The earliest European accounts of Brazil’s indigenous inhabitants focused on the natives’ startling appearance and conduct—especially their nakedness and cannibalistic rituals—and on the process of converting them to clothed, docile Christian vassals. This volume contributes to the unfinished task of moving beyond such polarities and dispelling the stereotypes they fostered, which have impeded scholars’ ability to make sense of Brazil’s rich indigenous past. This volume is a significant contribution to understanding the ways Brazil’s native peoples shaped their own histories. Incorporating the tools of anthropology, geography, cultural studies, and literary analysis, alongside those of history, the contributors revisit old sources and uncover new ones. They examine the Indians’ first encounters with Portuguese explorers and missionaries and pursue the consequences through four centuries. Some of the peoples they investigate were ultimately defeated and displaced by the implacable advance of settlement. Many individuals died from epidemics, frontier massacres, and forced labor. Hundreds of groups eventually disappeared as distinct entities. Yet many others found ways to prolong their independent existence or to enter colonial and later national society, making constrained but pivotal choices along the way.

How do the lives of indigenous peoples relate to the romanticized role of "Indians" in Brazilian history, politics, and cultural production? Native and National in Brazil charts this enigmatic relationship from the sixteenth century to the present, focusing on the consolidation of the dominant national imaginary in the postindependence period and highlighting Native peoples' ongoing work to decolonize it. Engaging issues ranging from sovereignty, citizenship, and national security to the revolutionary potential of art, sustainable development, and the gendering of ethnic differences, Tracy Devine Guzman argues that the tensions between popular renderings of "Indianness" and lived indigenous experience are critical to the unfolding of Brazilian nationalism, on the one hand, and the growth of the Brazilian indigenous movement, on the other. Devine Guzmán suggests that the "indigenous question" now posed by Brazilian indigenous peoples themselves-how to be Native and national at the same time-can help us to rethink national belonging in accordance with the protection of human rights, the promotion of social justice, and the consolidation of democratic governance for indigenous and nonindigenous citizens alike.

Examines the relationship of the Kayapo and Yanomami, two indigenous groups of the Amazon region, to Brazilian society and the wider world. Revised and updated from an earlier edition, the book includes new chapters on the resurgence of indigenous groups previously thought extinct and the renewed controversy among anthropologists studying the Yanomami.

DIVHow the Xavante Indians have reshaped the Brazilian government’s policies of nationalism and assimiliation./div

Anthropologists widely agree that identities_even ethnic and racial ones_are socially constructed. Less understood are the processes by which social identities are conceived and developed. Legalizing Identities shows how law can successfully serve

D. THE INDIGENOUS LANDS

This book analyzes the contribution of financial market institutions—banks and the stock and bond exchange—to São Paulo's economic modernization at the turn of the twentieth century.

This book unveils an ignored aspect of the Brazilian history: how the colonization of the country shaped the sexuality of its indigenous population. Based on textual research, the authors show how the government and religious institutions gradually imposed the family model considered as "normal" to Brazilian indigenous gays through forced labor, punishment, marriages with non-indigenous and other methods. However, such disciplinary practices didn’t prevent the resistance of the natives whose sexuality operates out of the hegemonic model, and the book also analyzes the impact of these forms of dissent on the development of indigenous movements, interethnic relations and indigenous policies in Brazil. Building upon Post-Colonial and Queer theories, the authors present a historical overview of the ideas and practices employed by the religious and governmental authorities to repress homosexuality among indigenous peoples since the beginning of the colonization process, on the 16th century. They also show how this process of colonization of indigenous sexualities goes beyond the formal colonization period, which ended with the Brazilian Independence in 1822, and is part of a wider process of compulsory heterosexualization and heteronormativity of native peoples, based on scientific, theological, social and cultural assumptions that inspired religious, civilizing, academic and political practices throughout Brazilian history.

Doña Marina (La Malinche) ...Pocahontas ...Sacagawea—their names live on in historical memory because these women bridged the indigenous American and European worlds, opening the way for the cultural encounters, collisions, and fusions that shaped the social and even physical landscape of the modern Americas. But these famous individuals were only a few of the many thousands of people who, intentionally or otherwise, served as "go-betweens" as Europeans explored and colonized the New World. In this innovative history, Alida Metcalf thoroughly investigates the many roles played by go-betweens in the colonization of sixteenth-century Brazil. She finds that many individuals created physical links among Europe, Africa, and Brazil—explorers, traders, settlers, and slaves circulated goods, plants, animals, and diseases. Intercultural liaisons produced mixed-race children. At the cultural level, Jesuit priests and African slaves infused native Brazilian traditions with their own religious practices, while translators became influential go-betweens, negotiating the terms of trade, interaction, and exchange. Most powerful of all, as Metcalf shows, were those go-betweens who interpreted or represented new lands and peoples through writings, maps, religion, and the oral tradition. Metcalf's convincing demonstration that colonization is always mediated by third parties has relevance far beyond the Brazilian case, even as it opens a revealing new window on the first century of Brazilian history.

Originally published in Portuguese in 1994 as Negros da Terra, this field-defining work by the late historian John M. Monteiro has been translated into English by Professors Barbara Weinstein and James Woodard. Monteiro's work established ethnohistory as a field in colonial Brazilian studies and made indigenous history a vital part of how scholars understand Brazil's colonial past. Drawing on over two dozen collections on both sides of the Atlantic, Monteiro rescued Indians from invisibility, documenting their role as both objects and actors in Brazil's colonial past and, most importantly, providing the first history of Indian slavery in Brazil. Monteiro demonstrates how Indian enslavement, not exploration or the search for mineral wealth, was the driving force behind expansion out of São Paulo and through the South American backcountry. This book makes a groundbreaking contribution not only to Latin American history, but to the history of indigenous slavery in the Americas generally.