Mercio Pereira Gomes

Mércio Pereira Gomes
Nationality	Brazilian
Alma mater	University of Florida
Known for	Being the President of the National Foundation for Indigenous Peoples

Mércio Pereira Gomes (born November 10, 1950) is a Brazilian anthropologist who presently (April 2015) teaches at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Florida, in 1977, under the supervision of Charles Wagley, who at that time was considered the foremost Brazilianist in the United States and had done extensive fieldwork in Brazil. His dissertation was about the Tenetehara Indians of northern Brazil and in it Gomes expounded how this Indigenous people had managed to survive almost 400 years of relations with Western society. Years later, Gomes published his first book called Os índios e o Brasil (Petrópolis, Vozes, 1988), where he hailed the survival of Brazilian Indians as the most important news in the recent history of inter-ethnic relations in that country. This book was later translated into English by the University of Florida Presses (2000) with the title The Indians and Brazil. Other books by Gomes are O Índio na História (Petrópolis, Vozes, 2002), Antropologia (São Paulo, Ed. Contexto, 2008), Antropologia Hiperdialética (São Paulo, Ed. Contexto, 2011), and a new, expanded version of Os índios e o Brasil (São Paulo, Ed. Contexto, 2012).

Since 1975, Gomes has done extensive fieldwork with several Brazilian Indigenous peoples, foremost the Tenetehara, the Guajá, and the Avá-Canoeiro. During his first fieldwork research he helped defend the Tenetehara Indians in a struggle they were having with farmers who claimed to be owners of their land. Beginning in 1980 he did research with the Guajá Indians who had been contacted just 7 years previously. During that year he was responsible for making the first contact with a band of Guajá Indians, who numbered some 30 people at that time. By 2014 this band had joined other bands and numbered some 220 people.

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