"We say to the confused, Know thyself, as if knowing yourself was not the fifth and most difficult of human arithmetical operations, we say to the apathetic, Where there's a will, there's a way, as if the brute realities of the world did not amuse themselves each day by turning that phrase on its head, we say to the indecisive, Begin at the beginning, as if beginning were the clearly visible point of a loosely wound thread and all we had to do was to keep pulling until we reached the other end, and as if, between the former and the latter, we had held in our hands a smooth, continuous thread with no knots to untie, no snarls to untangle, a complete impossibility in the life of a skein, or indeed, if we may be permitted one more stock phrase, in the skein of life.”
Saramago, Jose - The Cave
Where to start? Well not sure how far back I could go, but I thought it would be interesting to understand the formation of the brazilian people from the moment it was officially "discovered". This formation is curious for the fact that it is document from the moment the Portuguese people got in contact with the native Indians and is somewhat still under progress, in a continuous quest for identity.
Brazil (in Portuguese "Brasil") was named after brazilwood (pau-brasil), a tree of deep red coloured timber that was once abundant along the country's vast Atlantic coast. Due to its high commercial value (it was used to produce a red dye used mainly on textiles) and evidence, it was the first product exploited in Brazil. To name such country, the word might be slightly misleading as it seems to designate an unit, a single place as an opposite to a name like the "United States of America", that suggests various places united by a central government. If you have travelled throughout the country's various regions, you would have noticed that there isn’t one Brazil, but several. But on the other hand, the name as a singular substantive has an aggregation property that reflects how the diverse mix of traditions, cultures and races has spread into the massive continental territory in blends of different proportions of each of those defining characteristics but keeping the same essence.
Although some contradictions that suggest that the existence of the Brazilian land was already known amongst navigators, It's formal discovery happened on the 22nd of April 1500, when the Portuguese caravels shored where it is today called the state of Bahia, in Northeast Brazil. The clash of realities was massive:
"To the Indigene people that was there, naked on the beach, the world was a luxury to live in, so rich in birds, fishes, roots, fruits, flowers, seeds that would provide the joy of fishing, planting and harvest to as many people as would be interested in joining. In their simple and wise conception, life was a gift from good Gods who gave them splendid bodies to walk, to run, to swim, to dance, to fight.(…)
The newly-arrived people were practical, experimented, suffered, aware of their guilty that came from Adam's sin, predisposed to the virtue, with clear notion of the horrors of this sin and the forever damnation. The Indians did not know that. "
Ribeiro, Darcy - The Brazilian People - The formation and meaning of Brazil
What follows is the extermination of the Indigene tribes and population by the diseases brought with the contact with the newcomers, the slavery and the oppression to their traditions, costumes and beliefs under the flag of the Portuguese Jesuit conversion and mercantilist expansion .
The native Brazilian indigene people are commonly classified by the language they spoke:
- Caraíbas (or Karib) -populated the North of the Amazon River bay
- Nuaruaques (or Aruak) -populated an area that goes from the Amazon River Bay until the Andes
- Jês (or Macro-Je) or Tapuias -situated on the Central Brazilian Plateau
- Tupis -populated the whole Atlantic Coast and some parts of inland
To continue the various forms of exploitation of the new found colony, a big contingency of African slaves has been brought into the country. Together with the European and the native Indigene people they form the 3 "matrices" that allegedly formed the Brazilian people:
"At the ethnical-cultural sphere, the transfiguration takes place by the gestation of a new ethos that started to unify, in language and habits, the Indians removed from their native way of living, the Blacks brought from Africa and the European established here. It was the Brazilian being born, constructed with the bricks from these matrices as they come undone."
Ribeiro, Darcy - The Brazilian People - The formation and meaning of Brazil
Brazil is what Darcy Ribeiro, an important Brazilian intellectual and Anthropologist, calls a nation of "new people", rather than "transplanted people" - such as Canada, the US or Australia where the cities and the people mainly replicate the characteristics of the colonizers, differentiated maybe by factors such as nature and geography. Although our rooftops reminds us of our Portuguese colonization, the Brazilian ethos is perceived as one still under development, with strong traces of all those "matrices" that it comprises of. Some of those traces are stronger in some of the regions, hence the same ingredients in different proportions results in a variety of "Brazils" that one who travelled to more than one of the country's region has certainly noticed, and is also well classified by this picturesque Brazilian character:
- Crioulo - Mixed of Portuguese, African and native Brazilian Indians, formed mainly on the Northeast during the years where Brazil's main export was sugar
- Sertanejo - The cattle-raiser on the countryside, mainly at the Northeast, who inherited characteristics of the Portuguese culture, but also elements of the Brazilian own
- Caipira - Mainly inland people from Southeast and Midwest Brazil (states of Sao Paulo, Minas Gerias, Goias) and the inland part of the southern state of Parana, the "Caipiras" resulted mainly from a mix between the Portuguese and the native Indians.
- Sulinos - Gauchos and mixed of Portuguese, Lebanese, Japanese amd other European people (mainly German and Italian), African and Indigene, influenced by the missionaries and with their very own forms of cultural expression.
- Caboclo - With a strong Indigene background, the Amazonian people try to harmonise nature and technology
I shall elaborate on the economical and cultural elements and forces that generated these various "Brazils" in future posts.
If you visit the state of "Amazonas", follow to Bahia and then to the South you might see so many skin and hair colours and tones that you will ask yourself if you are still in the same country - or continent! Curiously, they all (with the exception of a (unfortunately) very, very small minority native Indigene people still living on preserved tribes) speak the same language - Portuguese. But what else do they have in common?
Brazil celebrates the fact that it is a very receptive and tolerant country. In more recent years (19th and 20th centuries), Immigration has also played an important role on the composition of the population, notably the Italian-Brazilians (of Italian origins), Nipo-Brazilians (of Japanese origins) amongst others. Many different people migrated there (many European friends are surprised when I tell them that we have the biggest colony of Japanese people outside Japan) and, despite preserving a few habits have quickly absorbed the essence and mixed into a new blends of what can be called "Brazilianess". In fact, as a Brazilian boy growing in the southeast I had Japanese, blond, black, brown and Indian like classmates and thought that was the most natural thing in the world. It is indeed something to be proud of, once we live in a world that is more and more bruised by intolerant acts. But that does not mean that this came easy - the country did pay a price.
"That cultural uniformity and this national unity are - without a shadow of a doubt - the great result of the formation process of the Brazilian people. It should not, however, make us blind to the fact that there are disparities, contradictions and antagonisms that underlie them as very important dynamic factors. The national unity, made feasible by the successive economic integration of the various colonial transplants, has been consolidated as a matter of fact after the independence, as an objective that was announced, conquered through cruel fights and political savvy of several generations. This is, doubtlessly, the only unchallenged merit of the old Brazilian ruling class. Comparing the unique block that resulted from the Portuguese America with the mosaic of diverse national frames that became the Hispanic America (n.t. from Spanish Rule), one can assess the extraordinary importance of this achievement".
Ribeiro, Darcy - The Brazilian People - The formation and meaning of Brazil
I do have to mention that Brazil is, unfortunately, not completely free of prejudice and there is a massive gap that separate people, although so diverse, from a more comprehensive integration. Without going further into the reasons, I shall highlight, though, that this prejudice, this gap is the result of the unsuccessful way the massive richness of such an abundant country has been distributed and is hence economical rather than cultural, religious or ideological - since the country has always proved open to incorporate new "tastes" of these elements of to the hot pot that it already is. You have to think of a blond Brazilian person of German origins attending to an African Bantu ritual here, of Japanese restaurants reformatted and present in every corner ran and staffed by people who are not Japanese or of Japanese origin at all or the thousands of people from all over the country attending to the Oktoberfest in the South of Brazil. Money unfortunately does matter - and the hope is that the improving economical situation should come with appropriate means to bridge this gap and transform this unique place into the most amazing and vibrant country in the world.
"Although there is not a theory to explain this people formed by the Lusitanian (Portuguese) sweetness, the African vitality and the Indigene magic, they are making the country build its own way, in all its originality"
All these people have left strong traces of their personalities, characteristics, costumes and traditions. The results is not a single physical or psychological stereotype, but several. What they have in common is what is consider to be Brazilian.
Colour/Race Profile
White
|
90,621,281
|
47.51%
|
Black
|
14,351,162
|
7.52%
|
Yellow
|
2,105,353
|
1.10%
|
Brown
|
82,820,452
|
43.42%
|
Indigene
|
821,501
|
0.43%
|
Not declared
|
36,051
|
0.02%
|
Total
|
190,755,799
|
100.00%
|
Source: IBGE's 2010 census
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