This article analyzes understandings of indigeneity and legal consciousness in Brazil in the 16th, early 20th and 21st centuries. The article focuses on the often ignored work of João Mendes Junior, written in 1912, about the indigenous peoples of São Paulo and on Gabriel Soares de Sousa’s Tratado descritivo do Brasil em 1587 [A Descriptive Treatise of Brazil in 1587]. Mendes’ ideas about race, biology and indigeneity diverge considerably from hegemonic Western theories of racial purity and Social Darwinism, but his contribution has never really been acknowledged. This article argues that theories that better fit the organizing model of the free market have become more hegemonic and widespread. For this reason, social scientists should strive to bring into discussion epistemological alternatives to the hegemonic principles of capitalism, which foster exploitation, destitution and the privatization of public space.
Allen JS ( 1989) Franz Boas’s physical anthropology: The critique of racial formalism revisited. Anthropology30(1): 79-84.
2.
Anderson B. ( 1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
3.
Barbieri SRJ ( 2005) The constitutional rights of indigenes: The rights to difference and the principle of the dignity of the human being. Unpublished Master’s thesis in law, UNIMES (Metropolitan University of Santos).
4.
Boas F. ( 1901) The mind of primitive man. Journal of American Folklore14(52): 1-11.
5.
Becker HS ( 1992) Social theory in Brazil. Sociological Theory10(1): 1-5.
6.
Bourdieu P. ( 1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Nice R (trans). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
7.
Davis M. ( 2004) Planet of slums: Urban involution and the informal proletariat . New Left Review26(March/April): 5-34.
8.
Escobar A and Ribeiro GL (eds) (2006) World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations within Systems of Power. Oxford: Berg.
9.
Farmer P. ( 2004) An anthropology of structural violence: Sidney W. Mintz lecture for 2001. Current Anthropology45(3): 305-325.
10.
Foucault M. ( 1999) Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974-1975, Burchell G (trans). New York: Picador .
11.
Freyre G. ( 1933) Casa grande e senzala [The Masters and the Slaves] .
12.
Gould SJ ( 1994) The Mismeasure of Man, rev. edn. New York: W.W. Norton.
13.
Goulet J.-GA (1996) The ‘beardache’/‘two spirit’: A comparison of anthropological and native constructions of gendered identities among the northern Athapaskans. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute2(4): 683-701.
14.
Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) (1863) The Works of Horace, Smart C and Buckley TA (trans). New York: Harper and Brothers.
15.
Ingold T. ( 2000) The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill. New York: Routledge.
16.
Kearney M. ( 1986) From the invisible hand to visible feet: Anthropological studies of migration and development. Annual Review of Anthropology15: 331-361.
17.
King AD ( 1999) Soul suckers: Vampiric shamans in northern Kamchatka Russia . Anthropology of Consciousness10(4): 57-68.
18.
De Magalhães C. ( 1876) O Selvagem [The Savage]. Rio de Janeiro : Typographia da Reforma.
19.
Mendes Junior J. ( 1998 [1912]) Os indigenas do Brazil, seus direitos individuaes e politicos [The Indigenes of Brazil, Their Individual and Political Rights]. São Paulo: Comissão Pró-Índio.
20.
Metcalf AC ( 2005) The entradas of Bahia of the sixteenth century. Special issue ‘Rethinking Bandeirismo in colonial Brazil’. The Americas61(3): 373-400.
21.
Miller BG ( 2001) The Problem of Justice: Tradition and Law in the Coast Salish World. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
22.
Miller BG and Goulet J-G (eds) (2007) Extraordinary Anthropology: Transformations in the Field. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
23.
Monteiro JM ( 2000) The heathen castes of sixteenth-century Portuguese America: Unity, diversity, and the invention of the Brazilian Indians. Hispanic American Historical Review80(4): 697-719.
24.
Oliveira Filho de OJ ( 1999) Projetos de promissão: A literatura da expansão ultramarina Portuguesa no Brasil (século XVI) [Projects of promise: The Portuguese literature of ultramarine expansion in Brazil (16th century) . Revista de Letras39: 37-48.
25.
Peirano M. ( 1981) The anthropology of anthropology. Unpublished PhD dissertation , Harvard University: Cambridge, MA.
26.
Ramos AR ( 1990) Ethnology Brazilian style. Cultural Anthropology5(4): 452-472.
27.
<CF f="AdvTimes-i" n="8.970000"/> Ribeiro D. (1968) O processo civilizatório [The Civilizatory Process]. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
28.
Ribeiro D. ( 1970) Os Índios e a civização: A integração das populações indígenas no Brasilmoderno [The Indians and Civilization: The Integration of Indigenous Populations in Modern Brazil] . São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
29.
Ribeiro D. ( 1995) O povo Brasileiro [The Brazilian People]. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras .
30.
Romo AA ( 2007) Rethinking race and culture in Brazil’s first Afro-Brazilian Congress of 1934. Journal of Latin American Studies39: 31-54.
31.
Santos AS and Hallewell L. ( 2002) Historical roots of the ‘whitening’ of Brazil. Special issue, ‘Brazil: The hegemonic process in political and cultural formation’. Latin American Perspectives29(1): 61-82.
32.
Schwarcz LM ( 1994) Espetáculo da miscigenação [The spectacle of miscegenation]. Estudos Avançados8(20): 137-152.
33.
Sousa de GS ( 2000 [1587]) Tratado descritivo do Brasil em 1587 [A Descriptive Treatise of Brazil in 1587]. Recife, PE : Editora Massangana.
34.
Stocking G. ( 1995) Center and Periphery: Armchair Anthropology, Missionary Ethnography, and Evolutionary Theory after Tylor: British Social Anthropology . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1888-1951.
35.
Velho O. ( 2006) The pictographics of Tristesse: An anthropology of nation building in the tropics and its aftermath. In: Escobar A and Ribeiro GL (eds) World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations within Systems of Power . Oxford: Berg.
36.
Vitebsky P. ( 1995) From cosmology to environmentalism: Shamanism as local knowledge in a global setting. In: Fardon R (ed.) Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge . New York: Berghahn Books, 81-94.
37.
Wasserman RRM ( 1983) The red and the white: The ‘Indian‘ novels of José de Alencar. PMLA98(5): 815-827.
38.
Weber M. ( 2003-1958) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism , Parsons T (trans). Mineola, NY: Dover.
39.
Wolf E. ( 1982) Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press .
40.
Wolfe P. ( 2001) Land, labor, and difference: Elementary structures of race. American Historical Review106(3): 866-905.
