Maria Fernanda Ziegler | FAPESP Agency – Indigenous peoples have occupied Brazilian territory for more than 10 thousand years. There are currently around 900 thousand individuals, distributed among 305 ethnicities with 274 different languages, according to the latest Census by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), carried out in 2010. This population occupies 722 reserve areas protected by legislation , which correspond to 13,8% of the territory and form a kind of enclave of tension between two cultures, two production systems, two Brazils.
“Integration in Brazil is always thought of as cultural assimilation, which is absolutely wrong. Indigenous people do not want to be assimilated, they could if they wanted. But that’s not the idea,” he said. Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences at the University of São Paulo (FFLCH-USP), during the eighth episode of the program Open Science of 2019.
For the anthropologist, cultural assimilation, “disguised in the euphemism of integrating Brazil”, aims to eliminate cultural differences and pave the way for the liberalization of indigenous lands for the market. The potential for mineral and agricultural exploration in some of these areas has led to the allegation in certain sectors of society that there is “too much land for too few Indians”.
"The criticism is to say that Indians are not productive, in the sense understood by capitalism. However, the way non-indigenous people want to explore and take away wealth is just a repetition of the entire history of Brazil – a constant exploitation of natural resources , without great results. It's just taking natural wealth to export, without taking advantage of existing knowledge and, in fact, transforming it into wealth", said Artionka Capiberibe, professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp).
Capiberibe emphasizes that the Indians' right to land was reiterated in the 1988 Constitution, a charter that also celebrates diversity as a value to be preserved.
In the evaluation of Geraldo Andrello, professor at the Center for Education and Human Sciences (CECH) at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar), with or without the law, it is now possible to witness the effects of the simple desire to free up indigenous lands for exploration.
“There was an 85% increase in clandestine mining alerts and a 38% increase in clandestine deforestation alerts on indigenous lands. This was only in the first half of 2019 and although the federal government is just discussing and announcing that it will send a proposal to tamper with indigenous lands. It is an announcement that has been repeatedly stated”, said Andrello.
contemporary
For the three anthropologists who participated in the program Open Science, it is necessary to highlight that, despite their own way of life and a different culture from non-indigenous people, Brazilian indigenous populations are not frozen in time.
“Indigenous people are our contemporaries. There is an idea that places indigenous populations as traditional and us [non-indigenous] as modern. In fact, neither we are modern nor they are traditional in the sense of cultures frozen in time,” said Capiberibe.
And what would be the definition of an indigenous people or individual? A few years ago, anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro proposed the need for a self-definition of indigenous peoples. Thus, an Indian is someone who is recognized by an indigenous people.
“Therefore, there is no such thing as an Indian, but a community that recognizes him as such. In this way, not just any community can consider itself indigenous, as a historical cultural link with pre-Columbian social organizations is necessary,” said Andrello.
According to the researcher, when we talk about indigenous peoples we are talking about diversity. “It is risky to try to establish parameters to indicate what indigenous peoples, as a whole, have in common. We are talking about diversity,” he said.
Perhaps, in the opinion of program participants, unity lies in the relationship with nature. “The relationship between indigenous peoples and what we call natural resources is completely opposite to the relationships that we in the West establish. In general, our relationship with natural beings is basically subject-object. Man is the subject of the relationship and the beings of nature are the intentionally inert objects”, he said.
An example that would explain the relationship between indigenous peoples and nature is the Guayapi, a Tupi-speaking people who live in Amapá and French Guiana.
“They do not have a colonialist view of their land. What is colonialist? It’s thinking that everything you occupy is at your service, for your well-being, which is the traditional Western view of nature,” said Carneiro da Cunha.
In this way, explains Carneiro da Cunha, the Guayapi “understand that the forest, the animals and the trees, for example, have rights. The river has rights and is a shared place, which was not created just for the enjoyment of humanity, but for all beings there. This understanding completely transforms the relationship with what we call nature, which, in fact, is a concept that doesn’t even exist among many people,” he said.
This worldview perhaps explains why, in the Amazon region, indigenous lands are better preserved than neighboring areas.
The “Indigenous” episode of the program Open Science It had the participation of students from the universities of São Paulo (USP) and the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), the Federal Institute of São Paulo and the Escola Estadual Prof. Manuel Ciridião Buarque.
Open Science is a partnership between FAPESP and the newspaper Folha de S. Paul. The program is presented by Alexandra Ozorio de Almeida, editorial director of the magazine FAPESP Research.
The new episode can be seen on the FAPESP Agency No. Facebook e No. YouTube and also on the website of TV Folha.
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