Rights, Inequality, and Afro-Descendant Heritage in Brazil

Abstract


 For the past thirty years, the Brazilian government has recognized dozens of sites and cultural practices of Afro-descendant groups as national heritage, including the historical maroon site Quilombo dos Palmares. As this site has gained international notoriety, academic research has focused on the value of this historical landmark for commemorating Afro-Brazilian heritage. This article looks to the ambiguous effects of such commemoration on contemporary people living in the area, some of whom are being forcefully evicted from the site in connection with its heritage status. The article addresses the vulnerability experienced by these residents, as it highlights broader issues associated with multicultural and heritage-recognition policies in Brazil. Specifically, I analyze the policies protecting contemporary maroon descendants and sites to reveal why Palmares residents making claims on their land and heritage fall outside of state recognition. I argue that as these policies have become an increasingly powerful mechanism for protecting Afro-Brazilian and minority groups, they have also acquired the capacity to hurt the most vulnerable individuals within these communities. Two very different types of heritage stand to be protected at Palmares: one of the historical maroons and their contemporary kin, and another of the structurally unequal system that inadvertently replicates the oppression it intends to dismantle. In the context of massive inequality that disproportionately affects blacks, maroon descendants, indigenous, and other minority populations in Brazil, it is critical to consider how political strategies for redressing ethnoracial inequality may also end up perpetuating segregation.
 
 Resumo
 
 Ao longo dos últimos trinta anos, o governo brasileiro tem reconhecido como patrimônio cultural dezenas de espaços e práticas culturais de grupos afrodescendentes, entre estes, o espaço histórico do Quilombo dos Palmares. À medida que este local tem adquirido notoriedade histórica internacional, a pesquisa acadêmica tem priorizado a importância do local no que se refere à comemoração do patrimônio cultural afro-brasileiro. Meu trabalho analisa as consequências de tal reconhecimento patrimonial na vida de populações que residem atualmente nesta região, algumas das quais estão sendo expulsas à força do local, devido à declaratória deste como patrimônio cultural. Analiso também as vulnerabilidades experimentadas por tais populações, no contexto da problemática mais ampla das políticas multiculturais de reconhecimento do patrimônio no Brasil. Especificamente, examino as políticas de proteção aos quilombos e indivíduos quilombolas, e analiso como e por que o Estado não reconhece as reclamações de terras e patrimônio feitas pelos residentes de Palmares. Minha tese é que embora tais políticas venham sendo poderosos mecanismos de proteção aos grupos afro-brasileiros e às minorias, têm também adquirido uma capacidade desproporcional para prejudicar os indivíduos mais vulneráveis daquelas comunidades. Assim sendo, a declaração de Palmares oferece proteção a dois patrimônios muito distintos: um é dos quilombos históricos e seus descendentes contemporâneos, e outro, do sistema estruturalmente desigual que tem como consequência inesperada a replicação da mesma opressão que a própria política visava a desmantelar. Dentro do contexto de desigualdade massiva no Brasil, que prejudica desproporcionalmente as populações negras, os quilombolas, os indígenas e outras minorias, é de suma importância considerar como as políticas atuais que visam à reparação da desigualdade etnorracial também levam à perpetuação da segregação.

Archaeology, land tenure, and Indigenous dispossession in Mexico

“…Multicultural recognition, the long-running effects of disentailment, and the expansion of archaeological research in El Tajín left the residents of San Antonio Ojital in an impossible situation. The recognition of rights to communal land elsewhere may have been fraught with unintended consequences (Escallón, 2019; Hale, 2005: 14–16), but there was no recognition whatsoever for Indigenous private property in this case. In the hands of the State Government of Veracruz, the land seems unlikely to be sold.…”

“…The legal reasoning for the complaint’s failure was grounded in ideas of property and recognition. In contrast to accounts of “spatial cleansing” (Herzfeld, 2006) and “fortress conservation” (Igoe, 2004: 69-102)—in which areas defined as heritage are “protected” by evicting residents and restricting land use (De Cesari and Dimova, 2019; Escallón, 2019; Meskell, 2011)—there was no apparent top-down project for dispossession. The timing of the dispossession coincided with Latin America’s broader multicultural turn (Hale, 2005; Saldívar, 2014: 100–103).…”

“…At the same time, the nationalist- indigenista framework for INAH archaeology in Mexico remains resilient (McGuire, 2008: 140–187; Vázquez León, 2003). As the failure of the 2016 CNDH complaint suggests, however, recognition did not mean rights to territory or heritage (compare Escallón, 2019; Hale, 2011; Hooker, 2020).…”

The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2019

“…In its pursuit of certainty, the state fix enlists familiar repertoires of violence and spectacle. We observe this at work in the carceral regimes of prisons and detention centers but also in the representative labor of photojournalists in urban Venezuela (Samet 2019a, 2019b), state‐sponsored antiwitchcraft campaigns in Sierra Leone (S. Anderson 2019), the “improvised practices” of civic works administrators to facilitate road construction in central Ethiopia (Mains 2019), forced evictions of maroon settlements in Brazil under the paradoxical guise of heritage preservation (Escallón 2019), the affective registers of populist Red Shirts in Thailand (Seo 2019), the breaking of tamper‐evident seals as a performance of Iranian noncompliance with the terms of nuclear‐safeguards agreements (Weichselbraun 2019), and efforts of security agents at the India–Bangladesh borderlands to “detect” unsanctioned migrants who fail to conform to anticipated conventions of citizenship (Ghosh 2019). Each of these repertoires involves the production of spectacular objects—of the suffering body as a representative of a vulnerable body politic, of asphalt roads as aesthetic vehicles of progress and development, and of supposed illegal migrants masquerading as citizens, for instance—to conceal disordered practices of statecraft that are shrouded by what Sahana Ghosh (2019, 11) terms a “bluff of coherence.”…”

The Quilombola Movement: Sensing Futures in Afroindigenous Amazonia

“…Despite the reparatory and inclusive intent, multiculturalism in Brazil brought about the naturalization of cultural difference and, in Amazonia, the bureaucratic invisibility of mestizo migrant peasants—also known as ribeirinhos— who lack a clear narrative of ethnic identity (Nugent and Harris 2004). This is why ethnohistorical approaches to quilombolismo still expose the “contradictory effect of Brazil's current multicultural regime”: namely, the paradox of a state that “defines its legitimate subjects of rights based on the standards of cultural difference, [while] it often ends up reinforcing ethnoracial segregation” of others (Escallón 2019, 361).…”