From chronological to spatio-temporal histories: mapping heritage in arukwa, área indígena do uaçá, Brazil.

Palikur historical knowledge is overwhelmingly recorded spatially in landscape, but given that the map-maker's vision of the world is a product of a discourse about space and time, is a map an appropriate medium on which to base an archive of historical knowledge? This article explores aspects of Palikur speakers' experiences of landscape and historical time in the region known as "Arukwa" along the Rio Urucau´a in the state of Amapá, Brazil, and contends that the canon of stories is organized spatially more than it is organized chronologically. Based on ethnographic data, several dimensions of Palikur spatial history are explored. These include the contentions that location and events may not be historically coterminous, although they may be used to imply one another; and that landscape may be considered to be agentive in the sense in which it constitutes a resource for memorializing societies, environmental skills and political capacities of people who have dwelt on it in times past. In addition, the article notes that landscape knowledge and orientation can be considered embodied knowledges; places in landscapes may be seen as animate and as extensions of human community; landscape is connected to upperworlds and underworlds, much as they are on the horizon; and time, in the Palikur language, is spatialized. The article contends that many of these issues would be elided by substituting a cartographic/spatial approach to the recording of a non-chronological history. The aim, then, is to establish a spatio-temporal understanding of heritage without resorting to cartographic understandings of space, in order to explore whether—and how—those might be represented in a multimedia archive that aims to work within a local historiographic idiom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]