In 2003, teachers at the municipal high school in Belmonte, Brazil, began presenting students with a radically different ideology about racial categorization: an essentialized ideology that defines anyone not "purely" branco (white) as negro (black). This system of categorization conflicts with popular belief in a mixed‐race moreno identity based not only on ancestry but also on observable physical features. Through a combination of ethnographic and experimental methods, I examine this apparent clash of ideologies in Belmonte with respect to academic theories on the cognition of race and ethnicity. I show how children and adults integrate certain aspects of essentialism but not others in their constructions of identity and in the way they reason about hypothetical scenarios. These nuanced solutions to the challenges posed by explicit conflicts over supposedly natural categories lead to my own questioning of race in anthropological theory.
Inspired by his own eldwork with Torguud nomads in Mongolia, Francisco Gil-White's article "Sorting is not categorization" contributes to a long-running discussion about the speci city of Brazilian racial categories in opposition to other racial categories such as those in the United States. He questions the heuristic value of Marvin Harris' methodology and therefore doubts the substantive hypothesis based on the results of these methods -that Brazilians and Americans have a fundamentally different system of racial categories. Gil-White additionally proposes the opposite hypothesis -that Brazilian racial categories have much the same structure as those of the United States:"It is true that one does not nd in the US as varied and proli c a vocabulary for describing people's phenotypes as one does in Brazil. It is also true that the US system features hypodescent, which prevents the emergence of intermediate racial categories. These are quite hoary observations of the differences between the US and Brazil. However, it is possible that this is the extent of the difference." 2
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