O ser indígena na história institucional brasileira: pardismo como razão de estado

Abstract

The thesis investigates the emergence of ethnic and racial categorizations in the eight national demographic censuses based on the hypothesis that tactics of de-indianization of Brazilian society configured the category “pardo” in statistical, legal and political discourse, determining a non-place for the pardo population of indigenous origin. The objective is to carry out an archeology of knowledge and a genealogy of power on the conditions of possibility of the invention of pardism in state rationality, measuring its consequences for the consolidation of the narrative of erasure and denial of the right to self-declaration of indigenous identity. Methodologically, this is an interdisciplinary research based on bibliographic and document review methods, whose corpus consists of demographic censuses carried out in the period from 1872 to 2010; Constitutions; legislation; and academic texts examined according to a qualitative approach. The theoretical contribution gathers elements to decolonize the institutional history, questioning the invisibility in the official data, as well as to re-discuss the normative image of the indigenous being constructed by the selfrepresentations of Brazil. It can be seen that the term “pardo” acquired different meanings over time, being used for the first time to name the original peoples at the time of the Portuguese invasion. In the 19th century, permeated by problems related to independence, labor economy and territorial unification, the slaveholding Empire classified the population into cabocla, pardo, black and white. The first census that took place under the republican regime maintained this census classification, replacing the category “pardo” with “mestizo” and, after its completion, the category “caboclo” was eliminated. The term “indigenous” was introduced in the form of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics only in 1991, so that for a hundred years indigenous people and their descendants were declared pardos in the publications of the country's main demographic instrument. The work therefore contributes to the improvement of public policies for the promotion of equality and the confrontation of structural racism, in addition to proposing a decolonial historical interpretation of the right to self-determination according to the Federal Constitution of 1988 and Convention n. 169 of the International Labor Organization, critically approaching the fundamental concepts of people, territory and nation-state in dialogue with contemporary indigenous movements of ethnic recovery experienced in the Latin American continent.