Os indios aldeados no Rio de Janeiro colonial : novos suditos cristãos do Imperio Portugues

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2000

RESUMO

This thesis analyzes the role of Indians in colonial society in Portuguese America, showing how they comprised a specific ethnic and social group that emerged within the Indian villages (aldeias) through a process of shared experience between themselves and other ethnic and social groups. The study adopts an interdisciplinary focus that considers culture as an historical product, an approach which has ieldedencouraging results in the study of relations between Indians and colonizers throughout the Americas. Based on these new insights, it becomes possible to rethink the Indians acts of "collaborating" with Europeans and of participating in missionary villages as forms of adaptive resistance, in which they could reconstitute their values, cultures and traditions through a process of resocialization. This process can be identified in the daily life of the villages and it included a great deal of tension, conflict and negotiation between the different social agents it involved. While this study does not seek to diminish the violence and harm that colonization inflicted upon the Indians, it seeks to emphasize that the Indian villages were not only Christian and Portuguese spaces, but also Indian ones, where they faced the challenge of rebuilding their histories, memories and identities. Once assigned to the villages, the Indians became the King s Christian vassals with specific rights and duties and they began to perform new cultural and polítical activities, which they were able to manage with great ability. The evidence on Indians and their villages in colonial Rio de Janeiro demonstrates that despite the great losses, which included high mortality and the disappearance of several ethnic groups, the various indigenous polities that were grouped together within the villages were able to rearticulate themselves with others in both social and cultural terms. In doing so, they adopted the new identity that the colonizers had imposed upon them: the identity of "índios aldeados" (village Indians), Christian vassals of Ris Majesty. That was the way they would identify themselves and also be identified by others until the beginning ofthe nineteenth century, when they were still fighting for the few rights coloniallegislation had given them

ASSUNTO(S)

jesuitas - america do sul etnicismo - america latina indios - identidade etnica

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