Paiter-Surui on Google Earth: Interative Mapping for Local-Global Sociabilities and Sensibilities on Environment Conservation

Within a research project scope which aims to investigate the online mobilization with regard to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Brazil, with the systematic tracking of the Brazilian environmental public sphere vehicles and themes, a video circulated by the Paiter-Surui of the Brazilian Amazon, during the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, Rio + 20, which took place in June of 2012, called our attention. The message aimed to divulge the multimedia content on this people in the Google Earth platform, an interactive 3D modeling georeferenced cultural map, which has been elaborated to represent the Surui territory.

On the one hand, the Surui Map confronts us with a digital representation of the nature in a new sociability experience, in this case, the territory representation is expressed and propagated through abstractions, a symbolic and interactive leisure experience, which is build through informatics applied to cartographic tools, so as to “turn tangible” the articulation and the expression of reciprocal relations between nature and culture both at local and global level. This takes place with the potential to “inform” and update on the relations between the natural world and the social in the process that engenders, here and now, this territory form and composition of nature, culture, and politic transformations.

However, the map transcends such analysis revealing an “enchanted forest”, shared in the Internet, which envisages the entertainment – the ludic – that incentivizes the feedback and collaborative construction, and what is constructed with representation layers that include myths, oral narratives, and images on the Paiter-Surui ways to relate with the forest. This includes expressing that their culture depends directly on their existence and vice-versa, and with this message, an invitation for reflection and dialogue.  Could this be an attempt to “educate the foreign eye” favoring different symbolic perspectives toward nature?