ABSTRACT
A number of elements of the indigenous material culture, as anthropologists have pointed out, helped the Portuguese to adapt to the geographic environment of Brazil. At the same time, the colonizers rejected indigenous peoples’ social organization. In any case, indigenous labor force predominated in plantations approximately up to the late-sixteenth century. The point was to expel indigenous people from large and broadened stretches of land and force them to perform slave work. The native social formation was unacquainted with slavery before the colonizers’ arrival. Unlike indigenous peoples, who confronted the colonizers organized in a tribal society, Africans arrived in Brazil detribalized, torn from their original milieu, and forcefully transformed into desocialized individuals. The African slave trade had two sides: on the side of the African sellers, it was only a matter of barter to obtain use value; on the side of the European traders, it was genuine commerce, an interchange of exchange values, commercial circulation for the sake of profit.
