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Measuring forms of otherness and establishing rights: government practices and knowledge in the creation of ethnic frontiers

This article has two objectives, focusing on the statistics for Brazil's indigenous population. One objective is methodological, starting with a criticaI and ethnographic perspective to analyze the quantitative data as both cognitive and political tools related to the recognition of rights, which need to be framed within the colonization and state-building processes. The second, focusing on current and past discrepancies between data from indigenous affairs authorities and the national censuses, as currently represented bythe National Indian Foundation (Funai) and the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), respectively, reflects on the heuristic potential of the latter, thereby allowing visualization of the extent and importance ofthe indigenous presence in the country's formation, counter to the administrative ethnicization and neglect in offidal history.

national censuses; indigenous peoples in Brazil; anthropology of numerical records


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