Mércio Pereira Gomes

Mércio Pereira Gomes is a Brazilian anthropologist who presently 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, 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, Antropologia, Antropologia Hiperdialética, and a new, expanded version of Os índios e o Brasil.