The Ends of Man: Biopolitics, Negative Anthropology, and Amazonian Uncontacted Tribes

• In Event: Formas de vida: animalidad y biopolítica 1

Abstract

This paper juxtaposes work by Canguilhem, Foucault, and Freud with analysis of discourses on so-called "uncontacted tribes" in the Amazon with two objectives. Since a radical change in policy in the late 1980s, Brazil now aims to secure the lives of members of "uncontacted tribes" by demarcating indigenous reserves on their behalf. So, first, the paper will analyze the paradoxical mode of biopolitics that fosters the life of an unknowable population. Second, this paper offers a genealogy of Brazil’s radical change of policy on uncontacted tribes by arguing that it relies on three discursive supports: the coincidence between Norman Lewis’s “Genocide” (1969), a journalistic exposé of continuing exterminations of Brazil’s Indians, and Foucault’s and Derrida’s (1966, 1968) philosophical speculations on the “end(s) of man” and its Eurocentric humanism; the resurgence of neo-Malthusianism in advanced industrial economies in the early 1970s; the emergence of pan-indigenous “Fourth World” politics in reaction to disappointments with third world nationalism c. 1974. Ultimately, I argue, although the politics of “uncontacted tribes” could serve as an occasion to develop a decisively negative anthropological perspective—based on an apophatic disavowal of knowledge of the human—political discourse instead rushes to fill the empty space of absconding presence with the contemporary conventional attributes of humanness.

Author

• Jimmy Casas Klausen, Instituto de Relações Internacionais, PUC-Rio