The fable of the three sciences.: Anthropology, ethnology and history in Brazil

This article gives a broad panorama of the origins of Human Sciences -or a part of them- in Brazil, and the role they played within the Brazilian nation-building process. It is suggested that each one of them -History, Anthropology and Ethnology- was delimited having regard to one of the great ethnical sectors of the country and to the role attributed to it in that process. Mainly, Ethnology captured Indians in a primitivist paradigm while excluding them from History; this latter was reserved to the White protagonists; while Anthropology focused on a black, margin-segregated population. The article also analyzes the value assigned to alterity in Brazilian Anthropology as a result of further developments in the above said scheme. Attention is also paid to the way in which the interpretation or translation of ''the other'' became a key element in a discipline which in its inception was meant to be instrumental for the configuration of a unitary social body.