Largo e Praça, Matriz e Catedral: the Sé of postcards “paulistanos”

Abstract

This article is a result of my first considerations about the use of the postcard as a source of anthropological analysis within a mastership research about the ruptures and continuities experienced by the inhabitants of São Paulo in face of the sociocultural transformations the city has gone through since the 1870s. In a scenery of Ouro-Preto-turning-into-Paris, which city images does the postcard, emerging in São Paulo at the end of the 19th century, contain? Conceiving the postcard as a symbolic representation of the constitution of a whole cultural dynamic which reflects itself deeply in the relation of identity the “paulistano” has started to build up towards his city, the goal here is trying to understand which city-dimensions thirteen images produced between the end of the 19th century and the 60s of our century express, assuming they are the way in which rapidly changing and growing São Paulo sees itself and wants to be seen by the spacially and/or temporally distant “other”.