Ferrari-Nunes, Rodrigo (2011) Indigeneity and Consciousness in Brazil

http://coa.sagepub.
com/
Critique of Anthropology
http://coa.sagepub.com/content/31/3/185
The online version of this article can be found at:
DOI: 10.1177/0308275X11409730
2011 31: 185 Critique of Anthropology
Rodrigo Ferrari-Nunes
Mendes Jr (1912)
Indigeneity and consciousness in Brazil: Analyzing Sousa (1587) and
Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com
can be found at: Critique of Anthropology Additional services and information for
http://coa.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Email Alerts:
http://coa.sagepub.com/subscriptions Subscriptions:
http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Reprints:
http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Permissions:
http://coa.sagepub.com/content/31/3/185.refs.html Citations:
What is This?
- Sep 5, 2011 Version of Record >>

at Library - Periodicals Dept on December 3, 2011 coa.sagepub.com Downloaded from
Critique of Anthropology
31(3) 185209
! Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0308275X11409730
coa.sagepub.com
Article
Indigeneity and
consciousness in Brazil:
Analyzing Sousa (1587)
and Mendes Jr (1912)
Rodrigo Ferrari-Nunes
University of Aberdeen, UK
Abstract
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 Joao Mendes Junior, written in 1912, about the indigenous peoples of Sao Paulo and
on Gabriel Soares de Sousas 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 con-
tribution 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.
Keywords
Brazil, colonialism, enlightenment, epistemology, habitus, legal consciousness, prejudice,
race, Sao Paulo, Tupi
On ideological continuity
I argue that initial colonization of Brazil and its eventual transformation into a
corporate industrial landscape in the 21st century are motivated by the same ideo-
logical elements. In other words, there is an ideological continuity crossing through
history, motivating these transformations, from colonialism to neoliberalism. This
article investigates common threads between colonialism, capitalism and neolib-
eralism, arguing that the distinction between these -isms is highly articial and
analytically weak, since they seem to denote the same ideological underpinnings.
Corresponding author:
Rodrigo Ferrari-Nunes, Department of Anthropology, School of Social Science, University of Aberdeen,
Aberdeen AB24 3QY, UK
Email: cosmoartist@gmail.com
Accumulation, growth, prosperity, land domination, patriarchy, state control,
industrial dependence, competition, slavery and their myriad euphemisms and
institutional oshoots (e.g. wage labor, bureaucracy, nationalism, enforced state-
controlled education, etc.) are all essential ideological elements of the same project.
My main sources are Gabriel Soares de Sousas Tratado descritivo do Brasil em
1587 [A Descriptive Treatise of Brazil in 1587 ] and Joa o Mendes Juniors Os indi-
genas do Brazil, seus direitos individuaes e politicos [The Indigenes of Brazil, Their
Individual and Political Rights] (1912). Mendes Junior diverged from the racist par-
adigms that were widely supported in Western academic institutions at the time (see
Gould, 1994). His ideas about indigenous virtues were based on linguistic evi-
dence and preceded the anti-racist inuence of Boasian relativism that transformed
the Brazilian intellectual elite through the works of Gilberto Freyre, whose Casa
grande e senzala [The Masters and the Slaves] (1933) is considered a turning point in
the critique of scientic racism within Brazil (Romo, 2007: 31). Boas only impacted
Brazilian scholarship in the 1930s, and Freyre only stopped using racially determin-
ist ideas in the mid 1920s (Romo, 2007: 32). Mendes (1998 [1912]), Sousa (2000
[1587]), and other writers and scholars, will provide us with examples of ideas that
conform, resist and adapt to the underlying expansionist paradigm.
Confronted with the hegemonic power of the scientic racism of the 19th cen-
tury, and with a mixed population that deed classication and made impossible
the existence of an ideal pure race, Brazilian intellectuals like Mendes (1998
[1912]), who rooted their assumptions in a recognition of the analytical depth
and descriptive power of the Tupi language, viewed racial mixing as strengthening
the character of the nation. He saw no dierence between the mental capacities of
indigenous peoples and Europeans, but observed many virtues in the indigenous
character, prior to the inuence of Boas, introduced by Freyre (1933), and unlike
other inuential writers like Sousa (2000 [1587]) and Magalha es (1876), whose
work is discussed in some detail for contrast.
In an attempt to understand history, scholars may choose to compartmentalize
it into clear progressive stages, and to rely uncritically on crystallized distinctions
(e.g. colonialism, postcolonialism, neocolonialism, capitalism, republic, empire,
nationalism, etc.). Invested ideologically in these categorical distinctions, they
may claim such idiosyncratic analytical constructions provide a nal answer.
This article proposes something dierent. Instead of picking apart the dierences
between categories engendered in the academic imagination and ranked high in an
economy of ideas, we shall seek for the core of what links colonialism to neolib-
eralism, as an immunologist studies epidemiology in order to understand a disease
that survives across several generations. It is vital to ght amnesia with regard to
issues of structural violence the natural expression of a political and economic
order based in exploitation, crowned with success, and that seems as old as
slavery (Farmer, 2004: 317). According to the homogenizing nationalist frame-
works active in most former colonies, indigenous ideologies and practices are back-
ward and have no place in this modern nation. The slavery of indigenous peoples in
Brazil should have ended with the law introduced by Dom Sebastia o in 1570, but it
186 Critique of Anthropology 31(3)
started to expand, and the few scrupulous Jesuits and clerics who dared to con-
clude all types of slavery should be illegal had their ideas quickly censored
(Metcalf, 2005: 400). I analyze the ideological underpinnings related to this destruc-
tive force of enslavement and exploitation.
This article is also an attempt to address the problems caused by metropolitan
provincialism the ignorance that anthropologists (and other Anglophone scho-
lars) in hegemonic centers have of the knowledge production of practitioners in
non-hegemonic sites and provincial cosmopolitanism the exhaustive knowledge
that people in non-hegemonic sites have of the production of hegemonic centers
(Escobar and Ribeiro, 2006: 13). I only realized that Mendes published conference
lectures were not given much attention even among Brazilian indigenistas and
anthropologists after I read the preface to the Comissa o Pro I
ndio edition. As
Becker (1992: 1) notes, Brazil possesses an educated class large enough to support
publication and diusion of knowledge in the national language, well versed in
works produced in English, French (and Spanish), but seldom produce their major
works in those languages. Another factor in these provincial dynamics is that
[s]cholars in the world languages seldom read Portuguese, so a vicious circle cre-
ates in other countries an ignorance of the sizable, varied, and interesting scholarly
output of Brazilian social science (Becker, 1992: 1). This article investigates inu-
ential ideas that have made the exploitation of the so-called New World possible
and which have also encountered critiques, helping to demystify, over time, mis-
conceptions about indigenous peoples around the world.
Misunderstood indigenes
I found no references to Mendes Junior (1998 [1912]), in Darcy Ribeiros major
works, namely, O processo civilizatorio [The Civilizatory Process] (1968), Os I
ndios
e a civizac ao [The Indians and Civilization] (1970) and Opovo Brasileiro [The Brazilian
People] (1995). All of Ribeiros books extensively discussed indigenous issues and the
formation of Brazilian society, yet he drew theoretically from prominent American
and English anthropologists, referencing evolutionist theorists from Rivers to Julian
Steward and Marvin Harris, and people like Sidney Mintz and Eric Wolf, who
descend intellectually from Stewards unilineal evolution, but intentionally move
away from his model. Ironically, the late public gure, legislator and senator
Darcy Ribeiro, considered one of Brazils most important intellectuals,
had missed completely the opportunity of analyzing the work of Mendes Junior,
providing a clear example of provincial cosmopolitanism. I puzzled over Ribeiros
omission; after all, he is known as one of the most important products of the intel-
lectual milieu of Sa o Paulo in the 40s and 50s, considered to have been the most
politically active and academically sophisticated center in the country (Ramos,
1990: 462; see also Peirano, 1981). Metropolitan provincialism and provincial cos-
mopolitanism were powerful inuences in the formation of Ribeiros ideas. Gilberto
Freyres inuence overshadowed Mendes Juniors ideas because of these provincial
dynamics.
Ferrari-Nunes 187
On the other hand, Mendes Junior could also be charged with being both
provincial (for seeing the United States as a civic model that should be followed)
and a romantic (for envisioning indigenous peoples as noble savages). However,
the cynicism directed to those that lean toward a noble savage stereotype is just
based on more stereotypes, and the real story is more complex. Indigenous peoples
clearly possessed more sustainable methods of production before colonialists
arrived. Pointing this out is not romanticism, its just historical fact, and it
would be incredibly nave to believe that the progression from colonialism to
industrial capitalism made the world a better place. Much of the knowledge that
existed has been systematically erased with the developments of industrial capital-
ism. The objective of ethnography is to document this knowledge and make sure it
is counted as part of the history of humankind, and the task of ethnology is to
discuss and propagate it, but often this has not been of service to those whose
knowledge has been studied. Regardless of the charge of romanticism, it is impos-
sible for ethnographers to ignore the profound impact of extreme poverty and
social marginalization in many of our work settings (Farmer, 2004: 307), and to
ignore the privilege of their own position.
The Portuguese and, later, nationalist Brazilians, followed the authority they
recognized that of the state, of the church, and of money and power. The indig-
enous peoples they found did not recognize that authority, and so it had to be
forced into them, just as Magalha es (1876) proposed with his system of military,
missionaries and interpreters. In many ways, Soares de Sousa (2000 [1587]) is an
ideological predecessor to Couto de Magalha es O Selvagem [The Savage] (1876),
which represents a mainstream view that diverges considerably from that of
Mendes Junior (1998 [1912]) in several ways. Magalha es (1876) announces that
his objective is to make sure savage peoples were incorporated into civilization so
that the government could acquire more than a million acclimatized arms, which
would allow them to conquer two-thirds of [our] territory. For Magalha es, what
distinguished him, an elite Brazilian, from the indigenous groups he sought to
enslave was simply that these (fantastically homogeneous) savages do not know
how to read and do not possess accumulated capitals (1876: viii). He thought it
was important to domesticate our savages, imagining that by conquering terri-
tory, authorities became the owners of all the bodies contained within it. It is
noticeable that the act of conquering was simply a declaration made ritually
over the land to proclaim it the property of the crown. It was a ritual that com-
pletely ignored the presence of indigenous peoples on those lands for thousands
of years.
Furthermore, in the 19th century, historian Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen
(181678) argued that the Tupi were foreign invaders, and used Sousas treatise to
conrm the so-called cowardly characteristics of all native peoples a farce used to
justify violent reprisals on the part of authorities (Monteiro, 2000: 71417). In other
words, Sousas writings were considered factual and were still used to stigmatize and
oppress indigenous groups at the end of the 19th century. One idea that acquired
some currency with colonialists was the myth that indigenous groups were quickly
killing each other and that an intervention by colonialists was their only hope for
survival (Monteiro, 2000: 715). One of the intentions that may pass as benign is the
idea that this conversion of indigenous peoples into order-following and hard-work-
ing good Christians couldbe done pacically. Magalha es expected that missionaries
would simply convince indigenous peoples, somehowvery easily, that the ways of the
Portuguese allied to the Catholic Church were superior to their traditional ways. All
they knew about the past should be forgotten, so they would join a new world, a new
powerful nationwhere everyone is equal laborers giving over 12 hours a day of labor
for their colonial masters. What a bargain, we should exclaim! The idea that if some-
thing is done peacefully it is necessarily good is quite deceptive. People were given
the choice to conformpeacefully to put down their heads and obey the newmasters.
But if they said no, certainly violence would follow. Indeed, it is quite incredible that
state-controlled standardized educational systems are invariably perceived as benign
andnecessary, containing the skills necessary tosucceedinlife. Withthe growthof the
state and the spread of nationalism as a homogenizing ideology, specialist education
becomes standardized to t the mode of production and alternatives become more
rare. Centralized systems of education with standardized nationalist curricula have
no means of providing even a supercial sense of the cultural variation buried by
the colonialist transformation of the landscape. Mendes Junior (1998 [1912]), on the
other hand, was critical of Western culture and open to the dierent epistemologies
represented by indigenous cultures. In addition, Mendes Junior did not assume that
indigenous peoples were inferior because they were illiterate, but recognized that the
complexities of vast landscapes were deeply known and evoked stories, standing for a
form of literacy that exists beyond the realm of phonetic representations commonly
called written language.
Mendes Juniors 1912 lecture on indigenous rights
Facing the Catholic cathedral and the Jesuit college where the city of Sa o Paulo was
founded in the 16th century, the square where today a large section of the Sa o Paulo
state legal system is physically installed was named after Mendes Juniors father
Joa o Mendes de Almeida a 19th-century intellectual interested in Brazilian ethno-
history, known as the abolitionist leader, who drafted the law of the free womb.
The civil forum for the city of Sa o Paulo, located in this square, in turn, was named
after Joa o Mendes Junior himself, who became a Minister of the Supreme Court by
the end of his legal, academic and political career. Mendes Juniors book contains
materials presented at three conference lectures on the theme of the political and
administrative relations of Indians in the Federations regime, held in 1902 at the
Society of Ethnography and Indian Civilization of Sa o Paulo (Mendes, 1998
[1912]: 5). For his rst conference lecture he focuses on historical developments of
North American legislation, and on the measures developed to establish the recog-
nition of indigenous rights. He focuses on the legal developments in colonial Brazil
(15001889) in the second, and in the third he deals with the legal developments
around aboriginal issues since the beginning of the Republican period (instituted in
Ferrari-Nunes 189
1889, with the fall of the Imperial regime right after the abolition of slavery in 1888).
Having noted that Joa o Mendes Junior argued for the recognition of congenial land
rights basedonprecedence of possessionandoccupationby the indigenous peoples of
Brazil, Manuela Carneiro da Cunha wrote, in the 1988 preface of the facsimile of
Mendes 1912 conference lectures:
Today, when the originary
1
rights of Indians over their lands have been recognized in
the Constitution, it seemed pertinent for the Commission Pro -I
ndio to re-edit this

classic book. I dedicate it to Rubem Santilli Brando, a doctor who died working
among the Yanomami, a comrade of the Comission Pro -I
ndio, who discovered this

book in a sebo [used book store] and gave it to me in 1978, the rst copy I ever saw.
(Foreword, in Mendes, 1998 [1912]: ii)
In 1988, the present Constitution of Brazil was partially recreated and almost
entirely reformed. The new Constitution did not give Indigenous peoples control
of their lands, which continued to be owned legally by the state. Mendes begins
his 1902 (published 1912) conference lectures with personal remarks addressed to
his audience, explaining how he came upon the data for his analysis. His views
express a degree of cultural relativism and tolerance of dierence that was quite
rare in his generation:
2
For a long time my spirit wavers to reach a complete determination about the political
and administrative relations with ndios living in this State, before the situation created
by the federative regime. At rst I supposed that my doubts came from prejudices
generated by my lack of conviction on the advantages of the federation; but studying
the legislation, the jurisprudence, the doctrine of the publicistas and the administrative
organization of the United States of North America, I understood that even if the
federative regime is admitted, the case can generate a great number of diculties.
I am, therefore, free from all suspicion and I have to face the problem, not before the
principles, but before the facts.. . . Do not suppose, illustrious consorts, that these
ndios ignore the political transformation we are passing through; on the contrary,
they refer to it using a language of instinctual foresight for conservation and defense,
assert that they are indierent whether this or that man governs Brazil given that they
can take their complaints, if they are not reviewed in Sa o Paulo, to Rio de Janeiro.
Whoever lives in the vain preoccupation that these ndios are incapable of thinking,
judging and reasoning, certainly will put in doubt this information of mine; but it is
easy to put to the proof, conversing with their principaes who have the custom of
coming to this capital, so that it inspires trust. (Mendes, 1998 [1912]: 67)
Mendes ideas about race resemble those of Boasian relativists, but diverge, having
dierent epistemological and experiential referents. In other words, the study of the
Tupi language inBrazil was better establishedby the early 20thcentury thanthe study
of indigenous languages in general in Western Europe. Brazil provided a vast eld of
inquiry for anthropologists interested in indigenous relationships, built into the
formation urban Brazilian elites. And, unlike in Britain generally, where armchair
anthropology sprang from, Brazilian intellectuals were living among complex mixed
populations from the outset, and sometimes, as we shall see, identied directly with
indigenous peoples.
Due to close proximity and a long history of interactions with indigenous peoples,
Brazilian scholars did not have to rely on letters coming from missionaries on the
other side of the globe, as Tylor, Frazer and Spencer did (Stocking, 1995). In 1902,
Mendes Junior delivered his conference lectures at the Ethnological Society of Sa o
Paulo, right after the publication of Boass The Mind of Primitive Man (1901). For
Boas: [t]he activities of the mind manifest themselves in thoughts and actions, and
exhibit an innite variety of form among the peoples of the world (1901: 1). In
addition, the student who wishes to understand this variety of form clearly must
endeavor to divest himself entirely of opinions and emotions based upon the social
environment in which he is born (Boas, 1901: 1). Mendes Junior also regarded
positions that Boas criticized as racial formalism (Allen, 1989: 79) as vain
preoccupation, a direct consequence of ignoring historical evidence, which denotes
history as a shared value between Mendes and later Boasians.
Mendes Juniors most important inuence seems to be his father Jo ao Mendes
de Almeida, especially from his study entitled Some Genealogical Notes a short
piece about the early history of Sa o Paulo, read in 1888 to the intellectuals of the
Society of Men of Letters of Sa o Paulo and appended to the end of his sons 1912
conference lectures publication. Almeidas interest in the Tupi language helped him
to partially divest himself of prejudicial opinions and emotions as Boas (1901: 1)
recommended. One of his main arguments, based on historical evidence, was that
the early settlers of Sa o Paulo who ourished in the rst half of the 16th century
were of mixed Portuguese and indigenous origins. According to Almeida, the
Paulistas (i.e. people from Sa o Paulo), descendants of the community from this
early period, are one of the very rst truly Brazilian native groups. This group
grew, attracting other migrants, under the command of a mameluco (i.e. neither
indigenous nor European), and a native woman with an adopted European name.
The group turned into a local aristocracy, later intermarrying with Europeans and
locals. These Paulistas were inevitably and irremediably mixed, and, as Mendes
Junior argues, following his father, intrinsically stronger than either pure
Europeans or pure natives.
This story illustrates how indigenous women who married mameluco men and
took European names could be the progenitors of an entire elite population, which
would later see themselves as purely European descendants and sever all ties
to their former origins. The European names they took up mask, over time,
previously existing kin relationships with pre-contact indigenous peoples.
Ironically, indigenous descendants self-identied with mainstream culture would
eventually help to oppress and exploit people who were still living according to
traditional values. Ethnic identities were erased by part of the mixed populations,
in a departure from the past, with the adoption of European names, economic and
religious ideologies.
Ferrari-Nunes 191
Almeidas (Mendes Seniors) argument has important ethical and moral impli-
cations that is, that it is impossible to determine individual racial purity, which
rendered racism absolutely unviable and oxymoronic from a logical perspective,
even though it was (and is) still practiced. The battle against scientistic racism was
being fought with relativist ideas and empirical data something that, at the time,
still needed to gather enough momentum to inuence reality. Almeidas argument
is quite anachronistic for 1888, particularly beyond Brazil, but is strengthened by
local ethnographic knowledge. As noted by Schwarcz (1994: 138) the evolutionist
models in vogue in the late 19th and early 20th centuries not only praised progress
and civilization, but also concluded that the mixture of heterogeneous races was
always a mistake, leading to the degeneration not only of the individual, but also of
the entire collectivity. Moreover, in July 1911, one year before the publication of
Mendes Juniors (1998 [1912]) lectures on indigenous rights, the rst International
Congress of Races (I Congresso Internacional das Rac as) took place, and Joa o
Lacerda, then the director of the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro, presented
a paper which claimed that the mixed Brazil of today has in its whitening in one
century its perspective, way out [sada], and solution (in Schwarcz, 1994: 1378). In
1902, Nina Rodrigues, another intellectual medical doctor with ideas about a
national racial type was inuenced by the craniological farce proposed by
Lombroso and described in detail by Gould (1994). Nina Rodrigues considered
miscegenation, by principle, a movement backward [retrocesso], a great factor of
degeneration (in Schwarcz, 1994: 145).
Almeidas 1888 memoria is also a study regarding the identity of the Tupi leader
who attacked the early inhabitants of Sa o Paulo in 1562, after the colonial settlers
broke an agreement with his people. Colonial historical sources mentioned three
dierent names, and Almeida believed he proved that the three names referred to
the same person, and that they expressed the cultures vision regarding this leaders
attributes and social position. Almeida discovered this by following his wish to
verify the indigenous origins of the principal families of the capitania Sa o Vicente-
Sa o Paulo (Mendes, 1998 [1912]: 78).
Even the name of this chief, Pi-herobia, xed and superior centre, converges towards
that explanation of the name Ururay: - pi, centre, herobia, authority, trust, respect,
obedience, honor, esteem, credit, xed. The daughter of this chief, who lived in mar-
ital union with Antonio Rodrigues, a Portuguese man, when in 1531, by the Bertioga
canal, the armada of Martim Aonso de Sousa arrived at the port, is the indigenous
progenitor of the principal families of the capitania of Sa o Vicente and Sa o Paulo, as
I have shown in my work Some Genealogical Notes. (Almeida, 1888, in Mendes, 1998
[1912]: 78)
It is impressive how a single name can hold so much meaning and express social
values such as trust, obedience and respect, revealing a semantic connection
between personal honor and authority the sign of a highly developed and at
the same time rational and relational type of legal conscience among indigenous
Brazilians. Almeida was interested in how the Tupi language worked to convey
meaning (i.e. semantics). He employed the Tupi language to analyze the history of
the province of Sa o Paulo. Almeida tended to view the Brazilian indigenes in a
respectful relativist manner, which is part of the legacy of his sons ideas as well.
Novels with important and central native characters depicted in heroic light, such
as Jose de Alencars O Guarani (1857), also represent important ideological inu-
ences aecting both Almeida and Mendes Junior. Alencar, not coincidentally, also
graduated as a lawyer in Sa o Paulo in 1850, and frequented the same social and
intellectual milieu as Almeida. Alencars work is considered as a kind of cultural
prism, refracting the lights of his place and age and:
[o]ne of these lights which is strongest in the three Indian novels, O Guarani,
Iracema, Ubirajara, is the commonplace that Brazilians as a people reect the fortu-
nate combination of the races inhabiting the land. (Wasserman, 1983: 816)
In his 1888 memoria, Almeida examines the Tupi term Piratininga, the rst name
given historically to the village of Sa o Paulo. His examination reveals yet more
facets of his linguistic technique and its underlying relativist-humanist ideology.
His ideas are infused with what Velho (2006: 266) calls the powerful social and
political inuence [shared] among Brazilian [intellectuals of the Enlightenment] of
Comtean positivism, which lasted far beyond the time when, in France, it was
reduced to the existence of a single museum (sponsored, it seems, by Brazilian
funds). Almeida writes about Sa o Paulos humble beginnings:
The village of Sa o Paulo was founded in the closed extremity of the Tiete river and its
meadow. Piratininga is the corruption of Pira-tiny-nga, sinuous and with unequal river
bed. Frompi, centre, bottom, ra, unequal, unlevelled, tiny or teny, to go around turning,
to be sinuous, with the particle nga (brief), to form the supine. It alludes to the ups and
downs of the river bed, its holes and wells, going to the right and left with innumerable
turns in its course. Thus it is not the same pira-tyni-nga of dried sh; although the sound
is almost identical. The indgena was too intelligent not to think of such denomination
for river or for eld. But the truth is that, when I ignored the Tupi language, I also
believed these and other foolish notions attributed to the indgenas. (Mendes, 1998
[1912]: 77)
Almeida realized he had been fooled in his judgment by misguided popular
understandings before he learned Tupi. For him, not knowing the local language
was a serious impediment to the correct understanding of indigenous conceptual-
izations. Perhaps this was an eect of his admiration for the structural and melodic
complexity and abstractive depth of the Tupi language, an aesthetic notion that
is compatible with a Boasian position grounded on a humanist arch-inductivist
historical particularism. The thread that connects the way Almeida and Mendes
Junior pieced together their anti-racist arguments is philology. And philology is the
connection to Boas, who was trained in the German traditions of philologist
Ferrari-Nunes 193
diusion, one of the only schools of thought in the 19th century that proposed a
degenerative view of sociopolitical change. That is, instead of assuming a teleolog-
ical and progressive vision of human evolution with Western civilization at the very
top, they assumed a degenerative view, which focused on the historical changes
undergone by Egyptian civilization over thousands of years, leading to a collapse,
not an ever expanding apex. The historical fact that the pyramids of Giza were
built at an earlier period and put together with a technology that clearly faded
away, with future generations not being capable of the same type of construction,
provides a serious problem for progressive evolutionary models. In fact, many
collapses of advanced civilizations point toward the notion of cyclical time,
which is more in tune with very ancient indigenous perspectives on history, time
and the evolution and origin of humankind.
Almeidas descriptions of Tupi make their language stand out as powerfully
abstract, able to convey complex descriptions in a compressed form, invented by
very intelligent indgenas (Mendes, 1998 [1912]: 77). Mendes Juniors idea of race,
blood and biology derived partially from the notion that the mixing of European
and indigenous blood produced people with characters and bodies that were at
least equal or even superior to those considered pure. Mendes Junior, after citing
Topinards suspicions of Mortons cranial measurements and his arbitrary con-
clusions arms that:
The reality is that the soul of the American indigenous person thinks, judges, reasons,
coordinates rational thoughts [raciocnios], with the same vigor of attention, reection,
analysis, synthesis, comparison and comparative apprehension; the indigenous soul is
subjected to the same passions to which the European soul is subjected, showing,
nevertheless, superiority in temperance, in the energy of patience, and even, let us
speak the truth, even in justice and in charity. The soul of the descendant of indgena
crossed with European is so vigorous, it is sometimes more vigorous than the pure
European or pure indigenous; and it has the advantage of uniting the ambition of
the European to the longanimidade [tolerance] of the indigenous, tempering one for the
other. We are contemplating descendants of pure races falling and degenerating, not
only with blows of repeated marriages between close family members, and with blows
of drunkenness, indolence, carnal incontinence and syphilis; on the other hand, we are
seeing, day after day, descendants of mixed races in whose organizations predomi-
nates a strong type, energetic, intelligent as long as it is kept free of civilizing vices.
(Mendes, 1998 [1912]: 512)
For Mendes Junior, it was important clarify his point by citing Aristotles deni-
tion, Chrysippuss development, and Galenos endorsement of the anthropological
truth that the human being contains in itself a very complex mixture of seminal
reasons, each representing a germen of the ascendants of the individual these
ascendants would ght against each other in the course of development and the
individual will be more similar to the victorious ascendants that were absorbed and
assimilated in the individual (Mendes, 1998 [1912]: 50). Mendes ideas on the
interconnectedness of inheritance, bodily form and morality, appear in a citation of
his late father Almeida during his third conference lecture of 1902:
A vigorous and well followed moral discipline forties the families, be they pure or
cruzadas (crossed or mixed), there is no better purier of the blood; there is no better
regulator of the nerves; there is no better syndesmosis
3
for the bones. Virtue, for the
very reason it is a great moral force, is also enormous physical power. (Mendes, 1998
[1912]: 50).
Interestingly enough, an important contemporary of Almeida was the Marechal
Ca ndido Mariano da Silva Rondon (18651958), one of the most important political
gures of the late 19th and early 20th century, famous for the motto to die if neces-
sary, to kill never. He was able to transcend cultural, racial and structural-legal
barriers [he] descended from Terena, Bororo, and Guana people, and in 1883
Rondon graduated with a bachelors degree in Mathematics, and the Physical and
Natural Sciences from the Superior School of War of Brazil (Barbieri, 2005: 143).
Mendes Junior and his father also noticed, through their engagement with the
judicial process as lawyers, that many European immigrants displayed cruder
habits than did professed indigenous peoples and their mixed descendants.
Even though Rondon held a powerful political and military ocial position
within the colonial government, and also identied deeply with indigenous ethnic-
ities, he was unable to hold back the economic and material forces of exploitative
progress from expanding in waves to take over indigenous lands. Rondon was
responsible for mediating the peaceful take-over of areas for agriculture, cattle-
raising, and plain development for prot, while indigenous people had to live in
indigenous posts [postos indgenas], delimited in parcels of the ancient tribal
territories (Ribeiro, 1970: 169). Rondons positivism was not inuential enough
to be able to restore indigenous sovereignty and legitimizing indigenous ideas of
justice. His role was limited to merely alleviating the inevitable, foreseen or not,
short- and long-term economic and psychological damage of colonialism.
A curious facet of Mendes Juniors humanism is that, even though he professed
the restitution of land use rights to indigenous peoples, he believed quite explicitly
that they were better o if taught the virtues of Catholicism, becoming civilized
under governmental and legal protection. His hope was that they would become
productive participants in mainstream society. For instance, Mendes Junior
praised the minister of agriculture Rodolpho Miranda for the:
impulse he gave to the catechese and the civilization of our indigenes: this was like the
awakening of the governments consciousness in the obligation to protect the primary
and natural possessors of our national territory. (Mendes, 1998 [1912]: 3)
There is a clear relationship between Jesuit missionaries who took an interest
in the local languages from the very beginning of the colonial enterprise and
humanist intellectuals of the late 19th century, who, like Mendes Junior and his
Ferrari-Nunes 195
father, proposed a Catholic model of civility and wished that indigenous peoples
could embody it to become free and productive citizens. This model is directly
related to the Jesuit interest in learning local languages with the intention of
proselytizing more eectively, and to convince indigenous peoples to accept the
gifts of civilization (e.g. Christianity, modernism, positivism, civic pride and
moral progress, unilineal evolution, etc.).
In contrast, even though Magalha es (1876) preserves many indigenous stories,
his interpretation assumes without much reection the superiority of his own cul-
tural tradition. For instance, in his discussion about a myth that personies the
Pleiades constellation, Magalha es (1876: 271), moved by the similarity of an indig-
enous myth regarding a voracious old woman who pursues a young man, asks
would this not be actually a symbol like Hercules or Ulysses, degraded by the
tradition of rudimentary peoples? He could not appreciate the poetic beauty of
the myth and could only come up with an ethnocentric interpretation. This is
something considerably dierent from what Mendes Junior (1998 [1912]) clearly
proposes. Magalha es assumed that all indigenous peoples in Brazil were still in the
stone age (1876: 281), implying a progressive and unilinear teleological under-
standing of history. His convictions are perhaps best illustrated by some interpre-
tations Magalha es assumes as undeniable facts, namely that anthropology
demonstrates that physical man [o homem physico] has always passed from a
more backward to a more advanced period; history demonstrates the same thing
about moral man [o homem moral] (Magalha es 1876 II: 24). Of course, these are
neither facts nor demonstrable nor demonstrated. In fact, the philological diu-
sionist school assumed the very opposite, that ancient civilizations degenerated
after reaching a pinnacle of technological and social advancement. How could
we compare the quality and substance of the works of Plato with those of the
Holy Inquisition? Obviously, the level of science and technology of a civilization
is based on the accumulation of knowledge over time and the ability to pass it on to
upcoming generations. It is not possible for someone alone to reconstruct all pre-
vious technological achievements from scratch after a sociopolitical and economic
collapse, for instance. If all the libraries in the world suddenly vanished, upcoming
generations would be in trouble having to recreate all the knowledge to make the
world work in a similar way.
Magalha es (1876 II: 2) notion of evolution divides humankind into four
trunks associated with stereotyped racial colours with a black, a yellow, a
red and a white trunk (troncos). He believed they came into being through this
successive order, that the white was the last and most evolved, and he claimed that
even the latest trunk would:
also disappear by the end of our contemporaneous geological period in order to, who
knows, give place to the appearance of another humanity, so much more perfect and
as distant from the current [form] as this is from the great quadruman anthropomor-
phics (quadrumanos anthropomorphos) which have lasted until our time. (Magalha es
1876 II: 2)
Magalha es, however, reaches a conclusion that problematizes his own assump-
tions about the progression of races into an ever more perfect ideal. The ancient
mixed races, he writes, date from time immemorial, with perhaps many thousands
of years since the blood of a white man mixed itself with the blood of the rst
indigenous woman [india] (Magalha es 1876 II: 7).
Sharpening the sense of confusion regarding human origins and race, Magalha es
also notes that the barbarian and backward state of indigenes in Brazil by
no means authorized a conclusion that disadvantaged them because there are
white races in a more barbaric and rudimentary state than our savages, and yet
others which, by vices of all sort, have degraded to a much lower state than them
(1876 II: 9). The contradictions that characterize Magalha es ideas are profound.
Even though his project was to transform a million indigenes into laborers through
cunning, he recognized their wisdom in form of technologies and materials
unknown to Europeans. For instance, Magalha es claims that he employed exclu-
sively in his boats on the Araguaya river the resin he calls breu indigena, which is
produced by a fusion of beeswax and resins from several trees, and is more durable
than that which comes to us from Europe (1876 II: 12). Mendes Junior, on the
other hand, understands the semantic power of the Tupi language and sees it as
incredibly advanced. Mendes Junior also sees many psychosocial qualities in indig-
enous peoples that Europeans do not possess because of civilizing vices. This
would indicate that he does not share some sort of progressive evolutionary
model of history and is critical of traditional Western values. However, he would
like to make indigenous peoples part of the Brazilian nationalist project, which
denotes an ideological alignment with cultural homogenization.
Sousas 1587 description of Brazil
Sousas TratadodescritivodoBrazil (2000[1587]) is alongdescriptive document written
to El-Rei the Portuguese-Spanish king in Madrid. For Sousa, El-Rei was the most
important source of binding law. Representing God on Earth, he was seen as the
dispenser of goods to the whole of humanity. The king was the source of policies
that ensuredthe growth of the colonial extractivist and salvationist endeavors overseas
(i.e. to extract resources for prot and to save souls, converting indigenous peoples in
the name of God). Sousa owned an engenho a sugar mill on the southern coast of
present-day Bahia, betweenthe valleys of the Jaguaribe andJequiric a rivers. One of the
purposes of Sousas Descriptive Treatise was to convince the king to grant himhuman
and pecuniary resources to undertake an expedition to inland Bahia, where he believed
many riches were ready to be found, including gold and precious stones.
He dedicated over 200 pages of his work to an account of Bahias natural riches, its
ora, fauna and dierent types of indigenous inhabitants. In over 400 pages divided
into 39 chapters, Sousa usually portrays Brazilian indigenes in interaction with the
Europeans and with each other. Most of Sousas Treatise is dedicated to geography,
land and water resources, fauna and ora, and historical events. Some of the infor-
mation on natural resources that Sousa himself believes to be the most reliable comes
Ferrari-Nunes 197
from stories told by indigenous peoples of dierent groups. Sousa refers to indige-
nous peoples generally as either gentios, gentiles, as ndios, indians, or by a partic-
ular tribal denomination (Tupinamba , Tupiniquim, Aimore s, Tapuios, etc.).
Stigmatizing stereotypes such as selvagens, savages, and barbaros, barbarians,
are also commonly employed. Both barbarians and savages, however, seem
quite similar and almost interchangeable in Sousa (2000 [1587]).
The type colonization employed in Brazil systematically was already an intensely
capitalist venture, even before the Industrial Revolution. Gabriel Soares de Sousa
lost his life during yet another quest for prot, after using his 1587 Treatise to
convince the king to fund his expedition. In his preface to the 1851 edition of
Sousas 1587 Descriptive Treatise, Varnhagen presents the story of Sousas death
as an adventure thriller. Having just been shipwrecked and being forced to forage
inland for food:
they proceeded, always along the right bank of the Paraguac u river, not without great
eorts to avoid the traps of the gentiles, to avoid insect stings, to gather the herds that
dispersed, and sometimes everyone got lost, even bitten by snakes, even eaten by
tigers; and nally facing the obstacles oered by the river itself, alongside it, which
had sudden oods that isolated the expeditionary crews who had to wait for the waters
to come back down. (Varnhagen, in Sousa, 2000 [1587]: xxxiv)
Then, faced with having to traverse a mountainous area, and having become
enshrouded in a dense fog for days without food, no dry wood to keep them warm,
and not much pasture for the animals, Sousa, tired of so much work, grew sick,
and passed away a little bit after that (Varnhagen, in 2000 [1587]: xxxiv). Sousas
book retells many stories of people who gave up their lives in a quest for prot. The
practice of continuously risking ones life, year after year, in order to make a large
prot was honorable and desirable.
Sousa, like other Portuguese slave-labor sugar mill owners, viewed the vast
expanses of the lands now known as Brazil above all else [as a] treasure in the
form of bullion (Wolf, 1982: 135). An ideology of accumulation of productive cap-
ital sets up the pace and denes the details of Sousas narrative. Sousa is known for
this opportunistic attitude of expansionist Portuguese merchants (Oliveira Filho,
1999: 45). Sousas treatise on Bahia, writes Monteiro (2000: 701), was composed
with sugar, slavery, mining and overland exploration as main objectives. Sousa pos-
sessed an indigenous slave force to take care of his sugar production. According to
Monteiro, Sousas main objective was to justify Portuguese domination, placing it in
a historical sequence of conquest titles (2000: 702). This ideology is explicit in the
manner and language Sousa uses to describe indigenous peoples.
He reacted spontaneously to aesthetic dierences and inferred the psychological
and religious inferiority of indigenous peoples on account of their dierent beliefs,
languages and customs. For instance, he labels Tupinamba customs as bizarrices
bizarre-nesses, emphasizing their beastliness and how they are supposedly more
barbarian than many creatures as God has created (Sousa, 2000 [1587]: 262).
The language he employs, overall, reects the consciousness of a particular colonial
outlook, based on an ideology of systematized and rationalized extraction and
expansion. This ideology is rooted in the type of Catholic cosmology represented
by the Portuguese king and his subjects. This colonial consciousness of exploitation
and appropriation is logically grounded and justied by the need to serve the king
as a direct embodiment of the divine, its authoritative legal power. Sousas pur-
pose in his 1587 Descriptive Treatise, as he himself makes clear, was to describe the
riches of Brazil because:
[i]f past kings have been so careless in the past about this land, it bets El-Rei Nosso
Senhor, and [will be] to the good of his service, that [there] be shown to him, through
these memories, the great merits of this Estate of his, its qualities and strangeness, etc;
so that he [the king] might lay his eyes on and breathe with his power; may this power
grow and extend the happiness with which have all the Estates under his protection
thrived. (Sousa, 2000 [1587]: 1)
The reference to the king as Nosso Senhor (Our Lord) is conspicuously religious,
and his personal role as the benefactor of humankind is quite clear in Sousas
imagination. As to how this pre-industrial capitalism worked in the 16th-century
Catholic cosmology embodied by Sousa and expressed in his writing, I hope that
extended evidence from Sousas 1587 Descriptive Treatise can help illustrate this.
The ideology of accumulation can be seen almost everywhere as a powerful engine
behind individual European actors found in Sousas writings. Right at the begin-
ning, while still addressing the El-Rei, he argues that his Majesty should carefully
dispense orders that will be well carried out in repair and accumulation, because a
great empire can be edied with little expense [in Brazil] and the land was very
fertile, very healthy, vigorous and washed of good airs, sprinkled with fresh and
cold waters (Sousa, 2000 [1587]: 1).
In the colonial contact period, the weapons of the colonizer were not necessarily
more eective than those employed by organized indigenous peoples, who were,
rst of all, far more familiar with the geographic features of the landscape. Sousa
himself died because of his lack of familiarity with the environment. In the follow-
ing passage, Sousa describes a Portuguese revenge mission against the coastal
Tupiniquim and Guaitacazes peoples because a whole village of settlers, with
sugar mills and farms had been abandoned as a result of their attacks:
Mem de Sa , who governed that Estate at the time ordered that an armada of coastal
sea ships well furnished with people and weapons be sent from Bahia to rescue the
people of Esprito Santo. He sent his son Ferna o de Sa as captain, who entered
through the Cricare river with the ships where he joined forces with the people of
Esprito Santo sent by Fernando Coutinho. With everybody together, Ferna o de Sa
disembarked unto land and came over the gentiles in such a way that threw them into
confusion right in the rst encounters. The gentiles [indigenes] then came back
together and quickly reorganized, pushing Ferna o de Sa in such a way that it
Ferrari-Nunes 199
forced him to go back to sea; he did so in such a disorder with his own men that even
before arriving at their ships, they killed Ferna o de Sa , with many of his people while
they entered ship. But already now his capitania is nally re-formed with two villages,
in one of which there is a monastery with priests from the company, and it has its
sugar mills and many other farms. To populate this capitania Vasco Fernandes
Coutinho spent many thousand cruzados that he had acquired in India, and he sold
for this purpose all the patrimony he held in Portugal. He ended up there such a
pauper that he was given things to eat for the love of God, and I dont know if he even
had a blanket of his own with which he could be covered when dead. And his son of
the same name lives today in the same capitania in such a condition of necessity that
he does not own more than his own title of governor. (Sousa, 2000 [1587]: 56)
Vasco Fernandes Coutinhos actions reveal the cosmological constrictions of the
accumulative model that leads to practices found within the problematic of colonial
capitalism and imperialism (Kearney, 1986: 343). During the rst century of
Portuguese contact, at least in areas densely populated by indigenous groups, the
legal ideas of the colonial Portuguese were still unable to override or undermine the
cultural principles around which indigenous groups organized. But subsequently,
throughout the centuries that followed, up to our post-industrial age, the massive
and continuous transportation, accumulation and reproduction of human eld
laborers and animal biomass from Europe and Africa, shifted the balance of
power and widened the gap. As Sousa describes, the rst ocial event carried out
in Brazilian lands after its alleged discovery in 1500, led by Pedro A
lvares Cabral,
was a solemn mass with a large celebration that claimed possession of the future
Brazil to El-Rei the captain planted the standard with the arms of Portugal,
which he carried for the discovery of India (Sousa, 2000 [1587]: 3). It was clear that,
as the cosmology of the time dictated, the Portuguese settlers, agents of an expedi-
tion funded by the semblance of God on Earth, believed that, through a solemn
ritual, they could transfer their legal consciousness to a land occupied by peoples
whose legal practices embody and employ concepts we can expect to have little or
no overlap(Miller, 2001: 203) with those enacted by colonial agents such as Sousa
himself and other characters of his 1587 Descriptive Treatise.
By the time Mendes Junior and his father Almeida were around, the Catholic
cosmology had become more sophisticated and scientic. Magalha es (1876), for
instance, follows in the footsteps of grand masters in the art of colonization to
come up with a system for training interpreters that could therefore, with the
sanctity of the laws of religion have a way of teaching the regenerative moral
of Christianity (Magalha es 1876: ixx). His idea is clear the heathen are con-
sidered degenerate and this problem needs a solution, assimilation. He believes in a
crusade to domesticate indigenous peoples by missionary action and to eectively
assimilate them (Magalha es 1876: x). According to Wolfe (2001: 866), white
authorities in the United States and Australia have generally accepted even
targeted indigenous peoples physical substance (synecdochically represented as
blood) for assimilation into their own stock.
Unlike 20th century Brazilian intellectuals like Mendes Junior, the colonial con-
sciousness of the 16th century was intolerant of cultural dierences on the basis of
religious cosmology. Sousa (2000 [1587]) perceives the cultural dierences of the
indigenous Tupinamba through this colonial lens. For him, the apparent lack of
certain sounds in the Tupi language represented by certain Latin letters meant
that concepts that started with those letters in the Portuguese language were
missing in the Tupinamba culture. It is impossible to take such a concept seri-
ously. In the chapter dedicated to the ways and language of the Tupinamba,
Sousa writes:
[t]hey do not adore anything, nor do they have knowledge of the truth, nor do they
know that there is living and dying; and anything that is told to them gets stuck in
their head, and they are more barbarian than many creatures God has created. They
have much grace when they speak, especially the women; they are very compendious
in the form of their language, and very copious in their praying/preaching; but three
letters from the ABC are missing for them they are F, L, and double R,
4
something
that we should take closer notice of; because if they do not have F, it is because they
have no faith in anything they adore; not even those born among Christians and
indoctrinated by the fathers of the company have faith in God Our Lord, nor do
they have truth, nor loyalty to any person that does them well. And if they do not have
L in their pronunciation, it is because they do not have any Law to keep, nor precept
by which to govern themselves; and each one does law his own way, and to the sound
of his own will; without having between them laws with which to govern themselves,
nor do they have laws with one another. And if they do not have the letter R in their
pronunciation, it is because they have no king (Rei) to govern them, whom they obey,
nor do they obey anyone, nor does the father obey the son, nor son the father, and
each lives by the sound of their own will. (Sousa, 2000 [1587]: 262)
Sousas vision of indigenous dierences contrasts sharply with that of Mendes
Junior centuries later. Sousas own writing is contradictory, and he is blinded by
the prejudices of his time. In the previous passage, for instance, the mention of the
graciousness of indigenous womens speech, the length and intensity of their pray-
ing, shows them adoring something, even though, for Sousa, they did not possess
the same faith the Portuguese did. Some dierences were too sharp for the colo-
nial imagination to grasp with any sense of relativism at the time.
Sousa also describes their polygamist practices. Men who had the most daughters
were the most respected among peers, sometimes at the expense of the principal in his
military role (Sousa, 2000 [1587]: 264). Sousas worldviewwas so strictly embedded in
the Portuguese Catholic cosmology of the time that he could see nothing remotely
resembling law in Tupinamba familial arrangements. Polygamy directly contra-
dicted what Sousa perceived as ordinary, banal, commonplace, trivial, routine
(Bourdieu, 1984: 468). He saw it as an animalized and beast-like primitive custom.
And yet, there are more examples of law-like notions in Sousas descriptions of
indigenous peoples. For instance, if the principal had to be both well-related and
Ferrari-Nunes 201
well-wished, this means that they had to be part of the right family and charismatic
enough to take a leading role and be respected for it.
Sousa uses over and over the term gentilidades (gentilities) to refer to customs
and notions enacted by the indigenous peoples that were considered childlike and
naive. Sharp aesthetic dierences regarding bodily ornamentation in daily life and
ritual, instead of sparking the artistic interest we might have expected of people
from the Renaissance, actually elicited negative reactions spiked with confusion
and prejudice. In the impressionable mind of Gabriel Soares de Sousa, dierences
that could not be understood with his preconceptions were factors of gentilities:
[a]s children are born from Tupinambas, soon they give them the name that they nd
appropriate; these names they use amongst themselves are of alimaria (land animals),
sh, trees, supplies, weapon parts, and other various things; they soon pierce the lower
lip, in which they x, after the children have grown larger, stones by gentility. (Sousa,
2000 [1587]: 266, emphasis added)
Sousa uses the cosmological language of the good God represented by colonial
forces versus the evil Devil represented somehow in mere aesthetic dierences of
indigenous peoples. Sousa claims, for example, that in order to make themselves
bizarre the Tupinamba make use of very strange bestialities, like using pointed
stone piercings that stick out in the upper and lower lips where they also stick
round stones, green or dark grey, that stay inserted in their face, like rubber mir-
rors (2000 [1587]: 267). Sousas representation of Tupinamba sorcerers or feiti-
ceiros also stands as an expression of the clash of between the colonial and
indigenous consciousness of the 16th century. Sousa claims that feiticeiros were
powerful men with a great name among them, because they stick into their heads a
thousand lies (2000 [1587]: 274). Feiticeiros live in dierent kinds of houses, smaller
and with a small entrance that blocks sunlight and maintains darkness nobody
dares to enter their house nor touch anything in it, even though the sorcerers
in fact know nothing, and take up this oce to make themselves esteemed
and feared, since they understand how easily things can be shoved into these peo-
ples heads (2000 [1587]: 268). The idea of this gentility indigenous peoples
were supposed to possess is an important element guiding Sousas ideological
framework.
The evils of licentious practices were also intrinsic characteristics of the beast-
like Tupinamba , a matter of great alarm and potentially fatal; Sousa armed that
they were so luxurious that there is not sin of luxury that they do not commit,
including being sexually initiated by old women at a very early age and having little
respect towards their aunts and sisters and since sexual relations with these rel-
atives were taboo or, as Sousa writes against their customs, these bestial men
willingly broke these rules by sleeping with them [sisters and aunts] through the
woods, and some with their own daughters; and they are not content with a single
woman, have many instead, and as has been said, they die of exhaustion because of
that (2000 [1587]: 268).
The idea that heightened frequency of sexual activities could lead to death seems
to have been a common misconception shared throughout Christian Europe up
until the Enlightenment. Foucault noticed that in 18th- and 19th-century medical
practices sexual excess was seen as a sort of diuse, general, and polymorphous
etiology that enables the whole of the pathological eld, including death, to be
connected to it as a sanction or sexual prohibition (Foucault, 1999: 2401). In
other words, Europeans have been historically repressive when it comes to sexual-
ity, and the lack of such repression among Brazilian indigenes caused people like
Sousa to view them as degenerate and animal-like. In The Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism, Weber notes that the sexual asceticism of Puritanism permit-
ted intercourse only as the means willed by God for the increase of His glory
according to the commandment Be fruitful and multiply (Weber, 2003 [1958]:
158). This current of a repressive understanding of sexuality crosses through several
Christian traditions that are aligned with colonial projects around the world. The
denigration of sexual practices that did not conform to a repressive understanding
based on standardized religious interpretations was a necessary logical twist to the
enslavement of indigenous peoples and the elimination of their cultures. Of course,
had Sousa been versed in ancient philosophy, he would have noticed that thinkers
like Diogenes the Cynic sought to deface the currency by acting in a way that
challenged long-established conventions and traditions. Perhaps he would not have
been so shocked. It would be too much to ask, however, of a subject of Portugal in
the 16th century, to have a critical insight into the system that propelled him into
action with orders said to come from God himself.
Conclusion: Colonialism at the core
Even though the technologies of subjection may change their external appearance,
they are essentially propelled by the same ideological underpinnings. The idea of
colonialism comes from the Latin colis (hill) and colonus (farmer). The colony is a
place converted for agricultural production. Farmers are named after the hill they
farm, and seen as part of the land. Urban populations have to be supported by a
large specialized farming base. This usually comes with a distinction of class that
undermines farmers in favor of their masters. Twenty-rst-century forms of
exploitative capitalism still abide by the same principles of domination of space
for protable production. The idea of colonialism is still useful for understanding
neoliberal capitalism in the 21st century. Capitalism is nothing more than a type of
colonialism, an outer coating for the same being or machine. To further propel the
encroachment of European colonialism the controlling elites formed the Brazilian
state and its nationalist ideology an imagined community (Anderson, 1991)
directly modeled on European traditional sources.
The idea of going to a foreign place, exploiting people for knowledge and labor
to generate prot and reap the benets that come from a social structure based on a
hierarchy of capital accumulation, has been around for thousands of years. The
Roman poet Horace, for instance, writing in the 1st century BCE, ridiculed the
Ferrari-Nunes 203
mentality of accumulation in his satirical Sermones. Horace views the ideology of
accumulation of the covetous as an obsession, a pathology that prevents them
from living fullling lives. For him, a great [wretched] majority are misled by a
wrong desire and cries No sum is enough; because you are esteemed in proportion
to what you possess (Horace, 1863 [Sermones, 1.1]: 612).
5
Economic prosperity
ensured respect and privilege, and is dependent on the ability to exploit people and
land for prot. Even though Sousa wrote his book a few centuries earlier
than Magalha es, they are part of the same project one serves Portugal, and the
other, Brazil. The dierences are only supercial, while the deeper essence of
exploitation and homogenization that are coupled with capitalism and nationalism
are a constant that remains untouched. The bureaucracies and laws may change
but the idea remains of making sure that indigenous notions and understandings
have only a place of oddity and the exoticism of a wild animal in a zoo or museum.
Traditionally, they have not been an integral part of most nationalist projects, and
are subjected to the opinions of experts and specialists authorized to document,
interpret, understand and represent them. Magalha es called for a conquest that is
worth millions domesticating the savages or making them understand us, which
is the same thing, is the equivalent of making the pacic conquest of a territory that
is almost the size of Europe, and richer than her (1876: viii). Magalha es wishes to
eventually colonize the minds of these imaginary homogeneous savages and con-
vert them into into laborers, because the savages are acclimatized (adapted) and
are the only people who can serve the industries which, for many years will be the
only ones possible in the interior the extractivist and pastoral (Magalha es 1876:
ix). In other words, Magalha es was on a quest to enslave indigenous peoples, take
their language and cultures away, and convert them into slaves in labor camps
linked to the extraction of resources like rubber and precious metals, and cattle-
raising. In the 21st century, the cattle industry has established itself in Brazil as one
of the most destructive environmental disasters known to history, leading the way
to the transformation of thick ancient rain forest into a barren wasteland that
serves the international industrial meat market.
This dynamic transformation of ideological and physical landscapes ensured
that the vicious cycle of exploitation remained in place regardless of attempts to
circumvent its inuence. Mendes Junior and Couto de Magalha es conform to the
Brazilian nationalist project they are both searching for the eventual
homogenization of culture into a single principled and enlightened nation. The
dierences between the types of national projects each defends are clearly
distinguishable in their appreciation and understanding of indigenous cultures.
Whereas Mendes Junior understood the symbolic power of the Tupi language,
and recognized several qualities in indigenous peoples that Europeans lacked,
Couto de Magalha es saw them simply as a wild workforce that had to be
conquered against their will through the cunning triple method of aligning
missionaries, troops and interpreters to convince them to give up their freedom
for a lifetime of labor serving capitalist European merchants a plague brought
upon the land by colonialism. This plague led to the current condition of
widespread poverty and misery, high crime rates, record high fatal trac accident
rates, etc., in a globalized world where [r]esidents of slums constitute a staggering
78.2 per cent of the urban population (Davis, 2004: 13).
If we had moved beyond colonialism by now, we should have eliminated exploi-
tation. This is clearly not the case. This has not yet been achieved even though
people working in highly protable computer and arms industries may believe we
have achieved the pinnacle of civilization. Perhaps it is a new low, depending on
ones point of view. If you are a scientist getting huge grants to study arcane
particles that are useful for the mining or arms industry, you are a leader of tech-
nologies of development and the world looks like a very advanced place indeed. If
you are an indigenous person whose traditional hunting and shing areas have
been poisoned by industrial, commercial and mining activities, you have witnessed
the demise of the environment for the sake of exploitation. There can be no middle
ground between these two incompatible positions. Dependent and reliable 21st-
century workers are more deeply enslaved and powerless than the slaves brought
from Africa to Brazil by the Portuguese in the 16th and 17th century. At least some
of the latter had the opportunity to escape, found their own cities (Quilombos) and
live free from colonial control, at least temporarily. Wolfe (2001: 868) argues that
the primary logic of settler colonialism can be characterized as one of elimination.
Santos and Hallewell (2002: 61) argue that after realizing slave labor was inev-
itably doomed, the Brazilian ruling elites began to stress the need to develop free
labor as a substitute at the same time that they did their utmost to delay the
abolition of slavery. Here we see clearly that the production system changes very
little, and slavery itself is something that changes names. The industrial production
system, with its exploited labor force, became a legalized, widespread and accepted
substitute for slavery, ensuring growing exploitation and freeing industrial pro-
ducers from having to take care of the health of their workforce, thus minimizing
costs. Large-scale production is still taking place and accelerating wage labor
exploitation, and this new type of slavery is instituted under a new name and
with the full backing of the state, with its education, missionary and military sys-
tems. Couto de Magalha es, for instance, argued for pairing up missionaries with
interpreters and military personnel in order to so-called civilize still wild indig-
enous populations in the interior with the hope of converting a million indigenes
into a workforce serving the elites. These elites, in turn, serve the foreign market as
pawns in a reshaped system of colonial exploitation.
Giving indigenous ideas scientic status would undermine the farcical national-
ist project, simply because it is knowledge based on sources that are not recogniz-
able by the self-referential academic practices enshrined as ideal and accepted.
However, some of us sense the coming of a new paradigm that does not assume
that oral histories are some sort of false consciousness but values and supports the
wisdom found within them (e.g. Goulet, 1996; Ingold, 2000; King, 1999; Miller and
Goulet, 2007; Vitebsky, 1995). An uncritical acceptance of Western ways of think-
ing ensures the perpetuation of this farce as a sign of progress in the right direc-
tion. Thus, governments have legitimized indigenous councils modeled on their
Ferrari-Nunes 205
own system, ensuring the existence of class and clan divisions that oppress and
divide rather than generate mutual cooperation. Resistance means lack of academic
tness and immediate disqualication from the acquisition of career resources. As
we have been proactive about providing more academic opportunities for women
and minorities, we make sure that they are thinking in the right way before they
are ltered out. In other words, thinking dierently and challenging conventions is
still seen as a handicap rather than an asset. In other words, one set of prejudices
was simply replaced by another. In contrast to the humanistic approach to cultural
and racial dierences adopted by some late 19th- and early 20th-century Brazilian
intellectuals like Mendes Junior and his father, the reasons used to take over indig-
enous lands in Brazil today derive from the cosmological vision of an exploitative
colonial epistemology and worldview, which supports segregation based on aes-
thetic dierences, conceptualizing the world through an ideology of wealth accu-
mulation, urban development, energy and resource extraction.
We are now at the dawn of an age dominated by multinational corporate cultures
that transcend national boundaries; such boundaries now serve managerial pur-
poses, such as providing various sets of laws in dierent countries to choose from.
It is no mystery to ethnologists that the kind of public accountability mining
and pharmaceutical companies have to face in India, Guatemala and Angola is
not the same as in France, for example. Brazilian ideas of race and biology, inspired
by the Enlightenment in the 19th century, as we have seen in our analysis of
Mendes (1998 [1912]), have diverged considerably from pseudo-scientic racist par-
adigms from Northern Europe that were later challenged by the Boasian Gilberto
Freyre, who had a lasting inuence in the formation of a Brazilian type that sought
virtue in miscegenation. Mixing, increased variation and the absorption of various
elements enhanced biological and psychological health. Blocking out racial impu-
rity, on the other hand, was the racist model proposed by Social Darwinists and
eugenicists.
This article shows how, in general, the images, perceptions and distinctions with
regard to indigenous customs changed according to the histories of the ideas dis-
cussed. Whether in the 16th century, the Enlightenment or the contemporary
world, cultural dierences are perceived and valued on the basis of the ontological,
historical and material circumstances that surround them, which, in turn, are
reected in the expressions of their consciousnesses conceptual knowledge
understandings which are ltered by experiences and memories, and (re)enacted
in the present.
Notes
1. From the Portuguese originarios, original from the land, a term that resembles autoch-
thones, the notion that people are from the land. In this case, it recognizes that indig-
enous peoples were originally (i.e. already) in Brazil before the arrival of the
Portuguese.
2. All translations are mine.
3. Heres an extended definition of this idea:
before a vowel syndesm-, repr. Gr. that which binds together, a ligament, in
recent terms of anatomy. syndesmitis, (a) inammation of the ligaments;
(b) inammation of the conjunctiva. syndesmodontoid a. (n.), applied to the
articulation formed by the transverse ligament of the atlas vertebra and the
odontoid process of the axis. syndesmography, description of the ligaments.
Syndesmology, that branch of anatomy which treats of the ligaments. syndes-
mophyte a bony outgrowth from an injured joint or vertebra. syndesmosis, the
union of two bones by a ligament; hence syndesmotic a. syndesmotomy, dissec-
tion or surgical section of ligaments. (Oxford English Dictionary Online)
4. The doubled R sounds like the English H in have, but it only appears after the first
syllable.
5. Horace wrote:
You sleep upon your bags, heaped up on every side, gaping over them, as if
they were consecrated things, or to amuse yourself with them as if they were
pictures. Are you ignorant of what value money has, what use it can aord?
Bread, herbs, a bottle of wine may be purchased; to which [necessaries], add
[such others], as, being withheld, human nature would be uneasy with itself.
What, to what half dead with terror, night and day, to dread proigate
thieves, re, and your slaves, lest they should run away and plunder you;
is this delightful? I should always wish to be very poor in possessions held
upon these terms. (Horace, 1863 [Sermones, 1.1]: 709)
References
Allen JS (1989) Franz Boass physical anthropology: The critique of racial formalism
revisited. Anthropology 30(1): 7984.
Anderson B (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. London: Verso.
Barbieri SRJ (2005) The constitutional rights of indigenes: The rights to difference and the
principle of the dignity of the human being. Unpublished Masters thesis in law,
UNIMES (Metropolitan University of Santos).
Boas F (1901) The mind of primitive man. Journal of American Folklore 14(52): 111.
Becker HS (1992) Social theory in Brazil. Sociological Theory 10(1): 15.
Bourdieu P (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Nice R (trans).
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Davis M (2004) Planet of slums: Urban involution and the informal proletariat. New Left
Review 26(March/April): 534.
Escobar A and Ribeiro GL (eds) (2006) World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations
within Systems of Power. Oxford: Berg.
Farmer P (2004) An anthropology of structural violence: Sidney W. Mintz lecture for 2001.
Current Anthropology 45(3): 305325.
Foucault M (1999) Abnormal: Lectures at the Colle`ge de France 19741975, Burchell G
(trans). New York: Picador.
Ferrari-Nunes 207
Freyre G (1933) Casa grande e senzala [The Masters and the Slaves].
Gould SJ (1994) The Mismeasure of Man, rev. edn. New York: W.W. Norton.
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 Institute 2(4): 683701.
Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) (1863) The Works of Horace, Smart C and Buckley TA
(trans). New York: Harper and Brothers.
Ingold T (2000) The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill.
New York: Routledge.
Kearney M (1986) From the invisible hand to visible feet: Anthropological studies of migra-
tion and development. Annual Review of Anthropology 15: 331361.
King AD(1999) Soul suckers: Vampiric shamans in northern Kamchatka Russia. Anthropology
of Consciousness 10(4): 5768.
Magalha es C de (1876) O Selvagem [The Savage]. Rio de Janeiro: Typographia da Reforma.
Mendes Junior J (1998 [1912]) Os indigenas do Brazil, seus direitos individuaes e politicos
[The Indigenes of Brazil, Their Individual and Political Rights]. Sa o Paulo: Comissa o
Pro -I
ndio.
Metcalf AC (2005) The entradas of Bahia of the sixteenth century. Special issue Rethinking
Bandeirismo in colonial Brazil. The Americas 61(3): 373400.
Miller BG (2001) The Problem of Justice: Tradition and Law in the Coast Salish World.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Miller BG and Goulet J-G (eds) (2007) Extraordinary Anthropology: Transformations in the
Field. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Monteiro JM (2000) The heathen castes of sixteenth-century Portuguese America: Unity,
diversity, and the invention of the Brazilian Indians. Hispanic American Historical Review
80(4): 697719.
Oliveira Filho de OJ (1999) Projetos de promissa o: A literatura da expansa o ultramarina
Portuguesa no Brasil (se culo XVI) [Projects of promise: The Portuguese literature of
ultramarine expansion in Brazil (16th century). Revista de Letras 39: 3748.
Peirano M (1981) The anthropology of anthropology. Unpublished PhD dissertation,
Harvard University: Cambridge, MA.
Ramos AR (1990) Ethnology Brazilian style. Cultural Anthropology 5(4): 452472.
Ribeiro D (1968) O processo civilizatorio [The Civilizatory Process]. Sa o Paulo: Companhia
das Letras.
Ribeiro D (1970) Os I
ndios e a civizac ao: A integrac ao das populac oes indgenas no

Brasilmoderno [The Indians and Civilization: The Integration of Indigenous Populations
in Modern Brazil]. Sa o Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
Ribeiro D (1995) O povo Brasileiro [The Brazilian People]. Sa o Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
Romo AA (2007) Rethinking race and culture in Brazils first Afro-Brazilian Congress of
1934. Journal of Latin American Studies 39: 3154.
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
Perspectives 29(1): 6182.
Schwarcz LM (1994) Espeta culo da miscigenac a o [The spectacle of miscegenation]. Estudos
Avanc ados 8(20): 137152.
Sousa de GS (2000 [1587]) Tratado descritivo do Brasil em 1587 [A Descriptive Treatise of
Brazil in 1587]. Recife, PE: Editora Massangana.
Stocking G (1995) Center and Periphery: Armchair Anthropology, Missionary Ethnography,
and Evolutionary Theory after Tylor: British Social Anthropology. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 18881951.
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.
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, 8194.
Wasserman RRM (1983) The red and the white: The Indian novels of Jose de Alencar.
PMLA 98(5): 815827.
Weber M (2003-1958) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Parsons T (trans).
Mineola, NY: Dover.
Wolf E (1982) Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Wolfe P (2001) Land, labor, and difference: Elementary structures of race. American
Historical Review 106(3): 866905.
Rodrigo Ferrari-Nunes (MA, University of British Columbia) is a sociocultural
anthropologist, a doctoral student at the University of Aberdeen in anthropology,
and a multi-instrumentalist musician and producer, originally from Brazil. He has
released two instrumental albums (Bias Project 2005 and Habitus 2010), and is the
author of the upcoming book Chess Power a critical exploration of chess meta-
phors, scholarship, geopolitics, nationalism and gender. His anthropological work
has mainly focused on questions of colonialism, development, exploitation, urban-
ization and indigeneity in Brazil. His current project explores his ideas of the
reconstitution of dwelling and a critical anthropology of listening through the
phenomenology of contemporary traditional musical practices in Scotland.
Ferrari-Nunes 209

Ferrari-Nunes, Rodrigo (2011) Indigeneity and Consciousness in Brazil

Transféré par

Informations du document

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Ferrari-Nunes, Rodrigo (2011) Indigeneity and Consciousness in Brazil

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

http://coa.sagepub.

http://coa.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Email Alerts:

- Sep 5, 2011 Version of Record >>

ndio to re-edit this

ndio, who discovered this

ndios e a civizac ao: A integrac ao das populac oes indgenas no

Vous aimerez peut-être aussi