The Politics and Poetics of Ethnic Consciousness

Dissertation submitted for the MSc in Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics Candidate Number: 21670 MSc. Social Anthropology, 2009-2010 London School of Economics and Political Sciences Word count: 9.999 The Politics and Poetics of Ethnic Consciousness Abstract In some of the accounts by Jesuit missionaries on Brazilian soil, the indigenous peoples were described as being “inconstant”. In other words, the efforts of the Jesuits in catechizing the autochthonous population would have very short-lived effects, and the latter would soon go back to its original customs. Representations produced in the colonial encounter played a big part in the process of what can be described as ethnogenesis and helped construct the category of the ‘generic Indian’. Representations that convey an idea of a culture that, though permeable to outside influences, grows back to its natural ways abound in the early accounts in the colonial period, and can also be found in more contemporary readings. Nearly five hundred years later, the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro refers back to the myrtle metaphor used by the Jesuit Antonio Vieira in 1657 to reflect upon what he describes as an “ideological bulimia” which he associates with the indigenous people in Brazil. The same author has suggested that the origin and essence of Amerindian culture is acculturation since cultural contact implies borrowing, either amicably or violently (Viveiros de Castro, 2004). Many anthropologists have written on the shift from class to culture (De la Cadena 2005, Wade 2004) which occurred after the 70s, having the Conference of Stockholm as its landmark, and how it paved the way to renewed processes of ethnogenesis across Latin America (Hill 1996, Norman E.Whitten 1996). I shall argue that this recent trend, alongside major political moves such as the inclusion in the Brazilian Constitution of a chapter named “On the Indians”, has served to rekindle a process of ethnogenesis in Brazil and that such a process is most effective when it can rely on representations that have a long duration. In other words, the constitution of indigeneity as an element of the national culture depends on the effectiveness of the narratives that support it and on the persistence of those narratives through time. Taking those observed facts into consideration this study intends to investigate how a certain configuration of factors, or the dialectical result of a combination of forces, contributed towards a differentiated treatment of the indigenous population in Brazil. By looking at how past representations still echo in people’s imagination, including that of decision makers, this study hopes to critically assess the category ‘Indian’ within the broader context of Indigenism in Brazil, and of ethnicity in general, whilst avoiding ethnic essentialism. This study shall deploy as theoretical references the pioneering work on ethnicity by Max Weber, who sees the formation of an ethnic group as politically oriented, and that of Fredrik Barth, who suggests it is an ongoing phenomenon and that ethnic affiliation happens in the encounter between groups who perceive themselves as different. Finally, it shall address the current phase of ethnogenesis in an attempt to explore possible implications of this contemporary and global trend. Table of Contents: Abstract 2 Table of Contents 3 1. Introduction 4 2. Ethnicity in Itself 7 3. Ethnogenesis 9 3.1. Representing Others 11 3.2. Indigenism 12 3.3. Content & Form 15 3.4. Conversion, Acculturation & Resistance 17 4. Ethnicity for Itself 21 4.1. Class & Ethnicity 22 4.2. Representing Oneself 24 4.3. Ethnic Consciousness 26 5. Ontology & Ethnicity 27 6. Conclusion 28 References 30 1. Introduction ‘Only anthropophagy can unite us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically.’ (Extract from the “Anthropophagic Manifesto”, by Oswald de Andrade,1928) The current Brazilian Constitution dates from 1988. Amongst its many chapters, the chapter named “On the Indians” is particularly relevant to what is at the core of this present study, the category “ethnicity”. Ethnicity refers to what goes on in public, not just what is in people’s private domains; thus, something like the writing down in the country’s Constitution of an ethnic group not only has a deep impact on the citizens’ understanding of the respective category, but it also serves to crystallize and legitimize certain representations. This paper argues that such process is most effective when it can rely on representations that have a long duration. In other words, the constitution of indigeneity as an element of the national culture depends on the effectiveness of the narratives that support it and on the persistence of those narratives through time.To speak of ethnicity with regard to the indigenous populations in Brazil is a shifting ground for, if on one hand we recognize 233 different ethnic groups (http://pib.socioambiental.org/pt/c/quadro-geral) in the national territory today, on the other, most policies treat ‘the Indian’ as a group. Even though Brazil as a nation-state did not set out to create collectivities, it did create actions which in turn produced ethnic groupness as a consequence, even if it was based on what came to be known as the ‘generic Indian’. Such process can be described as ‘ethnogenesis’. In Anthropology, the concept ‘ethnogenesis’ has been used to refer to the historical process through which human collectivities perceive themselves, and are perceived, as distinct cultural groups with distinct languages, in other words, when an ethnic group starts to perceive itself as differentiated. The process of ethnogenesis is ongoing (Barth 1969, Jenkins 1997), yet, certain historical conjunctures may draw on long duration elements, such as tradition or memory, whereby past interpretations are reframed in particularly powerful ways. Setting off from the premise laid out by the first of theorists on ethnicity, Max Weber, that ethnic differentiation is primarily political, this paper shall argue that a certain confluence of events, at key moments, may enhance difference and imbue it with relevant political overtones. The encounter between the indigenous peoples in Brazil and the missionaries may be perceived as such a moment, given the historical conjuncture of counter-reformation and imperialism; likewise, the new wave of Indigeneity that has been happening throughout Latin America could be interpreted as another one. Many anthropologists have written on the shift from class to culture (Harris 1995, Canessa 1998, De la Cadena 2005, Wade 2004) which occurred after the 70s with the Conference of Stockholm as its landmark, and how it paved the way to renewed processes of ethnogeneses across Latin America. This paper shall argue that such processes are most effective when they can rely on representations that have a long duration. In other words, the survival of the ‘generic Indian’ as an ethnic category in the national culture depends on the effectiveness of the narratives that support it and on the persistence of those narratives through time. An example of one such narrative is the “Anthropophagic Manifesto”, published in 1928, which became a symbol for the Modernist Movement The modernist movement is part of a period of Brazilian history when there was a coincidence of proposals in the cultural and political arenas, both concerned with the question of Brazilianness. In a true avant-garde fashion, Oswald de Andrade with the manifesto and Mario de Andrade with the novel Macunaima, the latter considered iconic for the content present in the former, created a parody of the hibridity ideology, based on theories of scholars such as Gilberto Freyre, who wrote Casa Grande e Senzala ( The Masters and the Slaves), published in 1933. Gilberto Freyre’s work stands now as the infamous attempt of veiling racism in Brazil by creating what would later be known as the “myth of the three races”, believed by some to be the founding stone of the Brazilian culture. that took place in Brazil in that decade. Its author, the poet Oswald de Andrade, was interested in the ritualistic content of the cannibal practice as narrated by some travelers to the New World whereby the killer can actually be empowered by his enemy’s substance. He explored the idea of cultural anthropophagy as a remedy for making such a diverse country a nation. The opening line suggests that the Brazilian people have to be anthropophagic in order to be one people, for only ‘cultural cannibalism’ could unite such different cultures. The author suggests that by cannibalizing Europe’s high culture, which represented the colonial force, and digesting it, the Brazilian subject could create something that enhanced the traits that were there to start with. Oswald de Andrade was drawing on representations which populated the national imagination, such as the autochthonous Brazilian who ate his enemy to assimilate the latter’s force. Montaigne had already transformed this ritual into poetics in his essay entitled “Of Cannibals” published in 1592. In 2004, the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro wrote an essay entitled “The Marble and the Myrtle”, where he interprets some representations, and in particular the adjective ‘inconstant’, of the indigenous peoples of Brazil by the missionaries at the time of colonization. The analogy with the myrtle comes from the description of those early travelers who described their pupils as complacent towards their teachings but quick to return to their natural state of being; the myrtle grows back disobediently as soon as the careless gardener neglects his topiary art. Unlike sculpting with marble, the myrtle grows out of shape again, to mirror and become the natural substance it is made of. In the model described by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro we have an assimilation that is only temporary, the receiver of culture gets pruned, and then recedes back to its natural state, or rather, becomes assimilated by nature. According to this author, the logic of the Tupinambás, was like the very essence of the myrtle parable, insofar that this indigenous people would interact through a continuous ‘becoming the other’, in an immanent relationship with alterity and openness to the other (Lévi-Strauss 1991,Viveiros de Castro 2003). What prompted this investigation was the question of how representations produced 500 years ago, referring to the Tupinambás, an ethnic group from the coast of Brazil long extinct, could still be present today in association with the generic Indian, which encompasses over 220 ethnic groups (http://www.socioambiental.org/). Four possible answers spring to mind: despite all epistemological transformations, the referential framework deployed today has similarities to that of the missionaries in the colonial encounter, therefore difference is interpreted in an analogous way; past representations still influence contemporary interpretations; past representations have such impact that the represented became and/or appropriated the representations; or, there must be some core similarities between the indigenous peoples that persisted despite all historical change. I shall take for granted that the first two propositions apply, for the western mode of knowing is far too ingrained to allow us to see beyond it without the referential constraints. This paper shall attempt to investigate the last two propositions while analysing the forces at work in shaping indigenous subjectivities. Drawing on the work by John and Jean Comaroff in South Africa on the formation of the Tswana ethnic category as a result of the encounter with missionaries in the nineteenth century, this analysis shall use, as analytical tools, concepts of culture, ideology, hegemony, representation and consciousness, to explore in which ways and why the colonial encounter between the native Indians in Brazil and the missionaries still echoes today. The second chapter of this present study shall present a selected theoretical background on ethnicity, against which the main points raised through the investigation will be set. The third chapter shall investigate the concept of ethnogenesis in the current political scenario, and in relation to the colonial encounter by analysing how representations from the past still influence current conceptions about the Indian. This chapter includes four subsections; the first two focus on representation, including an introduction to Indigenism and its relation to the lasting effect of the ‘generic Indian’. The next two subsections investigate the process of cultural exchange through oppositions such as form and content, acculturation and conversion. The last session of the third chapter will draw on historical anthropology in Goa as an attempt to determine differences in the early approach to conversion which may have affected the way Indians stand as subjects today. The fourth chapter shall attempt to make a parallel between ethnicity and class by using concepts such as ideology, hegemony and consciousness. The fifth chapter will explore possible connections between ethnicity and ontology. Finally, this paper shall conclude by addressing possible outcomes of this renewed wave of ethnogenesis. 2. Ethnicity in Itself Roy Wagner (1976) used the expression ‘inventing another culture’ for the process of objectifying and learning about another culture, an idea that seems to have paved the way for ‘inventing’ a tradition (Hobsbawn, 1983) and ‘imagining’ a community (Anderson, 1983) ten years later. Wagner adds that for an anthropologist to understand another culture he has to understand culture as a proposition, to enter the mode of ‘as if’ and proceed as if culture existed (Wagner, 1976:9). Wagner draws a parallel between the missionary and the anthropologist renaming the latter ‘culture missionary’, as one who believes in the culture he is inventing (ibid:7). The visibility of culture is only possible when one is placed in a situation where culture is no longer taken for granted. In Wagner’s words “culture is made visible by culture shock” (ibid). While establishing the missions or reductions the missionaries may have suffered a similar culture shock to that experienced by the fieldworker when first encountering the day by day difficulties of having to adjust to a new environment. I would like to suggest that something similar could be said on ethnicity: it is only in the encounter with the other that ethnicity becomes visible. The process of seeing another set of traits as a collectivity, triggers the process of classifying one’s own group. And still quoting Wagner, “Anthropology is brought into being by the invention of culture both in the general sense as a concept, and in the specific sense through the invention of particular cultures” (ibid:10). Such is the affinity between culture and ethnicity, for the phenomenon of the last few decades of inventing ethnicities has also brought new life to the discipline. This section shall delineate the scope of some terms which are fundamental for this analysis, starting with the category ethnicity. In the anthropological realm it has been common use to apply Max Weber’s and Fredrik Barth’s conception of ethnicity. The former describes it as a belief shared by its members which facilitates group formation (Weber, 1922). For Weber, it is “primarily the political community that inspires the belief in common ethnicity” (Weber 1922:385), customary rule will only apply as a principle for determining practices when the primary principle, interest, fails. As observed by Richard Jenkins (1997), Weber suggests that belonging together is a consequence of acting together. Alongside the idea that it is the political community that inspires the belief in common ethnicity (Weber 1922, Barth 1969, Alonso 1994), some authors refer to a gradual shift of the concept, alongside those of race and culture, and a historical evolution of ethnic labels (Wolf 1992, Wade 2004, De la Cadena 2005). In the case of the South American countries, the Spanish and Portuguese Contests was foundational to this discussion since the imperial forces brought the unified idea of the Indian. Although Barth observes that ethnogenesis is an ongoing process, he emphasizes that shared culture only occurs through a long-term process of maintaining the boundaries between groups. As Barth privileges the boundaries, the cultural content enclosed by it is not what defines the group, and he adds that common culture should be a result, not a definitional characteristic. The concern with de-essentializing the term by shifting the focus to what goes on between subject and object, and the dynamics of this relation with its unforeseen outcomes, suggests the idea that ethnicity is something that happens in particular situations when ethnic categories become relevant (Brubaker, 2004). Eric Wolf understands the notion of peoples as “social entities - ethnic groups or nationalities - who are conscious of themselves as owners of distinctive cultural traditions passed on along the lines of shared descent” (Wolf, 1994:1). The question posed by Wolf is related to what the concept of ethnicity allows us to think: concepts can take an essentialist turn by inferring endurance and inherence, but concepts can also be used as analytical tools to investigate the ins and outs of a given social phenomenon. In other words, one should be careful not to allow a concept, and here we are talking about the category ethnicity, to enter the domain of the taken-for-granted and thus become the object itself, rather than the lens through which we observe social interaction. This dilemma appears at the beginning of John Comaroff’s chapter “Of totemism and ethnicity” (1987), in the form of a Socratic parable Socrates gives two magnifying glasses to his students and asks them to look at one through the other. He then poses a question on what exactly is the object of analysis., thereby posing the question as to whether ethnicity should be an object of analysis or an explanatory principle that addresses fundamental differences in human condition. It has been suggested that ethnic categories constitute a chimera, being regarded as unsuitable for analysis (Alonso, 1994) since it lacks definable terms. Therefore, the approach in this paper will be to see it as a codifier for the relations at play. 3. Ethnogenesis The signifiers of the colonizing culture became unfixed” and were then “seized by the Africans” who in turn, refashioned them. This process caused the colonized to objectify their culture. The “natives”, that is, began to conceive of their own conventions as an integrated, closed “system” to which they could and did attach an abstract noun (setswana). The most curious feature of the process, however, is that, notwithstanding the rejection and transformation of many elements of “the” European worldview, its forms became authoritatively inscribed on the African landscape” (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1991:18). In the Comaroffs’ reading of Gramsci, culture is “the historically situated field of signifiers, at once material and symbolic, in which occur the dialectics of dominance and resistance, the making and breaking of consensus” (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1991:386). Now, a dialectic movement implies dynamism, and, if we see human culture as a dynamic system and as the result of hybridization processes, ethnogenesis is then seen as inherent to the human historical process. For the sake of synthesis, I chose as the working definition for this paper, Norman E. Whitten’s description of the phenomenon as “the public, historical emergence of culture” (Whitten, 1996:193). Ethnogenesis could also be seen as an analytical tool to critically assess the role of culture in situations of dominance and conflict, and how people creatively adapt to violent changes (Hill, 1996:1) thus acquiring a “historical consciousness of these struggles” (ibid:2). Hill takes a post-colonial approach to analyze the social and political emergence of previously colonized people, paying special attention to how relations of dominance and power play a significant part in the process (Hill 1996:1). Therefore, ethnogenesis necessarily implies the unfolding of new social configurations, which may refer to the resurgence of ethnic groups considered either extinct, acculturated or miscegenated and who claim specific rights (Hill 1996, Bilby 1996, Bartolomé 2006). It has also been observed that schisms may happen within an ethnic group in contexts where people have to struggle to gain control over resources (Hill 1996, Ferguson 1990), resulting in offshoots of a previously unified group. Ethnogenesis may occur as a result of resisting the dominant culture, as in the case illustrated by Hill of maroon societies, communities founded by escaped Afro-American salves, who having very distinct origins, had very little in common apart from the fact of being exploited (Bilby, 1996). It is clear that the scope of possible outcomes from the process is quite broad, ranging from the adoption of cultural traits to the production of new social and cultural configurations, which may come through exchange, symbioses or syncretism, to name a few. Given the current scenario of what has been seen as a new wave of ethnogenesis, further variations may yet be generated.  Jonathan Hill provides a counter-argument to the work of Urban and Sherzer, who wrote “Nation- States and Indians in Latin America” (1992). The critique posed by Hill is with regard to Urban and Sherzer’s suggestion of there being a continuum from Indian population to ethnic group, for if they are aware of the artificiality of the term Indian, why should they preserve the terms “as analytical concepts underpinning theoretical model?” (Hill,1996:9). I would argue that this critique could be applied in the case of academic work produced in Brazil which tends to criticize the use of the term Indian whilst often slipping into its generic form to present a case of similarities among distinct ethnic groups. It is as though the artificially created generic Indian has become greater than its creator. But why has the generic Indian persisted through time despite there being so many distinct ethnic groups?   3.1. Representing Others Representation is key for the analysis of colonization, insofar that to colonize involves, as noted by Jean and John Comaroff, “seizing and transforming others and assuming the capacity to represent them” (1991:15), both in the poetic and in the political sense. Poetics, in the anthropological sense, is related to poesis, term used by the Roman poet Horace (circa 20 BC) which derives from the Greek word “to make”, referring to the arts of painting and poetry, both related to mimesis or the imitation of nature. The native Amerindian was represented, poetically speaking, both in terms of image and words, standing as the object of a narrative that helped construct the category “Indian”. Perhaps the best examples of pictorial representation are found in the early maps of the sixteen hundreds by artists such as Lopo Homem, wherein the native appears either naked or dressed in feathers, sometimes cooking or hunting, but more often depicted in war, or in acts of cannibalism. Such images evoke the semantic and material politics of colonialism tied up as they are to the epistemological constraints of the time. At least ever since Edward Said wrote Orientalism, it has come to be commonly accepted that texts can create knowledge and that, over time, this knowledge produces a discourse (1978:94). Culture works through consent, and his argument goes that European culture produced the Orient “politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively” (ibid:3). It is easy to see how he opens himself to criticism, for what agency can there be left to the colonized? Yet, his argument that cultures get defined as they define the culture of others, does apply. I shall now move on to explore the dimensions of the discourse that has produced the ethnic category of the ‘generic Indian”, i.e., the Brazilian equivalent of Orientalism. 3.2. Indigenism “This field that I call Indigenism is the result of many overlapping factors that history has compounded in an extraordinary case of collective overdetermination” (Ramos, 1998:5) I would like to start this session by suggesting that the concept of Indigenism, as it got constructed historically in Brazil, follows an analogous orientation to the construction of Orientalism by the white European traveller. The protagonists of the first representations of the autochtonous population of Brazil were also travellers and missionaries. And likewise, those representations have been appropriated by the Indigenous populations with both political and cultural implications. In fact, politics and poetics are so intertwined in the construction of Indigenism that it becomes almost impossible to tell where one starts and the other finishes. It is not uncommon for anthropologists, and the lay public for that matter, to be baffled by the prominent place Brazilian native Indians occupy in the national imagination, considering they represent around 0.2 % of the national population (Ramos, 1998). Yet, one would only have to place the phenomenon in the context of a Nationalist narrative to fully appreciate what is at stake in the perpetuation of an autochthonous other. In an era where we take for granted that most categories are constructed, a concept such as autochthony bears more solidity than most, after all, the fact that some people were in Brazil before others hasn’t, as yet, been labelled as manufactured discourse. For the anthropologist Alcida Rita Ramos, the author of the most comprehensive research up to date on the matter, suggests that the country would be unthinkable without its constructed Indian, for they represent both the nation’s ancestor and its destiny. The indianist literary movement in the 19th century, to give one example among many, believed that the very essence of the nation was contained in this fictionalised Indian, clad as ethnic heroes with the attributes of warriors out of European novels. Ramos approaches her working definition of Indigenism to that of Souza Lima, for whom Indigenism is ‘a set of ideas (and ideals) concerning the incorporation of Indian peoples into nation-states’ (1991:239). But she goes beyond state incorporation to analyse the imagery present in the national consciousness. In an attempt to analyse the received ideas with regard to the Indian, Ramos critically assess some words/messages attributed to Indians: child, heathen, nomad, primitive and savage. She goes on to observe that anthropology is also semantically contaminated by such representations and plays a part in canonizing notions about the Indians. The fine line between poetics and politics is quite evident here as those legitimized assumptions influence the elaboration of policies. The Indian as child relates to Aristotle’s definition of child: “reason in a state of becoming” and the pre-conceived idea that the Indians needed protection because they were ill-equipped will guide the type of paternalistic policies based on tutelage present through most of the twentieth century. In fact it is worth noting that Marquis of Pomball abolished slavery of native Indians more than one hundred years before it was abolished for the African descendents. If the term Indian went through different phases with regards to its symbolic and poetic capital, in the 1970s it acquired a new, ideologically loaded, political connotation. The author expands the concept of Indian ideology to include representations produced by literature, missionaries, human rights activist, anthropologists, the media and the Indians themselves. Such a scope immediately draws the reader to the notion of Orientalism. But Ramos is quick to point out that, though the similarities are many, the two notions differ in an important way, for the Indian, the creation so to speak of Indigenism, lives in temporal and spatial contiguity with the creator. In other words, the Indians in Brazil participate in the construction of Indigenism, which makes the Indians also creators, and agents. This becomes quite apparent in the following account by the anthropologist Pacheco de Oliveira with regard to the Kiriri in Brazil who had to use identity cards, provided by the authority for indigenous matters, as proof that they were Indians. Following that every norm brings an equivalent appropriation of it, the Kiriri designated a person in the community to be in charge of ethnic identity issues using something similar to the existing list but with the difference that this particular list was under the control of the designated person in the community. By this system, it would not be enough to have an identity card and indigenous blood, for one would also need to have the right moral and political conduct and be in the list held by the cacique of the community, which would get updated after each indigenous council meeting. Ramos uses the concept of simulacrum from the philosopher Jean Baudrillard to talk about what she describes as the ‘hyperreal Indian’, a simulation of the real Indian, “a model that moulds the ‘Indians’ interests to the organization’s shapes and needs” (Ramos, 1998:275). The Indians thus have to conform to certain expectations, such as exoticism and integrity, in order to be considered authentic. Baudrillard applied the concept, which was originally used for a map that simulates a territory, to refer to the generation of a hyperreal, no longer connected to reality (Baudrillard, 1988). Alcida Rita Ramos wittingly adapted the adjective to the substantive Indian, for if the territory no longer precedes the map (the map now precedes the territory), the generic Indian precedes the real Indian, whatever he or she maybe. The “present-day simulators” as used by Baudrillard could very well be represented by all kinds of social actors who eagerly desire to match the real with the model. The distance between the concept and the real thing is unbreachable for, as Baudrillard remarks, the difference between them has disappeared: ”When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning” (ibid,1988:171). Adam Kuper perceives the hyperreal Indian as a type of activism’s backlash. This author claims that culture is now a euphemism for race, just as indigenous is for primitive. Kuper’s argument makes a parallel between indigenous claims and far right policies justifying his rejection of such claims by suggesting that most peoples in the world were once migrants, so why should any group be privileged over land claims? In brief, he warns us against the pitfall of essentialist ideology which, by generating ethnic grouping may create ethnic conflict. And worse, for anthropologists who shy away from the colonialist heritage, it may bring back to life the ‘primitive’ under the newly clad ‘indigenous’ (Kuper, 2003:395). Although his view could be seen as radical, it does serve as a warning against falling on to a monolithic vision of the indigenous peoples and thereby perpetuating the concept of Indigenism. Beth Conklin (1997) discusses the downside of what she describes as the commodification of Indian-related images and how its efficacy depends on the conformity to outsider’s expectations of Indianness. Those assumptions are based on two ideas: that Western technology is corrupting, therefore the ‘real Indian’ stays away from technology; and that cultural authenticity is evidenced by exotic body images. Politically, the environmentalist alliance has exacerbated the potential for this symbolic capital as ‘native ecology merges with two currents in the West: exoticism and primitivism’ (Conklin, 1997:713). It is ironic, she adds, that indigenous activism is grounded on the very essentialism anthropology tries to avoid. Could we tentatively suggest that Indigenism has become an ideology? 3.3. Content & Form Comaroff & Comaroff define hegemony as long-term ideology, or an ideology that succeeded in standing the test of time, while proposing that hegemony stands to ideology, as form to content (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1991:29). If we adopt this logic when looking at the argument presented by some authors that the indigenous peoples absorbed the content of the colonizer’s culture but in their own terms (Schaden 1969, Viveiros de Castro 2004, Fausto 2005), should we then conclude that they took on ideologies without renouncing their hegemonic models? Here we are reminded of Fredrik Barth’s definition of ethnicity as “organizational vessels that may be given varying amounts and forms of content in different socio-cultural systems” (Barth, 1969:14). This author suggests that the signs of ethnicity are arbitrary due to constant flux and change, and that the boundaries between the groups are more like relational attributes of categorization. In brief, ethnicity is like a static organizational vessel, the elements of which change according to conjunctural factors. That reflexion brings us to the opposition of form and content, with the former standing for ethnic boundary which is what defines the group, rather than its cultural content. Contrary to the case of the indigenous peoples in Brazil, the Comaroffs suggested that, among the Tswana, a process of ethnogenesis took place whereby the content of the missionary doctrine was rejected but the form appropriated the ideology of rational empiricism. These authors also understand consciousness as content not form; and as knowledge, not modes of knowing (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1991). We could perhaps conclude that the Comaroffs associate form with modes of knowing and hegemony. But if we are to take form and content to its limits in analytical terms, it maybe perhaps useful to first address some critiques. Joel Robbins looks at the Comaroffs’ distinction of form and content in the following extract “colonized people like the Southern Tswana frequently reject the message of the colonizers, and yet are powerfully affected by its media” (1991, 311). In this extract, media would stand for form, and the message for content. Robbins claims that such a distinction is impossible since in culture, forms are part of the content (Robbins, 2007). Lévi-Strauss had also rejected the separation between the two in his analysis of Propp’s work (1977), though his reasoning followed a somehow different route. He made a distinction between Formalism and Structuralism, suggesting that in the former form and content, or the abstract and the concrete, must be separate. It would not be the case with Structuralism, where such opposition would not exist, for content draws from structure, and form is structural formation. In any case, the suggestion of form being constitutive of content, as in Robbin’s claim, is not antagonistic to Barth’s view of ethnicity as organizational vessels. If we take the ethnographic work of Laura Rival in the Ecuadorian Amazon (1996), for example, about the impact of educational programs on local communities and on how Western notions of childhood can bring unforeseen changes to family structure and everyday life, is evident how form and content are intertwined. Unsurprisingly, this author starts her paper with a quote by Pierre Bourdieu: “By its very functioning, the school modifies the content and spirit of the culture which it transmits” (cf. Rival 1997). To summon up, it seems that content and form cannot be seen as separate aspects in the interethnic encounter. We shall now go on to observe the role they play in a few cases of attempted conversion of colonized others. 3.2. Conversion, Acculturation & Resistance Religion has served as a cornerstone in the construction of ethnic identities through the common borrowing of symbols of ritual power as has been remarked by a few authors (Nash 1979, Taussig 1980, Hill 1996, Harris 2006). Such claims corroborate the idea that ritual and myth are not only dynamic phenomena, but also protagonists in the process of cultural identity construction. It is almost impossible to talk about ethnogenesis in the colonial context without referring to practices of conversion and the attempt to ‘harness slippery souls’ (Ramos, 1998:26). The colonial encounter in Brazil in the 1500s encompassed an interethnic contact situation that has been interpreted by different authors as either a process of acculturation, or as one of resistance. Or even as both acculturation and resistance, if we accept the premise of exchange as the fundamental value in indigenous sociality based on relational affinity rather than substantial identity (Viveiros de Castro, 1993). The use of the adjective “inconstant” by missionaries when referring to the difficulties of converting the indigenous peoples to Christianity, noted earlier in this paper, has served to support the hypothesis that the autochthonous population resisted conversion. The fact that, according to the Jesuits, the ‘heathen’ had no religion, may well have contributed towards policies in the colony which differentiated from the ones applied in Goa, for example, another colony of the Portuguese Empire. The relevancy of looking at conversion in Goa, in India, springs from some historical coincidences which invite comparisons. Yet, it must be remarked that the process of conversion, produced distinct outcomes in these two colonial enterprises, despite the similarity of personalities and institutions, and, more strikingly, despite having the same main stakeholder, namely Portugal. Missionaries may have different responses to local traditions and to specific situations as evident in Rowena Robinson’s account on the colonial encounter between Hindus and Christians in Goa (2001; 1998). She observes that the missionaries there were tolerant towards the caste system for example, as they were under a highly hierarchical model themselves, an example of elective affinity. In addition, when mass conversions occurred caste differences were maintained. Conversions were sometimes pursued to achieve social or economic mobility or to escape oppression (Robinson, 2001:222). Talal Asad (1973) calls attention to two prevailing images concerning the relationship between rulers and ruled, one of them, associated with the functionalist anthropologist, focuses on the body politic as an integrated system; while the other, associated with the Islamic Orientalist, emphasizes force and submission. Having different frameworks, these models see different behavior; nevertheless, they converge inasmuch as both objectify a certain image. In a study entitled “The flight of the deities”, Paul Axelrod and Michelle Fuerch reject Orientalist stereotypes of subordination in their account of how Hindus in Goa protected their main religious symbols by transporting their deities to neighboring Hindu and Muslim states as a form of resistance. In the essay “The Discovery of the true savage” (1994), Mashall Sahlins makes a point about the need to understand people’s cultural constructions of events and the dialectics between present and past; whether an anthropology is being “colonizing” or “decolonizing” depends on time and conjuncture (Sahlins, 1994:354). The idea that the ideological follows a dialectic logic of the negative being set against the positive within the context of the dominated in opposition to the dominant, creates an ambiguous background against which ideological representations may be sensed as positive in some instances and negative in other moments (Santos, 1992). Olivia Harris’s ethnography on conversion to Christianity in Highland Bolivia illustrates this point. As she investigates whether devil worship is part of Christianity or antithetical to it she concludes that ambiguity, being constitutive to that particular mode of knowing, is inherent to Christian identity in Potosi. She also suggests that since conversion to Christianity demands a denial of past beliefs, conversion implies discontinuity with the past, which, in turn, produces an attitude which is less polarized and more associated with “both/and” than with “not either/nor” (Harris, 2006:63). June Nash arrived to a similar conclusion in her fieldwork in Bolivia while researching the contradiction lived by the miners who were both dependent on it and exploited through it. She concluded that contradiction is part of their belief system and therefore cultural. The miners’ worldview accommodates a dualism in which the upper and lower worlds correspond respectively to the Christian and pre-conquest spirits, which are in harmony and coexist alongside each other The two beliefs are not syncretised but rather, compartmentalized (Nash, 1979:7). In an attempt to investigate the level of acculturation among the Brazilian Indigenous population, Egon Schaden (1969) looked at the process of conversion among the Indigenous population in Southern Brazil and Paraguay. He observed that the majority of a Mbya sub tribe in the Guaira region in Paraguay present, in their religious-mystic system, many similarities to Christianity, partly transmitted through the priests from the Jesuit Mission and partly as a result of recent catholic and protestant influences, constituting two distinct phases of acculturation. The procedure Schaden used was that of analyzing the post-Jesuit system, then verifying what the common points with Christianity were, to then try and find correspondences in the religious system of other Tupi-Guarani populations. Curt Nimuendaju Born in Germany in 1883, Curt Nimuendaju travelled to São Paulo state in Brazil where He lived among the Guarani (Apapocúva). At the time there were two currents of thought in relation to policies towards the Indians, one of them supported the extermination of the indienous population while the other, with its origins in positivism, came to create the Serviço de Proteção ao Índio (Service for the Protection of the Indian) which Nimuendaju joined in 1922. He followed the migrations to the Terra sem Mal (Land without evil) and was adopted and renamed by the Apapocúva-Guarani. He later travelled throughout Brazil becoming the greatest specialist in indigenous matters of the first half of the twentieth century. His monographs on some tribes of the Jê served as source for both Lévi-Strauss and Lowie. He was self-taught and was ethically, politically and epistemologically committed to the Indians. He lived in Brazil from 1905 till his death in a Tikuna community in Alto Solimões, in1945., one of the biggest references in terms of early ethnographic work on the Indigenous populations in Brazil, had already observed the presence of the cross, the practice of christening, the coffin for the dead and the representation of the local heroes through imagery among the Apapocúva (1914-p.380). Yet, Schaden concludes that though the Guarani religion was greatly influenced by Christian thinking, the content of the latter was assimilated in such a way as not to obliterate, but to enhance certain core values of the native doctrine (Schaden, 1969). As for the Guarani’s cataclismology and imminent destruction of the earth “ The land without evil” (1995) is a leitmotif in Guarani cosmology and has been comprehensively studied mainly by Sérgio Buarque de Hollanda (1959), Héléne Clastres and Pierre Clastres (1974) ., Schaden rejects the suggestion of an importation of content, even if that does seem likely. Héléne Clastres also raised the question of whether the religious framework found among the Guarani was an example of syncretism or original purity. She suggests two theoretical presuppositions: that Indian religious thought allows the penetration of foreign elements; or that religious discourse could remain immutable while society changes (Clastres, 1995:6). She also observes that, ever since Curt Nimeundaju, every ethnographer has underlined the importance of religious life among the Tupi-guarani. How can this observation be reconciled with the early chronicles that point to the absence of religious thought among these peoples? The answer could be that indigenous conceptions of acculturation is more associated to assimilating corporal practices, such as clothing and diet, than spiritual ones, such as language and religion; to become white would be to take on the white man’s body (Viveiros de Castro, 1996:139). A well known critique of the Comaroffs comes from Joel Robbins who claims they sideline Christianity in their reading of the conversion of the Setswana, perhaps influenced by an anthropological culture of emphasizing difference and, at a theoretical level, cultural continuity rather than change. This author finds this a problematic trend since many types of Christianity stress change, or the necessity of a denial of the past (see Olivia Harris, 2006) and anthropologists are often suspicious of any real change. He blames this discredit from the part of anthropologists on mismatching conceptions of time and belief, which lead them to perceive differently from their Christian subjects. However, I would argue that an inverse problem may also arise, considering many anthropologists have had a Judeo-Christian upbringing, they may fall prey to interpret phenomena from a very limited framework. One such example would be Taussig’s reading of the cult of Supay among Bolivian miners, which, due to the above mentioned constraints, led him to associate it with the Christian devil. In brief, I would argue that although anthropologists may be drawn to continuity as Robbins suggest, it is also evident from the cases presented that changes in post-colonial contexts are often accompanied by some underlying continuities, due to an inherent attachment to the past whilst having to adapt to dominant forces. I hope these accounts of attempted conversion in places as far apart as India and Brazil have demonstrated that the threshold between conversion and resistance is not so well defined, one can convert and resist. There are many meanings and interests at stake and the conjunction ‘and’ plays a big part in colonial, as well as post-colonial, contexts. 4. Ethnicity for Itself ‘The pure nomad is the poor nomad ... mobility and property are in contradiction.’ (Sahlins, 1972:106). The distinction between “class-in-itself” and “class-for-itself”, as used in Marxist analyses, relies both on the relational aspect, and consciousness. At this point, I wish to draw a parallel to Edward. P. Thompson who does not see ‘class as a “structure”, nor even as a “category”, but as something which in fact happens in human relationships’ (Thompson, 1963:9), and to, tentatively, extend this definition to ethnicity, as something that happens in human relationships, entailing historical relationships. There are clearly distinctions; for example, ethnicity is a more horizontal structure while class is more vertical. But the point of the analogy I would like to focus on is the ‘for itself’, the complement of the term which implies awareness, and thus propose the use of ‘ethnicity-for-itself’ to explore concepts such as consciousness and ideology. Pacheco de Oliveira explains the process of ethnogenesis that goes on the northeast of Brazil as a strategy to compensate for the previous colonizing flux which resulted in the incorporation of the indigenous population. Similar phenomena are not so apparent in the Amazonian region given its particular environmental and geopolitical dimension. Ethnogenesis in the context of the northeast involves the emergence of new identities as well as the reinvention of ethnic groups already recognized as such (Pacheco de Oliveira, 1996). However, Pacheco de Oliveira is careful about the use of the term ethnogenesis for fear it may substantify a process that is actually historical. He also highlights that it is a historical fact that installs a new relationship between society and territory. The process of territorialization which has historically happened within the model of tutelage in Brazil, imposed institutions and beliefs which became characteristic of a particular indigenous life style associated with the reservations. He agrees with Barth that boundaries between ethnic groups are constructed by the members of the group and according to the situation, but questions Weber’s and Barth’s claim that ethnic groupness is primarily political. The Kiriri studied by Oliveira, imagine themselves as a religious unit, an aspect which enhances the unification of the community and maintains the internal basis for the exercise of power. 4.1. Class & Ethnicity In the preface to the book “Identidade, Etnia e Estrutura Social” (1976), the Brazilian anthropologist Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira called attention to interethnic friction as the logical equivalent to class struggle in the Marxist vocabulary, in an attempt to bring the notion of dialectics to the analysis of ethnicity. This author stated his concern about the need for a discussion on issues of representation and ideology within the studies of interethnic relations, and the necessity of looking at the superstructure following the trend of authors such as Althusser. Cardoso de Oliveira suggested that interethnic friction should be understood as the logical, not ontological, equivalent of the class struggle. In fact, his intention was to draw a relationship between social class and ethnicity, adding that they are irreducible to each other, that they interpenetrate each other, even if submitted to different processes of social articulation. Ethnicity as a category, or class for that matter, could become invisible to the eye at times, while at other times it could be activated given a specific context. The same author classifies three types of contact situations or interethnic systems: a) ethnic units are symmetrically related, as seen in High Xingu; b) ethnic units are juxtaposed in an asymmetrical and hierarchical relation, as seen in pre-conquest Chaco, or with the Terêna in the 70s, in the South of Mato Grosso; c) marked by interethnic friction: ethnic units are in contradiction with each other and happen within the context of class structure, as seen in the contact between Indians and white people (1976:49). The overlapping and interplay between class and ethnicity is further observed in the distinction between rural and urban populations where class struggles are apparent: in rural Brazil, indigenous peoples tend to be identified with peasants or farm workers, while in urban areas they are identified with manual labour workers. But that does not imply that, as an ethnic group, there is a perception of the group as class or class consciousness for that matter. Cardoso de Oliveira also observes that in situations of interethnic friction the Indians, whether they are peasant-Indians, proletarian-Indians or urban-Indians, are, above all, Indians, holders of a diverse ethnicity which opposes them to the peasants, proletarian or urban non-Indians (ibid:60). For this author, “ethnicity is a classifier which operates within the interethnic system at the level of ideology, as the product of polarized collective representations, by social groups in latent or manifest opposition” (Cardoso de Oliveira, 1976: xviii), a definition which overlaps with ethnicity as an “organizational type”, already suggested by Barth (1969) but with the added concept of ideology. Just as the white man represents the Indian based on stereotypical assumptions, the reverse is true. In her essay entitled “A Domesticação das Mercadorias” (2000) Catherine Howard suggests that the Waiwai found in reciprocal exchange a way to ‘pacify the white man’, since by ‘pacifying the goods’, they would also be pacifying who produces them. The author analyzes the equivalence between the ownership of material objects and the level of indigenous purity by the white people and concludes that ethnic identity becomes reduced to a sub product of capitalism. And indeed, the capitalist system penetrated Indian society since the time of the Jesuits. However, Howard demonstrates how the Waiwai adapted and subverted the model to make it adjust to their own needs; in her words “the symbolic capital of the colonizer gets deconstructed and reconstructed according to the indigenous society” (Howard, 2000: 29, my translation); white people’s economic practices get incorporated according to indigenous logic. 4.2. Representing Oneself But how do indigenous peoples think of themselves? Do they see themselves as Indians or as belonging to a particular ethnic group? João Pacheco de Oliveira (1998) observes that in the 50s the list of indigenous peoples in the northeast included 10 ethnic groups. Forty years later in 1994, the figure went up to 23.The following ethnographic accounts should reveal something about self and group representation. Cardoso de Oliveira observed the following case in the 70s: an area, belonging to the Brazilian territory, in the region of Chaco on the western banks of the Paraguay river, went through intense and secular colonization and is described by the author as ‘area of intertribal acculturation’ (Cardoso de Oliveira, 1976:10). A koixomunetí (doctor-shaman) from a Terêna community called Cachoeirinha, is an indigenous man whose father is Layâna ( a Guaná subgroup) and the mother is Terêna (also a Guaná subgroup). Despite the fact that affiliation follows a patrilineal pattern, he uses his Layâna identity when in the role of koixomunetí, seeing that the biggest and most prestigious koixomunetí claims a Layâna ethnic background. The Layâna words are used to impress the Terêna people. Yet, he often invokes his Terêna identity, which he claims as a birth right seeing that his mother is Terêna, for he intends to become a ‘captain’ in his community. Florêncio Almeida Vaz, an anthropologist of indigenous origin, presented his work entitled “A Pajelança e a Emergência Étnica Indígena no Baixo Amazonas” at the National Anthropology Congress in Brazil in 2008 (26a Reuniao Brasileira de Antropologia). In it, he describes how Amazonian shamanism plays a key role in the process of ethnic emergence. Caboclo is the term used to refer to those who have a mix heritage of Indian and white origin. Pajelança is a shamanic cult with caboclo origins. The movement started in the late 80s and today 12 different Tapajó communities, which sum around seven thousand people, take part in it. Vaz started researching the cult years before, and at that time, he interviewed the oldest pajé in the community. In 1988, date that coincides with the launching of the new Constitution, the community of Taquara had a meeting and decided they would claim their indigenous origin. After the elder’s death, his children took on his role and looked for the researcher in an attempt to retrieve previous recordings and some of the principles of pajelança that had been lost or forgotten during the time when being a caboclo did not represent cultural capital and they would rather be seen as a catholic community. Now, pajelança rituals can go public, and the researcher started to study the process of “becoming Indian”. According to Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira (1976), the possibilities of emergence of ethnic identification cannot be exhausted since the set of modes for identification is in the order of discourse, and particularly of an ideological discourse, and this set could only reach a limitation if the interethnic system came to an end. “Contact culture” can be more than a system of values since it refers to a group of representations, including values, which is produced by an ethnic group facing a contact situation where it classifies itself and others (ibid:23). Bearing in mind that ethnic categories are elements of an ideological system, they are loaded with values, and values are empirical facts, ‘points of view of the agents themselves’. 4.3. Ethnic Consciousness The afore mentioned shift from race to ethnicity from the 60s onwards served a political purpose of allowing people to reclaim a decolonized heritage and, consequently, decolonize the taste. Not only ethnicity allowed more flexibility and more room for agency, but it can also be seen as class relation (Harris, 1995), therefore permitting analytical overlaps. In this new context, being Indian becomes more valuable as symbolic capital than previous affiliations. Identitary processes have to be understood, taking up Weber’s understanding of ethnicity, as political action, within the parameters laid out by the nation-state, but without ignoring the presence of international entities as powerful stake-holders, themselves affecting the relationship between the ethnic group and the nation-state. What I find particularly relevant to the argument this paper is raising, concerns the Comaroffs' reading of the process of consciousness:   Between the consciousness and the unconsciousness lies the most crucial domain of all for historical anthropology and especially for the analysis of colonialism and resistance. It is the realm of partial recognition, of inchoate awareness, of ambiguous perception, and, sometimes, of creative tension: that liminal space of human experience in which people discern acts and facts but cannot or do not order them into narrative descriptions or even into articulate conceptions of the world; in which signs and events are observed but in a hazy, translucent light. It is from this realm, we suggest, that silent signifiers and unmarked practices may rise to the level of explicit consciousness, of ideological assertion, and become the subject of overt political and social contestation-or from which they may recede into the hegemonic, to languish there unremarked for the time being. (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1991:29) The Comaroffs then go on to suggest that it is from this liminal space that the organic intellectual will rise and, with him, the poetics of history. If hegemony is inscribed in the long duration forms laying the ground for relations of power and domination, it must be remembered that it is also a product of the dialectic “whereby the content of dominant ideologies is distilled into the shared forms that seem to have such historical longevity as to be above history” (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1991:30). I would like to now turn to a possible way of interpreting those ‘shared forms’. 5. Ontology & Ethnicity This paper has already suggested that the categories culture and ethnicity, and class and ethnicity, have overlapping characteristics; this present section shall explore possible associations between ethnicity and ontology, drawing its motivation on the debate recently held which opened with the motion ‘Ontology is just another word for culture’ (2008, University of Manchester). I noted at the beginning of this paper that the new turn in the discipline known as Anthropology of Ontology could serve to rekindle the process of ethnogenesis which had already been spawned as politically motivated action. I would also tentatively argue that this trend could serve to nurture the poetics of ethnic consciousness, as it endeavors to conceptualize other ways of being in the world. It has been suggested that, from a cognitive approach, ethnicity is not a thing in the world, but a perspective on the world (Brubaker, 2004:65), or even “modes of knowing” (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1991). When we think of the colonial encounter, we think of it as the meeting of two, or more, cultures, paradigms or “varieties of the phenomenon of man” (Wagner, 1976). We could also think of it as the encounter between two, or more, ontologies, bearing in mind that ontology should not be seen as a system of beliefs, but rather as a conceptual background or analytical tool (Viveiros de Castro, 1996). The introduction to the debate makes reference to a statement by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro suggesting that the cardinal value guiding anthropology is “to create the conceptual, I mean ontological, self determination of people[s]” (2003: 4; 18). The starting point of the discussion is that culture is not synonymous of ontology, for culture is associated with representation; there is only one reality but many worldviews, or cultures. As for ontology, it refers to multiple realities. Having established this important distinction, the discussion moved on to address the issue that opened the debate, i.e., what the purpose of anthropology is. Henare, Holbraad and Wastell (2006) suggested it to be the generation of concepts. I feel inclined to reject this claim on the grounds that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarry had already claimed in 1994, that the object of philosophy was to create concepts. Henare et al also suggest that a study of multiple realities or ontologies can generate new concepts that go beyond those that come from ‘our’ ontology. I would argue that a better way of phrasing the same idea would be to ‘translate concepts that go beyond our ontology’, since those concepts are already there, anthropology does not generate them. Traditionally, the anthropologist translates concepts and worldviews: ‘a science of the other, as Certeau says, begins just as the character of another society “resists occidental specifications”’ (Sahlins, 1994:362). 6. Conclusion I would like to start this conclusion by addressing likely criticisms to the way this paper has used both historical and contemporary anthropology. My justification to that choice is based on my commitment to historical materialism as the only possible way to understand current political scenarios and relations between hegemonic and subaltern forces. I also have a concern about the anachronistic aspect of the ethnographic examples I chose to make my point. João Pacheco de Oliveira (1998) notes that ethnographers who wrote extensively on the Indians in the first half of the twentieth century, such as Robert Lowie (1946), Alfred Métraux (1946) and Curt Nimuendaju, used as the main source material the accounts from travelers and missionaries from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or naturalists from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which means that many of these peoples are described according to the way they were portrayed in the past. Should I be accused of using a similar approach, as when I use material collected in the sixties to refer to the new momentum of ethnogenesis, I would reply by emphasizing the ongoing aspect of ethnogenesis masterly described by Barth (1969). This study started by wondering why representations about the Indian which originated in the colonial encounter, are still current today. I progressed by then investigating ethnicity as a category to form a solid base onto which I could look at examples of ethnic encounters in an attempt to assess what is at stake in the formation of ethnic groupness. The analysis has concluded that ethnicity starts as a category, something external, a logic grounded on cognitive devices and, once it comes to constitute a group, it gradually becomes internalized (Brubaker, 2004) at the individual level. Ethnicity also relates to shared practices of classification and categorization of both self and others, which may be applied to race and nation as well, perceived as differentiated but integrated domains (Barth 1969, Cardoso de Oliveira 1976, Wade 1993, Pacheco de Oliveira 1998). An ethnic group can be seen as an organizational mode through which the collectivity makes use of cultural differences to produce its singularity in relation to a differentiated other with whom the former is interacting on a regular basis (Barth 1969, Oliveira 1996). Implicit in this reading is the realization that ethnic groups cannot be imagined in isolation, in other words, it can only be envisioned by placing it alongside a boundary, the construction of which is ongoing and according to the given conjuncture of the time. But the debate arises between those who see ethnicity as a result of an instrumental adaptation to changing economic and political circumstances and those who see it as rooted in sentiments. Or, intrumentalists and the primordialists (Pacheco de Oliveira, 1998) to refer to the two strands present in studies on ethnicity. The former explain ethnicity through the political processes which have to be analyzed contextually (Weber 1922, Barth 1969, Cohen 1969), whilst the latter associate the category to primordial loyalties. My position coincides with that of Pacheco de Oliveira who suggests going beyond this opposition since both stances make use of constitutive dimensions essential for a reflection on ethnicity. In other words, ethnicity shapes social and material life and it is shaped by the surrounding environment, or habitus. Environment plays a part as it produces different patterns of life even among those with similar values and ideas as seen by Barth when he observed the many variations among the Pathans (1969). Habitus as “a matrix of perceptions, appreciations and actions” (Bourdieu, 1977: 83) does not determine actions but provides a framework and logic. I believe the work produced by the Anthropology of Ontology can shed some light on the matter concerning the influence of habitus on the modes of being in the world, which in turn have implications for ethnicity. The fact that the ontology of peoples from very different places display similarities (see Nadaski 2007) seem to indicate that other factors are at play, such as for example, being a hunter-gatherer, an economic relationship to nature which constitutive of their habitus. The colonial presence spawned a new relationship between land and society. For Oliveira, territoriality is key in the process of social reorganization, which in turn, implies, among other things, the establishment of a differentiating ethnic identity (1996). It is clear that many factors are at play in the constitution of an ethnic group. There remains the question if culture should be considered secondary in the understanding of ethnicity, or if it should be seen as primordial, leaving material processes as a secondary force. One could speculate that, taken the role of “agency” and “self-recognition” in today’s use of the ethnic category, culture could become more instrumental in the pursuit of power and interest. In other words, ethnicity, and culture for that matter, appears to be distancing itself from the essentialist pole, faring towards a more materially and historically constructed version with groups reshaping cultural schemas, appropriating representations to suit their mobilization efforts, and, in the process, generating unforeseen outcomes. History is for Sahlins, organised by structures of significance (1981), and the structure of the conjuncture, is affected by those structures of significance. Depending on the relationships that spawn from the conjuncture, categories may be redefined, and the set of relationships that characterised the structure in the first place, is thus transformed causing relationships to acquire new functional content, as in the example of the Hawaiian chief who used power of tabu to accumulate property (Sahlins, 1981). For that reason, Sahlins maintains that meanings are at risk in action, as seen in the case in Southern Tswana described by the Comaroffs where the water wells constructed by the missionaries threatened the spiritual bases of chiefly legitimacy (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1991). The social actor can use culture to his benefit as an instrument of self-agency, and it seems, from the ethnographic examples presented, that ethnic consciousness involves being aware of the constructive nature of the habitus. 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