Amazonian Indians: a discussion of the idea of vulnerability applied to indigenous minorities

Recognizing and respecting the “otherness” of ethnic groups is considered to be a moral responsibility of any host nation-state. In Brazil, the language used in such ethnic-minorities public policies is carefully chosen to reflect an ideological stand that unfortunately has tragic practical consequences. I investigate in this paper the influence of the metaphorical language that frames the discourse of the legislation concerning indigenous minorities construed in Brazil and how its application has been proven to be problematic. This paper deals with the ethical limits of the use of the notion of alterity in the domain of public policy. I will examine two case studies to point to how the notion of extreme alterity is a setup for injustice. The first is the case of the Zoë tribe that live trapped in a well-designed human zoo. The other is the case of the “Man of the Hole” last survivor of his tribe, who lives alone for two decades under the surveillance of the government that forbids his contact with any other human being, under the pretense of cultural protection. I argue that we have to postulate an ethical limit to the collective culture’s authority over the individual’s well-being, or we will inevitably incur in the fatal mistake of using these tribes as buffers of Western guilt, sacrificing real human beings for the sake of abstract Western concepts that only exist in the imagination of anthropologists.