Brazil’s Living Museum: Race, Reform, and Tradition (review)

Anadelia Romo’s interdisciplinary book deals with several aspects of Afro-Brazilian (or African-Brazilian) perspectives and other useful topics in the area of Bahia. In this publication, the assistant professor of history on the San Marcos campus of Texas State University argues that since the founding of Bahia, Afro-Brazilian identity has been contested and carefully constructed by an elite population that is often made up of external scholars, including those from the United States and, indeed, with African ancestry. Despite this, even the “state’s tourist board touts Bahia’s claim as the ‘birthplace of Brazil’ and the cradle of Brazilian traditions” (p. 7).

Historically, Afro-Brazilians have African roots; therefore, important queries emerge as one tries to offer a review of Romo’s book. What does it take to construct a “traditional” Afro-Brazilian identity in a multiracial, multicultural, and multiclass society? How long must this “cultural crafting” occur before what is imagined is accepted as fact? What tensions emerge during the creation of an “authentic” tradition from volatile histories that include slavery? Romo offers meaningful responses to these and other questions. Also, she challenges the continuing essentialist (and tourist) ideas about what is “real” and “not real” in Bahia.

Through a meticulous analysis of documents that pays attention to local, national, and global discourses, Romo pulls her readers into the complex intersections of race, cultures, and traditions to reveal how the interconnectivity of people, places, organizations, and ideas has resulted in the Bahia that many of us encounter. She accomplishes this by weaving the tensions between tradition and reform into chapters dedicated to legal medicine, the Afro-Brazilian congresses, the Bahian State Museum, and academia.

In accomplishing the foregoing, Romo utilizes a multidisciplinary approach, whereby she analyzes the published works, field notes, speeches, and correspondence of scholars and community leaders such as Melville J. Herskovitz (the great Africanist of Northwestern University), Edison Carneiro, Jose Valladares, Ruth Landes, Eugenia Ana Santos, Donald Pierson, and Raimundo Nina Rodrigues. In particular, she reveals how both U.S. and Brazilian scholars were enmeshed in the debates of the day on race, as well as their attempts to further their own research as they studied Bahia. The book tackles issues regarding which group of people and which history is to be represented, as well as where, how, and by whom.

To a large extent, scholarship about Bahia’s people and their histories would have required that one acknowledge the racial hierarchies and exclusions that existed in this perceived racially harmonious society—something external scholars (including those from the U.S.) were not always willing to do. Romo, however, is committed to making the history of Bahia live, to counter the idea, in her own text, that Bahia is a culturally preserved state, trapped by anachronistic ideas that oppositionally position tradition and progress.

According to the facts presented by Romo, one learns that Afro-Brazilians (with African ancestry) have had limited access to educational and political opportunities. Toward these ends, she provides numerous examples of cultural resistance, collaboration, and compromise, which prove that Afro-Brazilians have subtly, though almost silently, helped shape the debates about race, culture, and tradition over the past two centuries. In chapter 2, she focuses on the first two Afro-Brazilian congresses of 1934 and 1937. Both congresses helped shift ideas about race and culture from the medical to social-sciences field. The second congress, organized by Afro-Brazilians with the help of Candomblé leaders, was especially instrumental in cementing the study of Afro-Brazilian cultures as an important part of social science.

Romo interthreads the development of race, culture, and tradition by revealing the structures of relationships and spheres of influence that have helped construct the Bahia of today. Chapter 3, on the establishment of the Bahian State Museum, is a key chapter that connects previous ideas about race, culture, and tradition to the ideas about reform and race expressed in chapter...