"Girl, You Are Not Morena. We Are Negras!": Questioning the Concept of "Race" in Southern Bahia, Brazil

Abstract

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.

A non-essentialist theory of race: the case of an Afro-indigenous village in northern Peru

“…In Brazil, cognitive approaches have been used to investigate the claim that, despite local ideas about race positing continuous, rather than categorical racial variation, ordinary people operate with basic conceptual prototypical categories for classifying racial diversity into quite clear‐cut basic categories of black, white and Indian. Experimental methods have been used both to counter (Baran ; Baran and Sousa ) and confirm (Gil‐White ) the notion that Brazilian concepts of race are binary. Jones () directly investigates the issue of racial essentialism in Brazil, finding a local theory of racial essences, but also that such essences can be mixed in individuals and that race does not create clear‐cut groups.…”

Looks and Living Kinds: Varieties of Racial Cognition in Bahia, Brazil

“…More recently, Baran (2007) takes a more modulated position: Brazilian "thinking about race does not conform simplistically to either the conventional scholarly wisdom about multiple non-essentialized categories of race in Brazil or the idea that race is essentialized similarly to the United States" (Baran, 2007: 402). Th e Bahians he studied often considered race to be more than a matter of appearance, but were reluctant to adopt the bipolar perspective of political activists, for whom all non-whites are negro.…”

Race and Employment Practices in Northeast Brazil’s Ecotourism Industry: An Analysis of Cultural Capital, Symbolic Capital, and Symbolic Power

“…Compromising "between the racist doctrines in vogue around the twentieth century"-in which whiteness was associated with the establishment of modern societies-"and the socio-racial reality of Brazil" (Hasenbalg 1984, 2), this project emphasized mestiçagem (miscegenation) as a gateway to branqueamento (whitening), in order to frame Brazil as a modern multiracial nation-state capable of assimilating diverse people (Da Silva 1998). Brazil implemented eugenics programs designed for the branqueamento of the population, including offering subsidies to Europeans to immigrate to Brazil, which attracted more than four million European immigrants over the course of thirty years (Baran 2007). Brazilian intellectuals juxtaposed the Brazilian multiracial nation-state to the United States, critiquing the notion of race as a biological concept and rejecting American institutionalized notions of hypodescent and the black-white dichotomy (Da Silva 1998;Skidmore [1974Skidmore [ ] 1993.…”