Intercultural frontiers in Iberoamerica: the example of indigenous peoples in Brazil

Abstract

From  the arrival  of  Europeans  to  America  to  the  present  times,  Ibero-American identity is presented as the result of multisecular and successive migrations of men, plants and animals  between  the  Old  and  the  New  World,  creating  and  destroying  identity  boundaries between  the  "civilized"  and  the  "savage".  The  borders  convey  a  reciprocal  learning  about interethnic  confluences  and  oppositions,  operated  in  an  extreme  field  of  inequality  between European and Amerindian-dominated dominants. This event, of a planetary dimension, is seen from the cultural boundaries between the indigenous and western magic universe, resulting in a  process  of  annihilation,  resilience  and  adaptation  of  ibero-American  pluriethnic  and multidimensional identity, which takes, by central reference, the indigenous peoples –historical and current –of the Brazilian nation.