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Beyond Cannibalism: Indigenous Peoples and the European Colonisation of Brazil, 1500-1822: Sources

Module description

European accounts of the first encounters with indigenous peoples in Brazil described a fruitful land and the naked, docile and cannibalistic peoples who inhabited them. This module moves beyond these stereotypes and colonial constructs, and explores the ways in which Brazil’s indigenous peoples shaped their own histories throughout a period that saw the Portuguese, English, French, Spanish and Dutch settle on its Atlantic shores, hinterlands and the Amazon. Indigenous peoples engaged in processes of resistance, negotiation, alliance and adaptation to European colonialism, finding allies as well as foes in the Europeans and Africans that settled in their lands. Nothing remained unchanged, and it is only by looking at historical sources incorporating the tools and research of anthropology, geography, archaeology and cultural studies that we will uncover Brazil and its indigenous history in the early modern period.

Module aims - intentions of the module

Together with its co-requisite, in this module you will explore the processes of resistance, negotiation, peace-making and migration that characterised the first 300 years of European colonialism in Brazil, with a focus to uncover the indigenous histories that have too frequently been overlooked in histories of colonialism and constructed in the historiography as conversion vs. resistance. We will focus on individuals, groups, communities and states, adopting an approach that explores history bottom up as well as top down, as subalterns and autonomous peoples can only be understood within their historical context. Key themes will be resistance, ethnicity, race, culture, gender, violence, slavery, religion the environment. Given the immensity of Brazil, this module will focus on Amazonia, the Atlantic coast (including Rio de Janeiro, Salvador de Bahia and Pernambuco), Minas Gerais and several frontier areas.

Drawing on published and translated source collections as well as a small range of online digital archives, we will work with personal and official documents as letters, peace treaties, petitions, lawsuits, inquisition records, missionary accounts, reports, speeches, decrees, accounts, and fiscal records. You will also have the opportunity to analyse unpublished primary sources collected in the archives by the module convenor and translated into English, as well as material culture, paintings, engravings, maps, documentaries and films.

It is through the analysis of this wide range of sources that you will be able to engage with the historiography of the period and examine the interlinked processes that configured Brazil between 1500-1822. Through your source analysis, you will move beyond established historiography that argued that indigenous peoples either converted or disappeared, and engage with recent developments that explore indigenous agency, trans-national history, and the importance of interdisciplinarity to explore the history of Brazil and of its indigenous peoples.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 1. Identify the different sources available for the study of European colonialism and indigenous peoples in Brazil together with a very close specialist knowledge of those sources upon which you focus in your seminar presentations and written work
• 2. Analyse a diverse and complex range of sources pertaining to early modern Brazilian history.
• 3. Describe and explain the changing processes that characterised indigenous-European relations in early modern Brazil.

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 4. Analyse closely original sources and to assess their reliability as historical evidence.
• 5. Comprehend complex historical texts.
• 6. Understand and deploy relevant historical terminology in a comprehensible and sophisticated manner.

ILO: Personal and key skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 7. Select, organise and analyse material for written work and/or oral presentations of different prescribed lengths and formats.
• 8. Present complex arguments orally.
• 9. Present an argument in a written form in a clear and organised manner, with appropriate use of correct English.
• 10. Through essay development process, demonstrate ability to reflect critically on your own work, to respond constructively to feedback, and to implement suggestions and improve work on this basis

Syllabus plan

Whilst the content may vary from year to year, it is envisioned that it will cover some or all of the following topics:

• Methodology: History from below, indigenous history, ethnohistory, colonial and imperial histories, interdisciplinary approaches.
• Socio-cultural complexity of pre-colonial Brazil.
• Indigenous cultures and languages.
• First encounters and El Dorado.
• Cannibalism, death and indigenous rituals.
• Colonisation attempts and successful colonies: Portuguese, French, Dutch, English, Spanish.
• Religious conversion, resistance and syncretism.
• Missions and missionaries.
• Gender.
• Shamanism, knowledge and power.
• Indigenous resistance and autonomous communities.
• Ethnocide, ethnogenesis and migrations.
• Intra-Indigenous rivalries and alliances.
• Intra-European rivalries and European-indigenous alliances.
• Frontier politics, negotiation and peace-making.
• Colonial cultures and indigenous cultures.
• Slavery and Freedom.
• Nature and the environment.
• Interdependency and extractivism.

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

Summative assessment (% of credit)

Details of summative assessment

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Re-assessment notes

Deferral – if you miss an assessment for certificated reasons judged acceptable by the Mitigation Committee, you will normally be either deferred in the assessment or an extension may be granted. The mark given for a re-assessment taken as a result of deferral will not be capped and will be treated as it would be if it were your first attempt at the assessment.

Referral – if you have failed the module overall (i.e. a final overall module mark of less than 40%) you will be required to submit a further assessment as necessary. If you are successful on referral, your overall module mark will be capped at 40%.

Indicative learning resources - Basic reading

• Bethell, Leslie, ed. Colonial Brazil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, June 2012 [1987].
• Duffy, Eve M., and Alida C. Metcalf, The Return of Hans Staden: a Go-Between in the Atlantic World. Baltimore: Jons Hopkins University Press, 2012.
• Hornborg, Alf, and Jonathan D. Hill, eds. Ethnicity in Ancient Amazonia. Reconstructing Past Identities from Archaeology, Linguistics and Ethnohistory. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2011.
• Langfur, Hal. The Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750-1830. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006.
• Langfur, Hal, ed. Native Brazil: Beyond the Convert and the Cannibal, 1500-1900. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014.
• Lorimer, Joyce, ed. English and Irish Settlement on the River Amazon: 1550-1646. London: Hakluyt Society, 1989.
• Groesen, Michiel van, ed. The Legacy of Dutch Brazil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
• Monteiro, John M. Blacks of the Land. Indian Slavery, Settler Society, and the Portuguese Colonial Enterprise in South America. Edited by James Woodard and Barbara Weinstein. Cambridge Latin American Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
• Monteiro, John M. “Indigenous Histories in Colonial Brazil. Between Ethnocide and Ethnogenesis.” In The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, edited by Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.
• Metcalf, Alida C. Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500-1600. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006 [2005].
• Myscofski, Carole A. Amazons, Wives, Nuns, and Witches: Women and the Catholic Church in Colonial Brazil, 1500-1822.  Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013.
• O'Connor, Loretta, and Pieter Muysken, eds. The Native Languages of South America: Origins, Development, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
• Roller, Heather, Amazonian Routes: Indigenous Mobility and Colonial Communities in Northern Brazil. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014.
• Salomon, Frank, and Stuart B. Schwartz, eds. The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, volume 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999-2000.
• Schaan, Denise. Sacred Geographies of Ancient Amazonia: Historical Ecology of Social Complexity. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2012.
• Souza, Laura de Mello e. The Devil and the Land of the Holy Cross: Witchcraft, Slavery, and Popular Religion in Colonial Brazil. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.
• Wadsworth, James E. Agents of Orthodoxy: Honor, Status, and the Inquisition in Colonial Pernambuco, Brazil. Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield, 2017.

Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources

• ELE – https://vle.exeter.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=13720

Indicative learning resources - Other resources

• Schwartz, Stuart B. Early Brazil. A Documentary Collection to 1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012 [2009].

Key words search

Brazil, Indigenous People, Amazon, Colonialism, Resistance, Latin America