A comparative study of the image of the indian in Brazil and the United States

Author(s)

Sara Elizabeth Brandon

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Artes
• Defense date: 2005-05-20

Examining board members

Marcius Freire; Boris Kossoy; John Manuel Monteiro; Regina Polo Muller; Dominique Gallois

• Advisor: Marcius Freire

Abstract

This project proposes to study the construction of Native North American and Indigenous Brasilian identity in popular and dominant representations. ¿Indian¿ people have been analyzed using many different lenses. Anthropology, media, art and governmental groups have all created, recorded and finally documented images of indigenous people. These images reflect the presence of an ¿Indian¿ concept in the collective public imagination of each country. Since contact Native American identity has been generically reduced to a stagnant image. Its influences are rooted in the written, drawn and painted history of colonization as well as photography . The intention of this research is to demonstrate that this constructed ¿Indian¿ is a concept of dominant society's imagination which dehumanizes indigenous people. The ¿Indian¿ concept in dominant culture consists of some of these characteristics : a)the noble savage: (natural, exaggerated ecologist, or romanticized child) b) ¿bad¿ savage: (warrior, cannibal, headhunter, tomahawker, scalper and resistor of ¿manifest destiny¿), c)the voyeuristic object and the anthropological other , d) the acculturing or integrating Indian e) the vanishing race and the victim, f)the origin myth, g) the extraterrestrial h) the ¿real¿ Indian i) the halfbreed or the cafuzo/mameluco in Brazil, a generic masculinity and j) a focus on male Indianess and the demasculinization of this ¿Indian¿ in regards to the ¿white male¿. The Indian concept is not a stationary invention, and is always mutating. We will try to study early and present characteristics and their adaptations up to this point in time in terms of painted, drawn and photographic images. It is in the interest of this study to discuss these characteristics in terms of stereotypes which have caused the unequal treatment of indigenous people, both in terms of politics and identity. In Summary, we wish to deconstruct and compare the dominant imagination and the visual image of the ¿Indian¿ in Brazil and the United States. The word Indian can be associated with different images and concepts for different people. For the purpose of this study, ¿Indian¿ is the concept and word created by the colonial discourse of the Americas, which consisted of oral, textual and visual representations. This ¿Indian¿ has been reiterated and restructured by anthropology as well as contemporary popular culture. For different indigenous groups and individuals the word has taken on various contextual meanings. See Kaka Werá Jecupé. A Terra dos Mil Povos. 1998. (13-15). History hás been one sided. Accounts which take into consideration the points of view of indigenous peoples during contact, colonial and early history include: Native American Testimony; A Chronicle of Indian ¿ White Relations. Editor: Peter Nobokov and The World Turned Upside Down: Indian Voices from Early America. These books are only two which refer to the Native North American perspective of events, there are others. In Brazil see ¿Ymã Ano Mil e Quinhentos:Relatos e Memórias Indigenas Sobre a Conquista. Paulo Humberto Porto Borges. It is important to remember that the first representations would be re ¿represented in the form of xylographs. This process is best noted in the work, Grand Voyages by Theodore DeBry. Although used continously into the epic of the early painter-ethnographers, engravings differed from paintings and lithographs. It is important to remember paintings would have been more accessible to the wealthy. Thus, their influence on the masses is less obvious than those of lithography and most importantly photography. Of course later influences on the visibility of paintings must not be overlooked, as they became somewhat more avaliable to the masses through printed copies, reproductions, photographs and contemporary museums. The terms noble and bad savage, cannibal and caboclo, mameluco and cafuzo predate this project. Yet, we consider that the discussion of these terms in the past has been somewhat superficial. It has been superficial in the sense of the discussion of the imagery and iconography as unchanging. ¿Fabian discusses conceptions of the other which have been elaborated within anthropological discourse since the eighteenth century in Europe. Anthropology, as a 'science of disappearance¿ has tended to construe the 'other¿ as negative: the 'savage¿, without history, writing, religion and morals, was seen as part of a vanishing world which consequently required documentation¿(Hallam, Elizabeth and Street, Brian, 2). Cultural Encounters.Routledge. 2000. These stereotypical concepts will be studied in greater detail, not just as simplified noble or bad savage categories. They are to be defined by region, country and timeperiod. Each term although generic has traditionally been analysed as a general European concepts and not in specific detail. For example, the bad savage was not just uncivilized or against progress, it was defined by a set of characteristics in different contexts which evolved throughout time and space, while still functioning to define ¿Indianess¿ (AU)