The Spectacle of the Races: Scientists, Institutions, and the Race Question in Brazil, 1870-1930 (review)

One hates to see a book begin by egregiously and injuriously misquoting the most important previous work in its field. Here the field is Brazilian racial thought, and the work in question is Thomas Skidmore’s Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought. ¹ Schwarcz quotes, and condemns, Skidmore’s “conclusions” that Brazilians uncritically accepted European racial thought because they were “derivative in their culture, self-consciously imitative in their thought,...and ill-equipped to argue about the latest social doctrines from Europe.” (14) But this passage is drawn, not from Skidmore’s conclusion, but from his introduction. That introduction, and indeed that specific passage, make clear that, in describing Brazilians’ supposed intellectual passivity, Skidmore was referring to the mid-1800s. Between 1880 and 1930, he shows—indeed, it is the central theme of his book—, Brazilian intellectuals effectively challenged, reworked and reinvented racial doctrines emanating from Europe and North America. Far from dismissing Brazil’s role in that process of international intellectual exchange, Black into White was the first systematic examination of it. This same topic is now taken up again in Spectacle of the Races.

There were compelling reasons for Brazilian thinkers to challenge turn-of-the-century racial theories, which argued the irredeemable inferiority of the African, Indian, and racially mixed peoples who made up the bulk of Brazil’s population. If Brazilian elites and intellectuals accepted the validity of such dictates, they inevitably had to accept as well Brazil’s permanent second-rate status in the community of Western nations—or even worse, as one turn-of-the-century French writer suggested, the country’s eventual “reversion, as seems likely, to barbarism.”

Especially worrisome to Brazilian elites were the perils of race mixture, which, according to North Atlantic scientists and intellectuals, produced “degenerate” populations with all the defects of the inferior races and few, if any, of the strengths supposedly associated with European racial heritage. Brazilians countered this proposition with a new and quite original interpretation of race mixture that stressed the strength and superiority of “white” genes, and their ability to neutralize and eventually eliminate nonwhite racial traits Far from weakening and undermining the nation, Brazilian thinkers argued, miscegenation could actually strengthen it through a long-term process of racial “whitening.”

Schwarcz seeks to examine how these debates played out in a variety of scientific, educational, and cultural institutions: ethnographical museums, historical and geographical societies, law schools, and medical schools. (Brazil did not develop its first comprehensive universities until the 1930s.) This in turn requires her to devote a good deal of attention to the vicissitudes of creating scientific and educational institutions in nineteenth-century Brazil. In the absence of locally educated scientists, museums and scientific journals depended heavily on hired guns brought in from Europe: Herman von Ihering at the São Paulo Museum; Emilio Goeldi at the museum in Pará, later renamed in his honor; and other sojourners from Europe. Regional institutions in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and Recife competed relentlessly for prestige, political connections, and scarce funding. Other resources were in short supply as well: in 1887 the journal of the National Museum in Rio reported despondently on the difficulties of obtaining Indian skulls for phrenological research. What with “the superstitious ideas of the Indians on one hand and...the scruples of the missionaries on the other,” good skulls were hard to come by. (81).

After surveying the growth and development of these institutions, Schwarcz tries to get at the ideas and theories that circulated within them. She does so by cataloguing the contents of each institution’s journal, counting up the articles and assigning them to various categories. Much of the analysis is thus quantitative in character, and here Schwarcz’s use of numbers does not inspire complete confidence. Surveying articles in the Journal of the Historical and Geographical Institute of...