Amazon Town TV: An Audience Ethnography in Gurupá, Brazil

3. The Setting

CHAPTER 3 The Setting Gurupá is the name of a town and its surrounding municipality located on the lower Amazon River in the state of Pará (see Map 3.1 and Figure 3.1). The town and municipality are situated 1° south of the equator, 353 kilometers west of Belém.The municipality of Gurupá encompasses 9,309 square kilometers and has a rural population estimated at close to eighteen thousand (IBGE 2010). The town of Gurupá is located near the center of the municipality on the southern bank of the Amazon River. It has a population estimated to be seven thousand (IBGE 2010). Gurupá falls within the “island region” of the Amazon drainage system , so named because of the complex maze of islands and channels created as the Amazon River fragments into multiple passages to form the estuary (the physiographic zone is Marajó and Islands). As the Amazon River reaches Gurupá from the west it begins to break up, with channels weaving northward around the Great Island of Gurupá to the city of Macapá and southward around the island of Marajó toward the city of Belém. The southern channel of the river, which passes in front of the town of Gurupá, is five kilometers wide and sufficiently deep to allow the passage of large oceangoing ships. To reach Gurupá, people typically travel by boat since there are no connecting roads and airplane service is infrequent and expensive. A boat trip from Gurupá to the major port city of Belém (approximately eight hundred nautical kilometers) takes an average of twenty-four hours downstream , with the same trip upstream averaging thirty hours. As of the 2000s, there is boat transportation to and from Gurupá on a near-daily basis (see Figure 3.2). Air travel between Gurupá and Belém takes only 1¾ hours, one way, but there is no regular service. An eighteen-kilometer Figure 3.1. Riverfront view of Gurupá. Photograph by R. Pace, 2010. Map 3.1. Town and Municipality of Gurupá. Adapted from FASE 2006. 52 Amazon Town TV dirt road that runs south of the town ends abruptly as it reaches the Pucuru í River, a small tributary of the Amazon. About 58 percent of the area of the municipality of Gurupá consists of várzea, or floodplain/flooded forest (FASE 2006: 2) (Figure 3.3). This region is inundated by seasonal rains between January and June. Parts of the várzea also flood daily due to the rise and fall of the tides—from four to seven meters at the height of the seasonal flooding and from two to three meters during the low season. The várzea forms the eastern extreme of the ecoregion called the Gurupá Várzea, which stretches from the Tapaj ós River to the Great Island of Gurupá. This region is very rich in biodiversity . According to the World Wildlife Fund (2010) the ecoregion contains 148 mammal species (including deer, armadillos, pacas, agoutis, tapirs, howler monkeys, spider monkeys, tree sloths, giant anteaters, and bats), 558 bird species (including toucans, macaws, parrots, parquets, and hummingbirds), and unknown numbers of fish, crustacean, reptilian, and amphibian species.There are innumerable insect species, ranging from malaria- and dengue-carrying mosquitoes to tarantulas. Although there has been no systematic inventory of plants, the general vegetation classification for Gurupá is Floresta Pluvial Tropical Rain Forest (World Wildlife Fund 2010; Pires and Prance 1985). Figure 3.2. Boats docking in Gurupá. Photograph by R. Pace, 2010. The Setting 53 The várzea supports approximately 58 percent of Gurupá’s rural population (Treccani 2006), although the population density is sparse, about 1.9 people per square kilometer. Homes are typically strung out along the rivers and streams. They are organized into far-flung neighborhoods or communities with a school, a chapel, or a trading post/store serving as the social hub. Transportation throughout the várzea is by twenty-meter diesel-powered cargo boats, smaller boats and canoes with outboard motors , and human-powered canoes. It is common for people living on the várzea to visit the town of Gurupá several times a month to make purchases , receive government pensions and entitlement checks, visit friends and family, and seek entertainment in the form of festivals, concerts, athletic competitions, television, and DVDs and videos. Some families even maintain a second house in town. The rural inhabitants of the várzea earn a living by the...