Pardism: an ethnocide of the State

Abstract

The article aims to study the discourses of ethnic-racial categorization formulated by the Brazilian State, in order to question pardismo as an ethnocidal ideology from the perspective of movements for the recovery of indigenous identities and territories. The theoretical contribution is based on indigenous decolonial epistemologies, especially the political philosophy of Ailton Krenak, and the anthropology of colonialism by João Pacheco de Oliveira, using bibliographic review as a method of collecting information, a technique used mainly in the conceptualization of the ethnicity device. Furthermore, in the methodology we used documentary research, whose main documents consist of the Demographic Censuses carried out, initially, by the General Directorate of Statistics and, later, by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics in the period from 1872 to 2010. We found that for more than one hundred years, state rationality remained silent about the original presence in official statistics. Given the absence of a specific category, the indigenous population was measured as a brown population in the numbers defining citizenship and public policies, characterizing an institutional discursive practice of de-Indianization of society until the moment the indigenous category was inserted into the questionnaire in 1991 for the first time in history.