Dossier “Fighting for Indigenous Lands in Modern Brazil.
The reframing of cultures and identities”

Fighting for lands and reframing the culture

João Pacheco de Oliveira
Programa de Pós-Graduação em Antropologia Social, Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro/RJ, Brasil

Indigenous lands and territories have attracted little attention in studies on the peoples and cultures of the South American lowlands. They are usually presented as credible information, similar to the climate or political regime. A component of the landscape where social life occurs, mentioned by careful ethnographers, but never addressed as a social and political phenomenon to be adopted as the central focus of research.

Justifications for such, often only implicit, can vary widely, suggesting that they are the subject of other disciplines (geography, law, or political science), which supposedly have more appropriate methods and concepts. At other times, the argument for rejection rests on the assumption that lands and territories are involved in questions of an exclusively practical nature, directly connected to the administrative interests and political demands of groups and individuals. The subject thus, covered with passions and contradictory formulations, does not constitute a favourable object for scientific investigation and the advance of anthropology.

The set of works that integrate this Dossier advance in precisely the opposite direction. They affirm indigenous lands and territories as the object of an ethnographic view, striving to establish procedures of method and propose concepts and hypotheses that can serve as a beacon for investigation, contributing to a more dynamic and in-depth understanding. This could not be achieved without a critical effort to rethink the classical tradition of anthropology, recovering its potentialities and seeking to overcome its limits. Moving away from a strict mimesis of this tradition, seeking to incorporate experiences in the construction of other anthropologies, drawing in particular on formulations and existing lines of research in the Latin American and Brazilian context.