Abstract
This article addresses questions arising from the involvement of anthropology with the state within the context of policies on indigenous land claims in Brazil. We start with effective contributions of anthropology to the area of state biopolitics to ensure social and environmental justice for indigenous peoples in Brazil to contextualize the reactive criticism of anthropology and its practitioners by groups and economic sectors of society represented in a parliamentary inquiry commission which demonstrated the level of misunderstanding about the role this discipline plays in these policies. By analyzing the FUNAI/INCRA 2 Parliamentary Commission’s final report as a text formed from “common sense” about indigenous people, anthropologists, and the discipline, this chapter addresses the extent to which this same “common sense” is rooted in essentialist conceptions of identity that exist within anthropology and indicates the need for a critical review of the theoretical discourse within this discipline.
Keywords
Public anthropology; Land claims; Ethnicity; Common sense; Discourse analysis