CARLOS WALTER PORTO-GONÇALVES: A FUNDAMENTAL FEEL-THINKER FOR GEA-GRAPHING THE ANTHROPOS-CENE

Abstract

In its mainstream, modern geography has constituted itself as a fundamental tool of Western-centric imperial expansion; at once a means and an expression of the becoming of the "Anthroposcene" as the fateful 'destiny' of the civilisational course to which humans and the rest of the species that make up the earth's biodiversity have been subsumed. From its inception, geography was an epistemic and political practice of land occupation (thus already ontologically diminished). Occupying the land and exploiting it rationally is at the root of the attitude and cognitive interest not only of geographical science, but of all modern scientific disciplines.

The life and work of Carlos Walter Porto Goncalves can be understood as that of a radical gesture, not only of suspicion, but of total distancing and rebellion against this imperial mode of geography. His way of understanding and making knowledge of (and from) the Earth basically refers to an epistemology and a methodology that has been to follow, trace, reconstruct and critically revalue the Other Grafies that were precisely those that were supposedly extinguished by the Great Promethean Footprint of Anthropos and its strange notion of progress. These Other Graffiti - which have traced an innumerable diversity of light traces, but no less complex and rich in wisdom - have been the fundamental centre and the horizon of the cognitive and practical interest of his research and concerns.

In an attempt to highlight and continue with their teachings, this text makes explicit some basic features (theoretical-conceptual, methodological and epistemic-political) of these Geo-graphies of re-existences, aiming to point out the historical-structural contradiction between Occupy vs. Inhabit, as a key to reading the burdensome contemporary state of the Earth and of terrestrial coexistence. In this context, the sentipensar of Master Carlos Walter makes a fundamental contribution to re-imagine other possible futures; other Geo-graphies centred on Good Living, Good Con-living.