Anthropologists, Traditionally Occupied Lands and Strategies for the Redefinition of the State in Brazil

Abstract

The purpose of this text is to reflect on the anthropological practice in the course of the processes of modern construction of Brazil as a nation-state, that is, the processes of the so-called nation-building, in which capitalist enterprises and the modern state constitute the two most important powers that organize space today. The modernizing project of building the Brazilian nation-state involves not only the rulers who try to implement it, but also those who struggle against their negative effects in established legal political spaces. Together with the modernization project, new forms of making history are set up, especially after the 1987-8 Constituent Assembly, by recognizing lands traditionally occupied by indigenous people, quilombolas and other categories of traditional peoples. It is against these differentiated rights of citizenship that the CPI of FUNAI and INCRA is established, which seeks, ultimately, to attack the territorial and cultural rights of traditional peoples through strategies of criminalization of researchers. Criminalization acts in order to disqualify academic studies and research, as well as studies carried out for the preparation of anthropological technical reports and judicial expert reports, which would result in the guarantee of territorial rights and the questioning of dramatic socio-environmental effects. Such studies indicate that the implementation of public goals defined by the modernization project impacts the continuity of traditional ways of doing, creating and living.