Page:Artificial Indigenous Place Names in Brazil.pdf/5






 * b) The purpose of establishing the beginning of a new historical moment (such as the name Leningrad, which replaced St. Petersburg for decades after the Russian Revolution). With the decolonization of Africa and Asia, in the post-war period, for example, the elimination of colonial inheritance was often sought, as was the case with the replacement of the names Burma, Ceylon, Calcutta and Lourenço Marques by Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Kolkata, and Maputo, respectively.


 * c) The project of valuing national roots and cultural identities as a consequence of strengthening political nationalism. This was what happened in Brazil in the first half of the 20th century, when there was intense nomination in Amerindian languages spoken in the past, as we will see below.


 * d) The search for a geopolitical strategy of dominating a territory by eliminating cultural elements of a people living there. This has happened in Palestinian territories occupied by Israel. According to Nur Masalha, apud Moore et al. (2015, p. 17), there was a “toponymycide", that is, “...the ‘de-Arabization’ of the land, the elimination of former Palestinian toponyms and their replacement by recently created Hebrew Zionist toponymy.”

In the specific case of Brazil, the artificial nomination in indigenous languages is explained by certain cultural and sociological phenomena observed in the western world since the 19th century. One of them was Romanticism, which valued the historical and national tradition over the aesthetic models of antiquity. One turns to the past in search of models and representations of the new nations emerging since then. In the case of Brazil, such models were the Indians of other centuries and the indigenous language spoken in the early days of conquest. The Tupi Indian, who inhabited the coast, was mythologized. This term was a generic one used to designate the indigenous groups that spoke the Brazilian language described by Anchieta and Figueira in their grammars. These were the Tupiniquins, the Tupinambás, the Potiguaras, the Caetés, the Temiminós, the Tupis of São Vicente, etc. Meanwhile, the many Indians still living in the 19th century in Brazil were socially undervalued and discriminated against, and their languages were ignored. DOI logo.svg http://dx.doi.org/10.35572/rlr.v9i2.1700 256