Between Transamazonian Places: A Cartography of (In)existence?

[Original Title: "Entre lugares transamazônicos: uma cartografia da inexistência?"] This article focuses on the relationship between scientific knowledge and the reality of place, as well as the geopolitical repercussions of this relationship — given that the debate on the impact of geographical representations upon spaces can help clarify how development strategies for those spaces are conceived. The central aim is to problematize the geographical knowledge that informs the environment and human life along the edge of the Transamazon Highway. Drawing on a phenomenological methodology, I seek to render visible the fragility of the dialogue between life in places and the scientific and educational knowledge reproduced about those places — specifically, the communities of smallholder producers living between Pacajá and Anapu, in the state of Pará. I have conducted ongoing fieldwork since 2012, combining participant observation, photographic records, interviews, and bibliographic research on the scientific and educational knowledge produced about this research space. I conclude that there is a profound distance between knowing and living, resulting from the systematic non-prioritization of the place-scale in standard territorial knowledge, the depersonalization of individuals and communities living along the Transamazon Highway, and the perpetuation of an environmental imagery that does not correspond to reality — as taught in textbooks that inevitably decree the (in)existence of those who use them. The children and teachers who are educated in these places are reduced to background for the road itself: the object centrally valorized in geographical knowledge and in the geopolitics of the Transamazonian space of Pará.