Sandra Benites

Born in the Porto Lindo Indigenous Territory in the municipality of Japorã, in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, in 1975, Sandra Benites is a Guarani activist, researcher, and mother. She works as an anthropologist, art curator, and educator. She has stood out for her militancy in defense of the rights of Indigenous peoples, especially in the demarcation of Indigenous territories and Guarani education. Her reflections emerge from her experiences with ‘Guarani women’s knowledge’ (kunhangue arandu), resulting in academic debates and publications that challenge the colonization of knowledge imposed by hegemonic modes of knowledge production. These have invariably given scant attention to Indigenous women, not only in Brazil but in the various South American countries inhabited by the…

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Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira

Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira (1928-2006) graduated in philosophy at the University of São Paulo (USP) in the early 1950s, but it was in anthropology that his intellectual trajectory would develop. His first contact with the field occurred while still at USP, attending classes given by the sociologist Florestan Fernandes (1920-1995), who years later would supervise his doctoral dissertation, Urbanização e Tribalismo: A interação dos índios Terena em uma sociedade de classes [Urbanization and Tribalism: the Interaction of Terena Indians in a Class-based Society] (1966). After graduating, he pursued his anthropological career in four institutions: firstly at the former Museu do Índio (now the National Museum of Indigenous Peoples) in Rio de Janeiro, in 1954, where he began a project with the…

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Sueli Carneiro

Aparecida Sueli Carneiro, Afro-Brazilian intellectual and black feminist, was born in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1950. She enrolled for a philosophy degree at the University of São Paulo (USP) in 1971. It was at the university, from her arrival in 1971 to 1980, during the military dictatorship, that she became actively involved in the black and feminist movements. Carneiro is the author of a vast academic production on race and gender relations in Brazilian society with impacts in diverse areas of knowledge, including anthropology. These include more than 150 articles, essays, chapters and books, which seek to combine activism and theoretical reflection, such as Mulher negra [Black woman] (1995), Racismo, sexismo e desigualdade no Brasil [Racism, sexism, and inequality in Brazil] (2011), and …

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Ruy Coelho

Ruy Galvão de Andrada Coelho (1920-1990) was an anthropologist, cultural critic, and professor of sociology at the University of São Paulo, the only researcher of his generation to have conducted fieldwork outside of Brazil. Between September 1947 and July 1948, under the supervision of American anthropologist Melville Herskovits (1895-1963), he studied the Garífuna (the ethnonym for those currently known as the Black Caribs) of Trujillo, Honduras. This research was presented in his doctoral dissertation The Black Carib of Honduras: a Study in Acculturation (1955). Although remembered for his work at the journal Clima (1941-1944), which launched the careers of some of São Paulo’s most renowned literary critics, such as Antonio Candido (1918-2017), Gilda de Melo e Souza (1919-2005), Décio…

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Eduardo Galvão

Eduardo Enéas Gustavo Galvão (1921-1976) was a Brazilian anthropologist born on 25 January 1921 in Rio de Janeiro. He was one of the people responsible for consolidating anthropology in Brazil, both through his rich theoretical production on the phenomenon of acculturation and through his formulation of indigenist policies in the country. After completing high school, Galvão began a precocious academic career in 1939 as an intern at the Anthropology Division of the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro. Soon after, in 1941, he enrolled in the course in general ethnology at the National Museum under the supervision of American anthropologist Charles Wagley (1913-1991). This not only assured him an internship as a temporary assistant naturalist – a position that became permanent at the end of…

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Lélia Gonzalez

The black intellectual and Brazilian activist Lélia de Almeida Gonzalez (1935-1994) stood out for her academic work and intense political campaigning against racism and sexism. The discussions she proposed on questions of identity, and race and gender relations in Brazil have influenced diverse fields of knowledge, finding a strong echo in cultural studies and anthropology. The daughter of a domestic worker of Indigenous origin and a black railway worker from an extensive working-class family, Gonzalez migrated from Belo Horizonte, in the state of Minas Gerais, to Rio de Janeiro in 1942, where she trained in history and philosophy, becoming a teacher in the primary and secondary education system, teaching in public and private schools. She completed a master’s degree in social…

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Davi Kopenawa

Davi Kopenawa is a shaman and political leader of the Yanomami people, president of the Hutukara Yanomami Association, an activist in defense of Indigenous peoples and the Amazonian forest, as well as an author, scriptwriter, cultural producer, and public speaker. The Yanomami are an Indigenous group of Northern Amazonia, currently around 30,000 people, living in the interfluvial region between the Orinoco and the Amazon basins. Davi Kopenawa is one of the most important intellectual, political, and spiritual leaders in the contemporary panorama in defense of native peoples, the environment, cultural diversity, and human rights, recognized nationally and internationally. He is also the author of The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman (2010), and Yanomami, l'esprit de la forêt (2003…

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Ailton Krenak

Born in Itabirinha de Mantena, in the Doce River valley, in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, Ailton Alves Lacerda Krenak (1953-) is an Indigenous writer, philosopher, activist, and environmentalist of the Krenak people. He is the author of Ideas to Postpone the End of the World (2020), Life is Not Useful (2023), and Ancestral Future (2024), as well as other books in Portuguese. He became widely known for his performance at the National Constituent Assembly of Brazil on September 4, 1987, when he painted his face with black dye while speaking for the recognition of the rights of Indigenous peoples, drawing attention to violations they suffered. He was part of the committees that drafted the chapter concerning Indigenous peoples in the 1988 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Brazil (…

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Kabengele Munanga

Kabengele Munanga was born in 1940, in Bakwa-Kalonji, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo – the Belgian Congo at that time, until the independence in 1960. He graduated in social and cultural anthropology at the Official University of Congo, in 1969, becoming his country’s first anthropologist. Munanga moved to São Paulo, Brazil, in 1975 and became a professor of anthropology at the University of São Paulo in 1980 until his retirement in 2012. He produced over 150 works throughout his career, including books, book chapters, and articles. His main research themes are racism, black identity, negritude, multiculturalism, education, ethnic-racial relations, and anti-racist policies in Brazil. Kabengele Munanga, 1977, Museu da Pessoa, São Paulo He began his graduate studies at the…

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Beatriz Nascimento

Maria Beatriz Nascimento (1942-1995) was born in Aracaju, in the state of Sergipe, Brazil. She was the eighth daughter of Rubina Pereira do Nascimento and Francisco Xavier do Nascimento, who migrated to Rio de Janeiro at the end of 1949. Beatriz studied History at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), graduating in 1971. Under the supervision of historian José Honório Rodrigues, she completed a research internship at the Arquivo Nacional (National Archives) and then worked as a history teacher in Rio’s state school system. Specializing in the history of Brazil at the Fluminense Federal University (UFF) in Niterói, in the state of Rio de Janeiro, she became renowned for her research into what she called “alternative social systems organized by black people,” investigating…

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Antônio Bispo dos Santos

Antônio Bispo dos Santos (1959-2023) was born in the Berlengas river valley in the state of Piauí, Brazil. He was trained in the teachings of the men and women craft masters of the Saco-Curtume quilombo, in the municipality of São João do Piauí. Quilombo is the denomination of Kimbundu origin for communities originally founded by maroons, escaped enslaved men, and women of African descent, called quilombolas, who resisted slavery in Brazil from the 16th century until its legal abolition in 1888. Antônio Bispo dos Santos completed his basic schooling, becoming the first member of his family to be literate. Nego Bispo, as he is also known, was the author of articles, poems, and the books Quilombos, modos e significados [Quilombos, ways and meanings] (2007), Colonização, Quilombos: modos e…

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