This paper analyzes biological and scientific discourses about the racial composition of the Brazilian population, between 1832 and 1911. The first of these dates represents Darwin’s first arrival in the South-American country during his voyage on H.M.S. Beagle. The study ends in 1911, with the celebration of the First universal Races congress in London, where the Brazilian physical anthropologist J.B. Lacerda predicted the complete extinction of black Brazilians by the year 2012. Contemporary European and North-American racial theories had a profound (...) influence in Brazilian scientific debates on race and miscegenation. These debates also reflected a wider political and cultural concern, shared by most Brazilian scholars, about the future of the Nation. With few known exceptions, Brazilian evolutionists, medical doctors, physical anthropologists, and naturalists, considered that the racial composition of the population was a handicap to the commonly shared nationalistic goal of creating a modern and progressive Brazilian Republic. (shrink)

RESUMOO presente artigo analisa processos de alterização na biologia humana e na biomedicina. A alterização é entendida aqui como o processo cultural de produção de alteridades por meio da delimitação, rotulação e categorização das formas possíveis de ser outro, desde um determinado marco de referência sócio-histórico. Ainda que a alterização faça parte de qualquer processo de delimitação de categorias de identidade no seio de uma cultura - e, nesse sentido, possa apresentar visões do outro tanto positivas quanto negativas -, aqui (...) nos interessamos especificamente na alterização como fator de marginalização e exclusão social de diferentes grupos humanos. São analisados diversos processos de alterização operantes nos discursos e nas práticas das ciências biomédicas ao longo de sua história recente, os quais têm conduzido à exclusão social de diferentes categorias de outros, ou a tratá-los como inferiores, em pretendidas bases científicas, ou em função de determinadas práticas institucionalizadas dentro da comunidade científica. Exemplos típicos de grupos marginalizados pelas ciências ocidentais ao longo de sua história incluem as raças não europeias, as mulheres, os homossexuais e os "pobres". O principal objetivo do presente artigo é analisar, na história recente das ciências biomédicas, esses processos de alterização que têm conduzido à marginalização de tais grupos e a considerá-los como inferiores. ABSTRACTThis article analyzes processes of "othering" in human biology and biomedicine. Othering is understood here as the cultural process of production of otherness by means of the delimitation, tagging, and categorization of the possible ways of being "other" within a given socio-historical context. Although othering can be considered as a constitutive aspect of any process of delimitation of identities within a given culture - and in this sense it can present both positive and negative views of the "other" -, in the present article we are specifically interested in processes of othering that lead to the marginalization and social exclusion of different human groups. We will analyze processes of othering, which have operated in the discourses and practices of biomedical sciences throughout their recent history, that have led to the social exclusion of different categories of "others", or to treating them as inferior, and that have supposedly scientific bases or as a consequence of the institutionalization of certain practices within the scientific community. Typical examples of these "others", marginalized by the Western sciences throughout their history, are the non-European "races", women, gay and lesbian people, and the "poor". The main objective of this article is to analyze, in the recent history of the biomedical technosciences, these different processes of othering that have led to the marginalization of such "others" and to treating them as inferior. (shrink)