THE RUBBER STAGE: SOCIAL INTERACTIONS, IMAGES AND RITUALS AT THE CASSINA HOTEL IN MANAUS

Abstract

The research investigates the Hotel Cassina, located in the historic centre of Manaus, as a stage for sociabilities and social rituals that have shaped the city’s trajectory from the Amazonian Belle Époque to its transformation into a patrimonial ruin. The objective is to understand how the building, once a space of distinction and prestige, becomes an arena of plural memories crossed by practices of power, violence, and exclusion. The methodology combines documentary analysis, bibliographic survey, and interpretation of visual records, including photographs, oral narratives, and legal decrees, articulated with the anthropological understanding of the city as a space of symbolic dispute. The study shows that the Cassina cannot be reduced to an isolated architectural object but must be read as a social organism that reinvents itself through the uses and meanings attributed by different groups. The images associated with the building, produced over time, participate in the construction of its historical memory and highlight how urban spaces are traversed by layers of meaning, between celebration and stigma. The legal recognition of the building as cultural heritage in 2004 is interpreted as a ritual of symbolic revaluation that does not erase the contradictions of its trajectory but reinscribes them in new forms of visibility. It is concluded, preliminarily, that the Cassina operates as a living archive of Amazonian modernity, condensing glories, tensions, and silences, reaffirming that urban memory is constituted by disputes over what should be preserved, forgotten, or re-signified.