The not right places of the cowboys of Marajó Island

Abstract

The article proposes a reading of the “uncertain places” of the Marajó cowboys: spaces loaded with meaning that function as symbolic portals between the visible and the invisible. Anchored in an ethnography situated at Fazenda Mineiro, in the community of Cima do Teso, the text centers the listening of the cowboys, whose oral narratives reveal sensitive experiences and inseparable relationships among humans, non-humans, animals, and landscapes. Places such as Ponta do Maguary, Furo do Bode, Xixá do Carro, Três Ilhas, and Dom Ramiro constitute territories where the natural and the supernatural intertwine through signs, hauntings, enchantments, and omens. The article sustains that the “uncertain places” should not be understood as mere spaces of anomalies or superstitions but as frontiers of knowledge that involve sensoriality, ancestry, and resilience. Based on Amazonian cosmology and the cowboys’ oral tradition, it is argued that these territories are constitutive of a singular identity and express a particular language of reading and orientation in the world. To know them implies recognizing other epistemologies in which silence, respect, and attentive listening act as knowledge devices. It is, thus, a sensitive cartography, where memory, body, and territory merge into a single movement.