As lápides pioneiras, o discurso e a espiral: uma análise sobre os epitáfios do Cemitério Campo da Esperança em Brasília

Abstract

This is a master’s dissertation that examines the Campo da Esperança Cemetery, in Asa Sul, the main cemetery of the Federal District, as a space of historical enunciation and memorial of the country’s capital. However, its specific objective is the analysis of funerary epigraphic slabs — the epitaphs — from eight tombs, without, nonetheless, neglecting the cemetery itself as the protagonist agent of its own history. Founded in 1960, the cemetery is distinguished by its spiral layout and its hybrid practical character, between garden cemetery and traditional cemetery with very low and non-monumental slabs, which diminishes or eliminates the sculptural splendour characteristic of the nineteenth-century cemeteries of Brazil’s older capitals, such as Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo. As a consequence of this feature, the academic investigation herein unfolded selects tumular epigraphy — the epitaphs — to decode the social representations contained in discourses of finitude, dynamics of migration, grief, and achievements on the soil of the Planalto Central, from its foundation or even before it, as in the peculiar case of the analysis of the slab of the pioneer engineer Bernardo Sayão. The spatial scope is circumscribed to the Praça das Autoridades, as well as to the blocks destined for the burials of pioneer migrants and their families, areas of greater discursive significance for memory and mourning in Brasília’s first necropolis. Eight epitaphs anchored in six specific discursive typological categories were defined as the analytical corpus, whose discourse serves as an instrument for understanding the history of the capital and the myth of its construction through migrant hands. They are: 1) Bandeirante Epitaph, associated with the imagery of the first-hour migrant worker; 2) Religious Epitaph, characterised by the repetition of metaphysical and devotional formulae, generally of Christian nature; 3) Civic Epitaph, composed of texts of order and civism as founding elements of capital morality; 4) Occupational Epitaph, which exposes in text the pride and honour of holding public offices as social distinction; 5) Absent Epitaph, a typology that embraces and incorporates the absence of inscription or tumular record as method and sign of social segregation processes and memory erasure; 6) Infant Epitaph, a typology developed as a tool for the analysis of children’s epitaphs.1