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Ethnohistory 49.3 (2002) 703-714



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Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on the Formation of Cultural Identity

Robin M. Wright
Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Brazil)


The Brazilian People: The Formation and Meaning of Brazil. By Darcy Ribeiro. Translated by Gregory Rabassa. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. xviii + 334 pp., preface, introduction, bibliography. $34.95 cloth.)
"Licentious Liberty" in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region: Slavery, Gender, and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Sabará, Minas Gerais. By Kathleen J. Higgins. (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1999. xii + 236 pp., introduction, maps, appendix, bibliography, index. $22.50 paper.)
A Refuge in Thunder: Candomblé and Alternative Spaces of Blackness. By Rachel E. Harding. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. xix + 252 pp., introduction, glossary, appendix, bibliography, index. $39.95 cloth.)
Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil. By Jeffrey Lesser. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. xvi + 282 pp., preface, bibliography, index. $17.95 paper.)
The Heart Is Unknown Country: Love in the Changing Economy of Northeast Brazil. By L. A. Rebhun. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. ix + 297 pp., introduction, maps, appendix, glossary, bibliography, index. $45.00 cloth.)
The Anthropology of Love and Anger: The Aesthetics of Conviviality in Native Amazonia. Edited by Joanna Overing and Alan Passes. (New York: Routledge, 2000. xiv + 305 pp., preface, introduction, bibliographies, index. $85.00 paper.)[End Page 703]

This essay reviews five books on Brazil and one on South American ethnology. Of the first five, the predominant focus is on the historical formation of identity—of the Brazilian people as a whole, of Afro-Brazilian identity, and of three immigrant groups. One study analyzes the nature of love and human relationships in the context of rapid economic change in the contemporary Northeast. Likewise, the collection of essays in South American ethnology focus on the nature of love and anger but among indigenous societies. Numerous themes thus crosscut the six studies. The order in which I shall review the books thus follows both a chronological and thematic sequence.

I begin with the best-known of the Brazilianists, Darcy Ribeiro (1922–97), whose numerous essays and books, including the one under consideration here (The Brazilian People), are classics in the literature. Well known for his studies of indigenous societies, 1 his contributions to theories of cultural evolution, educational policy and, in this essay, his study of Brazilian society and culture as a whole, Ribeiro was certainly one of Brazil's foremost modern-day intellectuals. Yet he was also a politician, a great statesman and patrician, which is evident especially in the introduction and conclusion to the book, strongly tinged with nationalist pride. Thus the reader is told that "Brazil is a national ethnicity, a nation-people . . . Brazilians are integrated into a single national ethnicity . . . a uni-ethnic state" (3). "The only exceptions," he asserts, "are the several tribal microethnicities, so small that their existence does not affect national destiny." 2 Several pages later, he admits that this national homogeneity is an illusion when, in referring to the false consciousness of a "racial democracy," he warns of "potential anarchical convulsions that could well be brought about tomorrow that will set the whole society on fire" (5). Here, and in the conclusion, Ribeiro presents his paradoxical vision of Brazil as a "homogeneous and unified" people, yet a house of cards, a barrel of gunpowder riddled with internal social contradictions and explosive racial and social tensions which, in fact, are becoming ever more evident as time goes on. This is the Brazil that Ribeiro seeks to understand in this interpretive essay, which has been so masterfully translated by Gregory Rabassa.

Despite the numerous and somewhat disconcertingly groundless assertions Ribeiro makes of the early indigenous populations, 3 nevertheless the book offers a mature, anthropological reflection, from a native's point of view, on the ethnic roots of the Brazilian people and what it means to be Brazilian today. As the author states in his preface, the book is the product of nearly thirty years of reflection on these questions, and the final text went through several...

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