Race and Ethnicity in Latin America Wade 00 pre 1 24/03/2010 16:27 Anthropology, Culture and Society Series Editors: Professor Vered Amit, Concordia University and Dr Jon P. Mitchell, University of Sussex Published titles include: Home Spaces, Street Styles: Culture and Well-Being: Contesting Power and Identity Anthropological Approaches to in a South African City Freedom and Political Ethics LesLie J. Bank eDiteD By aLBerto Corsin Jiménez On the Game: Cultures of Fear: Women and Sex Work A Critical Reader sophie Day eDiteD By uLi Linke anD DanieLLe taana smith Slave of Allah: Zacarias Moussaoui vs the USA Fair Trade and a Global Commodity: katherine C. 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British Library cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library iSBn 978 0 7453 2948 2 Hardback iSBn 978 0 7453 2947 5 Paperback Library of congress cataloging in Publication data applied for this book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 designed and produced for Pluto Press by chase Publishing Services Ltd, 33 Livonia Road, Sidmouth, EX10 9JB, England typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, northampton, England Printed and bound in the European Union by cPi Antony Rowe, chippenham and Eastbourne Wade 00 pre 4 24/03/2010 16:27 contents Series Preface vi Preface to the Second Edition vii Introduction 1 1. The Meaning of ‘Race’ and ‘Ethnicity’ 4 2. Blacks and Indigenous People in Latin America 24 3. Early Approaches to Blacks and Indigenous People, 1920s to 1960s 41 4. Inequality and Situational Identity: The 1970s 61 5. Blacks and Indigenous People in the Postmodern and Postcolonial Nation – and Beyond 85 6. Black and Indigenous Social Movements 112 7. Studying Race and Ethnicity in a Postcolonial and Reflexive World 151 Notes 163 References 167 Index 196 Wade 00 pre 5 24/03/2010 16:27 Series Preface Anthropology is a discipline based upon in-depth ethnographic works that deal with wider theoretical issues in the context of particular, local conditions – to paraphrase an important volume from the series: large issues explored in small places. The series has a particular mission: to publish work that moves away from old-style descriptive ethnography – that is strongly area-studies oriented – and offer genuine theoretical arguments that are of interest to a much wider readership but which are nevertheless located and grounded in solid ethnographic research. If anthropology is to argue itself a place in the contemporary intellectual world then it must surely be through such research. We start from the question: ‘What can this ethnographic material tell us about the bigger theoretical issues that concern the social sciences?’; rather than ‘What can these theoretical ideas tell us about the ethnographic context?’ Put this way round, such work becomes about large issues, set in a (relatively) small place, rather than detailed description of a small place for its own sake. As Clifford Geertz once said: ‘anthropologists don’t study villages; they study in villages’. By place we mean not only geographical locale, but also other types of ‘place’ – within political, economic, religious or other social systems. We therefore publish work based on ethnography within political and religious movements, occupational or class groups, youth, development agencies, nationalists; but also work that is more thematically based – on kinship, landscape, the state, violence, corruption, the self. The series publishes four kinds of volume – ethnographic monographs; comparative texts; edited collections; and shorter, polemic essays. We publish work from all traditions of anthropology, and all parts of the world, which combines theoretical debate with empirical evidence to demonstrate anthropology’s unique position in contemporary scholarship and the contemporary world. Professor Vered Amit Dr Jon P. Mitchell vi Wade 00 pre 6 24/03/2010 16:27 Preface to the Second Edition A lot has happened in the study of race and ethnicity in Latin America since the first edition of this book appeared in 1997. There has been great increase in the amount of literature produced, especially in relation to indigenous social movements and also in relation to black people, or Afro-Latins or Afro-descendants as the current terminology often has it. A great deal of literature has come out of Latin American academies – most of it in Spanish and Portuguese, of course – as well as North American and European ones. There are new journals, such as Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, and new associations, such as the section for Ethnicity, Race and Indigenous Peoples, which is part of the Latin American Studies Association. There have been new theoretical focuses or more emphasis on ones that were already around – on sex and gender, on neoliberalism, on citizenship, on transnationalism and diaspora, on political ecology and biodiversity, on materiality and embodiment. There have also been new overviews of the contemporary scene, including ones that deal mostly with Afro-descendants – for example, Whitten and Torres (1998), Andrews (2004), Dzidzienyo and Oboler (2005), Davis (2007) – and ones that deal mostly with indigenous people, and usually with indigenous movements, such as Sieder (2002), Langer (2003), Warren and Jackson (2003), Postero and Zamosc (2004) and Yashar (2005). The split between indigenous and black people in studies of Latin America, which is a recurrent theme of this book, while it has been overcome in some new scholarship (see Chapters 2 and 6), seems still to retain a good deal of force. Overviews that bridge the divide are fewer – see, for example, Leiker et al. (2007), Branche (2008) and the more synthetic overview of Latin Americanist anthropology in Poole (2008) – and seem to be popular among historians (see Chapter 2). There has been an increasing geographical spread, especially in relation to what is sometimes called Afro-America. Although there is still a relative paucity of anthropological, ethnographic monographs – in English – on Afro-descendants in Latin America and although many of those that exist are on Brazil, overall there is now much vii Wade 00 pre 7 24/03/2010 16:27 viii racE And Ethnicity in latin AmericA more material on other parts of the region and I refer to some of this in Chapters 4, 5 and 6. In preparing this second edition, I have remained true to the underlying idea of the first edition. The book is not intended to be an overview of black and indigenous people in Latin America, nor of the scholarly literature that describes and analyses them. Instead, my intention was, and still is, to give an outline of the changing perspectives that have guided scholars interested in race and ethnicity in Latin America and to illustrate, with concrete examples, how these perspectives have guided their research. This is easiest to achieve for the earlier periods, up until about the 1970s. Thereafter it gets a little more difficult, as the field expands and diversifies, and it becomes more tempting to produce an overview of current scholarship in all its themes and focuses. Still, I have tried to pull out the broad shape of the guiding perspectives, even if these are not as easy to see for the 2000s – not having the benefit of hindsight – as they are for previous periods. I have revised all the chapters, adding new material that reflects recent work and directing the reader to a wider bibliography. Predictably, the chapters that have grown most are Chapters 5 and 6, which deal with recent approaches and themes. Chapter 6, for example, has more than doubled in size. The bibliography has also doubled in length. I have purposely biased the bibliography towards material available in English, despite the fact that there is a vast amount of material being produced in Spanish and Portuguese (not to mention French).