The Heathen Castes of Sixteenth-Century Portuguese America: Unity, Diversity, and the Invention of the Brazilian Indians Available to Purchase

The Portuguese first arrived on the eastern coast of South America in April 1500, but it was only in the final quarter of the sixteenth century that they began to produce systematic accounts that described and classified indigenous populations.¹ However, with the exception of Pero de Magalhães Gândavo’s brief História da província de Santa Cruz, published in Lisbon in 1576, and various Jesuit letters widely disseminated throughout Europe in several languages, the most important Portuguese writings remained unpublished for centuries.² For example, both Gabriel Soares de Sousa’s rich descriptive treatise of 1587, considered by many to be the single most important sixteenth-century account, and Jesuit father Fernão Cardim’s writings circulated in multiple manuscript copies and probably did not have a great deal of influence before the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the Tratado descritivo, as Soares de Sousa’s texts came to be known, and the Tratados da terra...