Entre corpos e espaços: uma história da criminalidade nas matas de araucárias (Mallet-PR, 1931-1950)

Abstract

This work aims to produce a study of criminality from the bodies and spaces in the municipality of Mallet, located in the Araucaria forests of the state of Paraná. We sought to concentrate this research between the years 1931 to 1950, a period when the records of crimes intensified, having the bodies as areas reached in conflicts conducted to the judiciary power. Since the end of the 19th century to the first half of the 20th century the territory where Mallet-PR was developed was defined by the contact of the cabocla population with thousands of Slavic immigrants, mainly of Ukrainian and Polish ethnic backgrounds, who settled there as a result of colonization strategies of southern Brazil. The relations developed between the different inhabitants of these predominantly rural areas implied in the formation and delimitation of spaces marked by tensions, disagreements and violence that inscribed their signs in the bodies and that gained governmental visibility in the decades of 1930 and 1940. With Mallet’s criminal processes as the main documentary support and serial history as the methodological basis, we intend to investigate how criminal records gained momentum beginning in 1931; what relations the bodies established with the spaces in these occasions of conflicts; how the disagreements were linked to the temporal, ethnic and cultural singularities of the residents and the judicial and police authorities; and what were the recurring patterns, discontinuities and perceived ruptures in the crimes that hit the bodies between 1931 to 1950. Finally, having the cartography as the concept to be used in this study on the criminality, this work intends to understand the spaces related to crimes in their different flows, becoming and movements, as well as intents to place the presence of the body as a fundamental aspect and inseparable from the historiographical narrative.