The Color of Sound: Race, Religion, and Music in Brazil

Notes

>> 189 Notes Notes to the Introduction 1. In Brazil’s ethnoracial lexicon, morena is translated as “brown.” Widely considered a “positive” term, it has been deployed since the 1930a as a diplomatic way to refer to African ancestry. In contrast, between the 1890s and the 1980s, the term negra, often translated as “black,” carried a negative connotation. Since the 1990s, negra caught on as a term of pride and self-respect. Still, today fewer people with African heritage identify themselves as negros than as moreno, mestiço (mixed), or mulato (mulatto). In the 2010 census, 7.6% of all Brazilians identified themselves as negros, while 43.1% identified themselves as pardo—an artificial census category that no one uses in everyday life but that corresponds for the purpose of the census to all “mixed-race” terms of reference; 47.7% of Brazilians told census takers in 2010 that they were branco (white). For recent, high-quality analyses of Brazil’s still-evolving racial terminological system, see Bailey 2009 and Silva and Reis 2011. 2. While there has been no large-scale survey of differential treatment of siblings by color in Brazil, qualitative evidence suggests a pattern of inequality between sisters of different degrees of darkness. See Sheriff 2001, Burdick 1998b, and P. Pinho 2009. 3. Given the expectation that families should be places of love and acceptance, disapproval of one’s phenotype by close family members is particularly devastating in Brazil. For a broader discussion of intrakin racism, see Wade 2009, 156–160. 4. I use the term racism, for Brazil, to refer to patterned differential treatment and attitudes, supported by powerful institutions, that favor people of European and disfavor people of African and/or indigenous descent. These attitudes and treatment favor people with phenotypes closer to a European “white” ideal and disfavor those whose phenotype reveals African or indigenous descent. See Winant 2001, 317. The terms race, racism, and racial are not at all foreign to Brazilian culture, having been current there since the abolition of slavery. See Dávila 2003, Stepan 1996, and Schwarcz 1999. 5. “Zumbi” is the name normally used to refer to the leader of the major runawayslave community in Pernambuco known in the late seventeenth century as Palmares . In 1693, this leader defended the community against a concerted assault by the massed Portuguese-Dutch military and lost. Legend has it that Zumbi fought a heroic last stand and that after his defeat the conquering Europeans 190 > 191 19. n a similar spirit, leaders of the Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus in Salvador refused to allow anthropologist Steve Selka to conduct interviews with congregants when they discovered that he intended to broach the topic of race. See Selka 2007, 105. 20. The Brazil-based social networking site Orkut currently hosts dozens of virtual communities that identify themselves as having to do with being negro and evangélico, such as Negros Evangélicos, Movimento Negro Evangélico, and 100% Negros Evangélicos. 21. In a recent analysis of affirmative action at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, for example, anthropologist André Cicalo found that many of the black militants he came to meet were evangelical Protestants. See Cicalo 2012. 22. More generally, bodily movement may be regarded as the occasion for the public display of “sexiness,” which indexes, in part, the ability of a group to maintain continuity over generations (i.e., through procreation). Tamara Johnson, for example, suggests that talk about the “naturalness” and “untrained” quality of the On-1 dancers (in contrast to the trained, methodical qualities of the On-2 dancers) moves quickly into talk about the “sexiness” of the former. The idea of “sexiness” evokes ideas of inherency, innateness, inner substances and properties transmissible through procreation. Sexiness is something one can enhance and work on, but it is, ultimately, a feature rather than an achievement of the self. The ethnic-identity dimension of this emerges because the majority of On-1 dancers (the “sexy” ones) are Latinos, while the majority of the On-2 dancers are not. This contrast reinforces the association of Latino descent (ultimately, blood) with certain “natural,” inborn properties that cannot be taught or acquired through training or in the classroom—of swing, spontaneity, “cool,” and sexiness. See Johnson 2011, 109. Notes to Chapter 1 1. A key force in this trend was the enormously innovative rap group Racionais MCs. One of the most striking patterns I found in all of my interviews was the near-universal...