Darcy Ribeiro and Mercio Gomes

ETHNICITY AND CIVILIZATION
Author(s): Darcy Ribeiro and Mercio Gomes

Source: Dialectical Anthropology, Vol. 21, No. 3/4, POSTMODERN STATES OF ETHNICITY
(September 1996), pp. 217-238
Published by: Springer
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29790430
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ETHNICITY AND CIVILIZATION
Darcy Ribeiro and Mercio Gomes
Darcy Ribeiro is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio

de Janeiro. He is also currently a Senator, representing Rio de Janeiro at the
National Congress of Brazil Mercio Gomes is Associate Professor of Anthropology
at the Federal University Fluminense in Niteroi, Brazil.
In the last few years, we have been witnessing the upsurge of so

many movements and struggles for ethnic affirmation all over the
world that it has become impossible to ignore them as one of the
motors of history. They, in fact, represent today the most crucial
theoretical challenge we face as social scientists. Sociologists and
political scientists have long ignored even the existence of this
phenomenon in their obsession to reduce everything to class struggle.
And we anthropologists are dumbfounded when we see our living
object of research now rising up with unimaginable drive to set off
such cruel social struggles within the very body of civilization. Having
reduced our ethnology to a descriptive barbarology that leaves very
little space for the study of civilization and the role of ethnicity in it,
we are at a loss to explain what is going on around the world, with the
rising of hundreds of oppressed peoples whose oppression had
previously passed unnoticed in our observations.
Indeed, anthropology seems to have cut itself off from its original
main purpose, the formulation of a general theory capable of
explaining human phenomena, including contemporary expressions of
ethnicity. This was certainly the raison d'etre for the rise of
anthropology as a science and as a discourse on man which was to be
powerful and convincing enough to compete with the various other
discourses, with a deeper sense of integrity. The deviation from this
purpose and the consequent option for functionalist and structuralist
studies result from a general timidity that controls the discipline and
makes its members shun research that involves political questions. Our
Dialectical Anthropology 21: 217-238, 1996.

? 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
218
science of man, thus depoliticized, has lost contact with the

surrounding reality and, so, it has become an aesthetic and distracting
exercise, with very little commitment to our human destiny.
We anthropologists have been busy studying our main object of
interest?culture?and particularly indigenous, communitarian, non
Western cultures, as if they were repositories of fossils of the human
spirit, or bizarre representations that occasionally and randomly show
certain functional uniformities and grammatical consistencies. In that
pursuit, we have managed to pay little mind to the existence of this
living object in present times. Consequently, anthropological discourse
has become isolated from other social sciences, principally from the
historical discourse which has been taking decisive steps towards the
interconnection of cultures, nations, and civilizations, through the
study of the processes of economic, social and, eventually, cultural
interactions.
Of course, this can be interpreted as the necessary consequence of
the inherent limitations of a model of theoretical explanation in
anthropology which purports to apply only to self-enclosed issues
within a limited time span and area. On top of that, there is the attitude
of false modesty and self-restraint that may be attributed to the need
for methodological rigor in research and interpretation, but also to a
kind of pervasive loyalty to the canons of monographic anthropology,
as well as from a certain lack of self-critique within the discipline
itself. As a result, we are left in need of a theory to explain present
ethnic resurgence and are also frequently condemned to a naive vision
of very crucial themes and problems.
This article aims, therefore, to propose a much needed debate in our
discipline in an area that we consider of political importance and
within our sphere of knowledge. We want to present a conceptual
framework made up of a few basic propositions, that may, on the one
hand, furnish elements for the composition of models better to explain
the cultural dynamics of the formations of civilizations, and, on the
other hand, to focus some light on what is going on right before our
eyes as regards modern nations, their ethnic constituents, and the
formation of great supra national and supra ethnic blocs. For that
purpose, we are taking up some themes developed in the five-volume
Studies in the Anthropology of Civilization and in an article published
219
more than two decades ago in Current Anthropology.1 These themes

are ethnic transfiguration, that is, the dynamics of permanence and
transformation of ethnic groups; the theory of the civilizational
process, especially as regards the interrelationships of ethnic groups
and other formative populations; and the empirical example of the
history of the formation of neo-American nationalities as a result of the
process of expansion of Western civilization.
Upon these themes, we will develop our concepts of ethnicity and
of ethnic groups, with a discussion of ethnicity's universal
constituents?ethnocentrism and ethnophylism?and of the social base
of an ethnic groups which is formed by a system of kinship
economically organized. An ethnic group will be further viewed in
terms of its process of resistance and transfiguration, its interrelation
with other ethnic groups and its political dynamics in relation to social
classes, nations, and supra ethnic entities. All of this will be analyzed
in the light of the extensive data collected on the formation of neo
American nationalities, where we can find instances of varied forms of
integration of ethnic groups and their potential for transformation.
We put forth the idea that we are witnessing, in our day, the rise of
a new kind of civilization, based, of course, on the great economic
changes that are taking place worldwide, and which can be
characterized by the incorporation?not just economic, for that has
already been going on for a very long time,2 but above all
ideological?of almost all peoples and nations in the world. It suggests,
furthermore, that the most interesting events now occurring produce
contradictory signs which we anthropologists are most apt to see?and,
for that matter, we should make an effort to sharpen our vision. These
signs are the unstable movements that result from the process of the
conflictive interrelationship between the constitution of great supra
ethnic and supra national entities and the manifest harshening of ethnic
affirmation within these entities.
Ethnic Group and Ethnicity
Ethnic groups are human communities that maintain the notion and
the sense of their uniqueness as a people. They are exclusivist and self
220
contained communities that look upon themselves as the true people,

and are seen by others as indeed different. An ethnic group, in this
sense, is equivalent to the notion of people and nationality, although
these latter expressions denote additional meanings of a political
nature.
Membership in an ethnic group is an essential quality of being
human. It is by means of this fact that humans express their humanity
in accordance with its given constraints. Indeed, to be human means
to belong to an ethnic group within a specific sociocultural milieu, with
its own speech, its distinctive customs?which do not necessarily have
to be unique?and with a fundamental sense of belonging and
participation.
The ethnic group can be considered the basic self-productive social
cell. It is there that one can find the general conditions for the
reproduction of human beings as social beings and for their self
maintenance. Members of an ethnic group organize permanent
relations through kinship lines and economic production, thus
consolidating sentiments of solidarity and reciprocity.
Thus, it is our view that the ethnic group is a concrete social entity
of which member identification is fundamentally substantive and
necessary, and only secondarily relational or situational. A member of
an ethnic group exists in a structured social space, with rules of socio?
cultural relations with which he/she primarily identifies, maintaining
the freedom to change self-ascription and loyalty.3
For quite some time, anthropology has recognized, in the notion of
ethnicity, a profound sense of self-value which allows an ethnic group
to raise itself above any other ethnic group, as well as to depreciate
and play down all others. This sense, well known as ethnocentrism, is
perceived as one of the universal constituents of the ethnic group, as
a sine qua non for its continuity, and as a centripetal force that creates
resistance before exogenous injunctions that might threaten its own
existence. Ethnocentrism opposes each and every ethnic group against
all others, by making it proud of itself and, at the same time, fearful
of others, who are, for all purposes, perceived as hostile.
The socio-political outcome of the radical activity of ethnocentrism
would be the isolation and self-containment of the ethnic group. But no
ethnic group is an island. One way or another, it communicates with
221
others, whether by confrontation, by interrelations, by trade, or by

political action and control. An ethnic group may reject other ethnic
groups, it may refuse to understand other customs and it may even
conceive other ethnic groups as a part of nature and not of the human
condition?and indeed, all this is very common. But, all the same, it
is also capable of understanding other ethnic groups, of relating with
their members, of setting up alliances, and making deals for common
purposes. We also find this in anthropological literature, albeit less
frequently. These activities can take place only because there is, in
fact, a motivating source which must also be inherent in ethnicity. We
propose, therefore, that ethnicity has, within itself, in the same
constitutive measure, a social tendency that is in opposition to
ethnocentrism. We might call this tendency ethnophylism, which would
be the sense that drives ethnic groups to the pursuit of mutual
communication and to recognition of equivalent identities, making
possible pacts of peaceful interrelationship.
Ethnophylism is to ethnocentrism as, on the individual level,
altruism is to egoism or egocentrism. Both are dialectical constituents
of the ethnic group and the individual. Both are needed for the
formation of and the survival of these entities although each tendency
is present in unbalanced dosages, as dictated by the contexts in which
they primarily operate. For anthropology, up until the present
formulation, the ethnic group was primarily recognized for its
ethnocentrism, given the nature of this tendency and the frequency of
its manifestations. Nothing is more usual in the anthropological
literature than the crude assertions that one ethnic group voices against
another, its neighbor, thus reducing it to the realm of nature. And
nothing is more banal in history than inter-ethnic wars, moved by
competition for power and goods, but justified by the hatred that
comes out of a feeling of humiliation. Rarely do we find cases of
cordial inter-ethnic relations, and usually they are described by
anthropologists and travelers as exceptions to a hard rule. In practice,
they serve only as examples to the military maxim, according to
which, peace is nothing more than an interval between two wars.
Going against this maxim, we propose that ethnophylism is essential
to the ethnic group in order for it to get out of itself, of its deceptive
self-sufficiency, and come to recognize itself as equal and equivalent
222
to other ethnic groups. It is through ethnophylism that an ethnic group

makes itself capable of understanding another ethnic group, or, on the
level of individual interaction, that a member of an ethnic group
becomes capable of understanding and recognizing him/herself in the
humanity of a member of another ethnic group. It is as a consequence
of this human tendency that knowledge and interchange are possible
for humanity as a whole.
The best example of ethnophylism at play is given us the by the
peoples that formed the Xingu ethnic-cultural complex. In the latter
quarter of the nineteenth century, a scientific expedition to the Upper
Xingu River, led by the German Karl von den Steinen (1940), came
across an unexpected phenomenon: there he saw, and later described,
a social situation equivalent to an inter-ethnic confederation constituted
by twelve ethnic groups, speaking twelve distinct languages that
belonged to five language stocks and cultural traditions. They were
living in perfect harmony, each maintaining its own language and its
political and economic autonomy. At the same time, they all shared a
common economic structure and organization, and a set of cultural
institutions that gave them a feeling of belonging to a larger entity, a
kind of supra ethnic organization, without the presence of a state or of
forms of domination or coercion on the part of one group over the
others. Here, each ethnic group was as much self-centered in its
activities and forms of reciprocity and solidarity as it was exo-centered
in the acceptance of the idiosyncracies of the other ethnic groups and
in the sharing of cultural traits that did not belong to its original
cultural traditions. The outcome of this was a cultural and political
formation that was truly harmonic and homogenous.4
Another example, the apparent opposite of the Xingu case, is that of
Switzerland, which formed in a period of 700 years a stable political
society with several ethnic groups, each of which belonged to larger
supra ethnic groups.5 The process of formation of Switzerland
occurred, of course, in the general context of the formation of the
other modern European nations. Therein, special geo-economic and
political conditions favored the peaceful consolidation of such a
federation of ethnic groups. So much so, that even Napoleon, who
could well have dared conquer the country and incorporate each ethnic
group into the respective states where it could belong, did not do so
223
and recognized the strength of ethnicity in the defense of small, but

ethnically diversified, states.6 The fundamental reason for this lies
precisely in balancing the ethnocentric with the ethnophylic tendencies,
which exist in every ethnic group. In this case, this equilibrium was
able to take place with declared rigor in the form of conviviality,
alliance, and laws.
In the Xingu case, the ethnophylic tendency gave way to a
communitarianism of equivalent identities, overrunning the
ethnocentric tendency so commonly present in similar situations. In the
Swiss case, the constitution of a supra ethnic nationality consolidated
itself through alliances around common interests.
Ethnic Group and Class
We put forth the argument that inter-ethnic struggle comes before

class struggle precisely because class has come into being only with
stratified society about five thousand years ago, whereas ethnicity has
a much greater existence in time. We also propose to heat up the
debate that it might be unthinkable that in the future there will not be
classes, but it is inconceivable that ethnicity will ever become
obsolescent by some kind of fusion of all ethnic groups into one single
macro ethnic group turned into itself.
To be sure, in class-structured societies class antagonisms constitute
one of the basic explanatory factors in the understanding of their
internal social life and, partially, of their interaction with other
societies. However, it is equally evident that class theory is insufficient
to explain fundamental instances of human life. One need not go too
far to prove this assertion, inasmuch as the whole of modern history
is marked by the presence of inter-ethnic conflicts. In the last world
wars, for example, there stand out both an absence of transnational
proletarian solidarity and a strong presence of national or ethnic
patriotic ties.
Nowadays, the so-called nationalistic struggles, in which ethnic
groups are oppressed as national minorities, are so visible that no one
denies the dynamic role of ethnicity. But, clearly, we lack an
explanatory theory for this role in order to make intelligible the present
224
situation of world civilizations and to explain why inter-ethnic

struggles have intensified so much in this post-war period. It seems
that, up until recently, national states worked in full capacity to silence
the voices of protest of their ethnic components and to curb insurgent
actions. Suddenly, this powerful control has been relaxed, unleashing
ever more gruesome movements of ethnic affirmation.
This ethnic insurgency announces the emergence, under our very
eyes, of a new kind of civilization, one whose distinct characteristics
are beginning to acquire visible contours. Among them there are the
tendency and the capacity to create large supra national spaces, such
as the European, the North American, and the Slav communities. In
turn, and contradictorily, there is an equally intense tendency to open
up spaces for the ethnic affirmation of oppressed people within these
vast political entities.
It is well known that the Basque people have never had so much
liberty to be and to affirm themselves as Basque, as a unique ethnic
entity. The surprising fact is that this liberty incites them to be more
fanatically Basque and to throw themselves, with all the strength they
can mobilize, into a struggle for autonomy. The same demand for
autonomy is expressed with less intensity by Catalans and Galicians,
with the result that they have been able to force Spain into reverting its
Castillian despotism and into opening itself as a plurinational state, as
a result of being a multiethnic society. The same goes for Belgium,
whose Flemish and Walloon ethnic groups have no qualms about
making explicit their differences and demanding equal rights. More
dramatic is the situation of former Yugoslavia, where the supra
national edifice that Tito managed to build and conduct, and Soviet
power maintain until very recently, now blows up in an infighting of
unspeakable violence.
Ethnic Transfiguration
Although we are lacking a theoretical framework to explain the

upsurge of ethnic affirmation in recent years, we already have a
conceptual scheme to explain the strength of ethnicity and the
permanence of the preservation of ethnic groups before exogenous
225
pressures. Over twenty years ago, we proposed such a scheme,

apropos of a critique of acculturation studies of indigenous cultures,
which we called the theory of ethnic transfiguration.7 Going beyond
the picture typified by acculturation, we defined ethnic transfiguration
as the process by which an ethnic group experiences substantial
alterations in its mode of being and living, as a result of its internal
cultural dynamics and, principally, because of its exogenous relations,
and yet maintains its self-identity as a unique people different from any
other. Indeed, ethnic identity persists precisely because of its capacity
to transfigure itself in accordance with the pressures rising from the
context in which it functions. In this effort of self-preservation, a
people might lose their original language; they might mix intensely in
the biological sense; they might also adopt a great number of cultural
traits from the outside context that envelops them to the point of
becoming almost indistinguishable from other population segments
around, and yet they may continue to preserve their essential ethnic
identity.
As this veritable sociopolitical trance is taking place, the ethnic
group changes a great deal but not in exclusivist character of its self
identity which keeps on functioning as an objectified consciousness of
itself that opposes itself, in its uniqueness, to all other ethnic groups.
This resistance is, indeed, a fundamental characteristic of ethnic
groups, and comes out of the ethnocentric tendency, which manifests
itself with varied intensity among different ethnic groups and according
to the historical characteristics in the social milieu.
This can be so clearly observed, for instance, among Jews and
Gypsies, who for thousands of years have continued to be themselves,
preserving their unique ethnic identities mainly because of their special
ability to modify their modes of being in order to conciliate their
existence in often oppressive social contexts.
Ethnic resistance works on concrete potentialities inherent to, and
characteristic of, the ethnic group itself. These are the ties of solidarity
and reciprocity which are institutionally expressed in the systems of
kinship and economy. In the context of inter-ethnic relations, the
kinship system may even acquire new mechanisms such as that which
allows for the absorption of new members, by redefining the qualities
of membership. Thus, half-breeds and even foreigners can be
226
incorporated into the group as members with full rights. That is the
way urbanized Indian groups, for instance, who live outside their
normal conditions of reproduction, are able to maintain the concrete
basis for their ethnic identity. Of course, this identity is reinforced by
a double play of force in which external hostility refused to accept
them as members of the larger ethnic or national group, and they, in
turn, reject any move to dissolve them among members of this larger
community.
In the course of ethnic transfiguration, inter-ethnic confrontation
operates on several fronts and levels, often simultaneously. Each one
of these is capable by itself of exterminating a people or of dispersing
its members to the point of making communitarian existence
impossible. It is the very sense of struggling for survival as an ethnic
group, coupled with the outside tendency to rejection and segregation
that makes it possible for ethnic identity to bear these trials.
It should be recognized right off that the basic ethnic confrontation
is of a biotic order, represented by the interrelations between distinctly
genetic populations, each with its own composition of morbid agents.
When the European arrived in the Americas, he came already equipped
to bear and survive several diseases to which he was biologically and
culturally used for centuries. As he faced non-immune populations, he
sparked off a chain of contagion which was responsible for the
horrendous depopulation of the American continent in the first few
centuries, and which is still decimating isolated Indian groups in the
virgin forests that steadily are being integrated in this contagion ring.
Another instance of confrontation, of a political-ecological order, is
the competitive interaction, as in the case of Indians and Europeans,
for the control and use of land and its resources, about which each
competitor has his/her own visions and attitudes. For example, as their
territories are reached by the frontiers of civilization, present day
Indians are compelled to establish contact, initially in the defensive
position, and then in peaceful intercourse. In any case, the upshot is
fatal, as their chances of surviving will depend fundamentally on the
extent and the nature of the invading economic wave that pushes
towards their ecological niche. This wave will determine the type and
the character of the ensuing interaction and the resultant adaptation.
227
A third basic confrontation lies in the socio-economic

interrelationship which may be harmonious but, in the extreme, can
take on the form of slave domination. This destroys family and kinship
ties and leaves no room for communitarian livelihood and, as a
consequence, no chance for ethnic survival of the dominated
populations. As a matter of fact, the formation of most neo-American
peoples came about initially by slavery and socio-economic
destruction, followed by the dispersal of indigenous people and
interbreeding.
The conceptual framework of ethnic transfiguration also involves the
study of the modes of formation and transformation of nations. These
are demographically larger entities, structured socially in classes or the
equivalent and organized politically under the rule of a central power.
The history of the formation of neo-American nations, like that of the
formation of Europe after the Indo-European invasion, are well known
and well documented examples that demonstrate how ethnic groups and
ethnicity itself play such important roles. They also demonstrate that,
however hard and resistant ethnic groups are, the can nevertheless be
destroyed or reduced to the minimal constitutive elements to serve as
building blocks for ne cultural and civilizational edifices.
In an extremely violent and devastating way, an immense mass of
Indians was incorporated into national neo-American societies as
genetic matrices represented by the hundreds of thousands of women
made prisoner and impregnated by white or black men. Their offspring
would not identify themselves as belonging to their mothers' people,
even if, frequently, their first language was their mothers', nor would
they be accepted as equal by their fathers' people. Thus, they were
forced to become one of the main agents of the civilization that was
surging up, by taking on the role of dominator of their mothers'
people.8 In Brazil, they became the most efficient instruments in the
extermination of Indian groups and in the capture of men for slave
labor and women for reproduction. Brought up in the body of a
national civilization, these mixed-blood descendants stopped being
Indians. Called mamelucos, native half-breeds, they were ethnically
nobody, and from this feeling of being nobody, they formed the new
ethnic entity, national in scope, from which they created their new
identity.
228
These new ethnic entities had a powerful force of attraction for

incorporating new members. Nevertheless, the contrast should be
pointed out between their assimilative capacity with respect to Africans
and immigrant Europeans and the notorious resistance of Indian ethnic
groups, who managed to keep themselves apart and away from the all
encompassing center of power and assimilation. Subjected to slavery
in foreign lands, Africans suffered a compulsion to de-Africanize
themselves so radically that no ethnic space was left for their children
to affirm themselves differently. As with mamelucos, they too became
nobody, unable to exist as human beings without a specific ethnic
community in which they might experience a sense of belonging and
which might recognize them as members. They were, thus, condemned
to dissolve themselves in a new supra ethnic entity, for which they
played a fundamental role in its formation.
Unwittingly as it were, all these mulatto and mameluco matrices
concurred to create new national entities, into which they were urged
to integrate themselves with the deepest feeling of identification.9 Once
their essential ethnic-cultural nuclei were constituted, as if by
mutation, they increasingly attracted new members. The formation of
neo-American peoples occurred in the midst of a political process
controlled and directed by Portuguese, Spanish, English, French, and
even Dutch colonizers who, as the dominant ethnic groups, imposed
their languages and even the singularity of their respective views of
what Western European civilization is supposed to be.
To be sure, these offshoots of overseas European national and ethnic
groups do not reproduce their original stock faithfully?for many
obvious reasons. One is that they interbreed with Indians and Africans.
Another is because they have been redefined by the introduction of
new cultural values and traits, coming from these latter matrices. And,
also, because they have been compelled to adapt themselves
ecologically to the diversified conditions they have found in the new
lands, as well as to the kind of economy which they have developed.
In time, as this historical formation moves on, new European
immigrants who come to make America bring with them the advantage
of belonging to the dominating ethnic groups and, as a consequence,
are easily incorporated into the highest strata of society. Their
229
assimilation is completed fully in their children, who find every facility

for acquiring an education and social advantages.
Present-day Indians, on the contrary, keeping to their own lands
where they know how to survive better than anyone, not only hold on
to their ethnic identity but also fulfill those minimum requirements to
keep it alive. They continue to lead a communitarian existence, where
generations succeed one another, speaking the same language and
cherishing valuable traditions, and, at the same time, they maintain the
minimum economic basis for physical and cultural subsistence.
If an ethnic group is able to maintain these basic requirements,
whatever the external injunctions and pressures, including the terrible
conditions of ethnocidal oppression of religious missions?ethnicity
will survive. Many Indian peoples have been suffering a perverse
missionary pressure for many decades, like the Bororo of Mato Grosso
and the Tukano of the Upper Rio Negro. Nevertheless, they have been
able to preserve their ethnic identity and practice the basic customs that
reinforce this identity, those that are somehow acceptable in the
broader context in which they live, as well as those that may seem
bizarre, such as the dramatic funerary ceremonies of the Bororo.
In some instances, in the process of ethnic transfiguration micro
ethnic groups are so enveloped in the circuit of oppressions. They are
forced to change so much that they often come to forget their native
tongue and preserve very little of their original cultures. The result is
that they can hardly be distinguished from the cultural contexts that
surround them. All the same, they continue to identify themselves as
distinct ethnic groups, as they maintain the essential nucleus of their
human identity, their ethnic brotherhood, and, of course, the concrete
bases for self-reproduction.
The most extreme instance in the process of ethnic transfiguration
is represented by blacks in the American continent. Here, they were
so radically overpowered that they were only able to survive
biologically by transfiguring themselves radically as ethnic groups and
cultures. Yanked out of their native environments, they were thrown
onto strange lands, where they were forced to produce things they
never consumed and to consume only the leftovers of others, and to
speak the language of their masters, which was learned from the yells
and brawls of foremen. Under these circumstances, from their original
230
stock, black people managed to preserve only their genetic heritage and
cultural fragments kept within the most intimate recesses of memory
and manifested by a general feeling of brotherhood and in musical and
religious expression.
The extremist form of power that is capable of promoting the
destruction of ethnicity without destroying life itself is personal
slavery, which makes human beings objects of alien property, thus
excluding any possibility of communitarian life. Greece and Rome
were able to assimilate their slaves as much as the American nations
have absorbed black peoples bought into slavery.
Macro and Micro Ethnic Groups
In the American continent, there are two well differentiated ethnic

configurations from which result two distinct political realities. On one
side we have the macro ethnic groups now represented by the great
masses of Indians, descendants of the high civilizations of pre
Columbian America, who keep a historical ethnic consciousness and
have the potential to unite politically to fight for their autonomy. On
the other side, there is a multitude of disperse micro ethnic groups,
each with a small population overtly different from one another by the
languages they speak and their cultural traditions. Both claim their own
territories, the right to be what they are and to maintain themselves as
autonomous peoples.
The macro ethnic groups, or indigenatos, are integral components
of the nations in which they live, as in the case of millions of Quichua
of the Andean altiplano and millions of Maya of Guatemala. But they
live in a permanent state of protest and are destined to struggle
continually against the political structure which subdues them. They
can succeed only with the breakdown of the present uninational states
and the creation of autonomous ethnic states. Where macro ethnic
groups are diverse and dispersed, as in Mexico, their struggle is for
the creation of pluriethnic states. In the last two decades, after
centuries of oppression borne in silence, they now rise up with an
ethnic fervor similar to that of the Basques of Spain, with similar
explosions of ethnic conflicts.
231
The most vehement expression of the spirit of struggle of these

oppressed peoples can be observed in the ethnic war that is being
fought in Guatemala. There it is the Mayan civilization that rises up
from the brunt of oppression, in an attempt to recover its own face and
to reshape itself as a national ethnic state. It should be pointed out that
a most terrible aspect of this war is its invisibility to Western
civilization. In Guatemala, between one hundred and fifty and two
hundred thousand peoples have been wiped out in the last few years by
a national state dominated by ladinos, the half-breeds that have
organized themselves in military fashion as an obsolete Europeanizing
force even more violent than in colonial times.10 More people have
been killed there than in most undeclared post-war conflicts, and yet
very little attention has been paid to this fact. How can one deny that
this neglect is not due to the fact that they are mere Indian people? One
would hope that the Nobel Peace Price winner, the admirable fighter
Rigoberta Mench?, herself a Mayan Indian whose family was wiped
out in this war, will open the eyes of the world to the drama that her
people have been suffering for so many decades.
The other ethnic-political configuration is represented by the
thousands of micro ethnic tribes that have resisted five hundred years
of oppression and now rise up to claim their dues. This is the case of
Brazil, with its couple of hundred Indian peoples who number about
three hundred thousand individuals, 90 percent of which have less than
one thousand members. It is also the case in the eastern zones of Peru,
Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela, in Chile and even, unexpectedly,
in Argentina, where micro ethnic groups rise in body and soul in
search of their lost space of existence.
What is most compelling in the rising of this new spirit of combat
is the fact that these Indians refuse to be led by missionaries, state
functionaries, or anthropologists, abhorring all forms of paternalism,
ans assuming themselves the direction of their struggle. In almost
every case, however, they are so imponderably small in numbers that,
whatever their conduct, they will not affect the destiny of the countries
they live in. In consequence, they do not aspire to the impossible goal
of breaking down national society and rupturing the national state that
subdues them, but they demand to be respected in their rights to live
and act as they please.
232
An example of this can be seen in the uprising of Indian peoples of

Ecuador in June 1990. Practically all Indian groups of that country,
from the altiplano to the Amazon Forest, conjured up an amazing
alliance, declared themselves insubordinate, mobilized public opinion,
and forced a national discussion of their claims. These were set forth
as: first of all, the right to be treated as equal, in opposition to the
existing anti-Indian bias; secondly, the sacred right to a territory of
their own within the nation where they might exercise their self
determination and autonomy.
An extraordinary model of self-determination is the case of the
Ashuar Indians of the Ecuadorian Amazon who, in a decade, rid
themselves of missionary and governmental oppression and organized
themselves with amazing competence. A similar thing is happening
with the Kayapo and the Gavi?es Indians who, after a short period of
a few decades since they first entered into peaceful contact with
Brazilian society, are revealing an unsuspected ability to deal with
national society by imposing their will on official and missionary
authorities and by organizing their economy in a reasonably efficient
way.
Never, since colonization, have we seen micro ethnic peoples with
such a drive to autonomy. This makes us suppose that this is because
in the process of integrating themselves in a larger civilizational circuit
they have found an empty space to be filled. This is the space of ethnic
affirmation which previously had not existed for any Indian group and
now opens up in spite of, or because of, the consolidation of a larger
supra ethnic space.11
On the contrary. For centuries, there has been an unchallenged
consensus over the inevitability of Westernizing national domination
and the legitimacy of the Christianizing action of missionaries over the
old Indian peoples. The Indians have always resisted both these
ideologies and kept alive their own ethnic identity but never with the
assertive power we now see among so many groups.
Slowly and steadily, among Latin-American and North American
nations, the perception of the contradictory character of multiethnic
societies governed by uninational states is spreading. National Creoles,
Iberian mestizos, and Anglo-Saxons, heirs of colonial rule, maintain
233
an oppressive domination over a multitude of Indian peoples that

survived colonization.
Assimilationism and Segregationism
The socio-ethnic outcome of the process of formation neo-American

nations, which varies in each case according to European matrices and
different ethnic and socioeconomic variables, has resulted in two
distinct patterns of inter-ethnic relations. One can be called
assimilationist and may be represented by Brazil; the other is
segregationist and can be exemplified by the United States. The first
one can be characterized by its promotion and emphasis on racial
intermixture and has an appearance of being more open and tolerant,
which has made it appear as a model of racial democracy. The second
crudely opposes its differentiated population segments and gives the
impression, therefore, of being more closed and intolerant.
Each of these patterns have developed distinct forms of racial
prejudice and biases which are acted out from the point of view of the
elite dominating ethnic group. The assimilationist pattern can be
characterized by what Brazilian sociologist Oracy Nogueira called
"color prejudice."12 This is the kind of prejudice that works on a
miscegenation axis, where rejection is acted out against those whose
body features resemble more closely the phenotype considered inferior.
The more an individual looks like the considered superior phenotype,
the less he/she is rejected and the more he/she is accepted. This is
often true also in relation to a cultural axis, where the dominating
ethnic groups' cultural ways serve as the ideal form of behavior. An
illusory hope is created in the dominated ethnic group that, through
more racial and social intermixing, the members of the group will in
future generations attain a decent level of acceptability.
The fact is that the assimilationist pattern accepts only members of
the dominated ethnic group by their incorporation into the dominating
ethnic group. In the Brazilian case, an Indian is a "good" Indian as a
future non-Indian and blacks as wishfully white-washed. What it in fact
purports to do is to dissolve them, in order to incorporate them into its
proletariat. This, by the way, was the proposal of the liberal
234
assimilationist ideologists in the early part of the century, up to the

moment when they realized that, statistically, intermixing creates an
equal proportion of whites and blacks, so the country would never
become white-washed.13
In the segregationist pattern, we find a different type of racial
prejudice, called by Nogueira "origin prejudice." In this case,
rejection is based on the affiliation of a person to the dominated ethnic
group, independently of the degree of miscegenation or of integration
in the sociocultural pattern of the dominating ethnic group. The
segregationist ideology credits each ethnic group with a value of its
own, which must be accepted with distant tolerance, and should not be
mixed up with others. It does not intend to wipe out ethnic differences.
But in non-egalitarian societies, this most often leads to a form of
apartheid that gives way to a more radical and crude form of racism.
The constitution of these two patterns of inter-ethnic relations came
about in historical contexts with several socio-economic variables. For
most social scientists, these variables are strong enough to explain the
differences.14 But anthropologists like Gilberte Freyre and historians
like Frank Tannenbaum15 long ago proposed that ethnic variables are
more powerful explanatory factors. The Brazilian assimilationist
pattern, for instance, would be better explained by the cultural ways
of the Portuguese colonizer who, for historical motivations, would
have developed his ethnic tendency of racial tolerance. Just the
contrary would have happened with the North American segregationist
example, whose cultural hegemony would have sprung from England,
a land of supposedly rooted racist bent. From our point of view,
however, the most accepted explanation would have to take into
account both the socio-economic variables and the ethnic ones. But the
basic reason for the ethnic tolerance of one people lies not in the
inherent qualities of the given ethnic group but, rather, in a general
predisposition that can be found in any and all ethnic groups and which
shows up and gets consolidated in certain historical circumstances.
This represents the previously defined ethnophylic tendency.
These two opposite patterns of inter-ethnic relations do not, by any
means, function in a cohesive fashion. Quite the contrary. Most often,
there is a permanent tension between the ethnocentric and the
ethnophylic tendencies, and shifting movements in the direction of
235
assimilationism or segretationism within the same society. This can be

seen in neo-American societies of either pattern, where various aspects
of antagonisms and solidarities are acted out by different cultural
matrices and different ethnic groups generated in the colonization
process. This is because in both patterns there are both social
confrontations that oppose the elite classes against the subordinate
ones, and racial antagonisms that place the privileged group of
European descendants against Indians and blacks.
In societies so pervaded by social inequalities some important forms
of solidarity are made necessary to hold the unequal components
together. The ethnophylic sentiment that exists in both the dominant
and subordinate ethnic groups can and does, indeed, build institutions
of cultural interrelations to help bridge the gap of socio-economic
differences and bring out more tolerant and bearable forms of
conviviality. Some of these institutions are rather efficient and keep
society going. But, all in all, the most important determinants in such
systems are, rather, of a political-economic order that end up stressing
differences, which lead to conflicting ethnocentric feelings. The given
tolerance of the dominating ethnic group is not strong enough to
elaborate permanent forms of relations to smooth out the hard social
reality of the dominated ethnic group, which looks upon its oppressor
with a more than justified feeling of distrust.
In short, assimilationism and segregationism are the results of social
processes but they are also social forces, as well, that are at work in
the making of civilization. In this, ethnophylism plays a driving
influence in the unifying movements of ethnic groups toward the
constitution of supra ethnic identities. We can see ethnophylism
fostering in equal terms the Xingu and Swiss cases, and we can also
see it struggling with ethnocentrism in the process of formation of
supra ethnic political economic blocs, such as the European, the North
American, the Slav, and the Latin-American. Cutting across ethnic and
national frontiers, the interplay of these two sentiments of ethnicity can
create cultural pacts that lead to new views and new feelings of identity
in a wider scope that eventually generate ideological discourses that
confound differences and play up similarities.
But hardly do these large supra ethnic blocs create a permanent
feeling of closeness and conviviality among their members. This, in
236
fact, can only be experienced intra-ethnically. That is why whenever

the ethnocentric tendency surges up in an ethnic group, previously
arranged alliances break down. We are witnessing such a process
happening in former Yugoslavia, with the debacle of the supra ethnic
political power that used to hold together the rivaling ethnic groups.
Here, there is not an sufficiently thick social or economic cement to
substitute for the former political one.
In the present framework of ethnic tensions, we see at work both the
ethnophylic tendency that favors the creation of continental sized supra
national entities, as well as a visible resurgence of ethnocentrism in the
form of racism and xenophobia. The latter is particularly clear in
Europe. In the United States, still living under a segregationist pattern
that resists any kind of assimilationist policy, be it of cultural, social,
or economic order, one can observe the crudest and most hateful
tensions and little sign of change. In Brazil, the fluency of racial
relations no longer covers up the harsh socio-economic reality, full of
inequities and impregnated by an exclusionist bias. Its assimilationist
tendency seems to have definitely lost its original impetus to cover up
or ameliorate bad social conditions. India, the oldest country to
maintain a sociocultural structure of a segregationist nature, cemented
by an efficient ideology of religious and economic interrelations, feels
a menacing burgeoning of desegregating trends.
Of course, most of these presently visible social movements and
tendencies have occurred at other times in the history of humanity. But
now they take place on a world scale and, simultaneously, as if we
were all connected by electric wires. Moreover, the role of ethnicity
seems to be crucial both in its building and in its destructive aspects.
We propose that anthropology, our science of human diversity and
of the transformation of peoples, should make a special effort to tackle
this question. At the same time, it should have no qualms but, rather,
assume a strong ethical stance to diffuse its own views the matter and
present viable political proposals to help direct action toward a
peaceful interplay of ethnic groups, or at least to ease hostility, in
accordance with out theoretical claim for the equality of all human
beings and our desire for social harmony. We believe that a first step
in this regard has been taken, as we recognize the basic role and,
therefore, the resiliency of the ethnic group in social life, the
237
dialectical tendencies of ethnocentrism and ethnophylism, and the

necessity for a forward study of the historical and political conditions
in which a more balanced realization of these tendencies can be
achieved.
Notes
1. Darcy Ribeiro, "Studies in the Anthropology of Civilization:" Vol. 1., The

Civilizational Process (Washington: Smithsonian Institute, 1968), Vol. 2, The
Americas and Civilization (New York: Dutton, 1971), Vol. 3, Os Indios e a
Civilizag?o (Petropolis: Vozes, 1993 6th edition), Vol. 4, O Dilema da
America Latina (Petropolis: Vozes, 1988 4th edition), Vol. 5, Os Brasileiros
(Petropolis: Vozes, 1991 11th edition).
2. Barry Gills and Andre Gunder Frank, "The Cumulation of Accumulation:
Thesis and Research Agenda for 5000 Years of World System History," in
Dialectical Anthropology, vol. 15, no. 1 July (1991), pp. 19-42.
3. Frederick Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (Boston: Little, Brown &
Co., 1969).
4. Eduardo Galv?o, "Cultura e Sistema de Parentesco das Tribos do alto rio
Xingu," Boletim Do Museu Nacional., n.s. Antropologia 14 (Rio de Janeiro:
1953). Eduardo Galv?o, Encontro de Sociedades (S?o Paulo: Paz e Terra,
1979).
5. Darcy Ribeiro, "La Suisse et la Suissite," in Suisse (Ministry of Education of
the Swiss Republic, 1992), published in commemoration of the 700th
anniversary of the nation^

6. Georg Kreis, Le Siede ou la Suisse Bougea (Lausanne, s/d).
7. Darcy Ribeiro, "The Culture-Historical Configurations of the America
Peoples," in Current Anthropology, vol.11, nos. 4 and 5 (1970), pp. 403
434.
8. Elman Service, "Indian-European Relations in Colonial Latin America, in
American Anthropologist, vol. 57 (1955), pp. 411-425.
9. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Capitalismo e Escravid?o no Brasil Meridional
(S?o Paulo: Difus?o Europeia do Livro, 1962).
10. Noam Chomsky, Year 501: The Conquest Continues (Boston: South End
Press, 1993).
11. Mercio Pereira Gomes, Os Indios e o Brasil (Petropolis: Vozes, 1991, 2nd
edition).
12. Oracy Nogueira, "Preconceito racial de marca e preconceito racial de
origem," Anhembi, vol. 5, no. 53, (S?o Paulo, 1955), pp. 279-299.
13. Sylvio Romero, Hist?rio da Literatura Brasileira. Vol 1: Introdugao (Rio de
Janeiro: Jose Olympio Editora, 1960 [1888]); Alberto Torres, O Problema
Nacional Brasileiro (S?o Paulo: Companjia Editora Nacional, 1938 [1914]);
238
Roger Bastide and Horestan Fernandes eds., Broncos e Negros em S?o Paulo
(S?o Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1959).
14. Florestan Fernandes, A Integrag?o do negro ? sociedade de classes (S?o
Paulo: Dominus Editora, 1965); Octavio Ianni, Ragas e classes socials no
Brasil (S?o Paulo: Editora Civilizac?o Brasileira, 1966), 2 vols.
15. Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves (New York: Knopf, 1946);
Frank Tannenbaum, Slaves and Citizens: The Negro in the Americas (New
York: Knopf, 1947).

Darcy Ribeiro and Mercio Gomes - Postmodern States of Ethnicity - Ethnicity and Civilization

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ETHNICITY AND CIVILIZATION

Author(s): Darcy Ribeiro and Mercio Gomes

Darcy Ribeiro is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio

In the last few years, we have been witnessing the upsurge of so

Dialectical Anthropology 21: 217-238, 1996.

science of man, thus depoliticized, has lost contact with the

more than two decades ago in Current Anthropology.1 These themes

Ethnic Group and Ethnicity

contained communities that look upon themselves as the true people,

others, whether by confrontation, by interrelations, by trade, or by

to other ethnic groups. It is through ethnophylism that an ethnic group

and recognized the strength of ethnicity in the defense of small, but

Ethnic Group and Class

We put forth the argument that inter-ethnic struggle comes before

situation of world civilizations and to explain why inter-ethnic

Although we are lacking a theoretical framework to explain the

pressures. Over twenty years ago, we proposed such a scheme,

A third basic confrontation lies in the socio-economic

These new ethnic entities had a powerful force of attraction for

assimilation is completed fully in their children, who find every facility

Macro and Micro Ethnic Groups

In the American continent, there are two well differentiated ethnic

The most vehement expression of the spirit of struggle of these

An example of this can be seen in the uprising of Indian peoples of

an oppressive domination over a multitude of Indian peoples that

Assimilationism and Segregationism

The socio-ethnic outcome of the process of formation neo-American

assimilationist ideologists in the early part of the century, up to the

assimilationism or segretationism within the same society. This can be

fact, can only be experienced intra-ethnically. That is why whenever

dialectical tendencies of ethnocentrism and ethnophylism, and the

1. Darcy Ribeiro, "Studies in the Anthropology of Civilization:" Vol. 1., The

anniversary of the nation^

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