Aqui e agora: a Pátria Grande de Darcy Ribeiro, indigenista

Abstract

This essay analyzes the Latin Americanist discourse of the anthropologist, educator, politician, and novelist Darcy Ribeiro. Unlike other proponents of the so-called “Pátria Grande,” and due in part to his many years of experience as an ethnographer, Ribeiro assigned a distinctive role to indigenous peoples in his conceptualization of a “Federation of Latin American Meridian States”. As an indigenist, he came to consider American societies from a perspective that did not find in colonialist modernity the only, or the most legitimate “regime of truth” for formulating a theory of history or constructing a better future. This character of Riberian thought – simultaneously macro and micro, exterior and interior, foreign and indigenous – and the dialectical relationship between these various ways of conceptualizing social difference, distinguish Ribeiro’s Latin American imaginary within the genealogy of “patriagrandismo” in the Bolivarian tradition.