EXTREME CULTURAL HUBRIS

Monte Reel, The Last of the Tribe: The Quest to Save a Lone Man in the Amazon (New York: Scribner, 2010) ("Throughout its history, Brazil has struggled to decide what role Indians should play in its national story. Official policy and public sentiment have sometimes agreed on the mater, sometimes not." "In the last half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, a mode of thought called positivism spread from Europe and took a strong hold on Brazil's middle class. It quickly grew into something close to a theology. One of its high priest was Candido Rondon, the legendary explorer of the country's backwoods who founded Brazil's first Indian Protection Service, and after whom Rondonia has been named." "According to the positivists, cultures evolved in specific stages, from primitive to mature societies. The native tribes of Amazonia represented the very first stage of cultural evolution, one marked by animism, or the belief that any natural object can have a spirit. The positivists believed that those tribes were incapable of rational thought. But from that stage of cultural primitivism, the positivists believed the tribes could evolve through more advanced stages of development: from animism to polytheism, then to monotheism, and finally to enlightened rationalism. Rondon believed that with help, the Indians might be able to skip the middle stages of development and leap straight into the light of modernity. He instructed agents in the Indian Protection Service that pacifying Indians helped preserve the possibility of their successful transition to modernity. He came up with a motto intended to guide agents on their pacifying missions: 'Die if you must, but never kill.'" "Positivism's influence faded in the 1930s, at about the same time the idea of cultural relativism began gathering force in anthropological circles. Anthropologists began putting words such as 'primitive' and 'savage' inside quotation marks ,arguing that they were loaded terms unfairly applied by Europeans to indigenous societies. The influence of the idea was transformative--but mostly academic. The intellectual theories that began to permeate popular thought outside of anthropological circles--theories including Freud's and Jung's--reinforced the idea that indigenous cultures represented a childlike stage of human development. Freud suggested that primitive Indians have a mentality roughly equal to that of a civilized child. Jean Piaget, a Swiss philosopher whose theories of cognitive development held wide sway over the fields of education and morality, wrote that members of many tradition indigenous cultures were, like very young children, incapable of distinguishing objective reality from their own subjectivity." "The notion of native as child thoroughly infiltrated Brazil and guided its policies. In the country's civil code of 1916, Indians were defined as 'relatively capable persons,' and granted the same legal status as minors and the mentally deficient. That status remained even after the country enacted the Indian Statute of 1973, which stipulated that Indians needed to live as wards of the state, in the form of FUNAL. In his 1988 book, The Indians and Brazil, Brazilian anthropologist Mercio Pereira Gomes summed up the result of the philosophies that over decades had combined to form the shifting backbone of the country's Indian Policy: 'All things considered, the Indian has become a kind of bastard child of our civilization--furthermore, an ill bastard child, for he is seen as suffering from a terminal disease, inexorably condemned to death. The state's social and humanist, if not Christian duty, then, would be to ease the suffering of these people and ensure that they meet death with dignity.'" Id. at 107-109.).