Latineos - Latin America, Caribbean, arts, culture

It is easy to see how Said opens himself to criticism, for what agency can there be left to the colonized? Yet, his argument that cultures are defined as they define the culture of others, in other words, that subjects are constructed through what they conceive as differences in relation to the other, is worth exploring.

The concept of Indigenism, in the context of Brazil, follows an analogous orientation to the construction of Orientalism by the white European traveller. The producers of the first representations of the autochthonous population of Brazil were also travellers and missionaries.Politics and poetics are so intertwined in the construction of Indigenism that it becomes almost impossible to tell where one starts and the other finishes And likewise, those representations have been appropriated by the Indigenous populations with both political and cultural implications. In fact, politics and poetics are so intertwined in the construction of Indigenism that it becomes almost impossible to tell where one starts and the other finishes. It is not uncommon for anthropologists, and the lay public for that matter, to be baffled by the prominent place Brazilian native Indians occupy in the national imagination, considering they represent around 0.2 % of the national population.

Yet, one would only have to place the phenomenon in the context of a nationalist narrative to fully appreciate what is at stake in the perpetuation of an autochthonous other, after all, many nations are defined through their autochthonous population, the ones who were there first. For the anthropologist Alcida Rita Ramos, who wrote the book Indigenism: Ethnic politics in Brazil, published in 1988, the country would be unthinkable without its constructed Indian, for they represent both the nation’s ancestor and its destiny. The indianist literary movement in the nineteenth century, to give one example among many, believed that the very essence of the nation was contained in this fictionalised Indian, clad as an ethnic hero with the attributes of  a warrior from European novels.

Alcida Rita Ramos goes beyond state incorporation to analyse the imagery present in the national consciousness. In an attempt to analyse the received ideas with regard to the Indian, Ramos critically assess some words and messages attributed to Indians: child, heathen, nomad, primitive and savage. She goes on to observe that anthropology is also semantically oriented by such representations thus playing a part in canonizing notions about the Indians. The fine line between poetics and politics is quite evident here as those legitimized assumptions influence the elaboration of policies. The Indian as child, for example, relates to Aristotle’s definition of child, ‘reason in a state of becoming’.

The idea that The IndianThe Indian becomes a single category, largely ignoring the myriad of ethnic variations needed protection because he was ill-equipped will guide the type of paternalistic policies based on tutelage present through most of the twentieth century. In the wake of this type of representation comes the idea of a generic Indian, which may be found in accounts by missionaries, human rights activists, anthropologists, the media and the Indians themselves. With such an approach, the Indian becomes a single category, largely ignoring the myriad of ethnic variations. Such a scope immediately draws the reader to the notion of Orientalism. But Ramos perceptively points out that, though the similarities are many, the two notions differ in an important way, for the Indian, the creation so to speak of Indigenism, lives in temporal and spatial contiguity with the creator. In other words, the Indians in Brazil participate in the construction of Indigenism, which makes the Indians also creators, and agents for that matter. This type of essentialized Indian was referred to by the author as the ‘Hyperreal Indian’.

The downside of this unpredictable outcome of Indigenism is evidenced in the commodification of Indian-related images, the efficacy of which depends on the conformity, from the part of the Indian, to outsider’s expectations of Indianness. It is ironic, that indigenous activism is often grounded on the very essentialism anthropology tries to avoid. But then again, such is the result of cultural encounters: a dialectical and unpredictable result of opposing forces.