SA, Celso Pereira de; OLIVEIRA, Denize Cristina de; MOLLER, Renato César    NAIFF, Denis Giovani Monteiro. The discovery of Brazil and its social memory: status in 1999. []. , 8, 3, pp.301-312. ISSN 1413-389X.

This paper seeks to characterize the state of the social memory about the discovery of Brazil in the contemporary Brazilian population one year before its fífth centennial celebration. Data collection involved: selection, recording and analysis of matters on the discovery and the colonization disseminated by four daily newspapers; application of a questionnaire to 742 adult subjects, aimed at the detection of their social representations; analysis of the contents of chapters on the Brazilian discovery and colonization in nine elementary and high school history text books. The set of the results, interpreted under the theoretical perspective of social representations, led to the following main conclusions: (a) the predominance of the image of Portuguese navigators' arrival, as a central dimension of the memory; (b) the occurrence, in a peripheral levei, of denunciation and critics to the so-called official history; and (c) the coexistence of both favorable and unfavorable attitudes in relation to Portuguese discoverers and colonizers

: social memory; social representations; discovery of Brazil.

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