Classification of “indigenous” households in the 2000 Demographic Census: elements for the analysis of health status

Abstract

The characterization of households during censuses, including dwelling conditions, basic sanitation, among other aspects, along with the socioeconomic profile of dwellers, is extremely important to analyze health status. In Brazil, there has been accumulated evidence that indigenous populations, in general, are subject to major inequalities with more pronounced morbidity and mortality, in comparison to other segments of society. Based on the micro data of the 2000 Demographic Census, the present study analyzed the frequency of households whose heads classified them as “indigenous” and that the household was collective or improvised, in the rural area of Brazilian municipalities. The characteristics of households were not studied for neither of the classification possibilities. In the analysis by color/race groups, “indigenous” peoples had the higher proportion of collective households, more frequent in the Center-West, more specifically in Mato Grosso. The frequency of “improvised indigenous” households was also higher than for non-indigenous, including “white”, “black” and “brown” individuals. Different from collective households, improvised “indigenous” households were seen in different regions of Brazil, especially in municipalities of the macro region south and in Mato Grosso do Sul. For municipalities located outside the Legal Amazon regions, where in general Native Lands are of small size, there were 1.5 more “indigenous” households classified as improvised than in the Legal Amazon. An argument is that the higher frequency of collective “indigenous” households are partly due to Census classification problems, given indigenous societies have their own social and family morphologies. The analyses indicate the need to improve the attainment of data on the characteristics of “indigenous” households in surveys conducted by the IBGE. Decreasing the “demographic and epidemiological invisibility” of indigenous populations and, consequently, facing the inequalities in health, will only be possible by generating information that takes into account the ethnical diversity of Brazil.