Significando o conquistador e o indígena: uma análise enunciativa de livro didático

Abstract

Since 1940, textbook has been the most used teaching material in Brazilian schools and that made it a focus for public politics of this kind of material and for the scientific research world. Concerning to these areas, there are many discussions about the quality of textbooks, and textbooks evaluation materials from the government has pointed out discussions about the fragility of some contents in teaching materials. Contents about indigenous people, which, recently inserted in textbooks, still have gaps as the indigenous representation, especially in colonization contents. Because of that, this paper aims to analyze enunciatively the designation of the word indigenous in Brazilian colonization contents, presented in the elementary school textbook Projeto Araribá História (a collection often chosen by schools and that has taken a leading position in sales). The National Didactic Book and Material Program, created in Brazil, selected this textbook to be used from 2017 to 2019 in Brazilian schools. Due the selected content for the analysis, it became relevant also to study the designation of the word conqueror, considering the strong relation between the colonizer and the indigenous representation in this content. These analyses aims to reflect on the meaning of these expressions, investigating whether one term imply to the other one. For this, as theoretical and methodological support, it is used some concepts from Enunciation Semantics, such as rewriting, Semantic Domain of Determination, enunciative scene and memorable, developed by Eduardo Guimarães; and the concepts of nominal structures and enunciative pertinence, developed by Luiz Francisco Dias. The procedures for the analysis were: to survey the utterances; next, for each term, to identify the relations that constitute the Semantic Domain of Determination; than to descript the enunciative scene and the memorable presented in the utterances. The analyses were divided in two parts, one for each term. They showed that the term conqueror is designated as the one who conquer a territory by dominating and subduing some people, but this sense is made by the legitimation of Portuguese domination memorable. This memorable puts the colonizers in a superiority position. In the analyses of the term conqueror, the word indigenous already means something through the silencing of indigenous people in the colonization history that is told in the textbooks. This word also means because of the conquered image that the conqueror presumes for indigenous. In the utterances that indigenous appear, this word is designated as native, first inhabitant. This expression also designates savage, the one who has to be civilized. However, this sense builds itself when the historian social position of the enunciation presents, not his saying, but another from European colonizers. From this thought about the senses mobilized by the terms, it is possible to affirm that, although the textbook tries to break a traditional European perspective off to see the colonization in Brazil, this still means through the discovering of Brazil memorable in this textbook enunciation. Therefore, this manual still has a Eurocentric discourse.