Race and Ethnicity in Brazil - Perspectives from Afro-Indigenous Relations and Peoples

"What happens to 'race' and 'ethnicity' when we stop thinking these concepts in terms of white-indigenous or white-black relations in Brazil? Exploring Afro-Indigenous spaces, peoples and relations in Brazil is one way of stepping into this question. I would like explore, on the one hand, how the categories of 'black' and 'indigenous', or 'race' and 'ethnicity' came to exist historically, and, on the other hand, how they are articulated, lived, and thought today not only as social science categories but as 'denominating' dynamic political subjects. In order to do the latter, I wish to conduct ethnographic research in indigenous and black urban as well as rural communities in Brazil. This includes ethnography in Maroons, or quilombos, as they are called in Portuguese. Quilombos enable me to explore Afro-Indigenous peoples and relations and slowly disrupt, or show the limitations of the concepts of 'race' and 'ethnicity'. What do these concepts hide? What are their recessive elements? Does anything change once analysis blurs an oppressor-oppressed dichotomy and instead navigates the country's multiplicity of power relations? In a way, then, my research is about exploring race and ethnicity beyond a binary opposition, instead looking at the diversity of experiences that the colonial encounter created in Brazil.
I start from the standpoint that research is embedded both within the history of the subject and literature (here social science) it belongs to and to the social and political environment within and from which it emerges. Therefore, 'race' and 'ethnicity' appear as transnational but also locally specific lived experiences and concepts, not only determined by the shared history of Colonialism, white supremacy and black Diaspora but also by the re-interpretations of race theories and Brazilian social science traditions, as well as the specificities of 'blackness' and 'indigeneity' in the country. The purpose of doing this research is to challenge research paradigms on the study of race and ethnicity that emphasise one group's experience and white-nonwhite relations, or, put differently, to defy dominant academic-intellectual contents and perspectives on this matter. What I mean by this is the incessant sociological focus on blackness and the anthropological focus on indigeneity both in Brazil but also in Latin America more broadly. Through that, I hope to expose the limits of the concepts I am here concerned with and come to a 'grounded theory' of race and ethnicity in Brazil that perhaps allows me to re-imagine Brazilian society. I believe that such an approach enables a distinct, processually hybrid and complex image of Brazil's 'ethnoracial' realities and can work towards a world that slowly de-centres from an incessant focus on whiteness. This poses a methodological challenge, which, in its way, offers a de-colonial option for thinking on race, ethnicity and identity in Brazil."