorium do Bradesco Theater.

‘I MAKE KNOWN THE END FROM THE BEGINNING’: Jaime Cortesão’s courses at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the processes of producing historical atlases in Brazil.

(Renato Amado Peixoto – UFRN – Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte/ Brazil)

The ‘School Historical Atlas’ [‘Atlas Histórico Escolar’ - AHE] was published by the Brazilian Ministry of Education and Culture in 1959 and had at least eight editions until 1983. 

The AHE was planned as an above average educational product with a low cost retail cost and to be used in secondary education. Its authors were some of the best geographers, historians, illustrators and cartographers of the country in that time and they were members of the Brazil’s most prestigious institutions and universities, as IBGE, IHGB, IRB, PUC and ‘Universidade do Brasil’.

Despite its importance to the History of Cartography as the only historical atlas edited and published in the country, this presentation is the first academic research on the AHE, however, we do not intend to restrict our exam to the maps or to the major characteristics of the AHE. 

Accompanying the idea of Matthew Edney in Progress and the nature of Cartography, I will explore the practices, the spacial discourses and the representational strategies by which an historical atlas of Brazil was thought between 1942 and 1959.
My proposition is that three processes of production were developed between 1940 and 1959. 

These processes are evidenced by an exam of the maps of the AHE that develops Brian Harley arguments on the ‘internal power’ and on the ‘conceptual agency of the cartographer’ in terms of post-structuralist analysis, as Edney considers in Cartography and Power. 

Moreover, the transformation of one process of the atlases onto another was marked either by what Jeremy Black called ‘the new agenda’ post-45 and by the breaking on the pattern and on the concept similar to those pointed by Walter Goffart: from ‘Historische Atlanten’ to ‘Geschichtsatlanten’ - from ‘historical atlases’ to ‘atlases for history’. 

The production of the historical atlas began in 1942 at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with Jaime Cortesão’s leadership and at that time it was thought as a multi-volume work, a compendium of the early maps.

Around 1946 it was developed as a single volume, joining early maps with maps drawn for illustrate the geographical context of the past events. 

Following the advances of Cortesão’s courses which constituted a cartobibliography and a spacial discourse incorporated by the State to its own interests, another process of production of the historical atlas arisen in the late 1950’s. 

The new process was centered in the task of translating the scholarly courses of Jaime Cortesão to the school education, an editing effort (following the idea of James R. Akerman) that resulted in the publication of the ‘AHE’ in 1959.