Rethinking Amerindian Spaces in Brazilian History (original) (raw)
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The following essay examines Portuguese and Brazilian understandings of the frontier as a term and concept applicable to Brazil's colonial history. It argues that Brazilian scholars often rejected the frontier as an analytical concept because of perceived excesses in its application to U.S. history. These reservations proved prescient, as their North American colleagues would come to share many of the same objections. In pushing the idea aside, however, Brazilian scholars sometimes overlooked the historical relevance of frontier incorporation during the colonial period. A renewal of scholarly interest in the subject points to a growing conviction that the colonial history of Brazil cannot be adequately rendered without close attention to internal territorial consolidation, whether or not the term frontier is used to describe this process. This foreign paradigm from the past century, one that never quite caught on among Brazilian intellectuals, has now been reshaped and rehabilitated.
e-journal of Portuguese History, 2021
Bruno Miranda & Mariana Dantas. The colonial administration and management of the indigenous peoples of Brazil has been a recurrent theme in historiography. However, the Amerindians themselves, important actors in the process of constructing colonial society, are largely absent from the historical literature. This article's objective is to critically debate, using modern historiographic methods and theory, three important aspects for understanding the governance of the Amerindians of Brazil: the religious administration, the control of native lands, and the management of their labor. This requires consideration of the indigenous people as actors in their own history and of their actions of resistance, adaptation, and negotiation when engaging with the colonial powers.
First christened the Minas dos Cataguases (the Cataguá Indian mines), the mineral-rich inland territory that became known as Minas Gerais (the general mining district) did so only later, as the eighteenth century unfolded (see map 4). The original name assigned to the region by the Portuguese explorers who traversed its mountains and river valleys bespoke a colonial history set in motion by encounters with native peoples. For generations, scholarship devoted to its fabled history contributed little to our understanding of the process by which its indigenous inhabitants responded. Even though their presence was the topic of countless contemporaneous administrative and ecclesiastical discussions, the mining district's Indians remained virtually unstudied until quite recently. 1 Although a few historians noted native participation in the early history of Portuguese America's primary gold-and diamond-producing zone, they almost always did so in the most restricted fashion, reducing the role of Indians to preliminary interactions, without considering their subsequent importance as historical agents who contributed to the captaincy's social and cultural formation. Even when their persistent presence was noted, Indians were treated as a mere afterthought and assigned an inferior status. A primary justification for this gap in the historiography was the alleged genocide perpetrated by paramilitary expeditions of conquest, known as entradas (entrances) and bandeiras (flag-bearing troops), toward the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries. According to this narrative, the first colonists penetrated the region's sertões (backlands), advanced indiscriminately through indigenous territory, and decimated the native population. 2 Indians were presumed to have been all but exterminated, leaving them no active role in the construction of regional society. Our objective in this essay is to refute this interpretation. We are not the first to recognize the survival of native peoples in the mining district long after the onset of Portuguese exploration, conquest, and settlement. 3 However, our analysis of an extensive corpus of neglected archival sources has allowed us to offer a significantly more complete rendering of this chapter of Brazil's indigenous history. 4 In this text we emphasize a particular aspect of our
Ethnohistory, 2018
This article focuses on the geographical space between the Amazon delta and the Maroni River (nowadays Brazilian Amapá and French Guiana) in 1600-1730. An imperial frontier between France and Portugal South American possessions, it has been conceptualized as a refuge zone for Amerindians fleeing European colonization. On the contrary, this article argues that the migrations and movements of people toward and within this Amerindian space have to be understood as a continuation of a pre-European set of indigenous networks. Through the reconstruction of multilingual and multiethnic networks, this article brings to light connections and exchanges that make of this space an Amerindian center as well as a European frontier. It analyzes conflicts, gatherings, celebrations, migrations, and alliances between European and Amerindian groups, including the Aruã, Maraon, Arikaré, Palikur, and Galibi. Rather than a refuge zone, this space remained central to Amerindian life and to the upholding of indigenous autonomy due to the maintenance of inter-and intra-ethnic connections and the regular use of routes across this space.
This article's objective is to present, via bibliographic research, the territorial makeup of colonial Brazil (1500-1822) and the Brazilian historical approach at the beginning of the twentieth century that sought to relate questions and concepts of frontier, territoriality, and nature in the historic role of the bandeirante movement. The goal here is to address territorial and geographic questions, but also environmental ones, based on historical geography, and to present arguments that fall in the nexus between history and nature in the debate on Brazilian territorial expansion. The text is grounded in classical works, and works by renown authors on this topic, but we also include discussion of less well known sources. The intent is to identify how the theme of bandeirantes and Brazilian westward expansion can be analyzed differently in the pertinent specialized historical literature.
Ethnografeast III: Ethnography and the Public Sphere …, 2007
This article is a debate on research that deals with categories pre-defined in the public agenda. It is supported by an experience of doing an anthropological study for the Tupinambá of Olivença aimed at the identification of a juridical category of "indigenous land" defined by the 1988 Constitution of Brazil. The main argument developed in this article starts with the assumption that in the contemporary situation the definition of public categories that involves cultural and social rights of minorities, such as terra indígena, have been defined in public debates in which anthropologists were involved. One of the necessary results of such a situation is that anthropology cannot see these categories as exogenous concepts to be criticized, but as categories of knowledge to be addressed. A detailed proposition of how I have addressed the issue concerning the delimitation of the seacoast border of the indigenous land of the Tupinambá of Olivença is here developed, showing how ethnography in anthropology is a particularly good device to achieve this challenges. Through the Tupinambá case, it is showed how ethnography as situated knowledge, enmeshed in a comparative project and prepared to incorporate the struggles that people face when dealing with conflict situations, intertwines public and indigenous definitions of social categories (in this case, the land) through what is here named compatible agendas. kEywOrds: ethnography and advocacy, indigenous human rights, landscape and sociality, indigenous land, Brazil, Americanist debates.
Landscape of Resistance: The Fronts of Economic Expansion and the Xavante Indigenous People—Brazil
Indigenous People, 2017
This article has the objective of identifying and reflecting upon the sociocultural strategies that allowed the Xavante Indians, after centuries of cultural spoliation and territory expropriation, the development of different adaptive mechanisms that guaranteed their reproduction. Here, the attempt is to show that those sociocultural strategies and mechanisms were decisive in the maintenance of its territory, social cohesion, and relative cultural autonomy. Likewise, as a specific objective of this article, one intends to identify which of those cultural changes are perceived in the landscape, seeking a deeper comprehension of the appropriation mechanisms developed by those people in the interface with the Brazilian contemporary society. The proposed methodology to reach the said objectives has been built upon extensive multidisciplinary bibliographical surveys, interviews, and field observations that made feasible, among other things, a more refined construction of the Xavante historiography and a more precise understanding of the social organization variation of those people. Finally, it is proposed here to view the Xavante people as the main subject of their decisions, capable of offering resistance to the progress of capitalist expansion fronts upon their territory and, above all, capable of maintaining their sociocultural cohesion deciding on the course of their own development.