Nature and Nurture in Jorge Amado’s Tent of Miracles

Given recent advances in the field of genetics, interest in the relation between biology, or human Nature if you will, and Society, or Nurture, has gained momentum, calling into question previous critical approaches that rejected biological influences out of hand. To illustrate the issues this has raised, I have chosen Jorge Amado de Faria’s (1912-2001) Tent of Miracles (1969). This because not only does Amado’s piece capture the cultural Zeitgeist of its times, it also, inadvertently I imagine, undermines them. I say inadvertently because Amado takes his ideas from a social constructivism we can trace back to Gilberto Freyre, and before him to Franz Boas. In the novel, Amado makes a social constructivist case in favor of miscegenation, the mixing of the races, and against these gregationist, white, Catholic, and Eurocentric ruling class of Brazil. His proxy for this alternative mixed society is the Afro-Brazilian religious construction known as candomblé. Essentially the idea is that a homogeneously mixed society will resolve all social problems, primarily by eliminating divisive class and racial tensions. Paradoxically, the solution offered is predicated on biology, and so undermines a pure form of either constructivism or biologism.

An example of Amado’s strategy appears when the liberal white professor Frago Neto asks mulatto protagonist Pedro Archanjo how he can reconcile science and candomblé. Archanjo first tries to combine these seeming contradictions into a mulatto or mixed epistemology, and then accuses the white Professor of having a narrow, rational, way of thinking. He says “I’m a mixture of men and races; I am a mulatto, a Brazilian … Primitive man is still alive in me, somewhere beyond the reach of my will, because he and I were the same person for so long” (315). With the reference to his past genetic heritage in evolutionary time, “Primitive man,” Archanjo brings biology and genetics into the discussion. Though later in the novel Archanjo, and Amado through him, appear to argue in favor of a Boasian cultural relativism, this relativism is always undermined by Archanjo’s emphasis on racial mixing, with race defined in genetic terms. Here, then, and throughout the novel, Amado’s great difficulty is that of reconciling biology with social constructivism.

This difficulty stems from the intellectual history of the times. As is well known, Amado was much influenced by Gilberto Freyre, who was in turn a student of Franz Boas. In 1911, with the publication of Changes in the Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants, Franz Boas effectively eliminated the role of genetic inheritance in human behavior from the debates of the day. Boas’s position was, in part, a reaction to a line of scientific thought that ran from Darwin’s purely biological position to Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism, from there to Francis Galton’s eugenics, and finally on to Nazi distortions of Galton’s ideas. When the truth about the Nazi eugenics programs began to surface, all biological explanations of human behavior became suspect, at best. The net result was that Boas’s cultural relativism swept to victory in the human sciences – Emile Durkheim in sociology, Burrhus Frederic Skinner and John B. Watson in psychology, Margaret Mead in anthropology, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf in linguistics, Freud in psychiatry, and so on. In fact, up to the present day, cultural relativism and social constructivism continue to form the theoretical underpinnings of the human sciences, while biological approaches languish in exile. In line with this thinking, Amado refers both to eugenics and to Boas repeatedly in Tent of Miracles (271; 169; 267) as he argues against both white supremacy and “separatism and undying hatred between the races” (186), and for racial equality. Indeed, it appears that Franz Boas himself was the model for the North American scholar who, in the novel, rediscovers Pedro Archanjo’s lost works, one James D. Levinson of Colombia University: “… sociologist, anthropologist, ethnologist, etc., Professor at Colombia University … His daring and controversial theories had revolutionized contemporary science … To conservatives he was a dangerous heretic; to his students and partisans, a god …” (22).

The real Boas, who came from a liberal...