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  • The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature between the Wars by Anke Birkenmaier
  • Elisabeth L. Austin
Birkenmaier, Anke. The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature between the Wars. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2016. 211 pp. ISBN: 978-08-1393-879-0.

Anke Birkenmaier's The Specter of Races is a carefully-researched history of early twentieth century anthropologists who responded to the negative race discourse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by theorizing Latin American culture as independent from race, rejecting the scientific racism of nineteenth-century Positivism and early twentieth-century eugenicists. Birkenmaier's cultural history focuses principally on Fernando Ortiz (Cuba), Paul Rivet (France), Jacques Roumain (Haiti), and Gilberto Freyre (Brazil), centering each chapter on one main author, along with his networks of intellectual peers.

While Birkenmaier's analyses confirm that not all of the figures she studies propose theories that are "antiracist" (17), her work convincingly shows how the diverse collection of social theorists she analyzes use science, literature, language, and art to ponder the relationship between culture and history separate from the elitist, race-based discourse of the past. One of the most important contributions of this volume is that it brings into dialogue anthropologists who worked separately, and yet occasionally in tandem, to define notions of culture in the process of which they "produced exceptional reflections on culture and cultural contact, language and race" (18). Comparing works from different cultural contexts that were originally written in several distinct languages, Birkenmaier synthesizes each author's work within a rich contextual frame. While race is not absent from the works she analyzes, Birkenmaier's clear prose explains the significance of these anthropologists' rejection of race as the foundation of culture, and how this opened a place for more inclusive conceptions of culture and its production.

The book's title, The Specter of Races, comes from a term coined by Cuban historian and anthropologist Fernando Ortiz (33) to signal at once the unreal nature of race as a social convention not based in science, and its persistence as a "dangerous idea" (33). In Chapter 1, Birkenmaier describes Ortiz's separation of the ideas of culture and raza, which were used interchangeably in the early twentieth century, and details how the historian and social scientist opted to reject the idea of pure races. Instead, he used his interest in philology to develop sometimes-spurious arguments for Cuba's linguistic independence from Spain. While Ortiz does not successfully avoid all racist ideas (36), Birkenmaier concludes that Ortiz's focus on culture [End Page 183] and "transculturation," the imprinting of cultures on one another, shifted the study of culture in Cuba away from race and toward cultural production.

Chapter 2 examines the writings of Paul Rivet, a French anthropologist who studied early American cultures before he was forced into exile during WWII. Rivet was exiled in Colombia and Mexico, and his student Alfred Métraux worked in Tucumán, Argentina, where he established an ethnology museum. Rivet, who believed that anthropology was deeply historical and that "cultures grew by way of diffusion and contact with other cultures" (52), claimed that his diffusionist approach allowed practitioners to better appreciate the contributions of indigenous cultures to contemporary society. Ultimately, his views were not influential to Mexican anthropology but his legacy resides in the museums he and his students established.

Chapter 3 centers on Haitian writer and anthropologist Jacques Roumain and his activist writings, addressing also the cultural debates raised by others working in anthropology and literature at that time in Haiti, such as physician Jean Price-Mars and writer Normil Sylvain. Here Birkenmaier describes a sudden increase in interest in Haitian folklore as nationalism surged at the end of the U.S. occupation in 1934: folklore and folk traditions were seen as the possible foundations for culture, and were seen by some as subversive (81) after the occupation. Because folklore was claimed for nationalistic purposes, the cultural status of the Creole language and the vodou religion were debated, as both were valued as authentic expressions of culture but not considered to be refined.

The last chapter, Chapter 4, traces the career of Brazilian anthropologist...

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