Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
MAPPING SPACE: COLONIAL MAP-MAKING
AND THE FICTION OF TERRA NULLIUS
The rectangular adobe schoolhouse the Xavante built at the Ri'tubre Village had three
rooms: two classrooms on either side and my living quarters right in the middle.
All of the other houses in the village were semi-traditional Xavante houses: square,
rather than round, constructions covered from top to bottom with the leaves of palm
trees. The idea of using adobe bricks came from the Protestant missionaries from the
Summer Institute of Linguistics (the “scientific branch” of Wycliffe Bible translators)
that had spent some time in Kuluene before me. (The missionaries had just finished
translating the New Testament into the Xavante language with the goal of converting
the Xavante into Christianity.) Adobe bricks were supposed to be a sign of “progress,”
according to the missionaries, and the square or rectangular shape, too. Square
corners, they argued, made it easy to divide the house into separate bedrooms, so that
sex could be kept private. Separate classes, too, argued Apitó Tomás, could be used
to separate girls from boys. The reason for that separation he could not understand,
shrugging his shoulders and saying: “
Wa õredi”
or I don't know. The community
agreed that rather than gender, it would be better to divide the students into different
classrooms according to the projects they were involved with. There were no desks
or chairs, so the community wove straw mats to cover the dirt floor. We all sat cross-
legged on the mats to do our work. There were no black or white boards, either. So
mostly we followed the Xavante tradition of producing and transmitting knowledge
orally. There were small notebooks and pencils that my father Jorge managed to send
from São Paulo. So we were doing some limited writing here and there until we
discovered the smooth porous surface of the adobe walls.
Adobe bricks are soft because they are not baked like regular bricks. They are sun-
dried only. In addition, the Xavante had covered the entire school-house building
with a layer of sand, to make it look really nice. And it did. But as it turns out, this
soft yellow-pinkish sandy cover on top of the adobes provided us with a superb
surface for map-making.
It all began when Apitó Tomás first tried to explain to me how I should get to the
house of a man that lived isolated from the villagers because he was considered a
“witch” by the Protestant missionaries. An outcast. He was sick and needed help.
So Apitó Tomás picked up a stick and sketched on the wall of the schoolhouse how
I should get to his house. From here to there it worked just fine, and I got there the
next day without the help of the compass destroyed by the jaguar's paws. That initial
drawing was like a rhizome that spread in all directions, mapping Xavante land in
minute details on the walls of the schoolhouse! The difference between those stick-
drawn maps on the sandy surface of our handmade adobe walls and the official
government maps was that the Xavante people became living beings acknowledged
in the landscape. Each and every house had the number of inhabitants living in it
inscribed on the map. Names of house leaders figured prominently in the maps,
which helped me locate people all over the land. In the evening, I would translate the
