Introduction 1. in the Portuguese of Brazil People Speak Occasionally of Brazilians of Italian, Spanish, Or Lebanese Descent Or Origin

Notes Introduction 1. In the Portuguese of Brazil people speak occasionally of Brazilians of Italian, Spanish, or Lebanese descent or origin. I have never heard anything like Ital- ian-Brazilian. 2. For a very useful and critical overview of anthropologists’ timidity as regards race over the last two decades, see Shanklin 2000. 3. In pre–World War II folk anti-Semitism, the Jew had no allegiance to terri- tory, felt at home in transactions and transient spaces, and was therefore a menace to the nation (Calimani 1987). Of course, Walter Benjamin re-constructed his existence in dealing with such sterotype by turning it upside down—celebrating incompleteness, transitory states, and committed and tormented cosmopolitanism. 4. Over the last decade from within the United States a movement has been developed that demands more attention in terms of research and census poli- cies for people of “mixed races.” The political journal Race Traitor has been an important vehicle of this movement. These recent trends notwithstand- ing, the United States and Brazil still seem to differ considerably in the place they assign to the mixing of “races.” In Brazil over the last fifty years the mes- tizo has been constructed as the best representative of the Brazilian race— the face of the nation—and does not see itself as part of an ethnic group. In the United States, in a way that is reminescent of modern South Africa, as an important component of the recent mixed-race movement people of mixed ancestry claim a place in the multi-ethnic country by representing themselves as one more ethnic group. It is not for nothing that a recent book on the topic edited by Spickard and Burroughs (2000) carries the title We Are a People. 5. Recent historical research shows that “black cultures” started to be formed already in Africa prior to the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, throughout the early encounters with Catholic or Protestant missionaries and through the transatlantic traveling of free Africans, or along the African coast where the deportees often had to wait for years for their passage. This process of making of a black culture in Africa itself has been documented as to the invention of a “Yoruba” nation around the turn of the last century, which soon inspired the offspring of Africans in Cuba and Brazil (see, 202 / BLACKNESS WITHOUT ETHNICITY among others, Matory 1999), and to South Equatorial Africa where it certainly benefited from the proximity of Bantu languages (see, among others, Thornton 1998; Slenes 1995). 6. Also the ways índios have been constructed as a racial and/or ethnic group show many similarities across different countries in Latin America. Gener- ally speaking, índios and indígenas have been associated either with the peas- ant condition, to the point that words such as indígena and campesino have been used interchangeably in the political history of Mexico and Peru, or, in dealing with the low-land rain forest regions, with nature, vegetation, and even certain diseases—and in recent times with biodiversity and ecology. It goes without saying that these are constructions of ethnic diversity with which many young people of native American origin do not always feel com- fortable—if only because they presuppose an endemic incompatibility with modernity and a direct association with socially close-knit localities. Even though in the academic tradition ethnic identity among native Americans and peoples of African descent have been dealt with as separate entities in Latin America, in many countries (certainly in Nicaragua, Colombia, and Brazil) these two populations have been looking at each other more than has been often assumed and they have developed new forms of ethnicities according to principles that are more similar than has often been held (San- sone 2000). 7. In my terminology black culture in the singular form is a basic taxonomic con- cept that refers to a number of common traits in the cultural production of black populations in different contexts. Black cultures in plural refers instead to the local or sub-group variants of the basic black culture. In fact, we could have used throughout the text the expression “black cultural production.” Even though it certainly renders better the idea that we are talking of a process rather than a fixed entity, it would, however, make the text cumbersome. 8. Notable exceptions are the works cited throughout this book on the Pacific and Atlantic Coast of Colombia and on a couple of coastal Brazilian cities. 9. For very interesting publications in French or Portuguese about blacks in Bahia, in particular, the relationship between black culture and working- class culture, ethnicity in candomblé, and the creation of new all-black Car- nival associations, see Agier 1990, 1992, and 2000; Bacelar 1989 and 2000; Cunha 1991. 10. For example, the polemic between Franklin Frazier (1942) and Melville Herskovits (1943) about the causes and origins of black culture and of the “black family” was sparked by fieldwork carried out in Bahia in the thirties. In fact my recent research on this famous academic debate and its offshoots for the making of the field of research of Afro-Baian studies shows that already starting in the late thirties, when Melville Herskovits gave the keynote speech to the second Afro-Brazilian Congress in Salvador da Bahia and the Chicagoan ethnographer Donald Pierson set off for a majestic piece of work on whites and blacks in Bahia, one can talk of a tense and dense field of study that is criss-crossed by anthropologists from abroad and from NOTES / 203 Southern Brazil—local, mostly self-trained ethnographers and important black leaders from the communities existing around the practice of can- domblé—who soon refuse to be treated as research objects and develop a research agenda of their own. Different and often even opposed research agendas meet and confront each other. In the meantime most of these researchers relate to gatekeepers from within a variety of Afro-Baian cultural and religious expressions as well as to actual focal concerns extant within Afro-Baian culture (with the power of certain magic practice or the need to attract important white people for turning them into political and financial sponsors of a specific religious house). A good example of this intercon- nectedness is evidence, found by scrutinizing the original photographs and field notes, that Melville Herskovits and Franklin Frazier ended up sharing at least in part the same cohort of informants, largely from the community around one famous candomblé house, Gantois. Yet the two Northern Amer- ican researchers, each motivated by a rather specific agenda, come to very different conclusions regarding the centrality of a supposed Africanness in the life of these people. 11. An overview of the paradigmatic book edited by Norman Whitten and John Szwed in 1970, meaningfully titled Afro-American Anthropology, is prime evidence of this unbalanced perspective. Only three of the twenty-two articles deal with the Afro-Latin region. A more recent, and less defensible, example of this Anglo-bias is the Africana encyclopaedia, edited by Henry Louis Gates of the Harvard Du Bois Center that has been sponsored by the Mi- crosoft. Gates’s work relegates the Afro-Latin world to the backdrop and ba- sically centers the mapping of black cultural production in the United States. For a critical perspective on the U.S.-centeredness of Gates’s compelling and paradigmatic production on Africa and the New World, and in particular his documentary Wonders of the African World, see the special issue of the journal The Black Scholar, Spring 2000. 12. The study of the construction of whiteness in Brazil is my future research project. 13. From 1981 to 1991 I did research in Amsterdam, where I focused on ethnic and race relations resulting from mass immigration of people of part-African descent from the former Dutch colony Surinam. Chapter 1 1. The 2000 Census data on color were not yet available at the moment of writing. According to the first projections, the total population totalled 172 million. 2. Such change can be measured by comparing the visual representation of Brazil in important tourist guides of the series Lonely Planet, Rough Guide, and Alternatieve Reizen from 1990 to the present: the number of photos of Afro-Brazilians has increased as has the description of Afro-Brazilian cultural production and of race relations in Brazil. 204 / BLACKNESS WITHOUT ETHNICITY 3. In modern Brazil, though a few remote rural black communities still man- tain a Bantu-based lexicon (Vogt e Fry 1996), black people have not pro- duced anything approaching a “black way of speaking Portuguese,” a style that both linguists and laypeople would accept as characteristically black speech. The existence of numerous regional and class-based variants of Brazilian Portuguese is commonly acknowledged. It might be argued that such a viewpoint is linked to an approach—dominant in Brazil, also among sociolinguists—which avoids emphasizing ethnic differences among Brazil- ians, and that instead attributes segmentation and different lifestyles basi- cally either to class or to differential exposure to modernity and globalization. 4. In Brazil earnings are measured in units called, somewhat inappropriately, minimum wages. In October 2002 one minimum wage was 200 Reais, ap- proximately USD 60. 5. For an excellent and up-to-date overview of the segmentation along color lines in the Brazilian labor market, see Hasenbalg and others 1999. 6. The reason why brown Brazilians (pardos) often have lower income and ed- ucational rates than blacks is because the former are overrepresented in the rural areas, which are overwhelmingly less affluent. 7. Angela Figueiredo and I carried out fieldwork during just over twenty months.

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