Melted Gold and National Bodies

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

Author(s): JOHN COLLINS
Source: American Ethnologist, Vol. 38, No. 4 (NOVEMBER 2011), pp. 683-700
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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JOHN COLLINS
City University of New York-Queens College and the Graduate Center
Melted gold and national bodies:

The hermeneutics of depth and the value of history in
Brazilian racial politics
ABSTRACT Yeah, yeah, there's something there under the cloth, something that we
don't know
Anthropologists have Long puzzled or understand
over that's hidden underneath that thick gravy. I'd
a supposed
just like to know
lack of explicitly racial identification if that gravy hides meat or if there's really hot pepper
among
Brazilians who face racial discrimination. Yet a clear down there underneath it. Because if you were to look closely, I think
uptick in Afro- В razili an identification and you'd discover hot pepper.
contestation of racism is observable in Brazil today. - Dona Aidil, resident evicted from the Pelourinho World Heritage site1
In this article, I examine the transformation of
Salvador, Brazil's Pelourinho neighborhood into a uring Salvador, Brazil's 1999 rainy season, as water pooled in
heritage center, a process that includes the
commodification of residents' lifeways, so as to link thundered to the ground, the residents of a ruined colonial
semiotic relationships encouraged by the building, invaded and christened the "Gueto" in a link to the
patrimonializing of buildings, people, and their D building, the thundered racial marbl
racialeconsci
consciousness
ousnessof iKinvaded
ngston,entranceway
Jamaica, huddltoedthearoundand aground, of christened Kingston, and the chunks residents the Jamaica, of "Gueto" the of 18th-century huddled a ruined in a link around colonial façade to the a
folder stuffed with valuable documents. The head social worker from
habits to alterations in racial politics. This case
suggests that racial consciousness ties into popular IPAC - the Institute for Artistic and Cultural Patrimony of the State of
concerns with secrets, depths, and hidden relations Bahia - had just left the building and had forgotten to take the paperwork
encouraged by heritage-based reifications of
with her. It contained lists of names and summaries of the questionnaires
everyday habits as potentially alienable forms of
her institution had administered to establish the number of the building's
property, [race, Brazil , cultural heritage,
inhabitants and the size of the indemnifications they would receive for va-
commodification, semiotics, archives, urban reform] cating their homes. This dispossession would facilitate, in turn, the trans-
formation of their neighborhood, the Pelourinho Historical Center, into a
tourist mecca and a restored UNESCO World Heritage site.
In the social worker's ledger were the names of 40 heads of households,
but only nine families remained in the Gueto. These people cursed their
state and their misfortune for not having gotten more relatives onto the
list, for their inability to conjure "phantasms" (fantasmas ), or imaginary
people created to facilitate illicit gain. Just then, one of the teenagers who
stood in the building's doorway, barring strangers and watching for police,
called up, "Malaquias, visitors! It's the lady from IPAC." Malaquias moved
to meet the young woman as he hid the papers that translated his lifeways
into accretions of qualities to be evaluated and priced by the IPAC bureau-
crats removing him and transforming the Pelourinho into a pastel-hued
mnemonic device.
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 38, No. 4, pp. 683-700, ISSN 0094-0496, online
ISSN 1548-1425. © 201 1 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10. 1 1 1 1 /j. 1548- 1425.201 1.01330.x
American Ethnologist ■ Volume 38 Number 4 November 2011
"My boss says that she mistakenly left some documents paid for his living quarters - produce a certain room for ma-
with you." neuver for a man from the storied Pelourinho Historical
"Oh, yeah? Documents?" answered Malaquias inno- Center, a colonial gem, Salvador's officially designated red-
cently. light district from 1940 to 1991, and the nation's most res-
"Yes, those copies of your indemnification agreement, onant space for Afro-Brazilian tradition. His emphasis on
well, there were some of Dona Karla's papers mixed in too." a black identity, very much an object of Bahian state plan-
"Gosh, I had no idea," answered Malaquias, "You know, ning during the 1990s, might thus be understood as a kind
like I told you when you interviewed me all those times, I'm of feedback or "looping effect" emanating from IPAC's at-
illiterate. It's too bad, because my sister just left and took tempts to manage a Pelourinho population for the most
them to my mother's house . . . You know from your research part removed (Hacking 1999). From such a perspective,
how poor our living conditions are. I didn't want them to get Malaquias would occupy categories whose performative
wet. Are the documents really important?" instantiation in IPAC's knowledge-gathering activities pro-
The intern answered affirmatively. vides him with a new way of, or category for, conceptu-
"Well, then I'll tell you what; you tell Dona Karla that alizing himself and social types more generally. Nonethe-
I'm gonna visit my mother tonight and I can get them. But if less, to gesture at purportedly shared origins or a person's
she . . . needs them now, I can dart out ... by cab. The fare is interior qualities, as Malaquias does in relation to docu-
only about R$10. You can bring the money by if Karla really ments and as the Bahian state has done repeatedly since
needs her papers." 1992 in its ongoing restoration of the Pelourinho and its
When the intern left, residents dissolved into laughter inhabitants as the roots of modern Brazil, involves more
and Malaquias announced, than the acceptance of a perch within the social scientific
taxonomies that support cultural heritage: Malaquias's play
Yeah, If I were to go I'd take the bus and it'd cost me for knowledge and power, waged on and through state-
R$1.40 total. They say they're the patrimony, well, I'm sanctioned sign vehicles employed to represent him, is also
patrimony. I'm the one who's folkloric. They wanna put
a context-specific manner of making sense of or depicting a
me in their questionnaires and put me up there, "Big
world through forms of reference that are themselves ma-
black guy from the Pelourinho," well those candy asses
terial entities (Hull 2003, 2008; Wirtz 2007). And because
[bunda mole] are gonna pay me what I deserve! I do
my own research. I have my own dossier, I know what reference is always "a social act, its interactive success de-
they're trying to do. pending on relations among participants in a discourse"
(Urciuoli 2008:212), I am interested in how the participants
Just then, one his neighbors added, "Hey Malaquias, don't in the exchanges described above came to agree that the
forget to include in that dossier, 'left-handed, toothless, and manipulation of documents describing everyday life affects
a stutterer."' and calls up racial identities, civilizational or personal "de-
ficiencies," and the flow of money.
The argument that, in the Pelourinho, sheaves of pa-
Heritage, objectification, and reference
per describing a population's habits may point to the re-
There is much to say about Malaquias's interactions with cesses of selves that hold great value in an international
IPAC, his ironic, moralizing aside about blackness, profit, marketplace for multicultural difference is not natural or
and social scientific categories, and his neighbor's witty yet even long-lived. I have worked in the Pelourinho on and off
aggressive deformation of these claims and identities. For since 1987, first as an artisan and then, after 1993, as a social
the moment, however, I note simply that Malaquias re- scientist. My heterogeneous experiences suggest that, un-
veals a sly sophistication about the collection, storage, and til the mid-1990s, overwhelmingly working-class and Afro-
value of data about minority populations and their every- Bahian Pelourinho residents typically rejected psychiatric
day habits, standard fodder for the transnational technique or psychologically grounded models of subjectivity. They
of property- and memory making known as UNESCO pat- claimed that one could not know oneself in any secure man-
rimony, or "cultural heritage."2 Malaquias's performance ner; that one could not predict how one would behave in
suggests that, as a living object of heritage, he is a focus a given interaction; that IPAC activities had scant bearing
of surveillance and a producer, as well as a part, of the on their lives, even as many residents cultivated friendships
representations employed by his state to anchor develop- and influence within the heritage institution; that black-
ment plans enacted through human beings' registry and ness, exploitation, and poverty tended to correlate; and
removal. that racial identities, while most definitely split between
As Malaquias suggests, IPAC's questionnaires and at- whites and blacks despite the fact that most residents con-
tempts to sequester and redeploy entextualized evidence sidered themselves "brown" (moreno), were not beholden
about his habits - in this case, ethnographic reports that to the lineal transmission of any racialized substance
help the state establish the size of indemnification to be such as blood, culture, or genes.3 Yet, in describing these
BM
Melted gold and national bodies ■ American Ethnologist
dispositions through recourse to my own experiences in 79). For Nogueira, as for a myriad of commentators in en-
Bahia as well as a larger social scientific literature on com- suing decades, there seems to exist in Brazil what Livio San-
munity and personhood, I am not arguing that race in Brazil sone (2003) dubs "blackness without ethnicity," or a con-
is somehow fluid, primarily situational, and not as tied to juncture in which powerful forms of discrimination are not
discrimination as it is in the United States.4 Nor am I sug- necessarily accompanied by concomitantly powerful forms
gesting that there is but one way of being Brazilian or that of corporate, racial solidarity.6 And as noted by none other
Brazilian racial categories and consciousness are uniform than Marvin Harris (1970), this "calculus" of racial identity
across space and time. Instead, I seek to understand how, seems an issue of "referential ambiguity."
in Salvador's Historical Center over the last three decades, I thus take reference seriously by exploring how what
concerns with racial being, the production of value, and his- goes on in a UNESCO historical center seems to influ-
tory or tradition have grown and moved in certain patterned ence Bahian conceptualizations of the relationships be-
ways, with important political results. tween "marks" and "origins" so much a part of social scien-
If discourse genres or categories presented by partici- tific discussions of Brazilian race over the last 50 years. I first
pants as contiguous or capable of calling up one another explore IPAC's emphasis on the resuscitation of suppos-
logically or naturally require specific cues and forms of edly shared beginnings. I focus on Pelourinho residents' at-
interpretation in order to be associated (Baumann 2005; tempts to defetishize these foundations at a moment when,
Silverstein 2005), what sorts of interpretive activity has as has become increasingly common around the world,
brought together race, money, and history in the Pelour- icons of community belonging and the culturad practices
inho? And what are the vectors whereby these associations and identities construed as demonstrating their existence
and their political effects have come to make sense in this have become commodified (Bunten 2008; Cattelino 2008;
critical site for Afro-Brazilian political mobilization? Collins 2008b; Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). Such con-
Social scientists have long linked race and history vergences between memorialization and alienation in the
through the argument that histories of exploitation rest on UNESCO historical center produce a popular interest in
and may even require racial discrimination, especially in surfaces and depths as markers of, or spheres for evalu-
the workplace. Anthropologists have also explored at length ating, truth and falsity. This interest encourages a rework-
how the "truths" that support ethnoracial distinctions re- ing of the forms of personhood coproduced by state and
quire authentication by competing inventions of tradition citizen during the Pelourinho reforms and in light of Afro-
(Godreau et al. 2008; Knauer 2009; Routon 2008; Scher 2002) Brazilian social movements' mobilizations in Bahia. Such
and "histories of the present" (Foucault 1972; McGranahan shifts provoke, in turn, alterations in how racial identity is
2010; Stoler 1995). Yet this article is not about competing understood. In other words, I suggest that changes in racial
versions of history or present conditions that temper what ideologies might best be approached not by investigating
may be said about that past. Rather, it is an interpretation of identities per se but by examining interpretive lenses, or,
how a setting off of lifeways through practices that reinforce in Webb Keane 's (2003, 2007) framework, "semiotic ideolo-
the perception that culture is a fungible thing results in spe- gies," through which state and citizen have come to un-
cific forms of calculating selves and objectifying practices derstand the production of value and the molding of con-
as content-filled signs of continuity. My approach thus fo- sent around reified forms of culture and history. Yet this
cuses in on a concern, developed in light of often seemingly approach does not present such meaningful and meaning-
distinct social realms, with a "hermeneutics of depth" (Ra- producing frameworks as either divorced from or simply
binow and Dreyfus 1983) whereby IPAC bureaucrats as well emanating from material relations. On the contrary, forms
as Pelourinho residents who often pit themselves against of reference through which practices in the present call up
those officials come to seek an underneath of things in sim- a commodifiable past stand as motors for the production of
ilar manners. And I suggest that, by the mid-1990s, they be- value in places like the Pelourinho today.
gan to do so in ways that did not conform to the popular In developing the argument sketched above, I first
dispositions and approaches to peoples, races, and histo- outline the Pelourinho's passage from colonial entrepot to
ries social scientists typically ascribe to Brazil.5 red-light district and, then, to a gleaming, UNESCO-
Put another way, in what follows I attempt both sanctioned heritage machine. From there, I move to resi-
a historical argument about and a novel methodologi- dents' mutating approaches to surfaces and depths, as they
cal approach to an influential claim crystallized in 1954 developed around the rumored, and the eventually authen-
by the Brazilian sociologist Oracy Nogueira. According to ticated, presence of skeletons and gold within their neigh-
Nogueira, "When racial prejudice takes form in relation to borhood's buildings and under its plazas. I tie these de-
appearance . . . one might say that it functions in relation velopments to discussions of race, and the transmission of
to marks; but when the claim that a person is a descendant racial essence, at the end of the 20th century. In doing so,
of a particular ethnic group is enough to unleash prejudice, I suggest that the interpretive work of becoming living hu-
then we might say that this is an issue of origins" (1985:78- man symbols of now- commodified origins, or what I call
BBS
side neighborhoods, renting, abandoning, or ceding their

homes to domestic servants, family associates, and Gali-
cian and Lebanese immigrants. By the beginning of the 20th
century, this colonial downtown area had gained a reputa-
tion as a cauldron of behaviors stigmatized in other areas
of Brazil's Northeast. Poor and "dishonored" women from
throughout Brazil fled to its boardinghouses, where they
could earn a living washing, cooking, vending, and caring
for the children of other working women in this red-light
district of Salvador, dubbed the "city of women" by Ruth
Landes in her 1947 ethnography of the same name. Men
from Salvador's "best" families left their wives to live in the
Pelourinho with Eastern European mistresses who passed
as French or with black Bahians who often traded domes-
Figure 1. Mock-up of Portuguese mariners' colonial gaze on native Brazil- tic service for prostitution.7 Thus, the Pelourinho has long
ian women, Pelourinho Square, Carnaval 1999. All photos by J. Collins.
figured prominently in stitching together a nation where,
across the 20th century, relations between powerful men,
nonwhite women, and European women whose moral sta-
"properly historical subjects," has had profound effects on tus may at times have rendered their racial identites suspect
belonging in a nation long presented as arising from so- quite literally engendered a fraternal community (Andrade
called racial democracy, Brazil's well-known myth of a foun- 1984).
dational and putatively harmonious mixing of Portuguese, For most of the 20th century, politicians and intellectu-
Native American, and African peoples. als anchored claims to communion with the people (povo)
by carousing in famous houses of prostitution, known lo-
"The cradle of Brazil" cally as "castles." Here, interracial relations produced a
public authenticity for bourgeois men (Skurski 1996) who
The restoration of Salvador's Pelourinho neighborhood, reveled in Bahianness on the basis of their knowledge of a
Brazil's most extensive collection of Iberian baroque ar-red-light zone. Nonetheless, by the 1980s, the Pelourinho
chitecture, its first capital, and the former administrative became a hotbed for the black cultural production and pol-
center of the Portuguese south Atlantic, provides a win- itics sweeping Salvador as Brazil returned to civilian control
dow onto a state and its citizens' negotiation of the shifting after 20 years of military rule. At the same time, residents
meanings of race in a nation whose history has been posedbegan to build multifloored shantytowns alongside the in-
repeatedly as thinkable only through mixture. Or, put some-terior walls of collapsing mansions, preserving their facades
what differently, as the most expressive sign of colonial ori-and creating a vibrant but marginalized community that
gins and African legacies in Brazil, the Pelourinho is a linch-would attract continued attention after UNESCO declared
pin for imagining, and deploying, race in a nation in whichthe neighborhood a World Heritage site in 1985.
academics and citizens find themselves divided between
those who defend a vision of redemptive and quintessen-
tially Brazilian racial mixture (Fry 2007; Lessa 2007; Mag-
gie 2005) and those who understand this formation as basic
to an enduring racism, albeit one that at times is difficult
to disaggregate from other forms of discrimination (Bur-
dick 1998; Caldwell 2007; Goldstein 2003; Gonçalves da Silva
2008; Hanchard 1994; Perry 2004; Selka 2007; Twine 1997).
The Pelourinho, or "Pillory," holds such a special place
in dominant imaginaries in part because its buildings and
inhabitants, celebrated since at least the 1920s by mod-
ernist intellectuals responsible for the establishment of a
federal cultural bureaucracy, stand as one of the first man-
ifestations of the wealth and slave labor constitutive of the
modern Atlantic world. Yet Bahia's preeminence ebbed as
the 18th-century Caribbean eclipsed Brazil in sugar pro-
duction. The neighborhood declined further after the 1763
transfer of the capital to Rio de Janeiro. Around the end of
Figure 2. The interior of the Gueto as IPAC moved to destroy indemnified
the 19th century, the owners of its mansions moved to sea- residents' homes so as to displace those who sought to remain.
dent in 1992 into those who would remain - because they

embodied what the state perceived as the correct Afro-
Brazilian values for an account of harmonious mixture -
and those who would be forced out through indemnifi-
cation and police pressure. This separation turned on the
ethnographic production of knowledge about residents.
Such data provided the state with justification for removing
people and, thus, with factual support in putatively objec-
tive and usually triumphant histories of the reconstruction
of buildings and a population. Nonetheless, bureaucrats ad-
mitted to me informally that their decisions about who to
allow to remain typically turned on residents' ability to pro-
duce expressive culture or their skill in maintaining patron-
age relations with politicians or IPAC leaders.
Perhaps even more significant in terms of histories of
Brazil as well as the state's deployment of social scientific
data to justify the urban reforms, ethnographic accounts
and surveys of everyday habits and household practices
make up the bulk of IPAC's archival holdings today. The
restoration has thus given birth to primary sources pro-
duced in the sorts of interactions between state and citizen
with which I opened this article and that stand as the raw
material of future histories (Trouillot 1994). This standing
reserve is critical to the factual bases and, thus, the content
and shapes, of still-unwritten histories of Bahia and Brazil.
Additionally, IPAC's archive plays an important ideological
Figure 3. The hustle and bustle of reconstruction efforts on the Pelour-
role, as it appears to grant content to stories of Brazilian-
inho's Praca da Sé. A portion of the archaeological site discussed in this
ness enacted in narratives and in the streets of the histor-
article is covered by the tent at bottom right. ical center. In the process, it helps cover up the fact that
the Pelourinho is largely devoid of inhabitants and, thus, as
noted by foreign consultants invited to assess the restora-
In 1992 the Bahian state, through IPAC, initiated a tion project in the late 1990s, lacks the "life" that UNESCO
$100-million reform designed to produce citizens, to attract presents as essential to the smooth functioning and authen-
capital to a Bahia supposedly made modern and demo- ticity of historical centers.8 This is significant in relation to
cratic through its exhibition of blackness, and to support the state's and citizens' interest in the "phantasms" (fan-
the Bahian political establishment's attempts to take con- tasmas) I introduce above in sketching Malaquias 's and his
trol of national politics. The plan emphasized a reconstruc- neighbors' attempts to manufacture people - to inflate the
tion of Brazil around its first major settlement, the Pelour- numbers of residents of their abodes, as recorded by their
inho; the celebration of the nation's African roots; and the state's ethnographers - and so attract higher indemnifica-
economic progress this redevelopment would spur. If mod- tions.
ernist, rectilinear Brasilia had been the nationalist project As culture has grown increasingly fungible, anthro-
par excellence of the 1950s, by the 1990s a form of de- pologists have come to pay significant attention to the
velopment based on the reconstruction and marketing of phenomenon of "being ourselves for you," or the self-
baroque roots associated with minority populations had re- objectifications so important to the performance of iden-
placed the future-oriented teleologies made concrete by the tity under neoliberal multiculturalism.9 Yet, because of the
new national capital's construction some four decades ear- removal of the majority of the Pelourinho's pre- 1992 pop-
lier (Holston 1989). ulation, the Bahian historical center is not, like a colo-
The conservative political coalition that ran Bahia nial Williamsburg filled with professionals in period cos-
through much of the 1990s and oversaw the Pelourinho's tumes, most effectively analyzed in relation to paid actors'
reconstruction was defeated at the polls in 2006, leading to performance of history (Handler and Gable 1997). Rather,
a situation today in which a more social-justice-oriented the exhibitions of selves and associated truth claims as
government has begun to rethink its approach to public deployed by a myriad of actors from the state, the com-
culture. Nonetheless, the fact remains that over the last munity, and Brazilian and international civil society draw
20 years, IPAC separated the more than 5,000 people resi- content and verity from IPAC's research and its resultant
6B7
archive of community practices. They do so explicitly, as in on the 'sex,' they'd say, 'Hey, you're gonna ask my sex, aren't
the redeployment or republishing of data produced since you?' They already knew all the questions by heart."
the institution's establishment in 1967, and implicitly, by Stereotyped interactions with IPAC increased and
mobilizing an archival gravity that authorizes the institu- shifted during the 1990s, as architects measured build-
tion's pronouncements and attempts to delineate "prop- ings and anthropologists maintained censuses in prepara-
erly historical subjects." By this, I mean that the rigor with tion for indemnifications. Residents moved, died, went to
which IPAC conducted its studies provides an archive-as- prison, found new jobs, and went on vacation only to re-
empirical-base that supports the production of ghostly fig- turn and demand inclusion in the latest census. Many in-
ures, people who self-consciously perform the role of pop- vited relatives to live with them to augment indemnifica-
ular actors, in a neighborhood essentially without a populations. The population would swell when word went out that
tion engaged in the supposedly unmarked, everyday duties IPAC was registering households. Many residents switched
IPAC presents as an enduring cultural tradition that defines addresses, accompanying the rhythms of IPAC's movement
Brazil. I turn now to the production of these ethnographic through the neighborhood and, thus, collecting multiple
data and their redeployment in a variety of contexts. Such payments. I know of many people who received three in-
co-constructions of a culture's and a people's ostensibly en- demnifications and one - a capoeirista who, tellingly, car-
during content are critical to the ways transnational dreams ried the nickname Dois de Olho (TWo Are Necessary to Keep
of accumulation and concepts of racial identity have taken an Eye on Me) - who received four.10 By 1996, IPAC began
form around the bureaucratic management, or cultiva- to attempt to limit people to a single payment. In response,
tion, of a population configured as a valuable sign of the residents employed multiple identities to confound the new
nation's and the African Diaspora's histories by means of its limitation, and by 1997 the institution found it necessary to
archived, absent presence. photograph all those it indemnified.
Attempts to quantify and manage the population pro-
duced contradictory effects, suggesting the extent to which
the state is not a seamless front as well as the ways that
Producing properly historical subjects
resultant facts and archetypes have been appropriated by
In 1967, the Bahian state began a project intended to up- people aware of their special, patrimonialized status. First,
lift the community and to make residents as representative in emphasizing the difficulty of the reconstruction, of the al-
of the nation as Pelourinho buildings. As described by IPAC terity of a population for the most part removed, the Bahian
directors, if the most Brazilian of architecture was to be re- government sought to show its dedication to restoring the
cuperated as a sign of an autochthonous essence, then in- region's former luster. But in the process, Bahian memo-
habitants' inner selves also needed to be revealed because ries of the Pelourinho became tied to the population re-
Afro-Brazilians, like buildings, required polishing, restora- moved. As a result, the history of the redemption of people
tion, and forms of care that would allow their true beauty to and buildings continues to frighten the "respectable" mid-
shine through. Given this Lamarckian goal, the Bahian statedle classes, reminding them of previous decades' immoral-
established what is today known as IPAC. Residents sim- ity. In this memorializing, which reduces its revenues by
ply called it "the Patrimony." Directed by its bylaws at the discouraging the bourgeoisie's visits, the Bahian state nev-
rescue of buildings and the care of archives, IPAC instead ertheless supports the myth of racial democracy by locat-
began its activities with research aimed at prostitutes and ing blackness in the historical center, in the past. It per-
their families. Patrimony, in the Pelourinho, was thus, frompetuates one of the dominant tropes of racial democracy,
the time of IPAC's inception, as much about humans, their that is, a movement away from blackness through a progres-
state-directed moral evaluation in relation to economic and sive whitening, or, understood slightly differently, through
sexual practices, and their purported recuperation as it was the definition of the brown and the modern in contradis-
about monuments and buildings. tinction to the African that lies in history but not in the
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, questionnaires, future.
soup kitchens, medical posts, handicraft projects, and By wrapping residents in the ritualized activity of social
friendships between IPAC employees and residents made scientific study and indemnification, IPAC also strength-
working-class Afro-Brazilians intimate with at least one of- ened these people's links to heritage. One of the most
fice of the Brazilian state, and vice versa. As Jeferson Bacelar, salient results has been that current and former Pelour-
the head of IPAC field research in the late 1970s and now inho residents, already familiar with IPAC, began to de-
a professor of socicil sciences at the Federal University of clare themselves - like Malaquias, with whom I opened
Bahia, told me in 1998, "The population became expert in this discussion - both patrimony and social scientists. They
social scientific research . . . IPAC did so many quantitative have become, in their view, both a collective object of the
studies . . . they were so used to researchers that when ... the nation and the group of technicians who produce that
questionnaire was like 'name, sex, age' and . . . you passed object.
GOB
having seized social science? On one level, it suggests that

the historical center, if examined as a process and not a
fixed form, is much more than an ethnographic theme
park that supports a status quo or imperfectly reifies an
everyday life that those "in the know" may thus mourn
(Brumann 2009). Such perspectives configure anthropolo-
gists as powerful and residents as heroically resistant yet
in need of "our" social science. They also partake of that
tired trope that typically fascinates metropolitan audiences,
namely, the local who mimics cosmopolitan styles, ways of
being, and knowledges (Taussig 1992). With these points in
mind, I turn to the stories of skeletons and treasure that
became common around the Pelourinho during the late
1990s. Rather than simply folkloric misidentifications, naive
attempts to make sense of a bewildering storm of history
Figure 4. Gueto residents, personal archives in hand, meet IPAC repre-
and capital, or even insightful readings of capitalism and
sentatives seeking to negotiate their removal from the Gueto.
cultural heritage management, such stories are productive
of real political change on the basis of their impact on the
In the historical center, one commonly hears, "I'm re- problem of referential ambiguity, and its relationship to his-
searching you" ( estou lhe pesquisando, viu!) as a warning tory, that is so much a part of Brazilian racial politics.
that a person is keeping another under watch. I have never
heard this expression from any Bahians other than current
and former inhabitants of the Pelourinho. People also point
Melted gold and community possessions
out that facts and histories can be produced through "re-
search." They laugh at IPAC attempts to do so, but they I first heard tales of treasure and skeletons in 1992. Resi-
also weave stories in rhetorics and through methods very dents claim that the stories have circulated since at least the
similar to IPAC 's. Residents joke that they are historiadores late 1970s, so today's accounts are not a brand-new genre.
(historians), slurring the first syllable so that the word also And anthropologists have long documented tales of trea-
means storytellers or spinners of tall tales (estoriadores). sure and secret tunnels as means by which people demon-
Such skills have been useful for staking claims. But in mak- strate their superior or privileged knowledge or ownership
ing this point, I do not simply celebrate resistance. Rather, of land (Briggs 1988). But my ethnography of the neigh-
I struggle to understand how the erudite and the popular, borhood, conducted since 1993, suggests the mid-1990s re-
a state and a citizenry, past and present, and racial and eth- forms helped spur an explosion in the detail and frequency
nic belonging are mutually if unequally constituted at a mo- of such stories. This spiraling concern with what is masked,
ment of rupture in long-standing ways of imagining Brazil with what lies beneath the visible, reveals residents' growing
and the role of a populace in economic "progress." interest in the hidden bases of the historical center and in
Of the approximately one thousand three hundred understanding their state's writing of a supposedly shared
families resident in the Pelourinho in 1992, only between history through the appropriation of their ways of being.
150 and 200 have managed to remain in the neighborhood Through repeated talk of slaves who died on the job
in the face of IPAC's shift from an "assistentialism" (asisten- and were sealed up in walls so as not to waste space, and
cialismo) designed to cultivate healthier and more moral of the remains of slave families discovered chained together
producers of Bahian culture to an effort to force out all but a and surrounded by gold, residents speak of corrupt insti-
few while conserving an aura of popular authenticity rooted tutions, heritage authorities' appropriation of bodies, the
in its archive of everyday life. Those who have managed to confiscation of labor and possessions, and the possibility
hold onto homes frequently have done so by claiming social of working-class solidarity. They thus employ skeletons and
scientist status or by using IPAC's techniques against the in- treasure to make sense of the transformation of their neigh-
stitution. They thus keep field notes, maintain dossiers, and borhood and habits into what appear to be mysterious
write questionnaires so they can present arguments about sources of enormous wealth. But rather than simply imag-
themselves and their neighbors when facing the bureau- ining how such alternative accounts of landscapes and his-
cracy. Good ethnographers, they often claim ignorance to tory might undercut official narratives or reveal some sort
draw out others' commentaries and gain new perspectives of interaction construed as a local idiom for making sense
on debates with politicians or IPAC. of capital, I am interested in how official histories and lo-
But what is one to make of this phenomenon of cal "rumors" about what lies under the Pelourinho's squares
working-class Afro-Bahians with little formal education bleed into and inform one another in ways that support
689
Figure 5. Skeletons on the Praca da Sé, Apríl 1999. Figure 6. University student employed by Salvador's municipal govern-
ment "explains" the skeletons to visitors, April 1999.
sanctioned histories and that promise to alter the condi-

tions of possibility for political action in Bahia. that of heritage authorities to assert he was a "field archi-
In March of 1999, IPAC restored the Praça da Sé, the tect" (arquiteto de campo) as he stood in the archaeological
Pelourinho's largest square, the site of Brazil's first cathe- site and explained it to onlookers. This official-sounding
dral, and the seat of ecclesiastical power during the colo- job, according to archaeologists and foremen in charge
nial period. Begun in 1524, the cathedral was torn down in of the Praça da Sé excavations, does not exist. In daily
1933 at the behest of an English streetcar company. Its re- conversations with residents from whom they purchased
mains were thus hidden from view until the 1999 reforms, lunch, coffee, and cigarettes, workers like the field architect
when excavating workers came across approximately one would talk about techniques for dating bones, for analyzing
hundred human skeletons. IPAC removed half to the Mu- skeletal marks supposedly produced by manacles, and,
seum of Archaeology and Ethnology but left the others in especially, about what they perceived as extensive evidence
situ, as part of the historical center. of kinship among the skeletons.
On the night of the inauguration of the renovated Praça In August of 1999, amidst snowballing stories of skele-
da Sé, tourist police and university students explained that tons and treasure in the Pelourinho, I traveled to Salvador's
the bones were those of Portuguese nobles, buried close to working-class suburb of Simões Filho to discuss the Histor-
God and the center of Brazil. However, that same night, the ical Center's transformations with Dona Aidil and Seu Joel,
public - a mix of Pelourinho residents and mostly working- a couple who had lived in the Pelourinho throughout the
class Bahians from throughout Salvador-began reject- 1980s and early 1990s. Dona Aidil had sold cigarettes, liquor,
ing these claims. They clambered into the gravesites and and candies to passersby and workers from a stand directly
screamed out alternatives in rhetorics remarkably similar adjacent to where the bones were discovered in 1999.
to those politicians had employed moments before in offi- In November of 1997, Aidil and Joel accepted a R$3,000
cially opening the plaza. Over the next several days, Pelour- IPAC indemnification in return for their house in the Pelour-
inho residents began to argue that the discovery revealed inho's Ladeira da Misericórdia.11 The rear wall of their
the truth of their knowledge of their soil. They claimed that colonial-era home had backed up against the ground in
the bones were the remains of slaves and that IPAC had which the skeletons were discovered in 1999. When I vis-
stolen the treasure it had discovered among the remains. ited them in Simões Filho, Joel and Aidil told me about their
In support of the insight that "dead bodies animate late 1980s hunt for skeletons and treasure while living in a
the study [and practice] of politics" (Verdery 1999:23), different Pelourinho building. Joel claimed that he had dis-
residents would duck under ropes cordoning off the graves covered a panel in the wall of his family's rented room. After
and "explain* the site to visitors. It is thus significant that he became sure that it hid treasure, he began digging, dis-
one construction worker - a member of a group com- lodging bricks "like those of a catacomb." Neighbors, look-
posed mainly of men from rural regions and peripheral ing through floorboards, warned the landlord, who evicted
neighborhoods that my research indicates became quickly the family. Whether Aidil and Joel left because of his dig-
integrated into neighborhood life on the basis of meals, ging or because of other quarrels with the owner, for whom
accommodations, and interests shared with similarly they sold sugar cane liquor and beer on a consignment ba-
working-class, Afro-Bahian Pelourinho residents- sis, they never put their hands on any treasure. Yet their
employed a language of technical expertise reminiscent of story of a hunt for gold in a home from which they were
IN
Joel's account of turning the gold he believed lay un-

der his house into circulating money points to the indem-
nification process as a conversion of homes and habits into
community possessions. This took place at a moment when
the Bahian state was confiscating those possessions and the
Brazilian state was offering the nation's heritage on an in-
ternational marketplace. In this way, Joel's desire to enrich
himself by melting down and distributing the gold suggests
his understanding of heritage preservation as a processs
that transforms everyday objects into the inalienable prop-
erty of the nation, which nonetheless uses those objects to
generate earnings at a neoliberal or postneoliberal moment
when culture is conceived of as a resource. Joel wishes he
could undo this patrimonialization and thus partake of the
riches he believes are located unfairly at the level of the col-
lectivity, just out of his reach. As he makes clear, he is not
worried about the nation-state. He is not worried about pre-
serving collective property but, rather, about his rights to
individualize and transform this patrimony into circulating
money. He wishes he could dig down and extract the fruits
of an apparently preserved slave labor, seemingly appropri-
ated and frozen for a while by the state, from the public do-
main even as the state also extracts them through its pecu-
liar form of cultural heritage management. In this Bahian
form of "restoring" the past, the practices of people like Joel
fill archives with a vitality that comes to animate histories
of Brazil that draw on such repositories as sources of data
and human personages, which are in turn valuable to the
state's culture industry. But most of all, Joel is concerned
with the confiscation of his home and with his forced move
to a faraway location that no longer permits him to fix rich
Figure 7. In 1994, Dona Aidil, flanked by her daughter and neighbor, people's televisions or his wife to maintain her cigarette
offers cigarettes and candy at her stand near the Praca da Sé site at which stand.
treasure and skeletons would be uncovered in 1999.
Unlike Joel, who claims that the patrimony must be
broken up and put back into circulation, his former neigh-
bor Malaquias understands himself and his representation
in social scientific questionnaires as a form of patrimony
evicted serves as an allegory for their later removal from that attracts money, empowering him to demand payment
the Pelourinho during reforms designed to restore the trea- for the knowledge that IPAC has produced about him and
sured neighborhood to its former glory. that he appropriates as a part of his self-construction.
On the second day that we discussed treasure, skele- Malaquias frequently curses IPAC employees as thieves who
tons, and the family's move from the city center, Seu Joel profit from his essence as a part of the Pelourinho. In do-
sold the freezer he had bought with his 1997 indemnifica- ing so, he presents himself as akin to a capital that pro-
tion and commented, duces interest, one of capitalism's central myths. Yet this
special, fictive, status emboldens him and provides him
with arguments that support his desire to remain in and
After we left, IPAC . . . dug down and found a chest to profit from the Pelourinho as a type of living treasure.
stuffed with gold coins. They found a gold crown. And
Unlike Joel and Aidil, who received a pittance in return for
a gold braid ... I'd have been rich if I had gotten a hold
their exclusion, Malaquias inhabits the state's commemora-
of that gold. I wouldn't have given it to anyone, no way!
What damned state?!? It would have been mine, mine! tions of Afro-Bahianness and takes hold of what he argues,
Nobody was going to know. I'd melt it all . . . I'd sell it in the language of that state, is rightfully his. I point this
in little pieces. Today here, tomorrow there, afterwards out not to claim that he is somehow exploiting his identity
out that way. I'd never sell it all in one place. I'd just sell but to reveal how his own self-understanding and politics
small pieces little by little. Melted gold! as a "big black guy from the Pelourinho" emerge from an
ВП
at times conflictive, but nonetheless oftentimes shared, di- ically involved statements like, "Well, I'm brown, but I can
alogue with his state's projects and representations. understand their position, we're being treated like slaves to-
In this unequal engagement, residents employ skele- day." However, in May and June, a larger group of people
tons to critique IPAC, the institution that took their homes from working-class suburbs began to claim, "Those people
and worked to make some people into patrimony while ex- were slaves. I know because we black people know those
iling others. This distinction between different members of sorts of things."
a population configured as living signs of the nation's roots As I note above, to argue for a specialized knowledge
points to new types of differentiations in communities en- of the past on the basis of a public declaration that one is a
tering into the world system, not for the first time - the black descendent of slaves is to contradict dominant claims
Pelourinho was formed in the Atlantic triangle trade - but in the literature on race in Brazil. According to most 20th-
as capital more effectively colonizes arenas of everyday life. century studies, Brazilians of a variety of social positions
It illustrates also how IPAC, while working to make people have sought, at a number of junctures since 1889 eman-
into patrimony, has helped residents appropriate the meth- cipation, to deny a racialized relationship to slavery and,
ods of social science. These augment the frequency, reach, thus, blackness as a historical marker of that status (Cas-
and truth of popular accounts of Pelourinho soils and, it tro 1995; Guimarães 2001; Reichmann 1999). Even as this
seems, content-filled cores. is in no way a negation of the existence of intense racism
in Brazil or a denial of Afro-Brazilian political agency, an
emphasis on "color" rather than a conception of race that
Afro-Brazilian genealogies and substantive
operates around ideologies like North America's "one drop"
interiority
rule (Degler 1986; Harris and Kottak 1963) has been most
Although residents interpreted the skeletons as those of salient.12 Yet, in 1999, in front of the remains of Brazil's first
slaves even before the Praça da Sé's inauguration, people cathedral, working-class Bahians from throughout Salvador
from Salvador's periphery who visited for work or diversion stood at their nation's symbolic origin and declared them-
usually offered competing versions of the bones' prove- selves descendants of slaves on the basis of race.
nance. For example, Bahian visitors often argued that the Of course, a generalized reckoning of descent from
skeletons represented victims of recent political feuds and slaves is basic to arguments about race mixture: Despite
that the Pelourinho's patron, Bahia's governor, Antonio Car- salient shifts in people's recognition of racism and a growing
los Magalhães, had hidden them to dispose of evidence move toward claiming blackness (Guimarães 2007; Sansone
of his crimes. However, during May and June of 1999, the 1993; Silva 1995) as well as indigenous ethnicity (Bolaños
dominant version, as enunciated by remaining residents, 2010; Warren 2001), a majority of Brazilians still claim a
their recently displaced neighbors, and visitors from far-off brown identity, which may or may not index African de-
neighborhoods, changed. Most people from working-class scent (Baran 2007; Karam 2007; Nobles 2000; Telles 2006).
bairros (noncentral neighborhoods) began to follow Pelour- They often put forth such a vision of hybrid, brown sta-
inho residents and argue that the bones were the remains of tus around a dimly remembered yet at-times celebrated
African slaves. I understand this shift as one result of resi- interaction between kitchen and master's bedroom. Even
dents' attempt to explain their patrimonialization as well asnoted sociologist and former president of Brazil Fernando
a facet of larger shifts in racial and historical consciousnessHenrique Cardoso infamously referred to this association
going on in Brazil at the turn of the millennium. by stating to reporters in the mid-1990s, "I have one foot
Residents would visit and stand above the bones, chal-in the kitchen." Yet the banalization of a violent relation-
lenging official interpreters and arguing to the crowds thatship between female domestics and male slave owners that
flocked to the site that these remains were evidence of a has played a pivotal role in modern Brazilianness has come
slavery made tangible in IPAC policies. Over the course
under increasing scrutiny during the Pelourinho reforms
and across Brazil over the last two decades. This has oc-
of these discussions, which I observed almost daily over
curred in the Pelourinho in ways that are not reducible to
a period of months, many visitors from distant neighbor-
hoods would eventually identify the skeletons as slaves
disputes over the invention of different traditions or to a
but nonetheless deny their own genealogical relations to simple challenging of facts and histories enacted by op-
them. Their attitude contrasted with that of Pelourinho positional social movements in a historical center: Rather,
inhabitants who, tightly involved with IPAC, visitors from recent alterations in long-standing racial ideologies predi-
throughout the African Diaspora, and neighborhood social cated on appearance in the present have come to turn on a
movements like the Afrocentric carnival group and resi- recognition of historical continuity. This means of relating
dents' association Olodum, would claim formal or direct signs and evidence turns not on additional facts or clearer
equivalence to, and descent from, the bodies entombed in knowledge about sexual violence but around a semiotic
buildings and plazas. Meanwhile, arguments about slavery orientation toward, or an ability to link, specific types of
and history put together by those from periurban areas typ- facts to interpretations that posit a direct and continuous
812
relationship between signs and their objects. In other racial consciousness that might take appearance into ac-
words, how, rather than with what particular data, one faces count as an explicit mark of descent, and thus corporate
the past and makes claims on it is critical to changing per- identity. Furthermore, in the possession and trance-based
ceptions of personhood and racial belonging: In Brazil to- Afro-Bahian religion known as Candomblé, the transmis-
day, a tendency to recognize race as something that is more sion of axé , or spirit, is a basic link in the genealogical rela-
than "skin deep" is growing alongside a number of different tionships between temples and religious practitioners. This
ways of figuring content or claiming historical continuity. axé is a word commonly used in Salvador to refer to the in-
To return to the skeletons: By July 1999, the authorized terior of persons, and a number of students of Candomblé
interpreters hired by city hall who had challenged and "cor- have played important roles in constituting the Pelourinho
rected" citizens seeking answers about the skeletons' prove- as a heritage center. They include at least two former IPAC
nance and the objects uncovered began to recognize the directors. So it would be incorrect to deny the influence of
presence of slaves. There are many reasons their account multiple factors on the claims made about the skeletons as
changed, but here I emphasize simply that it did so in re- remains of slaves. In fact, I am not making a directly causal
lation to vociferous claims about human chattel as enun- argument here. I suggest, instead, that across Brazil a variety
ciated by visitors to the Praça da Sé, and thus that the ru-of realignments in producing truths about pasts and human
mored identity of the remains had now become a sanc- subjectivities unavailable to direct experience have been
tioned reality. The state's belated recognition of those slavescatalyzed by legal (French 2006), philanthropic (Biehl 2007;
seems to be one result of the ascription of identities and theCollins 2008b), and religious debates and ritual grammars.13
intuition of rumored gold that people have used to make These mediate relationships between political-economic
sense of the IPAC-managed gentrification of their neighbor-processes and racial politics in ways that respond to, but
hood and, in some cases, of their bodies and claims to per- never emanate directly from, citizens' clear analysis of the
sonhood. true content of those social relations. Among them seems
What is most significant here is that racial ideologiesto be the creative appropriation of the conventions of so-
cial science and cultural heritage. Pelourinho residents,
and related histories and identities gain traction in light of
emergent forms of governmentality, and accumulation, that as subjects interpellated within a social scientific space
of evaluation that has material effects on the sizes of in-
generate concerns with evidence and its referents and, thus,
with surfaces and depths and presents and pasts. Such rela-demnifications and on those subjects' ability to remain in
tionships, or "dispositions toward the past" (Daniel 1996),the historical center, have thus come to look deep inside
themselves and at their habits as indexes of something
have undergone alteration during the period of the Pelour-
else.
inho's restoration (Collins 2008a). And they are important
to understanding the workings of race in relation to histo- Academics have begun to note, and at times decry, a
burgeoning concern with racial essences portrayed as po-
ries enunciated within the increasingly influential form of
urbanism that turns on the objectications of cultural her- larizing a Brazil supposedly previously immune to such
itage (Price 2006). This is due in no small part to the ex- Manichean divisions justified by relatively fixed ontolog-
tent to which race has long been approached - and so often ical claims. Some have even suggested that this concern
denied - in Brazil as an issue of appearance and perceptionis a result of an imposition of North American-style pol-
rather than as an essentialized biology or genealogical in-itics from abroad (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999), a posi-
heritance, as is more common in North America. In other tion their critics have attacked as empirically unjustified
(Hanchard 2003), illustrative of competing imperial agen-
words, what takes place in the heritage zone is both a factor
in and a symptom of reconfigurations of truth-producing das (French 2000), or a means of marking and thus disqual-
operations fundamental to recent development programsifying the contributions of Afro-descendent scholars (Cald-
well 2007). Thus, the growing fusion of surface signifiers to
based on the specification of the content of national culture
ideas about interior essences - as well as the spiraling ac-
and Afro-Brazilian selves as well as to race's hold on every-
day life and community imaginaries. ceptance of such a model of exterior evidence and interior
Despite my identification of a novel emphasis on ge-being - taking place in multiple social realms is an impor-
nealogical recognition in the Pelourinho of the late 1990stant political issue on a variety of levels. It is also a base-
and to a snowballing racial consciousness directed againstline condition for the operation of racial calculations reliant
long-standing arguments about race mixture, there are aon concepts of interiorized essence and historical transmis-
sion of substance, or ontologies common in understand-
variety of spheres, most notably Afro-Brazilian religiosity,
capoeira, Bahian carnival groups, and even soap operas, ings of race elsewhere in the world (Abu El-Haj 2007, 2008;
in which discussions of slave roots have been salient for Palmié 2008; Pálsson 2007).
decades (Bastide 1978; Downey 2005, Gois Dantas 2009; My approach to and conclusions about race and her-
Rodrigues 1996; Santos 1986). At the same time, Brazil's itage respond to this insight even as they do not un-
Black Movement (MNU) has worked diligently to foster a dermine the observation that- especially in Brazil- racial
693
identification is usually contested, negotiated, and situa- historical center, an archive of "popular" practices thought
tional (McCallum 2006; Sansone 2003; Sheriff 2001). Such to authenticate it, and thus a self-conscious gesturing at a
a bifocal perspective, which encompasses essentializations history with a clearly malleable content that I dub "proper
as well as relativity, arises from a consideration of the his- historicity" because of its relationship to the forms of self-
torically specific and materially significant presuppositions presentations and self-cultivation coproduced by residents
that govern interpretation: In Salvador's Pelourinho of the and IPAC in the Pelourinho. These incitements toward a
1990s, a heritage-based protection and resuscitation of ob- concern with self are central to IPAC's social scientific-
jects thought to conjure up a community's authentic origins based cleansing and culling of an Afro-Brazilian popula-
has generated a popular concern with that which lies un- tion configured as unruly, immoral, and tinged with pros-
derneath the visible and antecedent to the present. titution. They produce semiotic alignments that attune
The details of the production of history are critical to the Bahian state's heritage-making techniques to the tech-
alterations in Brazilian racial consciousness in a region long niques through which residents argue for the right to stay
configured as Brazil's African heart and described by Bahia's on in the restored Pelourinho. Yet such means of knowing
minister of culture and education as "this generous and and representing selves and supposedly shared histories on
brown mother, who shelters in her wide lap all of our ances- the basis of evidence about morality and everyday cultural
tral secrets" (IPAC 1997:preface) . They are likewise key to my practices are predicated on a fiction of content or substance
implicit refutation of a simple model of cultural influence basic to worldwide patrimony programs (Ferry 2005; Han-
whereby foreign racial ideologies would symbolically infect dler 1991). If culture is something that nations and modern
a Brazil supposedly lacking the sharp lines so well known peoples are thought to possess, a racial substance that en-
in the United States or South Africa (Marx 1998; Skidmore dures and is passed down, like biological material, might
1993). As I mention at the outset of this article, Keane (2003, also begin to appear natural. Such a development is quite
2007) describes contests over competing moral economies novel, and politically significant, in a Brazil where "the racial
as "semiotic ideologies," or those specific and historically common sense . . . historically rejected the notion of a par-
shifting presuppositions about how signs signify. He does ticularist racial group membership as legitimate building
so by examining the imbrications of words and objects in blocks of national community" (Bailey 2009:215).
encounters in the colonial Indies through which Protestant
missionaries sought to define the proper relationships be- Conclusion
tween words, things, and people's inner states. This take
on propriety, a word that evokes Pelourinho-based contests My argument about the perceptual and communicative
over patrimony, which is a form of public property, as well vectors through which Bahians from different neighbor-
as state attempts to evaluate residents' moral statuses to de- hoods have come to link claims about noticeable phenom-
termine whether they may remain in a restored historical ena to putatively enduring and shared essences rests on
center carved out of a former red-light zone, helps resituate the observation that racial logics, even when not about bi-
Fenella Cannell's observation that the "contemporary belief ological traits, carry with them vestiges of visual relation-
in sexuality as the key and hidden foundational truth about ships. By this I mean that racialized truths, which are at base
identity grows . . . out of the Christian sacrament of confes- claims about what people are "really" like deep within selves
sion" (2006:19). In this light, insights into religious conver- construed as knowable through careful perusal of surface
sion might be brought to bear on neoliberal techniques mo- signs like skin color, hair, skull size - or even dress, musical
bilized by a Bahian state that, drawing on decades of investi- taste, and domestic arrangements - require specific means
gation of the stigmatized habits of a Pelourinho populace it of linking the visible to the invisible (Stoler 1997). I have
configured as sexually suspect, seeks to produce sanitized, argued above that such suppositions, understood as sub-
folkloric, and properly historical subjects who might popu- sets of what an earlier anthropology might have called "cos-
late a UNESCO World Heritage site. And it is this attempt to mologies," function to align evidence and claims about the
fashion properly historicized citizens out of decades of be- world. And I have sought to show how such representational
haviors coded as improper that I find so productive of new vehicles emanate, at base, from lived engagements with
insights into shifts in racial consciousness. momentuous changes wrought within a UNESCO World
IPAC's ethnographic endeavors since the late 1960s Heritage program in Brazil.
have functioned for residents as a type of confession or At a moment when a population has come to pro-
a ritualized interaction predicated on forms of moral- duce value not simply through labor on the shop floor
ity and a concern with individual reflection produced in or in cane fields but around representations of everyday
the spaces between socially and institutionally differen- habits packaged as alienable culture, the management of
tiated participants. Over the last two decades, this in- a people's practices and identities has come to play a cen-
teraction has come to function as a powerful means of tral role in development programs around the world. And
self-presentation and self-objectification generative of a if such objectifications produced by states are not simply
894
metaphysical entities or arbitrary signs of something else tween racial identities, narrative accounts of the past, and
but, like commodities themselves, formative vectors for the nation- states arises from somewhere.
constitution of social relations, then it appears that the The somewhere to which I refer, and that I seek out in
patrimonialized objects and the black Bahians who attract the wake of anthropology's late 20th-century deconstruc-
money to the Pelourinho do much to support not only the tions of histories' facticity and teleologies, races' natural
bourgeoisie's profits but also the parameters of truth and or biological bases, and nations' putatively primordial or-
falsity, authenticity and inauthenticity, and belonging and ganicism, might be located in the naturalized assumptions
expulsion from the polity. Such a claim about residents' that govern perception. This is clearly a cultural argument.
roles in the constitution of Brazil and its political-economic Yet it is frequently overlooked in historians' and ethnogra-
"goods" is not simply a recognition of the importance of phers' perhaps too-rapid assertions that people like Pelour-
the conduct of conduct and, thus, what Michel Foucault inho residents, as rational subaltern actors, seize hold of
dubbed "biopower" and "governmentality." Rather, it sug- culture as a discrete medium easily mobilizable as a tool
gests the extent to which the democratic yet often ignored for economic empowerment (Chesnut 2007; Comaroff and
imperative that states attend to the health and well-being Comaroff 2009; DeHart 2010). Despite Malaquias's clear in-
of their populaces and the historically specific relationship sights into sources of value and his state's efforts, he has
between land, governments, and "peoplehood" (Waller- emphasized to me repeatedly that he understands only a
stein 1991) so important to postcolonial Latin American re- small part of the roiling abstractions and distortions that
publics, have helped configure the ground of political be- surround him. But, in an attempt to survive and to increase
longing and individual and collective identities in relatively this understanding, he provokes and tests. As his former
new ways. And this terrain is constitutive of important shifts neighbor Lula, a community leader now squatting in a ru-
in a Brazil that is booming not only economically but also in ined building in south London, told me, "I'm like a spider.
relation to the provision of formal rights to a citizenry too What counts is that I build my web. I can do it anywhere, in
often denied those rights (Holston 2008). Yet my ethnog- any corner. I need only build my web to survive." Similarly,
raphy of history, and thus of racial identification and the "Caboré," another of Malaquias's former neighbors and one
semiotic ideologies through which pasts and presents enter of Salvador's most successful street-level marijuana dealers,
into dialogue, illustrates something else. who managed to build a brand around his pyramid- shaped
Citizens' attempts to explain mystifications often draw packaging of the herb, once confided to me, "John, I really
on cultural repertoires that describe multiple forms of ex- don't know where this [contestation of IPAC] is going. I don't
ploitation or domination, including sexual inequality, as even know what I want from the state besides a better deal
"intertwined modalities of domination are mirrored in which may involve money, or buildings, or I dunno [sei la] .
stories that mix symbols or levels but that, in using .I .just
. know that if I push and push something's gonna pop
metaphor . . . employ a commonly available idiom or in-up. It might hurt me, and make me run, or it might be good.
terpretive framework" (Edelman 1994:61). This critique But ofI'll only know by pushing."
analyses that posit neat alignments between exploitation A reader familiar with Brazil might recognize the state-
ments above as related to the bricolage, making do, and
and the vocabularies used in its analysis or contestation
infamous tricksterdom (malandragem) so often construed
(Taussig 1983) might be augmented through an emphasis
as signs of Brazilianness (Da Matta 1991). Whether such
on the materiality of sign vehicles and a more internally dif-
claims about what defines Brazil are really true is not im-
ferentiated, yet nonetheless patterned, approach to signifi-
portant here because, over the course of the 20th century,
cation's cultural predispositions. I have sought to perform
something along those lines in relation to invocations peoples
of and states acted on and came to know and rep-
treasure and skeletons. I have done so not in terms of vo- resent themselves through them. Thus, they have become
cabularies but by drawing on the alignments of naturalized true. But what is important is that thousands of people in
suppositions that govern how signification is produced. Salvador's downtown managed to survive and to argue for
Such an updating of a concern with meaning as a consti- sovereignty in ways that often ignored the materiality of
tutive aspect of capitalism and its contestation, together territory, at least in terms of possessive logics. This is not
with the recognition that market-based "development" al- to say that, as a result of some subaltern astuteness, they
ters in remarkably complex ways the very forms and reg- have fashioned the correct answer to questions regarding
isters of representation available to a populace, helps clar- the linkages between politics, objectified culture, and con-
ify how and why, in late 20th-century Bahia, movements trol of landed property like the Pelourinho. It is to argue, in-
in democratic governance, the marketization of vernacu- stead, that the very vectors through which human percep-
lar practices as a regionally branded and ethnically marked tion or action in the world and entities like territory or stone
form of culture, and states' and citizens' coproduction of buildings are mediated and made meaningful stand as crit-
tradition seem to have moved in concert in the Pelourinho. ical and material bases of consubstantiation, survival, and
They have done so in part because a path convergence be- politics.
695
But does the paragraph above simply reiterate an epis- panionship in marriage to an emphasis on inner states and emo-
teme essential to the configuration and reach of UNESCO tive connection in the nearby northeastern Brazilian state capi-
tal of Recife - a city that has long vied with Salvador for regional
sites today, namely, a very North American culturalism, a
preeminence - see Rebhun 1999. Although not concerned with in-
concern with knowledge as power, and an anthropological ner states or intimacy, Annette Liebing and Sybille Benninghoff-
fascination with relativizing and recognizing cultural differ- Lèuhl (2001) discuss a growing concern with social memory in
ence that has helped give rise to a burgeoning form of cargo late 20th-century Brazil, a point supported in Alexander Dent's
cult called the "cultural heritage center"? Perhaps. Yet it also (2009) sensitive study of rural nostalgia and Brazilian country
music.
suggests that, for example, when race becomes genealogi-
4. In other words, I do not accept as true the 20th-century ideo-
cal and illustrative of a shared substance rather than sim-
logical bases of Brazilian nationalism or the contention that Brazil
ply a shared experience, the ways one builds and activatesis a mixed-race nation in which, because of a history of miscegena-
tion, racial identities are somehow more situational, less salient,
one's webs and their results also change. How such shifts in
and hence more mutable than they are elsewhere in the world.
perception and communication take place seems an impor-
Nonetheless, such claims are a powerful part of the constitution of
tant reason to continue an engaged ethnography of the con-
modern Brazil. For examples of this nationalist discourse, see espe-
ditions and specific guises under and within which capital
cially Freyre 1963 and 1986.
flows through spaces, bodies, and thus the particular types 5. In popular as well as much social scientific thought, Brazil
of semiotic vehicles and communicative relations consti- appears insistently as a "nation of the future," characterized by
an emphasis on play, on surfaces, and on a creative ability to
tuted through such movement. After all, the vectors or vehi-
cles through which agreements and collisions become real,invert or undermine rather than inhabit existing social cate-
gories in a fixed manner. Roberto da Matta (1991, 1997) is per-
apparent, and thus material seem to have made race sub-
haps most illustrative of this tendency even as he emphasizes
stantive, in novel ways, in Bahia today. that such ideological representations are in many ways a func-
tion of an extremely hierarchical society. Yet, since the election
in 2002 of President Luis Ignácio "Lula" da Silva and his succes-
sor Dilma Roussef in 2010, state-directed challenges to, if not al-
Notes leviation of, glaring inequities suggests that certain of the gird-
ers of 20th-century Brazilianness may be undergoing alteration
Acknowledgments . Fieldwork for this article was made possi- today.
ble by support from the National Science Foundation, Fulbright, 6. Sansone's statement of Brazil's racial dilemma runs contrary
Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and PSC- to Robin E. Sheriff's (2001) compelling argument that working-
CUNY. Ann Stoler, Ordep Serra, Thomas Abercrombie, Vagner class Brazilians have long understood race in terms of black-white
Gonçalves da Silva, James Herron, Jane Schneider, Esra Özyürek, dichotomies and that this result of the historical experience of
Núbia Bento Rodrigues, Fred Meyers, Julie Skurski, two anonymous discrimination gives rise to corporate identities quite similar to
reviewers from American Ethnologist , and, especially, Fernando those in the United States, even as Brazilian linguistic and so-
Coronil, all offered valuable comments on versions of this article. cial conventions mean that such affiliation is normally unvoiced
I dedicate it to Fernando. All misinterpretations and misrepresen- or not proclaimed in public. Sheriff's claims, which contrast with
tations remain the author's responsibility. much research on Brazilian racial politics but nonetheless are
1. Dona Aidil is drawing on a popular figure of speech here. "De- relatively consistent with the politics of black activists in Brazil over
baixo do pano," literally, beneath the cloth, is an expression com- the last 30 years, are germane to my argument. This is because they
monly used for any hidden or unknown process revealable by lift- point at the importance of reference, and semiotic conventions, to
ing its veil. When employed in conjunction with references to food, the functioning of racial ideologies as well as the conceptualiza-
it conjures an image of the hot lunches day laborers (bóias frias) tions of identity advocated by many of the actors involved in the
on Bahian plantations carry in pots and jars covered by scrubbed struggle for civil rights today. And this, in turn, provides helpful
white cloths in the absence of expensive wraps. roads into understanding how race may appear essentialized or di-
2. Cultural heritage is both a thing and a process - the term chotomizing, as well as situational, in Brazil today.
describes a landmarking or setting off via legal fiat and ritual of 7. My mention of Afro-Brazilian women who migrate to city cen-
objects and practices that thus become configured as the shared ters for economic reasons alongside women fleeing the violence
property of a given community. At an international level, it is over- of Eastern European pogroms, whose association with prostitution
seen by UNESCO and the International Committee on Monuments rendered them not quite white, draws on histories of the gendered
and Sites (ICOMOS). Nonetheless, these institutions simply sug- construction of Latin American nationhood. See Guy 1991 for a dis-
gest policies and oversee associations, and individual nation-states cussion of Argentine nation-state formation in relation to attempts
or regional governments are ultimately responsible for the content to control immigrant women in Buenos Aires and Rago 1987, 1991
and ongoing management of heritage objects. for a consideration of similar processes in São Paulo and Rio de
3. Social scientific claims about a growing emphasis on individ-
Janeiro. Rama 1996 analyzes the role of Atlantic port cities' fad-
uality and on inner states are a hallmark of studies of moderniza-
ing colonial downtown precincts in the gendered interactions crit-
tion, transitions to capitalism, and the analysis of liberal democ-
ical to the development of a particularly Latin American intimate
racy. I recognize the extent to which the gloss of shifts in person-
public sphere, a process retold in the first person in Gabriel Garcia
hood I have noted in the last two decades in the Pelourinho and Márquez's novella Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2006).
among working-class Bahians reflects common observations about 8. Copies of the working papers may be found online in Spanish,
modernity and individualization around the world. Yet my ethno- French, and Portuguese (see SIRCHAL n.d.).
graphic experiences in Bahia support these claims. For a related 9. On "being ourselves for you," see especially Nick Stan-
discussion of a late 20th-century shift away from economic com- ley's 1998 book of the same title and Elyachar 2006. Agha 2007,
B9B
Vanthuyne 2009, and Warren and Jackson 2002 present fine- Andrade, Mário de
grained discussions of selves, skills, and objectifications not lim- 1984 Macunaíma. E. A. Goodland, trans. New York: Random
ited to cultural heritage and its affines. Charles R. Hale's concept House.
of "neoliberal multiculturalism" (2002) refers to the exercise or Bailey, Stanley
attempted exercise of legal or formal rights, but not necessarily 2009 Legacies of Race: Identities, Attitudes, and Politics in Brazil.
political-economic power, around identitarian movements today. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
10. Capoeira is an Afro-Brazilian martial art whose Brazilian Baran, Michael
manifestations are usually identified as originating in Bahia. Es- 2007 "Girl, You Are Not a Morena: We Are Negras!": Question-
sential to the "game" are dodges, feints, and obfuscations typical ing the Concept of "Race" in Southern Bahia, Brazil. Ethos
of the Brazilian practice of malandragem, "badness" or "trickster- 35(3):383-409.
dom." On capoeira, see Downey 2005. Bastide, Roger
11. R$3,000 was worth approximately $2,000 at 1999 exchange 1978 The African Religions of Brazil: Toward a Sociology of the In-
rates. terpénétration of Civilizations. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
12. In making the claim that social scientists have long empha-versity Press.
sized color's role in Brazilian racial identification instead of an of- Bauman, Richard
ten legally prescribed sense of corporate and historical belonging 2005 Indirect Indexicality, Identity, Performance: Dialogic Ob-
that is so much a part of U.S. understandings, I am not challenging servations. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1): 145-
the numerous studies put forth since the 1980s that have demon- 150.
strated, despite an absence of U.S.-style categorizations and iden-Biehl, João

tifications, that Afro-Brazilians face a variety of barriers and prej- 2007 Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival.
udices. I work, instead, to contextualize these findings not only by Princeton: Princeton University Press.
demonstrating how different yet eerily familiar U.S. and Brazilian Bolaños, Omaira
racial ideologies really are but also by revealing historically specific 2010 Reconstructing Indigenous Ethnicities: The Arapium and
mechanisms that structure and alter an ethnoracial common sense Jaraqui Peoples of the Lower Amazon, Brazil. Latin American
so basic to modern nationhood. Research Review 45(3):63-86.
13. Issues of authenticity have taken on new significance, and Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc Wacquant
seem to require alterations in the performance of identities, in a1999 On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason. Theory, Culture and
variety of spaces in which ethnoracial markers are made public Society 16(l):41-58.
or commodified in Brazil today (Karam 2007). This is especially Briggs, Charles
salient in Afro -Brazilian Candomblé, a religion that demonstrates 1988 Competence in Performance: The Creativity of Tradition in
a long history of transformations in the roles played by erudite and Mexicano Verbal Art. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
secret knowledge (Matory 2005). Paul Christopher Johnson (2002) Press.
has put forth a fascinating argument about "secretism," or the cul- Brumann, Christopher
tivation of ostensibly secret knowledge associated with particular 2009 Outside the Glass Case: The Social life of Urban Heritage in
means of individualizing identities, at precisely the moment that Kyoto. American Ethnologist 36(2):276-299.
Candomblé 's rituals have become relatively public and, thus, a partBunten, Alexis
of the national heritage I examine in this article in terms of the2008 Sharing Culture or Selling Out? Developing the Commod-
Pelourinho. My own analysis is thus indebted to Johnson's as well ified Persona in the Heritage Industry. American Ethnologist
as Roger Sansi's (2007) nuanced examinations of the circulation of 35(3):380-395.
Burdick, John
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Melted gold and national bodies: The hermeneutics of depth and the value of history in

Brazilian racial politics

American Anthropological Association, Wiley are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,

City University of New York-Queens College and the Graduate Center

Melted gold and national bodies:

side neighborhoods, renting, abandoning, or ceding their

dent in 1992 into those who would remain - because they

having seized social science? On one level, it suggests that

sanctioned histories and that promise to alter the condi-

Joel's account of turning the gold he believed lay un-

strated, despite an absence of U.S.-style categorizations and iden-Biehl, João

Johnson, Paul Christopher Perry, Keisha-Khan

Nogueira, Oracy Silverstein, Michael

Skurski, Julie Indigenous" in Postgenocide Guatemala. PoLAR: Political and

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