Desenvolvimentismo, etnicidade e questão agrária.

(Developmentalism, ethnicity and the agrarian question). This article has as its objective to analyze the relationships between economic development processes, ethnicity and agricultural expansion. Its focus is the contradictory logic which involves the forms of administration of Terras Indígenas (Indigenous Lands, specific territories with specific rules) in Brazil within the agrarian structure. The XIX Century had as a legacy the idea that racial and ethnic contractions represented a barrier to Brazil's formation as a nation, marking different debates around capitalist modernization. This conception resulted in the identification of a determined place for indigenous societies and their relation with territory, in which ethnicity was perceived as an obstacle to progress. But the historical process of development/modernization in the XX Century and the social struggles that occurred modified this situation, so that indigenous lands became a component of the structure of the State itself. In general, indigenous peoplés lands began to occupy a central place in agrarian territorial structure in Brazil, but not without conflict between different political objectives. We intend to analyze how the reactivation of discursive categories and developmentalist policies at the beginning of the XXI Century makes explicit the contradictions between different political "projects" for the rural world, that are expressed in turn in a dispute for the redefinition of territorial management and agrarian space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]