Melted gold and national bodies: The hermeneutics of depth and the value of history in Brazilian racial politics

Abstract

Anthropologists have long puzzled over a supposed lack of explicitly racial identification among Brazilians who face racial discrimination. Yet a clear uptick in Afro‐Brazilian identification and contestation of racism is observable in Brazil today. In this article, I examine the transformation of Salvador, Brazil's Pelourinho neighborhood into a heritage center, a process that includes the commodification of residents’ lifeways, so as to link semiotic relationships encouraged by the patrimonializing of buildings, people, and their habits to alterations in racial politics. This case suggests that racial consciousness ties into popular concerns with secrets, depths, and hidden relations encouraged by heritage‐based reifications of everyday habits as potentially alienable forms of property.

Miracles, Rituals, Heritage: The Invention of Nature in Candomblé

“…Thus, they had to be persuaded to take on board the idea that heritage was sometimes not “material” but could be “immaterial”; that is to say, it not only involved things or places but also the ideas, legends, songs, and practices associated with these things and places (Lody :108). Brazil was a pioneer in developing a notion of immaterial heritage, which was then put into more general use by UNESCO in its declaration of a notion of “intangible heritage” in 2003 (see Collins , ).…”

Matters of Patrimony: Anthropological Theory and the Materiality of Replication in Contemporary Latin America

“…The articles in this issue explore the idea that the processes of production, replication, and dispersion that almost invariably attach to, or even generate, renowned cultural goods are not epiphenomenal to, but integrally co‐constitutive of, their value and potency. This move away from spiraling social construction toward patrimony's labile objects requires a more capacious approach to the material culture of heritage, or one that engages collectively held possessions as not simply resonant sites for new interpretations, but as actants and ciphers within economies of signs fueled by the tensions between the miniature and the monumental (Abercrombie, this volume; Angelini ), the movable and the immovable (Ramsey ; Sansi, this volume), the visible and the invisible (Collins ), and the multiple and the singular (Rozental ). Such moves, and the images they engender, might “not only pervert and refract the transmission of genealogical material” but “also enable a form of continuity that learns from ruptures” (Elhaik :227).…”

“…In addition to stressing the need for sophisticated anthropological engagements with replication, the articles in this issue suggest that Latin America's history is central to understanding the extent to which many social scientists’ approaches to copies and their assumed originals conspire to support restricted or simplistic senses of materiality, performance, and reproduction. Historically, replication and iteration have been normative in the region, whether through colonial saint images that appear, multiply, and move in landscapes to produce territories and collectivities (Abercombie ; Bastide ; Rozental ; Vainfas ), the use of cunning and transgression as strategies for political legibility (Sommer ), the reproduction of forms of recognition and citizenship in cartas de relación (González Echevarría ), or in confusions of people and objects in patrimonializing rituals (Collins , ). Replication and mimicry might thus be approached as making up a quotidian aspect of Latin America's speech genres and communicative practices, rather than being located at the fringes of popular practice or imagined as most salient at moments of hybridization and resignification in the colonial encounter (Bhabha ; Rafael ).…”

Learning to Transgress: Law 10.639 and Teacher‐Training Classrooms in São Paulo, Brazil

“… See Baran (), Schwartzman (), and Collins () for additional ethnographic studies that address shifting notions of race in Brazil. …”