The (Il)legal Indian

Abstract

This article traces different aspects of the present-day juridification and judicialization of indigenous lives using the example of the Tupinambá Indians of north-eastern Brazil. The Tupinambá’s identity is being increasingly bureaucratized by public administration and is constantly being questioned by public and private agents to deny the Tupinambá’s constitutional land rights. In the course of the still ongoing process of the demarcation of the Indigenous Territory Tupinambá de Olivença, indigenous inhabitants are facing a plethora of civil actions, and Tupinambá leaders are being persecuted and criminalized by the police and the judiciary. This article exposes the legal intricacies of possessory actions against indigenous people in Brazil and discusses the different acts and attitudes of the actors of the Brazilian ‘juridical field’ as regards the indigenous rights. It suggests a view of law, law enforcement and law suits as means of social sense making, that is, a public staging, interpretation, imagining and ‘mapping’ of Brazil’s ‘indigenous question’, which has, ultimately, to be legitimized by society at large.

Keywords

Brazil indigenous identity indigenous rights legal anthropology territorial disputes Tupinambá Indians

One day whilst I was ‘hanging around’, yet again, at the local office of the Brazilian Bureau of Indian Affairs (FUNAI) in the city of Ilhéus, North-Eastern Brazil, a middle-aged man showed up, asking one of the officials on duty for a ‘declaration’ of Indianness for his daughter. Being used to such demands, the official gave her stock response, saying that such declarations did not exist, nor was there a local ‘register’ of indigenous people, but that the man’s daughter could always, if she deemed it necessary, fill in one of the ‘auto-declaration’ forms which the Bureau provided. As the man insisted on receiving a declaration from the Bureau itself, the officials started to inquire as to his family’s origins and the indigenous village he belonged to. It turned out that the man was not actually living in one of the Tupinambá villages close to Ilhéus, but in the city itself, and that it was the university administration in Salvador, the state capital of Bahia, 400 km by road to the north, that was demanding proof of Indianness from his daughter. As the FUNAI officials started to entertain some doubts about the man’s claims of indigenous identity, it was agreed that he should return another day, accompanied by one of the caciques (chiefs) of the area who would be able to bear testimony to his and his daughter’s belonging to the Tupinambá community.

In the course of this article, I will discuss three elements of the juridification of indigenous lives in Brazil, using the example of the Tupinambá Indians from the north-eastern state of Bahia: the bureaucratization and challenging of indigenous identity, the question of indigenous land rights and the possessory proceedings against indigenous peasants and, if briefly, the criminalization of indigenous leaders committed to the demarcation of the Tupinambá territories. By tracing the intricacies of the juridical treatment of indigenous identity, land and civil rights, I’m seeking to demonstrate the complexity of the interplay of law, legal procedure and the public enactment of justice and ‘justness’ in the case of the Tupinambá. Drawing on, on the one hand, Geertz’s rather ‘interpretative’ or ‘hermeneutical’ approach and, on the other hand, Bourdieu’s rather ‘functionalist’ approach to the nature of law and jurisdiction, I will then try to ‘make sense’ of the Tupinambás’ juridical experience from a perspective that gives priority to the dynamics of proceedings over legal texts or the process of lawmaking. Eventually, I will suggest that the legal battle that involves Tupinambá Indians, estate owners, the Federal Police, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office and a number of public authorities - a battle fought out in a seemingly interminable juridical back and forth between first instance courts, courts of appeal and, recently, the country’s Supreme Court -, is not only a paradigm of the difficulties of juridical resolution of social conflicts but constitutes, in itself, a performative ‘enactment’ of societal disputes that go well beyond the Tupinambá’s particular case.

The local office of FUNAI in the city of Ilhéus (home to Brazil’s probably best known writer, Jorge Amado), as a matter of fact, although unwillingly, does issue certain types of documents related to the question of the ‘Indianness’ of the petitioner. Such documents are sometimes required by public institutions such as universities, as indigenous applicants may benefit from special admission quotas, like students of Afro-Brazilian origin. Although the Convention No. 169 (Article 1.2) of the International Labour Organization, ratified by Brazil in 2002, as well as a recently promulgated federal Brazilian law on university quotas,¹ relies on the principle of ‘self-identification’ or ‘self-declaration’, on a more local ‘scale’ of mapping of indigenous rights – to borrow an image from the Portuguese legal sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos (1987) – things work differently. Candidates for the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), for instance, have to provide proof of their ‘condition’ of Indianness ‘by means of a certificate of […] FUNAI’ (UFBA, 2014: Article 6.1) when applying for one of the two extra places for ‘indigenous villagers’ (índios aldeados).² Ringing up UFBA’s ‘Pro-rectorate for Affirmative Actions and Assistance to Students’³ in late 2014, I was informed that to apply as an indigenous student to one of the ‘Perseverance’ fellowships,⁴ one would have to produce an auto-declaration and a FUNAI certificate – although the corresponding decree lists these documents as alternatives (MEC, 2013: Anexo I.II).

This is just one example of the increasing bureaucratization of indigenous lives I was witnessing during my fieldwork in Ilhéus, Bahia. Whereas Brazilian law endorses the principle of indigenous self-identification, local government agencies often prefer to rely on ‘hetero’-identification or ascribed identity. Indigenous people see themselves as constantly obliged to ‘prove’ their Indianness, be it when applying for a place at university, a job as an (indigenous) school teacher or a pension as an (indigenous) rural worker. The requirement of such evidence of identity is often extralegal, even if the Brazilian Supreme Court (Supremo Tribunal Federal, STF) in 2012 confirmed the constitutionality of both the principle of hetero- and auto-identification (STF, 2012: 37f). Moreover, FUNAI officials have become wary of the danger of acting as, or being considered to be acting as, a kind of ‘certification authority’ for indigenous identity. FUNAI servants in Ilhéus, for instance, had to report to the Federal Police, as a consequence of alleged pension scheme frauds in which FUNAI declarations were part of the indigenous applicant’s file. As a consequence, the certificates issued by FUNAI Ilhéus have undergone frequent revisions. The one for ‘educational purposes’, at the time of my fieldwork in Ilhéus, was basically not certifying anything of itself but merely confirming, in a nearly unintelligible multi-clause sentence, that ‘according to the declaration of the cacique’ and that of another ‘four community leaders’, the person concerned would be a Tupinambá Indian, living at this or that place. As one of the officials joked, this latest version of the certificate would hopefully prevent them from being prosecuted by the Federal Police as a quadrilha (criminal organization).

The Making and Unmaking of Indianness

The question of who is, and who is not, a ‘legitimate’ Indian⁵ has become a matter of public concern in Brazil. Especially (but not exclusively) in the country’s north-east, home to many indigenous groups that have only relatively recently managed to successfully reaffirm and reclaim their indigenous identity and rights (see, for instance, Oliveira, 2004), interest groups linked to the country’s thriving agribusiness have managed to put the ‘indigenous question’ on the front line of the political agenda and public media discourses. Media reports on alleged ‘bogus’ Indians often go hand in hand with accusations that FUNAI and anthropologists are complacent accomplices in the ‘making up’ of indigenous people, in places where, in reality, there would only be farmworkers of mixed descent who had long abandoned their ‘original’ Amerindian culture. A very contemporary example of the innumerable communication media that draw upon this ‘bogus Indian’ discourse is the infamous (among anthropologists) weblog Questão Indígena (Indigenous Question) which, to cite just one of the many posts that question the legitimacy of the Tupinambá’s ethnic identity, has recently reported on the occupation of a fazenda (country estate) by Tupinambá Indians by saying that:

Around 100 Afro-Descendants who adopted indigenous identity to claim other people’s lands in southern Bahia once again occupied fazendas in the region of Ilhéus and Olivença. The areas had already been invaded, but the Federal Police removed the indigenoids [indigenóides] by virtue of eviction orders. According to the “cacique” Sinval Tupinambá, one of the group’s leaders, [the Indians] discovered that the judiciary had suspended the eviction orders and therefore decided to newly occupy the fazendas.⁶

Tellingly, the blog’s corresponding Facebook page uses as its profile picture a drawing of a White man holding a mask in front of his face, which supposedly turns him into an Indian.⁷ Popular magazines like Época and Veja, available nationwide, take a similar line. Media reports from Veja and Época have not only exerted significant influence on the Brazilian middle class’s assessment of the indigenous ‘question’ but, interestingly, also found its way into the records of legal cases. In one of the possessory lawsuits filed at the Court of Federal Justice of Ilhéus (to which I will return later), for instance, the landowner, in a petition in which he questions the demarcation of ‘that newest Indigenous Reservation of 480 square kilometres […] intended for the accommodation of pseudo-Indians Tupinambá who have never lived there’, annexes a report of Veja, Brazil’s biggest illustrated magazine, on the ‘Jamboree of opportunist anthropology’ (2010) as evidence for his deliberations.⁸ An article headlined ‘Lampião Tupinambá’ (which could be translated as ‘Billy the Kid Tupinambá’)⁹ from the magazine Época (edited by Latin America’s largest mass media group Globo), in turn, is cited by the federal judge of another possessory action as documentary evidence for the ‘notoriety’ of land occupations by indigenous groups in southern Bahia.¹⁰ In the Época article cited by the judge, Babau (the cacique of the indictees) features as ‘one of the leaders of a group of 3000 individuals who name themselves Tupinambá’ and who ‘together with his band’ supposedly had ‘invaded’ more than 20 fazendas in the area.

As Brazil’s constitution of 1988 guarantees extensive rights to the country’s indigenous population (which have only been partly and often unwillingly implemented by the successive post-military governments), to deny indigenous people their Indianness altogether has become the core strategy of stakeholders who see their own – mostly economic – interests endangered by claims based on these rights. In yet another possessory action against the ‘Indigenous Tupinambá community of Olivença’, the plaintiff characterizes the defending party as ‘invaders, tagged as “Indians”, who get together, dress their heads with plumage, daub their bodies with paint [and] invade private properties […]’. In the same case, the federal judge of the court of first instance even falls back on the travelogues of the German Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied to argue against the Indianness of the defendants. Wied-Neuwied had visited the Jesuit Indian Mission of Olivença near Ilhéus during his expedition to Brazil in 1815–1817. In the account of his journey, Wied-Neuwied (1820: 82) expresses his regrets on the fact that the ‘dark skinned Indians’ he caught sight of on the beach of Olivença did not entirely equal the Tupinambá he had read about in Lery’s Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil, published more than 200 years before (in 1578). The federal judge of Ilhéus, in his judgement dating from early 2012, willingly embraces Wied-Neuwied’s chagrin, citing the prince’s deliberations for over a page as evidence for the fact that ‘already at that time [the Tupinambá Indians] dressed, spoke, worked and behaved like people that had integrated into the culture of the White’.¹¹ Wied-Neuwied’s remark that the indigenous people he met in Olivença had ‘unfortunately lost their original characteristics’ and his frustration at ‘not seeing a Tupinambá-warrior approaching’ are both reproduced in bold print in the judge’s statement (Wied-Neuwied, 1820: 82).

The use of ethnic belonging (and its denial) for the purpose of settling more or less local conflicts of interests is of course not exclusive to Brazil’s so-called ‘cocoa coast’ (before the Second World War, the region around Ilhéus was one of the world’s biggest cocoa producers). Comaroff and Comaroff (2009), for instance, have assembled a minute account of the uses of ethnicity in what they call the ‘lawfare’ of (and against) indigenous people in North America and Southern Africa. In what concerns the village of Olivença and its Tupinambá inhabitants, Marcis (2004) points to the long history of indigenous resistance against their cultural and physical extermination by colonial and postcolonial Brazilian society, emphasizing the importance of concepts of ethnicity in the constant struggles between the native inhabitants and the White elite from Ilhéus. After the foundation of Vila Nova de Olivença by Royal Charter in 1758:

affirmation of their ethnic identity turned out to be fundamental to the indigenous population for the preservation of their lands, costumes and culture, as, to the extent that the [indigenous] groups became more dependent on dominant society, colonizers and authorities declared them to already be “civilized”. Thus confounded with the other inhabitants [of Olivença], the Indians would lose their rights to the lands of the [former] missionary settlements, which would be converted into common lands [and consequently] split up into parcels to be redistributed among [Indian] descendants and other interested parties. (Marcis, 2004: 56)

However, at that time, the Indianness of its inhabitants was decisive not only for the native population of Olivença but also for the White elite from Ilhéus who had started to establish itself in the Vila, after the extinction of the Jesuit mission. As Marcis relates:

the indigenous condition of the Vila became a double-sided prerogative: it was negated, on the one hand, in consequence of the extinction of the mission, but it guaranteed, on the other hand, the very existence of the Vila as a[n independent] political and administrative unity (2004: 69f).

Even though the Alvará Régia of 1680 and the Land Tenure Act of 1850 guaranteed, in principle, to the indigenous population preferential rights over the lands they possessed (either as successors of the Jesuit mission or as its primary occupants), in practice, these rights were ‘constantly violated by private individuals and authorities’ (see Marcis, 2004: 56, 67, 69). As soon as the ethnic identity of the primary inhabitants of Olivença ceased to work to the advantage of the local elite from Ilhéus, it became challenged altogether. Towards the end of the 19th century, Vila de Olivença was ‘administratively declared “extinct”, for [an alleged] lack of any sign of proper “indigenous” life among its inhabitants’ (Viegas, 2007: 18).

This very brief account of the history of Olivença, at the present-day gateway to the, fiercely disputed and still not demarcated, Indigenous Territory Tupinambá de Olivença, may give an idea of the perpetual historical need of the indigenous population to aver its ethnic identity. The fact that Brazil’s Indians, in what concerns the imperative of permanent vindication of their ethnic belonging, find themselves in almost the same situation today as during the preceding centuries, is related to a, for a long time-dominant, political (and juridical) understanding that the indigenous question, given time, would sort out itself through the ‘integration’ of all indigenous people into Brazilian society as a whole. One can trace this concept from the Diretório dos Índios (a royal law conceived by the Marquis of Pombal in 1755) down to the Estatuto do Índio (Statute of Indians) of 1973, a law still in force, even if partly rendered obsolete by Brazil’s constitution of 1988. Quite modern in its definition of indigenous identity in near Barthian terms (‘persons of pre-Colombian origin or descent who identify themselves and are identified as belonging to an ethnic group whose cultural characteristics distinguish them from society as a whole’), the Estatuto do Índio leaves no doubt that Indianness is a condition to be considered temporary. As laid down in its very first article, it is the purpose of the statute not only to protect Brazil’s indigenous population but also ‘to integrate them, gradually and harmoniously, into the national community’.¹²

The Tortoise and the Hare

Unexpectedly, to the legislator of the early 1970s, the contrary has happened. The Brazilian Institute for Statistics, which included the category ‘indigenous’ in its population census from 1991 on, reports for the year 2000 ‘a demographic growth above all expectations from 294,000 to 734,000 individuals in only nine years’.¹³ In rural North-Eastern Brazil, the number of people who declared themselves indígena rose more than 58% from the census of 2000 to the most recent one of 2010 (IBGE, 2012: 12).¹⁴ Naturally, the growth of the indigenous population in rural areas has also heated up Brazil’s festering land-use conflicts, currently pitching against each other first and foremost the country’s agronegócio (agribusiness) and the inhabitants of indigenous territories in the process of legalization as indigenous reservations.

The process of recognition of the indigenous reservation Terra Indígena Tupinambá de Olivença (TI Tupinambá) became official only in 2001 as a result of an (internal) FUNAI report on a research mission carried out in the district of Olivença ‘for the purpose of collecting data on the land claims of the Tupinambá Indians’ (Paula, 2001). Nearly a decade later, with the approval of the final report for the delimitation of the TI Tupinambá by the president of FUNAI in 2009 and its subsequent publication (DOU, 74/2009), the proposed reservation completed the second most important stage of its legalization. Since then, it has been awaiting its official creation by means of a declaration by the Minister of Justice. According to the decree that regulates the demarcation of indigenous reservations, the Brazilian Ministry of Justice is legally responsible to take a final decision within a maximum of 6 months after the publication of the delimitation report.¹⁵

To pressure FUNAI and the Ministry of Justice to carry out their administrative duty in due time, the Tupinambá Indians eventually began to occupy several of the fazendas situated within the limits of their proposed Indigenous Reservation (see Alarcon, 2013; Magalhães, 2010).¹⁶ The proprietors – most of whom hold legal land titles issued by the state government of Bahia – reacted by instituting proceedings, generally at the Court of Federal Justice of Ilhéus. At the time of writing, according to the federal judge who had taken office in early in 2014, there were well over a hundred possessory actions still to be decided on within his judicial district. The earliest proceedings I came upon during my fieldwork in Ilhéus in the same year (I was granted permission to scrutinize a dozen case files in detail without any restrictions) date from 2004, which is actually the year when the first occupations of fazendas (called retomadas by the indigenous population, i.e., ‘recaptures’ or reoccupations) took place. However, the fact that most of the legal proceedings have been ongoing for more than a decade now is not necessarily due to the tardiness of Brazilian civil justice. To give an example, in a lawsuit concerning the retomada of an estate located in an area called Serra do Padeiro, at the Western tip of the TI Tupinambá, filed in December 2004, there have been more than a dozen decisions of first instance, and the case register (available on the Internet) meticulously lists around 400 entries recording petitions, summons, appeals and so on.¹⁷

The case is typical in its toing and froing from the court of Ilhéus to the Higher Regional Court in Brasília. At the same time, it is unique as regards the identity of the claimant, who is not, as is usual, the proprietor or holder of the land title, but the indigenous community of Serra do Padeiro itself. In the petition that institutes the proceedings, Babau, the already mentioned leader of the Comunidade Indígena Tupinambá Serra do Padeiro, claims that:

In view of the legislation in force and the legal opinions and decisions of the Higher Courts, the legitimate entitlement of the Tupinambá of Serra do Padeiro to the fazenda, which is being perturbed by the defendant party and out of which they are trying to expel [the claimants], proves to be unquestionable. Moreover, due to others’ will, [the claimants] are subjected to humiliations and constant violence, confined within small areas bare of resources, hindered from making use of what belongs to them and what is warranted to them by the Carta Magna. This being the case, nothing else remains to be done than to resort to the judiciary. The people of the Tupinambá village of Serra do Padeiro can only hope that justice prevails and peace will be re-established, if late, after nearly 400 years of massacres and injustice. For hundreds of years, the great nation of Tupinambá from the village of Serra do Padeiro is crying and waiting for JUSTICE!¹⁷

Babau’s deliberations are testimony to the Tupinambás’ growing collective awareness of their rights as an indigenous people – a process that can be traced back to the late 1990s, though there had been various movements of resistance against indigenous disenfranchisement before then (see Paraiso, 1987, 2009). The plaint of the Indians of Serra do Padeiro is also paradigmatic as to what constitutes the crux of all possessory actions: to decide which of the opposing parties has the ‘better’ right of possession. Whilst the Tupinambá of Serra do Padeiro claim that they are being hindered, by the defendant, from making use of the lands that belong to them by virtue of the Brazilian constitution, the defendant – acting as the plaintiff in an action regarding the same fazenda, filed by him 2 weeks after the Indians – asserts that it is he who should be considered a victim of disturbance of possession.¹⁸

To understand the devious routes of the possessory actions regarding the TI Tupinambá (as those regarding many other indigenous regions throughout Brazil), it is worthwhile briefly to go back in time not just to the beginnings of Brazil’s colonization (the Jesuit village of Olivença was part of the Captaincy of São Jorge dos Ilhéus, donated in 1534), but to the days of Ancient Rome. Modern European civil law is closely affiliated to Justinian’s Corpus Juris Civilis, a legacy which is also very present in the Brazilian Código Civil of 2002 (which goes back to a draft from 1975) and which draws the same clear line between posse (possession) and propriedade (ownership) – a distinction that gradually emerged in the course of history of the Roman Republic. The legal concept of ‘possession’ originated initially in connection with public lands, which were given out to individuals during the expansion of the Roman Empire, not as owners, but as possessors (Mousourakis, 2012: 157). As Kaser notes, earlier in Roman history, the distinction between ‘ownership’ and possession had still not taken shape:

Generally speaking, in ancient Roman conception the relations between people and things is never understood from a merely proprietary perspective, that is, things are not considered assets at one’s free disposal. To the contrary, particularly in what concerns rural estate, the farm, with its living and lifeless stock, the awareness prevails that this epitome of material goods constitutes the basis of existence of the family, ensuring its future. This implies multifarious moral and legal commitments which limit its legal dominion […]. As a consequence of this very conception, the [peasant’s] house and fields enjoy sacral protection. Our present-day notion of property […] is only the result of a long development. […] Ancient Roman property, in contrast, was not yet dissociated sharply from possession. (Kaser, 1955: 105)

As ownership, based on legal entitlement, gradually differentiated itself from possession, that is, the factual control of a thing (or a piece of land), it became ever more important to provide legal means of protecting possession, as securing one’s right of property (through a vindicatio) demanded proof of ownership. This, however:

would in principle require [the owner] to prove that the person from whom he had acquired the thing was then its owner. That of course would turn on whether that person had acquired from the person who was then the owner; and so on ad infinitum. (Johnston, 1999: 55)

The possessory interdicta was held out to solve this problem: ‘In comparison with the regular proceedings of actiones, they held the advantage of tightness and swiftness, which was given also to all the other interdicts, owing to their administrative public law character’ (Kaser, 1955: 325).

So far, so good. The trouble is that, be it in Ancient Rome or in modern Brazil, even interdicts cannot exclusively rely on the factuality of possession. Even the interdictas, Kaser cautions:

only provided relative protection, they decided in favour of the party with the ‘better’ possession than the adverse party. The possession was considered ‘worse’ if the adverse party had obtained it in a defective way, namely by force, clandestinely or by grant at will. (1955: 123)

Similarly, Article 922 of the Brazilian Code of Civil Procedure gives formal expression to the relativeness of all ações possessórias: ‘It is admissible that the defendant, alleging that he was infringed in his possession, [himself] demands possessory action […]’. And, not much different from Roman law, the Civil Code declares, ‘It is just the possession which is not forcible, clandestine or precarious’ (Article 1200, emphasis added).

Before taking a closer look at the manner with which the Brazilian judiciary has been dealing with the question of possession in the case of the territories disputed by the Tupinambá Indians, it is worth pointing out another commonality between ancient European and modern Brazilian rural society, in what refers to differing concepts underlying the use of land. To the indigenous population currently living within the limits of the not-yet-declared TI Tupinambá, the meaning of land is still very different from that ascribed to it by many of their legal opponents. Various scholars have pointed to the prevalent Tupinambá notion of land not as a good or property but a ‘place where existence materializes’ (e.g. Lara, 2012: 56). Kaser’s (1955: 105) reference to the ‘moral commitments’ attached to ‘things’ (including land) and the ‘sacral protection’ a peasant’s house and lands enjoyed – not as property but as sources of family life – matches, for instance, with Viegas’ observation of the Tupinambás’ ‘total identification of a person and their house’, a relation ‘which is not mediated by a relation of alienable property […] but by bonds of personal responsibility’ (Viegas, 2007: 86). Viegas thus attributes part of the Tupinambás’ massive land losses from the 1940s to the 1960s – when many Indians sold or bartered their land possessions to cacao farmers from Ilhéus for ‘a bottle of cachaça [rum]’ or to clear their debts – to what she terms ‘equivocal compatibilities’ (2007: 265). Pieces of land that, within indigenous reasoning, were seen as areas that only potentially would turn into a lugar, a place where families would exist and subsist – within the Tupinambás’ conception of life as an interminable ‘circle of abandonment/revitalization’ (2007: 266) – to their trade ‘partners’ from the city of Ilhéus was terreno, real property that could be, and demanded to be, the object of ownership, independent of its actual use.

The same diverging notions of land were prominent in the courtroom of the Court of Federal Justice of Ilhéus, in 2014. Unlike his predecessors, who regularly had seen no necessity to hear the indigenous defendants of the possessory actions filed by fazendeiros (estate owners), the newly arrived judge, in an attempt to ‘pour oil on troubled waters’, as he called it, endeavoured to achieve temporary settlements between the opposing parties, until a final decision as to the demarcation of the reservation would be taken by the Ministry of Justice. Indigenous peasants and title-holding estate owners were thus forced to sit together, discussing their different points of view regarding the disputed lands. Whilst the judge managed to induce the opposing parties to compromise in numerous actions, it also became clear how different their demands actually were. The proprietors (who often did not live on their estates but entrusted the agricultural work to an administrator and/or a reduced number of agricultural labourers) were eager to detail the economic losses they had suffered in the wake of the retomadas. Explaining the troubles of ‘professional’ agriculture, one of the estate owners came to admire ‘how the Indians actually manage to survive’ on her farm. On the other side, in the same case, the Tupinambá made a point of explaining how the fields they were tilling for subsistence agriculture provided for so and so many families and that their main concern would be ‘to have land that really belongs to us’.

The judge’s proposal that the indigenous occupants, for the time being, should work as paid labourers on the occupied fazenda, whilst it would still legally be possessed by the non-Indian proprietor, was hence categorically rejected by one of the caciques: ‘We may withdraw from the land if necessary, but work on it as employees, never!’

Law, Law Enforcement and Lawsuits as Acts of Social Sense Making

But what about the question of the justness of the possession of either the Tupinambá or the title-holding fazendeiros? Putting aside, for the moment, the problem of ‘material’ justness, that is, the fairness of the Tupinambá’s demand to be allowed to inhabit the territories that had belonged to them, as a dynamic ethnic group, for centuries, the problem of ‘formal’ legal justness of either party’s possession is juridically rather intricate. According to its (post-dictatorship) constitution of 1988, the Federative Republic of Brazil ‘recognizes the Indians’ […] primordial rights over the lands they traditionally occupy’ (CF, 1988: Article 231). The indigenous population, though, is not the proprietor of these lands – which legally belong to the Federation (Article 20/XI) – but enjoys the right of their ‘permanent possession’ (Article 231, section 3). Moreover, the constitution declares all indigenous lands to be ‘inalienable and inviolable, and the rights over them irrevocable’ (Article 231, section 4). To an advocate of indigenous rights, these lines of the Brazilian constitution must sound quite utopian, especially if compared to the situation of indigenous people in other continents (like Australia). For many indigenous people in Brazil though, the full implementation of their constitutional rights is rather part of a Utopia that has yet to develop. The period of 5 years allotted for the demarcation of all the country’s indigenous reservations (ADCT, 1988: Article 67) has long passed, and political movements to severely limit precisely these constitutional rights have gained force in the meantime.¹⁹

As mentioned, most of the fazendeiros within the TI Tupinambá do in fact hold legal titles for their estates, issued either by the state of Bahia or by the federal government. Formally, this fact itself does not undermine the Tupinambás’ demands: the constitution determines explicitly that all such titles are to be considered ‘null and void, not producing any legal effect’ (Article 231, section 6) – although, in the case of the neighbouring Pataxó Hã-Hã-Hãe Indians, it took the STF 30 years to finally recognize that (see Zoettl, in press). At the same time, within possessory actions, the question of ownership is irrelevant altogether, as their purpose as a legal remedy is to protect the factuality of a given instance of the exercise of power over a certain ‘thing’. On these grounds, the Tupinambás’ argument that the lands they had retaken actually belong to them by act of the constitution has regularly been rejected by the courts of first instance. As the new judge of Ilhéus wrote, shortly after taking office and probably still under the influence of his local juridical assessors, as a representative of the Federal Prosecutor’s Office (Ministério Público Federal, MPF) speculated, ‘what is being discussed in the present possessory action is not the demarcation of the Tupinambás’ lands […]. As long as the Indigenous Territory is not yet delimited, the possession has to be safeguarded of whoever is effectively exercising it’.²⁰

To cut a long story short, it suffices to note here that the legal interpretation of the question of indigenous possession, as opposed to the possessory rights of the fazendeiros, is not only complex but, like most points of law, subject to differing interpretation. Contrary to the cited judge’s opinion, FUNAI, MPF and the legal representatives of the federal government (all of them responsible, according to the constitution, for defending the legal interests of Brazil’s indigenous population) regularly defend the primacy of indigenous possession over the private possession conceded by the Civil Code. Taking up their arguments, a federal judge from the neighbouring district of Itabuna, in another possessory action regarding the TI Tupinambá, considered that ‘be there or not occupation by private persons, indigenous people regularly do not lose their possession of an area, as it is “permanent”, a characteristic which detaches it from the civil/private regime of possession’.²¹ Accordingly, the STF has repeatedly clarified that the constitutional right of indigenous possession does not depend on its administrative demarcation, which is to be considered a merely ‘declaratory’ act (e.g. STF, 2010: 237).

Reflecting on the above-mentioned lawsuit of the Pataxó Hã-Hã-Hãe Indians at the STF (which ended in 2012 with a long-awaited victory for the indigenous population of the TI Caramuru-Paraguaçu), I argued that the court proceedings, publicly re-enacting the ‘drama’ of the Hã-Hã-Hãe, and themselves drawing on dramatic forms of representation, could be interpreted, in (Victor) Turnerian terms, as a ‘cultural performance’ which stages, in the court’s plenary hall, a variety of social conflicts inherent in modern Brazilian society (Zoettl, in press). The lawfare of and against the Tupinambá Indians, at its present stage, differs from that of the Hã-Hã-Hãe though, in that it has not yet reached, as far as its legal side is concerned, the publicity and public visibility of the widely noticed ‘final battle’ of its parentes (kin) from Caramuru-Paraguaçu, less than 100 km away. Apart from a single judge decision on the part of Joaquim Barbosa, the then president of the STF until his early retirement in 2014, which suspended more than a dozen eviction orders,²² the great majority of lawsuits concerning Tupinambá Indians are processed in a tiny room in the Federal Court of Ilhéus, hardly noticed by the general public.

What becomes publicly known, through media coverage on an often nationwide level, are the frequent actions of the Federal Police against individual Tupinambá Indians or the forced evictions of whole Tupinambá villages. Babau, the cacique from Serra do Padeiro, has been repeatedly arrested on dubious grounds by the State Police (polícia militar) or local agents of the Federal Police, put into custody by means of local courts’ decisions, yet regularly released on the grounds of habeas corpus by the higher courts. The writs that have come to Babau’s aid – if sometimes after he had already spent months behind bars – are occasionally full of comments that show how disconcerted the higher judges are by the modus operandi of the lower courts and the police: ‘the person concerned [o paciente] was detained only seven months after obtaining the arrest warrant’, ‘[he] has been imprisoned for 90 days without any notice of formalization of the complaint’, ‘the Federal Prosecutor’s Office [MPF] itself, in the trial of first instance […] pleaded against [his] imprisonment’, ‘the decision of the court of first instance which ordered the remand in custody hardly refers to the person concerned, limiting itself to referring to statements of unknown witnesses’, ‘the access to these statements, surprisingly, was restricted to the police authorities and the prosecution, excluding the defence’ and so on.²³

Clifford Geertz has advocated a ‘hermeneutic’ perspective on law, which would seek to transcend functionalist approaches that interpret law as either ‘a clever device to keep people from tearing one another limb from limb, advance the interests of the dominant classes, [or] defend the rights of the weak against the predations of the strong […]’ (1983: 232). Thinking of the Tupinambá case, it sometimes seems difficult not to interpret law, legal procedure and the action of judges and law enforcement officers as a device to maintain a certain political, economic and historic situation literally in statu quo res erant ante bellum. The persecution of the people who identify themselves today as Tupinambá has run through the centuries, and has usually been administered through close cooperation between the local elite, personified by the so-called Coronéis do Cacau (cocoa colonels), local and state government agents, the judiciary and the police. After what became known as the revolt of caboclo Marcellino in the 1930s (an uprising against the construction of a bridge over the River Cururupe to facilitate access from Ilhéus to the indigenous territories near Olivença), it looked as if the remaining population’s resistance had finally been broken. Marcellino, vilified by the press as ‘Lampião Mirim’ (‘the tiny bandit’), charged by the judiciary with crimes as diverse as murder, defloration, or ‘being communist’, hunted first by the police of Ilhéus and later by Bahian government troops, eventually disappeared under suspicious circumstances around 1937, and many of his indigenous companions were subjected to torture during the pursuit (see Alarcon, 2013; Paraiso, 1987, 2009).

Half a century later, the Bahian historian Maria Hilda Paraiso (1987: 105) observed that ‘[o]nly now, in 1984, can we notice a recommencement of a movement that aims to recover the [Tupinambás’] lands and their recognition by the state’s Bureau [of Indian Affairs]’. The indigenous population’s ‘gatherings during which they seek to strengthen their ties of solidarity and revive their cultural practices’, Paraiso went on, ‘have already provoked reactions from the residents of Ilhéus and Olivença, including criminal complaints at the Federal Police’ (1987: 105). A brief look into the report of the ‘Special Commission on Tupinambá’ of the National Council for the Defence of Human Rights, instituted to ‘map the police investigations, administrative procedures and judicial processes which involve indigenous leaders’,²⁴ gives an idea of how local and federal institutions continue, another 25 years after this latest resurgence of the Tupinambá movement, to work hand in hand to undermine the Tupinambás’ efforts to actualize their constitutional rights. To cite just one example, under the chapter heading ‘History of Violence Against and Imprisonment of Tupinambá Leaders’, the report lists, for 23 October 2008, the following incident:

Police operation in the village of Serra do Padeiro, with more than 130 police officers, 2 helicopters and 30 vehicles – including funeral cars – to execute judicial eviction orders which had been suspended by the TRF of the First Region [regional appeal court] and against the advice of the Ministry of Justice, resulting in 22 indigenous people injured by rubber bullets and intoxications by bombs and gas, destruction of houses, community vehicles, food and school equipment. The officers of the Federal Police took away spears, clubs, arrows and burned headdresses, breechcloths, maracas, in short, indigenous attire, in flagrant violation of the cultural rights of the Tupinambá, an indictable offence according to law 6001/73. (CDDPH, 2011: 35)

In what way could the anthropologist endeavour to make sense, in Geertzian terms, of such a blatant persecution of an ethnic minority in the 21st century in a democracy, albeit a young one? Are the bureaucratization of indigenous identity, the judicialization of indigenous rights and lives and the criminalization of indigenous leaders and individuals by state agents and the judiciary not simply different aspects of what Bourdieu (1987: 838) has called (referring to law) an attempt to consecrate ‘the established order by consecrating the vision of that order which is held by the State?’ Although such a way of looking at things may not be completely wrong, it partly ignores the complex dynamics underlying the processes of making and applying the law and the relation of these processes to the ‘bigger’ dynamics of negotiation of societal interests. Even Bourdieu, who emphasizes predominantly the latent power of ‘symbolic domination’ inherent in legal norms (1987: 846), does not refrain from pointing to the importance of law in the symbolic and actual brokering of social conflicts. Whilst, at one point, Bourdieu exposes the arbitrariness of and the ‘rationalization process’ behind legal reasoning, he also comes to consider judicial acts as representations of societal disputes. One could conceptualize trials, Bourdieu suggests, as the ‘paradigmatic staging of the symbolic struggle inherent in the social world: a struggle in which differing, indeed antagonistic world-views confront each other’ (1987: 837). Within the same line of reasoning, Bourdieu describes the judiciary as ‘a specialized body […] responsible for organizing the public representation of social conflicts according to established forms’ (1987: 830f). Bourdieu’s sociology of the ‘juridical field’ is thus not necessarily antagonistic to Geertz’s symbolic interpretative view of law as being ‘constructive of social life not reflective, or anyway not just reflective’ (1983: 218). But whilst Bourdieu does not refrain from denouncing legal procedure as a ritual ‘designed to intensify the authority of the act of interpretation’ and the interpretation of law as a ‘symbolic struggle between professionals possessing unequal technical skills and social influence’ (1987: 827), Geertz advocates a – perhaps more relativistic – view of law as ‘a distinctive manner of imagining the real’ (1983: 173).

Both the meandering of the Tupinambá case through the various instances of the Brazilian judiciary, as much as the juridification (and criminalization) of indigenous identity itself are not bare of elements that recommend a Bourdieusian and/or Geertzian perspective on them to overcome a purely ‘instrumentalist’ view (criticized by Bourdieu himself) of legal and state actors and actions as merely reflecting ‘existing social power relations’ and the ‘interests of dominant groups’ (1987: 814). As a matter of fact, the Tupinambá world view and interests have been defended, at great sacrifice, not only by the Tupinambá themselves and some of their allies (such as, for instance, the Conselho Indigenista Missionário) but also by various actors of the ‘judicial field’. The MPF of Ilhéus, for instance, has peremptorily refused to press charges against Indians for trespassing on land (esbulho possessório), arguing that the Tupinambá retomadas would be a legitimate part of their struggle (cf. Alarcon, 2013: 69). Many preliminary first-instance eviction orders have been suspended by the higher courts, occasionally on the grounds of a remarkably insightful argumentation. The presiding judge of the Tribunal Regional Federal of the First Region (TRF1), for instance, in a decision taken the day before the execution of the contested eviction order, deemed that the first instance decision to concede such an order ‘by way of preliminary injunction, that is, without exhaustive analysis of the causa’ – the usual processual form taken in all possessory actions against the Tupinambá – would be ‘precipitant and imprudent’; all the more so as ‘the execution of the decision […] may pose a serious risk to the security of the Tupinambá indigenous community and the police agents’. ²⁵ In the already cited decision of the constitutional court, Joaquim Barbosa, at that time Brazil’s most senior judge, cautioned against the fact that ‘in most cases, the eviction of occupants does not involve any prospect of dignified [future] accommodation’ and ruled that ‘to avoid the constant and involuntary relocation of the population’ was a ‘precaution as important as that of securing the duly execution of judicial injunctions’.²⁶ In view of the persecution of Tupinambá Indians by state agents, the MPF of Ilhéus has recently filed a civil action claiming that the Brazilian state should pay R$500,000 (around US$200,000) to the Tupinambá community for ‘acts of violence and torture’ presumably perpetrated by Federal Police agents during criminal ‘investigations’ at a retomada during which, according to the MPF, indigenous activists were tortured by means of Taser weapons.²⁷ As for the attacks on indigenous rights by the media, the MPF of São Paulo has filed a civil action against the publisher of Veja magazine for defamation (dano moral) of indigenous (and Black rural) communities in the already cited article on the ‘Jamboree of opportunist anthropology’.²⁸ Then again, with respect to the erratic bureaucratization of indigenous lives, the MPF of Roraima (a state at the northern tip of Brazil) has filed a civil action regarding the university’s non-acceptance of indigenous self-identification for fellowships.²⁹

The symbolic struggle Bourdieu identifies in the proceedings of the different legal actors is however, at least as far as the legal treatment of indigenous lives in Brazil is concerned, less a question of differences in technical skills and social influences than, more generally, shifting societal paradigms that make certain judgements, at a certain point in history, socially ‘acceptable’ or not. To give an example from another legal domain, Brazil has recently witnessed an unprecedented and widely unexpected crackdown on politico-economical corruption, spearheaded by federal and constitutional judges, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office and the Federal Police. A number of the highest ranking officials of the ruling Partido dos Trabalhadores have been convicted in 2013 by the STF and given prison sentences without parole for their involvement in a congressional vote-buying system which became famous as the mensalão (‘big monthly allowance’). At the end of 2014, the Federal Police jailed a number of highest ranking members of the executive boards of some of the country’s biggest companies in an operation named ‘Lava jato’ (‘car wash’), following a judicial inquiry which disclosed a multibillion dollar corruption scheme within the state-owned energy corporation Petrobras, and in March 2015, the STF authorized criminal investigations against 34 members of the National Congress, including the presidents of the Federal Senate and the Congress, for suspicion of complicity and passive corruption.

Regarding indigenous rights, though, some of the STF’s very recent decisions seem to indicate a further paradigm shift, which could prove particularly unfavourable to those indigenous groups who are still struggling to see their traditional territories demarcated. In late 2014, the second chamber of the STF overruled a decision of the highest non-constitutional court (STJ) on the grounds that only those territories could be demarcated which had been occupied by indigenous people on the very day of the promulgation of the country’s actual constitution (of 5 October 1988) – no matter by what means the indigenous inhabitants had been driven out of their territories, and even if this had occurred only the day before – thus categorically dismissing the rights conferred on them by virtue of Brazil’s earlier constitutions.³⁰

The STF’s changing juridical stances, of course, also reflect changes of the political balance of power (not necessarily related to this or that ruling party, but often rather to the shifting influence certain lobby groups enjoy within the governing coalition) – not least because the judges of the STF are nominated by the President in office. At the same time, Brazil’s Supreme Court has never denied its political responsibility, in the sense of assuming and acknowledging its role as a kind of final referee for a near-indefinite variety of social disputes (see Paixão, 2007). This political side of judicial reasoning frequently shines through the lines of the published grounds for the court’s decisions as, for instance, when one of the judges of the above-cited decision initiates her:

vote with the disquiet of being aware of the difficulty of finding, judicially, a solution that attends equally to the anxieties of the indigenous community which has long since been dispossessed of their lands, and the farmer determined to work for the country’s inland development […].³¹

The (alleged) antagonism between indigenous minorities’ rights and the ‘national’ interest of the country’s economic development has indeed become, for the moment, the way Brazil’s indigenous question is predominantly ‘imagined’ within public discourse. This includes not only the – mostly biased – media coverage of ‘clashes’ between indigenous peasants and (supposedly small-scale) agriculturalists but also, and not necessarily in a biased way, the ‘juridical field’. One may lament this (hopefully fugacious) paradigm, which reduces a sociocultural issue to one of, predominantly, ‘late liberalist’ (Povinelli, 2011) economics – a perspective against which one of the STF’s ministers had actually cautioned in another recent key decision.³² It nevertheless represents both, in Geertz’s words, a ‘mode of giving particular sense to particular things in particular places’ and a ‘set of practical attitudes toward the management of controversy’ (1983: 184, 232).

Geertz’s hermeneutic view of law would be stretched to its limits, though, if it had to make allowance for even for those manoeuvres of state power that seek to suspend the action of law altogether. Brazil’s military dictatorship has bequeathed the country a cunning legal remedy called suspensão de segurança (‘suspension of security’) that allows public legal entities to plead to the higher court’s president for the suspension, by simple order, of any previous court decision, by alleging that it would do ‘severe damage to public order, health, security or economy’.³³ The ‘suspension of security’ has been and is being amply used by Brazil’s present government to push through large-scale construction projects that jeopardize the cultural and physical existence of various indigenous tribes in the country’s north. Several court decisions, for instance, that suspended the construction of Belo Monte Dam on the Xingu River in the state of Pará on the grounds of gross procedural errors (such as lack of prior consultation of the indigenous communities and illegality of the environmental impact statement) have themselves been suspended – without considering the substance of the case – by means of an order of suspension of security, in what one of the MPF’s public prosecutors from Pará has called a suspension of legal order itself (Santi and Brum, 2014).

‘In the modern era’, observes Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ‘law has become the privileged way of imagining, representing, and distorting, that is to say, of mapping’ of social spaces (1987: 286). Whilst the Tupinambá at least won’t see their traditional territories flooded for the benefit of ‘national economy’ (represented at Belo Monte, as it happens, by a consortium of some of Brazil’s biggest private companies, some of which are currently being investigated for their participation in the ‘car wash’ corruption scheme), they still struggle to be allowed to make use of what is theirs by virtue of the country’s constitution. Much more than written law itself, it is a legal procedure that has become the script for the public assessment of the Tupinambás’ (and other Indians’) demands and their very right to exist within Brazilian society at large – a script written dynamically by a multitude of different judicial actors proposing, to the Brazilian public, a multitude of different ways of ‘imagining’ the country’s contemporary and future social reality. However, as the acts of the judicial field depend not only on the intrinsic ‘rules of the game’ of judicial procedure but also on the legitimacy ascribed to them a priori and a posteriori by society at large, it is, ultimately, the Brazilian public itself that will have to decide on the ‘just’ interpretation of the indigenous question, as laid before them by the country’s judiciary.

Footnotes

Funding

The research for this article was funded by a postdoctoral scholarship from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT).

Notes

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