Dissertation Research: Legal Rights and Ethnic/Racial Identity in Northeastern Brazil

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This project investigates the impact on identity of a struggle for land where the state has devised legal categories to specify race and ethnicity. Law, the investigators hypothesize, operates as a powerful social force, imposing categories and ordering social relations, and providing structures for self--identification and mobilization. The research will focus on the struggle for legally-guaranteed land rights by a community of descendants of Indians and a neighboring community of descendants of fugitive slaves in the backlands of Sergipe. Methods will include ethnographic field research, such as household surveys, participant observation, interviews, and collecting life stories, supplemented by documentary research. This research has significance for academics and policy-makers and will contribute to the fields of socio-legal studies, history, anthropology, and law. It will contribute to debates about legal treatment of mixed-race rural communities throughout Latin America.