3rd World Congress of Environmental History

Transfer of forest and agricultural knowledge between Germany and Brazil through migration (19th century)

• In Event: Agricultural Knowledge

Abstract

The settlement of Germans in Brazil during the 19th century not only put different forms of natures in touch but rather approximated several methods of managing forest and agricultural resources. In southern Brazil Germans colonized densely forested areas and established agricultural colonies largely dependent of forest resources; moreover, Germans adopted very fast the traditional crops belonging to Brazilian agriculture and its methods of shifting cultivation (coivara). These processes have been reflected by some scholars through time and they have been deemed as a radical rupture between European and Brazilian realities. However, this proposal tries to think the opposite; research in Germany, Poland and Brazil has showed some continuities between agricultural and forest management in Germany and the practices carried out in German-Brazilian settlements. In addition, German settlers seem to have selected forest types and subtypes to develop either agriculture or lumber activities. The connections between Germany and Brazil can be perceived mainly through the intense use of fire for land clearance and through the cultural translation of the Brazilian forests into the traditional German categories of Laubwald and Nadelholzwald. The former corresponded to decidual and semidecidual forests of Mata Atlântica and they were considered proper to agriculture; the latter adjusted into the so-called araucária forests (conifers), which were deemed fit for lumber exploitation. Fire by its turn had been widely used in Germany for agricultural purposes up to the end of the 19th century, mostly in distant and scarcely populated places. It is then suggested that rather than being an one-sided process of forest-agricultural adaption, the settlement of Germans in forested areas in southern Brazil should be understood through its entanglements and under the transfer of agricultural and forest knowledge realized by migrants themselves.

Author

• Eduardo Relly, Freie Universität Berlin