African-Brazilian Culture and Regional Identity in Bahia, Brazil

6. The Project of Regional Identity Formation: Culture, Politics, and Tourism

6 The Project of Regional Identity Formation Culture, Politics, andTourism In 1952, the archbishop of Salvador, Dom Augusto Álvaro da Silva, lifted another ban on the Washing of Bonfim ritual. This one had lasted for three years. The lifting of the prohibition was emblematic of the wider process of the acceptance and inclusion of African-Bahian cultural practices since 1930.1 When the ritual was performed on the morning of 15 January 1953, the mayor of Salvador was present to signal his support for the AfricanBahian practice, and the governor of the state was present when the procession to the church began. Journalists were in place, ready to gather data for reports on the syncretic practice. In addition, folklorist Antônio Monteiro and the largely middle-class members of the Permanent Commission for the Symbolic Washing of Bonfim had played significant roles in pressuring the archbishop to lift the ban. By 1953 it is possible to distinguish a much clearer project of regional identity formation, especially among members of the dominant class. Part of the motivation for this was the desire to pursue Bahia’s potential for tourism . In keeping with this desire, the newspaper reports on the Washing of Bonfim in both 1953 and 1954 mentioned the presence of tourists. One of the accompanying photographs in 1953 captured what had very recently become a standard image of the festival—tourists participating alongside Baianas. Indeed, since the mid-1940s the emerging practice of photojournalism had contributed a new layer—this time of visual power—to the project of establishing and disseminating the relevance of African-Bahian culture to Bahian regional identity. In the hands of photographer Pierre Verger, photojournalism began to overlap with the academic practice of visual anthropology as a medium for associating Bahia with its AfricanBahian heritage. 6 7 6 7 196 · African-Brazilian Culture and Regional Identity in Bahia, Brazil Verger was in Africa in 1953 and 1954 and missed the ritual Washing of Bonfim in those years, but one of his collaborators, Odorico Tavares, was present at the Church of Bonfim for the washing in 1954. Tavares positioned himself at the center of the dominant-class effort to create and disseminate a regional identity on the basis of including African-Bahian culture. Tavares was a modernist poet and journalist and the director of operations for two of Salvador’s three major newspapers and a radio station . He embodied the convergence of the press, modernists, folklorists, photography, the emerging influence of Brazil’s illustrated weekly magazines , the surge in Bahian promotional literature, local government, samba musicians, the literary elite, the fine arts, and, finally, the tourist industry. Odorico Tavares was born and raised in Pernambuco and therefore was an outsider, but by the early 1950s he was active in an influential network of people who were channeling the city’s formal and informal ritual practices into a hegemonic discourse that reshaped the meanings of Salvador’s modern twentieth-century regional identity. The carrying out of the Washing of Bonfim in 1953 and 1954 in honor of the Senhor do Bonfim and his Candombl é alter ego Oxalá—probably the principal public ritual expression of Bahianness—lent significant performative power to the consolidation of the reworking of Bahian regional identity. This chapter explores the important efforts of several key cultural and political actors during the years immediately following World War II, as aspects of African-Bahian agency and performance combined with the return of electoral politics, tourism, and the deepening importance of modernism to consolidate the notion of Bahia as inclusive of its African-Bahian traditions.2 The Candomblé Community, Antônio Monteiro, and Pierre Verger The Candomblé community and its allies continued to make efforts toward influencing the reappraisal of African-Bahian practices after 1945, just as they had for most of the twentieth century through their insistent and enthusiastic participation in the city’s public festivals. Key to the influence of the African-Bahian community was its ability to build alliances with important members of the dominant class. This is most clear, for example, in the community’s efforts leading to the revival of the Washing of Bonfim . The Union of Afro-Brazilian Temples of Candomblé (União das Seitas Afro-Brasileiras), which was formed in 1937 to organize leaders within the Candomblé community to defend their right of religious practice, was replaced in 1946 by the Bahian Federation of African-Brazilian Worship The Project...