The Presence of the past in the construction of the city

the narratives of Monte Serrat in Florianópolis, Brazil

Abstract

Past events, once re-interpreted and re-signified, has been made into part of the production of narratives which aim for the building of a notion of culture for different groups. As well as this phenomenon may be observed in a large scale, through official apparatus such as the State and the Academy, groups put apart of these processes have been recurring to its own past in order to construct their own narratives. In this sense, the community of Monte Serrat, located in Florianópolis, has had an important role in the last decades. Through a critical lecture of the mechanisms used to produce official narratives and an ethnographic investigation within the community, this works aims to understand how these local narratives have been produced in Monte Serrat, and how these processes have been part of the production of its territory itself.