The Indians and Brazil (review)

The Indians and Brazil, 3d ed. By MERCIO P. GOMES. Translated by JOHN W. MOON. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2000. Notes. Bibliography. xvi, 300 pp. Cloth, $49.95.

A simple theme runs through Brazilian anthropologist Mercio Gomes's The Indians and Brazil. Despite what many imagine, the identifiably Indian population of Brazil is not declining but growing, especially since the 1950s. This is the result not just of improvements in health care but of increasingly effective cultural accommodation promoted by more sophisticated leadership of both the indigenous communities and the nation. But if death and assimilation will not resolve the country's centuries-old "Indian problem"--many would argue that it is more a "white" problem--what does this mean for Brazil?

The first part of The Indians and Brazil is a history of Brazil "from the point of view of the Indians" (p. 15). From the outset the interest of the Europeans in the indigenous population was chiefly economic; what the Indians initially expected is less clear, though they soon learned to expect the worst. The author repeatedly indites the Land Law of 1850 as responsible for the loss of Indian lands, but he neglects the 1854 Reglamento (regulations) of this law that specifically guaranteed Indian community property. The point, in any event, is that laws of whatever sort had scant effect on land grabbing in the country's vast interior and did not stop provinces and states in the late nineteenth century from simply declaring that Indians, and therefore indigenous rights, no longer existed. The obvious failure of the empire's 1845 Reglamento--oddly translated here as "Regiment"--das missôes de catequese (Regulations for Christianizing Missions) as a mechanism of Indian assimilation and control and the international outcry following the abuses of the turn-of-the-century rubber boom prompted the new republican government to form the Indian Protection Agency (SPI) in 1910. But the idea of the inevitable demise of the indigenous population was so thoroughly entrenched in bureaucratic and popular imagination that the SPI, reorganized into FUNAI in the 1960s, sought only to bring about this end through acculturation and assimilation instead of the historically more common annihilation.

If the author is correct, and Indians and Indian cultures are not disappearing, where do they fit in modern Brazil? The second half of The Indians and Brazil surveys the sociopolitical organization of surviving indigenous groups and their interactions with the rest of the nation and the nation-state. It is important to remember that the "Indian problem" is only one of many facing Brazil in the 1990s, and it is not a high priority for millions of poor Brazilians reeling under the effects of globalization and "savage capitalism." Indigenous cultural groups enjoy a peculiar place in Brazilian law. On the one hand, they remain "minors" with limited but specific rights; on the other, the advantages of this special status are such that some caboclo (assimilated Indians/mixed bloods) communities are now reassuming visible indigenous identities, to press their cases. And in the vast Amazon basin, these rights make Indians the most important barrier to uncontrolled devastation.

Questions remain: Is the population upturn permanent or only temporary? What resources are Brazil's non-Indian people and the state willing to devote to two percent of the population, a population that, at least on paper, often controls vastly more resources per capita than do the non-Indian poor? What will be the effects of growing class differences within indigenous groups and competition among communities? Based on anthropological fieldwork and a wide range of secondary sources, The Indians and Brazil is particularly useful in that it raises almost as many questions as it answers, and were it available in paperback, it would be highly recommended for classroom use.

DAVID MCCREERY, Georgia State University

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