Homenagem toponímica a Nina Rodrigues no Estado do Maranhão: apologia implícita à crença na degenerescência étnica pela mestiçagem?

Abstract

This paper purpose is to peer if the toponymic tribute to Nina Rodrigues in the state of Maranhão advocates implicitly the myth sedimented by Phrenology that human interbreeding produces ethnic degeneration, as this Brazilian physician(1862-1906) used to postulate flying on the assumption of a superiority of the white ethnicity. (SKIDMORE, 1989). This is a bibliographic search and it is anchored on the studies of (CLOVAL, 2001), (NASH, 2013) e (DICK, 1987, 1990). In the beginning, it intends to show that the racist theses of Dr. Nina Rodrigues, clearly unveiled by means of the vocabulary he employs, are arising from a historic context carved out by the European Social Darwinism and the slaveholder ideology, maintained in Brazil, even after 1888, and, that such a paradigm should be rejected at the light of the highest spectrum anthropological discoveries existent today. So, starting from postulates about the negro ethnicity origin, their ethnonyms and acts in the old civilization, it touches the illation that miseducation, cruel treatment, and constant depreciation, coming from several makers of social opinion, build behaviors and the said hereditary degenerative defects, i/o it is not an immanently wild nature, but a product.

Keywords

• Toponymy
• Nina Rodrigues
• ethnicity.Up to three words