John Manuel Monteiro (1956-2013)

On March 26, 2013, a tragic auto accident interrupted the rich and productive career of historian John Manuel Monteiro. Born in Minnesota, the descendant of Portuguese immigrants, John spent part of his childhood in Brazil and Colombia but did his advanced studies in history in the United States, first at Colorado College and then at the University of Chicago, where he earned both his master's and doctoral degrees in 1980 and 1985, respectively. He returned to Brazil shortly after completing his doctorate, taking a position as professor at the Universidade Estadual Paulista, where he taught from 1986 to 1991. In 1994 he moved to the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP), where he eventually assumed - just a few months before his death - the directorship of the Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas. John also taught as a visiting professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1985-1986), the University of Michigan (1997 and 2010), and Harvard University (2003-2004), institutions with which he maintained regular contact.John's doctoral dissertation, revised and expanded, became a seminal work that left its stamp on Brazilian historiography. Challenging traditional historical interpretations, Negros da terra: Índios e bandeirantes nas origens de São Paulo (1994) traced the paths by which colonists who settled the plateau of São Paulo constructed, from the mid-sixteenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth, a vibrant economy based on the capture and exploitation of an indigenous labor force that supplied a trade in foodstuffs and served as the source of substantial wealth. By focusing on the processes of integration, exploitation, and destruction of indigenous populations subjugated by the paulistas, John contended that his book addressed "three central problems in the history of Brazil: the role of the Indian [índio] in the social and economic history of the colony; the potent bandeirante myth; and the importance of the nonexport economies for the formation of the nation."1In analyzing the origins, development, and decline of indigenous slavery, John considered the diverse ways in which Indians were incorporated into the colonial universe, and he foregrounded the means by which they confronted the masters and colonists. In John's study, indigenous peoples shifted from being supporting actors to occupying a central role in the formation of colonial society. They went from having generic names and being considered incidental inhabitants of a backlands destined for deforestation by the paulistas to being identified by their ethnonyms and differentiated social dynamics. John also revised the long-standing claim that the paulistas simply served as intermediaries in the commerce in slaves, acting only as suppliers of Indians for the coastal sugar estates. Through a painstaking analysis of their incursions into the backlands in search of slaves for their own farms and for the development of paulista agriculture in the seventeenth century, John reconfigured the study of the colonial history of São Paulo, offering new interpretations of paulista wealth and poverty.There are, moreover, additional dimensions of this book's influence on Brazilian academic scholarship. Basing aspects of his research on notarial and judicial sources, John undertook a careful analysis of indigenous experiences during colonial rule, inserting them into the broadest debates about the history of slavery in Brazil and the Americas. He thus participated in the historiographical trend that recuperated for the enslaved - whether African or, now with John's book, indigenous - the condition of historical subjects. In a similar vein, he challenged conventional assumptions about the "extinction" of the Indians and their exclusion from a national history that privileged the dynamics of colonization and the expansion of capitalism or, at most, African enslavement.These themes and debates were also present in the many articles, chapters, and papers that he wrote and published in Brazil and the United States dealing with the production of historiographical silences with regard to the Indians, ethnocide, and the processes of ethnogenesis. These publications, such as his chapter on "Coastal Brazil in the Sixteenth Century" in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas (1999), took his work in a new direction, even as he continued to engage with questions central to ethnohistory and colonial Brazilian studies. Whereas Negros da terra was, first and foremost, a work of social and economic history, the essays that John began publishing in the mid-1990s were more in the vein of intellectual history and historiography. He would eventually compile these essays in his livre docência thesis entitled "Tupis, Tapuias e historiadores: Estudos de história indígena e do indigenismo," which he defended at UNICAMP in 2001. John introduced this work by citing the boom in ethnohistorical studies in Spanish America, which he contrasted with the continued paucity of serious historical studies of indigenous cultures in Brazil. John saw this scholarly silence as largely a consequence of a still-dominant view of native Brazilians, dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, as "peoples without a history and without a future."2 At the same time, he acknowledged that there were other, more nuanced perspectives that had emerged from Brazilian political and intellectual circles over the past two centuries and that existed in tension with this dominant trend.Each chapter of the thesis elucidates the way in which certain assumptions about indigenous peoples worked their way not only into intellectual debates, archives, and scholarly production but also into policymaking and implementation on the ground, often with grave consequences for indigenous populations. As the title indicates, one motif that runs through the thesis is the Tupí/Tapuia binary that emerged from colonial sources (or a particular reading of them), as well as from nineteenth- and twentieth-century studies seeking to construct regional and national myths that required a foundational figure both autochthonous and civilizable. The Tupí, figured as sturdy, intelligent, and cooperative, represented the "superior" indigenous legacy absorbed by the Portuguese settlers, whereas the Tapuia symbolized the barbaric and the backward, unfit for absorption into the Brazilian nation. Far from being confined to arcane ethnological arguments, polemics over the ethnicity of indigenous peoples undergirded debates between assimilationists who supported a "catechization and civilization" approach to indigenous populations and those who favored the "disappearance" of native peoples, including through policies that amounted to extermination.Of particular note is the thesis's final chapter, "Races of Giants," in which John compares the scholarly oeuvre of two historians, one from São Paulo and one from Portuguese India (Goa), both of whom, in works published from the 1920s to the 1940s, constructed myths of racial superiority. The former, Alfredo Ellis Jr., constructed a genealogy of paulistinidade, arguing that the rugged demands of life on the plateau favored the selection of both especially robust Portuguese settlers and the heartiest indigenous types. In contrast, Germano Correia sought to construct a genealogy of "Luso descendants" in Goa who he claimed refrained from intermarrying with local women and maintained their essential European qualities. Despite differences in the details of their mythmaking projects, John shows the striking parallels in Ellis's and Correia's scholarship, including their persistent use of social Darwinist and eugenic concepts even after such ideas had been discarded by more mainstream academics. Their work, in different ways, also hinged on the presence or absence of Portuguese women in the colonizing project, an issue that Ellis indelicately summarized with the adage, "He who doesn't have a dog, hunts with a cat."3 Although John found no evidence that these two scholars had any contact or even read each other's work, his comparison of their work allows us a sense of the overlapping concerns that emerge in early twentieth-century writing about race and identity in the Lusophone world. Even though John himself will not be able to pursue to completion his ongoing research on Portuguese India, his studies will surely inspire other scholars of race and ethnicity to broaden their analytical frameworks and ethnohistorical imaginations.With his vast knowledge of archives and his deep erudition, John also played a crucial role in the production of resources for researchers interested in indigenous history in Brazil. Perhaps the most important of these reference works was the Guia de fontes para a história indígena e do indigenismo em arquivos brasileiros (1994), which emerged from a collective project that he coordinated. Also notable were his admirable efforts at historiographical revision beyond the walls of academe. Even before the passage of legislation in 2008 mandating the diversification of high school history instruction in Brazil, he invited secondary schoolteachers to meet the theoretical and political challenges of incorporating indigenous themes in their school curriculum and in the topics they broached in the classroom.His texts and ideas and his activities inside and outside the university helped to draw the academic and political outlines of a new and fruitful field in Brazilian historiography. Throughout this productive career John Monteiro enjoyed the love, support, and inspiration of his family, and he is survived by his wife, the distinguished historian Maria Helena Pereira Toledo Machado, and their sons, Álvaro and Thomas.John's untimely death cut short a career with various projects left unfinished. Among them was a proposal to write in English a new history of "Bandeirantes and Indians in the Making of Portuguese America." Not since Richard Morse's useful compilation of texts The Bandeirantes: The Historical Role of the Brazilian Pathfinders (1965) or John Hemming's more general Red Gold (1978) had a major book in English been devoted to that theme. John's proposed volume, incorporating new work in anthropology and ethnohistory, his own original research findings, and his vision of a Brazilian history that includes its indigenous peoples as subjects and actors in the country's formation rather than simply as a doomed historical predicate, promised to be a memorable one. Whoever takes up that task in the future, like all of us who benefited from his friendship and scholarship, will owe a debt to what John Monteiro wrote and the new historical pathways he opened

Chapel · Doctoral studies · Historiography