Anthropology and the State in Brazil: questions concerning a complex relationship

Abstract

In this article we argue that, in order to understand the “attack” made on anthropology in Brazil, undertaken in the public sphere since the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, we need to look at how anthropological knowledge has become disciplined and institutionalized in the medium to long term. We refer, in particular, to the relationship between what has been constituted as a “field of anthropology” and issues related to the public sphere. It is also necessary to consider the configuration with other institutionalized knowledge throughout the period spanning from the end of the nineteenth century to the present, with discontinuities but also with some important continuities. We look to show that the anthropology initially undertaken in Brazil was basically committed to furthering the interests of the agrarian-based political elites, a situation that continued from the turn of the nineteenth century to the twentieth century and into the first decades of the twenty-first, not only at the level of nation building, but also in the formation of the State. However, since the 1950s, and especially following creation of the new postgraduate courses in the late 1960s and early 1970s, anthropologists developed knowledge that led them to make an ethical and moral commitment to the communities with which they worked, combined with a critique of the military regime’s developmentalism and dictatorial authoritarianism. During a third moment ranging from the constituent process to the present, a portion of Brazilian anthropologists began to work directly in the recognition of rights constitutionally assigned to differentiated collectivities, generating a growing and progressive zone of friction with the hegemonic sectors at the economic-political level.