“O LEGENDÁRIO ‘INFERNO VERDE’ QUE, POR CERTO, SE TRANSFORMARÁ EM PARAÍSO VERDE”

AS MISSÕES BATISTAS E A MOBILIZAÇÃO DE “MITOS, EQUÍVOCOS E PRECONCEITOS” SOBRE A AMAZÔNIA BRASILEIRA

Abstract

The objective of this research is to highlight the performance of the Baptist missions in the mobilization of “myths, misconceptions and prejudices” about the brazilian Amazon, through texts published in the official organ of the denomination in Brazil, O Jornal Batista (OJB). The analyzes that make up the study come from three contexts of Baptist missions in the region throughout the 20th century: the period of the “rubber cycle”; the Amazonian “decline phase”; and the “age of great socioeconomic transformations”. These tangled contexts constitute a notion of “intersection”, typical of the relational perspective that guides this study, in order to address the mobilization of a representative tradition on the brazilian Amazon, by the Baptist missions. Approaching the Baptist missions as a new mobilizing agent of these representations can contribute to the understanding of the consolidation of a vision of “homogeneity” of the Amazonian space within Brazilian society.