Brazil's Living Museum

Cover

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Title Page, Copyright, Dedication

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Contents

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Acknowledgments [Includes Image Plate]

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pp. ix-xi

After many years of work on this manuscript, it is a pleasure to finally be able to acknowledge, in print, the many colleagues and friends who have helped along the way. For their valuable comments and careful readings, I thank many generous souls, including Patrick Barr-Melej, Dain Borges, John Coatsworth, João José Reis, Julia Rodriguez, and John Womack. Carrie ...

Introduction. Between Africa and Athens: Bahia’s Search for Identity

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pp. 1-12

The northeastern state of Bahia occupies a critical position in Brazil’s imagination and in its history. Alternately romanticized and denigrated, it has served both as a cradle of Brazilian national identity and as an embarrassing symbol of Brazil’s backwardness. More recently, Bahia has played a central role in representing Brazil’s African roots, both for Brazilians and for the ...

1 Finding a Cure for Bahia

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pp. 13-46

Bahia’s public health reformers never convinced Catholic authorities to take action against the malicious germs lurking in their sanctuaries, but goals of disinfected and hygienic churches remained symbolic of their modernizing, reformist vision for society as a whole. With the final abolition of slavery in 1888 and the advent of a new federal republic the following year, Bahian society ...

2 Contests of Culture

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pp. 47-85

Brazil’s revolution of 1930 ushered Getúlio Vargas into the presidency and shifted power away from the nation’s traditional oligarchies. Bahia’s elite faced the future uncertainly as federally appointed governors, or interventors, replaced them in office. They referred scornfully to Interventor Juracy Magalhães (a native of Ceará) as a forasteiro, or foreigner, and used him as a ...

3 Preserving the Past

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pp. 86-112

Bahia’s Afro-Brazilian Congress had begun to alter the atmosphere of Salvador, but Edison Carneiro was not there long enough to savor its results. In 1939 he relocated to Rio de Janeiro to research the “regional ethnography of black and indigenous” cultures in several Northeastern states for the National Museum, returning to Bahia only for short research expeditions. ...

4 Debating African Roots

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pp. 113-132

The U.S. sociologist Donald Pierson memorably characterized the city of Salvador in the late 1930s as “not unlike a medieval city surrounded by African villages.” His adviser’s introduction to his work employed much of the same language: Salvador’s spatial juxtaposition permitted one to walk though “Europe on the ridges” of the city’s hills and hear “the insistent boom of African drums . . . ...

5 Embattled Modernization and the Retrenchment of Tradition

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pp. 133-150

The forced resignation of Getúlio Vargas in 1945 brought the start of redemocratization and a sense of national renewal and hope. Brazil would start again to build its future, and the policies of the late 1940s and 1950s were imbued with an optimistic push toward modernization.¹ President Juscelino Kubitschek, elected in 1956, reflected the euphoria of the period, ...

Conclusion

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pp. 151-159

In 1950 the newly constructed Hotel of Bahia unveiled a fresh mural for its “typical restaurant.” As José Valladares described it for the newspaper A Tarde, the mural presented scenes from “historic and picturesque Bahia,” with the Candomblé deity Iemanjá joining Baianas in the ritual washing of the church of Bomfim. Yet in his phrasing Valladares revealed one of the central tensions in Salvador and Bahia as a whole: the traditions described ...

Notes

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pp. 161-194

Bibliography

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pp. 195-216

Index

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pp. 217-221