MESTIÇAGEM, ETNIA e INTERCULTURALIDADE: UM ESTUDO SOBRE AS RELAÇÕES INTERRACIAIS NA SOCIEDADE IRATIENSE

Abstract

Brazil is internationally known, since the mid of the nineteenth century, as the country of mixed races. Since then, authors of various branches of science and various locations around the world conduct studies against and in favor of this miscegenation. In this research we studied the miscegenation, believiereeng that writing on this theme is to write about what it`s like to be brazilian, and it`s about national identity. The miscegenation as an identity factor of the Brazilian people, has cultural, anthropological, psychological and social, dimensions as it involves all aspects of everyday life of Brazilians, their beliefs, their knowledge, their way of relating with the world concrete and abstract and with how to be different from other people. We believe that miscegenation is not natural, it was and still is a political project with racist bases, and that the device of miscegenation in Brazil has always had as its starting point the superiority of the white race and culture, on the other races and cultures, such as African and indigenous. In this way, the mixed races should be seen as a historical fact, with its contradictions, conflicts and potential. The main studies about miscegenation in Brazil occupied themselves with discussing relations between blacks, whites, Indians and their positive or negative points based on the existence of a hierarchy between the races. Our challenge here is discuss the miscegenation, also among the descendants of Europeans, in our case, Ukrainian and Polish, showing that the same involved all races and ethnicities who are in our territory. We use as theoretical basis the intercultural philosophy to show that mixed races can, and should be done considering the equal importance between the races involved and during this process there is no racial hierarchy, but a constant exchange of knowledge in a linear way, where everyone involved, must have the same place. The miscegenation, while power device, has exceeded its main goal, which was to whiten the population through miscegenation between blacks and whites. Currently, the fusion occurs with the most diverse racial groups and with the widest possible compositions, which makes the miscegenation a structural device of the Brazilian society. To think about how this process happened, which obstacles these couples had to overcome to form new families arising from these unions can bring a new range of possibilities for thinking the Brazilian miscegenation. These new possibilities may explain the context of the Brazilian people, so far, little studied the contemporary context of miscegenation.