RACE, COLOR AND CULTURE: QUESTIONING CATEGORIES AND CONCEPTS IN SOUTHERN BAHIA, BRAZIL by Michael D. Baran A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Anthropology) in the University of Michigan 2007 Doctoral Committee: Professor Lawrence A. Hirschfeld, New School for Social Research, Co-Chair Professor Conrad P. Kotak, Co-Chair Professor Susan A. Gelman Professor Bruce MannheimUMI Number: 3287451 INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality ilustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscrist and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized ‘copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion UMI UMI Microform 3287451 Copyright 2008 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 ‘Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346© — Michael D. Baran 2007For my family and friends iiACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. Many Brazilians I know would start out any acknowledgment saying, “First I ‘would like to thank God.” Though this is not quite academic tradition, if there is a God, I would like to thank him or her first. Talso thank my parents who have always supported my endeavors even when my travels took me far outside their comfort zones. Ithank my siblings and my extended family, many of whom have been role models and/or inspiring cheerleaders for me in this marathon. I cannot thank my wife Jill enough for everything she has done in support of this project. Having met at recruitment weekend for graduate school, this dissertation parallels wonderful years of romance and adventure. 1 thank my kids Rio and Solomon for just being who they are, Much of the time I spent not writing this dissertation was spent getting to know you guys and enjoying every new day of your little selves. Ihave been unbelievably fortunate to have several of the key theorists in this, dissertation on my committee. Lawrence Hirschfeld, Conrad Kotak, Susan Gelman, and Bruce Mannheim have inspired me, guided me, encouraged me, and supported ‘me at all the right moments. I thank them for these interactions, and I also thank them for producing the scholarship that made this work even possible. I also thank Scott Atran, not on this committee, but a great friend and mentor. My fellow graduate students have shared the joy and pain and humor throughout this process, and I am grateful that we all did it together with much love and cooperation. In particular, I thank Paulo Sousa for the intellectual exchanges, the collaboration, the iiiwhiskey, and for trying to teach me how to samba, 1 also thank Laurie Marx who is not only a friend but also a truly gifted solver of impossible life and graduate school logistics, My non-graduate school friends have always kept me grounded and laughing, no matter how far across the globe we may be spread. Portions of this dissertation were published as an article: ““Girl, You Are Not Morena, We Are Negras!”: Questioning the Concept of Race in Southern Bahia, Brazil” in the journal Ethos v.35 (3). I would like to thank the Society of Psychological Anthropology, the Richard G. Condon Prize Committee, and Ethos for their support and for the opportunity to publish this article; in particular I thank Janet, Dixon Keller for her detailed and thoughtful comments. My research would not have been possible without generous grants from ITE Fulbright, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Michigan, 1 thank Jefferson Bacelar and Jocelio Teles dos Santos for providing letters of support allowing me to secure some of these grants. [ also thank Marcio Goldman for his friendship and support and for introducing me to Alberto in Belmonte and graduate students Ana and Luiza who carefully transcribed hundreds of hours of recorded interviews. Finally, I thank friends, students, and collaborators in Belmonte, Brazil for their generous help in this project and for the warmth and openness they extended during my stay. You watched the gestation of both this project and of my first child, and I can’t wait to show them both to you soon. ivTABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS LIST OF FIGURES LIST OF TABLES GLOSSARY CHAPTER 1. Introduction: “Girl, You Are Not Morena. We Are Negras!” 2. Racial Democracy and Black Activis Biology and Culture in Conflicting Ideologies 3. Categories and Essentialism: Theories and Methods for the Investigation of Boundaries in a Place Where “Everyone is Mixed” 4 “She is White but Her Blooc Appearances in Mixed Brazilian Families 5. Classification and Consequence: Race and Race Research in Discrimination and Public Policy 6. Future Directions in Theory and Practice BIBLIOGRAPHY ii iff vi viii ix 38 8 134 173 210 230LIST OF FIGURES 1.1: Map of South America with Belmonte 1.2: Crab sculpture, Belmonte 2.1: Drawings of three types of indios from history textbook 2.2: House styles associated with indio types from history textbook 2.3: Photograph of present day indio child from history textbook 2.4; Drawing of Yemanjé from history textbook 2.5: Dique do Tororé 2.6: Capoeira roda 2.7: Core group of capoeira students watching a video of a roda 2.8: Capoeira in the street 2.9: Os Netos de Gandhy preparing for Camaval procession 3.1: Moreno/Caboclo cluster from Study 3.1 3.2: Branco cluster from Study 3.1 3.3: Negro/Moreno cluster from Study 3.1 3.4: Pictures not included in clusters for Study 3.1 4.1: Mean scores for influence of discovery regarding ancestry 4.2: Mean influence of discovery by race of target picture vi 12 21 42 43 43 45 51 37 58 60 62 113 14 15 116 144 1454.3: Percentage of responses for same race branca category question 4.4: Percentage of responses for same race branca picture question 4.5: Percentage of responses for same race morena category question 4.6: Percentage of responses for same race morena picture question 4.7: Percentage of responses for same race negra category question 4.8: Percentage of responses for same race negra picture question 4.9: Percentage of responses for mixed race branca-negra category question 4.10: Percentage of responses for mixed race branca-negra picture question 4.11: Percentage of responses for mixed race branca-morena category question 4.12: Percentage of responses for mixed race branca-morena picture question 4.13; Percentage of responses for mixed race morena-negra category question 4.14; Percentage of responses for mixed race morena-negra picture question 5.1: Examples of pictures used in Study 5.1 5.2; Example of drawings used in Study 5.2 5.3: Influence of “embodied” transformations of race, sex, height, weight, and class 5.4: Alex and Alan Teixeira da Cunha (cover photo from Veja online) vii 156 157 158 158 159 159 160 160 162 163 164 164 181 191 194 205LIST OF TABLES Table 1.1: Belmonte population by sex and color/race (1872) 1.2: Belmonte population by sex and color/race (1950) 3.1: Number of groups sorted — raga and cor 3.2: Average number of connections of picture with pictures in other clusters 3.3: Number of groups sorted by age 4.1: Percentage of subjects using each of four isolated strategies 5.1: Consistent versus mixed responses in Study 5.1 viii 16 18 110 119 125 146 182GLOSSARY abadé: one-piece outfit won by men in the Carnaval bloco Os Netos de Gandhy. bean cake fried in palm oil, usually served with fillings made from pumpkin and okra, hot sauce, and dried shrimp. baiana: Bahian woman wearing traditional clothes associated with Africa. berimbau: single-string percussion capoeira instrument shaped like a bow. bloco: Carnaval group. branco: hite, both in official census and popular discourse. buzios: shells thrown by candomblé mae de santo to read the future. cabocla: mixture between indio and branco; in popular discourse it is often used for someone who looks indio but is not culturally indio. cacau: chocolate bean cachaga: sugat-can alcohol cafuzo: mixture of negro and indio, as taught in school history textbook candomblé: Afro-Brazilian syncretic religion incorporating spirit possession and worship of Aftican gods. capoeira: martial art performance derived from slave experience cararié: ritual meal including acaraje and associated with candomblé. clube: social club, dendé: palm oil, often associated with Africa fantasia: costume ‘favela: hillside shantytown on the outskirts of major cities.fazenda: farm, plantation. feijoada: “national dish” of Brazil associated with slavery. It includes beans and various pig parts and is typically served with collard greens and manioc flour. india: indigenous, usually reserved for those who are culturally indigenous. ‘macumba: witcheraft, pejorative term for candomblé and umbanda, mae-de-santo: female candomblé leader (mother of saint). maculele: Afro-Brazilian dance / martial art performed with sticks. mameluco: along with cabocla, mixture between branca and india. This term is not very common in Belmonte. ‘mestigo: mixed-race person of any combination, ‘moqueca: fish stew made with palm oil and coconut milk, considered “typically” Bahian, moreno: brown. This term is primarily used to refer to brown or mixed-race people, but its meaning is ambiguous. It can also mean someone with light skin and dark hair, or it can be used as a “softer” way of saying negro. mulato: ’xture between branco and negro in popular useage and in school textbook. negro: black. This term is often considered insulting, but it is also the politically correct term. orixé: candomblé god. pai-de-santo: male candomblé leader (father of saint). pardo: grey, brown, mixed. This is the official census term but not commonly used in everyday speech, preta: black. This is the official census term and is also used in popular speech. It sometimes connotes lower class and is not advocated by black movement organizations. oda: circle, as in a circle of people practicing capoeira. terreiro: candomblé house of worship.trio eléctrico: large truck with speakers used to play music in the streets during Carnaval. umbanda: Afro-Brazilian religion often associated with candomblé but with a different history and considered to not invoke evil forees by practitioners. xiCHAPTER 1 Introduction: “Girl, You Are Not Morena. We Are Negras!” During a March afternoon in 2003, in an eighth-grade science class in Belmonte, Brazil, racial ideologies collided. The lesson of the day dealt with human biology and basic genetics. One student in the class asked the teacher about the biology of race mixing. In response, the teacher tried to clarify the supposedly natural facts about racial classification for the class. She explained that there were only two races — blonde and blue-eyed brancos (whites) and everyone else, considered negro (black).' Although a few heads nodded in approval, most of the class looked confused or upset. ‘The teacher was presenting a particularly extreme form of the racial classification system that Black movements have urged Brazilians to adopt, one where those with any traceable African ancestry would self-idemtify as negro as a sign of positive self-image and political solidarity. While this newly used conception of negro has been animating Black movements for at least 25 years in Bravil’s urban centers, it has only now reached more rural areas like Belmonte. And it is not always well received. give approximate translations for native race/color terms at their first appearance in the text despite the fact thatthe concepts are culturally specific and not accurately translatable. As such, | will leave the terms in their original Portuguese throughout the dissertation. The Glossary lists the terms used with approximate translations; however, ! hope the reader will gain a deeper understanding of the Brazilian terms themselves and will ignore the cultural meanings associated with the English translations, 2 The relaxing of the repression during the military junta from 1964 to 1983 saw the (reJemergence of ‘many black movements. The period has been labeled as the “re-A fricanization’” of Bahia (Bacelar 1989; Sansone 2003).“Bu sou morena, nfo negra!” [I’m morena, not negra!],’ cried 14-year old Paula.’ This claim of mixed-race “brown” identity echoes the more common ideology’ in Belmonte, academically labeled “racial democracy.” The roots of this ideology extend back to Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre’s influential 1933 book, Casa-Grande e Senzala (published in English as The Masters and the Slaves] (Freyre 1946). Freyre found strength in the biological and cultural mixing of Portuguese colonizers, native Brazilians, and slaves of African descent whereas race scientists before him saw only physical and mental weakness (Freyre 194 ina Rodrigues 1938; Ramos 1939). Freyre’s foundational story, still framing Brazilian history in school texts, holds that historical mixing has created an ethnically unified population without stark racial divisions or resulting discriminations making Brazil a supposed “racial paradise.” Consistent with this ideology, most residents of Belmonte prefer to self-identify with the inclusive term morena, which can be used in various linguistic contexts to refer to almost any combination of physical features.* To call someone a negra within this racial democracy ideology is to separate them out from the mixed Brazilian mainstream and denigrate them as a separate category of “pure” Black, associated with slavery and Africa. That is just what caused a stir when Ana Maria > Unless noted, all translations by author. “ All names are pseudonyms, except in the cases of public figures where a name change could not possibly disguise identification use the term ideology to refer toa set of proposals relating to Brazilian racial categorization — an attempt to establish a racial “common sense” (Omi and Winant 2000). I do not use the term in the Marxian sense to mean thatthe set of ideas are duplicitous, though some black activists would argue thatthe racial democracy ideology is deceitful and intended to keep the racial hierarchy in order. ©The official Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estaistica ((BGE) census term for “mixed” is parda, ‘which approximately 80% of Belmonte residents self-identified as during the 2000 census. In Belmonte, the use of this term parda is limited to official documents while morena is the common folk term that can encompass an even wider array of meanings.yelled out to Paula, “Menina, vocé nao ¢ morena, Somos negras!” (Girl, you are not morena, We are negras!]. In the tite of this dissertation, the phrase “Questioning Categories and Concepts” has two levels of significance that frame my principal ethnographic and theoretical arguments. First, it refers to the questions of some students as teachers impose new identity categories that clash with previously held “common sense” beliefs about race. The manner in which these new categories are taught does not integrate with explicit and implicit teachings from school lessons, nor does it take into account beliefs students hold about biology and cultural identity. I will argue that the way teachers present this new ideology leaves many students confused — unable to identify as branco because they are not considered biologically “pure,” but unable to identify as negro because their physical features, presumed ancestry, and cultural identifications do not match with their understandings of the negro category. As they come to understand this new black movement ideology better through increased exposure, they begin to assimilate certain aspects of this essentialized ideology but not others. Second, the title of this article refers to my own questions regarding academic conceptions of race, questions that arose in the early stages of my research in Belmonte and continued as I came to understand students’ conceptions in greater detail. In the literature on racial categorization in Brazil, I had found two different arguments that parallel the debate in the class between Ana Maria and Paula. On one hand, a more conventional wisdom holds that racial categories in Brazil are multiple (up to hundreds in some cases), they can change from day to day or person to person,and they are based on physical features rather than rules of descent (Harris 1970; Harris and Kottak 1963; Kottak 1983). On the other hand, recent crities, both anthropological and psychological, argue that racial categories in Brazil are essentialized — they are dichotomous, rigid, and defined by descent (Gil-White 2001b; Sheriff 2001). Observing the co-existence of both ideologies in Belmonte and the active construction of supposedly natural categories led me to question both sides of this debate and to question the dominant theoretical construction of race in anthropology. In this introductory chapter, I provide background for the dissertation in three areas. First, I briefly summarize the development of the concept of “racial democracy” that has been central to the study of race in Brazil. I show some limitations of the anthropological conception of race, and explain how I negotiate these challenges in this dissertation by integrating anthropological and cognitive psychology frameworks. Second, I explain the contribution that a study in Belmonte in particular can contribute to research on race in Brazil and elsewhere. I give a brief history of the city, focusing on the chocolate bean (cacau) industry and how it has influenced the development of the region. Finally, I explain my research design — the rationale behind my focus on children, the circumstances of my getting to know them, and the particular mixed methodology approach I took to investigate race as not as a reified natural category of identity, but rather as constructions of kinds and essences making sense of biology, color, and culture.The “Race” in Racial Democracy Several countries in Latin America share similar histories of Iberian colonization in the New World with plantation systems based on slave labor; yet, Brazil is often academically singled out as the quintessential example of a “racial democracy.” While the meaning of this concept has changed over the past seventy years, it has consistently been positioned as a foil to the decidedly un-democratic nature of race relations in the United States, As mentioned, the concept was popularized in Brazil in the 1930s by the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre. Before Freyre, Brazilian intellectuals advocated for eugenic policies based on race science (Graham 1999; Mitchell 1999) much as was the case in the United States in the early 1900s. Brazil’s eugenic policies, however, were decidedly different from the eugenic policies of the US such as forced sterilizations, immigration reform, and ‘marriage laws that prevented racial mixing (Dorr 1999). In Brazil, eugenicists after abolition in 1888 faced what they imagined to be a “mulato problem,” and they advocated for massive European immigration “to crush [the mulatos] under the pressure of an enormous immigration by a vigorous race which, in the struggle for life spoken of by Darwin, will annihilate them by means of assimilation” (Euclides da ‘Cunha, quoted in Ramos 1939: 287). Toward this branqueamento (whitening) end, the Brazilian government subsidized massive immigration of Europeans at the turn of the century to work on the coffee plantations in the South and to “erase” the blackness from the population through inereased miscegenation (Graham 1999). Freyre, like others in Latin America such as José Vasconcelos in Mexico (Vasconcelos 1979 [1925]) and Fernando Ortiz. in Cuba (Ortiz. 1995), took on the racescientists, arguing that racial mixture had created a superior race with the best qualities of the three “great races.” He argued that slavery in Brazil lacked the pervasive violence experienced under the English system. Therefore, he added, Brazilian race relations were not characterized by the extreme antagonism that one finds elsewhere. Freyre, who had studied under Franz Boas at Columbia, was internationally influential in politics, academia, and the public imagination, He influenced a new generation of researchers who emphasized the harmonious social relations between Brazilian “Negroes” and whites and the lack of racial barriers to economic advancement, especially in comparison to race relations in the United States (Landes 1947; Pierson 1942). After World War Il, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) initiated a series of studies in Brazil aiming to better understand these harmonious race relations within the intemational context of Nazi horrors and intense racial segregation in the US. Ironically, many of these researchers returned from Brazil to argue that race relations were not as “democratic” as had been suspected and that Afio-Brazilians faced systematic discrimination, even if social relations in certain contexts were cordial. The findings of the “Sao Paulo School” of Brazilian sociologists, for example, provided statistical data on racial inequalities (Cardoso and Ianni 1960; Fernandes 1969). In light of these findings, the concept came to be known as the “myth” of racial democracy. Academics no longer recognized certain tenets of the concept such as the purported lack of racism or the absence of a violent slave past. The UNESCO researchers nonetheless concluded that race was conceptualized quite differently in Brazil than in the US; these conclusionscreated a resilient conventional wisdom that has become tied to the concept of racial democracy. ‘The conclusions of Marvin Harris and Conrad Kottak in the 1960s became emblematic of this new conventional wisdom, Unlike earlier researchers such as. Pierson and Landes, Harris and Kottak took racial categories themselves to be objects of study, looking at the particular articulation of these categories with social, economic, and political factors in everyday practice (Harris and Kottak 1963; Kotak 1983). ‘Their specific methods and detailed conclusions will be discussed in detail in Chapter 3. In this section, I simply summarize the conventional wisdom inspired by their studies ~ that racial categories in Brazil are multiple (up to hundreds in some cases), they can change from day to day or person to person, and they are based on physical features rather than rules of descent (Harris 1970; Harris and Kottak 1963; Kottak 1983). This conventional wisdom has served as the base for hundreds of studies on race relations and Afro-Brazilian culture, and virtually all of these studies react to the conventional wisdom in one way or another. The anthropological study of race, however, has changed dramatically in the past fifty years such that today it is one of the most central analytic concepts of the discipline. Countless articles, classes, and conferences have addressed the concept directly; entire journals of the American, Anthropological Association (AAA) have dealt exclusively with the topie;” ” Seo, for example, Anthropology News (Volume 38, Number 7, October 1997), American Anthropologist (Volume 100, Number 3, September 1998), and Anthropology News (Volume 47, Numbers 2 and 3, February and March 2006) dedicated to “Rethinking Race and Human Variation.”anthropologists have consulted for policy issues related to the census;* and anthropologists have attempted ambitious public education projects.” Anthropology, probably because of its integrated cultural, biological, linguistic, and historical approach, has staked a proprietary claim on the concept and would seem well-suited for the task (Moses 1997). Anthropologists of the twentieth century were instrumental in debunking the idea that races could be defined biologically as distinct groups, and now anthropologists generally agree that race and ethnicity are “socially constructed” but they struggle to define the concepts that have become so central to the discipline (see “AAA Statement on Race” and Overbey 2005). Within social science discourse, the concepts of race and ethnicity have evolved, and several researchers have provided detailed reviews of changing meanings (Hirschfeld 1996; Smedley 1993; Wade 1997), Within studies of race in Brazil, the concept of race itself is rarely clearly defined apart from the particular context of one’s given topic. This allows definitions of racial categories to be based on completely different criteria — surface features such as physical appearance or inside essences based on ancestry. In either case, however, it can still be called race. In much of anthropology and cognitive science, race is linked to essentialism — racial thinking relates to differences that are considered to be natural, enduring, and indicative of inner qualities as well as physical features (Gil- White 2001a; Hirschfeld 1996). * Leading up to the 2000 United States census, the AAA wrote an official response to the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) Directive 15: Race and Ethnic Standards for Federal Statistics and ‘Administrative Reporting and published an official “Statement on ‘Race.”™ In 2007, the AAA launched an educational website (htp:/www.understandingrace.org) in conjunction witha traveling exhibition “RACE: Are we so different? that will our museums across the country educating people about historical, biological, and cultural aspects of race. This project was funded by the National Science Foundation and Ford Foundation with grants totaling nearly four nillion dollars,As I began my research, I found myself struggling with the term, race, and the varied academic concepts of race. Initially I had hoped to determine whether or not race in Belmonte was essentiali od like it is in the US. Or, following the implicit association of race and essentialism, did race exist in Belmonte at all? As I came toa richer understanding of how people cognized race in Belmonte, it seemed that there were ways in which categories followed essentialist thinking and other ways in which they did not, And some people (such as Ana Maria) seemed to be following essentialist beliefs while others (like Paula) were not. How could I precisely define the term while acknowledging similarities and differences in thinking? The term itself became a hindrance. I subsequently framed my research as a more detailed account of the categories people used, the ways they processed those categories, and the contexts in which these categories were used. In effect, I stopped researching “how people cognize ‘race”” and started researching “how people think about difference and similarity” with regard to physical features, ancestry, and culture. But this created communication problems in trying to explain my research to other anthropologists. I could not describe what I was doing broadly without using the word “race” and I could not describe what I was doing specifically with the word “race.” This notion that race is a problematic concept is certainly not unique, and responses to this challenge include diverse approaches with varying success. Many have argued against the usefulness of race as a reified category of identity (Brubaker and Cooper 2000; Gilroy 1987; Handler 1994); others have stressed the need to look closely at how the concept evolved in the context of academic discourse (Wade1997); Livio Sansone writes how it is more useful to analyze the process of racialization in cultural context (Sansone 2003); and Lawrence Hirschfeld has pioneered an approach to precisely define the concept in both cognitive and cultural terms thus making the race concept specific and open to true engagement with other scholars (Hirschfeld 1996). My final approach is enabled by the insights of all these, particularly by the work of Hirschfeld whose dual cultural and cognitive approach both inspired and guided my own studies. In this dissertation, I resolve the semantic and conceptual challenge of using the race concept by delaying my analysis of the concept because, in effect, itis the object of study. T use the words “race,” “racial categories,” and “racial identity” liberally but I do not ask the words to do any analytical work. That is, when I call a category “1 I do not mean to say anything about the cognitive processing (whether or not it is essentialized and in what ways). Instead, I use these terms loosely to refer to any way that people are making sense of themselves or others by reference to imagined ancestral groups (Portuguese brancos, native indios, and African negros), and I call that “race” because it is the best translation for the folk concepts of raga and cor that people in Belmonte use to describe their own categories. | also include many cultural features in the study of race that some would consider to fall more in the analytic domain of ethnicity. I do not separate these terms analytically; rather, I describe cultural features as part of race if they contribute to the way people think about categories of difference. This strategy is effective for thinking ethnographically about specific categories and beliefs without imposing constructs with theoretical and culturally 10specific “baggage.” Additionally, I hope this strategy is useful in communicating with the reader who may have their own “common sense” assumptions about “race” that must be consciously ignored for cross-cultural understanding. In Chapter 6, I retumn to consider the concept of race more specifically after presenting the conclusions from my research, My conclusions in each of the four substantive chapters contribute to three different areas of theory. First, my argument about the cognition of “race” will help advance anthropological theory beyond problematic and underexamined associations between race, ethnicity, essentialism, and identity. ism is not a ‘Second, my conclusions provide support to existing theories that essenti unified cognitive process, but rather an interrelated set of cognitive beliefs and construals (Gelman 2003; Gelman, et al. 1994), And finally, I integrate theories of race in Brazil that seem to contradict one another but actually highlight different and equally valid ways to think about difference. “But There Are No Negros in Belmonte” 1 sat in front of Jefferson Bacelar from the Centro de Estudos Afro-Orientais (Center for Afro-Oriental Studies) in Salvador, capital of Bahia state, feeling quite sheepish. Thad only been in Brazil a total of three months conducting summer predissertation fieldwork, and I was explaining my proposal to one of the most knowledgeable researchers on race in Brazil. Responding to my choice of fieldsite, he told me he thought it would be a great idea to study how people think about race outside of the Recdncavo region where most research on race relations in Brazil had ubeen conducted. I was feeling pretty good. Then he added, “But, you know there are no negros in Belmonte, right?” I quickly lost my confidence. Thad just made the trip to Salvador from Belmonte, approximately 850 kilometers away (see Figure 1.1). Figure 1.1: Map of South America with Belmonte (Expedia Maps:www.expedia.com) I knew that I had to forget my own intuitive way of dividing up “races,” and I knew there was much debate about the boundaries and definitions of racial groups in Brazil But I was pretty sure that no matter how one defined the groups, there had been negros in Belmonte. Next to a native expert and Brazilian intellectual, I was so taken aback and insecure in my own knowledge that I did not ask the questions that might have helped me meaningfully interpret his statement. I was heading back down to 12Belmonte in a few days and thought I would just figure it out then. I did not figure it out during that quick return visit to Belmonte, but my confusion and curiosity convinced me that Belmonte was the right place to address the topic of race in Brazil, a topic that had already been researched extensively by Brazilians and foreigners alike throughout the 20 century. considered two possible ways in which Jefferson’s warning could be interpreted, both of which turned out to make Belmonte a fascinating place to study this topic. irst, Jefferson may have been trying to convey that there was a lower percentage of African descendents in Belmonte than in Salvador. There is a popular misconception that the cacau industry in Southern Belmonte was not dependent on slave labor like the sugar cane industry was around Salvador. Historian Mary Ann Mahoney has labeled this the “myth of cacau” ~ that cacau farmers were not part of the slave owning elite and that they prospered through their own work and determination (Mahoney 1996). While I do not think that Jefferson was necessarily duped by the myth of cacau, itis possible that certain misconceptions led him to think that, biologically speaking, there was not a large negro presence in Belmonte. I will provide some evidence to the contrary below in the section entitled “The Rise and Fall of Cacau” as I describe historical developments in Belmonte that relate to race and segregation. Second, I came to wonder if Jefferson’s comments emerged from his understanding of the region’s social history — that there were not many self-declared negros because black movement ideologies had not yet permeated Belmonte. In one way, that sentiment was right — there was not a strong presence of political black 2B‘movement organizations like there was in Salvador. In a different way, that idea was wrong. There were several different kinds of black activism in Belmonte, some of which were newly emerging and some of which had been around for a long time, In this dissertation, I focus on conflicts between racial democracy and black activism ideologies in school teachings, Carnaval groups called blocs negros, capoeira academies, and a newly emerging regional black movement whose Semana Zumbi (Zumbi Week)" came to Belmonte for the first time in 2003. As black activism ideologies clashed with racial democracy beliefs, I was able to witness the active constructi of categories supposedly based in nature. My confusion over Jefferson’s initial comment reflects the multiple interpretations of a single race term, which would later contribute to my theoretical understandings of the race concept itself. The Rise of Cacau In this section I present a selective history of the development of the cacau industry in order to introduce the reader to the growth of the city, the racial segregation during the cacau boom, and the official census terms used for race, which are different than the terms I have introduced to this point, Belmonte was founded in the late 1600s by Padre Joseph de Araujo Ferraz when the entire region (from north of Ilhéus to south of Porto Seguro) was still populated by many indigenous groups and largely unexplored by the Portuguese (Barickman 1995). The town went through various names such as S. Pedro do Rio Grande, Villa de Bello Monte, Villa do Rio ‘The festival honors the death of Zumbi dos Palmares on November 20, 1695. Zumbi dos Palmares ‘was one of the leaders of the Quilombo dos Palmares, a community of primarily escaped slaves that formed the nucleus of resistance against slavery in the Brazilian colony in the late 1600s. This day, along with May 13 (the day of abolition in 1888) is nationally recognized as an important day for commemoration of the history associated with slavery and resistance. 14Grande, Villa de N.S. de Carmo de Bello Monte, S. Pedro de Belmonte, and finally Villa de Belmonte in 1765 (Santos 1917). Many people in Belmonte today believe that their town was actually the site of Brazil’s “discovery” by Pedro Alvares Cabral, though Porto Seguro to the south is officially recognized as having that distinction. People claim that Cabral landed in Belmonte because he saw the emptying of what is now called the Jequitinhonha River. They surmise that he may have followed the fresh water to Belmonte’s shores. Scholars believe that cacau was first introduced to the region in 1746 (Mahoney 1996) beginning with the neighboring municipality of Cannavieiras (Bondar 1938; Caldeira 1954)."" By the late 1800s, the regions around Belmonte, neighboring Cannavieiras, Ilhéus, and Itabuna were producing a significant amount of cacau for export. Despite the misconceptions that cacau plantations (fazendas) were run primarily by plantation owners and their families, it is clear that slaves provided a large percentage of labor on cacau plantations before abolition in 1888. Many arrived through the regional slave trade or with their masters who had come to the area to take part in the newly emerging cacau industry. Others may have actually been smuggled in from Africa after the 1831 law was passed abolishing the transatlantic slave trade. These slaves landed in IIhéus but were then taken to work throughout the farms in the region. The first census conducted by the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatistica (IBGE) in 1872 provides the earliest evidence regarding racial ™ Cannavieiras and Belmonte are both broadly situated in the delta formed by the Jequitinhonha and the Pardo Rivers. They are neighboring cities, although there is no road connecting the two (construction was underway to build a road and barge system for passage across the rivers in 2003). Travel between the two is by small boat, navigating rivers, mangroves, and ocean for approximately 15 hours. 15composition of Belmonte’s population and the number of slaves in the city (see Table 1.1 below). Table 1.1: Belmonte population by sex and race/color"? (1872) 301 980 (265 slaves) Parda™ 975 761 1736 (197 slaves) Branca 723 616 1339 Cabocla™ 122 145 268 Total 4323 (intemational Population Census) In 1872, the census reported 462 slaves for Belmonte, 265 who had been classified as preta and 197 classified as parda, totaling 11% of the entire population, or 17% of the total combined prefa and parda population. After the effective close of the transatlantic slave trade in 1850, the price of slaves increased dramatically and many owners were tempted to sell them to the coffee-growing regions of the Southeast. ‘Though the number of slaves dropped by over one half in the sugar cane region of Bahia during the short period of 1864 to 1874, the number of slaves in the cacau region increased and peaked in the 1860s and 1870s (Reis 1993), demonstrating their importance to the cacau industry. " Data is reported using the words “raga ow cor” (literally, “race or color”). Chapter 3 will address the similarites/dfferences between these two terms in detail " Preta isthe official IBGE census term for “black.” Compared to negra, preta means literally the color black while negra refers only to people. Presa carries negative connotations of low class, and negra is the more politically correct term. The 2000 census still used the term prefa though researchers at the IBGE have told me they are working toward changing the term to negra. ™ Parda is the official IBGE census term for “brown” or “mixed” and was still used on the 2000 census. In everyday speech, morena isthe term used for brown or mixed, but census officials believe the term is too ambiguous for use inthe census (see Harris etal 1993; Silva 1994), "* Cabocla in present usage, refers to someone with some indigenous ancestry but not culturally indio. In this early census, it may refer to both. 16Brazil was the last country in Latin America to abolish slavery, and the process was gradual and relatively nonviolent, Richard Graham writes that “[bly 1872, there were 4.25 million free blacks and mulattos, and they accounted for at least three-quarters of all African Brazilians (as compared to a mere 262,000 or 6 percent of all Aftican Americans in the U.S. South on the eve of emancipation)” (Graham, 1999: 31). Abolition included no plans for the restructuring of labor in Brazil - “The very brevity of the [Golden Law abolishing slavery] revealed the limits of Brazilian abolitionism — no compensation for the slaveholders, no welfare for the slaves, no planned transition to a new order” (Drescher 1988: 53). Many of those newly freed by abolition, along with people struggling with devastating droughts in other areas of the Northeast, migrated to the cacau region to make their fortunes in the fast developing industry.'® Belmonte’s population increased fivefold in the 50 years from 1890 to 1940. “Cacau exports almost tripled between 1890 and 1900, then they doubled again between 1900 and 1910 and between 1910 and 1920...Briefly in the 1900s [the southern Bahia region] moved into first place in overall world production, but by 1915 it had settled into second place behind West Africa, a position it maintained until quite recently” (Mahoney 1996: 414), At the peak of the cacau boom in 1950, Belmonte population rose to 33,007 people, almost twice as many as the current population. “© This time period is most famously captured in fiction by Jorge Amado’s Gabriela, Clove, and Cinnamon and The Violent Land, both set in Uhéus. 7Table 1.2: Belmonte population by sex and race/color (1950) Preta 3274 2634 3908 Parda 11,057 9,717 20,774 Branca 3269 3055 6324 ‘Amarela” 1 0 1 Total 17,601 15,406 33,007 (ternational Population Census) By this table, we can sce the shift in meaning of the term parda, ‘The census categories changed, eliminating the category of cabocla in favor of the category amarela, Clearly, those who would have self-identified as cabocla or indigenous in this census classified themselves as parda instead, The percentage of the population self identifying as parda increased from less than 50% in 1872 to 61% here in 1950 and continued to increase, reaching approximately 80% in 2000. From 1872 to 1950 the proportion of people categorized as branca decreased significantly from approximately 31% to 19%. Also interesting is that Belmonte in 1940 had one of the lowest percentages of people classified as branca (22.14%) of any of the municipalities in the cacau region. This number is comparable to IIhéus (22.46%) and Itabuna (29.31%) but contrasts sharply with Cannavieiras (57.62%) (Mortara 1952). During this peak of the cacau boom in the 1950s, Belmonte was home to several wealthy cacau plantation owners and their families. Elders told me how these branco plantation owners took frequent airplane trips directly from Belmonte’s airport to Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Europe, and the United States to conduct business, to sight-see, and to fill their homes with hand crafted furniture and other Amarela is the word for the color yellow, and refers to people of Asian descent, 18fineries. They celebrated festivals and social events in clubes (private social clubs) that were highly segregated by class. One of these clubes, called América, also denied entry to negros throughout the 1950 and 1960s. This points out an important feature of comparative studies of race in Brazil (and elsewhere). At the time that Harris and Kottak, for example, were conducting studies in Arambepe, a small fishing village with ambiguous racial categories, people in Belmonte were experiencing very real rigid categories that excluded certain people because of their race. One woman I talked with, Caroline, told me: Otha, antigamente, tinha um clube aqui que s6 era para rico e branco. ‘Vocé podia até ter dinheiro, mas se vocé fosse negra, voe8 néio entrava. E tem um caso aqui antigo que...um pessoal que tem dinheiro daqui, criou uma menina, morena, escura, ¢ essa menina foi um dia, nesse clube. Pararam a musica e mandaram a menina se retirar. Look, in the olden days, there was a club here that was only for the rich and branco, You could even have money, but if you were negra, you could not get in, And there was an old case where...there were some people with money from here and they raised a girl, morena, escura, and this girl went one day to the club. They stopped the music and made the girl leave. People in Belmonte today frequently point out this past racism as a concrete example of the subtle but pervasive racism that they feel but have difficulty pointing out (see also Twine 1998). As such, I could ask people questions about the clube that point to implicit ways they conceptualize racial differences. For example, I often asked people who would be denied entry into the clube. Most of the time, people told me that morenos and negros (or pretos)'* were denied entry. Some, however, claimed that “Morenos entravam. O negécio era preto” [Morenos entered. ‘The thing was preto}. These observations helped spark an idea for later controlled investigations For many, these terms are synonyms. 19(Study 5.1 and 5.2) that ask about entrance rules for a Camaval group as a way to cut through difficult to interpret racial terms. Conte onte Today in Belmonte, the former elite families try to maintain their beautiful houses along the main roads, but peeling paint and splitting columns speak of the disappearance of their wealth. In the early 1990s, vassoura de bruxa (witches’ broom disease) wiped out almost all of the cacau trees, flattening previous economic differences. Now, options for jobs are limited, Plantation owners are working on cacau cloning; though it has not yet been very successful, they remain optimistic. The tourism industry provides some jobs for people in nearby towns, but this recent boom has bypassed Belmonte where the beach is awash in chocolate brown waves due to the emptying of the Jequitinhonha River. Some people were employed by the Mut ipality for jobs such as cleaning the streets or watching the guiamum (crabs) kept underneath the huge concrete crab sculpture at the town’s entrance (see Figure 1.2 below). During the time of my research, these jobs paid the minimum wage of 180 reais, or approximately 60 dollars, per month. Teachers at the municipal high school could work a double shift to eam twice this minimum while workers in a coveted job at the town bank could earn approximately five times the minimum or more. Many just scrape by, with approximately half of those over 10 years old not receiving any monthly salary (IBGE 2000 census). These people may try fishing for swordfish and tuna in the ocean, catfish in the river, or collecting and shelling 20Figure 1.2: Crab sculpture, Belmonte crabs. Unemployed people in Belmonte talk about how lucky they are for the rich seafood and the abundant fruit trees. Many are malnourished, but few are starving. Children in Belmonte today grow up in this setting where actual wealth disparities are relatively small but imagined hierarchies of class and race loom large. A very small percentage of children are sent to private schools, but the vast majority chooses between the State and Municipal public schools. My research concentrates on children and adolescents in the Municipal elementary school (grades 1-4) and in the secondary school (grades 5-8). Statistics for education in Belmonte show very low education levels. According to the 2000 IBGE National Census, approximately 25% of people over 10 years old had not even completed one year of schooling. Most students do not finish 8" grade and very few continue past that grade. During the graduation for eighth grade in 2002, 10 students graduated out of approximately 150 that had begun fifth grade. Students in both the elementary school and secondary school can attend either moming classes or afternoon classes, and adults can take 21night classes at the secondary school. I found teachers at the secondary school to be generally dedicated, skilled, and well-liked by the students. Teachers at the elementary school, however, often left the management of their classrooms to untrained intems who were not extremely effective Living situations for these students are highly variable. Because work is so scarce in Belmonte, parents who are prime working age often leave the children in Belmonte with relatives while they seek to make a living in urban centers such as Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, So Paulo, and (on a smaller scale) Porto Seguro. Women often give birth to children when they are very young (many as teenagers) and often end up as single parents. As such, many children end up being raised primarily by grandparents, siblings, or other relatives. Kin and friend networks are critical for raising children, who may spend periods living with whichever family member is best able to support and care for them at the time. Children of all ages are frequently on their own to run around town once schoo! gets out for the day. Belmonte is a small, compact city, laid out in a grid pattern with cement block or sand streets. The center of town is compact with colorful cinder block houses spaced closed together or abutting one another. The town is bounded to the West by the Jequitinhonha River and to the East by the Atlantic Ocean, The main road, Avenida Rio-Mar is 1.5 miles long stretching from the river to the sea. On its way toward the sea, Avenida Rio-Mar passes through the center of town, alongside soccer fields, by the airport where the overgrown runway is now used for fast-walking and driving lessons, and by the private country club with the town’s only swimming pool. Rio-Mar ends at beach-side kiosks where people drink and snack as they watch the 22brown waves come in, Cars are extremely rare, and most people rely on bicycles for personal transportation and horses or donkeys for transporting materials. As such, the streets are used by children for dodge ball and soccer practice. At the time of my research, the town was considered a very safe and clean place, and children were left free to play on their own at very young ages." In this dissertation I focus on children and adolescents in the secondary school asa crucial component to this study for two reasons. First, I include a developmental aspect to my study for theoretical concerns. Research indicates that racial categories in various areas of Brazil may be rapidly changing (Kottak 1992), and much of this change occurs along generational lines (Sansone 1993). Unfortunately, anthropologists often assume that cultural learning is a passive process whereby children gradually come to have the knowledge that adults have. This is not the case (Hirschfeld 1999a; Woodhead 1990). Children are active agents driving cultural change, and may come to hold knowledge that is quite different from adults in the same community. Not only that, but they may even process categories in different and developmentally specific ways (Hirschfeld 1996). Second, older children specifically became a critical component to my research because of ethnographic developments unknown to me until | arrived for fieldwork in April 2002. As mentioned above, in 2003 I witnessed the first systematic teaching of racial ideologies inspired by black activists. ‘This provided a unique opportunity to talk with ° By phone, friends have told me that this situation has been changing forthe worse, and that children are given much less freedom to roam the town,children who are making sense of conflicting ideologies and to test the impact of explicitly taught ideologies. My entrée into research in the schools of Belmonte was only possible through a parallel entrée into the politics of Belmonte. During predissertation fieldwork I met the Principal of the Municipal Secondary School, Gindsio Pedro Calmén, She had welcomed me (and my research agenda) with open arms and introduced me to many of the students and teachers. Yet when I retumed almost two years later, she was no longer the Principal and was not even in town. I met with the new Principal who directed me to the Secretary of Education, Karla D’ Andrade, the cousin of the Mayor at the time, Janio Natal. Municipal Schools in Belmonte are run through the virtual dictatorial power of the Mayor and his Secretary of Education. When Janio Natal took office in 1992, he instigated a massive personnel change in the schools that affected many of the teachers. Teachers in Belmonte now fear losing their jobs through any small sign of disloyalty, such as not attending a city-function or voting for anyone other than the Mayor or his allies.” Under the advice from friends in town, I approached my relationships with Janio and his associates with caution, Karla D’ Andrade, the Secretary of Education, asked me to write a proposal to the mayor that detailed my research plan and offered a reciprocal service for the favor of the school’s cooperation. Knowing that I needed unconditional support from the Mayor, I asked around before submitting a proposal. The consensus among those I asked was that I would probably be expected to help with English classes in the municipal schools, (AU children from 5" to 8" grade take two English classes per ® Somehow when teachers vote otherwise, it becomes public knowledge. I was often told that secret ballots did not often live up to their name. 24week as part of the curriculum.) Thus, I offered my assistance with developing or teaching English classes. The Secretary of Education came up with a plan to send the existing English teacher to a remote rural school in the municij ity to act as Principal (while the existing Principal took matemity leave). I then took over his English classes for the remaining two months of the year, My experience teaching English ended up being critical to my research. These classes facilitated a rapport with the young people of Belmonte that was necessary for my sensitive research on race. Thad two initial reservations about this arrangement. First, I was worried that this position might take too much of my time that should be devoted to research. ‘This concern was easily assuaged by talking with the Principal of the school regarding expectations for my teaching. She stressed that I would not be responsible for even a half-schedule of classes and that I could consider myself more of a cultural ambassador without worrying about covering a specific curriculum. Additionally, the position was only for two months with several breaks for holidays, I decided this, ‘would be time well spent getting to know an age group of children who were generally busy with their own concerns and not as interested in meeting “the outsider.” Thad a second major concem though — that I would be perceived by the children as an authority figure. Current research suggests that children hide certain beliefs and behaviors from authority figures much more so than from their peers or other adults, specifically concerning the topic of race (Van Ausdale and Feagin 2001). 1 attempted to avoid this problem by framing my class differently from the standard 25classes in Belmonte, We played games, sang songs, and generally had lots of fun. This set-up facilitated relationships that seemed distinct from the typical teacher/student relationship. I was perceived as an adult but not an authority figure, and my foreignness probably contributed to this perception by making me a not quite culturally competent adult (Corsaro 1985). My pedagogy created one more way for me to distance myself from any perceived authority. I only spoke English to my students during class time — an effective method for teaching foreign languages. This pedagogy not only contributed to an increase in the English language skills of the students but it also helped to create distance between my research self and the authority figure of my teaching self, This arrangement thus ended up benefiting everyone involved — having fun with the children and helping them lear, satisfying the Mayor and the Secretary of Education, allowing the English teacher to take a prestigious (though temporary) position, and allowing me to get to know more than a hundred students well. My position in the school also facilitated my interaction with parents. In Belmonte, a grown man observing classes without contributing in some notable way would be considered strange and inappropriate. As a teacher, I fit a more appropriate cultural model, and was warmly received by parents across town. My experiences as a teacher made me a normal fixture in the school. I spent much time there even after my position ended, observing classes and talking with students and teachers during breaks. 1 also became acquainted with many of the teachers in the grade school through schoo! functions. These relationships opened doors that allowed me to observe elementary school classes and become acquainted 26with younger children whom I was not teaching. Older and younger students felt comfortable stopping by my house (which was right in the center of town) to get a glass of water, to meet my wife, to see newly hatched chicks in my backyard, to look at my family pictures, or just to chat. This comfort greatly facilitated more in depth investigations as I moved into other phases of research beyond participant observation with the children. .d Methods I began conducting many home visits to get to know children’s families and to lear about their lives outside of school. I often conducted semi-structured interviews with parents and relatives of students, working towards a more holistic understanding of their lives. I was also coming to a deeper understanding of race in Belmonte — the diversity of ways that people talked about categories and the complex ways these categories were deployed in social situations. It was at that point that I felt ready to conduct a series of controlled investigations to further investigate similarities and differences in the cognitive processing of categories that were entangled with race terms that often had multiple or unclear meanings. I had decided to conduct controlled investigations because of cautions of a number of cognitive anthropologi that have come to believe that the standard methodological tools of cultural anthropology are not adequate for making claims about what people think, Rita Astuti, for example, conducted research with the Vezo of Madagascar and writes “that there is a significant discrepancy between what Vezo adults say, the cnunciations that get transmitted and are part of what anthropologists would identify 27as ‘Vezo culture’, and the theoretical presuppositions that people mobilize to reason inferentially, irrespective of their cultural narratives” (Astuti 2001:435), In other words, anthropologists cannot assume that what people say reflects what they think, and research has confirmed that there are often crucial differences between the two (Astuti 2001; Bloch 1998). In my case, the race terms that people used often did not seem adequate to describe the complex ways people were thinking about race and so these investigations became critical, especially in the case of children who may have an especially hard time articulating the vast knowledge they possess. ended up discovering additional benefits to the controlled investigations that enhanced my research. First, they added a valuable systematicity to standard interpretive methods that can be susceptible to researchers’ own subjectivities. Striving for statistical significance by talking to a large number of people for each research question was useful for breaking me out of the comfort zones I established in the field, Attempting to produce random sampling, I was constantly forced to talk with people I had not already beftiended and might not have met through casual interaction. 1 also found that controlled investigations enhanced my ethnography. In my Study 3.1, for example, I asked people to sort real-life photographs into groups and then asked questions about the groups that they sorted. This study provided a wealth of information, not only from statistical analyses, but also from the conversations it prompted. The photographs I used seemed to fascinate people and open barriers. Reflecting on the faces in the photographs, people from Belmonte talked openly about race and racism; this openness was particularly striking considering the 28sensitive subject matter. People who I had only just met got out their own photo albums and showed me pictures of their parents and grandparents, sons and daughters, telling personal and emotional stories that I might otherwise have only heard from my closest friends in Belmonte. I was able to use a controlled investigation as a door to opening up an ethnographic interview after the experiment questions were finished. This was incredibly useful not only for conducting research, but also for establishing personal connections with people in the field, creating a comfortable research environment and allowing for more in-depth research in the future. Controlled investigations in different cultural contexts can be awkward where the research frame is not well understood. It is certainly an imposition to ask people to take time out of their days to answer questions. And if that interaction is kept impersonal, or even compensated with money, it can lead to misunderstanding and resentment, Talking with people for a while after the study questions are concluded helped alleviate some of these problems. Switching between vastly different methods in the field proved surprisingly uncomplicated; writing about them, however, was not as simple. Disciplinary conventions in anthropology and psychology are quite different. Cognitive psychologists follow a standard format (goals, method, procedure, results, discussion) that is usually written in article rather than book form, posing a specific hypothesis and then testing it, Anthropologists, on the other hand, typically present evidence based on example rather than large sample. They insert themselves reflexively into the ethnography and they follow the narrative lines of the people with whom they work rather than shaping their work to conform to disciplinary format conventions. 29Integrating these conventions while maintaining a singular “voice” can be challenging. Ihave attempted to maintain a decidedly anthropological voice, even when I present quanti ive results. I am especially self-reflective in describing the methodology of controlled investigations, hoping to demystify this procedure for anthropologists who may be skeptical of the idea of ass ing numbers to complex ruman actions, feelings, and thoughts. Below I describe my attempts in each of the chapters, to integrate theory, method and writing style in this interdiseiplinary endeavor. Organization of this Dissertation In Chapter 2, I describe and analyze specific “sites” ~classrooms in which school texts teach race, capoeira performances, Camaval processions - where the ideologies of racial democracy and black movements are experienced by young people and adults in Belmonte. 1 begin by analyzing school lessons where the standard textbook faithfully reproduces the Freyrian story as the founding myth for the country. The history of Brazil is presented as a story about the biological and cultural mixing of three essentialized races that leads to a modern Brazilian population in which no one person belongs exclusively to any one of these past groups. I argue that while biological mixing is presented as straightforward, the cultural mixing discussion implicitly reproduces the hegemony of branca culture and the “otherness” of india and negra culture. It does this by associating past indios and negros, but not brancos, with culturally “different” practices. When those practices 30and symbols are used in the present, students make the association to the essentialized groups in the past. Scholars often claim that cultural symbols related to Africa or slavery (such as foods, music, and religion) were appropriated by the Brazilian state in the service of constructing a unified national identity (in the Freyrian sense) rather than a distinct racial identity. In this Chapter, I present ethnographic descriptions of two specific black movement cultural organizations that use some of these symbols in their performances. Mestre Raio runs a capoeira (sport/martial art/music) academy that not only trains people in the art of capoeira, but also teaches them about slavery and the struggles of negros in Brazil. Capoeira is symbolic on a national and international level as quintessentially Brazilian (athletic, inclusive, energetic, and cool) and fits with the cultural part of the racial democracy ideology. Black Camaval groups called blocos negros, on the other hand, employ symbols from the Afro-Brazilian religion of candomblé in their performance. These symbols associate the bloco not with the mixed Brazilian race, but with a separate black culture and past Afticans, These performances (such as that by Os Netos de Gandhy [The Grandchildren of Gandhy] that I describe) are publicly celebrated as shared folklore but do not inspire widespread identification with African symbols. The description of these cultural symbols and activities sets the stage for a detailed look at cognitive categories in the following three chapters. In Chapter 3, I begin to examine the structure of racial categories from a cognitive perspective. I begin by explaining how essentialism fits into the idea that categories and concepts are organized by intuitive theories that structure causal 31relations in various domains by domain-specific modular cognitive mechanisms, 1 examine cognitive theories of race and essentialism and describe how I designed controlled investigations looking individually at various implications of essentialism. I then examine methods used by Marvin Harris and Conrad Kottak that led to the establishment of the conventional wisdom about race in Brazil. I present some inguistic, and cognitive perspectives isms of their claims from ethnographic, and then show how many of these criticisms are unfounded based on careful reading of their conclusions. Following this, I present my own methodology for investigating the Harris and Kotak claim about the multiplicity of racial categories. I use photographs I took of people from a nearby town for a sorting task designed to answer several questions about the interrelationships between race, color, and social class in categorizations by adults and children. I argue that although people associate color with social class status, racial categorizations comprise an autonomous domain, primed equivalently by the words cor and raca. Based on the clusters into which people sorted a set of pictures, I show that categories are not ambiguous, but that some categories show more agreement than others. I show that there is widespread agreement regarding the pictures that are sorted into the category branca and that these pictures are rarely grouped with any other pictures. I also show that there is high agreement regarding the pictures that are grouped into a category most often, labeled negro/preto/moreno but that the boundary between these pictures and the others is less absolute, Pictures that are described in mixed blood terms show more ambiguity — less cultural agreement and more porous borders. I then look at the justifications people give as to why they sorted the pictures in the ways they did, and 32hypothesize that there is a biological understanding of white / non-white; however, those in the non-white category are not equally conceptualized as black. In fact, the non-white category may be structured in a graded way with one person being considered more negro than another because of visible physical features. These conclusions provide a model that begins to account for the diverse findings about racial category definition, showing how visuals and ancestry work together for categorization. The next studies, presented in Chapter 4, focus specifically on the defining roles of ancestry, or “blood,” for categorization. If categories in Belmonte are essentialized, “insides” should be defining rather than surface features, much as they are for essentialized non-human animal species. In Study 4.1, T adapt the methodology from a Frank Keil study to see if a classification originally made on visuals alone would be revised when new information about family ancestry is revealed. By looking at each subject's patter of responses to questions about three different pictures, I show that approximately half responded using a “pure branca” strategy. That is, they changed the classification of someone considered branca when ‘moreno or negro family members were revealed because of the darker blood; however, they did not change their classification when someone originally considered negro was revealed to have branca family members because they were still relying on visuals to make the classification. The other half of reliable subjects responded by using a consistent strategy; they never changed the classification when the new information was revealed. Though this seems to be a completely different classification scheme, an analysis of the justifications revealed striking similarities in 33the reasoning between the consistent strategy and the “pure branca” strategy. Even when the subjects did not change the classification of the picture originally classified as branca, they still talked about the blood, saying things like “she is branca, but her blood is negra.” This seems to imply that negro blood has stronger innate potential to influence categorization, so I designed a different study to specifically test varying conceptions of blood in cases of mixed race unions. In Study 4.2 I ask second graders, fifth graders, and adults to look at drawings of various combinations of same-race and mixed-race unions. In one condition, I ask them about the categorical identity of the child — if the child will be branca, morena, or negra. In the other condition, I ask them to pick the probable child out of three drawings that look identical except for the race of the child, Unlike Hirschfeld’s findings in the United States, I find that neither children nor adults show any indication of believing that negro blood has more power in determining physical features in branca-negro unions when the intermediate ‘moreno option is available. However, when the mixed union is either branca-moreno or morena-negro, | find an interesting age difference where sixth graders, but not adults, pick the darker option in the category identification for the morena-negro union and both the category and biological conditions for the branca-moreno union. I hypothesize that sixth graders, because of changes in teaching and changes in media representations, are thus demonstrating a slight tendency towards attributing more innate potential to darker blood. In Chapter 5 I further investigate the defining roles of visuals and ancestry by asking people about category identity not in the abstract but in the context of a 34hypothetical Camaval bloco with specific rules for inclusion and exclusion. In Study 5.1, I tell fifth graders, eighth graders, and adults about a bloco that only allowed brancos/negros or that did not allow brancos/negros. I then show them photographs representing a mixed-race branca-negro couple and, one by one, pictures of three children of this couple that approximately represent the groups of branco, moreno, and negro, For each child, I ask whether they will be allowed to enter the bloco and why. This experiment reveals that for the majority of informants in all three age groups, visuals determine who can enter the bloco because one or two of the siblings can enter while the remaining one/s cannot. I also show that the picture considered moreno is considered distinctly from the picture considered negro in this context even. though had previously shown that biologically they were both similarly non-white. If visuals are so critically important, then it may be possible, as talk seems to indicate, that one can alter physical features so as to change racial categories. In Study 5.2, I examine this question using the same bloco context, except that I compare reasoning about a bloco with rules regarding race to ones with rules for sex, height, weight, and class. I tell fifth graders, eighth graders, and adults about someone who really wanted to get into one of those blocos, showing them a drawing of the person and asking whether that person would be allowed in. When they say they would not be allowed in, I tell them about a transformation the person underwent and show them a drawing of the “new” person. I then ask whether they would now be allowed to enter and why. I find that all age groups do not allow the person to enter the bloco when the rule is about sex, but that they all do when the rules are about height, weight, or class. With race, I find an interesting age difference where 35adults allow the transformed person to enter but eighth graders do not. In looking at their justifications, it seems that they are “punishing” the person for wanting to change their color because they should be happy with who they are, ‘This certainly suggests that although they still focus much attention on visuals, they have appropriated an important part of the black movement ideology — that one should not, try to “deny” their natural color or their ancestry. ‘The studies presented in this Chapter are based on hypothetical situations since Belmonte does not have blocos that explicitly include or exclude based on race. observed, or was told about, several actual contexts in which discrimination occurred, and for the most part this discrimination occurred against people who were phenotypically darker, considered negro. While it seems to be that discrimination is reserved for the darkest people in Belmonte, statistics on institutional racism demonstrate otherwise. I explain controversies over categories used on a national scale —(1) in the national census and (2) in affirmative action programs. I explain how studying the complexity of racial categorization even in a small city like Belmonte can illuminate national debates and contemporary public policy issues. In Chapter 6 I conclude by clarifying three main theoretical points from the ‘sum of the conclusions of the previous chapters. First, I clarify how my conclusions fit into theories of essentialism in cognitive psychology, and I show how my results support those who argue for a more detailed look at components of essentialism. In addition, while my primary concern is not to hypothesize about cognitive architecture, my conclusions support those who argue that the way humans are essentialized is quite different from the way that folk biological species are 36essentialized. Second, | follow some cognitively-oriented researchers in stressing that racial categorization should not be separated from categorization in other domains such as those commonly labeled as ethnic or national. I describe how my research builds on these positions, and I suggest using terms such as “race” and “ethnicity” as folk concepts rather than analytic ones. Third, I argue that this cognitive perspective can show how theories of race in Brazil can complement one another. In this way researchers can move past debates about static systems and focus on the ways that cognitive categorization interacts with real-world problems. Tend by describing two newly begun social movements in Belmonte. The first is specifically a black movement organization ~ a regional network of local artists throughout Southem Bahia. I describe the events from their annual Semana Zumbi in IIhéus, including a description of their roundtable meetings planning for the future of the movement. This particular black movement consciously includes many different styles of art, allowing for freedom of expression for anyone who might consider themselves negro. The second movement I describe is a human rights organization started in Belmonte to fight abuses against those without power. Both of these movements were inspiring in their messages of equality, resistance, and freedom of expression. 37CHAPTER 2 Racial Democracy and Black Activism: Biology and Culture in Conflicting Ideologies I sat on the couch in the front room of Professora Rita’s house, waiting in the March heat for her to get home for the interview that we had arranged. The windows and door were flung far open to catch any trace of a breeze that might blow past. As I waited, Rita’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Gisele, and I passed the time making conversation, She asked about my research, and I told her a bit about my project and why I was doing it. She began explaining her own heritage and started to identify herself as a morena because of some purported mixing in the past. But glancing down at my notebook and tape recorder, she stopped before she could finish the word morena, She then said that she was a mulata, “At least I think that’s the right word for the mixture of branco and negro. My mom would kill me if she knew I didn’t remember this. We learned it in school... just don’t remember. I’m sure there’s a book around here ~ we could look it up” (translated in field notes). She rummaged around the house and came back with a history book from the class that her mother teaches. Even though the tape recorder was not tumed on, its mere presence marked the interaction as “official” and Gisele wanted to get it right. Within a minute she had located the page that explained the three types of mixed-race people in Brazil: mulato refers to the mixture between branco and negro; caboclo or mameluco is used for the 38mixture between brancos and indios; and, though “less common,” cafuzo describes the mixture of indio with negro. “You see? I was right. I'm a mulata,” she stated proudly. Gisele, and most Belmonte residents that I knew, did not remember these terms for specific racial mixtures because they are not the terms used in everyday life. More commonly, any assumed mixing is glossed as morena and then described in reference to combinations of ancestry, or “blood” [sangue] from two or three of the races that came together in the founding of Brazil. The racial democracy ideology that forms the basis for history lessons in Belmonte schools does not explicitly tell students that they are morena, but it does teach that all true Brazilians are biologically mixed such that they cannot be exclusively descended from any one particular race. But the history lessons are not only about biological mixing. They also describe modem Brazilian society as a mixture of cultures from the three races. And yet when Gisele thinks about her own racial identity, she seems to only thinks about the biological aspect of mixing — not the cultural aspects, despite the cultural activism of black movement organizations. In this Chapter, I describe the conflicting ideologies of racial democracy and black movements at the sites in which they are experienced in Belmonte ~ over textbooks in school classrooms, in capoeira rodas where symbols of the past and the present intermingle, and in candomblé and umbanda centers where indexes of Africa are publicly celebrated in locos negros but resisted and stigmatized in religious context, While scholars and people in Belmonte acknowledge and attempt to reconcile the biological conflict that the ideologies of racial democracy (mixing 39makes us the same) and of contemporary black movements (one drop of blood makes us different) present, they often overlook the ways in which cultural symbols complicate the transition between ideologies. I argue that the cultural aspects of the racial democracy ideology often undermine the attempts of black movement organizations to “ethnicize” blackness ~ that is, to associate beliefs, behaviors, and symbols with a distinet negro culture, 1 begin this Chapter by analyzing school lessons where the standard textbook faithfully reproduces the Freyrian story as the founding myth for the country. The history of Brazil is presented as a story about race; biological mixing is straightforwardly presented as an equally proportional blending of three essentialized races that leads to a modern Brazilian population in which no one person belongs exclusively to any one of these past groups. The biological aspects of racial mixing are presented in a straightforward way that intuitively makes sense to the students. ‘When teachers try to present a different form of racial classification that is advocated by black movements, they present it in terms of a conflicting, and counterintuitive, way to understand biology. The racial democracy ideology presented in the school textbook is also a story about mixing cultures; however, when the story implicitly exoticizes cultural symbols, of Afro-Brazilians, it subverts the explicitly cultural strategy of many of Belmonte’s black movement organizations. Blocos negros, for example, work to valorize aspects of culture associated with Africa and Afro-Brazilian history. Scholars argue that, these symbols and activities arising out of the slave experiences in Brazil were appropriated by state and tourist organizations in such a way that they now signify a 40united national identity rather than a specific racial one (Fry 1982; Hanchard 1999; ‘Teles dos Santos 1998). | argue that in Belmonte, that claim holds true for many Afro-Brazilian symbols and practices including the popular martial art capoeira that 1 will describe below. Religious practices from the religions of candomblé and umbanda, however, constitute a breach of shared Brazilian culture. Symbols from these religions are publicly celebrated as examples of past mixed heritage, but they are resisted and stigmatized as cultural blackness in the present, thus subverting the black activist efforts of blocos negros that attempt to utilize these symbols for popular mobilization. 1001 Lessor Indios, Portuguese, and Negros Gilberto Freyre’s formulation of Brazil as a racial democracy frames the history of the Brazilian nation, making the founding of the country into a story about race that is dutifully told in the history textbook used in the municipal secondary school in Belmonte (on founding “myth” see DaMatta 1987). I examine specific lessons from the text book used for fifth and sixth graders (Guyo 2002). During the lasses that I witnessed in the secondary school, teachers closely followed the book, page by page and exercise by exercise. In this section, I briefly present the biological and cultural descriptions of portuguese, indios, and negros as they are described before the mixing that brought them all together. In sum, the three groups are described in essentialist terms ~ as separate biological and cultural kinds; however, each of the three is described quite differently. Past indios are described with a focus on both physical and cultural features that carry through to present day indios. The 41portuguese are implicitly presented as rational, without specific cultural or biological features, And the Africans, alternatively called slaves and negros, are presented as passive victims, associated only with religious beliefs from candomblé. The book begins the history of Brazil with a description of the indigenous groups populating the New World before the arrival of the Europeans. It first asks the students a question ~ “Por que os indios parecem ser todos iguais?” [Why do all indios seem to be the same?] (Guydo 2002, 88). The book explains how indios are not actually all alike. In fact, it reports, there are three distinct groups that represent the kinds of indios that existed in the New World — the Esquimé, Pele-vermelha (red- skin), and Tupi-guarani. ‘The book shows stereotypical drawings of these three types and then asks the students to look carefully and reflect on the physical differences because facial features allow them to recognize the differences between human groups (see Figure 2.1 below). Figure 2.1: Drawings of three types of indios from history textbook a tt - = . H R , s Evga Petevermelha ‘These indio types are not only distinguishable by physical features, but also by cultural differences. Each type has its own style of house: iglu, fenda (tent), and oca (hut) (see Figure 2.2). 2Figure 2.2: House styles associated with indio types from history textbook OS iu Tend Because those indios found in Brazil are from only one of these three grouy Brazilian indios are basically essentialized — presented as physically and culturally homogenous. A photograph of an indio boy is shown in the next exercise (see Figure 2. Figure 2.3: Photograph of present day indio child from history textbook Students are asked what features they can see to know that the child is indio. This picture draws continuity from the past essentialized group through the present, showing how indios maintain their identity over time. Ethnographically, I found it to Bbe the case that Belmonte residents associated indios with traditional ways of dressing, speaking, and living. People said that there were no indios in Belmonte, but that there was a reservation not too far away where some lived. The ways that the category of indio seemed to be equally essentialized in the past and the present presents extremely interesting opportunities for comparative studies between the “othered” groups of indios and negros. The scope of this dissertation did not permit these studies, for my focus is on the groups actually residing in Belmonte ~ the brancos, the negros, and those considered a mix of the two (or three). A later lesson in the book, titled Casa Grande e Senzala (translated in English as The Masters and the Slaves for the ttle of the Freyre book of the same name) sets up the contrast between the portuguese and the negros. The portuguese are not described physically or culturally; they are presented as rational businessmen making calculated decisions about the required labor supply for the sugar cane plantations. ‘When discussing slavery, the portuguese are not even discussed as agents; both slaves and masters were merely acting their part in the plantation system, In this way, the chapter surprisingly follows Freyre’s work, which virtually absolves the portuguese of slavery, citing the causal power of the labor situation on the plantation, The African slaves are presented as passive victims in the slave trade. Several lessons in the book addressed issues that seemed to be progressive — the terrible journey from Africa and the unfair conditions of slave life in the plantation society. The text asks students to imagine the atrocious treatment of the slaves and to think about whether or not discrimination exists in their town; however, the fact that slaves were almost always called negros rather than escravos (slaves) contributes to thestigmatization of the term negro for contemporary identity. And, differently from indios, the lesson implicitly denies the present existence of negros because there is no present existence of slaves. There are no pictures of slaves or present day negros, and the only drawing presented in these lessons is that of Iemanj, a god (orixé) from the Afro-Brazilian religion, candomblé, dressed in clothing associated with Africa (see Figure 2.4). Belief in candomblé is the only cultural description given for the African slaves (more on this below in the section, “Mixed Culture”). Figure 2.4: Drawing of Yemanjé from history textbook School Lessons: Biological Mixin; The concept of mixing takes center stage in the next lesson, called “Como nasce um povo” [How a people is born], with the biological aspects addressed first. The Portuguese, because they controlled the plantation, could “lie down” with whomever they wanted. First they married indigenous women, producing mestigos — the first true brasileiros, Then “as mulheres negtas tiveram filhos com os homemsbrancos...Essas criangas nasciam escravas, mas nio eram pretas nem brancas € comengaram a ser denominadas pelo nome de mulatos” (the negra women had children with the branco men... These children were bor slaves, but there were neither pretas nor brancas and they began to be called by the name of mulatos” (Guyiio, 2002: 235), In the following section called “Somos Brasileiros” [We are Brazilians), the book defines several terms for the students: the word raga as refers to physical characteristics that “allow us to distinguish people of very different types” (Guyio 2002: 235); mestico is the general name given to a person born from parents of different races; mulato describes the children of branco and negro parents; caboclo or mameluco describes the mixture of branco and indio; and cafuzo is given for the rare mixture between indio and negro. This biological mixing is described with contradictory messages. On one hand, the mixture combinations listed are very precise, and people like Gisele often have the impression that there is a “correct” biological classification that may be unknown but discoverable. Other times, in the text, biological mixing is described as, so complete that terms attempting to describe people are meaningless. The idea that Brazilians are unclassifiable is illustrated with a lesson in the book that follows the lyrics from a rock song by Amaldo Antunes. The song is titled “Inclassificdveis” (Unclassifiables) and it repeats numerous race terms, some real and some invented, reinforcing the idea that these terms do not delimit kinds of people, but rather descriptions of the various tokens of the mixed Brazilian kind. This focus on biological mixing as creating children neither branco nor negro directly contradicts the new racial classification ideology presented by the teacher inChapter 1. According to teachers, the new classification system of contemporary black movements had been discussed at a regional municipal meeting before the start of the academic year. ‘The overall vision of the new system was poorly explained; many teachers came away with just the basic requirements ~ they should use the word negra instead of preta; they should stress that morena did not exist and people who had previously been considered morena should identify as negra due to an assumed African ancestry; and they should use the word raga (literally, race) instead of the word cor (literally, color) for describing the categories (see Chapter 3 for discussion of raga and cor). Some teachers were not clear as to the reasons for these changes. They were not given any guidance as to how to bring them into the classroom nor were they given any materials to supplement existing textbooks. These poorly understood instructions sometimes led teachers to avoid the topic in their classes or sometimes to give idiosyncratic explanations such as that described in Chapter 1. I label the explanation from Chapter 1 idiosyncratic because the teacher added her own directions and explanations that helped her make sense of and use the ideology. Black movement organizations may advocate for one-drop classification systems but they generally do not describe the branca category as including only those with blue eyes and blonde hair. The main thrust of their advocacy is to push those who identify as mixed or with intermediate terms to assume their negro identity by “rejection of the use of middle-range color terms, which they claim have long been part of the white ruling class's strategy to keeping Afro- Brazilians divided against themselves” (Burdick 1998: 150). The extreme form of classification presented by this teacher served to confuse students even more than 47necessary. In that case, students were especially perplexed by the fact that, according to the teacher, people they considered branca with brown hair were supposed to be called negra in the new system. One student told me, “That would mean that you should be called negro. It doesn’t make any sense.” Another student complained, “The teacher says that I should call myself negra, but that's crazy. Just look at me — I'm Branca!” Anthropologist John Burdick relates the reflections of one of the most prominent black activists, Abdias de Nascimento, that “the lion’s share of the movement’s energy has been devoted to convincing the black to accept his blackness” (Burdick 1998:150). He writes that this has become a central focus of the movement because of the importance of census numbers. Those who identify as prefo typically comprise approximately 10% of the population and those that identify as pardo typically surpass 50%. Black activists follow statistical researchers in emphasizing that according to major indices of health, wealth, and education, pretos and pardos are equally disadvantaged in comparison to brancos (Hasenbalg 1985; Silva 1985). If all of the pardos would identify as preto, the thinking goes, then this new category (called negros or afrodescendentes) would be a majority of the population and could wield these numbers to fight for more political power. The various black movement organizations’ insistence on removing intermediate terms for identification is absolute. Burdick writes how supporters who have “slipped” and used intermediate terms have been “chastised and corrected” (Burdick 1998: 151). He writes that this insistence has kept many who are sympathetic to the goals of the movement alienated, forcing them to deny non-negro ancestors or to feel embarrassed by claiming to 48understand the discrimination faced by those with more obvious negro physical features. I found these concerns to be prevalent in Belmonte as well, and the teacher presenting the new categorization system certainly did not help to explain or make sense of these concerns, ‘Spontaneous comments from teachers often pointed out markers of biological inheritances from éndios and negros (not brancos), but never in relation to cultural differences. For example, the first day I visited the sixth grade English class at the high school, the professor introduced me to the students, saying that they were lucky to have me there because I was an “americano legitimo” [legitimate American]. Then seemingly out of the blue, he added “ele € um americano legitimo como eu sou um negro legitimo” [he isa legitimate American like I ama legitimate negro]. He pointed to one lighter skinned child in the class (who would be urged to identify as negro using the new categories) and said “Vocé nao é legitimo. Olha a pele dele” [You are not legitimate. Look at his skin (said to the class)]. He then pointed to a boy with darker skin and said that he was so close to being a negro legitimo, but not quite there, While at first pass it may seem that he is equating blackness with Americanness, the idea of a legitimate American was just a trigger for him to talk about race, which he later told me he often tries to incorporate into lessons to educate students about their heritage. Looking at his comments and gestures, he was explicitly concerned only with a close examination of skin color as a proxy for blackness in a graded rather than absolute way. Other examples of these spontaneous comments also drew attention to physical features as clues to knowing how much of each group was mixed into a 49particular individual. During one history class on religion, a different teacher spontaneously pointed to one of the female students, Carmen, and asked the class to look at her straight hair in a braid, He pointed out that she certainly had some indigenous ancestry even if she didn’t know it, He indicated the gir! next to her and added, “You too.” They both protested strongly. He continued to explain how he could see the biological india features and eventually the girls stopped protesting. He then tumed back to the book and said that maybe they have “preguiga india” [Indian laziness] and that is why they can’t get any work done.” Later, at an eighth grade school graduation ceremony this same girl (Carmen) was walking toward the principal to receive her diploma and was met with an unexpected comment from the emcee of the event, a former teacher. He described her as “uma simpatica menina com a cor geneticamente brasileira, fruto da miscegenagdo de ragas do Brasil” [a preity girl with a genetically Brazilian color, fruit of the miscegenation of races of Brazil].”” This statement has nothing to do with the culture of Carmen in comparison to any of the other students, but rather is related to a physical prototype that exists, especially in women, of a racial mix imagined to reflect exactly equal proportions of the three past races. 21 The statement about indo “laziness” was not part of a racial democracy ideology, but simply the unfortunate repetition of a negative stereotype that the professor probably felt comfortable repeating because no one in the class identifies as indio. ® Two aspects ofthese interactions are troubling yet quite common. The first isthe freedom Belmonte ‘men have to comment on wornen and their bodies, even in public spaces (Caldwell 2007; Goldstein 2003). The second is the way that mixed race Brazilian women have been sexualized as they are made ‘symbols ofthe history ofthe nation. This pattern occurs in several other Latin American countries ‘with myths of racial democracy (Kutzinski 1993; Pravaz 2003; Wade 1993). 50School Lessons: Cultural Mixing The history book gives a concrete example to illustrate the concept of cultural mixing for the students, The author describes a lake in the center of Salvador next to the soccer stadium called the Dique do Tororé that embodies the cultural mixing of these three races (see Figure 2.5). Figure 2.5: Dique do Tororé From the indigenous culture comes the name of the lake, meaning “muita chuva, ‘muita agua” (much rain, much water); from the Affican culture come the large statues in the middle of the lake of candomblé gods, called orixds; and from the portuguese culture comes the settling of that particular area because the colonizers so desperately needed fresh water. This example is very telling, The Portuguese contribute nothing to this cultural mix except a rational need for water to run the colony while the indios and the negros have contributed a cultural element of “otherness.” The text describeshow the European (Portuguese) way of life forms the basis for present day Brazilian culture - the language, the religion, the way of living and dressing, etc.. The Portuguese, or branca, culture is equated with Brazilian society, as in the sentence “Além da mistura de herangas fisicas, a sociedade brasileira também recebeu influéncias das culturas natives e africanas” [Besides the mixture of physical inheritances, the Brazilian society also received influences from the native and African cultures] (Guydo 2002, 235). In order to have cultural mixing, there must be a clear idea of the primary groups being mixed, Peter Wade, in arguing against the liberating power of a racial democracy (or mestizaje) ideology, succinctly describes the inherent essentialism present in mixing ideologies: The reconstruction of racial origins is an inherent part of mestizaje. Blackness, whiteness, and indigenousness are constantly being recreated as, in a real sense, racial absolutes with primordial origi Mixture can not be simply set against original and essential identi Instead, it recreates them and redeploys them and, in doing so, re- establishes the basis for racism. The recreation of blackness does not automatically mean that anti-black racism will be directed against that category, but the former is necessarily a condition for the latter, if not sufficient one. In short, to see mixture and hybridization as, inherently opposed to racial absolutism and essentialism is quite wrong (Wade 2004: 356). s. ‘Wade’s argument focuses on the way that mixing and primordial groups are conceptualized biologically. Scholars who focus on the cultural aspeets of the racial democracy ideology argue that the Brazilian state actively promoted the idea of a common mixed culture by appropriating cultural practices arising out of Afro- Brazilian slave experience into national symbols, thereby reinforcing a racial democracy ideology on a national scale (Hanchard 1999). 52Brazilian anthropologist Peter Fry, in a seminal article on this topic, introduces the topic of symbolic appropriation with an example from his time in the United States. Living in New York, he decides to cook a typical Brazilian meal, ‘feijoada, for his US friends. Feijoada is a dish that arose as slaves utilized the ‘unwanted leftover parts of pork, and it is today served with black beans, rice and couve (collard greens). With much difficulty, Fry finds the right ingredients and serves the dish to his friends, one of whom is African-American from Alabama. As Fry serves the national dish of Brazil with much pomp and circumstance, his friend casually remarks that it just looks like the food he always ate when he was a kid, soul food. For Fry this exemplifies the comparative situation of symbols arising out of the slave experience — in Brazil the dish becomes a symbol of the nation while in the US it becomes a symbol of blackness. Other proposed cases of this national appropriation are samba (music), candomblé (religion), and capoeira (music/spor/martial art). Scholars argue that through active intervention of the state, these activities became symbolically appropriated as Brazilian rather than Afro-Brazilian. In the case of samba, for example, under the Vargas dictatorship in the mid-1930s the government subsidized and exerted control over samba schools (escolas de samba) in Rio de Janeiro, effectively taking the control of samba and Carnaval out of the hands of poor favela (hantytown) residents (Chasteen 1996). Capoeira, the combination music, sport, and martial art arising out of African dance and self-defense training for slaves, was incorporated in the 1970s by the Brazilian Boxing Federation as the national sport afier having previously been criminalized and associated with lower classes and 53blacks (Teles dos Santos 1998). And candomblé passed through a similar trajectory from being outlawed to being promoted as a national, and especially Bahian, symbol for identity and for tourism (Agier 1999). While it may be true that these activities and the symbols associated with them are ideologically celebrated and appropriated for representations of national identity, my research in Belmonte indicates that many of these symbols and activities are associated with Africa and marginalized by regular folk. This occurs in varying degrees — from foods that are widely eaten but associated with Africa to candomblé practices considered to be associated with “evil forces.” In the following section, I give some background on black movement organizations and describe two different types of black movement cultural activism in Belmonte that employ the symbols related to Aftica in very different ways. First, I briefly describe Mestre Raio (Master Lightning), leader of one of the two capoeira academies in Belmonte. His activism is small in scale, but largely successful because capocira is celebrated not as an inheritance from Africa, but as a shared way to be Brazilian, moder, fit, and cool. I then contrast this with one of Belmonte’s blocos negros, Os Netos de Gandhy (The Grandchildren of Gandhi), and its leader Celso do Gandhy. 1 argue that this bloco is simultaneously celebrated as past heritage and marginalized through its association with candomblé, Black Activism and Cultural Symbols Black movement organizations in Brazil vary widely in goals, strategies, and ideologies. Some of these organizations have explicit agendas for biologically 34defining categories while others do not. Sansone (2003) lists three broad periods of black activism in Brazil. In the first period from the 1920s through the Vargas dictatorship beginning in the mid-1930s, the Frente Negra (Black Front) and the Experimental Black Theater (TEN) led by actor/activist Abdias do Nascimento were the most active black movement organizations. The second period of black activism occurred during the loosening of the last years of the military dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s and included the Movimento Negro Unificado (Unified Black Movement) (MNU) and the Pastoral do Negro (a department of the Catholic Chureh), both of which are still active across Brazil. The third period, roughly from the impeachment of President Collor in 1992 through the present, saw the development of more local black organizations. These organizations often operate alongside non-governmental organizations, working on specific issues such as health, or education. In this present period, Burdick describes differences in black movement, organizations across the country along five axes: (1) “groups that focus on the antiracist struggle in judicial, labor, and legislative arenas” versus “groups such as the musical blocos afros Olodum or Agbara Dudu, which focus on the building of positive black identity through cultural work” (Burdick 1998b, 137); (2) “groups that emphasize an essential black identity rooted in African cultural/racial lineage” versus “those that emphasize a black identity rooted in the New World experience of cultural mixture and synthesis” (ibid: 138); (3) “groups whose audience has traditionally been ‘made up mainly of middle-class professionals and intellectuals” versus “those that pride themselves in having ‘gone to the bases” through courses of professionalization, 55‘education, and consciousness-raising in poor and working-class communities” (ibid: 138); (4) “willingness to work with political parties and inside the state bureaucracy” (ibid: 138); and (5) “the specific concerns of black women” (ibid: 138). I describe these axes in detail in order to provide a context with which to place the two different organizations described in this Chapter. Capoeira During the course of my conducting home visits to all the students in one fifth grade class, I met Mestre Raio (Master Lightning), who runs the more popular of the two academies of capoeira in Belmonte. He is the father of two girls in that class, half-sisters who were both eleven years old. I met Raio at the academy for an interview, and was immediately struck by his personability and generosity. After we talked for a while, he invited me to see a performance (roda) that night. The performance began with capoeira angola which consists of slow, controlled movements in which two people “fight” in the middle of the circle to musical chants and beats from a drum and a berimbau. After approximately 20 minutes, they switch to capoeira regional ~a faster and more gymnastic style. The basic movement of capoeira regional is called the ginga, a rhythmic back and forth movement that prepares the capoeirista for offensive or defensive maneuvers. Other standard movements include the alternation of swinging high kicks by two adversaries who narrowly avoid each other's faces (see Figure 2.6), 56Figure 2.6: Capoeira roda Experienced capoeiristas get extremely creative with front and back flips on the ground and off walls, spinning on heads, and other acrobatics. Each pair “fight” for a minute or so before a new person breaks in to take the place of one of the fighters. ‘The performance is incredible to observe; itis a showcase of extraordinary gymnastics integrated with dance and music. One of Mestre Raio’s eleven year old daughters was unbelievable, and I later leamed she had been practicing for nine years. After the roda, the class sits in a cirele on the floor and each one in tum is given a chance to speak anything that is on their mind about the roda or otherwise. At any given time, Mestre Raio trains 30-40 students that range in age from very young children to middle aged adults, though the vast majority are teenagers (see Figure 2.7). 37Figure 2.7: Core group of capoeira students watching a video of a roda Of those, perhaps 25 percent are female. This integration of the sexes is quite different from the other national sport, soccer, which is completely segregated in both professional and casual games. This gender integration and female empowerment is an integral part of capoeira academies. Further, Master Raio runs his academy not, only for martial arts training, but also as a place to develop an alternative lifestyle for young men and kids who he considers “at risk.” Through capoeira, they gain discipline and strength and challenge themselves in productive ways. Not all students, however, are considered “at risk.” Also among the students are some of the town's wealthiest (and whitest) residents, including a town dentist, the judge’s wife, and my wife Jill during our stay. Students meet several times a week to practice in preparation for a Friday night roda, They usually practice in the academy but sometimes get together to practice on the beach. 58Raio teaches his students that they are learning about the struggles of negros through slavery, abolition, and present day discrimination. He said that he focuses on the injusti s of slavery and the travesty of abolishing slavery without giving compensation to negros. “‘Liberdade sem emprego € prisio” [Liberty without employment is prison], he says. He told me that although capoeira was legalized in the 1930s by Presidente Vargas, it was still associated with criminality. In Belmonte it wasn’t until the early 1980s that this began to change, around the same time that capoeira masters throughout Bahia were promoting capoeira not as folklore, but as a vital aspect to Afro-Bahian identity (Teles dos Santos 1998). In the 1990s capoeira began to be seen on TV as legitimate, thus changing perceptions in Belmonte, Mestre Raio stressed that although there is no legal segregation and although stereotypes are changing, itis important to instill in the students a sense of pride in their cor and a sense of faimess — that everyone should be treated equally. Mestre Raio sees himself as educating people about these issues, but he is not, linked to a larger black movement and does not associate with some of the other symbols of blackness, especially candomblé. In fact, he is a devout Evangelical, and Evangelicals in Belmonte are typically very much against candomblé. Raio is not vehemently opposed, but is firmly against the idea of spirits or gods coming down and possessing one’s body. He does not want capoeira to be associated with candomble like it was before 1930 when persecution of both activities drove them to the same hidden spaces to perform. Raio focuses not on Aftica in his efforts at educating, but rather on understanding the history of slavery and having pride in the work that negros have done to overcome obstacles. In this way, he reinforces the 59idea of capoeira as a truly Brazilian sport and not Aftican. While his religious beliefs preclude united association with black movement organizations based around candomblé symbols, he is interested in political change for the better and keeps good relations with other leaders of black movement groups in the community. Belmonte residents who see capoeira on television, see it through a national and international lens. While I conducted my fieldwork there was a teenage soap opera that was extremely popular with my students. The main male characters (of all colors) who were considered to be the best looking and the most popular, practiced capoeira. As it becomes more popular in urban centers in Brazil and throughout the world, the symbols become representative of the positive image of Brazil and Brazilians — athletic, beautiful, rhythmic, and inclusive. When Mestre Raio organizes a roda to be performed in the street during important events, it generates much excitement from the crowd, especially among the youth (see Figure 2.8). Figure 2.8: Capoeira in the street 60‘The capoeira images are highly trafficked for tourism, both intemationally and nationally, especially in Salvador and nearby Porto Seguro. Berimbau, capoeira clothes, eds, and t-shirts are sold as souvenirs that can alternatively represent Brazil, Bahia, and blackness. These symbols take on very different meanings than those associated with the r ing out of slave experiences. In the next section, 1 describe the public performance of a bloco negro, performing candomblé symbols and dances for the inauguration of Camaval 2003. Os Netos de Gandhy — Carnaval 2003 The excitement mounted as several dozen of us gathered in Celso’s dirt yard in the Biela neighborhood a mile from Belmonte’s city center. After months of practice and preparation, we were making final adjustments to our costumes and choreography before the real thing ~ before the midnight parade by Os Netos de Gandhy that would officially kick off Carnaval. Most of the women were busy putting on their handmade Baiana clothes. Others, along with Celso and his wife Carmen Liicia, were helping the men arrange their traditional one piece outfits called abadés. A final contingent put the finishing touches on the more elaborate fantasias (costumes) for those who would play orixds. The characters and costumes for the bloco are decided by a mée de santo (candomblé leader, literally “mother of saint”) ‘who throws the biizios (shells) to see which saint or orixd should be portrayed. This year, Celso was parading as Xangé while other members were Jansd and Oxald. 1 ‘was busy as both a participant in the bloco and official videographer, both at Celso’s 61request. As midnight approached, Celso lined us up on the dark and quiet street in front of his house. Although people from Belmonte had already been celebrating Carnaval for days, this was the first official night. As had been the tradition for approximately forty years, this bloco’s presence in the Carnaval plaza would officially mark the moment of Carnaval commencement. I imagined that plaza Sao Sebastian was already filled with people, and I pictured them waiting for our bloc, Os Netos de Gandhy. As Ihad mistakenly come to envision it, they would see the Afro-Brazilian based costumes, music, songs, and dance all combined in elaborate choreography, they would be moved with the feeling of shared heritage, and the communitas of Camaval would begin Figure 2.9: Os Netos de Gandhy preparing for Carnaval procession Led by a huge paper mache dove, we set off in two neat columns (see Figure 2.9 above). Supporters lit loud firecrackers and we danced down the side street over to the main thoroughfare where we met the rio eléctrico, a large truck composed of massive speakers. Another bloco negro met us there. I was a bit shocked by the sight of them. Their costumes were markedly more elaborate, apparently subsidized by 2Belmonte’s mayor. Cosme, a locally known candomblé pai de santo (leader, literally “father of saint”), led them. Members from both groups greeted one another as Celso and Cosme negotiated who would parade first and which musicians would play on the trio eléctrico during which moments of the procession. Cosme’s group went first and ‘we all began to dance to the music blasting from the frio eléctrico. The songs were a mixture of candomblé thythms and more popular tunes, usually assumed to be based in Afro-Brazilian tradition, As we passed the houses on the main avenue, some people who were still around town opened their shutters or came out to watch, occasionally joining in the dancing. The groups danced along slowly, moving from one end of town to the other in approximately 2 hours. As we approached the Carnaval plaza, I ran ahead with my video camera to film the big entrance. The square was packed. People were s ing at tables or dancing to music that boomed from walls of speakers that framed a huge stage. Food and drink stands lined the far end of the plaza, Vendors sold hot dogs, skewers of meat dusted with manioe flour, and the traditional acarajé with the unmistakable smell of dendé oil filling the air. They sold beer, blended fruity vodka drinks, and coconuts filled with cachaga (sugar cane alcohol). As the two blocos approached the entrance to the plaza, the speakers were blasting a crowd favorite, a well-known pop tune that largely drowned out the music of the blocos. As Cosme and then Celso led the groups through the packed plaza, several friends and neighbors greeted bloco members, others came close to look at the procession, but most of the celebrants ignored the blocos altogether. I filmed as bloco members danced for a while after finally being introduced by the emcee of the event. 63The blocos negros passed through the plaza and then came to a stop around three in the morning as members peeled off, heading back to the plaza to celebrate with the rest of the crowd or to go home. While Celso seemed tired and satisfied after a successful parade, I was confused by the reaction of the people in the streets and the audience in the plaza. I knew that the majority of Belmonte residents did not participate in and did not approve of the Afro-Brazilian religion of candomblé, But | had expected that during Carnaval, the quintessential festival celebrating brasilidade (Brazilianness), all residents with some recognized African ancestry might rejoice in the African-based dances, religious symbols, and clothes of the locos negros. That was not the case. Carnav: jocos in Belmonte Brazilian and foreign anthropologists have long sought to better understand Brazilian culture through the lens of Camaval. Anthropologist Roberto DaMatta interprets Camaval as a set of inversions: reality takes a backseat as social conventions are thrown to the wind; the wealthy cede control of the city’s central streets to the povo (common folk); and the traditional division between casa (house) and rua (street) are broken down. “During Camaval ... laws are at a minimum. It is as though there had been created a special space, outside the house and above the street, where everyone can be unconcerned about relations or affiliations with groups having to do with birth, marriage, and occupation...I would say that the law of Carnaval is to have no law” (DaMatta 1991: 89). His particular examples of inversions such as families camping out on central city streets in Rio de Janeiro orstrangers celebrating across traditionally separated groups are particular to the Carnaval in the large urban center of Rio de Janeiro. Carnaval varies greatly by region across Brazil, and in contemporary Bahia state it is primarily a popular street festival without the samba schools that are the comerstone of the Rio Carnaval. In Bahia, groups called blocos parade through the main avenues, separated from the rest of the crowd by a traveling cord held in place by asecurity team. Often, within the corded off bloco is a trio eléctrico ~ the monstrous eighteen-wheeler constructed entirely of speakers that was mentioned in previous section. In Salvador, the capital of Bahia state, the majority of the population identifies as either negro or moreno, and yet the most popular blocos are composed primarily of middle class whites who can afford the large entrance fees that put one close to the musicians. In contrast, one internationally known bloco afro called 116 Aiyé (founded in 1974), only allows negros in its celebration of African heritage and val zation of negros. In Belmonte, Carnaval today resembles that of Salvador on a much smaller scale. In Chapter 1, I described how during the peak of the cacau boom in the 1940s and 1950s, some clubes did not allow negros in their Camaval celebrations. In ‘Camaval of Belmonte today, this type of explicit inclusion and exclusion is over, though race and class certainly influence who joins which Carnaval bloco. Some locos, such as Amigos do Janio (Janio Natal was Belmonte’s mayor) attract more affluent and powerful members because of social ties or political affiliations. Others, especially Siri na Lata (Crab in the Can) weed out poorer residents with a relatively expensive entrance fee that pays for the t-shirt and shorts to wear when the bloco 65parades. The t-shirts are also worn throughout the year, especially by adolescents, and serve as a social marker of which group or groups one joined during the last Carnaval. Some of the blocos make use of the large trio eléctrico while others mount speakers on pickup trucks or play their own music. Most of the blocos in Belmonte are based around popular pagode music rather than traditional samba, Pagode is samba-based but is associated with music from Salvador and usually focuses on songs about dating, dancing, sex, and sexuality. The b/oco members follow the music from the irio around town dancing and/or drinking all night. Other blocos are known as “traditional.” One called Rompe Bragos (break sticks/arms), is the only bloco de graca (free block) since the necessary costume consists only of leaves and branches from Belmonte’s brush? Another bloco, one of the most popular, is called 4s Piranhas (the piranhas or “man-eaters”) and features men dressing as women and more recently, women dressing as men, Other traditional blocos, such as Os Netos de Gandhy, are alternately called blocos negros or blocos afro or afoxé. They parade through town as members play and si traditional African-based songs, drawing on symbols ftom Afro-Brazilian culture such as candombié, drumming and chants, and maculele (rhythmic dancing with sticks). Some of these blocos perform for other special occasions and events as well. In fact, many political events, such as the Governor’s visit or the inauguration of new hospital equipment (to use examples that I witnessed firsthand), include the paid participation of these locos negros. A bloco's participation at these events appears to confer feelings of celebration, importance, and tradition just as they do during ® While this bloco is extremely popular today and draws popular participation by all, in the past this. ‘bloco was primarily composed of truly poor people who could not pay the entrance fee for another loco. 66Camaval. Blocos negros in Belmonte, while comprised primarily of people who self identify as negro, do not openly exclude non-negros and accept willing members of any color, unlike /1é Aiyé. Most of the Camaval blocos during Carnaval in Belmonte were hugely popular: people followed them slowly down the town streets dancing and socializing for hours, either within the bloco or just close to the musie; hundreds of people, including the town’s poorest and wealthiest residents together, cross-dressed for the bloco As Piranhas; and hundreds more paraded through the streets dressed in leaves and sticks for the Rompe Bragos. But Os Netos de Gandhy and the other bloco afro paraded through town without popular accompaniment and they were greeted in the plaza by passive and often interrupted observation rather than by enthusiastic dancing and collaborative cheering. I argue that the reason for this difference is the link to the religious practices of candomblé. Os Netos de Gandhy and Candombt The two blocos negros that participated in the “opening” of Camaval 2003 have both a public and a private side. In public, these blacos employ the symbolism of candombié as they add pomp to the celebrations of events such as Carnaval, inaugurations of public buildings, or gatherings for political speeches. ‘The blocos are celebrated publicly as national folklore. Before Carnaval 2003, for example, the lone Belmonte radio station continually reminded people of the schedule of events, especially emphasizing the blocos negros. The radio focused on the importance of these blocos in reference to “nosso tradi¢do" [our tradition]. Tradition, in this case, means that these blocos hearken back to a distant slave past that is shared by the 67culturally mixed contemporary Brazilians. The word tradition also captures the longstanding participation of these particular blocos in Belmonte’s Carnaval. In private, many participants are also active members of candomblé groups. Sitting in Celso’s yard one day, he explained to me his own connections to candomblé and how his bloco got started. He described how around 1958 or 1959 a prominent pai-de-santo was performing a candomblé ritual out in the streets during the Friday of Carnaval. “People in the streets applauded and a new tradition was bom” (translated in field notes). The candomblé leader and his followers began to go out as a group through the streets on Friday of Carnaval with increasing numbers of members every year. A woman named Pamela took over in the early 1980s and named the group Filhos de Gandhy (Sons of Gandhy] after the Salvador bloco by the same name. This Salvador bloco had been formed by striking dockworkers a year after Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, As these men tried to think of a name for their bloco, they decided to honor this man and create a bloco for the poor and disenfranchised who would march and win the strike in peace. ‘The Belmonte Filhos de Gandhy had begun to perform every Carnaval Friday, leaving from one of the drummer's houses on the Tamandaré Street. Meanwhile, Celso was not even in Belmonte at this time. He had been born in Belmonte but left for 25 years to live in Salvador where he worked for the Brazilian national gas company, Petrobras. He returned in 1990 having retired with a pension. In Salvador, Celso had been a supporter of candomblé since his ex-wife was a filha- de-santo (literally, daughter of saint, an initiate) and he had himself been a member of the bloco Filhos de Gandhy of Salvador. Because of his experience with Afro- 68Brazilian cultural matters, members of the Belmonte Fithos de Gandhy bloco asked him to be the preto velho [old slave spirit honored in Afro-Brazilian religions of candomblé and umbanda] for their parade the year after he returned to Belmonte from Salvador. The next year, when the leader, Pamela, was absent during Camaval, Celso was recruited to help run the bloco. He changed the costumes to their present form and increased participation in the group to approximately 200 people. In Salvador around this time, the bloco of the same name was receiving much national and international attention so Celso decided to change the name of his group, taking the name of a Salvador bloco which he thought had stopped functioning, Os Netas de Gandy. He laments that with each passing year it seems harder and harder to raise the necessary funds for performances and membership is decreasing. Below I offer some of my own experiences with Afro-Brazilian religious celebrations in Belmonte and my observations of popular aversion to the belief®. Candomblé and umbanda, both Afro-Brazilian spirit-possession religions, ‘were broadly lumped together by many under the pejorative term macumba, associated with “as forces do mal” [the forces of evil]. And this is not taken lightly by a Belmonte population that is generally religious. The predominant religion is, Catholicism, but the number of Evangelicals (known as crentes) has been growing. Practitioners of umbanda and candomblé also generally adhere to some Catholic beliefs, though the two have quite different historical trajectories (Brown 1986; Harding 2000). ‘The spaces of worship for these interrelated religious practices are kept inconspicuous in Belmonte. They are not marked on the outside, so from the street, they appear the same as any other house. I became familiar with the Center of 69umbanda and many of the practitioners early in my research after meeting the pai de santo, Raimundo. I could tell several embarrassing stories of my getting accustomed to the practices of a religion that included people being possessed by spirits of gods, young children, and old slaves. The people in the Center were extremely patient with ‘me and one young eight year old gir! in particular kept an eye on me and made sure I was doing more or less the appropriate thing at the right time. The religious ceremonies, called estas (parties), were held in the small front room at the Center were composed primarily of participants with few observers, none of them casual observers. In total, there were probably 20 people at the festas which would typically last all night with observers participating by clapping blocks and other percussion instruments to the rhythms of the dancing. They conducted several public parties and processions throughout the year, but they did not have a strong public presence in Belmonte. also conducted participant observation research with one of the two principal terreiros of candomblé. The terreiros had a much larger constituency, as their festas were more open to casual observers and often drew around 30-50 observers who were not participating in the ceremony but were able to watch off the margins of the ceremony room, The main participants in these religions are also “performers” in the religion, [use the term because they dance in front of an audience during every service, while I avoid the complexities around describing a spirit possession as a performance. Without the religious aspect, many of these participants also performed in the blocos negros. While the overlap is not total, it is a fair generalization that one 70terreiro’s participants form the majority of Os Netos de Gandy and the other terreiro's members perform in the other bloco negro led by Cosme. Belmonte residents were frequently shocked by my familiarity with Afro- Brazilian religious customs and my friendship with many participants. Walking from my house to the umbanda center one day, for example, I ran into two students I knew from the high school. They asked me where I was going, and I told them I was on my way to an umbanda party that was open for everyone. I asked if they wanted to stop in since they were going to be giving away candy for the kids. They did not hesitate in saying “no way.” quickly yelling goodbye as they tumed down a side street. This ‘was particularly striking because of the awkward silence that came when I told them where I was going (and because kids in Belmonte do not typically tum away from free candy), During another festival day, the umbanda Center organized a procession to walk together to Catholic Mass at one of the town churches and then from Mass back through the streets to the Center. On the way home, many people from Mass had walked with the procession, and I walked while talking to one of the teachers from the grade school. We were having a very nice conversation. Since she was walking with the procession, I assumed she was at least sympathetic to umbanda. When we got close to the Center, I asked her if she was going to go to the Center for the party. She look completely perplexed and shocked and then said “Oh, I get it. I didn’t realize that’s where everyone was walking. No, I’m not going there. Bye” (translated in field notes). Her reaction is illustrative of the way that Afro-Brazilian 1symbols can be read as common heritage in a public context but alienating in the private space of the Center or the ferreiro. Food is also a commonly acknowledged symbol that bridges the private and public spaces of candomblé. While feijoada may be celebrated as the national dish that emerged out of slave experiences, I never once saw anyone in Belmonte prepare a feijoada. Instead, 1 found certain foods to be important especially as regional symbols of unity. At the local level Belmonte residents cited guiamum (blue crabs), which are collected and shelled in vast quantities, manioc flour (farinha),?* cacau,?> and the plethora of fruits growing around town when talking about identity. Foods made with palm oil (dendé) are critically important for regional (state) identity. The ‘most popular of these dishes for Bahian identity is moqueca, a fish stew made with onions, peppers, tomato, dendé, fish, and coconut milk. Other dishes made with dendé are widely consumed and also associated with candomblé. The most common is acarajé, a bean cake fried in dendé, split in half and filled with sauces made from okra and pumpkin, hot pepper paste, and dried shrimp. This dish is primarily a street food, sold by baianas (women in typical Aftican-based clothing). These women were traditionally associated with centers of candombié and would cook acarajé not only for people in the street but also for the orixds. ‘The fried bean cake of acarajé is also served in other contexts such as candomblé and umbanda religious ceremonies and another ritual meal called cararti, Sometimes cararit is given away to the public by a religious center or an individual to repay a spiritual debt. People may promise to give > A common refrain regarding the growing baby in my wife's belly was that she was clearly Bahian, being sustained with dendé and farinha. > Though most cacau trees have died, some remain scattered throughout town, including one in the front yard of the house I rented. This cacau tree was so well known that often times all I had to do to tell someone where | lived was to mention the cacau tree in front. 2away cararii on a specific day every year for a given number of years, A cararti meal features many of the ingredients from acarajé separated on a plate typically with rice and coconut sweets as well. Roberto DaMatta finds important Brazilian symbolism not only in particular foods, such as feijoada or carar:i, but also in the way that Brazilians mix together all the different components of a dish on the plate, He finds the mixing of these elements to be an “embodiment of the ties which for centuries have enabled so hierarchical a society to absorb and harmonize values from other cultures. Itis similar to the effect achieved by humbly and subtly blending in the same dish black beans and white manioc flour to form an intermediate mass that is as delightful as a mulatto skin” (DaMatta 1987a, 3). Despite DaMatta’s poetic interpretation, I found that food, like other symbols, served to mark negros as “other” —as ethnically different from mainstream morenos.** Of all the cultural symbols linked to Africa, those of candomblé and umbanda tend to be the most stigmatized in Belmonte, yet they are the same symbols that many black movement organizations, such as Os Netos, attempt to use in mobilizing support for negro culture, This link has clear historical precedence, as ferreiros frequently served as bases for organizing black movements, and the connections remain strong even today. Nonetheless, the connection is alienating to many people that know. John Burdick also argues that black activists may be ignoring large numbers of potential members by their insistence on associating only with candomblé and being openly antagonistic towards Protestant religions. “As long as the % Children did not associate specific foods with morenas, but did say that branco food were pizza, lasagna, hot dogs, beef stroganoff, and salad ~ all foods considered European in origin, One girl from sixth grade even related food and race to class saying, “Negras eat beans and rice; morenas eat beans, rice, and meat, and brancos eat food from a restaurant” (translated in field notes). Bmovement continues to insist on an exclusivist valorization of non-Christian religiosity, it misses the opportunity to connect symbolically and culturally with a large potential constituency” (Burdick 1998: 149). Conctusion I describe my experiences with Os Nefos in detail because they are the single most visible group involved in black movement activism in Belmonte. Celso’s connections with candomblé and his interest in Afro-Brazilian culture led him to his position of leader of this group. He wants to preserve the culture, or folklore, as he calls it. And he also wants to help people gain self-confidence either through participation in Os Netos or through the soccer team he coaches, and more recently by his political efforts (described in more detail in Chapter 6). Yet, Celso is not an advocate for redefining racial categories and he does not want his efforts to be exclusionary in any way. Wanting to probe Celso further about the connection between racial identity and participation in this bloco, I asked whether the bloco would ever be exclusively for men like Filhos de Gandy in Salvador or exclusively for negros like the famous bloco Ilé Ayé. Celso said: “Nao, Isso ai, ndo vai ter preconceito. Eu quero que ndo tenha preconceito. Agora, que Vai ter um compromisso com a nossa raga, vai. Um compromisso de respeito de cidadania do homem preto, da mulher preta, que haja esse respeito, que tenha igualdade, condigdes de igualdade pra todos e isso é uma coisa que é meu pensamento também. Manter e ter alguém, dentro do grupo que dé continuidade ao trabalho de igualdade social.” [No. There will not be prejudice in this [loco]. 1 don’t want there to be prejudice. Now, there will be a committment to our race, a committment of respect for the citizenship of the preto man and the preta woman, That there will be respect and equality, conditions for equality for all this is what I am 14thinking as well. ‘To keep someone within the group to give continuity to the work of social equality.] Celso was also hoping to join together his groups and other cultural groups in Belmonte under one umbrella organization, Late one night, he hosted a meeting on his porch with the leaders of two other blocos negros and an independent man who wanted to be president of the association, The intention of forming this association ‘was to become more financially independent from the continual solicitations of subsidies from the mayor. They would raise funds by charging money for loco appearances, much like Salvador blocos. And they would have a formal structure with a president, a director, treasurer, secretary, and coordinators. The man who was positioning himself to be president was interested in this as a business opportunity, and he wanted to collect a commission. He claimed to have experience that would help the group with organizing and fundraising. In thinking of names, the following were suggested: Associagdo Raga Negra de Belmonte (Black Race Association of Belmonte), Pele Negra (Black Skin), Raga Pura (Pure Race), Mam@e Africa (Mama Aftica), and Afro-Cultura Belmonte (Afro-Culture Belmonte). In the end, no specific actions were taken. The leaders of the blocos were skeptical of getting many people involved in the organization, saying that they could not even get the most dedicated members of their groups to attend meetings, let alone try to recruit new members. The story of Celso and his b/oco illustrate the value in analytically separating ideas about biology and culture in class lessons, in religious spaces, and in public performances. Too often, analyses about race tend to focus only on the biological definitions without seeing how the cultural aspects influence folk thinking about 15categories and concepts. In Belmonte, teachers are trying to change students’ ideas using a strictly biological approach while blocos negros attempt negro valorization through a particular kind of cultural approach. Yet, schoo! lessons undermine both of these attempts. Biological redefinition does not resonate with students who are accustomed to thinking about mixture in a certain way. And culturally based organizations such as Os Netos underestimate the extent to which children are implicitly taught to associate candomblé with the Aftican past. As such, their work in Belmonte is especially challenging in ways that capoeira organization is not. In Belmonte, these cultural symbols are not ingrained as natural markers of cultural differences based on race. This lack of marks of cultural difference can be seen by looking at everyday “performativities” (to borrow a term from Judith Butler). For example, language is often considered a powerful marker of social difference. Irvine and Gal among others point out that linguistic features can act not only as indexes of social groups but also as icons, “as if a linguistic feature somehow depicted a social group’s inherent nature or essence” (Irvine and Gal 2000:37). Some linguistic work indicates that differences within Brazilian Portuguese can index social variables such as class, region, and education, though race is conspicuously absent from such analyses (Azevedo 1984, 1989; Koike 1985; Perrone and Ledford-Miller 1985). There is no “Black Portuguese.” And there are no specifically negro non- verbal forms of communication, no specifically negro television shows, no specific kinds of everyday clothing styles for negros, etc.."” This absence is even more striking considering the vast amounts written about linguistic differences in the US © There is a relatively new magazine (Raca) that is marketed specifically for negros but these ‘magazines are not sold in Belmonte. 76based on race (see Hill 1999; Morgan 1998; Rampton 1995; and Ureiuoli 1991). In fact, having dark skin, but not speaking “black” can lead to accusations of “acting white” or being an “Oreo” ~ that is, not really black (Bergin and Cooks 2002). In addition, in the US racial boundaries are patrolled not just by biology and language but by beliefs about not crossing the racial line for music preferences, clothing styles, cigarette brands, handshakes, walking styles, and food preferences (to name a few). While I found no evidence of such differences in Belmonte, Sansone does report the existence of the distinct cultural markers in Salvador including body language, public greetings, walking, and dancing that he considers markers of ethnicity for the younger generation identifying with the term negro (Sansone 2003). In the next three chapters, I integrate ethnography with controlled investigations to further probe how people cognize physical features, ancestry, and cultural signs through categories in a place that lacks these cultural race differences. 71CHAPTER3 Categories and Essentialism: Theories and Methods for the Investigation of Boundaries in a Place Where “Everyone is Mixed” Introduction 1 clapped loudly outside the small cinderblock house to see if anyone was home. I was just starting out a full day of interviews as part of my first controlled investigation in Belmonte. | had already interviewed 68 people for this particular study on my way to the 72 that I had projected. This study (Study 3.1 described later in this Chapter) represented my first attempt at systematically investigating and quantifying the cognitive representations of race in Belmonte. As I waited outside the window, two conflicting thoughts were running through my head. On one hand, I ‘was shocked by the amount of time and energy that it had taken to conduct this many interviews in people’s homes, and I was thinking that I had better get some interesting and significant results as a payoff. On the other hand, I felt that even if the results yielded nothing quantitatively interesting, the ethnographic experience alone had already far exceeded my expectations for this study as I came to know and interview hundreds of people in all different parts of town. A forty five year old man named Valdemar opened the window and invited me into the front room to talk. After talking for a while about his life and his family history, I asked his permission to participate in a study asking for his ideas about a set Bof photographs. In this task, I asked people to sort 22 laminated photograph cards into groups based on raga (literally race), cor (literally color), or social class. Below I introduce this chapter with an extended excerpt from my recorded conversation with Valdemar, first in Portuguese and then translated into English. Michael: Valdemar: Friend: OK. Como eu falei, estou aprendendo coisas daqui. Ai, para ajudar, eu tirei umas fotos, que... sto pessoas da Bahia, mas niio sto de Belmonte, ndo. Ai, ndo vai conhecer ninguém. Vocé pode fazer 0 seguinte? Vocé pode dar uma olhada nessas fotos aqui e fazer uma separagio segundo a raga da pessoa? Ah, eu estou entendendo, viu? No caso, separagdo dos negros... Como voeé faria, né? Vocé pode botar os negros aqui, os outros aqui, né? Como vocé entender no dia-a-dia, Pode fazer rapidinho, néo tem certo ou errado, Eu é que estou aprendendo. Isso aqui eu vou me embananar todo aqui. Nao se preocupe - vocé diria que qual é a raga dele? Vocé quer dizer, assim, no caso: 0 espanhol, 0 brasileiro...no caso. Assim, como vocé divide as pessoas, assim.. Como vocé faria no dia- a-dia, mas todos eles so baianos, né? () Talvez raga seja a palavra errada, Se alguém te perguntasse qual ¢a cor dele, vocé diria 0 qué? Rapaz, nao sei falar... [risos]. porque sou (...), eu sei s6 0 branco eo preto e acabou. Ah, enti. E assim. Faz favor! Esse rapaz esté me perguntando.. Chega ai, senta ai. Boa tarde. Boa tarde, 19Esta me fazendo uma pergunta aqui que é a seguinte. Vem conferir. Faz favor. Aqui, no caso, para separar. Aqui, no caso, vocé chama isso aqui 0 qué? Voce chama isso aqui 0 qué? A cor. Claro, né? Eeesse aqui? E uma pessoa, assim, mais escura. Nao... mais escuro, nfo. Aqui é 0 negro, rapaz. Que negécio é esse de mais escuro? [risos]. Dizem mulato, cabo-verde... esse tipo de coisa. ‘Mas eu digo logo o negécio, no precisa (...), nao. E 0 negro [risos]. ‘$6 tem branco e negro. Entio, is aqui é répido. Ela, entdo? ‘Aqui jé dé o nome de qué? E mulata ou cabo-verde? Como € que 6? F: Rapaz... Porque aqui nao é preto. Nao é preto nem é branco. M: ‘Voces que sabem. Vocé nao falou que todo mundo € branco ou & preto? V: E sim, Mas af jd mudou a cor um pouquinho, né? F; Mas, no caso af é branca, né? v: Nao, nao é branca. M: Bota ela onde, entio? Com eles? Ou separado? V: Aqui, no caso, vamos separar. Michael: OK. Like I was saying, I’m learning about things here, So, to help, I took some photos that ... are people from Bahia but they are not from Belmonte [showing a pile of 22 pictures]. So you won't know anyone. Could you do the following - give them a look and separate them into ‘groups by the raga of the person’? 80‘Valdemar: Ah, Lunderstand. To separate the negros... However you would do it. You can put negros here and any others here...however you would do in your everyday life. You can do it pretty fast —there’s no right or wrong answer. You're just helping me to learn [about Belmonte}. I'm going to mess it all up here. Don’t worry. What would you say is the raga of each person in the picture? ‘You mean, for example, Spanish, Brazilian... However you would like to separate the pictures. However you do it in your daily life. But they are all Bahian, [prolonged silence] Maybe raga is the wrong word. What if someone asked you what this person’s cor was? What would you say? [holding up a picture} [laughing] Man, I don’t know how to say ~I only know branco and preto and that’s it. Ok, that’s it then, [Valdemar starts making 2 piles. He then sees his friend walk in the room and addresses him.] Please! This guy is asking me some questions. Have a seat. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. He’s asking me this question. Please, give me a hand. Here, how to separate these pictures. What do you call this one? What do you call this one? The cor. {holding up a picture} Claro [clear, light}, right? And this one? It's a person...Jet’s see, more escuro [dark]. 81No... “more escuro” - no. He is negro, man, What is this business about more escuro? [laughing]... People say mulato, cabo verde, that kind of thing. But I say forget that business — it’s not necessary. He’s negro. There’s only branco and negro. M: Then this will go quick then. What about her? (holding up another picture] V: Here...what is the name they call that ~ mulata or cabo verde? What is iv? F: [laughing] Man... Because here she is not preto, Not preto and not branco. M: You are the ones who know. Didn’t you say that everyone is either branco or preto? Vv: Yes, that’s true. But the cor here changed a bit. F Isn’t she branca then? No, she’s not branca. M: Where should I put her picture then? With these? Or separate? Well, in this case, let’s separate. This interaction illustrates many of the tensions faced when Belmonte As residents try to integrate explicit ideologies with implicit cognitive categori mentioned in Chapter 1, cognitive anthropologists have shown that in many cases, people’s talk does not always reflect the categories that guide everyday reasoning. Francisco Gil-White, for example, argues that ethnic categories in Mongolia are essentialized (Gil-White 2001a) despite “surface” talk to the contrary. In the case of Brazil, Robin Sheriff has argued that the talk about multiple racial categories based ‘on visuals is merely that — talk that is used to soften, to identify, to position, and to insult, But under all the talk about intermediate mixed race categories lies a 82conception of a true negra identity based on one drop of African ancestor blood. She says, “[jJust as is the case in countries such as the United States, my informants saw the racial world as one divided between branco (white) and negro (black)” (Sheriff 2001). highlight the interaction with Valdemar because he follows the opposite pattern of what one would expect to see, based on cautions from Sheriff and Gil- White. In those cases, one would expect much surface talk about multiple categories and a binary structure emerging when one uncovers the implicit categories. ‘Valdemar, however, talks about a binary division but when faced with photographs of real people, he cannot bring himself to sort with only two categories. It simply doesn’t feel right to him and he faces public embarrassment by contradicting his earlier emphatic statement that “there's only branco and negro.” In the last chapter I focused on explicit ideologies and the sites where children and adults come into contact with public representations of race. In this Chapter, | examine the structure of race categories in Belmonte with respect to theory and methods from (1) contemporary cognitive psychology and (2) previous controlled investigations of racial categories in Brazil. In the first section, I review the cognitive psychology concept of essentialism - what it is and what role it plays in current theories of concepts and categories. In the second section, I examine the past methods of Marvin Harris and Conrad Kottak for analyzing racial categories in Brazil. The hypotheses that emerged from their work over forty years ago established a conventional wisdom that remains powerful even today. Following this, I describe the collecting of photographs that I used as stimuli for two sorting tasks designed to explore racial categories and boundaries. Study 3.1 explores linkages between race, 83color and social class among adults, and a follow up study extends the sorting task to three different age groups of children. Like Sheriff, I argue that racial categories in Brazil are not as “ambiguous” as has been suggested, But unlike her, I do not find that all those who are not branco are equally negro. 1 argue that branco is a racial category with strong cultural agreement over clearly defined visual boundaries. I further argue that there is fairly strong cultural agreement regarding a category of people most commonly referred to as negro, preto, escuro, ot moreno with visual features similar to an essentialized past category of negro or Africano. And there is a large group of people considered to be some combination of races. In this group, there is more ambiguity regarding what features may be important in forming groups and because of a conceived mixture of blood, talk frequently shifts between visuals and blood as defining features. This sorting task represents only the first in a series of critical studies designed to examine the role of essentialism in racial categories in Belmonte, Essentialism in Concepts and Categories The concept of essentialism is critical to understanding the debates about race in Brazil, and, more generally, the cognition of race. The term, essentialism, has a Jong and complex history in philosophical and scientific thinking with many varied ‘meanings (for an analysis of types of meanings see Gelman 2003; Gelman and Hirschfeld 1999). Cognitive anthropologists and psychologists today study the concept of essentialism in a specific way ~ as a cognitive bias in the way that human beings process certain categories. It is important to study from a cognitive 84perspective precisely because the world is not structured in essentialist terms but our minds construct categories that are essentialized. This particular way of understanding essentialism became popular approximately 20 years ago as a reaction to the dominant paradigm that categories were structured by beliefs about similarity. In the following section, I will briefly describe two previous understandings of categorization — the Classical Theory of Concepts and the Prototype Theory of Concepts — as a means for understanding essentialism as part of a Theory-Theory of Concepts (for more detailed and thorough reviews of the history of categories in cognitive science see Boyer 1994; Gelman 2003; Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994b; Laurence and Margolis 1999). Similarity Concepts and categories, the building blocks of cognition, are conventionally defined as follows: Roughly, a concept is an idea that includes all that is charactristically associated with it A category isa partitioning or class to which some assertion oF set of assertions might apply. It is tempting to think of categories as existing in the world and of concepts as corresponding to mental representations to them, but this analysis is misleading. Ibis misleading because concepts need not have real-world ‘counterparts (¢.g., unicorns) and because people may impose rather than discover structure (Medin 1989), Researchers working with theory-based approaches today believe that concepts and categories not only enable us to organize information, but also provide us with intuitive understandings of how the world works. For many years, however, ‘similarity’ was hypothesized as the glue that held concepts together — “objects fall into natural clusters of similar kinds (that are dissimilar to other clusters), and our concepts map onto these clusters” (Murphy and Medin 1985) ~ without taking causal 85links into consideration. This was considered true in both the Classical Theory and the Prototype Theory. The classical view assumes “that a conceptual representation consists of the representation of a series of features that are singularly necessary and jointly sufficient to characterize the similarity between instances of the concept” (Boyer 1994). Laurence and Margolis point out that in fact there is no one version of the Classical Theory; rather, there are many theories, dating back to the writings of Plato, which propose definitional theories for concepts (Laurence and Margolis 1999). Many critiques of the classical view have been advanced. For the purposes of this chapter, the most relevant critique is also the most serious overall — that while people ‘may believe that their concepts are based on defining features, the definitions rarely hold up to scrutiny. In addition, researchers found that some examples of categories are considered “better” than others (e.g. a robin versus a penguin for the category “bird”), and some objects may be ambiguously categorized. Eleanor Rosch attempted to overcome these objections by forwarding a theory of similarity based on prototypes rather than defining features. Rosch draws on Wittgenstein’s (Wittgenstein 1953) notion of “family resemblance” to hypothesize that categories may be “fuzzy” — members may be included because they share clusterings of properties or correlated attributes of a summary prototype (Rosch and Mervis 1975) or a specific exemplar (Smith and Medin 1981), The clustering of attributes enables efficiency in cognition and communication, especially at the “basic” psychological level of objects (Rosch, et al. 1976). These theories were highly influential, even in anthropology (Rosch 1975; Sweetser 1987); however, they 86could not overcome the shortcomings of any theory based solely on similarity (on philosophical problems with similarity see Goodman 1972). Essentialism and Causal Theories Category structure based on similarity to a prototype, a typical exemplar, or defining features, ignores a critical aspect of concept organization — the motivational aspect. Medin (1989) described how many researchers in the 1980s recognized that a theory of categories and concepts needed to be integrated with “theories” that ordinary folk have about their world and the causal relations within it. In the context, of everyday mental activity, concepts are not driven by surface similarities, but rather by underlying knowledge structures about the material, biological, and social world (Gelman and Markman 1986; Keil 1989; Medin 1989). Medin (1989) proposed the highly influential idea of “psychological essentialism” — that “[p]eople act as if things (cg, objects) have essences or underlying natures that make them the thing that they are” (Medin 1989:1476). Medin writes that people approach the world with this essentialist heuristic to attribute common essences to objects that look alike, even when that essence is unable to be defined. In this way he reconciled the intuition that surface similarity was important for people’s perceptions of categories with the psychological understanding that the concept formed part of a deep theory-based understanding of the world. His idea of an essence placeholder was originally proposed as domain-general, but some researchers found that essentialism accounted extremely well for data within some domains but not others. 87Since different domains of experience are organized by different causal mechanisms in the real world, a new domain-specific paradigm emerged looking at whether ordinary folk might organize concepts differently with respect to these different domains, Researchers in many different disciplines (such as linguistics, anthropology, developmental psychology, computer science, evolutionary psychology, and ethology) converged in the advancement of this research program with Chomsky’s arguments about the specificity of the language faculty paving the way (Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994a). Within this research program, there are many competing hypotheses over specific issues such as the number and boundaries of domains, the cognitive architecture that supports differing conceptual processing, the degree of innateness and the role of cultural input, In this dissertation, I focus on understanding categories and the way they are processed with relation to essentialism. I do not try to speculate on the cognitive architecture. Nonetheless, itis informative to provide a brief sketch of proposals regarding the proper domain of essentialism in the mind, Where is Essentialism? In his 1983 book The Modularity of ind, Jerry Fodor proposes the idea of a “modular mind” in which perceptual processes only were “domain specific, innately specified, hardwired, autonomous, and not assembled” (Fodor 1983:37) while the bulk of the mind was presented as nonmodular, Dan Sperber (Sperber 1994) then extended Fodor's position of limited perceptual modularity into one of “massive modularity” in which conceptual as well as perceptual modularity is hierarchically 88structured with a metarepresentational module providing integration across modules. Several conceptual models have been proposed, three of which have received the most anthropological attention. Folk psychology (or ‘Theory of Mind’) has been proposed as a mechanism by which children and adults interpret other people’s actions based on attributed beliefs, desires, and emotions (Boyer 1994; Wellman 1990). Folk biology proposes that our common sense beliefs about the natural world including plants, animals, and elements may be universally organized in hierarchical taxonomies by species-like groupings (Atran 1990; Berlin 1992). Folk sociology is the study of the common sense beliefs about the social landscape, specifically how people understand themselves in relation to social collectives with multiple shifting affiliations and coalitions (Hirschfeld 1999). Researchers working with issues related to folk biology, folk psychology and folk sociology have come to understand that categories in these domains are often essentialized ~ “that categories have an underlying reality or true nature that one cannot observe directly but that gives an objects its identity” (Gelman 2003). While there is evidence that categories such as gender (Fuss 1989; Gelman, et al. 1986; Taylor 1996) and personality (Gelman 1992) are also essentialized, it has been natural kind species and human social groups such as races that have proved most controversial in their proposals regarding essentialism. Within folk biology, researchers have shown that natural kinds, as opposed to human-made artifacts, are cognized even by young children as discovered rather than invented, determined by birth, unalterable, based on a shared inside essence that is causally responsible for 89surface similarities in appearance and behavior, and rich in inductive potential (Atran 1999; Hatano and Inagaki 1999; Keil 1989). The study of essentialism with regard to human kind social groups proves to be more controversial, Lawrence Hirschfeld, turning conventional wisdom on its hhead, has presented experimental evidence that even young children in the United States cognize race as deep and enduring rather than merely superficial and physical (Hirschfeld 1988), He claims that there may be a specific cognitive device evolved to process human kinds which may or may not be what ordinary folk consider race. Children come prepared to pick out important social groups in their environment and possibly essentialize them - to treat members of a group as possessing a common essence that is natural, enduring, and causally responsible for surface features and. behaviors. ‘These sometimes parallel ways of processing species and human kinds lead to speculation on the part of some researchers that folk biology has a proprietary claim ‘over essentialist reasoning and that essentialist thinking then gets attributed to races through a process of analogical transfer (Atran 1995; Gil-White 2001a; Rothbart and Taylor 1990). Atran (1995), for example, argues that the proper domain for essentialism is living kinds, ‘That is to say, following Sperber (1994), a module may have evolved in order to essentialize non-human categories of living kinds; therefore, non-human animals would constitute the proper domain. The actual domain, however, would encompass anything in the environment that triggered this conceptual processing. Thus, Atran argues that readily observable racial features may trigger essentialist attributions from folk biology through analogical transfer. Gil- 90White maintains that same basic framework but believes that the conditions triggering alliving kind module are category-based endogamy and descent-based membership (Gil-White 20012). Hirschfeld argues against the claim of “naturalism” by Atran and others with convincing evidence that essentialism of social kinds is not the same as the essentialism of animal and plant species (Hirschfeld 1995a). His studies show that that one racial group may have more innate potential than another in the formation of offspring, as in the case of presumed mixed-race unions in the United States. In addition, the manner in which the concepts are learned by young children is critically different. Species, because surface features cluster together, are readily apprehended and are leamed through visual cues in this bottom-up manner. “For racial categories, in contrast, there is litle correlation among features, either at the level of nonobvious traits (e.g. blood-group genes) or at the level of salient physical characteristics (e.g. skin color and facial structure” (Hirschfeld 1996:117). Races, or human kinds, are thus leamed top-down through language. Children hear race and construct essentialized categories before they can identify common physical features of group members (Hirschfeld 1996). Certainly explanations are not limited to either analogical transfer or a specialized folk sociology module, and Hirschfeld (1996) proposes that essentialism may in fact constitute a domain-general mode of construal (Keil 1989) that may fit multiple conceptual domains. Gelman and collaborators support this hypothesis that essentialism may be “a domain-general assumption, but one that gets invoked differently in different domains, responding to the causal structure of each domain” (Gelman, et al. 1994:358). 1In this dissertation, I do not propose to address this debate. Instead of conducting this research to shed light on the architecture of the mind, I study theories of architecture of the mind to better understand the ethnographic situation in Belmonte. In the process, however, my findings do prove interesting for this debate. In folk biology, save for the occasional exceptions such as mules (Kalish 1995), the species groups considered natural do not mate with one another. What happens to essentialism in the opposite case — when the vast majority of the population is considered mixed race and the founding myth of the country is built around the ideology of racial mixing? Hirschfeld (1996) began to address these questions by conducting research in an integrated community in the United States and my research in Belmonte furthers this discussion. In this Chapter and the two that follow, I ask questions about essentialism in racial categories — about boundaries of group, about ancestry and visuals, about stability of racial identities, and about inductive potential. Yet, as I mentioned in Chapter 1, I found that I could not say whether categories of race were essentialized or not. Instead, I attempt to sketch specific cognitive components to essentialism. In calling for a more fine-grained look at essentialism, I follow recent researchers such as Susan Gelman (2003) and Nick Haslam, who writes, “essentialist claims have several distinet and loosely bound conceptual components, and accounts of human kinds can profitably retain some components without thereby yielding to essentialism” (Haslam 1998:291). Extrapolating Susan Gelman’s framework for implications of essentialism, I list the following five beliefs we might expect if racial categories are completely essentialized in Belmonte: (1) races represent real and 92natural categories that were discovered rather than invented; (2) members of a race have many obvious and nonobvious properties in common; (3) members of a race are similar because of some genetic or biological cause; (4) they cannot be changed into any other race; and (5) groups are bounded absolutely — someone is or is not a member of the group (Gelman 2003). Believing that one single study could not address all these implications, I conducted several studies addressing different aspects of essentialization. ‘The studies in this Chapter investigate the structure of racial categories in Belmonte through a set of picture sorting exercises. I analyze these studies in several different ways as I sketch out a preliminary picture of the structure of racial categories. Past Methodologies for the Study of Ra: gories in Brazi In this section I examine the methodologies of previous quantitative studies of race in Brazil and the criticisms that have been leveled against these studies. Few studies have been conducted in Brazil with the explicit goal of uncovering the cognitive categories of race using quantitatively analyzable methods. I focus here on the studies of Marvin Harris and Conrad Kotak, the first researchers to systematize collection of data in the style of eognit ive anthropologists of the day, whose conclusions have formed the basis for the conventional wisdom about race in Brazil. ‘They have conducted quantitatively analyzable studies on racial categories for over forty years, with the explicit goals of clarifying “the nature of the ambiguity in the Brazilian ‘racial’ calculus” with the “development of cross-culturally valid methods of cognitive analysis” (Harris 1970:2). In this section, I focus exclusively on their 93controlled investigations and quantitative analyses. I separate their numerous studies into the two primary claims emerging from their investigations. Claim 1; Multiplicity of Terms Harris and Kottak (Harris and Kottak 1963) showed a set of 9 drawings, varying by skin tone, hair texture, lip thickness, and nose shape to 100 people in the Bahian fishing village of Arambepe. They showed these drawings and asked the people to name the qualidade of the person in the drawing. This word qualidade literally means “quality”; it was the term that they determined primed racial identifications in Arambepe in 1962. By showing these 9 drawings, they elicited forty terms both between and within subjects: “Branco, preto, moreno claro (light brown), moreno escuro, mulato, moreno, mulato claro, mulato escuro, negro, cabocla, escuro, cabo verde, claro, araguaba, roxo, amarelo, sarard escuro, cér de canela, preto claro, roxo claro, cér de cinza, vermelho, cabocla escuro, pardo, branco sararé, mambebe, branco caboclado, moreno escuro, mulato sarard, gazula, c6r de cinza clara, creolo, louro, moreno claro caboclado, mulato bem claro, branco mulato, roxo de cabelo bom, preto escuro, pelé” (Harris and Kottak 1963:203).”* This multiplicity of terns provided further support for the existing hypotheses of the large number of different racial types that researchers had found in Brazil (Hutchinson 1952; Pierson 1942; Zimmerman 1952). 2* | do not provide English translations for all ofthese terms. While I could provide a rough translation based on my knowledge of Belmonte use of these terms in 2002-2003, I can have no confidence that the meanings were the same for Arembepe residents in the 1960s. Many of the terms are variants or combinations of other terms presented here, and it isnot of critical importance that the reader know the exact translations. The important feature of the list is that some terms seem to refer in great detail to physical features, some seem to refer to ancestry, some combine both ofthese features, and one references a famous soecer player.Several years later, Harris utilized “a deck of 72 full face drawings constructed out of the combination of three skin tones, three hair forms, two lip, two nose, and two sex types” (Harris 1970:2) to elicit identifications from 100 Brazilians in five different states, The respondents could glance at the whole deck before making the first identification, which was asked using one or more of the words qualidade, typo, raga, and as a last resort cor. Lexically, 492 different categorizations were identified, ranging from 2 to 70 per respondent. Harris writes that opposed to other domains such as chemical or botanical terminologies, each of the drawings was identified by at least 20 different lexical combit ions. Sanjek (Sanjek 1971) employed the same methodology in a single village, eliciting 116 different terms. Related to this claim of multiple categories is the sub-claim that there is a lack of intersubject agreement about how to identify a given individual. Harris and Kottak (1963) further analyzed the results of their elicitation of identifications for 9 pictures by counting how many different labels were given to each of the drawings. They found that “a given individual in Arambepe could be called by as many as 13 different terms by the other members of his community. These terms are spread out across the entire spectrum” (Harris and Kottak 1963:204). Harris and Kottak also claim that categories are fluid; using the same picture identification method, they argue that a given subject could change his identification of a picture from one interview to the next (Harris and Kottak 1963). Several criticisms have been made about the assumption that each term elicited corresponds to a “racial type.” Anthropologist Robin Sheriff explains multiple color terms she encountered in a favela in Rio de Janeiro as being simply 95color descriptors, operating as a different domain than race (which she believes Brazilians conceptualize only in terms of black and white). Additionally, she believes that the extremely high number of terms represents a “descriptive discourse” that describe physical features and that often reflect Brazilians’ creativity and linguistic play. She writes: I could well imagine the sly amusement with which Celso, José, Alberto, and others on the morro might approach a task such as that which Harris (1970) and Sanjek (1971) put to their informants. Confronted with a stack of drawings on which differently shaded human faces were depicted, they might well have interpreted the task as a test of wit and linguistic creativity. Seen in this light, it would appear that in eliciting more than four hundred color terms, some of which appear to be entirely nonsensical, Harris was not tapping the “Brazilian system of racial classification,” as he insisted, but the creative (and often humorous) poetics of color description or in Celso’s terms, the Brazilian adoration of slang. (Sheriff 2003: 56). Francisco Gil-White, referring specifically to the 1970 Harris article, echoes Sheriff’s concern that color descriptors and racial categories may both get elicited by this methodology. In addition he criticizes this study from a cognitive perspective for using four different words to prime the domain in question and for not systematically testing whether these words primed the same racial domain, He alleges that the wild variation may be a product of asking four different questions. He then criticizes the black and white drawings as stimuli, believing that photographs or at least more realistic color drawings should have been used. The black and white photos, instead of factoring out “noise,” as was their purpose, probably served to “increase the ambiguity in people’s guesses because people are likely to have individually varying biases to imaginatively complete the missing information” (Gil-White 2001b:230). 96Gil-White’s primary concern, however, is with the basic premise of the methodology — that asking people to identify a set of drawings will not capture cognitive categorization, but rather people’s guesses of identity based on limited information. He argues that cognitive categories were not tested because definitions were not elicited, He writes, “suppose you and I agree that someone is branco white’) if and only if his/her parents are also branco; however, you and I have different thresholds of increasing brownness at which we stop guessing that someone is a branco. Should we be told the facts of descent, you and I will agree on who is and isn’t branco, but when Harris shows us the pictures, we will make different guesses” (Gil-White 2001b:230). In the Harris and Kottak 1963 article, however, it is clear that they were concemed with definitions of terms, in the abstract. They write, “For example, one-half of the community ranked moreno claro as a lighter type than ‘mulato claro, while the other half reversed the order” (Harris and Kottak 1963:204), Gil-White advances two further cognitive criticisms that relate specifically to the sub-claims of Claim 1. First, he suggests the possibility that much of the disagreement between subjects is simply semantics ~ that two people may agree that a picture is in the same category, but one labels the category preto and one labels it ‘moreno, for example, And second, he proposes that people may respond at different levels of categorization, as in the example branca and sarard, which he suggests may be a subset of branca. Sheriff's criticisms overlap with many of these, but from a linguistic rather than a cognitive perspective. First she argues that some terms, such as moreno specifically, function as part of a “pragmatic discourse” and ‘serve as polite euphemisms for blackness” (Sheriff 2001: 31). She emphasizes the role of 97context, believing that terms may seem fluid not because identities are ambiguous, but because contexts change and communicative intention varies. Claim 2; Absence of Descent Rules Harris and Kottak (1963) searched for an actual family in town with a set of siblings whose physical features varied but who were believed to have the same mother and father. They took photographs of the three sisters and asked 100 people to identify the race of each of the sisters in the photograph individually. Only six people used the same term to refer to all three of the sisters. Follow up tests confirmed these findings and one even asked about fraternal twins so that the common parents would not be questioned even slightly. In another study, they asked people whether it was possible for brothers and sisters with the same parents to be pretos and brancos. People seemingly had no problem with this, indicating to the authors that despite the fact that they had found no family with siblings ranging from the lightest to darkest, it was still cognitively possible to categorize as such, These two studies together lead Harris and Kotak to the conclusion that race in Brazil is not based on descent, such as itis in the United States, They argue that in the United States a child always takes the racial identity of the minority parent in the case of mixed marriage. They coin a new term for this ~ hypodescent — and argue that in Brazil they have shown that hypodescent does not exist. Harris and Kottak claim, however, that simply because racial identification is not based on descent does not mean that it is solely based on appearances. In fact, they highlight “visibly obscure if not invisible factors” (Harris and Kottak 1963:204), 98referring specifically to class and citing the phrase “money whitens” (Harris 1956). They conclude by saying, “we must be prepared to develop a highly complex cognitive calculus in which the subject’s actual physical appearance is only one of the relevant components. But we are inclined to the view that it may never be possible to formulate this calculus, The use of racial terms varies from individual to individual, from place to place, time to time, test to test, and observer to observer” (Harris and Kottak 1963:205) Neither Gil-White (Gil-White 2001b) nor Sheriff (Sheriff 2001) addresses these studies in particular. Sheriff presents evidence from her interviews that contradicts this claim, showing how people define their race by ancestry. One woman, Analucia, says, “I am parda, but of the black race (da raga negra)” (Sheriff 2001: 43), Sheriff writes, “As other informants had, Analucia described herself not, on the basis of her own unique appearance but according to notions of racial ancestry. She directly contradicted the assertion made by many (e.g. Harris and Kottak 196 Harris 1964) that Brazilians classify themselves by appearance rather than ‘hypodescent™ (Sheriff 2001: 43). Gil-White only mentions the conclusions of these studies to dismiss them because they do not fit into his definition of “race.” He writes that Harris did not “bother” to elicit cognitive categories, thus leading to “Harris's remarkable claim that in Brazil full siblings may be classed in different ‘racial’ categories, an interpretation that stretches thin not only the data he has, but also the concept of ‘race’ as usually understood” (Gil-White 2001 37). Gil-White defines races as classical categories whose definition for inclusion is the possession of the racial essence that can only be inherited biologically (see Baran and Sousa 2001, for a 99more complete discussion). This is clearly his working definition although he does not include essentialization as part of his explicit definition for race: “people may essentialize racial categories” (Gil-White 2001b, page, emphasis added). Sheriff finds many different kinds of discourses relating to categories of color and descent yet she privileges the times that race terms are used to communicate biological commonality as defining the “true” underlying racial identities (for criticisms, see Sansone 2004 and Fry 2000). Gil-White, although he has not conducted research in Brazil, assumes a priori that there will be essentialized categories of race, and the anthropologist’s job is to uncover them using cognitive methods. In criticizing certain methods of Harris and Kottak, these researchers in fact falsely represent the conclusions that Harris and Kottak draw from their methods. They assume that Harris (1970), for example, claimed that there were over four hundred races, with a simple one to one mapping between the concept and the term, when this was clearly not the claim, And they ignore that Harris and Kottak were attempting to explore the relationship between color, class, and descent in a systematic way that showed interesting differences with the way that racial classification seemed to work in the United States. I find these goals more compelling that simply trying to label race as essentialized or not. During my initial ethnographic observations in Belmonte, I found that people used race terms in many different ways to talk about color and to talk about ancestry. ‘There were certainly people I had come to know, especially those involved in Belmonte’s black movement organizations, who claimed that the only true identities were branco and negro. Yet, ethnographically I found no compelling reason to 100privilege one kind of talk over the other. As such, I set about designing controlled investigations to systematically understand how terms were being used in specific situations and how terms matched up with categories that seemed to guide understandings of color, race, and culture. In the process, I took into consideration the many fine linguistic and cognitive cautions raised over these past methodologies, despite the fact that many of their criticisms are unfounded. Preparing for the Sorting Task — Taking Photographs on ion Di Researchers have successfully used different types of drawings as stimuli in studies designed to learn about certain categories, especially those of non-human living kinds. But in trying to understand social categories in Belmonte, appropriate stimuli were harder to obtain. In my search, I downloaded Harris’ face drawings from the intemet and contemplated using them for a sorting task. I found that these designs did not capture the reality of physical features, hair styles, or clothing choices that might be important for everyday classifications (see also Gil-White 2001b). I sought out more sophisticated computer programs that might be able to manipulate features in a more realistic way but could not find any that I considered satisfactory.” Ttherefore decided to take on the challenge of creating a set of photographs that could serve as stimuli for several studies. I wanted to collect a set of pictures that might adequately represent the variety of people found in Belmonte; yet, I did not want to use pictures of people from the town, I wanted to be able to control the information fier returning from the field, I did learn ofa program called Morpheus that can make combinations. cof real photographs in ways that might prove useful for future research. 101that subjects “knew” about each of the pictures (apart from the visual signs evident in the pictures themselves). In struggling to think about the logistics of putting together an appropriate set of pictures from a nearby town, a fortunate event aided me— Election Day. On October 27, 2002, Luiz Indcio Lula da Silva (“Lula”) from the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) (Workers’ Party) was overwhelmingly elected to be Brazil’s President after three previous unsuccessful attempts. Voting is mandatory in Brazil, and on Election Day, which is a national holiday from work, almost all Brazilians visit one of the designated polling locations scattered liberally throughout the country. I decided to take photographs in the nearby town of Porto Seguro. The town is approximately three hours from Belmonte, and while there is some movement back and forth between these cities, the inconvenient trip (which involves a bus, a barge, and then another bus) as well as the economic barriers (Porto Seguro is more developed and more expensive) keeps travel to Porto from Belmonte limited. Porto Seguro is large enough that J felt confident that I could collect a sample of photos completely unknown to residents of Belmonte. 1 took the majority of photographs in an outlying barrio where the population roughly appeared to match the population of Belmonte in phenotype, style of dress, and socioeconomic status. I took some photographs also in the center of town, but did not include any of the tourists in my picture sets. Some additional photographs were taken during the walk from one polling place to the next, occasionally of people in their places of business. By midmoming, people packed into the schoolyard in the outlying barrio, and I stood amidst the crowds with my clipboard and camera asking all passersby if they 102‘would mind having their picture taken for use in my research project in Belmonte. I explained a little bit about the research and, if they agreed, asked them to sign consent forms indicating that they agreed to have their picture used and published. Standing outside the polling location with a clipboard and camera, many people tried to ask me questions about the voting procedure. At first, I was worried that looking “official” ‘would make people think they had to agree to be photographed even if they did not want to, This did not seem to be the case, as some people declined, others accepted, and many engaged me in extended discussions about the eventual use of the photograph. In addition, I was apprehensive about asking people to be photographed because of the charged nature of this exchange between tourists and locals in other places in South America that I had visited. Some people may feel offended or violated and others have become accustomed to charging money for the rights to photograph them. In Southern Bahia, this was not the case. I found collecting the photographs to be a mostly enjoyable and educational activity as I discussed the future research with those people I met, At the end of the day, I developed and laminated over one hundred photographs to be used in sorting tasks discussed later in this Chapter (3.1 and 3.2) as well as Study 4.1 and 5.1 (see results sections below for examples of the photographs). Looking at the entire set of photos, I concluded that certain sectors of the population were overrepresented for a Belmonte study. Specifically, those members of higher socioeconomic status were more likely to allow their picture to be taken for research purposes. In designing the sorting tasks, however, this was not a problem since I pared the photos down to a maximum of 22 anyway so as to not 103overwhelm respondents. As I began conducting the studies, I was tremendously excited about the world of talk that they opened up even outside of the specific controlled investigations. Looking at these photographs was exciting for people of Belmonte and it allowed them to talk openly about features of race and color in ways that were much more difficult if the topic was broached by asking about their own identity or that of people they knew. Election Day 2002 opened up a world of new possibilities with these methodological tools for the integration of ethnography and controlled investigations in the field.” Study 3.1: Sorting by Raca and Cor Goals In this task, there were three questions that I hoped to answer. First, I needed to know whether raga and cor were words describing the same domain or whether they were different types of categories as suggested by Sheriff and others who believe that people clearly distinguish between race and color. This was a critical question, not only for theoretical considerations, but also for logistical ones — in future tasks, I would need to use one of these words to ask about categorizations; yet at this early point in my research I was still unsure which word to use. The word raga is often confusing to people in Belmonte. Some people understood the word in the older sense of “a nation” or “a people.” If asked a person’s raga, they would often reply the person was of the Bahian raca or possibly Spanish or German or something to » Of course, Election Day 2002 also opened up new possibilities for Brazilians with the election of a President from the Worker's Party. Though the start ofthe Lula presidency was marked by ‘tremendous optimism on the part of Belmonte residents, corruption scandals in 2004 and 2005 have contributed toa slight eroding of these good feelings. 104that effect. Others associated the term only with dog breeds, which was extremely common. And others understood the term in the more recent way it has been used by black movements in Brazil —to signify something more like the English word “race.” In this case, itis often heard as part of the expression “raga negra,” which has become sort of a catch phrase that I have even seen on t-shirts in Salvador. ‘The word cor, on the other hand, was easily understood by everyone and triggered categorizations such as branca, morena, negra, etc. I understood that some people, especially those more involved with Belmonte’s black movement organizations, made a distinction between the two words cor and raga, and they frequently used the word raga in their speech. A given person, for example, who appeared brown and had one parent considered indio could be described as having a cor morena from the raga india. The cor description highlights the physical appearance and the cultural similarity with the Belmonte mainstream and the raga label highlights the minority ancestry. They are related but different. Another ‘woman explains the difference as follows: “Porque a cor, é a cor da pessoa, E a raga é a raga que se origina. Entre branco com negro, entre indio com branco” [Because the cor is the cor of the person. And the raga is the raga that gives rise to it, Between branco and negro, between indio and branco}. The vast majority of people that I knew, however, did not appear to distinguish between these category types. In order to be systematic I needed to demonstrate this to be the case so that I knew how to approach future research designs. This task was designed to answer that question. The second goal of this task was more exploratory — to get an understanding of the terms and groupings that adults in Belmonte were using. Certainly the 105ethnographic research I had already conducted had given me important insights into the terms and the categories people were working with in various contexts. Yet, systematicity had been difficult to achieve since people would talk to me about race regarding themselves and their close friends and relatives or public figures but it was hard to find comparisons. In addition, the topic was sensitive for some people such that I did not even feel comfortable asking about a person’s self-identification until they offered that information themselves. As such, I still did not have a good idea of the extent to which people conceived of race by groups of two, three, or more, This task was designed to get a better understandings of the terms people were using, they groups they envisioned, the boundaries they conceptualized, and the cultural agreements or disagreements regarding these issues A third goal to this research was to explore the connections between color, race, and social class, Early research on race in Brazil focused so much attention on class (Harris 1956; Pierson 1942; Wagley 1952) that some have argued they these researchers completely reduced race to class (Caldwell 2007). More accurately, it could be said that they were arguing against the idea that race in Brazil was solely based on physical features (Nogueira 1985). In turn, they searched for the categories that stratified society and found critical interactions between ‘race’ and ‘class.’ “It is incorrect to imply that racial identity in Brazil is simply a matter of what a person looks or acts like, for the perception of what he looks or aets like appears to be influenced by visually obscure if not invisible factors” such as education and economic status (Harris and Kottak 1963:204). Kottak later writes, “The main difference is that the US has a dual system of stratification in which both ‘race’ and 106class divide the population. In Brazil, there is a single stratified order in which race, or phenotype, is simply one factor in determining a person’ class affiliation. Other determinants are education, wealth, job, and family connections” (Kotak 1983:67). I wanted to bring out these issues with a controlled investigation, Method and Procedure The task I designed to answer these questions was a picture sorting task. I used 22 of the photographs described above ~ head and shoulder photographs of people from the nearby town of Porto Seguro. Out of the hundred pictures that I had taken, I selected 22 to reflect a range of different phenotypic features, an equal distribution of males and females, a cross section of ages, and some variety of social class. I set out to interview people in their homes. I selected homes by walking down mapped out streets and calling on every fourth house. If no one was home at that house, I continued down the street until I found a house with someone home. In this way, I randomized participants but got to talk with people in all the different areas of Belmonte. 1 began each interview by introducing myself and the project in general terms and asking a little about the person’s family and their life history. I then asked the participant if they could sort the 22 pictures into groups based on either raga, cor or class. I asked 24 adults to sort the pictures into groups by raga, 24 different adults to sort into groups by cor, and 24 different adults to sort the groups by social class (mean age = 39.59 years old, ranging from 17.89 years to 68.04 years). I then asked 107people to name the groups and tell me about them — why did they sort the pictures this way and how does one group differ from another? ‘There were times when asking people about raga was not possible because of varying interpretations of that word. ‘The opening story of this chapter is one example of this, and below I present another example. I had asked Jamila to sort the pictures bby raga and she replied that the person in the first picture was Bahian, and then she said the same thing for the second picture. I explained that everyone in the pictures was Bahian. At this point, she called her friend from across the room to help: Jamila: Deise: Michael: - Eo za 9 Que raga vocé acha que ¢ essa foto? Hum? Esta fazendo uma separagiio de ragas. Raga 6 0 qué? Que pais voed &? E separagao de raga. Raga, para vooés, é 0 qué? Raga, o termo raga’? Raga quer dizer o qué? Para mim, raga é de cachorro (risos). Raga, raga de gente, que vocé esta falando? EB Para mim, aqui tudo é baiano. Aqui é baiano. Talvez raga néo seja a palavra certa, Como é.... que palavra tem para se dividir pessoas em grupos? Vocé fala... quem falou de raga? 108Eu falei a palavra, talvez esteja errado, porque eu nao falo portugués muito bem, mas raga, assim, como € outro nome? E cor, por exemplo. J Aqui é moreno. Jamila: What raga do you think this picture is? Deise: Huh? Michael: She is dividing the pictures into ragas. D: What is raga? What country you are from? M: Separating by raga. What does raga mean to you two? D: The term, raga? M: ‘What does raga mean? i To me, raga is for dogs (laughter). You are talking about raga of people? M: Yes i Ithink everyone here is Bahian. This one is Bahian. Maybe raga is not the best word for what I’m asking. What word would you use to divide people into groups? You're saying...who said raga? I said the word but maybe it was wrong because I don’t speak Portuguese very well. But is there another name for raga? Is it cor, for example? What is the cor of people? This one here is moreno. In cases such as this, the interview was then continued using the word cor. This procedure deserves clarification. It seems to be that raga can be understood in a 109newly used way similar to the English “race” or in the older way as “kind of people.” When people gave answers such as “Bahian” to the raca question, this is ethnographically interesting and suggests that they conceive of a “Bahian” kind, similar to the biological and cultural mixing of Brazilians discussed in Chapter 2. For this study, however, I was only interested in comparing the new use of raga with cor; as such, those with the older understanding of the word or with confusion about the term were then given the prime cor. All responses were recorded and later transcribed by a Brazilian graduate student. Results: Raga and Cor 1 analyze the results of this task in several different ways. First, I ask whether there is a systematic difference in the way that Belmonte residents are conceptualizing raga and cor. The answer is “no” and in this section I will explain why. Respondents sorted the 22 pictures into anywhere from 2 to 7 groups (see below Table 3.1): Table 3. {umber of groups sorted ~ raga and cor 2 Groups 3 Groups or More Group | Raga 7 2 4 8 [Cor 2 10 12 None of these differences between the raga and cor conditions were significant by Pearson Chi Square tests. then examined the terms that respondents used to describe the groups. The most common were: branca, morena, morena clara (light brown), morena escura 110(dark brown), negra, preta (black, literally the color black), escura (dark), clara (light), and mulata, Other terms were common, but used with less frequency: sarard (light skin and tightly curled black hair), cabo verde (dark skin and straight hair), cabocla (showing some indigenous features), and galega (light skin with light hair). And certainly some people used creative terms (often given exaggerated importance by North American researchers in their own studies) such as café com leite (coffee with milk) and cravo ¢ canela (clove and cinnamon). Due to these multiple terms, analysis proved challenging. With helpful advice from Susan Gelman and the entire staff of the Center for Statistical Consultation and Research,” I overcame this challenge by counting how many times each of the 22 pictures was grouped with each of the other 21 pictures. I then created similarity matrices that could be tested for correlation. The end result was that the raga and cor conditions were 94% correlated. This extremely high correlation along with the fact that there were no significant differences regarding number of groups, allowed me to assume that if people were making distinctions based on color and race, it was not based on the words cor and raga, In summary, the two conclusions drawn from this analysis were: ‘© The words raga and cor are not direct triggers for different domains of categorizations. ‘* Very few people sort the pictures into a binary division. 3 After meeting twice with a senior consultant exploring possibilities, I was invited to present this problem to the entire staff during the weekly meeting (the first time an outsider had ever done that). ‘Afier many helpful suggestions, a consensus was reached as to the most straightforward and accurate ‘way to test my research question, This isthe solution | used. M1Results: Race Clusters The next question I wanted to answer from this data was: which pictures do people tend to sort together and why? As was the case when comparing raga and cor, I could not rely on the terms given for each group in analysis because of the multiplicity of race terms. Instead I looked at the data showing how many times each picture was grouped with each of the other pictures, combining both the raga and cor conditions for a total of 48 subjects. After consulting with Susan Gelman, I isolated clusters of pictures that emerged from the data, ‘The criteria used to pick out a cluster were (1) the pictures had to be grouped together at least fifty percent of the time and (2) each picture in the cluster had to be clustered with all of the other pictures in the cluster. Using these criteria, three clusters emerged for the adults: 1. This cluster is composed of people with light brown skin and hair considered to be straight (see Figure 3.1). Sometimes people mentioned possible Indian ancestry.* My brief description ofthe common features of photographs in each cluster represent the way that the pictures were generally described by people in the study. 112Figure 3.1: Moreno/caboclo cluster from Study 3.1 2. This group was almost always labeled as branco. ‘The people pictured have very light skin and hair that is considered straight and light, 113Figure 3.2: Branco cluster from Study 3.1 3. This group is composed of people with skin considered dark and hair considered crespo (Kinky) (even if it has been shaved). Some members of the group have skin 4considered lighter but have other symbols associated with Afro-Brazilians such as the clothes of the baiana and dreadlocks. Figure 3.3: Negro/Moreno cluster from Study 3.1 1sThose pictures that did not fit into any of the clusters were the 17, 18, 28, and 32. ‘What was it about these particular pictures that left them out of tight clusters? Below | ist all the terms used to describe each picture: 17: negro, mulato, caboclo, preto, moreno, pardo, moreno escuro, and cravo e canela 18: negro, preto, moreno claro, mulato, pardo, caboclo, moreno escuro, and cravo ¢ canela 28: moreno claro, mulata, morena, negra, branca, cabocla, parda, galega (used to describe people with light skin and blonde or red hair), and moreno escuro 32: moreno claro, negro, mulata, galega, caboclada, branca, café com leite, parda, sararé, and loira (blonde), 116These four pictures were the most ambiguous, with the most disagreement as to the other pictures with which they were grouped. These pictures were described using virtually all of the terms for race (though 17 and 18 were never labeled branca). After the study, I talked with some friends about these particular pictures. They pointed out that all of these four had physical features considered contradictory or hard to classify. Number 32, for example, had facial features many considered negro, but had very light skin and hair dyed blonde, In summary, the following conclusions can be drawn from this analysis: ‘© There is a general agreement among the population as to three clusters of people that can be grouped together when one is given only visual information, © Of those kinds of people, hair seems to be playing a large role in differentiating a negro from a mixed group. This confirms my ethnographic observations and has been mentioned in several other works on Brazil and other places in the African diaspora (Badillo 2001; Caldwell 2004; Candelario 2000). © Cultural cues associated with Afro-Brazilians can lead a person to classify a picture in a different way than physical features alone. «A small number of pictures considered to have ambiguous features are grouped with a wide variety of other pictures with little cultural agreement, 117Results: Boundaries After isolating these clusters, which encompassed all but four of the 22 pictures, I wanted to know about the boundaries of those clusters ~ if they were absolute or fuzzy and if it was the same for all clusters. Using the existing matrix of the tallies of how many times each picture was counted with each of the other pictures provided a novel way to answer these questions. 1 first calculated the cultural agreement of group boundaries by taking each of the clusters and examining, ‘on average, how many times pictures from that cluster were grouped with pictures in clusters outside their own.** In the table below I present the rankings from fewest connections to most, [ also label each of the three groups with a shorthand ~ branco, moreno/caboclo, or negro/moreno. While this simplified the variety of terms used for pictures in the clusters, it generally represents the way people understood the clusters ~as white, mixed, and black. 1 took the total numberof times each picture inthe cluster was grouped with pictures in other clusters and then divided that total by the number of pictures inthe other clusters (since some of the clusters were bigger than the others). 118Table 3.2: Average number of connections of picture with pictures in other clusters Picture Number ‘Average Number of Times ‘Group Grouped with Pictures in Other Clusters _ 115 ‘ranco 1.85 ‘branco 3.151 ‘ranco 331 ‘branco 3.54 ‘branco 367 hegraymoreno 367 hegro/moreno 5.67 negra/moreno 5.89 inegro/moreno | 6.56 negra/moreno - 667 ‘negro/moreno — 7.22 negra/moreno - 70.28 Torenofcabocio | 70.93 ‘morenofeaboclo 11.00 ‘moreno/cabocio | 11.43 ‘moreno/eaboolo 73.11 negra/moreno | 15.11 inegro/moreno The patterns from this table are striking. In the first place, the five pictures from the branco group had the fewest connections to other pictures outside of that group. In effect, the branco group was the most clearly delineated of all of the clusters. Also interesting, however, is that the majority of the negro/moreno group was similarly quite insulated — without being grouped very often with pictures in other clusters. Two pictures from this 9 picture group form an exception — numbers 9 and 37 which have the most connections out of all the pictures listed. It seems to be the case that these two pictures are often grouped together with the moreno/caboclo cluster, pethaps because 9 has extremely light skin or perhaps because 37 has hair that is ‘more wavy than curly. 19From this analysis, I conclude the following: Of the three clusters, the group generally labeled branco forms the most insulated group ~ categorized least with pictures in other clusters. ‘This boundary is fairly rigid Seven of the nine pictures from the cluster generally labeled as negro/moreno also form a highly agreed upon group; however, their boundary is more porous. They are clustered with two pictures that seem to be more ambiguous. Pictures of people that appeared to have intermediate or conflicting physical features had less cultural agreement regarding the terms used to describe them and in relation to which of the other pictures they were grouped with. This is the case for the group often identified as moreno/eabocla and two of the pictures from the negro/moreno group. Results: Social Class In this study, groupings in the social class condition did not correlate with either the cor or raga conditions. Most of the 24 respondents in this condition lumped the vast majority of people in the pictures in a group considered lower class, much as they would group the majority of real-life Belmonte residents. The pictures certainly contain information that can be read for social class and those signs reflect a vast majority of lower class people, especially in the outlying barrio of Porto Seguro. In addition, brancos in Brazil are overrepresented in the upper classes. As such, the 120pictures most commonly labeled as upper or middle class were those pictures generally considered branco. ‘This condition was included in the study to explore the claims that “money whitens” (Degler 1971; Harris 1956). I looked at several hypotheses to see iff class ‘was affecting racial classification or vice-versa. First, I looked to see whether non- whites who were occasionally grouped in the upper/middle class (such as pictures 1, 2, 4, 9, 29, 32, 34, and 37) were included in racial clusters with pictures that appeared “whiter” than would be expected. This did not appear to be the case. Second, I looked to see if pictures that were classified as branco but appeared lower class were ‘grouped with pictures other than those labeled lower class. I found no examples of this. In addition, at no time in the sorting by raga or cor did anyone mention anything relating to money or class. In other words, I found every reason to consider beliefs about race to be autonomous from those regarding class. In separating race from class, I am certainly not alone, as this has been the trend for over twenty years by Brazilian researchers ; in the 1980s, a wave of statistical research demonstrated that race is an important variable that stratifies the population, even when education and class are factored out (Hasenbalg 1985; Silva 1985) (see Chapter 5 for more discussion). ‘Nonetheless, it is obvious from talking with people that people expect color to correlate with class; having money is very much associated with whiteness and being poor with blackness. It is an induction that people commonly make. One woman explains how she was going to look at an apartment to rent. She says, “Entrei com 0 carro, tinha uma preta do lado, com cara fechada para mim. Pensei que a preta era 121empregada, mas era a dona do recinto. Vocé esta entendendo? Eu nao dei valor a ela. ‘Achei que era empregada por causa da cor” [I entered with the car and there was a preta to the side giving me a hard look. I thought the prefa was the maid, but she was the owner of the complex. Do you understand? I didn’t give her any credit. I thought she was the maid because of her color). Statistically speaking, this is a reasonable correlation to expect. Color and class statistically are correlated in Brazil, and it seems that in areas of high inequality this situation is even more pronounced. In talking to people about discrimination, people often found it easier to talk about economic discrimination, which they also included as part of the term racismo (see also Twine 1998). Often, people in this study considered discrimination against negros in contemporary Belmonte to be largely an economic discrimination in contrast to the past when it was more about color. For example, when discussing the clube America that did not allow negros or ‘pobres, I would often ask whether a negro with money could enter, and was always told that it did not matter if they had money or not, they were not allowed to enter. ‘When I asked people what they understood by the expression, “money whitens,” the answers were varied. Some had never heard of it but said they assumed it just meant that if'a negro had money, he was not treated as a negro, but rather as a branco (at least on a superficial level). Others thought it referred to the fact that if negro had money, he could buy (and do) more expensive whiter) things that negros could generally not afford. These uses seem to be metaphorical and communicative rather than implying that people had truly changed categories. ‘Nonetheless, as money is a critical part of everyday life and is associated with 122whiteness, it can be used as one factor amidst many that people can use in claiming identification with a term that they associate as lighter. My research focuses on how people classify others, and in that case, it did not appear that money changed cla fication, However, some research indicates that where this phrase may hold true is in people’s self-definitions, as people with more money self-identify using terms that may seem to be lighter than their physical features would indicate (Telles 2004). Another way that class may affect self-classification is in a very different way. Telles (2004) finds that non-whites with higher class are more likely to self-identify with darker terms, especially negro, rather than mixed-race terms. In effect, one could say that in terms of self- rather than other-identification, “money polarizes” — both whitening and darkening. Discussion This Study 3.1 speaks to Claim 1 from the past methodology section (Claim 2 will be addressed in the following chapter). Studies by Harris, Kottak, and Sanjek found a large number of race terms, with Harris (1970) eliciting 492 classification terms from a deck of 72 face cards. My own study also found many different terms used, though significantly less than past studies. This could possibly be a result of changing times, as would seem possible based on Kottak’s work showing a trend towards fewer terms (Kottak 1992). And it could also be a result of the different methodology asking people to form groups instead of describing an individual picture. I believe that having people sort pictures into groups satisfies many of the cautions previously mentioned, allowing me a way to find categorical structure 123amidst the multiple terms. Respondents used 15 terms to describe the groups they made. Ido not conclude that there are 15 racial types in Belmonte, But should I claim that there are three racial types in Belmonte that correspond to the three clusters that | isolated in the adults’ data? This question is more difficult to answer. I do not suggest that there is a system with three equal types to which people can be assigned ‘one racial identity. But this study shows some broad cultural agreement about the kinds of people sorted together based on visuals, and those clusters reflect basic understandings of branco, mixed, and negro, even as individual respondents choose to sort into different numbers of groups. Having satisfied questions about raga, cor, and social class, I conducted the next study to compare sorting across different ages. Study 3.2: Children’s Sorting I decided to conduct a similar sorting task with children of three different ages, interviewing 108 children, 36 each from 2" grade (mean age = 8.74 years old, ranging from 6.3 years to 12.57 years), 5" grade (mean age = 11.48 years old, ranging from 8.7 years to 16.12 years), and 7" - 8 grades (mean age = 13.93 years old, ranging from 12.18 years to 15.08 years). All interviews were conducted during school hours ~ students were interviewed individually in an empty classroom. The 2" graders were selected from morning and afternoon classes at the Licia Paternostro Municipal School. The other children were selected from classes at the Gindisio Municipal Pedro Calmén. Seventh and 8" graders were combined into one age group because there were not enough subjects in either grade separately. The procedure was the same except that I only asked children to sort the pictures by cor, and I only used 12414 pictures (a pilot study demonstrated that 22 pictures was taxing for the young children). I showed each child a picture and asked “what is this person’s cor?” I began forming the piles myself, asking the same question of every picture. Sometimes they would directly join me in the sorting and other times they would simply state the cor, and I would ask if the picture belonged with one of the other piles or separate. The goal of this study was exploratory to see what categories students were using at different ages, what clusters would emerge from their grouping of pictures, and what kinds of boundaries could be found around these clusters. Results: Number of Groups In looking at the data, I first tallied how many groups the children tended to form compared to those of the adults. In Table 3.3 below, I list how many people in each age group sorted the pictures into 2 groups, 3 groups, or more than three groups. The adults’ data comes from Study 3.1, with the cor and raga conditions combined. Because there are 48 adults and 36 for each of the child groups, the table lists both numeric count and percentage of total. Table 3.3: Number of groups sorted by age 2 Groups 3 Grow 4 or more Groups ‘Adults 4 (8.3%) 24 (50%) 20 (41.7%) [7-8 Grade 719.4%) 17 (47.3%) 12 33.3%) |S Grade 6 (16.7%) 119 (52.8%) 11 G0.5%) [2Grade 14 G8.9%) 18 (50%) 411.1%) Inall the age groups, approximately half of the subjects divided the pictures into three groups. The three oldest age groups share a similar pattem. Though the adults seem 125to be sorting into fewer binaries, this difference is not significant. The second graders show a markedly different pattem — sorting the pictures into 2 groups significantly ‘more than the other ages, and sorting the pictures into four groups or more significantly less (Pearson Chi-Square, p <.05). Results: Children’s Clusters As with the adults, I counted all the times that each picture was grouped with cach of the other pictures. Using the same criteria as the adults’ clusters, I examined those that emerged from each of the children’s age groups: Seventh and Kighth Grades: Four clusters emerged, one more than in the adults’ data: 1. (4, 25, 29) This cluster is the same as the adults’ cluster I labeled moreno/eaboclo — skin considered brown and hair considered straight. 2. (4, 14, 34, 37) Picture number 4 doubles in this group and the one above. This group is interestingly different from the adults. They seem to be focusing more on skin color itself, as these pictures share a brown color generally considered intermediate, or moreno. The pictures with symbols of Afro-Brazilians (baiana clothes and dreadlocks) are included in this intermediate cluster. 3. (24, 33, 35, 34) Picture 34 doubles in this group and the group above. This group is composed of dark-skinned individuals with hair considered curly (even if itis not visible). This cluster was often labeled negro or preto. 1264, (7, 10, 27, 28) This cluster is the same as the branco group for the adults with the addition of 28 to the group. Again, it appears that these eighth graders focused on her skin color as they included her in this group. (One picture was not included in any cluster, which was picture number 32, also one of the ones not included in a cluster for the adults. Fifth Grade: The fifth graders’ groupings also reveal four main clusters: 1. 4, 25, 29) This is the same as the adults’ and eighth graders’ cluster of brown skin and straight hair. 2. (4, 14, 24, 25, 34, 37) This is an expanded group that includes brown skinned people of different hair types, facial features, and cultural cues. 3. (33, 34, 35) This is similar to the darkest group for the 8" graders, often described as negro or preto. 4, (7,10, 27, 28) This is the same branco cluster as the eighth graders and adults. Again, the one picture not included in any particular cluster is number 32. Second Grade: Clusters from this age group break down into two groups (as Table 3.3 suggests that it would): 1. (4, 14, 24, 33, 34, 35, 37) This forms a group of virtually all the people considered to have darker skin, 2. (7, 10, 27, 28, 29, 32) This forms an expanded lighter skin or blonde hair group, Picture 32 interestingly forms part of this group, often because of her blonde hair, which older children and adults were quick to point out as bleached. 127‘The picture not included in any cluster for the second graders was picture 25. 1 similarly conducted an analysis of borders and insularity for the fifth and 7-8 grade ‘groups (the second graders showed such a different pattem, it would not make for interesting comparison). Intuitively I sensed the same pattern would exist because of the fact that some pictures doubled in clusters for the children, but never the pictures in the cluster considered branco. And in fact, this is what the analysis revealed. The pictures from the branco cluster all had the lowest average number of times grouped with other pictures. In both the fifth and seventh-cighth grade condition, after the branco pictures, the pictures that formed a tight cluster as negro or prefo were pictures 33 and 35. The others were markedly more porous with many connections to other clusters. Conclusion: Discussion of Studies 3.1 and 3.2 These studies have revealed a robust cultural pattern despite a seemingly confusing set of multiple race terms, providing the initial steps in my investigation of essentialism in racial categories in Belmonte. This is only a first step because it only asks people to sort based on visuals. The methodology, however, afforded several possibilities for analysis: an exploration of race terms and groups, a testing of group boundaries, and a rich set of ethnographic data elicited by real life pictures that inspired hundreds of people to talk about this topic to me in ways that Thad previously only been able to discuss with my closest friends in Belmonte. 128In analyzing the quantitative results from these studies, I began to form a hypothesis — that in the realm of black/white relations, there is a clear distinction between who is white and who is not. Subjects across all three of the older age groups sorted a highly agreed upon group of brancos that was tightly bounded. Those pictures were almost always grouped together and rarely grouped with any other pictures, Would this result then support the claim by Sheriff that race is truly binary (black/white) despite the multiple terms used? I suggest that it does not support that claim for two reasons. First, Table 3.3 shows that very few people (with the exception of second graders) sorted the pictures into two groups. And while one could argue that this isa result of the methodology, I still would have expected more people to sort using a binary. The second way that this study seems to contradict Sheriff's claims is that even though | find a firm boundary around a highly agreed- ‘upon branco group, I do not find those included in the non-white group to be equally considered negro. However, the boundary between negro and mixed is not as fixed. To further explore this issue, I looked to the transcriptions from the interviews I conducted for the studies presented in this Chapter. In going through the conversations that I had with people, I noticed a striking difference between the way that people talked about their classifications for branco and negro that reinforced some of the previous quantitative analyses. When people talked about definitions for branco, they often used a conception of “pure” branco that was based on biology and blood (even though the study was supposedly only based on visuals). On the other hand, when talking about definitions of negro, they seemed to be using a graded conception, where some people were more negro than 129others, and some (because of prototypical features) were considered the best examples of negro, “negro mesmo” (real negro). Below I present a small sample of quotes that illustrate this difference: ‘© “A pessoa branca é aquela que é branca, branca mesmo, que a familia é de origem branca, descendente de alemio, essas coisas, que pode se identificar como bran [The branca person is that one that is branca, branca mesma, that the family is of branca origin, descendents of Germans, these things, that one can identify as branca © “Aqui é misturado, nao é branco legitimo, vamos dizer, sangue azul, sangue ae [This one is mixed, he's not a branco legitimo, let's say, blue blood, pure blood] ‘© “Porque as vezes a pessoa é aparentemente branca mas nio é.” [Because sometimes a person is aparently branca, but they are not} ‘© “Olha ‘eu’: meu pai era da minha cor. Minha mie era negra, negra, negra, negra, Eu sou o qué? Eu sou negra. Uma pessoa que tem o sangue de negro nfio pode dizer que é branco. Nao posso dizer que sou branca. Dizem que sou morena clara, mas meu sangue é de negro, negrinho!” {Look at me. My father was of my cor. My mother was negra, negra, negra, negra, And what am 1? 1am negra, A person that has negro blood cannot say that they are Branco. I cannot say that I am branca, They say that I am ‘morena clara, but my blood is negro, negrinho}Negro Mesmo: “Escuro nao é um negro bem negro, é um moreno escuro. Quando a gente fala negro é porque ele é bem negro, bem preto. Tem um pouquinho de diferenga.” [Escuro is not a very negro negro, it's a moreno escuro. When we say negro, it’s because he is very negro, very preto. There's a little bit of difference] “O pai ¢ preto mesmo. E 0 pessoal se refere a ela como uma morena. ‘Ninguém diz.que ela é uma negra, que a cor dela é diferente da cor do pai. O negro que eles falam ¢ aquela negra mesmo. Vocé niio vé passar na televisdo aquele.. Como é 0 nome dele, meu Deus? Aquele de Salvador. Nao é Gilberto Gil? Gilberto Gil é negro (com emfasis).” [The father is preto mesmo. And people refer to her [the daughter] as morena. No one says that she is a negra, because her cor is different than the cor of her father. The negro that people say is that negro mesmo. You didn’t see on TV that...What’s his name, my God? That one from Salvador. Isn't it Gilberto Gil? Gilberto Gil is negro (with emphasis)]. “Mas, é morena, eu diria, Pele morena, Nao chega a ser negra, no.” [But, she is morena, I would say. Morena skin. She doesn’t quite make it negra). “Porque tem o negro, negro mesmo. Mas também tem 0 mulato.” [Because there is the negro, negro mesmo, But there is also the mulato] “O pai ja caboclo, Ela saiu uma negra legitima por causa do cabelo ruim” [The father is caboclo, She came out a legitimate negra because of her “bad” hair] Both the qualitative and quantitative analyses from these studies point to a surprising conclusion ~ that perhaps within the domain of racial categorization there are different kinds of borders between groups: (1) an absolute border between branco and ndo-branco based on an idea of purity and (2) (for those who do not sort in a binary way) a fuzzy, graded border between non-white categories of negro and 131various other mixed combinations that vary by individual and are based on visible surface cues such as physical features (especially skin and hair) and cultural signs (dreadlocks, baiana clothes, ete). How does this hypothesis fit into existing literature on the essentialization of categories? Susan Gelman writes that “{t}he claim is not that essentialism predicts absolute category boundaries 100% of the time...” (Gelman 2003: 67). Instead, she argues that because the “world is an untidy place” (ibid: 67), people can conceive of essences being combined or impure. As such, she suggests that we should find “boundary intensificati around essentialized categories — that is, “category membership should be distinct from typicality” (ibid: 67) and “category boundaries should be treated as relatively more dichotomous (either/or, discrete, or nonfuzzy) than they truly are” (ibid: 67). My data shows that for the category of branco, both of these predictions seem to hold: the boundary between branco and ndio-branco is treated as dichotomous and it appears that people consider all members of the category to be equally members. For the rest of the population, the results are not so clear. Within the category negro, the results of these studies lead me to speculate that judgments of typicality might not be so distinct from judgments of category membership. In hindsight, this would have been a fascinating study to conduct, and I plan to return to Belmonte soon to conduct, this study and other follow-up studies. Based on surface features, most people separated a distinct group of negros, but some pictures were considered better examples than others and those that were not agreed-upon as the best examples were often grouped in a different category, even though (as one respondent said), “negro e 132‘moreno. ..so todos na mesma familia” [negro and moreno...they’re all in the same family], Several questions, however, still remain regarding these boundaries. In the next chapter, I look closely at ancestry and blood to see if there are specific descent rules that will reduce ambiguity or fuzziness more than visuals. And in Chapter 5, 1 integrate beliefs about visuals and beliefs about blood to see how people categorize individuals in the context of a culturally charged scenario taken from everyday life in Belmonte, The results from the studies in this Chapter hint at a way of understanding how fuzziness and border intensification can both play critical roles in the way that Belmonte residents understand physical features, ancestry, and cultural identity. 133CHAPTER 4 “She is White but Her Blood is Black”: Ancestry and Appearances in Mixed Brazilian Families Introduction In the previous chapter, I focused on how people would interpret visual cues to sort photographs into racial groups. Belmonte residents have a rich vocabulary and keen awareness of subtle physical differences. Yet, in sorting groups supposedly based on visuals alone, people talked a lot about insides ~ specifically about sangue (blood) and mixing. Considering the critical importance of “mixing” in popular ideologies, this was not altogether surprising. However, I was still unclear about the extent to which ancestry, or sangue, could actually define a person’s racial identity, either in their own eyes or the eyes of others. According to Sheriff, ancestry completely defines branco and negro in an essemtialized way with any negro blood defining one’s true identity as negro. Harris and Kottak, however, argue that racial identity is not, in fact, determined by race of parents, citing their study in which people assign different racial labels to three sisters of the same parents. And Gil- White argues that people may sort pictures into different groups but will most likely revise their initial classifications if new information about ancestry is provided. In this Chapter I focus specifically on the ways that blood or ancestry plays into racial categorization. If categories in Belmonte are essentialized, “insides” should be defining rather than surface features, much as they are for essentialized 134non-human animal species. In Study 4.1, I adapt the methodology from a Frank Keil study to see if a classification originally made on visuals alone would be revised when new information about family ancestry is revealed. By looking at each subject’s pattem of responses to questions about three different pictures, I show that approximately half responded using a “Pure Branca” strategy. That is, they changed the classification of someone considered branca when moreno or negro family ‘members were revealed because of the darker blood; however, they did not change their classification when someone originally considered negro was revealed to have branca family members because they were still relying on visuals rather than blood to make the classification, The other half of the subjects responded by using a consistent strategy; they never changed the classification when the new information was revealed. Though this seems to be a completely different classification scheme, an analysis of the justifications revealed striking similarities in the reasoning between the consistent strategy and the Pure Branca strategy. Even when the subjects did not change the classification of the picture originally classified as branca, they still talked about the blood, saying things like “she is branca, but her blood is negra.” This seems to imply that negro blood has stronger innate potential to influence categorization, so I designed a different study to specifically test varying conceptions of blood in cases of mixed race unions. In Study 4.2 I ask second graders, fifth graders, and adults to look at drawings of various combinations of same-race and mixed-race unions. In one condition, [ask them about the categorical identity of the child — if the child will be branca, morena, or negra. In the other condition, I ask them to pick the probable child out of three drawings that look identical except for the 135race of the child. Unlike Hirschfeld’s findings in the United States, I find that neither children nor adults show any indication of believing that negro blood has more power in determining physical features in branca-negro unions when the intermediate ‘moreno option is available. However, when the mixed union is either branca-moreno or morena-negro, | find an interesting age difference where sixth graders, but not adults, pick the darker option in the category identification for the morena-negro union and both the category and biological conditions for the branca-moreno union. I hypothesize that sixth graders, because of changes in teaching and changes in media representations, are thus demonstrating a slight tendency towards attributing more innate potential to darker blood. By examining the ways that blood affects categorization and biological expectations, I will be in better position to consider the ization of these categories in Belmonte. i les and Appearances: The Cognitive Perspective As discussed in the previous chapter, one of the fundamental shifts in how psychologists understand categories has come from the realization that categories are not based on judgments of surface similarity, but rather by causal theories about the world. In the realm of natural kinds, the understanding has been that children and adults reason about categories based on their “kind” rather than their appearance. Gelman and Markman (Gelman and Markman 1986), for example, presented subjects with a triad of pictures — two that strongly resembled each other on the surface and two that represented the same kind. They found that subjects made inductions about novel properties (internal parts, behavior, physical transformations, function, and 136origin) based on category identity for living kinds such as squirrels, fish, birds, bugs, ete. but not for human-made artifacts. Later testing showed this effect to be robust ‘even for children as young as two and a half (Gelman and Coley 1991). That which determines “kind” is largely believed to reside “inside” the organism for natural kinds, more so than for artifacts. Gelman and Wellman demonstrated the even four- and five-year-old children believe that the identity and function of an animal such as a turtle or dog would change with the removal and replacement of its “insides” (blood, bon , organs) but not its outsides (skin, fur) (Gelman and Wellman 1991). Frank Keil tested a similar idea by asking whether adults and children would admit that surface features could give the wrong, impression of an animal’s identity that could later be corrected when scientists looked ide” the animal. I describe his study in detail below, as it forms the basis for Study 4.1 in this Chapter. Keil, in these “discovery” studies, tells children a story, for example, about animals that live on a farm, say “neigh,” eat oats and hay and everybody calls them horses. But then some scientists go to the farm and decide to study them very carefully. By looking inside, they find that the blood, bones, and inside parts are of cows. They also find out that the parents of the animal were cows and the babies ‘were cows, The experimenter then asks “What do you think these animals really are: horses or cows?” Keil finds a developmental pattem in these studies. As children get older they judge that the discovery of insides and ancestry become more important identifiers than observable features. Adults define natural kinds almost always in this 137way whereas they virtually never do for artifacts (human-made categories such as chair or key). In looking at how people make sense of groups of human kinds, ethnographic and historical evidence show that insides, specifically blood and genes, have formed the basis for folk beliefS of race as well as misguided scientific quests for investigating racial differences. The importance of blood as a trope has been well documented across cultures and across time (Hirschfeld 1996). In the literature on race in the United States, the trope of blood even defines the common name given to the system of hypodescent ~ the one drop rule. In Brazil, the ubiquity of “blood” talk cannot be underestimated, particularly in the context of discussing racial mixing, Certainly racial mixing has long been commonplace throughout the Americas from the time of colonialism through the present, and people were often able to resolve categorical identity with biological calculations of blood. Hirschfeld (1996) claims that “belief in essences is recruited to render systems of racial classification coherent” since neither biological mixing nor physical features support racial classification systems coherently, In order for essence, via the trope of blood or genetics, to resolve ambiguity in classification systems, the categories must be defined by insides rather than appearances. This is common not only in cases of non-human animals, but also in the case of human groups, The one-drop rule represents one common way to resolve these ambiguities in the United States (though not historically the only way). Ethnic kinds are defined by patrilineal descent in the case studied by Gil-White in Mongolia. And Jewish identity is passed matrilineally. Yet debates about the defining role of 138ancestry for race in Brazil continue. In the last chapter, I demonstrated a strong cultural agreement regarding how people would sort photographs based on visuals, despite the conventional wisdom that there is much ambiguity in this regard. Belmonte residents clearly agreed on who would be sorted together as part of a branca group though there was less cultural agreement regarding those considered mixed. This next study examined whether there is an agreed upon rule that resolves this ambiguity by a calculus of ancestry. Goals, Methods, and Procedure The goal of this study was to examine whether racial classification of individuals would change when the race of the family relatives was “revealed.” Will Belmonte residents intuitively revise their initial classifications of strangers (presumably based on physical features) upon discovering new information about family history? If so, will they do so equally for the three most common self- identified racial groups — branca, morena, and negra? With these questions, I address a critical debate in the literature about race in Brazil. Is racial identity defined by ancestry or visual features? The subjects consisted of 24 children in 3" grade (mean age = 9.72 years old, ranging from 8.35 years to 11.44 years) recruited from municipal grade school Licia Paternostro, and 18 adults (mean age = 37.57 years old, ranging from 17.95 years to interviewed in their homes throughout Belmonte. I designed this study loosely based on Keil’s “discovery” study presented above. I used some of the 139photographs of real people that I had taken from a neighboring town as stimuli (see Chapter 3). One photograph was used for each vignette and I presented three vignettes to each subject. The pictures I used were generally accepted as branca, ‘morena, and negra — I determined this correlation between picture and label from previous testing. Ihad to adapt Keil’s study in several ways. I needed to entice respondents to classify the picture without naming the potential categories of classification and thus guiding the answer. Keil avoids this problem by listing a behavioral feature of the animal (“go neigh”), a way that they are used by humans (they are ridden with saddles), a preference (“like to eat oats and hay”), and the name that they are commonly called by people who see them, For my own study, as mentioned in Chapter 2, there are no reliable behavioral features, beliefs, or preferences associated with present-day mixed culture Brazilians that could be used to describe the observable features of any particular racial group. In addition, because of the multiplicity of race terms, I did not want to say that “everybody calls, them” anything. In my study, I decided to rely on visuals to let the subject come to his/her own conclusion about the race of a target person. I did not guide the subjects in any way; I let them make their initial judgments based on what they inferred from the visuals and not what they were told. As such, I simply showed subjects one of the photographs and asked them “Qual a raga ou cor dela/dele?” [“What is her/his race or color?"}. I used both priming words raga and cor following Study 3.1 in which I had found them to prime highly correlated groupings. I did this, following Brazilian census protocol, in order to use the easily understood word cor while also priming the word newly 140associated with ancestry. In this study, I considered the claim that racial categories were not defined by descent to be the more surprising conclusion and wanted to give respondents every opportunity to use descent for their definitions After asking the subject about the race of the person in the photograph, they would reply with a classification x. I then said, “What if I now told you that the parents, the grandparents, and the children of this person were y? What do you think the person really is: x or y?” 1 picked a different color term for y based on a triadic system of branco, moreno, and negro. Whichever of these terms was given for x, 1 ‘would ask about the other 2 terms separately as y.** After they responded whether the person was really x or y, subjects were asked “why.” No matter what the response, subjects were presented with follow up “even though” questions emphasizing the features of the category they did not pick. For example, if they chose the initial classification, the experimenter asked, “So, even though this person’s children are y, you still think they are really x?” Or if the subject chose y, the experimenter asked “So, even though you initially thought this person was x, now you think they are really y2” This reveals another critical difference between this study and Keil’s. I did not tell people that scientists came to look inside a person to determine their racial ‘group, thus eliminating the “expert” component from the question. I made this adjustment for two reasons. In the first place, anthropologists now firmly acknowledge that there is no biological determinant to racial groups as they are ‘commonly understood (Brace 1995; Montagu 1960). In the second place, there is a ™ TEsubjects responded with a classification other than one of these three, I did not score the answer for that particular vignette. This did not happen often because the photographs chosen were highly- ‘agreed upon. 141long and tragic history of anthropologists looking inside people to determine their racial group. It would be inconceivable to give validity to this practice by using it in a story about human (rather than animal) groups. As such, I asked only about family relatives being of a different cor, which is a common point of discussion in Belmonte. Thad three concems with this methodology. First, there was occasionally a strong element of disbelief when subjects were told that relatives of a certain person were of a different color. It did not happen all the time, nor did it happen equally for all of the “discovery” scenarios. Most frequently, people questioned the truthfulness of the vignette that showed a picture of a person they classified as negro and were then told about branca relatives. If this happened frequently and prohibited people from answering the questions, I would have been concerned, but because it happened only occasionally and only in very specific ways, it actually reinforces the conclusions I describe below. My second concem was with the use of the ambiguous term moreno. | felt it was critical to conduct the study including this intermediate category; yet, I was concerned that the results would be difficult to analyze because of the many different meanings associated with the word, In the end, I hoped that my asking about race using a triadic scheme would prime the sense of moreno as a mixed-race category. Nonetheless, it did prove problematic, as will be seen below in the discussion section. Finally, I was also concerned with using the word negro which some people in Belmonte found offensive. In the first place, I did not want to offend anyone; however, after talking with friends in Belmonte’s Black Movement and hearing the term taught in the municipal schools, I felt comfortable to proceed. ‘Yet, I was also worried that people would be hesitant to use the term negro, 142influencing them to not chose it as their answer even if they wanted to. I do not believe that this happened, possibly due to my use of the word as well, signifying that I understood it in the positive sense rather than the insulting one. Results All responses were tape recorded and transcribed by a Brazilian graduate student. I then scored each response on a three-point scale. Following Keil’s scoring, scale (s0 as to loosely compare results), a score of 1 was given to those responses that indicated that a person’s classification was not influenced by the new information about family, and a score of 3 was given when the new information changed the initial classification, Keil scored some responses with a 2 to indicate ambivalence, but I eliminated this score from my system, as many subjects responded with ambivalence (see “Discussion” below). Each subject saw three pictures and heard two vignettes about each picture; thus, each subject received a total of 6 scores. Below Figure 4.1 shows the mean scores by age for my study plotted alongside an approximation of Keil’s original results. If we look at an approximate graph of the results, looking at average score by age, we can see that overall, the scores are relatively low — relative to Keil’s study on animal kinds where people reclassified animals according to their insides, people in Belmonte infrequently changed their race classifications based on ancestry. 143Figure 4.1: Mean scores for influence of discovery regarding ancestry Mean score 1.2 —— oa 1 _ = 1 2 2 4 Level 1 = Kindergarten Level 2 = Second Grade Level Level The results from my study were low, averaging 1.63 for third graders and 1.43, for adults, showing a striking difference between adult means in my study and Keil’s study for animal species, Whereas Keil found virtually all adults revising their classification with new information about insides (blood, bones, and ancestry), the majority of adults in my study did not change their initial classification even when relatives were described as entirely of a different category. Certainly there are crucial °* Keil tested fourth graders, not third graders but Belmonte students are slightly older than US, students, so I grouped them together on this loosely comparative graph. 144differences between the methodologies of the two studies, but the difference between the results seems to suggest that in general, ancestry is not defining for racial categorization in Belmonte. However, looking more closely at the data reveals even ‘more interesting patterns. Below, Figure 4.2 shows the mean influence of discovery for each of the three conditions in both age groups. In both age groups both the branca and morena Figure 4.2: Mean influence of discovery by race of target picture Age Gove conditions are significantly different from the negra condition, but not significantly different from each other (Tukey’s HSD p <.05). This suggests that despite the ‘overall low score for the influence of discovery, there are certain times when ancestry may be more defining than others. 145Looking further at the responses from each subject, I classified a person's pattern of responses as following | of 4 basic strategies — pattems I gleaned after analyzing the transcriptions of the interview. The four basic strategies, which I will explain in detail below, are (1) “Pure Branca” in which people revise their classifications of the branca picture but not the others, (2) “No Revision” in which people do not revise their classifications for any of the photographs, (3) “Revision” in which people revised the classification for all the photographs, and (4) “Ambiguous Moreno” in which people seem to be changing some photographs but only because they are granting the term moreno different meanings (e.g. moreno meaning moreno versus moreno meaning negro). ‘The percentage of people following each strategy is presented below in Table 4.1. Table 4.1: Percentage of subjects using each of four isolated strategies Pure Branca | No Revision | Revision | Ambiguous Moreno | Total ‘Adults [39% 39% 0% 22% 100% 3rd Grade | 38% 33% 8% 21% 100% As can be seen from this table, the adults and the third graders responded very similarly; as such, I will not discuss age differences in this study. I focus on the strategies that people used and the insights to be gained from looking closely at these justifications. 146Revision : This strategy was used by very few people. None of the adults and only 8% of the children consistently changed their classification based on new information of ancestry. Ambiguous Moreno: At the start of this section I noted a concem with the ambiguities of this term. Initially I was surprised by the fact that people seemed to be reasoning similarly about the moreno photograph and the branco photograph (see Figure 4,2). I looked to the transcriptions of the justifications to find out what was happening, Looking at the responses for some people (approximately 20%, from each age group - see Table 4.1 above), the ambiguity of the term moreno made it so that I could not say for certain whether people were thinking about blood or if they ‘were simply agreeing to call a person by the term moreno when they had initially called that person branco or negro. Because I could not interpret their answers reliably, I did not give these answers much weight when drawing conclusions about, ancestry and blood. Pure Branca: One half of all respondents (excluding those in the Ambiguous Moreno group) followed what I have labeled a “Pure Branca” strategy. These people changed the categorization of the branca picture but did not change the classification of the negra picture, Below I present excerpts from the transcription of one adult, participant (Eduarda) who exemplifies the thinking of those who used this particular strategy; they responded differently to the Branca and the negra questions. First, Eduarda responds to the branca picture: 147Michael: Qual é a raga, cor dela? Eduarda: —Branea. M: Se a senhora souber que os pais dela, os avds dela ¢ até os filhos dela sdio morenos, vocé diria que ela realmente € branca ou € morena? E: 3 filhos stio morenos? M: EB E: Ela nao é branca legitima. Ela é morena. M: ‘Mesmo que a senhora tenha primeiro achado ela branca, agora ela pode ser morena? E: por causa dos filhos. Ela aqui mostra que ela ¢ branca mas se os filhos so morenos... Michael; What is her raga, her cor? Eduarda: Branca M: If you knew that her parents, her grandparents, and even her children were morenos, would you say that she is really branca ot morena? E: Her children are morenos? M: Yes. E She is not a legitimate branca, She is morena, M: Even though you had first thought she was branca, now she can be morena? Yes, because of the kids. She is looking like she is branca, but if the kids are morenos... 148Then later, Eduarda replies to the negra picture. I asked her what she would say if 1 told her that the man’s parents, grandparents, and children were branco. She replies: Eduarda: _O pai e a mde sto brancos? Mas... ele é negro. Michael: Mesmo com os pais brancos? Ey Mesmo com os pais brancos, ele é negro. M: Nao pode ser branco no? ‘Nao pode ser. Pode ser negro. Eduarda: His father and mother are brancos? But ... he is negro. Michael: Even with his parents brancos? E Even with his parents brancos, he is negro. M: He can’t be branco? E He can’t be. He can be negro. ‘The difference illustrated in these two interactions is critical. Eduarda and the others who followed the Pure Branca strategy changed the classification of the branca picture because finding out about moreno or negro ancestors made it impossible to be a branca legitima. In this way, these people seem to be drawing a clear biological distinction between white / non-white (much as Chapter 3 suggested). This biological rule, however, does not apply to those originally classified as negro. In those cases, 149people did not even consider the person to be mixed race upon hearing the new information. ‘The person in the picture was negro because they looked negro and no information could change that, Appearances can be deceiving in the case of branco; yet, this is not the case for someone originally classified as negro. No Revision: Approximately the same number of respondents following the Pure Branca strategy followed a Consistent | strategy, meaning that they never changed the classification of any picture when new information about family was given. This ‘would seem to indicate that they were classifying by visuals alone without taking ancestry into account. However, looking closely at the justifications, this is clearly not the case. In fact, the reasoning by people in this strategy closely parallels the reasoning of people included in the Pure Branca strategy. In the negro condition the answers were the same and people similarly justified their response by saying that the person in the picture was obviously negro and even if the entire family is branco there must have been someone in the past with the cor negra. Those who did not change the classification of the branca picture, however, qualified their responses in ways that they did not for the negra picture. They demonstrated a tendency to report, classification unchanged even if “insides” were acknowledged as different. As one adult responded, “She is branca, but her blood is negro.” 150Discussion This study, adapted from Frank Keil’s study on animals, tests whether insides or observable physical features define human groups. Below, I summarize the main findings of my study; these findings show three ways that racial categories in Belmonte seem to be cognized differently than species in folk biology, © People do not consistently change racial classification with new information about race of family members. Most people did not revise their initial classifications. © New information sometimes does influence classification, but in asymmetrical ways. Hearing about morena or negra relatives induced some people to change the classification of someone originally considered branca; however, when someone is originally considered negra, information about branca or morena relatives did not induce people to change their classifications. * Contradictions between physical features and insides are acceptable. In the case of the branca photograph, those who maintained the original classification often did so with the qualification that they had negro blood. This study was designed to address the issue of whether there was a defining rule about ancestry that would definitively place a person in a racial category. Harris and Kottak argued that in the towns they studied, there was no such rule because children could be classified in different categories. Sheriff, however, presented compelling 151evidence that people did define branco and negro by referencing ancestry, following the principle of hypodescent that Harris and Kottak originally used to describe the way racial identity was decided in the United States. My results in this study show similarities to both of those positions. The strategy of “Pure Branca” looks very much like hypodescent, as ancestry can reveal white appearances to be deceiving. Yet, those following a “No Revision” strategy seem to show a different pattern as they accept that a person can be branca even though they have negra blood. In this case, blood does not seem to be defining a “true” identity that is more basic than that defined by surface features. In this study, I asked about family ancestry but not specifically about mixing. In the next study, I further examine the power of negro blood to change classifications in the context of racial mixing. Folk Ideologies of Mixing — Study 4.2 Goals, Methods, and Procedure ‘The previous study 4.1 implies unequal innate potential of white and black blood. That is, negro blood has the power to change a classification of branco whereas the reverse is not possible. In that study, I compared information about family ancestry with visible cues. In this study, I explicitly compare how people will label the expected children of hypothetical same-race and mixed-race unions ‘compared to how they expect them to look. My primary goal is to understand whether negro ancestry asymmetrically influences categorical o biological expectations in the case of mixed race unions. 152My inspiration for this task comes from Hirschfeld’s studies contrasting categorical and biological understandings of same- and mixed-race couples (Hirschfeld 1995b; Hirschfeld 1996). Hirschfeld’s studies asking subjects about children of same-race parents suggested that “preschoolers believe[d] race to have innate potential in that children believe race to be part of an individual’s biological makeup, to be fixed at birth, and to be impervious to social experience” (Hirschfeld 1996; 165). He later conducts studies that ask about racial mixing to test ideas about categorical identity and biological inheritance to better understand the development of social and biological interpretations of the “one drop rule.” In the categorical identity task, he asks the subjects about the race of the child of the target parents and the degree to which the child will resemble each of the parents.*® Interestingly, in the case of mixed race parents, adults most frequently labeled the child Black while sixth graders were more likely to call the child “Something Else.” Subsequently, in the resemblance task, sixth graders and adults expected children of mixed-race couples to resemble the black parent (regardless of gender) more than the white parent. ‘These results confirm the existence of something like the “one-drop-rule,” but in a specific way. Sixth graders and adults endorse a biological interpretation of this formula while only adults also held the equivalent categorical belief in social identity. Hirschfeld importantly points out that these beliefs may vary across cultures or even communities. He tests this hypothesis by conducting a similar study (7.4 from Hirschfeld 1996) in a racially integrated community adjacent to the majority white community in which he conducted his previous studies. He finds an interesting °° The second graders were not asked directly about “race” because of their difficulty understanding the term. Instead, they provided answers to questions based on unions of parents from two fictional groups. 153difference in that older children in the integrated community are more likely to choose intermediate outcomes in the mixed-race parent task, regardless of race of subject. In this way, they reason about racial inheritance similarly to other the inheritance of non-racial physical features such as hair color and physical features associated with non-human animals. This integrated community most likely comes closer to approximating the cultural familiarity with “mixing” that I found in Belmonte where ambiguity is explicitly celebrated rather than “resolved.” In the Belmonte study, I asked residents questions about a hypothetical couple and their hypothetical child. I used color pencil drawings as stimuli. These pictures ‘were drawn by a local artist whom I asked to draw pictures of 3 men, 3 women, 3 girls, and 3 boys representing the colors branco, moreno, and negro. 1 wanted these drawings to be basic yet somewhat realistic. After several attempts, we managed to put together sets of drawings that varied only by the most commented physical features generally associated by race (skin color and hair texture). In the end there were four sets of drawings roughly corresponding to features that the artist created as branco, moreno, and negro (these categorizations were confirmed by 3 adults and 3 young children in a pilot study). Each subject answered questions about category identity and biological expectations regarding the following six combinations (the mixed-race couples were counterbalanced for sex of parents): ‘Same-race: branca-branco, morena-moreno, negra-negro Mixed-race: branca-negro, morena-braneo, negra-morena 154‘Compared to the Hirschfeld study, I added two combinations of mixing (white-brown, and brown-black). This lengthened the task and complicated the analysis, but 1 believe the addition was important for conducting the study in Belmonte because unions of those on opposite ends of the black-white spectrum are rare. The order of the eategory or biological condition, the order of the combinations, and the gender of the parents and children were all counterbalanced. The questions were given to 24 second graders (mean age = 8.82 years old, ranging from 7.06 years to 12.72 years), 24 sixth graders (mean age ~ 12.96 years old, ranging from 11.35 years to 18.93, years), and 18 adults (mean age = 27.18 years old, ranging from 17.2 years to 49.94 years). The question for the “naming” condition (category identity) read as follows: “Se esse casal tiver um filho, vocé acha que vai ser um branco, um moreno, ou um negro?” [If this couple has a son, do you think it will be a branco, a moreno, or a negro]. The question for the “picture” condition (biological expectation) read as follows: “Se esse casal tiver um filho, vai ser qual desses aqui?” {If this couple has a son, which of these here will it be?]. At that point three pictures of children were shown and the subject picked one. Each of the questions for both tasks was followed up with a question of “why.” After each question, I also asked (following Hirschfeld) whether the child would take after the father or mother more (puxar mais a mae ou 0 pai). If they responded with one of the parents, I asked whether the target child ‘would look a lot more like that parent or just a little more. 155Results For each of the combinations of pictures, I counted how many times each response was given, Below I present graphic depictions of the results ~ what percentage of times a given response was chosen for each age group.’” Following the graphs for each combination, I discuss the results separately then make overall conclusions in the discussion section below. Figure 4.3: Percentage of responses for same race branca eategory question ‘same nace -seanea category) Figure 4.4: Percentage of responses for same race branca picture question. *” Using the colors white, brown, and black to represent the bars inthe graph corresponding to branca, ‘morena, and negra is crude and simplistic. 1 do not mean to equate complicated cognitions with a simplistic color representation, but rather I use this color scheme to aid in viewing and interpreting the results, 136seme nace Banca (Pictur) ‘These graphs show very high agreement that when two drawings looking branca are imagined to have a child, the child is assumed to be categorically and biologically branca, 157Figure 4.5: Percentage of responses for same race morena category question Figure 4.6: Percentage of responses for same race morena picture question ‘These graphs show that when the two drawings look intermediately brown, the child is primarily expected to be categorically morena and biologically intermediate. There is slightly more variation in the category response, but the trend to identify the child as morena is strong. 158Figure 4.7: Percentage of responses for same race negra category question Figure 4.8: Percentage of responses for same race negra picture question sae ace tr ee These graphs show an interesting trend departing from the other same race groups. Biologically, the child of two seemingly negra parents is assumed to have similar physical features, as shown in Figure 4.8. Categorically, however, there is a significant difference (p< 0.05 by 2 sided Fisher's exact Chi-square test) betweensixth graders and adults, with adults labeling the child morena more often than negra. I believe this clearly demonstrates the way that morena is used to mean negra when the term negra is considered offensive. The sixth graders may be more comfortable with the term or they may be more influenced by my use of the term indicating its acceptability in our interview. Figure 4.9: Percentage of responses for mixed race branca-negra category question Figure 4,10: Percentage of responses for mixed race branca-negra picture question 160In these graphs, several findings stand out. Second graders’ preference for saying the child will be categorically branca is surprising and seems to differ from Hirschfeld’s results on a similar task (Study 7.1 from Hirschfeld 1996).** In that task, second graders chose equally between the two parent groups and responded less frequently that the child would be a mixture. Hirschfeld finds that second graders responded with a gender-of-parent strategy. While I did not find this trend for second graders, I am hesitant to interpret the second grade results as anything more than reflecting the cultural value and social desirability of whiteness. Sixth graders and adults predominately labeled the child of this mixed race couple as morena. This clearly reflects the explicit ideology about mixing, and also interestingly differs from Hirschfeld’s results in a similar task in a majority-white community in the United States. In his study, adults predominately labeled the child as Black, more frequently than “Something Else.” Sixth graders chose “Something Else” more often than “Black,” but chose “Black” over 30 percent of the time. Notice that in Figure 4.9 above, none of the sixth graders in my study chose negro. Hirschfeld concludes that sixth graders in his study do not reason using the explicit ideology of the “one-drop rule” for categorization and in this way differed from the adults who did reason this way. In Belmonte, both adults and sixth graders reasoned using the explicit mixing ideology for categorization. Looking at the picture condition shows interesting results as well. Hirschfeld assessed biological interpretation of the one-drop rule by asking respondents whether the child would resemble the mother or father more. He found that sixth graders and °*-This task is not exactly the same for the second graders. Hirschfeld did not want second graders to confuse black and white as “race” with black and white as color. As such, he showed the same pictures but labeled the groups “hibbles” and “glerks.” 161adults both endorsed a biological interpretation of the one-drop rule whereby they expected the child to resemble the black parent more. This patter is significantly different from their reasoning about non-racial features such as hair color, as determined by a follow-up study. In my study, I found that adults and sixth graders in Belmonte expected the child to be predominately intermediate in features (though a smaller, but equal, number of respondents expected the child to appear either branca or negra), A child of mixed race may be reasonably expected to demonstrate a variation of physical features, and there is no evidence from this question that negro blood asymmetrically causes surface features to resemble the negro parent more. This conclusion is confirmed by the follow-up questions that I asked similarly to Hirschfeld about which parent the child would resemble more. Unlike Hirschfeld’s findings in the US, the responses fell at the scale’s midpoint of 0, indicating there was no branco or negro influence for resemblance. Figure 4.11: Percentage of responses for mixed race branca-morena category question 162