Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on a tradition of engagement of the Brazilian anthropology: mainly in support of the indigenous people and afro-descendants. Such an analysis can offer useful contributions to the European anthropologists who must face one of the most burning issue of our times: the "migration crisis"

Paper long abstract:

The Brazilian anthropology, although born thanks to the influence of some of the most relevant European anthropologists (e.g. Lévi-Strauss and Bastide in the 1930s.), has developed during the times a more propensity to the engagement within the public sphere: both inside the institutions for influencing the national politics in relation to the rights of the indigenous and afro-descendants communities and also, from outside, for putting pressure on the government.

Today the Brazilian anthropologists are involved in anthropological surveys, for the national indigenist body, on indigenous territorial claims. In many occasions the Brazilian Anthropology Association has adopted an official position against legislative proposals aimed to restrict the processes of demarcation of the indigenous reserves.

The Brazilian anthropologists, reflecting about their public position as intellectuals and about the heritage of the dynamics of power typical of the colonial period, have decided to assume a political position to defend the disempowered communities, traditionally objects of their studies. We have to taking also in account the connection with other Latin American anthropological traditions: the "internal colonialism" theory of Stavenhagen in Mexico or the Barbados Declaration of 1971 (in which a group of Latin American Anthropologists declared that the researches on the indigenous peoples could be realized only with a strategic alliance with the Indians). All these theoretical and political reflections more diffused in the Brazilian anthropology than in the European one, can offer useful contributions to the European anthropologists who must face one of the most burning issue of our times: the "migration crisis".