Toponímia dos assentamentos rurais em Sergipe: denominação, memória e ideologia

Abstract

In the process of occupation of geographic spaces by human communities, memory and ideology are constituted and materialized in the various acts of language, including the ability to give names to occupied places. Through the constitutive lexicon of these denominations, each society attributes characteristics that are its own and that can be understood in the light of Toponymy, a branch of Onomastics whose object is the names of places and their motivations. The present work consists of a descriptive and analytical approach to the names of Rural Agrarian Reform Settlements in Sergipe. Our objective is to show how the process of naming these spaces – democratic and collective action within the Landless Rural Workers Movement – brings sui generis aspects to these places into its lexicon. In this way, we seek to highlight how it is possible to perceive in the lexicon the marks of these characteristics that serve us to a better understanding of the modus vivendi and modus cogtandi of these human clusters and that serve as a basis for a reinterpretation of the story traditionally told about this population. . As a theoretical contribution to the study of these toponyms, we use research methodologies in Critical Toponymy – an emerging area of toponymic studies that aims to take an internal look at space, in search of characteristics that highlight identity and ideological relationships, as well as power relations - , especially the studies by Vuolteennaho and Berg (2016) and Rose-Redwood and Aldernan (2011), without, however, taking into account the contributions of Dick (1990; 1998) on toponyms and their exterior and interior characteristics. To analyze the Corpus, composed of the names of 236 Rural Settlements (in addition to parallel names), each name linked to the study of their land expropriation and settlement creation ordinances, we proceeded with the identification of affinities between the names (based on in the socio-history of each name) in order to fit them into Motivational Fields that reflect a line of left-wing ideology present in the peasant movement. Thus, we were able to identify among the toponyms, three main Motivational fields – Motivational Field of Topophilia (Tuan, 2012), Motivational Field of Memory and Identity (Le Goff, 2013; Rossi, 2010; Candau, 2021) and Motivational Field of Religiosity and da Fé (Neto, 2014) –, which in turn are divided into smaller Motivational Fields, and in this way we are able to present an analysis of the composition of these names, the way in which ideology is presented in the composition of each name, in addition to presenting this data through various tools, such as tables, diagrams and lexicographic maps.