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“Fraudulent” Identities: The Politics of Defining Quilombo Descendants in Brazil
Author(s) -
FarfánSantos Elizabeth
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
the journal of latin american and caribbean anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.624
H-Index - 15
eISSN - 1935-4940
pISSN - 1935-4932
DOI - 10.1111/jlca.12108
Subject(s) - descendant , conceptualization , identity (music) , portuguese , politics , ethnology , sociology , history , genealogy , law , political science , aesthetics , art , philosophy , linguistics , physics , astronomy
This article analyzes the role of historians and anthropologists in the conceptualization of “quilombo,” past and present, in Brazil. The validity of the new political identity, remanescente de quilombo (quilombo descendant), has been contested by the popular media as a “fraudulent” identity used by black communities to obtain land rights. While the term quilombo was used by the Portuguese Crown to refer to three or more fugitive slaves in hiding, quilombo descendants have been defined beyond the limits of simply the ancestors of fugitive slaves. I argue that when it comes to quilombo descendants obtaining actual rights they are often dismissed as frauds until proven authentic. Their authenticity depends not only on their ability to perform and describe the ancestral history of their community, but more importantly, in their ability to tell a specific history of their past as it has been written and incorporated into the Brazilian national imaginary.