Religiosities: an analysis of two collections of brazilian public school textbooks

Abstract

The textbook is a fundamental tool for teaching. In Brazil, it has the guideline by the National Plan of the Didactic Book (PNLD); in its project analyzed in this research work there is the function of working with racial and ethnic issues inherent in Brazilian cultural plurality. This research analyzes the collections Nova História Integrada and História Sociedade e Cidadania from the PNLD 2015 under the bias of the religiosity how the peoples addressed are intended to demonstrate the coloniality of minds; the influence of the still predominant eurocentric historiography in the textbooks; and how are treated the religiosities of the different peoples presented in the collections. I analyze the collections by the decolonial perspective, supporting myself fundamentally in authors like Franz Fanon, Catherine Walsh, Homi Bhabha, Arturo Escobar, Walter Mignolo and Stuart Hall, and Circe Bittencourt and Kazumi Munakata which method is approximated in the analysis of the textbooks. In both collections the history of the oppressed peoples has a little expression compared to the European and eurocentred history; the discussions on exploitation and oppression during colonial age are suppressed; the culture and religiosities have different spaces, minimizing the Africas and as Americas, homogenizing them and even justifying the civilizing character of the colonizer.