O Instituto Histórico, Geográfico e Antropológico do Ceará: memória, representações e pensamento social (1887–1914)

Almir Leal de Oliveira

doi:10.35260/54211932-2024

The Historical, Geographical and Anthropological Institute of Ceará: memory, representations and social thought (1887–1914).

Authors

Almir Leal de Oliveira

Universidade Federal do Ceará (UFC)

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1829-5498

DOI: https://doi.org/10.35260/54211932-2024

Keywords:

Historical, Geographical and Anthropological Institute of Ceará, Social representation, Social thought of Ceará (1887-1914)

Synopsis

In this book, we explore the behind-the-scenes of the historiographical construction of Ceará between the 19th and 20th centuries, focusing on the intellectuals who, organized in the Instituto Histórico do Ceará, shaped an official narrative about the origin, identity and role of the state in the Brazilian nation. By mapping the discourses, trajectories and practices of these historians, the work reveals not only the meanings they imprinted on Ceará's past, but also the symbolic and political mechanisms that transformed memory into ideology, an event into truth, and Ceará into an identity “clearing” within national history. This is not just a tour of 19th-century erudition — it is a critical excavation of the foundations of Ceará's imaginary.

Far from seeking simple refutation or mechanical revisionism, this study offers a lens through which to understand how texts from the past still whisper (or scream) in the present. By treating historiography as a language and social reading, the research proposes that the reader not only learn about the milestones of this intellectual production, but also question its uses and implications. How is a “strong people” built? Who decides what should be remembered or erased? And why is it important to discuss this again now? In the end, the invitation is clear: to revisit history not as something fixed in stone, but as a field of symbolic disputes — alive, unstable and politically charged.

Chapters

Ceará historiography and the image of Ceará in nationality
the narratives of the Historical Institute of Ceará
The emergence of a historiographical narrative for Ceará
The historian and his social place in Fortaleza at the turn of the 19th/20th centuries
Socially situating intellectuals and historians
defining a métier
A homeland called Ceará
the construction of the history of Ceará through memory actions
History and civics
republicanism and the definition of the Ceará homeland
Monuments of the history of Ceará

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Author Biography

Almir Leal de Oliveira, Universidade Federal do Ceará (UFC)

Bachelor of History from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (1992), specialist in Brazilian History from the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais (1995), master (1998) and doctor (2001) in Social History from the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo. He has been a professor of theory and methodology of history and Brazilian history in the History Department of the Federal University of Ceará since 1992, where he works in the Graduate Program in History (2002) and in the Graduate Program in Brazilian Education (2012). He held the Joaquim Nabuco Chair in Brazilian Studies at the Center for Latin American Studies (2010-2011) at Stanford University, where he also completed his postdoctoral studies in the Department of Biology. He is the leader of the research group Colonial Ceará: economy, memory and society (2003), of the Directory of Research Groups in Brazil of the CNPq.