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Brazil, Anthropology in
MARIZA PEIRANO
Universidade de Brasília, Brazil

The development of anthropology in Brazil tells of a constant movement of both

differentiation between neighboring disciplines and expansion into new fields of
interest. When the social sciences were institutionalized in the 1930s, sociology was
an encompassing subject that included what we today distinguish as anthropology,
sociology, and political science. Over the years, a process of differentiation has taken
place between the disciplines but the major institutional links between them have
been maintained. By the late 1960s, social anthropology had become the dominant,
hegemonic orientation within anthropology, and the following decades saw a steady
movement of inclusion of other topics besides anthropology’s traditional definition
as the study of indigenous peoples. Today, anthropology embraces a broad array of
interests, both in a sizable Portuguese-speaking community at home, and in significant
international contacts abroad.
After a brief overview of the historical context, two approaches are presented: the
process by which a sociology lineage gave way to contemporary anthropology and an
ideal-type approach to reveal the sort of alterities that are at stake in Brazil.

Brief setting: The case for elite education

European standards of intellectual life have always been a major source of inspiration
and dialogue in Brazil, whether explicit or implicit, since the early nineteenth century,
when the Portuguese court moved to Rio de Janeiro in a flight from Napoleon’s invasion
of Portugal. Whereas Brazilian intellectuals sought approval from the old continent,
formal education lagged behind. From 1808 to 1882 twenty-four proposals for the
foundation of universities went before Parliament but all were rejected. The Portuguese
crown prohibited the founding of universities in the country during the colonial period,
and the Brazilian elite was educated at the few existing seminaries, at law schools,
and primarily at Coimbra, Portugal, one of the oldest European intellectual centers of
education. The local Portuguese-speaking elite was relatively homogeneous and able
to deal with the administrative and political tasks of governing the country (Carvalho
1975). Independent Brazil was a monarchy from 1822 through 1889. Its second
emperor (Dom Pedro II, 1825–91), a patron of the arts and sciences, encouraged and
sponsored some independent schools (e.g., the Escola de Minas de Ouro Preto [Mining
School of Ouro Preto] in Minas Gerais) and encouraged the founding of ethnological
museums: the Museu Paulista (1893) in São Paulo; the Museu Paraense (1894) in Pará;
and the reform of the Museu Nacional, in Rio de Janeiro, in 1890. Several geographical
The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea1636
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and geological commissions to explore the hinterland of the country followed suit.
These observed the naturalistic tradition established by the German explorers before
them (e.g., Von Martius’s [1817–20] and von den Steinen’s [1884, 1887–88] expedi-
tions), but they primarily sought to provide information about the hinterland for the
central government. Among such expeditions, the Rondon expedition (1892–1930),
whose aim was to exploring the interior in order to establish telegraph lines, ended up
contacting aboriginal populations; this led to the creation, in 1910, of the governmental
agency, Serviço de Proteção aos Índios (Indian Protection Service). Its aim primarily
was to pacify and assimilate the Indian population into the national society.
Higher education in Brazil was still restricted to independent schools of law, engi-
neering, and medicine, the latter being the cradle for many professed anthropologists
around the country, who were interested in topics such as race and the prospects of
so-called Brazilian miscegenation, medical issues, criminality, and degeneracy, often
with a footing in folklore and psychiatry. An answer to the deep sense of “national
inadequacy,” motivated by a European perception of Brazil, was a pressing concern.
Upon the proclamation of the republic in 1889, some responded to the European
view of Brazil as degenerate with claims that the country was progressing admirably and
that, given its natural resources, it was destined for greatness. Others tried to accommo-
date themselves to European theories of racial and climatic determinism, while another
group rejected the European frame of reference, believing that the solution to Brazil’s
relative backwardness could not be achieved by dialogue with theories of determinism
but only through careful analysis of the historical causes of its conditions at the time. The
latter writers were the forerunners of a new understanding of the “Brazilian problem,”
which would come to the fore during the 1920s and 1930s with the rise of “Brazilian
modernism,” primarily as a literary movement.
It was in this context that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, in the major
urban centers, a movement for educational reform gained momentum. At the time,
the urgent need for it was considered more of a priority even than economic devel-
opment. The educators took a sociological approach (based on the writings of Émile
Durkheim) that regarded the problem as sociopolitical and not merely administrative.
The “Manifesto dos Pioneiros da Escola Nova” (“Proclamation of the Pioneers of the
New School”), issued in 1932, proposed both reforms in the elementary schools and
the creation of universities and blamed the late nineteenth-century political system
for the emphasis on professional schools. The educators, as the social link between
the literary men of the 1920s and the social scientists who followed them, became
important figures in the foundation of the universities in the 1930s. That decade’s effer-
vescence had peaked in 1922, during the Week of Modern Art in São Paulo to celebrate
the first centennial of Brazilian independence. This movement insisted that literature,
music, and painting should draw from what was ultimately considered national, now
in a positive disposition, despite the inspiration it had gained from the French and Ital-
ian avant-garde at the time. As a paradigmatic example, the well-known paulista Mário
de Andrade, a writer, musician, poet, and folklorist, conducted “ethnographic trips” in
the period 1928–29, in which a group of artists visited the northeast to gather popular
motifs, expressions, and music in an attempt to incorporate them into the noble arts.
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BR A ZI L , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN 3

The increasing confidence in things Brazilian opened the way to a specific literary
genre, the historico-sociological essay with literary overtones, which was at the height of
its fullest development. Gilberto Freyre, a student of Franz Boas, had an optimistic con-
ception of Brazil as unique, ethnically mixed, and a tropical civilization; Sérgio Buarque
de Holanda wrote a concise but influential book on Brazilian roots through comparing
the Portuguese and Spanish population settlement patterns in Latin America; and Caio
Prado Junior’s groundbreaking work provided a materialistic explanation of the colonial
legacy.
The institutionalization of the social sciences changed this picture, shifting intellec-
tuals’ social roles into separated and specialized academic categories. As in other parts
of the world, literature, rather than philosophy or the human sciences, had up till then
performed the task of reflecting on social issues, but this state of affairs was to change.
Self-taught literary men continued to reflect on Brazilian social conditions in a creative
and aesthetic vein, but social scientists inherited the task of critically evaluating, analyz-
ing, and eventually contributing in a rigorous scientific way to solving the questions of
social and/or territorial integration of a country into a modern nation-state. Social sci-
entists were to become cultivated knowledgeable citizens, replacing socioliterary essays
with their analyses, through the search for academic excellence merged with a social
commitment to a better society.

Why São Paulo?

Though schools of liberal arts had increased in number after the proclamation of the
republic in the late nineteenth century, the new universities were launched only in the
1930s, in Rio de Janeiro (the capital of the country at the time) and in São Paulo. Rio’s
Universidade do Distrito Federal (UDF) was doomed to fail, as it could not survive the
contradiction between the liberal ideology on which it was based and the fact that, as a
federal university, it was under direct control of the central government. It survived for
only four years. However, the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) became an influential
center and socially recognized model for the teaching of the social sciences, especially
sociology, for decades to come.
If Brazil, as the seat of the Portuguese empire, had been a historical anomaly in
the early nineteenth century, São Paulo was another at the beginning of the twentieth
century. The economic development that had been achieved had not led to a change
in political mentality. State support of the new institutions was meant to produce a
liberal intellectual elite that would propagate a European model of representation
in the face of the dominant patrimonial regime that had prevailed since colonial
times. By 1932, frustration was widespread and it was clear that centralization, rather
than decentralization, would result (Schwartzman 1975). It was in this context that a
paulista group, composed of large-scale coffee producers, newspaper owners, and the
state government, took the view that the social sciences and the humanities, together
with pure science, were the means for forging a more enlightened governing elite. A
radical project, based on canons of scholarly competence, was instituted to educate
an elite for political action. Instead of sending more students abroad, as had been
the tradition up till then, the new project aimed to attract European “missions” to
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spend time in Brazil. Influenced by French and German university models, a group of
intellectuals traveled to Europe to invite specialists to teach at the new Universidade de
São Paulo on temporary contracts, for just long enough to educate the next generation
of Brazilian students.
For the purpose of establishing the new Faculty of Philosophy, Science, and Letters,
a commission went to France and invited professors of sociology, history, philosophy,
ethnology, and geography to come to Brazil. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s stay in Brazil in the
1930s was part of this initiative. In Italy, whose political ideas were questionable to the
Brazilian liberal elite, invitations were made to mathematicians, physicists, and geol-
ogists; and from Germany came professors of zoology, chemistry, and botany. At the
same time, in São Paulo a new school, dedicated mainly to sociology, the Escola Livre
de Sociologia e Política (ELSP) (Free School of Sociology and Politics), was created
by industrial sectors. Professors more oriented to Anglo influences were brought from
the United States and from Britain. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown spent two years during the
1940s at the ELSP; his limited influence on students may have resulted from the fact
that, at the time, French was the intellectual lingua franca. The combination of the two
sources of influence, USP and ELSP, was to be essential to many students, since mas-
ter’s degrees were not awarded by the Universidade de São Paulo, and many students
attended courses and obtained degrees from both institutions.
As philosophy had never existed in Brazil as an institutional discipline, USP’s aim was
not to educate philosophers but to engender a critical attitude toward Brazilian social
and cultural thinking. The university was ready by 1934, but student applications were
slow to materialize. The young generations in São Paulo were not yet prepared to follow
a scientific career rather than the major professional ones of law, medicine, and engi-
neering. It was necessary to approach pedagogy students, who hoped to follow a teach-
ing career, to convince them of the important role of the new Faculdade de Filosofia, of
the variety of its courses, and of the new perspective that would open up for those who
decided to follow them. In March 1935 the courses finally started, with 177 students
enrolled, sixty-four of whom were registered in the social sciences and philosophy.
An indirect specialization of intellectual roles followed suit. During the first decades
of the twentieth century, social reflection had been carried out mostly by individual
thinkers such as historians, writers, journalists, lawyers, and educators. The appearance
of the social scientists in the 1930s to take responsibility for rigorously and critically
evaluating and analyzing the possibilities for social development slowly produced a
schism between the socioliterary essays and the formal academic literature of the new
disciplines.
The difficulty of recruiting regular students contrasted with the enthusiastic support
of the São Paulo elite, who followed the courses of the best-known professors like avid
auditors. Members of well-known families, and even the governor himself, attended the
classes. For students and professors, though, a different picture emerged: foreign pro-
fessors were concerned with the students’ ability to acquire and to understand the new
ideas and were surprised to find them knowledgeable of the latest Parisian intellectual
fashions (Lévi-Strauss 1955). Brazilian students were ambivalent and more interested
in judging their professors’ basic attitude toward teaching in a less developed country.
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They wanted to make sure that they were free to pursue their independent views with
regard to their intellectual roles.
The following decades saw further movements in the trend toward differentiation,
whereas the all-embracing sociology would slowly be dismembered as anthropol-
ogy, sociology, and political science. Anthropology—then concerned basically with
Indian populations—were not at the center of attention in terms of institutional
prestige, despite significant names such as Herbert Baldus, Egon Schaden (1954),
and, outside academia, Curt Nimuendajú (Baldus 1946). Divergences toward the
sociology-centered group have opened up the space for other interests in anthropology
in a segmentation movement that, a couple of decades later, would allow the emergence
of urban anthropologists, such as Ruth Cardoso and Eunice Durham (Magnani 2012).
Sociology was the most encompassing, relevant, and prestigious of the disciplines
to answer the call to help create a new, knowledgeable, political elite. It maintained
its hegemony among the social sciences, at least from the 1950s to the 1970s, when
anthropology began to dispute the leadership.

The social sciences in Brazil: Differentiation between

disciplines

Florestan Fernandes’s (1920–95) career provides a key example of the movement that
gave proper shape to sociological concerns over time. It also illustrates what anthro-
pology was not meant to be at the time. As one of the first USP philosophy faculty
students, later considered the founder of the “Paulista school of sociology,” he faced
the task of transforming into a sociologia feita-no-Brasil (made-in-Brazil sociology) the
legacy he had received from the French sociologists and ethnologists who had taught
him, together with the German influence from the ELSP, where he had been awarded
his MA. By present standards, the beginning of his career was that of a true anthropolo-
gist but it was an anthropology that did not take hold straightaway; it made a comeback
only three decades later.

Fernandes’s Tupinambá
In the unavoidable ambience of the modernist movement at the time, Fernandes’s
first challenge was to prove that a Brazilian student could solve a problem that even
renowned ethnologists such as Alfred Métraux (1902–63) could not figure out: to
reconstruct the social organization of the Tupinambá Indians inhabiting the country
when the Portuguese arrived through the documentation left by so-called cronistas
(chroniclers), namely, travelers, missionaries, and colonizers. Encouraged by Herbert
Baldus at the ELSP, Fernandes expanded a final paper to test the consistency of his early
findings and, in 1947, produced his MA thesis, “A organização social dos Tupinambá”
(Tupinambá Social Organization; Fernandes 1963). For his doctoral dissertation
presented at USP, he later amplified his analysis by focusing on warfare in “A função
social da guerra na sociedade Tupinambá” (The Social Function of War in Tupinambá
Society; Fernandes 1970).
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Proving that a Brazilian student could defy well-established facts revealed that
intellectual (and “international”) competence was at stake. Fernandes received full
academic recognition in Brazil and, with the support of Métraux, had the research
results published in France. What was at stake in his project was also a commitment to
the roots of Brazilian history. Surprisingly, both the publisher and the author discov-
ered that important books do not necessarily sell well and that the rigorous analysis
of the zero moment of Brazilian history did not have public appeal. Instead, Fernandes
used his social recognition within academia to gather together a group of former
students and to recruit them to teach at USP. His Tupinambá feat was not repeated. It
also took several decades for the books to be acknowledged as truly anthropological
because the following generation simply considered them as Fernandes’s “functionalist
phase” and as something to be superseded.
Fernandes’s disappointment with the seven-year dedication to reconstruct
Tupinambá social organization indicated that a change in direction should fol-
low. A confrontation with society was needed to solve the dilemma of combining
an academic career with a political viewpoint, a concern very much felt by most of
Fernandes’s generation. His answer was participation in a UNESCO research project
in the following years, in collaboration with his former USP French professor, Roger
Bastide, with the purpose of establishing a scientifically acceptable definition of “race.”
Brazil was considered an example of racial democracy. Fernandes’s participation
in this venture generated an important shift from the dominant approach to the
optimistic interpretations of national character by Gilberto Freyre (1900–1987), as
well as the studies previously carried out in Bahia by Nina Rodrigues (1862–1906)
and the pioneering approach of Arthur Ramos (1903–46), who introduced psychi-
atry and psychoanalysis to challenge the academic prejudices of the time. Instead
of looking at race from the perspective of so-called primitives, neurotics, or the
alienated in conditions of deficiency, Fernandes assumed that “race relations are
social relations” and that they must be seen as part of the class system that had
been dictated by economic factors in the historical development of Brazilian soci-
ety (Fernandes 1972). “Races” must be seen in social relations and not as unique
entities.
The phase of confrontation with society continued with Fernandes’s writings on
dependent capitalism and the social classes in Latin America and on the bourgeois
revolution in Brazil, namely, large sociological pictures of the development of Brazil
after independence—the seeds of what later would become dependency theory. The
1964 military coup forced the retirement of many of the well-known USP sociologists
of the time, providing an unexpected space for a renewed mode of doing (social)
anthropology to flourish.

Interethnic friction
The connections between intellectual lineages materialized in a peculiar generational
way when in 1953 Darcy Ribeiro (1922–97) invited one of Fernandes’s students,
Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira (1928–2006), to be his assistant in an anthropology
specialization course to be offered at the newly founded Museu do Índio, housed at the
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BR A ZI L , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN 7

Indian Protection Service in Rio de Janeiro. At the time, São Paulo was the cradle for
recruiting new talent.
Ribeiro had been educated at the ELSP, under the influence of Herbert Baldus
(1899–1970). His readings of classical socioliterary essays from the beginning of the
century led him to refocus the traditional interest in Indians as alternative modes
of society by bringing to the fore flesh-and-blood individuals and their destiny in
terms of surviving contact with Brazilian society. From strict field research on Indian
populations at the beginning of his career, he moved toward major concerns related to
their acculturation into the wider society and to the pioneer groups (which he called
“expansion fronts”) that reached the Indians (Ribeiro 1970).
Educated at USP under Fernandes, the new assistant, Cardoso de Oliveira resented
the lack of theoretical sophistication in Ribeiro’s approach, which conceived a typology
for explaining contact (isolation, intermittent contact, permanent contact, and integra-
tion), but he did maintain an interest in the Indian question—who, from a symbolic tiny
minority of the Brazilian population, were to become a token of Brazilian society itself.
Apart from the experiment of the Tupinambá studies, Cardoso de Oliveira received his
inspiration from Fernandes’s race-relations approach. In this movement, anthropology
maintained its interest in the study of Indians but shifted to analysis of “interethnic
relations” or, in Cardoso de Oliveira’s new formulation, “interethnic friction” (Car-
doso de Oliveira 1963, 1978). Sociology was thus divided up in terms of institutional
settings, and the center of gravity of anthropology moved from São Paulo to Rio. Its
immediate subject was revised and now included a dynamic dialectical approach to the
topic of contact. It was now formulated as “social anthropology,” in contrast to Ribeiro’s
cultural-anthropology perspective. Interethnic relations were based on the idea of con-
tact as totalities themselves, unified by opposing interests and not simply on separate
entities in touch with one another. The primacy of social relations (economic, political,
and kinship) was to outweigh Ribeiro’s static acculturation approach, a disagreement
that helped to trigger Cardoso de Oliveira’s move to Museu Nacional to found a new
specialization course with the collaboration of anthropologist Luiz de Castro Faria; this
was later transformed into the first graduate anthropology program in 1968.
Interethnic friction thus tried to focus on the contact between Indian populations
and the national society itself, not the Indians on the one hand and the local popu-
lation on the other but its dynamic aspects. For Cardoso de Oliveira (1963, 43), the
contact situation is “syncretic,” that is, “a situation in which two groups are dialectically
‘unified’ through opposing interests.” In this fashion, the author tried to overcome the
inadequacy he saw both in the idea of “social change” and in “acculturation,” coming
from British and from American authors, respectively. Instead, he wanted to imprint on
anthropology the same line that Brazilian sociologists (e.g., Fernandes) had developed,
concentrating on the relations brought about by the contact.
A deep move occurred in this context: though Indian populations continued to be
the cardinal topic of anthropology, Cardoso de Oliveira moved away from the tradi-
tional concerns of respected scholars such as Herbert Baldus and Egon Schaden to
introduce Fernandes’s then hegemonic sociological approach. The theoretical frame-
works of sociology and anthropology were not to be totally separated, and Indians were
to be maintained as objects of study as long as they were seen within the totality of
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8 BR A ZI L , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN

interethnic contact. From Fernandes, Cardoso de Oliveira also mastered the example
of the significance of institutional basis to elevate anthropology to a respectable and
eminent academic discipline, later launching a second graduate program at the Univer-
sidade de Brasília and subsequently collaborating with the faculty’s graduate program
of social sciences at the Universidade de Campinas in the São Paulo state. In analyti-
cal terms, race questions evolving from the enslavement of Africans have resurfaced as
interethnic relations concerning indigenous first nations.
The sociogenetic moment of the institutionalization of the social sciences in Brazil
has resulted in a permanent tension between the aspiration for excellence and theo-
retical accomplishments—the consequence of direct contacts with European scholars,
with whom Brazilians compared and against whom they judged themselves—and the
commitment to social causes to a better and more egalitarian society. “How do we show
our readers we are socialists?” was a constant question for young social scientists. It was
thus usual for the first generation of sociologists and anthropologists, later in their lives
and often directly, to get involved in politics after returning from exile due to the 1964
military coup. Fernandes had always been an advocate of educational matters and, dur-
ing his last years, he was elected a representative for São Paulo in the National Congress
to defend high-quality public education. Ribeiro occupied high government positions
for many years, during which time he founded the Universidade de Brasília (1962).
Exiled by the 1964 military coup, he returned to become vice-governor of the state of
Rio de Janeiro, founded a second university, and, in a pioneering effort, launched a series
of public full-time integrated educational systems for young people. When he died in
1997, he was a senator of the republic as well. The sociologist Fernando Henrique Car-
doso, one of Fernandes’s students, was also a senator and became Brazil’s president for
two terms, from 1995 to 2003.
In terms of socially recognized acceptance, interethnic contact was a notion that
proved to be impressive in the long run. It appealed to students of the social sciences
who had felt discouraged by the dictatorship from pursuing sociological studies.
Interethnic friction opened up a possibility of studying social sciences with a new
approach that allowed for a renewal of the traditional study of Indian populations.
The empirical study of contact had served both as a confrontation with Brazil’s
hinterland and as an expression of the need to include the tiny but highly symbolic
indigenous part of the population in the broader society. With interethnic friction, a
sociologist/anthropologist had not just a constructive approach but also a theoretical
point of view. Given that Museu Nacional was engaged in two large research projects
during the 1960s, namely, the interethnic research and the Harvard Central Brazil
Project, there was a firm institutional basis for the launching of a graduate program
in (social) anthropology. Together with their American fellow students, Brazilian
graduate students at the time, such as Julio Cezar Melatti and Roberto DaMatta, in
the company of Roque de Barros Laraia, participated in both projects. The Harvard
project was triggered by the ongoing controversy between David Maybury-Lewis’s
and Lévi-Strauss’s writings on the topic of dual organizations and was based on
Curt Nimuendajú’s classical Jê monographs. The major theoretical question lay in
the comparison between different Jê groups to solve the anomaly represented in the
literature, namely, the existence of highly developed social systems in technically
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BR A ZI L , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN 9

rudimentary societies (Maybury-Lewis 1974). Museu Nacional became a model and

a reference for the new graduate anthropology programs in the country at the time,
and graduate teaching in anthropology moved from a tutorial European style to an
American model of required seminars and courses.

Concepts of difference

The process that has occurred in anthropology around the world during the last few
decades, the incorporation of research topics close to the personal experience of ethno-
graphers, has similarly occurred in Brazil since the mid-1980s but at an accelerated
pace, and in a way that has been guided by the launch of graduate programs, by the
increasing recognition of the discipline, as well as by the impulse received from new
combinations of theoretical approaches. Exoticism and eccentricity were never a mobi-
lizing factor for Brazilian social scientists. However, a vigorous project of educating
new graduate students in classical anthropological theory (sometimes including kin-
ship studies as a requirement) has been maintained to the present day as a necessary
and fundamental element for scholarly competence and may be credited as a legacy of
the Harvard Central Brazil Project and a new wave of doctorates taken in elite American
universities since then. Nation building, in terms of integration of strata and of territo-
rial incorporation, has continued to be a basic reference for anthropologists, but the last
few decades have also seen a significant broadening of horizons. The combination of a
sound theoretical education with a vested social commitment has been a strong feature
throughout. The different brands of Marxism that dominated during the 1960s gave way
to more nuanced ethnographical approaches in (social) anthropology, without the loss
of larger macro sociological goals. Anthropology separated its approach from sociol-
ogy proper by an emphasis on multiple senses of alterity, a foundation in the history of
anthropology, and the adoption of an ethnographic approach.
A broad panorama can be discerned by means of (Weberian) ideal types related to the
kind of difference conceived by anthropologists themselves. They emerged in sequential
form and, after a decade, each type had been incorporated into the mainstream. Cutting
across the previous material presented, it offers an alternative approach to outlining the
present state of anthropological investigations in Brazil.

Extreme alterity Brazilian mode

Scattered in the interior of Brazil for centuries following Portuguese colonization,
indigenous populations had been visited by German explorers since the nineteenth
century, when numerous ethnological expeditions had crossed the country in a search
for answers to contemporary European questions of the state of “naturalness” suggested
by the historico-cultural method. Karl von den Steinen, Paul Ehrenreich, Theodor
Koch-Grünberg, and Max Schmidt were among those who also collected artifacts for
the European ethnological museums (Baldus 1954). It was not an attraction to Brazil
that moved them but inquisitiveness regarding the state of nature of “primitives.”
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10 BR A ZI L , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN

During the first decades of the twentieth century, many foreign ethnologists
established themselves in the old museums and new universities and fostered the
interest of new generations in Brazilian Indian populations. Throughout this period,
the major activity was producing monographs about those populations; their relation
to the local agrarian society was commented on in smaller and more marginal articles
by ethnologists.
Before the 1980s, the Jê were the most studied group in Brazil, following the
lead of Curt Nimuendajú (1883–1945), a German ethnologist who worked among
Brazilian Indians for more than four decades but had never applied for an academic
position. Many of his monographs became accessible through translation into English
by Robert Lowie in the United States. The Harvard Central Brazil Project, born
out of the Maybury-Lewis and Lévi-Strauss controversy in the 1960s and grounded
in Nimuendajú’s work, was the most extensive research program related to this
indigenous group. Maybury-Lewis had studied under Herbert Baldus when he first
came to Brazil and gained his MA from ELSP in São Paulo. Meanwhile, Tupi research
had continued, as attested by the work of Herbert Baldus on the Bororo, Karajá, and
Tapirapé; Charles Wagley (1913–91) and Eduardo Galvão (1921–76) on the Tapirapé;
Egon Schaden (1913–91) on the Guarani; Darcy Ribeiro and Berta Ribeiro (1924–97)
on the Urubu-Kaapor, and, more recently, those of a younger generation from the
Universidade de São Paulo and Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro.
A more recent Tupi research group has been that of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and
his students at Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro. Bringing back Fernandes’s classical
work on sixteenth- century Tupinambá cronistas and, based on fieldwork among the
Awareté Indians, Viveiros de Castro pursued the theoretical goal of substituting
functional explanations for the concern with Tupi cosmology. A series of theoretical
exchanges followed suit and “perspectivism” became a novelty on the international
scene, with debates being generated by French and British scholars (Viveiros de Castro
2012). In this scenario, new theoretical approaches have become as significant as
ethnographic contributions. (Classic anthropological topics offer a positive pathway
to interlocution across borders, especially when indigenous populations are not
conceived as “Brazilian Indians” but as Indians who are part of larger well-known
groups in the literature and who just happened to be situated in Brazil.)

Contact with remoteness

The intellectual bricolage that resulted in the concept of interethnic friction, the concept
developed by Cardoso de Oliveira in the 1960s, is the prototype of the idea that Indian
populations and the national society should be seen not as separate unities but as a
whole, however dialectically separated they happen to be. The concept was a theoretical
answer to Ribeiro’s indigenist preoccupation, and it continued to develop throughout
the following decades in several graduate anthropology programs. It was a Brazilian
answer to outright imported approaches and a topic that led to the expansion of a series
of research programs. The study of the expansion fronts into the hinterland (a topic
explored by O. Velho [1972]), relations between indigenists and government policies,
between indigenous groups and the Fundação Nacional do Índio (FUNAI) (National
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BR A ZI L , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN 11

Indian Foundation), the role of the military and the demarcation of frontiers, the regu-
lation of Indian rights in Brazil, the maintenance of their identities after becoming part
of the urban environment, and the ever-present subject of the demarcation of Indian
lands, have been regular concerns.
In connection with these topics, the study of peasants made its appearance, which
then led to an interest in larger themes such as internal colonialism, capitalist devel-
opment, and, more recently, agrobusiness. (Today’s environmental studies may also be
associated with this line of investigation.) To the degree that concern with indigenous
groups shifted to the theme of contact and then to peasants, the peripheries of big cities
had their day during the 1970s. At USP a series of confrontations involving the institu-
tional areas of anthropology and political science consolidated a space for urban studies,
which had had its inception in the study of the periphery of the city, immigrants, and
popular festivals.

In the metropolitan centers

The occupation of Brazilian territory along the coast, and the continuous and violent
deflection of indigenous communities to the hinterland, had an indirect effect on the
distinction between sociology and anthropology. Cities were centers of cosmopolitan
identification. When anthropologists moved away from the traditional topics of interest
to incorporate the totality of Brazilian society, different paths were opened up. Two
major figures, Roberto DaMatta and Gilberto Velho, with their characteristic lines of
study, emerged on the scene in the 1970s. Both inaugurated fruitful research projects.
Roberto DaMatta (b. 1936) was educated in anthropology as part of the Harvard Cen-
tral Brazil Project of the 1960s. A decade after publishing classical monographs both on
the Apinajé and on Indian contact, he shifted his interest to the national society as a
whole. Inspired by Lévi-Straussian structuralism, he stood by the classical sociohistor-
ical essays that had dominated the intellectual scene at the beginning of the twentieth
century. He granted a special place to the broad panoramas of Gilberto Freyre and other
predecessors, such as Sérgio Buarque de Holanda and Caio Prado Junior, and proposed
facing “the Brazilian dilemma” (DaMatta 1979), which intertwines individual orienta-
tions with an emphasis on personal relations. He submitted national ritual events, such
as carnival, independence day celebrations, small daily conventional sayings to current
anthropological analysis; his line of inquiry has become a reference for the study of
nationhood rituals.
Gilberto Velho (1943–2012) is known as the founder of an area of study previously
hardly explored in Brazil, the “anthropology of complex societies” (G. Velho 1973).
Inspired by the symbolic interactionism of the Chicago school of sociology and by
the British social anthropology of the 1960s, Velho was adept at interdisciplinarity at
a time when the term was rarely applied, opening up an extensive research field on
sensitive urban topics, which his many students have continued to expand. Having
had his education in anthropology at the Museu Nacional, he obtained his doctoral
degree at the USP under the anthropologist Ruth Cardoso—a regular practice until the
1980s in the then absence of such an academic level at Museu Nacional and elsewhere.
Velho’s interests initially encompassed topics such as middle-class lifestyles and drug
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12 BR A ZI L , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN

consumption. An influential adviser and scholar, he was deeply involved in high-level

national academic commissions. His research later broadened to include urban vio-
lence, poverty, gender issues, urban kinship and family, music, and politics. He not only
situated different urban phenomena in the cities but tried to understand the conditions
of sociability in metropolitan areas and influenced a wide-ranging, extensive line of
publications as editor.
Expanding to include urban phenomena, which had been the domain of sociology,
anthropology has kept to ethnographical microscopic and comparative perspectives
during the last few decades. DaMatta and Velho engaged in a brief discussion about the
nature of fieldwork in general in the 1970s, dismissing difficulties relating to research at
home; topics of interest expanded to include new approaches to racial issues, popular
festivals, politics, crime, citizenship, elections and political representation, feminism
and gender studies, quilombos (runaway slave settlements), indigenism, shantytowns,
landless movements, large development projects, and environmentalism.

Research abroad
Advances into the larger world beyond Brazilian frontiers has until recently been con-
ducted intermittently and has been mostly directed by individual opportunities. At
present there is an expectation that graduate programs pursue international exchanges
as a means of improving their comparative national ratings.
The pioneering, classical example for research abroad continues to be the sem-
inal comparison of racial prejudice between Brazil and the United States in the
mid-twentieth century (Nogueira [1959] 2008), later examples were recorded by G.
Velho (1995). The directions in which Brazilian anthropologists have ventured outside
their borders have tended to be places where Brazilian students have completed
their doctoral dissertations (mainly the United States and France). Comparisons and
theoretical considerations between different ways of doing anthropology, whether in
India, Australia, Canada, or other Latin American countries, along with new proposals
for alternative approaches to the discipline, have been strengthened. Familiarity with
the Portuguese language is an initial incentive, and many investigators have been to
Portugal’s former colonies, such as Guinea-Bissau, the Cape Verde Islands, East Timor,
Mozambique, and later pursued independent interests, for example in Africa. English
has also become a language for fieldwork, and compelling topics of interest in Brazil
have been compared with other countries (South Africa, for example). Comparisons
between the habits and modes of occupying public spaces has increased over the
years, there being Brazilian, European, and American examples. Argentina, Syria,
and Colombia have also become foci of interest, as a result of anthropologists’ family
origins.

Anthropological self-reflection
The continual process of national examination has also involved anthropologists in
attempts at intellectual self-examination. Whether investigating the subject in the coun-
try or comparing it with other contexts, beginning in the 1980s, anthropologists set in
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BR A ZI L , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN 13

motion a series of studies about their discipline. Given the sociogenetic character of the
institutionalization of the social sciences, in which inspirational dialogues with external
interlocutors have been usual (often in a one-way direction), topics have varied from the
biographies of social scientists in Brazil to critical evaluations of classical sociological
authors. Studies relating to the development of anthropology in museums and univer-
sities, comparisons between intellectual careers, intellectual biographies and memoirs,
research on individual scientists and racial questions in Brazil, bibliographies of anthro-
pology in Brazil, comparative projects related to the social sciences, historiographies of
the discipline in the country, comparison between national styles of anthropology, anal-
ysis of the relationships between social science and Brazilian national ideology, as well
as new research on the areas of science and technology, are all focal points in many
graduate programs.

At home and abroad

The expansion of graduate programs in anthropology has been followed and evaluated
for several decades by governmental agencies linked to the Ministry of Education
(Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior [CAPES; Bureau
for the Enhancement of Higher Education Staff]) and to the Ministry of Science
and Technology (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico
[CNPq; National Council of Scientific and Technological Development]), which grade
them comparatively and grant research funds to graduate programs and individual
researchers. A pattern of seminar and course requirements, plus minimum standards
for MA and PhD degrees, has become the norm. Following the basic model established
in the first graduate programs at Museu Nacional and Universidade de Brasília in
the 1970s, and inspired by American university programs based on credits, graduate
programs and PhD candidates in different parts of the country have recently multiplied,
and this has led to a recovery and a reconfiguration of local and regional pioneers of
the discipline and to alternative lineages of intellectual descent.
Since the mid-1990s, for a country in which the social sciences were primarily con-
cerned with the questions of nationhood, crossing national frontiers has become more
accessible in terms of finance. State agencies have been increasingly granting funds for
research abroad as part of doctoral research programs. Comparisons and cooperation
between different “national” styles of anthropology have been put forward, some of
which aim at a new global scenario.
Today, anthropology in Brazil has expanded in the number both of specialists and
of topics of interest; anthropologists can be found in different settings, from academia
to nongovernmental organizations, congressmen advisers, environmental agencies,
Indian protection services, public advocacies, media staff, and minorities advisers.
Anthropologists meet every two years at the congresses of the Brazilian Association
of Anthropology (Associação Brasileira de Antropologia [ABA]) and, together with
sociologists and political scientists, at the annual meetings of the National Association
of Graduate Programs and Research in the Social Sciences (Associação Nacional de
Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Ciências Sociais [ANPOCS]).
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14 BR A ZI L , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN

International communication, until recently almost entirely limited to center–

periphery relations or regional exchanges between social scientists within Latin
America and especially with specialists in Mexico and Argentina, have multiplied
in different directions. New political relationships in recent decades point to the
role of Indians as protagonists in the public scenario—a considerable change in a
context where anthropologists traditionally acted as the in-between characters. Indians
are being incorporated into graduate anthropology programs and are becoming
professionally accredited.

SEE ALSO: Addiction; Brazilian Association of Anthropology (ABA); Cardoso

de Oliveira, Roberto (1928–2006); Favelas and Other Self-Built Neighborhoods;
Fernandes, Florestan (1920–95); Freyre, Gilberto (1900–1987); Interethnic Friction;
Latin American Association of Anthropology / Asociación Latinoamericana de
Antropología (ALA); Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1908–2009); Portugal, Anthropology
in; Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1881–1955); Ramos, Arthur (1903–49); Representation,
Politics of; Ribeiro, Darcy (1922–97); Tristes tropiques; Velho, Gilberto (1945–2012);
World Anthropologies

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Cardoso de Oliveira, Roberto. 1963. “Aculturação e ‘fricção interétnica’ [Acculturation and
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