University of Wisconsin Press
  • A Nationalist Environment:Indians, Nature, and the Construction of the Xingu National Park in Brazil
Résumé

Este artigo analisa as origens históricas e o simbolismo cultural do Parque Nacional do Xingu, criado pelo governo brasileiro em 1961 no norte de Mato Grosso e que engloba povos indígenas das quatro principais famílias lingüísticas indígenas. Ao desconstruir as imagens culturais dos indígenas, do meio ambiente, e da identidade nacional utilizada pelos proponentes do parque, o ensaio examina como o Parque Nacional do Xingu serviu não só de refúgio para "espécies em extinção" mas também como um mito de origem e uma ensaio de nation-building. De fato, o passado "primitivo" interessava não só aos brasileiros urbanos incomodados por uma mudança industrial abrupta, mas também aos ideólogos e "profissionais" do estado desenvolvimentista que defendiam o valor simbólico ou político de uma política de preservação. Como a grandeza da natureza brasileira (e, de uma maneira menos acentuada, da sua população indígena "primitiva") perpassa os livros didáticos das escolas de primeiro grau, a indústria turística e a mídia, este ensaio contribui para um esclarecimento não só da política governamental na Amazônia, mas dos fios embaraçados do nacionalismo brasileiro.

In 1961, the Brazilian government created the Xingu National Park, an area of approximately 8,530 square miles and home to indigenous peoples representing the four major aboriginal language families in Brazil: Tupi, Arawak, Carib, and Gê. Located in northern Mato Grosso, the Upper Xingu basin remained historically isolated from Brazilian society, in part because the presence of numerous waterfalls and rapids bedeviled navigation beyond the lower range of the river and, in part, due to the presence of warrior nations [End Page 139] such as the Xavante and Kayapó located at the periphery of the basin.1 Notwithstanding their linguistic diversity, many of the groups, most likely from years of close interaction, share similar cultural patterns such as the circular layout of villages, oval huts, planting techniques, and women's use of the "uluri," or small triangular "bikini" to cover their genitalia.2 The ecology of the Xingu reflects a transitional zone between the vegetation of the cerrado (tropical savannah) and the Amazonian rainforest.

The Xingu Park—whose peoples have been amply studied by ethnographers, ethnomusicologists, filmmakers, photographers, and art historians—has not escaped the scrutiny, nor the debate, of scholars focused on Brazilian state policy towards indigenous peoples. Indeed, given the unprecedented nature of the demarcation of such an extensive territory for indigenous peoples in Brazil and the ostensible success of the park in protecting indigenous sociocultural traditions, it is hardly surprising that the experiment would raise some eyebrows. Celebratory accounts of the Xingu Park that stress the valiant efforts of the Brazilian government to "save" the Indians of Xingu pervade official publications and pronouncements on the park, as well as, of course, the memoirs of those high-level officials most actively involved in its creation.3 The park, a "radically protectionist" model for indigenous groups to retain their cultural independence in their natural "habitat," is contrasted with the marked developmentalist profile of state policy, which has sought to market indigenous goods, commodify their territory, and harness their labor for capitalist economic growth.4

Subsequent research on the Xingu Park, however, cast aspersions on both the state's motivations in creating the park and questioned its luster given the far murkier realm of Brazilian indigenous policy. Tales of governmental altruism have been pushed aside by scathing indictments of state efforts to consolidate institutional power, to appropriate indigenous territory for military and scientific purposes, and to gain dominion over indigenous lifestyles under the guise of "protecting" Indians. Researchers have stressed the importance of the Brazilian Air Force in the establishment of the park and its maintenance of an air base in the region, which even possibly served as a site for the training and provisioning of counterinsurgency troops combating a leftist guerrilla group in the 1970s.5 The purportedly unobtrusive role of benevolent state officials in the years following contact in Xingu has been challenged by studies revealing the alterations in village and intertribal dynamics spawned by the presence of indigenistas and other members of the Indian bureau in the region.6 Moreover, in spotlighting the Xingu Park in both national and international forums, the Brazilian government stands accused of romanticizing the nature of indigenous communities and the efficacy of state assistance, diverting attention from the rampant land invasion, socioeconomic [End Page 140] marginalization, and systematic discrimination faced by the overwhelming majority of Brazil's 180 different indigenous groups.7 Still others have slammed the media for its sensationalist exploitation of the Xingu Indians, paraded as if they were "circus beasts to entertain whites."8

This essay explores the historic context of the creation of Xingu Park, but is concerned less with pinpointing "the truth" behind its genesis than with deconstructing the culturally charged images and myths regarding native peoples, the natural environment, and national identity that were employed by its proponents. Such an exercise is relevant to understand not only Amazonian politics but Brazilian nationalism, since the uniqueness of Brazilian nature (and, to a lesser extent, its "primitive" indigenous populations) is a theme that suffuses primary school textbooks, the tourist industry, and the media. Indeed, in a recent study surveying Brazilian nationalism, José Murilo de Carvalho found that Brazilians, regardless of educational background, overridingly listed the natural environment as their greatest source of national pride—far ahead of music, carnival, soccer, or national character.9 Likewise, Alcida Ramos has shown Brazilians' enduring fixation with the nation's indigenous population.10 To be sure, the intricate threads that interweave culturally constructed notions of race and nature are not unique to Brazil: as Donna Haraway has noted: "Race, like nature, is at the heart of stories about the origins and purposes of the nation [...]. Race, like nature, is about roots, pollution, and origins."11 Through a study of Xingu, this essay seeks to explore the historical roots and political underpinnings that have helped to popularize and sustain such views in Brazil.

Between 1937 and 1961, twenty national parks and biological reserves were established in Brazil covering over one million hectares—albeit only one-eighth of one percent of Brazilian territory.12 Six parks alone, including Xingu, were created in 1961, although Xingu Park was unique in its inclusion of native peoples. Primitivist fantasy, scientific laboratory, archaeological surrogate, biocultural sanctuary, historical matrix—images of Xingu Park spun like a cultural kaleidoscope in the eye of its beholder. Xingu Park represents, then, not only a place of refuge for endangered "species," but a craft of Brazilian nation-building, a symbolic complement and counterbalance to the developmentalist policies of the nationalist state in the postwar period. The celebration of the "pristine" Xingu and its "primitive" population, in fact, followed a long intellectual tradition of identifying the backlands as the cradle of the nation, the "essence" of Brazil that demanded state assistance.13 Amidst the societal self-reflection and change that marked Brazil's rapid urban growth and industrialization in the 1950s, Xingu Park emerged both as both a foil of modernization and a site of cultural authentication and exceptionalism.14 [End Page 141]

Scientists, the State, and the Conquest of Xingu

Unlike other Amazonian rivers, the Xingu, because of its navigational challenges, never served as a primary means of penetration for rubber tappers, nut gatherers, miners, settlers, and missionaries. In 1884, the German ethnologist Karl von den Steinen, traveling overland by mule and descending the Batovi river (which flows into the Xingu), succeeded in entering the upper portion of the Xingu. On a subsequent expedition three years later, von den Steinen explored another tributary of the Xingu, the Culiseu, and penned the first descriptions of the indigenous inhabitants and their linguistic complexity. Although other expeditions subsequently entered the Xingu region, it was only during the March to the West, a state-sponsored project to colonize the Brazilian hinterland unveiled during the Estado Novo dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas (1937- 45), that sustained efforts to integrate the Xingu region and its populations into the nation-state were undertaken.

For the authoritarian regime of Getúlio Vargas, colonization of the west offered both an alternative to agrarian reform and a solution to rapid urban growth, labor unrest, and provisioning of agricultural staples.15 The March to the West found eager support from the military, a critical buttress of the regime, which was long committed to national integration and territorial defense. For adventurers, the west conjured images of the eighteenth-century gold rush or daring forays into "unknown" indigenous areas, while for entrepreneurs and industrialists, the west promised new resources and markets.16 Brazil's entry into World War II in 1942 led to further consolidation of state power and greater preoccupation with national defense. The Roncador-Xingu Expedition, initiated in 1943, sought to forge an overland aerial link between Rio de Janeiro and Manaus, a 2,900 kilometer stretch that, given the lack of infrastructure in the central west, previously followed a coastal route in a journey of more than twelve hours. The Fundação Brasil Central (Central Brazil Foundation—FBC), also created during the war, aimed to install agrarian colonies in the sparsely populated central-western frontier, to construct airstrips and other infrastructure in the west. The Brazilian Air Force, whose fleet would expand under the wartime Lend-Lease policies of the United States, was critical in transporting goods, surveilling western territory, and facilitating communication between the west and the more industrial southeast.

The conquest of the west, spearheaded by an authoritarian government in an age of mass media, both heralded Brazil's glorious future and reenacted its mythical past. In his magnum opus, Marcha para Oeste, published in 1940, propagandist Cassiano Ricardo sought to resurrect the legendary exploits of the paulista bandeirantes, whose penetration of the backlands in the colonial period in search of Indian slaves and gold had contributed to the expansion [End Page 142] of Brazil's borders.17 Drawing historical connections between the contemporary campaign of Vargas to settle the hinterland, Ricardo defined "bandeirismo" as a hallmark of Brazil's national character, the key to both past and future success. Indeed, the festive send-off of the Roncador-Xingu Expedition from São Paulo ritually recreated episodes from the colonial period. Through his radio addresses, Vargas promoted the west as a land of untold natural resources, urging the poor to migrate with promises of a better life.

In addition, publishers during the Estado Novo, particularly Editora Nacional in its Brasiliana collection, printed a score of books on indigenous peoples and the western frontier, or reissued a number of nineteenth-century classics on these subjects.18 In his introduction to the first Portuguese-language version of von den Steinen's account, published in 1940 by the São Paulo Department of Culture, ethnologist Herbert Baldus expressed hope that the book would increase "the love of the Brazilian people for their beautiful homeland."19 Journalists and filmmakers accompanied the Roncador-Xingu Expedition, spotlighting for curious urban readers and viewers the "exotic" sights of the west and the accomplishments of the state.

In 1946, the Roncador-Xingu Expedition made official contact with indigenous groups occupying the Upper Xingu. Initially, the most sustained contact took place with the Kalapalo Indians, whose village on the Culuene River was situated next to an airstrip constructed by the Expedition, as well as with the Kamaiurá whose village was located three hours away from the camp by boat. The Juruna, whose population numbered thirty-seven, moved their village in 1950 to a camp established at Diauarum.20 Orlando and Claudio Villas Boas, the two most renowned members of the Expedition, noted that the distribution of and relations among villages in the Xingu was almost the same as described by von den Steinen, with the natives displaying "the same peaceful nature, the same hospitality and curiosity that is transformed on contact with strangers into the naïve and friendly attitude that so impressed the German explorer and inspired him to make a highly detailed and expressive record of them."21 One matter, however, that the Villas Boas brothers noted was not "the same" was the dramatic decline in the indigenous population of the Xingu and the presence of some metal tools—both of which the brothers attributed to periodic contact in the preceding decades between tribes of the lower Culiseu river and Brazilian settlers. Pedro E. de Lima, a researcher from the Museu Nacional who made several trips to the region between 1947 and 1950, estimated the population of the Xingu between 700 and 800 individuals, a steep decline from the 2500 estimated by von den Steinen. The Expedition itself would soon contribute to a rash of epidemics that claimed the lives of Xingu communities: 28 Kalapalo Indians of a total population of 180 succumbed to a grippe in 1946, while in 1950, 12 Kalapalo and Kamaiurá Indians died.22 [End Page 143]

State penetration of the Xingu region offered a treasure trove for Brazilian ethnographers and natural scientists. To be sure, under the Republic (1889- 1930) ethnographic study, geographic demarcation, and botanical classification had marched hand in hand with state-sponsored public health and telegraphic "missions" in the backlands. During his leadership of the Comissão Construtora das Linhas Telegráficas (1890- 1915) linking the northwestern regions of Brazil, Cândido Rondon gathered flora and fauna and geographic data, and presided over the formation of Brazil's Indian Protection Service in 1910. In 1912, anthropologist Edgard Roquette Pinto accompanied the telegraphic construction team of Rondon in the western Amazon, collecting valuable ethnographic and medical data on the Nambiquara Indians (published in 1938 under the title Rondônia).23

With the institutionalization and "professionalization" of the social sciences in the 1930s (marked by the founding of the Escola Livre de Sociologia e Política in 1933, and the Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciência e Letras of the Universidade de São Paulo in 1934), anthropologists assumed and were accorded increased cachet by state planners for their scholarly contributions to "pre-historical" knowledge, their understanding of human ecology, and their utility in regional developmental policy.24 In 1943, Museu Nacional Director Heloísa Torres, seeking additional backing for her institution, had impressed upon Vargas that Brazil was the "only place on earth" whose "primitive" peoples' customs were preserved intact, offering an invaluable source for anthropological research.25 Researchers from the Museu Nacional conducted various trips to the Xingu region between 1948 and 1951, publishing on its flora, fauna, and indigenous populations.26 Anthropologist Lima, noting the biological "purity" of the groups, expressed his excitement in conducting "anthropometric studies of these populations, so that with these relatively 'pure' facts we can later establish links between the original groups and their descendants."27 In addition, botanists and zoologists backed by Brazilian state institutions flocked to the west to document its flora, fauna, and indigenous populations, categorizing and classifying their specimens in the interest of scientific progress. Botanist Othon Machado traveled to the Ilha Bananal as part of the Equipe Geográfica à Mesopotamia Araguaia-Xingu in late 1945 and published various articles and a monograph on the flora of central Brazil.28

Although such fieldwork was undoubtedly trying, technological advances eased the journey. The Brazilian Air Force established an air base at Jacaré in the Xingu region that would serve as point of disembarkation not only for supplies but also for distinguished visitors of all stripes. This logistic support greatly facilitated scientific investigations; as one researcher of central Brazilian flora noted, in one-hour flying time one could cover the same amount of ground as the Roncador-Xingu Expedition covered in one year.29 With privileged access to such remote environments, these scientists envisioned a laboratory to conduct pioneering research. [End Page 144]

But precisely because of the west's "primordialism," certain adherents or agents of the national developmentalist state determined that its wealth lay not only in the future extraction of resources and data, but in the symbolism of its past. For the modernizing Vargas regime, preservation of Brazil's national patrimony—a selective patchwork of social myths, folkloric celebrations, regional identities, artistic manifestations, and historical commemorations—was a key component of its ambitious project of nation building.30 The tension between preservation and progress, of course, lies at the very core of the nation-state: for while the tenor of the state is progressivist in its promise of a better future, the concept of the nation is primitivist in rooting its identity in a foundational past.31 Thus, the protection of indigenous peoples and the natural environment—purported markers of national origin and exceptionalism—received formal endorsement and (fledgling) institutional support under Vargas. Although since the colonial period Luso-Brazilian officials had drafted conservationist policies aimed at managing natural resources for utilitarian needs, the Vargas era inaugurated a campaign to preserve the environment as an end unto itself.32 The national developmental state set in place the institutional and legal framework for the environmental and indigenist movements that would blossom in Brazil decades later.

In the postwar democratic era (1946- 64), under the folds of the Brazilian developmentalist state, efforts persisted to preserve the "primitive" or "natural" past as a core element of national identity. One of its most noteworthy campaigns, the movement to protect the natural environment and indigenous populations of Xingu, was generated by sectors that had been heavily involved in the March to the West—the Brazilian Air Force, the Indian Protection Service, the scientific and anthropological community, and the Villas-Boas brothers—who called for restricting outsider access and regulating the gradual integration of these communities and regions into Brazilian society. In promoting a "preservationist" state policy for the indigenous peoples and the natural environment of Xingu, these avatars of scientific universalism and rationalism ironically conjured a nationalist discourse rooted in historical-mythic precedent and primitivist allure.33 In exploring the construction of the Xingu Park, we can unpack the institutional origins and cultural matrix of Brazil's environmental and indigenist movements of the late twentieth century.

Environmental Protection and the National Developmentalist State: Myths, Conflicts and Achievements

It was during the first Vargas regime (1930- 45) that the Brazilian state, harnessing a geographic nationalism that sought to cast the nation as an organic [End Page 145] outgrowth of the natural world, undertook environmental protection in a more concerted effort. There had been a fledgling effort at the protection of fauna since the turn of the century, when the Brazilian government had signed on to several international conventions that included protection of certain endangered species and birds critical to agriculture. Indeed, the Swiss-born director of the scientific museum in Pará, Emilio Goeldi, underscored to the state governor in 1895 the importance of defending the egret and guará on Marajó Island. Still, the gains were minor, and writers such as Euclides da Cunha denounced the wanton destroyers of the environment as "creators of deserts." Over the first decades of the twentieth century a growing environmental movement in Europe reverberated in Brazil with the organization of the First Brazilian Conference on the Protection of Nature held in 1934 in Rio de Janeiro, sponsored by the Sociedade dos Amigos das Árvores. These pioneering environmentalists, such as Alberto José de Sampaio and Leônio Corrêa, would influence the drafting of Brazil's environmental legislation.34

Under Vargas, the Brazilian state established its first agency to monitor the use and protection of forests. The Serviço Florestal (Forest Service), created in 1934 and subordinate to the Ministry of Agriculture, was entrusted with protecting forests and endangered species; combating erosion and forest fires and promoting reforestation; mapping and gathering statistics on existing forests and standardizing nomenclature of species; creating ecological reserves in all regional ecosystems of Brazil with their respective flora; cultivating species in laboratories and providing instruction in forest management.35 The Código da Caça, instituted in 1943, sought to protect endangered species. Nevertheless, the agenda of the Forest Service reveals the varied importance of forest management for the Vargas regime. Aside from cultural symbolism, forests were potential sites of scientific investigation, economic exploration, pharmaceutical production, and epidemiological danger. The emphasis on the systematized cultivation of species to furnish primary products for industry and pharmaceuticals—such as the rubber tree, carnauba and babassu palms, oiticica—demonstrated the overriding concern with managing natural resources for economic profit. This conformed to the Estado Novo's overall efforts to rationalize the production of primary products through state-run institutes, and to explore and inventory primary products such as lead, copper, and petroleum for industrial development. Indeed, a survey of 377 articles and publications on Brazilian forestry between 1920 and 1950 reveals detailed research on forest resources and marketability.36 One of the many responsibilities of the Forest Service was to serve as an intermediary between the state and industrialists and loggers to smooth the process of cultivation and marketing; another was to work closely with scientific researchers from the Museu Nacional, and agronomists [End Page 146] and statisticians from the Ministry of Agriculture. Furthermore, the systematic cultivation of medicinal plants such as andiroba and quina, along with extirpation of plants whose leaves provided breeding areas for mosquitoes, would ensure a healthy and productive population.37

Yet the protection of "pristine" nature had a different appeal as a testament to Brazil's exuberant landscape and a marker of the nation's organic origins. Thus, the Constitution of 1934 empowered the state to "protect natural wonders," while the Constitution of 1937, promulgated under the Estado Novo, went further in establishing that "unique natural landscapes" would enjoy state protection, with crimes committed against them an offense towards "national patrimony."38 Brazil's National Parks, slated for areas of exceptional natural beauty, were to remain untouched by human hands (except, when necessary, for the creation of basic visitor infrastructure and the construction of airstrips) to allow future generations to behold aboriginal flora and fauna.39 As engineer Paulo F. de Souza remarked of the Parque Nacional do Iguaçu, created by presidential decree in 1939: "our descendants will be able to go there to see the species of Brazil as God created them." Likewise, Wandebilt de Barros, administrator of Parque Nacional de Itatiaia noted that it "constitutes a cultural center for future generations. Its conservationist importance transcends the boundaries of the nation. Everyone who admires the region because of its natural exuberance is moved by its unusual scenery."40 Just as the Vargas regime would ensure that baroque mineiro architecture would dazzle the eyes of all Brazilians, Afro-Brazilian samba their ears, and bandeirante exploitstheir mind, so the organic natural landscape and its aboriginal inhabitants would touch their heart.

Brazilian state officials were clearly influenced by the history of National Parks in the United States, South Africa, Japan, Canada, Argentina, and Europe. Moreover, Estado Novo officials did not invent the idea that Brazilian exceptionalism derived from its lush, tropical landscape. Brazil's very national anthem proclaimed that its forests had more life and its fields more flowers than anywhere else, while the hymn to the flag, written by poet Olavo Bilac, celebrated its colors that reflected "the sky of purest blue / the unequalled green of its vegetation." Affonso Celso's ultranationalist text, Porque me ufano do meu paiz (published on the quatracentenary of the "discovery" of Brazil in 1900), stated: "There is no more beautiful country than Brazil [...] within its enormous perimeter can be found all that is picturesque and grandiose that the earth offers."41 Rather, Estado Novo officials laid claim to a tradition seeded by colonial chroniclers, nineteenth-century European travelers and naturalists, postcolonial Brazilian romantics, and twentieth-century modernist intellectuals and nationalists. Yet Vargas officials vowed to go one step further in the veneration of Brazil's natural environment: the "strong hands" of the state would ensure that Brazilians could behold this natural [End Page 147] beauty for eternity.42 As Lucia Lippi Oliveira has argued, propagandists of the Estado Novo proclaimed that what was "new" under Vargas was not only a drive towards industry and modernization, but official concern with the "true roots of nationality."43

Given the Estado Novo's naturalistic nationalism—which remains a core tenet of Brazil's identity—it is interesting to observe that the historic verdict had never been unanimous in its praise of Brazilian flora and fauna. Indeed, as numerous scholars have pointed out, there is little that is "natural" (no less national) about nature given the shifting and contested meaning that individuals have attributed to the environment and which are inextricably entangled with social values and assumptions.44 Brazil's wild and untamed backlands, inhabited by "savage" and "heathen" Indians, represented from the outset in the minds of church officials and settlers a realm of physical danger and moral turpitude.45 Although Portuguese colonial legislation sought to restrict access to timberwood, defiant settlers contravened royal injunctions and contributed to the destruction of Brazilian forests.46 Colonists in Brazil, preoccupied with economic profit, indigenous attack, and daily survival, were far more concerned and knowledgeable about the utilitarian purposes of the natural environment than with its preservation or aesthetics. In the nineteenth century, the environmental disregard of coffee fazendeiros in deforesting virgin territory was legendary.47

Scholars have noted, for example, the absence of decorative landscaping among colonial Luso-Brazilian settlers, even when its practice had become increasingly widespread in Europe. For the European bourgeoisie, the garden would allow symbolic contact with the natural world amidst a growing urban environment, while the cultivation of new and exotic species would serve as a status symbol. In the eighteenth century, public gardens already existed in Europe, although during the following century they would become more prevalent as spaces designed for leisure and contemplation.48 It was during the Dutch occupation of northeastern Brazil (1630- 54), that a cadre of foreign botanists, naturalists, and landscape artists arrived to study and catalogue its flora and fauna and to design an urban garden in Recife. The Portuguese did not maintain this custom, although by 1800 botanical gardens were created in Belém, Salvador, and Ouro Preto (the former entrusted with gathering and planting both local and imported species). The first public park in Rio de Janeiro, Passeio Público, initiated in the late eighteenth century, was, according to European travelers, small and poorly frequented.49

With the arrival of the Portuguese Crown to Brazil in 1808, Dom João VI created the Real Horto—later renamed the Real Jardim Botânico—importing numerous aromatic and medicinal species from Asia. Foreign travelers who visited the Jardim Botânico in its early years, such as George Gardner and Charles de Ribeyrolles, were quite disappointed to find that the botanical [End Page 148] gardens contained almost no native Brazilian species. After Independence, Emperor Dom Pedro II invited the French botanist/ landscape artist Auguste François Marie Glaziou to serve as the Diretor Geral de Matas e Jardins. Influenced by both French and English landscape artists, Glaziou would reform the Passeio Público, and design the gardens at the imperial residence at the Quinta da Boa Vista as well as at Campo Santana. Among the private gardens that became more commonplace in Brazil by the mid-nineteenth century, European mimicry could also be found in the plants, statues, vases, and ornaments that came to adorn them.50

European naturalists, who undertook numerous scientific expeditions to Brazil in the nineteenth century to study, classify, and ship home specimens of native species, however, remained awed by the abundance and variety of flora and fauna. Glaziou himself gathered and classified various species, published several books on Brazilian flora, and served as a botanical/ climatic consultant to the Comissão Cruls, which was dispatched to central Brazil in 1894 to study the possibility of the relocation of the Brazilian capital to the planalto. Glaziou's excitement regarding the region brimmed in his report to Cruls on the "incomparable" landscape.51 Such enthusiasm for Brazilian flora was likewise manifested by Oscar Constatt, a German scientist who visited Brazil in 1871 and stated: "instead of the modest and limited range of European forests, we find here an ineffable variety of shapes, trunks, leaves, and flowers. Each one of these natural colossi that seek to reach the sky differs from its neighbor in the uniqueness of its form, and at the foot of each giant grows a cluster of green, florid bushes."52 The presence of foreign naturalists and explorers in classifying, transacting, and extolling native plants remained conspicuous and decisive.

To be sure, not all Europeans were enamored of Brazilian nature. Detractors, armed with pseudo-scientific theories about race and geography, branded the flora, fauna, and native population of all of the Americas inherently inferior to the Old World. To eighteenth-century European geographers, for example, the absence of larger mammals in the New World affirmed the stunted development of all species, including humans, in the Americas.53 As a tropical nation, Brazil faced the additional stigma of possessing a "miasmatic" landscape conducive to disease and degeneration.54 Still, given the conspicuous role of European naturalists and landscape architects in depicting and defining Brazil's natural environment, the transition from the natural world to Brazilian nationhood was far from seamless.

Brazilian Rediscovery of the Natural Environment

Among Brazilians, the exaltation of the natural environment was taken up in the nineteenth century by nationalist intellectuals and by romantic poets and [End Page 149] writers, whose works paid homage to noble savages and the paradisiacal landscapes they inhabited. Romantic Indianist literature, for example, sought to rank tropical civilizations above their European rivals because of their proximity to "exuberant nature."55 Likewise, as John Monteiro has shown, the mid-nineteenth century Brazilian elite sought to develop "a national mythography that placed the noble, valiant, and (especially) extinct coastal Tupi at center stage."56 In the twentieth century, these nationalistic themes extolling the flora, fauna, and indigenous cultures of Brazil would be expressed with greater punch in the manifestoes of modernist poets, on the canvasses of avant-garde artists, and the propaganda of right-wing ideologues.57 A 1926 Brazilian-made documentary, De Santa Cruz, which looked at "the legitimate Brazilians"—theIndians of the remote Mato Grosso backlands—who live "like strangers in their own land," insisted upon "the duty of every Brazilian to know about Brazil."58 As throughout Latin America, this modern primitivist movement in Brazil derived from a conjuncture of factors: disillusionment with "Western civilization" following World War I, archaeological discoveries and the growth of cultural anthropology, the influence of European avant-garde movements, and the rise of populism and nationalism.59 Although based in Brazil's industrial southeast, these cultural movements drew inspiration from indigenous and Amazonian themes; regional manifestations surfaced in the literary works of amazonense Pereira da Silva who penned glorious odes to the natural beauty of Amazonia.60

Like other American republics, Brazil came to embrace the "wild" natural environment (and its "primitive" inhabitants) as a marker of superiority, rather than a badge of shame in comparison to the Old World's more historicized landscape. Just as "naturalistic nationalism" in the United States touted the distinct and regenerative impact of the western frontier on both the pioneer and society, and in Canada praised the effects of the forbidding northern terrain in forging a "healthy, hardy, virtuous, and dominant race," so, too, in Brazil the lush tropical climate was defined as the nation's cultural template.61 Brazil's agreeable climate (deemed a token of divine preference) redounded in the benevolence of its inhabitants; its exuberant foliage inspired (and reflected) generosity and sensuality in its people. Moreover, because Brazil, unlike Meso-America and the Andes, lacked the impressive historical monuments (and anticolonial symbols) bequeathed by the great pre-Columbian civilizations, the natural landscape (and its "stone-age" populations) acquired even greater importance as a testament to national exceptionalism.

Brazilian state officials recognized the symbolic appeal of parks and their potential for forging nationalist sentiment. Such enthusiasm was to be inculcated in "the people" through physical contact and personal experience, rather than mere artistic representation or lyrical incantation. As Jardim Botânico Director J. Geraldo Kuhlmann noted in 1939, boasting of his [End Page 150] intent to acquire trees endemic to more remote Brazilian regions (restinga,caatinga, Amazonia): "The main objective of the Garden increasingly is to demonstrate to the people ("o povo") more than to tourists, the grandeur of the flora that is undervalued precisely because we have become habituated to this excessive grandeur."62 Helmut Sick, a German scientist who worked with the FBC in studying the flora and fauna of central Brazil would soon oblige: his botanical samples, including orchids and seeds, were sent to the Botanical Garden in Rio.63 Similarly, in accompanying Vargas on his trip to the Amazon, Rio de Janeiro Mayor Jesuino Albuquerque sought to gather flora and fauna for the Botanical Garden.64 Natural conservation, along with other sociocultural and historic manifestations in Brazil, was deemed a matter of state intervention and national defense; its attainment would attest to the very strength of the state in penetrating what had been the realm of private property and regional domain.

The Estado Novo's principal commitment, of course, was to state-led industrialization and consolidation of federal power—not environmental biodiversity and indigenous cultural autonomy. The resources earmarked for environmental protection and indigenous communities remained minimal and their proponents hobbled by all sorts of restraints. It is not for nothing that Vargas is still remembered nostalgically in the minds of many Brazilians as the father of the poor rather than the keeper of the forest. After all, state officials pronounced that Brazil would only emerge as a modern and powerful nation by exploiting its natural resources and transforming an agrarian economy into an industrial powerhouse. During his famed visit to the Amazonian city of Manaus in 1940, Vargas asserted that "nature offers a magnificent gift that demands treatment and cultivation by human hands"—a sure sign that he did not have in mind ecotourism as the Amazon's primary destiny.65 Likewise, in an essay celebrating the emergence of Brazil as an industrial power under Vargas, published by the state's Department of Press and Propaganda, Mario Travassos lambasted those who sought to avoid the sad reality of the nation's underdevelopment by recounting the florid accounts of Brazil's first chronicler, Pero Vaz de Caminha. While the romantics "sing about the beauty of the land, of its forms and colors and the presumed wealth that lay within it, ignoring the eternal struggle of man to forge from Brazil's geohistoric complex a new form of tropical civilization," the Vargas government, Travassos boasted, had taken concrete steps to establish basic industries.66

Intensified industrial development during the war and the postwar period, however, elicited growing preoccupation with environmental protection among the more privileged social sectors in Brazilian cities. In São Paulo, where rapid industrialization, population growth, and urban expansion and renovation since the first decades of the century had destroyed remnants of the Atlantic Forest, residents displayed a heightened reverence for [End Page 151] the city's parks, trees, and botanical gardens.67 The grinding tempo of urban, industrial life and consumerist culture undoubtedly led elite critics to romanticize a more "primitive" and "natural" landscape. It is telling that Brazil's first national park, Itatiaia, was created in a region proximate to the cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the nation's most industrial and socially diversified centers, as well as the heart of its embryonic environmental movement.

But the concern with preserving western territory would not take long to follow. With the aggressive thrust of western expansion and migration, the future seemed to dim for the peoples and cultures of the Xingu. Manoel Rodrigues Ferreira, an engineer, photographer, and reporter who accompanied state expeditions to the Central-West, noted ominously in an account published in 1946: "the backlands have an irresistible appeal to us because of its primitive nature and its mysteries. To experience the backlands is a pleasure; but as a result of this pleasure we deprive future generations."68 Or as José Candido M. Carvalho, a zoologist who formed part of a research team from the Museu Nacional that visited the Xingu Region in 1946 and 1948, noted: "for a zoologist accustomed to the geography of the coastal zone whose flora is intact in only a few places and whose fauna already has lost some of its species, a trip to Xingu offers tremendous appeal. There the flora and fauna preserve their primitive splendor, because civilized man has not yet caused the marked modification of the biological balance among the species of the region."69 According to Ferreira, it was Carvalho who first raised the idea of creating a national park in 1948 while conducting scientific research in the Xingu and conversing one night with other scientists, anthropologists, and the Villas Boas brothers about the future of the flora, fauna, and indigenous peoples of the region. Ferreira agreed to provide newspaper coverage to promote the idea.70 (Carvalho would later become the head of the Museu Nacional, as well as the president of the environmental organization, Fundação Brasileira para a Conservação da Natureza, founded in 1958.71 )

Since the corporatist state's recipe for environmentalism, like that for social peace, never proved easy or even-handed, the proponents of the Xingu Park struggled to master the contested and contradictory realm of nationalist discourse. Appealing to the nationalistic symbolism of the natural landscape—a motif present (albeit not dominant) within the developmentalist state's agenda—these scientists, as we shall see, lobbied for environmental preservation as the basis, rather than the antithesis, of national progress. But first we must touch on the developmentalist state's policy towards indigenous people, for Xingu national park was to serve not only as a refuge for endangered flora and fauna, but for the indigenous population as well. Here, too, we see that the nationalistic discourse promoted by the state was radicalized by those demanding a more far-reaching and comprehensive protectionist policy. [End Page 152]

Acculturating the Noble Savage

The protection of indigenous people and the demarcation of their land had always been the official policy of the first Vargas regime, yet, true to its national developmentalist bent, indigenous people were to be transformed into sedentary agriculturists, regimented laborers, and full-fledged Brazilian citizens. Vargas's ideologues, however, also valued the symbolic importance of indigenous peoples as purported markers of Brazilian exceptionalism and progenitors of its mixed-blood population. In the central-western region of Mato Grosso, so-called uncontacted Indians and their territories commanded special appeal for nativists because of their pristine nature, ostensibly uncontaminated by external influences.72 Of course, socioeconomic integration was fundamentally at odds with cultural preservation; yet official state policy, employing a pseudo-scientific positivist logic typical of pan-American indigenismo, envisioned that the (positive) essence of Indianness could still be retained under government stewardship. Indeed, the image of the naked "stone age" Indian staring at or winding the propeller of a government delegation's airplane, which graced books and journalistic spreads, suggested the seemingly harmonious integration of these two worlds.

Like the marked interest in "pre-history" evinced by Estado Novo publications on Brazilian archaeology and paleontology as well as the newfound interest in nineteenth-century naturalists' accounts, indigenous people were valued as clues to the past, the matrix of Brazilian society.73 In 1943, Army Major Jonathas Correia wrote in a military journal that Indians—"diligent, serious, intrepid, honest, and competent"—had always been useful to Luso-Brazilians since the arrival of Cabral.74 Likewise, archaeology professor Angyone Costa proclaimed that Indians had imparted to Brazilians "tameness, a delicateness in treatment, a certain irony that we dispense to people, kindness for animals, an acuteness for all things."75 Such tributes to the indigenous population and its mixed-blood progeny, of course, collapsed distinction among indigenous peoples, romanticized coerced interethnic unions, and conjured invariant cultural traits.

Museum exhibitions and other visual media sought to highlight for the Brazilian public the indigenous contribution to nationhood. A 1940 exposition to commemorate the inauguration of the new headquarters of the Ministry of War displayed ethnographic material that revealed "the inventive genius of our Indians and suggests the possibilities they can offer, once they are contacted and civilized, a task being undertaken by the Serviço de Proteção aos Índios."76 In 1944, the SPI organized an ethnographic team to travel annually to the Brazilian hinterland to film, photograph, gather artifacts, and to conduct linguistic studies for the creation of a museum—which a decade later would become the Indian Museum in Rio de Janeiro. In [End Page 153] addition to combating prejudice towards indigenous people, anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro (a graduate of the Escola Livre de Sociologia e Política), noted that the museum would "demonstrate the enormous legacy that we received from the Indians, which was their experience of living in the forest, cultivating the plants that came from there."77 On a somewhat similar note, Major Correia praised the idea of a museum where scientific research could be done in a "patriotic" manner for the "necessary and useful integration of the indigene into Brazilian life."78 Nilo Velloso, a photographer who formed part of a research team of the Indian Service dispatched to the Xingu region, studied the lifestyle, rituals, and language of the Kuikuro, with the hope of "instilling in Brazilian youth some tenderness for this race."79 In 1948, the Sociedade de Amigos dos Índios was founded in São Paulo to defend indigenous rights and to eradicate prejudice through films, photographs, and other material that had been heretofore restricted to specialists. The organization counted anthropologist Harald Schultz and sociologist Florestan Fernandes among its directorate and sought to disseminate information regarding "indigenous ancestors and the Indians who still live in perfectly organized societies in our backlands."80

Given their invaluable cultural contributions to the nation's formation, indigenous people were deemed by state officials as ideal defenders of the nation's borders, colonizers of the frontier, and transmitters of sociocultural assets. The state would oversee the Indians' protection in order to ensure their cultural and biological fusion with other Brazilians. Officials at the SPI spoke openly of their goal of thoroughly (albeit gradually) assimilating indigenous peoples and, in the process, producing a more vigorous and virtuous Brazilian population.

The Preservationist Campaign for the Xingu Indians

But as the idyllic scenario portrayed by state officials increasingly went awry with the intensification of interethnic conflict and the invasion of indigenous land in Mato Grosso, some began to challenge the state's integrationist model for indigenous peoples. In a letter to the president of the Indian Protection Service, the governor of Goiás, Jerônimo Coimbra Bueno, questioned the ability of the agency to protect indigenous peoples in the west after witnessing the massacre of hundreds of Krahô Indians in 1941 in his own state. Critics argued that the March to the West stoked interethnic violence by unleashing the invasion of Indian territory and questioned the capability of the state to protect indigenous communities.81 Thus, for uncontacted Indian populations, the goiano governor suggested that a more fitting measure would be "to leave them like they are, limited to the territories they occupy, until the country, after the rehabilitation of illiterate and unproductive whites in the [End Page 154] sertão [...] can dispose of resources not only to attract the Indians, but, above all, to duly assist them."82 In 1948, Bueno proposed a national park on Bananal Island to protect the flora and fauna of central Brazil and its indigenous populations. Similarly, Herbert Baldus, chief of the ethnology section of the Museu Paulista, asserted that the Brazilian government lacked the capacity to incorporate Indians through proper "scientific" process, and urged the temporary isolation of Indian groups with little or no contact with outsiders.83

Likewise, the writer Austregésilo de Athayde stated: "we must adopt, faced with these Brazilians, a different policy that consists in leaving them in their huts, without any initiative of protection or understanding"; newspapers proclaimed their admiration for indigenous indomitability, "a virtue which during these times should be well imitated by all of us."84 Critics of integrationism defended uncontacted or semi-contacted groups in the west as "the entrails of their native country," the last vestige of pre-Columbianism, "the last Brazilian Indian."85 Like the environmentalists, these advocates of indigenous protection would rework the institutional matrix and nationalistic iconography of the developmentalist state to lobby for more preservationist goals that, although couched in a secular and scientific language, were rooted in a classic/ religious vision of Amazonia as a Biblical Eden.86

In 1949, Vasconcelos Costa, a federal deputy from Minas Gerais, delivered a speech in the Brazilian congress in which he called for the creation of a "national park" in northeastern Mato Grosso. As Costa stated:

The region of Central Brazil where the Xavantes are located, between the Rio das Mortes and Culuene, which encompasses the Serra do Roncador, is one of the most beautiful in this country and, until now, one of the most unknown. [...] One has the impression that it is a paradise there, such is the beauty of the land, the robustness of the man who lives there and his happiness will never be exceeded in exchange for civilization.

The creation of a national park, however, would safeguard the land "with its primitive lords and the variety of game and fish so abundant there," and ensure the "historical and geographical patrimony for future generations."87 Costa's discourse consecrated the image of the pristine Indian that had formed part of the Estado Novo's nationalistic propaganda—but whose preservation was unintended.

Although Vasconcelos Costa's plan to establish a national park encompassing Xavante territory foundered, contemporaneously the movement to create a national park in the Xingu region gathered momentum. In 1948, Federal Deputy João Café Filho visited the Xingu region with a congressional delegation and was very much unsettled by the growing conflicts and attacks on the Indians that threatened to spoil for "future generations" the exuberant [End Page 155] and pristine flora and fauna of "pre-Cabralian Brazil."88 As vice-president under Vargas (democratically elected in 1950), Café Filho convened a group of specialists, including anthropologists Heloisa Torres and Darcy Ribeiro, Air Force Brigadier Raimundo Vasconcelos Aboim, and sertanista ("backwoodsman") Orlando Villas Boas—to draft a proposal for the creation of a national park in the Xingu, and, together with General Cândido Rondon and various indigenistas, met with Vargas to discuss a proposed congressional bill for the Xingu Park.

In his memoirs, Darcy Ribeiro recounts that meeting in May 1952 with Vargas. Decrying the environmental damage caused by cattle ranchers in clearing pasture in central Brazil, Ribeiro impressed upon Vargas that only the Indians were "capable of preserving a living sample of the original nature of Brazil, which everywhere is being destroyed." According to Ribeiro, Vargas was moved, not by his affinity for the Indians, but by his love for Brazilian nature and his concern with protecting Amazonia and the "original Brazil" from obliteration.89

Indeed, Ribeiro reiterated these themes in the preamble to the congressional bill for the Xingu Park introduced in 1952. While he mentioned the promise of the park for future scientific research and its logistical importance for aeronautics, the main thrust focused on the park's cultural and historical significance for the Brazilian nation. The document declaimed the urgency of "saving some of the last remnants of pre-Columbian Brazil from certain destruction as occurred to millions of others who were victims of our expansion." The Indians of Xingu, "representatives of pristine Brazil," would serve to showcase the conditions in "which the first society of European tradition was successfully implanted in the tropics: Brazilian society." Underscoring the importance of the park for preserving Brazil's flora and fauna as a "sample for future generations," Ribeiro noted: "It is necessary for this reserve to be representative of pristine Brazil not only in its bio-geographic characteristics but, also, in its territorial grandeur." To preserve the integrated cultural and ecological milieu that had allowed these indigenous societies to flourish, the park would encompass an extensive territory, rather than subdividing the region into small reserves.90

The defenders of the park promoted greater cultural awareness of Xingu to generate popular and congressional support for the project in the postwar democratic arena. In 1948, Manoel Rodrigues Ferreira, the engineer/ photographer who joined the Roncador-Xingu Expedition, published a series of articles in the São Paulo daily A Gazeta calling for the creation of a national park in Xingu; his photographs depicting the simple and idyllic life of the native dwellers were exhibited at the Museu de Arte Moderna in São Paulo and later published in 1951 in a coffee-table book.91 Ferreira stated that his [End Page 156] photographs allowed Brazilians for the first time to see "these tribes in their natural state, free of contact and influence of civilizados." Ferreira apparently was quite successful in conveying these messages: a letter to the editor of A Gazeta glowed that his coverage showed Indians "living, dancing, and swimming in a nearly biblical scene, living, in short, a childlike existence [...]."92 But perhaps Ferreira's biggest success was his documentary film, Aspectos do Alto Xingu, completed in 1949, which received accolades from audiences in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and European film festivals.93 Further support for the Xingu park came from the Rio de Janeiro daily Correio da Manhã, whose editor-in-chief, Antonio Callado, later published a fictionalized account in his widely acclaimed novel, Quarup.94 Media magnate Assis Chateaubriand, owner of the Diários Associados, personally wrote articles about the Xingu and played an important role in drumming up support for the creation of a national park.

The park's proponents, however, offered romanticized and inaccurate renditions of indigenous peoples and the national environment, both past and present. The depiction of the Xingu Indians as culturally invariant and uncontaminated by external influence, propounded at the time of the Roncador-Xingu Expedition, distorted the indigenous peoples' historical experience. For, although "uncontacted" Indians may lack direct interaction with "whites," they are not immune from cultural influences—or diseases—transmitted by other indigenous groups who do maintain more regular contact. In the Xingu region, a refuge zone where various indigenous peoples exerted mutual influence upon one another, outlying groups such as the Bakairi had longstanding interaction with Luso-Brazilians—an indication that the peoples of the Xingu were not as hermetically sealed nor as historically frozen as the primitivists exulted.95 The presence of metal tools among the Xinguanos affirmed by the first government expeditionaries attests to this. As systematic contact of Indians with "whites" increased with the presence of photographers, journalists, and air force officials in the Xingu, the image of the pristine Indian (promoted often by these very interlocutors) strayed even further from reality. In depicting Xinguanos as practitioners of a timeless culture and as inhabitants of a bygone time, state officials and anthropologists served to distance these populations from the ongoing historical processes shaping these communities.96 The ahistorical rendition of Xingu's populations, in fact, conformed to classic depictions of native Americans and colonized peoples worldwide, portrayed as anachronistic or atavistic, belonging to the realm of nature rather than history.97 Suspending indigenous peoples in time allowed urban Brazilians to critique (or, alternatively, to marvel at) the rapid "progress" taking place in metropolitan and industrial regions. [End Page 157]

As an authentic diorama of pre-Columbian topography, the Xingu Park was also misleading. The depiction of the forested areas of mid-twentieth-century Xingu as representative of pre-Columbian Brazil belied both nature's spontaneous transformations as well as the anthropogenic modifications imposed by indigenous actors; in fact, researchers from the Museu Nacional who arrived in the region decried the destructive fires in central Brazil caused by indigenous hunters, particularly the Xavante.98

Still, the proposal for the Xingu National Park broke new ground in Brazilian legal history. Rather than conceiving of indigenous land in narrow terms of physical occupation, the Park envisioned an integrated "habitat" capable of sustaining a community's physical as well as cultural well-being.99 Furthermore, it is important to recall that the preservationist policy for the Xingu area—however problematic in its ideological underpinnings—was but one competing project for the region in a highly contested political arena. State officials in Mato Grosso, who fiercely opposed the federal territory as an affront to local authority and regional progress, promoted feverish real estate speculation among investors seeking land as a hedge against inflation or with an eye towards overvalued indemnification. Mato Grosso Governor Fernando Correa da Costa and his cohorts railed against the proposed Xingu Park as "another enormous area for the aborigine" that violated the state's "territorial integrity." Mato Grosso elites generally viewed Indians as savage, indolent and, ideally, destined for extinction.100 In their view, only the industrious "white man" merited state assistance in occupying lands "legally" acquired. These opponents of the park constructed their own myths of progress, laying claim to the dominant strain of developmentalist discourse that touted the importance of economic investment and colonization of the frontier. Their efforts were rather successful. When the Brazilian Congress finally approved the creation of the Xingu National Park in 1961—nine years after the introduction of the initial bill—the area had been significantly reduced in size. Marring the edenic vision of the west, the violence, fraud, land-grabbing and speculation that marked the struggle for Xingu proved a far more durable tradition in the history of the Brazilian frontier.

Xingu: A Brazilian Exhibitionary Complex and Its Legacy

In his study of the emergence of European museums and expositions in the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century, Tony Bennett notes the pivotal role that museums, galleries, and exhibitions played in the formation of the modern state, transferring objects and bodies from private to public arenas and forming vehicles for inscribing and broadcasting messages of power throughout society. Although Bennett views this "exhibitionary complex" as [End Page 158] variant to Foucault's carceral archipelago (seeing vs. being seen), he posits an intrinsic interrelationship in the endeavor to regiment, educate and "civilize" the populace.

A standard trope of the European museum exhibit aimed at the lifelike reproduction of an authenticated past and its representation as a series of stages leading to the present, while museums of science and technology represented the history of industry as a succession of progressive innovations culminating in the triumph of industrial capitalism. In the context of nineteenth-century imperialism, the "exhibitionary complex" played a central role in connecting yet differentiating the history of North Atlantic nations with non-Western "others." In portraying a rupture between "primitive peoples" who had disappeared or would disappear from history, the museums conjured an earlier stage of species development that Western nations had long surpassed. "Primitive" peoples served as the "once upon a time" in this positivistic narrative—a representational starting point at which human history had long ago emerged, marking the beginning of the transition from nature to culture. In short, the construction and display of the primitive other, reaching back to prehistoric time and encompassing all areas of the globe, served to ratify imperial superiority.101

An examination of the preservationist discourse surrounding the creation of the Xingu Park confirms, in part, this general trend. Under the developmentalist state, the flora, fauna, and indigenous people of Xingu were to be spotlighted—a living museological display—to inform the Brazilian people of their historical and cultural pedigree. The park, thus, followed in a longstanding colonialist tradition in which Indians have been confined to nature and a nebulous "prehistory."102 Indeed, since the nineteenth-century Brazilian ethnographic museums and scientific institutions had sought to collect and display anatomical curiosities of indigenous people to prove their biological inferiority and atavism.103 Certainly, Brazilian indigenous policy, with its positivist underpinnings, retained an evolutionary paradigm presaging the ultimate disappearance of indigenous peoples.

Yet the preservationist campaign for Xingu Park, arising within Brazil, differs in critical ways from the "exhibitionary complex" or the primitivist movement within the North Atlantic. For the indigenous people of Xingu were seen as more than evolutionary precursors or foils of "modern man": they were viewed as biocultural progenitors of the Brazilian nation. This placed contemporary Brazilians in a more ambiguous relationship with their indigenous compatriots, with cultural constructions oscillating between affinity and alterity. Likewise, the preservation of the forest and its species was deemed critical not only for natural but national history. In short, the overridingly nationalist rather than universalist importance of the park emerges as a defining characteristic of the struggle for Xingu in Brazil. [End Page 159]

The preservationist experiment in Xingu would leave a particular mark on indigenous and environmental politics. Xingu residents would come to serve as a metonym for all Brazilian Indians, notwithstanding the wide divergence in the indigenous population's social realities and historical experiences. Indeed, as one study has noted, with at least eighty percent of all media coverage and cultural representations of Brazilian Indians focusing on Xingu, the Xingu Indians have come to serve among the urban populace as the generic Indian, a present-day version of the Tupinambá romanticized in historical accounts of the colonial period.104 Sadly, this has reinforced stereotypes among Brazilians regarding indigenous peoples and led them to impugn the ethnicity of Indians who adopt dominant cultural patterns or who lack such "authentic" markings.105 As Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has pithily noted, the Xingu Indians have had to pay the price of being "metaphors of themselves." They have been paraded before distinguished visitors, diplomats, government officials, and the media; spotlighted in films, telenovelas, coffee-table books, and documentaries; the Xingu Indians have been made to serve as the illustrious exemplars of indigenous culture, even as they are the exceptions to the rule of poverty, exclusion, and marginality. This imposed identity promotes an alienation of ethnic consciousness as Xinguanos have had to "play Indian" for their admirers and have been barred from articulating solidarity with other indigenous groups whose realities (appear to) contrast so dramatically from their own.106 Thus, if other indigenous groups in Brazil have witnessed the appropriation of their land and labor by ranchers, multinationals, and squatters, the Xinguanos have been confined to a ritualistic space in which their modes of production have been symbolically leeched by romantic indigenists and nationalist ideologues.107 Likewise, the edenic vision of a pristine environment, although appealing to disillusioned urbanites, discounts or oversimplifies the complex relationship of indigenous peoples and other rural dwellers with the natural world.

Defenders of the park, then, perpetuated ahistorical and essentialist notions of indigenous peoples and the environment even as they struggled to protect them from depredation. (Although, to be sure, even the Xingu Park would not be spared mutilation by the military government's road-building projects in the Amazon.108 ) Still, proponents of Xingu succeeded in upholding the preservation of indigenous cultures and the natural environment as constitutive of rather than inimical to nationalism.

Under the military government, the Brazilian state would expand the institutional and legal framework for environmental protection with the creation in 1973 of Brazil's first environmental protection agency, the Special Secretariat for the Environment (SEMA), which was founded in the aftermath of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, and with the National Environment Act in 1981.109 Although such efforts at [End Page 160] environmental protection were piecemeal and limited—restricted to the preservation of unique samples of Brazilian ecosystems—they reflected the ongoing recognition of the scientific and nationalist importance of environmentalism. Thus, the military's developmental policies, which paradoxically both expanded and violated indigenous rights and environmental legislation, served to fuel a growing indigenist and environmental movement that would flourish in Brazil in the 1990s.110 In tracing the origins of the Xingu Park, we gain greater historical insight into the institutional and cultural roots of Brazil's environmental and indigenist movements of the late twentieth century.

Seth Garfield

Seth Garfield is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his PhD from Yale University in 1996. He is the author of Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil: State Policy, Frontier Expansion and the Xavante Indians, 1937-1988 (Duke UP, 2001). He recently received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to work on a new book manuscript on the Battle for Rubber in the Brazilian Amazon during World War II.

Notes

1. Ellen B. Basso, The Kalapalo Indians of Central Brazil (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1988), pp. 1-2.

2. Eduardo Galvão, Encontro de Sociedades: Índios e Brancos no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1979), p. 36.

3. See Orlando Villas Boas and Claudio Villas Boas, Xingu: The Indians, Their Myths (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973); Orlando Villas Boas and Claudio Villas Boas, A Marcha para Oeste (São Paulo: Editora Globo, 1994); Darcy Ribeiro, Confissões (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997).

4. Shelton H. Davis, Victims of the Miracle: Development and the Indians of Brazil (Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1986), pp. 47-8.

5. Maria Lúcia Pires Menezes, "Parque Indígena do Xingu: Um Estudo das Relações entre Indigenismo e Geopolítica," in Philippe Lena and Adélia Engracia de Oliveira, eds., Amazônia: A Fronteira Agrícola 20 Anos Depois (Belém: Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, 1991) p. 98. The presence of the air base, conveniently obfuscated in "postcard" images and documentaries of the park is also raised in Stephen Schwartzman, The Panará of the Xingu National Park: The Transformation of a Society (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987), p. 317.

6. See Carmen Sylvia Junqueira de Barros Lima, "Os Kamayurá e o Parque Nacional do Xingu," Thesis, Universidade de Campinas, 1967.

7. See Leandro Mendes Rocha, "A Marcha para o Oeste e os Índios do Xingu," Indios do Brasil 2 (June 1992): p. 28.

8. Angelina Cabral de Teves, "Notas sobre o Estado Atual das Tribos da Região dos Formadores do Xingu," Revista Brasiliense 31 (1960): 162.

9. José Murilo de Carvalho, "O motivo edênico no imaginário social brasileiro," in Dulce Chaves Pandolfi et al., ed., Cidadania, Justiça e Violência (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fundação Getúlio Vargas, 1999), pp. 25-33.

10. Alcida Rita Ramos, Indigenism: Ethnic Politics in Brazil (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1998).

11. Donna J. Haraway, "Universal Donors in a Vampire Culture: It's All in the [End Page 161] Family: Biological Kinship Categories in the Twentieth-Century United States," in William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), pp. 321-22.

12. See Roberto P. Guimarães, The Ecopolitics of Development in the Third World: Politics and Environment in Brazil (Boulder: Lynn Rienner, 1991), p. 100; Anthony Hall, Sustaining Amazonia: Grassroots Action for Productive Conservation (Manchester; Manchester UP), pp. 52-53; and José Candido de Melo Carvalho, ed., Atlas da Fauna Brasileira, 2nd Ed. (Rio de Janeiro: FENAME; São Paulo: Melhoramentos, 1981).

13. See the compelling study by Nísia Trindade Lima, Um sertão chamado Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Revan; IUPERJ; UCAM, 1999), for an overview of both edenic and pathological renditions of the backlands.

14. On the efforts by several prominent Brazilian intellectuals in the 1950s to explain and redefine national culture, see Carlos Guilherme Mota, "Os Anos 50: Linhas de Produção Cultural," Revista de História 28.56 (1977): 155-75.

15. See Alcir Lenharo, Sacralização da Política (Campinas: Papirus/UNICAMP, 1986).

16. See Hermano Ribeiro da Silva, Nos sertões do Araguaia (São Paulo: J. Fagundes, 1936); and Willy Aureli, Roncador (Rio de Janeiro: Edições Cultura Brasileira, 1939). They followed in the footsteps of Percy Fawcett, a British adventurer who set out in 1925 to find a "lost civilization" in central Brazil and who never returned. On the Fawcett expedition, see Georges Miller Dyott, Man Hunting in the Jungle, Being the Story of a Search for Three Explorers Lost in the Brazilian Wilds (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1930). On the interest of industrialists in the economic potential of central Brazil, see Armando de Arruda Pereira, Diário de viagem de São Paulo a Belém do Pará descendo o Araguaya (São Paulo: Graf. Paulista, 1935).

17. Cassiano Ricardo, Marcha para Oeste, Vol II (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1959 [1942]), 278-79.

18. See Heloísa Pontes, "Retratos do Brasil: Editores, Editoras e 'Coleções Brasiliana' nas Décadas de 30, 40 e 50," in Sergio Miceli, ed., História das Ciências Sociais no Brasil (São Paulo: Vértice; Editora Revista dos Tribunais; IDESP, 1989), 359-409.

19. Karl von den Steinen, Entre os Aborígenes do Brasil Central, trans. Egon Schaden (São Paulo: Departamento de Cultura de São Paulo, 1940), p. 9.

20. Rocha, "A Marcha para o Oeste," p. 18.

21. Quoted in Davis, Victims of the Miracle, p. 49.

22. Rocha, "A Marcha para o Oeste," pp. 16-19.

23. Lima, Um sertão chamado Brasil, pp. 73-77.

24. Angyone Costa praised anthropologists for shedding light on "the olden time, of the first ancestors who lived in Brazil." See Costa, Migrações Internas, p. 91. As Gilberto Freyre wrote in 1943 of the importance of carrying out anthropological research in Brazil in matters of cultural ecology, warning that so long as such scientific research was not carried out all interregional socioeconomic policies would be doomed. Gilberto Freyre, Problemas Brasileiros de Antropologia (Rio de Janeiro: Edição Casa do Estudante doBrasil, 1943), pp. 57-59. In 1939, the Conselho Nacional de Geografia adopted a resolution calling for an investigation into the present state of anthropological research in Brazil. The response is found in Candido Mariano da [End Page 162] Silva Rondon, A Etnografia e a Etnologia do Brasil em Revista (Imprensa Nacional: Rio de Janeiro, 1946). For an analysis of the institutionalization of the discipline of anthropology in Brazil and the role of anthropologists in nation-building, see Mariza Gomes e Sousa Peirano, "The Anthropology of Anthropology: The Brazilian Case," (Ph. D. diss., Harvard U, 1981).

25. Carlos Augusto da Rocha Freire, "Indigenismo e Antropologia: O Conselho Nacional da Proteção aos Índios na Gestão Rondon (1939-1955)," Master's Thesis, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, 1990, p. 210-11.

26. See José C. M. Carvalho, Pedro E. De Lima, Eduardo Galvão, Observações Zoológicas e Antropológicas na Região dos Formadores do Xingu (Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional, 1949); José C.M. Carvalho, Relações entre os Índios do Alto Xingu e a Fauna Nacional (Rio de Janeiro: Museu Nacional, 1951); Eduardo Galvão, Diários de campo de Eduardo Galvão: Tenetehara, Kaioá e índios do Xingu, ed., Marco Antonio Gonçalves (Rio de Janeiro: Editora UFRJ; Museu do Índio-FUNAI, 1996).

27. Pedro E. de Lima, "Notas Antropológicas sobre os Índios do Xingu" in José C. M. Carvalho, Pedro E. De Lima, Eduardo Galvão, Observações Zoológicas e Antropológicas na Região dos Formadores do Xingu, p. 32.

28. See Othon Machado, Botânica-Plantas do Brasil Central (Contribuição ao Conhecimento da Flora do Brasil) (Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional, 1954).

29. Helmut Sick, Tukani: Entre os Animais e os Índios do Brasil Central, trans. Leonardo Fróes (Rio de Janeiro: Marigo Comunicações Visual, 1997), p. 211.

30. On the construction of Brazil's historical patrimony under Vargas, see José Reginaldo Santos Gonçalves, A Retórica da Perda: Os Discursos do Patrimônio Cultural no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Editora UFRJ; IPHAN, 1996); Daryle Williams, Culture Wars in Brazil (Durham: Duke UP, 2001).

31. Erik Camayd-Freixas, "Introduction" in Erik Camayd-Freixas and José Eduardo González, Primitivism and Identity in Latin America: Essays on Art, Literature, and Culture (Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2000), p. xviii.

32. On the Portuguese crown's (failed) conservationist policies regarding Brazilian forests, see Shawn William Miller, Fruitless Trees: Portuguese Conservation and Brazil's Colonial Timber (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000).

33. In distinguishing Latin American primitivism from its metropolitan counterparts Camayd-Freixas stresses the importance of studying "the returning gaze of the colonized." See Ibid., p. x. On the construction of primitivism, see Adam Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformation of an Illusion (New York: Routledge, 1993); Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990).

34. José Candido de Melo Carvalho, "A Conservação da Natureza e Recursos Naturais noMundo e no Brasil," Anais da Academia Brasileira da Ciência 41 (1969): 14.

35. A. C. Callado, "O Serviço Florestal," Revista do Serviço Público 1.1 (Jan. 1939): 30-34.

36. United States Department of Agriculture, Bibliographical Bulletin No. 18, The Forests of Continental Latin America (Including European Possessions): A Bibliography of Selected Literature, 1920-1950 (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1952), pp. 44-71. [End Page 163]

37. Ibid., pp. 32-33.

38. See Jair Tovar, "Parques Nacionais" in Revista do Serviço Público 87.3 (June 1960): 122-34.

39. Ibid., p. 34.

40. Quoted in Tovar, "Parques Nacionais," p. 126.

41. Affonso Celso, Porque me ufano do meu paiz, 8th ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Garnier, n.d.), p. 13.

42. Callado, "O Serviço Florestal," p. 34.

43. See Lucia Lippi Oliveira, "Vargas, Os Intelectuais e as Raízes da Ordem" in Maria Celina D'Araujo, ed., As instituições brasileiras da Era Vargas (Rio de Janeiro: EdUERJ; Fundação Getúlio Vargas), p. 93.

44. See William Cronon, "Introduction: In Search of Nature" in Cronon, ed. Uncommon Ground, pp. 23-56 and Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," in Uncommon Ground, pp. 69-90.

45. See Laura de Mello e Souza, O diabo e a Terra de Santa Cruz: feitiçaria e religiosidade popular no Brasil colonial (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1986). For parallels in eighteenth-century Anglo-America, see Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness," p. 70. On edenic visions of Brazil, see Sergio Buarque de Holanda, Visão do paraíso: os motivos edênicos no descobrimento e colonização do Brasil. 4th ed. (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1985).

46. See Shawn William Miller, Fruitless Trees: Portuguese Conservation and Brazil's Colonial Timber (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000).

47. See Stanley J. Stein, Vassouras: A Brazilian Coffee County, 1850-1900 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985); and Nancy Priscilla Naro, A Slave's Place, A Master's World: Fashioning Dependency in Rural Brazil (London: Continuum, 2000).

48. Carlos G. Terra, O Jardim no Brasil no Século XIX (Rio de Janeiro: EBA/UFRJ, 2000), p. 37.

49. Ibid., pp. 37-45.

50. Ibid., pp. 48-83.

51. Ibid., pp. 60-61.

52. Constatt, quoted in Tovar, "Parques Nacionais," p. 134.

53. For a fine review of this literature, see the chapter "Natureza e Identidade Nacional nas Américas" in Maria Ligia Coelho Prado, América Latina no Século XIX: Tramas, Telas, e Textos (São Paulo: EDUSP; Bauru: EDUSC, 1999), pp. 179-216.

54. See Julyan Peard, Race, Place, and Medicine (Durham: Duke UP, 1998).

55. Hermano Vianna, The Mystery of Samba: Popular Music and National Identity in Brazil, trans. John Charles Chasteen (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1999), p. 48. See also Celso, Porque me ufano do meu paiz.

56. John M. Monteiro, "The Heather Castes of Sixteenth-Century Portuguese America: Unity, Diversity, and the Invention of the Brazilian Indians," Hispanic American Historical Review 80.4 (Nov. 2000): 710.

57. Vianna cites an article written by modernist poet Oswald de Andrade in 1915 in which he extolled Brazilian painting that depicted "our vast hinterland," offering "the most varied scenery, the most diverse hues of palate, the most expressive types of tragic and opulent life." Quoted in Vianna, The Mystery of Samba, p. 70.

58. Ibid., p. 119 f4. On the depiction of Indians in Brazilian film, see Robert Stam, [End Page 164] Tropical Multiculturalism: A Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture (Durham: Duke UP, 1997).

59. Camayd-Freixas, "Introduction," p. xiii.

60. See the collection of poems by Pereira da Silva, originally published in 1927, Poemas Amazônicos, 3rd ed. (Manaus: Editora Valer, 1998).

61. For a comparative study of "naturalistic nationalism" in the United States, see Eric Kaufmann, "'Naturalizing the Nation': The Rise of Naturalistic Nationalism in the United States and Canada," Comparative Studies of Society and History 40.4 (October 1998): 666-95. Gilberto Freyre would adopt a similar position in his elaboration of a Luso-Tropicalist model to explain the uniqueness of Portuguese colonialism in Brazil and Africa. See Freyre, New World in the Tropics.

62. Quoted in Callado, "O Serviço Florestal," p. 31.

63. Helmut Sick, Tukani: Entre os Animais e os Índios do Brasil Central, trans. Leonardo Fróes (Rio de Janeiro: Marigo Comunicações Visual, 1997), p. 3.

64. Propaganda Amazonense, A Visita do Presidente Vargas e as Esperanças de Resurgimento do Amazonas (Manaus: Imprensa Pública, 1940), p. 29.

65. Vargas, quoted in Propaganda Amazonense, A Visita do Presidente Vargas, p. 12.

66. Mario Tavassos, "A Eclosão da Era Industrial no Brasil" in Os Grandes Problemas Nacionais (Rio de Janeiro: Departamento de Imprensa e Propaganda, 1942).

67. See Nicolau Sevcenko, Orfeu extático na metropole: São Paulo, sociedade e cultura nos frementes anos 20 (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992), pp. 111-16.

68. Manoel Rodrigues Ferreira, Nos Sertões do Lendário Rio das Mortes (São Paulo: Editora do Brasil, 1946), p. 162.

69. Carvalho, de Lima, Galvão, Observações Zoológicas, p. 7.

70. Manoel Rodrigues Ferreira, "Aspectos do Alto Xingu" e a Vera Cruz (São Paulo: Nobel; Secretaria de Estado da Cultura, 1983), pp. 37-8.

71. Carvalho, "A Conservação da Natureza," p. 19.

72. See, for example, Departamento de Imprensa e Propaganda, Rumo ao Oeste.

73. See, for example, Angyone Costa, Migrações e Cultura Indígena (São Paulo: Editora Nacional, 1939); Angyone Costa, Indiologia (Rio de Janeiro: Zenio Valverde, 1943); Anibal Mattos's tribute to the nineteenth-century Danish naturalist, Peter Wilhelm Lund no Brasil: Problemas de Paleontologia Brasileira (São Paulo: Editora Nacional, 1939).

74. Jonathas Correia, "A Casa do Índio," Revista do Instituto de Geografía e História Militar do Brasil 4.3 (1943): 143-46. See also Joaquim Rondon, O Índio com Sentinela das Nossas Fronteiras.

75. Angyone Costa, Indiologia, p. 13.

76. Antonio dos Santos Oliveira, Jr., A Comissão Rondon na Exposição Retrospectiva do Exército (Rio de Janeiro: Departamento de Imprensa Nacional, 1951). The essay originally appeared in 1940.

77. Ribeiro, Confissões, p. 196.

78. Correia, "A Casa do Índio," p. 146.

79. Nilo Velloso, Rumo ao Desconhecido (n.d.), 6.

80. Boletim No. 1 da Sociedade Amigos dos Índios (São Paulo: Departamento de Cultura, 1949), p. 62. [End Page 165]

81. Herbert Baldus, "Tribus da bacia do Araguaia e o Serviço de Proteção aos Índios," Revista do Museu Paulista 2 (1948): 154.

82. Bueno's appeal to the minister of agriculture appeared in the newspaper Folha da Manhã, May 7, 1949 and is excerpted in Herbert Baldus, "É belicoso o xavante?," Revista do Arquivo Municipal 142 (1951): 131-2.

83. Baldus, "É belicoso o Xavante?," pp. 125-26.

84. See Museu do Índio, Setor de Documentação [herein MI, SEDOC], Film325, Fot672-743.

85. The epithets were given by Assis Chateaubriand in O Jornal, May 29, 1949.

86. On the evolving and contested images of Amazonia as Eden, see Candace Slater's masterful Entangled Edens: Visions of the Amazon (Berkeley: U of California P, 2002).

87. Vasconcelos Costa, "Problemas do Brasil Central," 1949, MI, SEDOC, Film389, Fot759-60.

88. See Freire, "Indigenismo e Antropologia," pp. 221-22.

89. Darcy Ribeiro, Confissões (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997), p. 195.

90. See the bill for the Parque Indígena Xingu in Serviço de Proteção aos Índios, Relatorio Anual do SPI, 1953, pp. 101-05.

91. Anthropologist Herbert Baldus expressed hope in the book's introduction that the photographs would "open the hearts of Brazilians to the heart of Brazil" and help in the "conservation of that world" through a National Park in the Xingu. See the preface by Herbert Baldus to Manuel Rodrigues Ferreira, Cenas da Vida Indígena: Album dos Índios do Xingu (São Paulo: Edições Melhoramento, 1952), n.p.

92. Manoel Rodrigues Ferreira, "Aspectos do Alto Xingu" e a Vera Cruz (São Paulo: Nobel; Secretaria de Estado da Cultura, 1983), pp. 28-32.

93. Ibid., pp. 65-205.

94. Freire, "Indigenismo e Antropologia," p. 234.

95. Rocha, "A Marcha para o Oeste," p. 18.

96. In a trenchant critique of cultural relativist and structuralist/functionalist approaches, Johannes Fabian denounces anthropologists who deny the coevalness of the cultures that they study. See Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia UP, 1983). On the interconnectedness of cultures, see also James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988).

97. See, for example, Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 30-31; Kerwin Lee Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narrating the European Conquest of Native America, 1890-1990 (Berkeley: U of California P), pp. 129-212.

98. Carvalho, Lima, Galvão, Observações Zoológicas e Antropológicas, p. 12.

99. Rocha, "A Marcha para o Oeste," pp. 21-3.

100. "Practicamente fora do cartaz o Parque Indígena do Xingu," Brasil-Oeste 1.6 (October 1956): 30-31.

101. Tony Bennett, "The Exhibitionary Complex," in Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner, eds., Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994), pp. 123-54.

102. Monteiro, "The Heathen Castes," p. 718. [End Page 166]

103. See Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, O espetáculo das raças: cientistas, instituições, e a questão racial no Brasil (1870-1930) (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1993).

104. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, "Quanto custa ser a metáfora de si mesmo: os paradoxos da identidade xinguana," Museu de Antropologia, Publicações Avulsas 1 (Florianópolis: Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, 1979), p. 3.

105. For an astute analysis of the challenges faced by "post-traditional" Indians in asserting their ethnic identity, see Jonathan W. Warren, Racial Revolutions: Antiracism and Indian Resurgence in Brazil (Durham: Duke UP, 2001).

106. For a comparative discussion of indigenous challenges in engaging dominant ideologies, see Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale UP, 1998).

107. Viveiros de Castro, "Quanto custa ser a metáfora de si mesmo: os paradoxos da identidade xinguana," pp. 3-7.

108. See Davis, Victims of the Miracle.

109. On SEMA, Brazil's first environmental protection agency, see Guimarães, The Ecopolitics of Development in the Third World, pp. 143-171.

110. Hall, Sustaining Amazonia, pp. 53-78. For one of the most influential environmental manifestoes that emerged in the 1970s under military rule, see José A. Lutzenberger, Fim do Futuro? Manifesto Ecológico Brasileiro (Porto Alegre: Movimento; Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, 1977). [End Page 167]

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