Anthropologist, lecturer and leader of the New Social Cartography unit at Manaus University, Amazonia. Alfredo has been practicing community mapping techniques with increasing success through the New Social Cartography unit. The process is based upon community self-empowerment whereby the anthropologists and cartographers train communities to map their own territories providing them with the path to control their own autonomy and the ability to lobby politically for the recognition of their land rights.
Brazil’s African slave descendants, the Quilombola, have fought a long and hard struggle for recognition. After the abolition of the slave trade they were left abandoned and ostracised, devoid of rights and outside of Brazilian mainstream society. But things are slowly changing amongst rural communities. In the 1988 constitution Brazil’s Quilombola were granted access to […]