Brazil's Living Museum: Race, Reform, and Tradition in Bahia

Introduction. Between Africa and Athens: Bahia’s Search for Identity

introduction BetweenAfricaandAthens:Bahia’sSearchforIdentity The northeastern state of Bahia occupies a critical position in Brazil’s imagination and in its history. Alternately romanticized and denigrated, it has served both as a cradle of Brazilian national identity and as an embarrassing symbol of Brazil’s backwardness. More recently, Bahia has played a central role in representing Brazil’s African roots, both for Brazilians and for the millions of tourists who travel to Salvador, the state capital. It has become universally accepted that Afro-Bahians—whose ancestors were brought forcibly with the Atlantic slave trade, and who still today represent the vast majority of the population—have maintained a cultural autonomy that has guarded their traditions from the modernizing tendencies of Brazil’s South. It is tribute to the power of this vision, and to the vibrancy of Afro-Bahian culture itself, that this latest role for Bahia now seems natural. Yet to see Bahia as inherently, essentially rooted in Africa ignores a creative and important process of cultural crafting that has been at work over the course of the twentieth century. To see Bahia as a cultural preserve is to see it as static, whereas Bahian culture has been anything but. 2 introduction Bahia’s story in many ways parallels that of Brazil, a nation that during the twentieth century reinvented its culture and came to embrace African heritage as central to its national identity, whether in the rhythms of samba or in the very essence of its cuisine. While the general outline of this story may be clear, however, it is still riddled with ambiguities, and much of its historical evolution is still muddy.1 This is even more true for Bahia, which witnessed the most dramatic incarnation of this cultural transformation. But because Bahia hosts the greatest black majority of any state in Brazil, many have viewed the process there as an inevitable outcome. Yet demography is not destiny; it still remains unclear how and when Bahia came to reinvent itself in the midst of a turbulent century that overturned much of the accepted knowledge about race, culture, and the nature of African heritage . This book gives Brazil’s larger question of national identity a regional answer, paying close attention to how Bahia has struggled to redefine itself over the twentieth century. As I show, such a transformation was in no way natural or inevitable; rather, it resulted from sustained, and often controversial , efforts. These efforts took place in a rapidly changing landscape of racial ideology . Though race in Bahia was discussed at the beginning of the twentieth century in the realm of medicine, the discourse moved by the 1930s to the social sciences and, finally, by the 1950s, to anthropology. This book traces ideasofraceacrossthedisciplinesandthusfollowsdebatesaboutracewhere and when they proved most pivotal. Bahia proves a particularly interesting setting to examine racial ideology, as Afro-Bahians have played a powerful role in shaping these debates. Leaders in the Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomblé were active in crafting a cultural identity centered on Africa, for example, as a rich scholarly literature attests.2 As I show further, these same leaders transformed Bahia’s Afro-Brazilian Congress of 1937, where they took a dominant position in driving the course of Bahia’s social sciences. Yet much of Bahia’s black community is not represented in the written record . Literacy rates in the state hovered at 20 percent in 1872 and increased only marginally to 27 percent in the 1950 census; given recent gaps between black and white literacy of almost 20 percent, we can only assume that such racial divides existed earlier as well.3 Black Bahians have thus been even less able than other residents of the state to leave written accounts of their history . Widespread illiteracy helps explain why a black press never developed in Bahia as it did in other parts of Brazil and why we have limited sources to tell us how the wider black community thought about race. A larger history introduction 3 of black Bahia in the early twentieth century remains to be written and will require new types of sources.4 Even with such gaps in the historical record, it is clear that the cultural invention of Bahia has been powerfully shaped by the actions of the AfroBahian community. In addition, however, we must also posit a changing attitude toward race and Afro-Bahian culture on the side of policy makers and intellectuals...