A categoria colono no relatório socioeconômico Toledo de Kalervo Oberg

Abstract

This dissertation aims to point out the influences on the delimitation of the concept of settler, based on the socioeconomic report entitled “Toledo - A Municipality of the Western Frontier of Paraná” (1960), by Canadian anthropologist Kalervo Oberg. The book has become an important reference of research on the period of social and spatial occupation of the Western region. The report offers a wealth of statistical data, documents, maps, tables and interviews on various areas of life for the inhabitants of the developing city. In the report, settlers are referred to as the southern residents who migrated from the states of Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul to the newly founded city in the 1940s. Our theoretical background was based on the transnational history of the social sciences. We analyzed the biographical and disciplinary trajectory of the author, the geopolitical context of the time, the characteristics of community studies and the documentation of the colonizer Maripá, who was the owner of the area where the municipality of Toledo was built. These confronted elements helped to bring together a number of factors that influenced the construction of the settler category that we seek to analyze from their otherness. Given the evidence of the presence and coexistence of descendants of Italian, German, Caboclos and Paraguayan immigrants in the report, we argue that the cultural ethnic diversity present in the daily life of the city was not included in the category coined by the author.