This article examines the acts and the representations developed by agents of the National Soil Populating Service (Serviço do Povoamento do Solo Nacional). The emphasis is on the important role that immigration and colonization policies have amid larger processes of construction of national states. I will thus show how the power techniques involved in the execution of these policies have an important role in the construction of public authority. The analysis here presented parts from an anthropological demarche, which states that public policies must not be conceived as merely the application of projects by pre-existing structures, but rather as the place where these structures are built and, therefore, as the place where public authority is construed. This interpretation stresses the way that administration mechanisms are structured by means of the construction of public policy’s objects, by means of the social agents that execute the public policies, and by means of the construction of social interaction networks through which these public policies circulate.
immigration and colonization in Brazil; nation and state; public policies; state anthropology
