The Quest for Visibility and Legibility: Quantifying the Indigenous Population in Brazil in the Late Twentieth Century

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ABSTRACT Recent decades have witnessed a major increase in demographic data uptake on Indigenous populations in official statistics of Latin American countries. Perhaps the most striking modification in the racial categories utilized in Brazilian national censuses in recent decades was the inclusion of the Indigenous category in the 1991 census. We situate the inclusion of Indigenous peoples in the Brazilian national census in the second half of the twentieth century as part of a broader historical, social, and political process. From our perspective, this is complemented by considering initiatives related to the quantification of Indigenous peoples led by non-governmental organizations that took place in the 1970s and 1980s, preceding the inclusion of the Indigenous category in official statistics in the 1990s. Furthermore, we explore the centrality of issues related to visibility and forms of legibility of Indigenous peoples’ sociocultural configurations, as well as how they were represented through demographic quantification.