Abstract
ABSTRACT: An early 20th century photograph in the collections of Museo do índio in Rio de Janeiro shows Paresí children in Mato Grosso exercising “Swedish gymnastics”. The program for physical education codified by Swedish educator Pehr Henrik Ling was practiced in the schools of several SPI indigenous stations in the period, as part of the state indigenist project of “nationalizing” the indigenous populations. With the photo as a starting-point, this article explores the relation between a positivist nation-building project in Brazilian indigenism, and Ling gymnastics as a project directed towards the population and the nation. Applying Mary Louise Pratt’s concepts of colonial contact zone and strategies of “anti-conquest”, as well as Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima’s analysis of state indigenism as a continuation of the war of conquest with other means, I argue that Ling gymnastics resonated particularly well with positivist indigenism. Perceived of as a method of physical education not tainted by chauvinistic militarism, it could find its place in a colonial nation-building project resting on denial of its own inherent violence.
Highlights
Doing research at the library of the Museo do Índio in Rio de Janeiro a few years ago, I was intrigued by a sun-bleached photograph hanging on the wall
With the photo as a starting-point, this article explores the relation between a positivist nation-building project in Brazilian indigenism, and Ling gymnastics as a project directed towards the population and the nation
Applying Mary Louise Pratt’s concepts of colonial contact zone and strategies of “anticonquest”, as well as Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima’s analysis of state indigenism as a continuation of the war of conquest with other means, I argue that Ling gymnastics resonated well with positivist indigenism
Summary
Doing research at the library of the Museo do Índio in Rio de Janeiro a few years ago, I was intrigued by a sun-bleached photograph hanging on the wall. The purpose of the indigenist agency was double and, arguably, self-contradictory; on the one hand to protect indigenous peoples who were under the pressure of intensified colonisation, on the other to contribute to the population of the hinterlands. To this purpose, as Lima has shown, the indigenous peoples would, through the practices of contact and pacification, be transformed from índios into “national workers”. It was a grand enterprise, and somewhere in this enterprise little indigenous children were taught to wear shoes and clothes, to know the Brazilian map and sing its patriotic hymns Is there something in the specific technique of body discipline that was codified in Pehr Henrik Ling’s programme that resonates with the colonial efforts of nationalizing the índio at the Brazilian frontier of colonial expansion? And if so, what?
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