CECILIA MCCALLUM
Instituto de Saúde Coletiva, Universidade Federal da Bahia
Racialized bodies, naturalized classes:
Moving through the city of Salvador da Bahia
A B S T R A C T
In this article, I describe racialization processes in
Brazil’s third-largest urban center, Salvador da
Bahia, focusing on a broadly defined field of social
practice. In a cross-class ethnographic portrait of
the city, I examine the situated, embodied
production of meanings about the body, as
subjects move through urban space and time. I
trace the emergence of racialization from residents’
microhistorical passages through the metropolis as
these sediment into a shared, if partial, knowledge
about difference and identity. I argue that it is
such knowledge, borne by subjects as they
ceaselessly reconstruct themselves, that grounds
the mutual constitution of whiteness and of
blackness in the city. Further, these processes
generate knowledge of the naturalization of class.
Thus, if a uniting factor underlies the diversity of
discourses circulating in the city, it is the
embodied by-product of subjective experience.
[racialization, class, subjectivity, identity,
experience, Brazil, Salvador da Bahia]
Racialization takes place when differences between human beings are
simplified and transformed into Difference, overvaluing particular bodily
differences by imbuing them with lasting meaning of social, political,
cultural, economic, even psychological significance. Racialization is pro-
duced and reproduced through ideological, institutional, interactive, and
linguistic practices that support a particular construction of Difference.
—Virginia R. Dominguez, 1994
The rift in the subject is paradoxically its capacity to move beyond itself, a
movement that does not return to where it always was, identity as
movement in the promising sense.
—Judith Butler, 1995
acialization is the product of embodied experience, occurring
R over time and through space. This is apparent from the essays
and novels of many, mainly black, writers and intellectuals. But
anthropological studies of race have not addressed all of the
implications of the embodied production of racialization. Two
questions, in particular, invite further exploration: How do embodied
practices reproduce entrenched society-wide inequalities while both pro-
ducing and contesting the differences that underlie them? And how are
such inequalities naturalized, for instance, as class? Such questions pose a
methodological challenge to anthropology, one that I take up here in the
form of an ethnographic exploration of city dwellers’ journeys across an
urban landscape, in time and space, constituted intersubjectively.
Ethnography as the movement of subjects also offers a fresh angle on
the study of race in Brazil. Two analytic traditions stand out in anthropo-
logical approaches to this topic: first, an emphasis on language analysis;
second, the recurrent problem of how language informs social difference.
This problem is often expressed, in sociological idiom, as a question about
the relation of race to class, a reflection of the powerful influence of
sociology on the anthropology of urban Brazil, which, I argue in what
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 100 – 117, ISSN 0094-0496, electronic
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 Racialized bodies, naturalized classes
follows, has caused something of a methodological im-
passe when it comes to discussing racialization.
In studies of Salvador, the metropolis in focus here,
the articulation of the two traditions is evident. Race and
class inequality there has long been described as extreme
and entrenched (Azevedo 1959; Guimarães 2002).1 More
than 80 percent of the population is both poor and visibly
Afro-descendant and most of the upper and upper-middle
classes look European. Yet ‘‘Soteropolitans,’’ as the city’s
natives are called, do not readily think of class position as
determined by a racial identity. Indeed, one often hears
claims that all Brazilians are a mixture of races. As else-
where in Brazil, naming race is not straightforward. In
practice, a roomful of people have difficulty agreeing on
each other’s color. Interminable discussions occur in the
course of deciding which of many descriptive terms is
most appropriate for each person.
In the past, some scholars took the plethora of color
terms as evidence of a multipolar racial classification
system and argued that Brazilians did not have clear racial
categories, which resulted in ‘‘racial harmony.’’2 In recent
years, a heated debate has raged about whether Brazil’s
racial system is unique or whether bipolarity like that in
the United States sustains a particularly perfidious, be-
cause disguised, form of racism.3 Those involved in the
debate have tended to appeal to overarching categories
such as ‘‘society’’ and ‘‘culture,’’ at the expense of regional
differences. But as the debate unfolded, anthropologists
continued to provide fine-grained ethnographies of spe-
cific groups, localities, and social movements.4 Further
work examined terminology. In Salvador, for example,
studies documented changes in use of racial terms, sig-
naling shifts in the social configuration of inequality (San-
sone 1993; Silva 1993). Ethnographers focused more on
language in use than on classification systems in isolation
(Maggie and Rezende 2001). Robin Sheriff’s (2001) study of
a favela (low-income settlement) in Rio de Janeiro exam-
ines the conscious manipulation of language and the
creative use of terminology in day-to-day life. She high-
lights how speakers shift between a descriptive discourse
of race and a pragmatic discourse, depending on context,
and argues that these discourses neither regulate subjects’
understandings of their own identities nor link to any more
profound set of multipolar categories. Opposing the view
that racial identity in Brazil is fuzzy, however, she insists
that a third discourse—the discourse of race, based on
a black – white contrast—operates at a deeper level. This,
she suggests, emerges as ‘‘the only true system of racial
classification in Brazil’’ (Sheriff 2001:57). This system both
sets up ‘‘an essentialist, naturalized notion of racial being’’
and allows a conscious awareness that blackness is ‘‘a
product of oppression’’ (Sheriff 2001:57).
The claims about underlying essentialism aside, this is
an important point.5 Residents of the favela use an oppo-
n American Ethnologist
sition between ‘‘us’’ as negro (black) and ‘‘them’’ as
branco (white) in contexts of talk about class. In what
follows, I show that this negro – branco contrast, which
may be named (but often is not), is not best described as
a system of racial classification; further, it is more than
evidence of a social order governed by a hegemonic
discourse. Sheriff’s ethnography is rich in discussion of
all manner of social practice, not just discursive, so lifting
the above quotes from her work is somewhat unfair. But
they do help my own purpose in highlighting the need to
look beyond the role of language in creating the bounds of
what people mean by ‘‘race.’’ Thus, I follow the lead
provided by Sheriff and others in emphasizing context
and practice, but I step beyond the methodological scope
of in situ language analysis.
Sheriff shows that the processes affecting particular
subjectivities directly set up the naturalization of social
difference. Subjective experience, for example, of discrimi-
nation and of poverty, informs racialization. She accesses
this experience, however, at secondhand, so to speak, de-
scribing her subjects’ stories about encounters outside
the favela but offering few direct observations of cross-
class interaction in downtown Rio, at workplaces, schools,
clinics, and places of leisure.6 Indeed, community-based
ethnographies are not well adapted for studying the class
relations that span different localities in large urban cen-
ters. In effect, most anthropologists working on race in
Brazil (myself included) find it hard not to think of ‘‘class,’’
which is identified by demographers, theorized by sociolo-
gists, and experienced as oppression by informants, as an
objective category. Although the effect is unintended, class
outside the favela comes across as a thing, rather than a
social relation.
This observation is not meant as a criticism. Ethnog-
raphy requires that the anthropologist embody a limited
set of subjective standpoints, which are best absorbed
through extensive, empathetic coresidence. Embracing
antagonistic views at the same time is hard, and being in
two places at once impossible. Nevertheless, the problem
of how to study class ethnographically remains. The natu-
ralization of difference in this kind of highly divided setting
involves the constant interaction of opposing standpoints
in intersubjective encounters. Ideally, an ethnographer
must find a way to appreciate the subtleties of all sides of
these encounters.
Social practice theorists insist on the importance of
unconscious dispositions embedded in habitus, said to
structure and be structured by social living (Bourdieu
1977, 1990, 1998). Importantly, all practice carries these
dispositions and does this symbolizing work. Therefore,
one must embrace a wide definition of social practice that
includes but does not foreground discursive practice
as exceptional. Wade makes a similar point in his discus-
sion of the problem of materialist – symbolist dualism:
101
American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 1 February 2005
‘‘Post-structuralist approaches to society and culture made
a bid to resolve the problem by focusing on the discursive
constitution of material realities and the materiality of
discourse’’ (1999:451). He notes that often this endeavor
resulted in a retreat into discourse. His solution is to
expose the fusion of the symbolic and the material in
embodied practice, taking embodiment as the existential
grounds of culture (Csordas 1993). Racialization processes
may be taken as driven by the body in action.
Wade makes his point through a discussion of a black
rap group in Cali, Columbia, and its engagement in cul-
tural politics. His argument is pitched against those who
would abstract off a reified culture or a detachable repre-
sentation about race. I explore a rather different object of
analysis, one constituted by a focus on subjectivity. What
follows is an exercise in writing ethnography out of the
bounds of particular communities or social groups and
across race and class lines. I set off from the realization
that, in pursuing subjective experience, one is inevitably
led across the city and through the frontiers separating
such categories as the ‘‘shantytown dwellers’’ or the
‘‘elite.’’ My argument is that racialization follows on such
journeys rather more closely than we, as anthropologists,
have heretofore been able to describe, not least because
of our need for rooted, localized ethnography of ‘‘groups
of natives’’—‘‘poor blacks,’’ ‘‘rich whites,’’ ‘‘confused
browns’’—with their associated ‘‘native points of view’’
(see Gupta and Ferguson 1997).
The ethnography of social practice I develop below
aims to unravel the symbolic processes informing the day-
to-day racialization processes that distinct subjects expe-
rience as they move at different tempos across the city.
I eschew an abstracted or timeless body, of the sort pos-
ited in racial classification systems. Rather, I show bodies
as constituted in social interaction, within the field of
meanings conferred by places.7 So, rather than the body
in itself, I consider the ever-changing relationships be-
tween bodies and spaces. Thus, I seek to apprehend the
relationship between what is said about social differences
and what ‘‘goes without saying’’ (Bloch 1992) for the city’s
inhabitants, or the nondiscursive practices that structure
apprehension of social difference. I consider the cognitive
baggage that subjects bring to and take from specific social
interactions—the effects of embodied and remembered
experiences, understood as the sediments of repeated
passage through and toward other urban spatial contexts.
Such experiences and memories, I show, confer both
structuring weight and dynamism to social encounters.
Where do subjects in such interactions come from and
where do they proceed? How does their memory of these
transitions, embodied as knowledge that may or may not
be accessible through words, shape their participation in
these events? More specifically, I ask, how might this
knowledge mold the constitution of race during such
102
events and shape the processes of racialization in Salvador
more generally and (from an analyst’s perspective) in a
more abstract sense?
In short, I tackle racialization in what follows as it is
constituted and experienced daily. The ethnography
shows how meanings are produced intersubjectively in
specific contexts that are connected to other such con-
texts as subjects move between them in real time and
space. By shifting the perspective on the constitution of
race in two directions—away from a mainly cultural
conception of the body and away from methodological
emphasis on analysis of discourse or linguistic data—the
ethnography illuminates how meanings and values are
attached to urban spaces, how these meanings rebound
on the significance of bodies, and how movement through
the spaces effects changes in the racial signification at-
tached to both bodies and spaces. I argue, in short, that
the dynamic signifying interaction occurring in real time
between body and space constitutes the specific features
of race and, thereby, of class.
Methodology of research and writing
I adopt a particular form of writing ethnography here:
This article takes the form of a fictionlike description of
an event and the movements of some participants after
they leave it. The characters, who are based on real
persons or who are composites created for the purpose
of the narrative, move to and through different places in
the city over the course of one evening. The description is
ethnographic, that is, although the events are storylike—
the actions, thoughts, and words of the subjects, and the
settings in which they take place, are taken from material
collected during extensive participant-observation in Sal-
vador and research involving both informal discussions
and formal interviews.
Writing ethnography as if it were fiction—not as
fiction—is useful in this case for several reasons. First,
it is a solution to the methodological dilemma faced by
ethnographers of interracial and cross-class urban life,
noted above, in which one ‘‘native’’ point of view (usu-
ally that of the oppressed) imposes itself more than an-
other. Through the story, I am able to analyze different
subjective standpoints simultaneously, in the different
settings, situations, and events described, in a fashion
that is rarely possible in verbatim descriptions, even
when enriched by after-the-fact interviews with partici-
pants of actual events. I can conjugate all that I as
ethnographer know—in both conscious and embodied
fashion (Hastrup 1994)—about real subjects, speech, and
settings to present this knowledge in an ordered and
meaningful fashion appropriate to the purpose here.
Moreover, writing the ethnography as a story allows the
reader to follow the journeys of distinct subjects through
 Racialized bodies, naturalized classes
different urban spaces in the course of an imagined day—
in real time, rather than in the ethnographic present of
classic Malinowskian anthropology. For this reason, too, I
have set the story precisely, in the year 1997. Many of the
details in the text refer to fashions of the day and to events
that took place that year.
Michael Carrithers, in his critique of Clifford Geertz’s
Works and Lives (1988), noted important differences be-
tween fiction and ethnography, emphasizing that ‘‘where-
as the canon of a fictional realist might be to achieve
verisimilitude, ethnographers adhere to quite a different
standard. In their writing the touchstone must be fidelity
to what they experienced and learned about others, and
much of what they write has to be verifiably true’’
(1988:22). I am in agreement with this statement. It
clarifies the seriousness of the ethnographic enterprise,
to which this study contributes. As already stated, my
story is based on deep anthropological knowledge. Be-
cause writing ethnography as if fiction, however, is an
unusual and potentially problematic strategy (although
not without precedents in ethnographic writing), I need
to detail research methods and empirical foundations.8
The ethnography derives from both formal research
and informal participant-observation in Salvador. I have
lived in the city since 1991 (bar a few periods spent in
Britain) working on different research projects, including a
study of a low-income settlement and another of social
networks encompassing middle-class and working-class
persons, focusing on race, class, and gender. I can claim
a special familiarity with the city because of my personal
circumstances. Married since 1993 to a Soteropolitan, I
have affines on both sides of the socioeconomic divide.
My Bahian family is cross-class and has been ‘‘interracial,’’
too, ever since my daughter was born. I have lived both
in poor neighborhoods and at upscale addresses. In short,
the description that follows is well grounded. One addi-
tional fact is important: It is based on my own participa-
tion in more than 30 children’s birthday parties over
the 1990s.
All Bahians together?
A family party is beginning in Itaigara, a new bairro nobre
(‘‘noble’’ district) in Salvador. A young couple is celebrat-
ing their son Rogério’s second birthday in the salão de
festas (party hall) of the Palazzo Veneziano, the recently
built high-rise building in which they live.9 This building is
considered alto nı́vel (high level) for a number of reasons:
Each apartment has three en suite bedrooms, ‘‘complete
dependencies’’ (a maid’s room adjoining a laundry area),
and two spaces in the garage. There are two sets of ele-
vators: social for the residents and serviço for servicemen
and the maids. In addition, there are only two apartments
on each floor. Rogério’s apartment is especially valuable
n American Ethnologist
because it faces the rising sun, not the sunset, and because
the material used in the acabamento (finishing), such as
the floor tiles and bathroom fittings, is of the finest quality.
The apartment is located in a fashionable and sought-after
area, Alto das Flores, where just one old mansion bears
witness to the vicinity’s recent rural past.10 When it be-
came a gym academy, however, the mansion gained a new
appearance, modernized with a tile facade in brilliant
colors on which its name is written in large letters: ACA-
DEMIA BOA FORMA.
In Alto das Flores many new high-rise buildings are
ostentatiously alto nı́vel. They are replete with luxury
material, such as granite, and have pretty verandas, stylish
garden patches, and, in the public areas, acres of tiling,
communal swimming pools, party halls, asphalt sports
areas, and small, boxlike tiled constructions to shelter
the porters at their desks. They have several stories of
garages. The apartments themselves are cramped, no
doubt because of construction costs. But in the eyes of
the residents, the lack of space is compensated for by the
agreeable sensation that those living there belong to a new
world: modern, hygienic, privileged, stable, secure—in
short, of a ‘‘high level.’’
Outside the buildings, however, the chaos of the old
world still appears. An empty lot has become a rubbish
dump, feeding a colony of large, chubby rats. An enormous
hole has appeared in the new tarmac of the road and no
one knows when it might be fixed. Sewer water of un-
known origin runs ceaselessly into a small stream, its
banks rank with a flourishing growth of tall grass and
weeds. An open area, clearly planned as a public square,
shows signs of neglect. Uncut grass, paper and other items
of rubbish strewn about, it seems to hold promise for a
better future. The road is narrow, and the guests arriving
in polished new cars have difficulty parking. Some small,
dusty boys, posing as car minders, hand signal directions
to the newcomers with vigorous gestures and shouts of
‘‘Aqui, Tia, vem, vem, vem!’’ [Here, Auntie, come on, come
on!] They are residents of a small local ‘‘resistance,’’ as
those influenced by the Movimento Negro call such
pockets of low-income settlements, made up of a mixture
of tiny, old-fashioned tiled houses, painted in flaking
blues, pinks, and greens; precarious shacks; and never-
finished brick constructions.11
Inside Rogério’s building, the party is a fine affair. A
row of tables covered in white cloths offers a feast to the
eye. On them are many trays laden with salgadinhos—
mouth-sized patties, cheese tartlets, chicken rissoles,
kibbes, Bolivian meat pies, prawn alla milanesa, and other
such salty delicacies. There are piles of the pão delicia—a
soft, pale, bread roll sprinkled with cheese—that is indis-
pensable in any party. On another table is a display of cold
cuts: An entire roast turkey, ready sliced on the bone, is
an island in a sea of platters bearing ham, capon, roast
103
American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 1 February 2005
pork, salami, and pâtés, ornamented with elaborate ar-
rangements of tropical fruits. But the main table, located
in the large, glass-walled salon at the center of the build-
ing’s área social (public area for events), is for the sweets.
At its center is the cake, or rather, the cake box, an elabo-
rate construction imitating Mount Olympia, the home of
the gods as depicted in Disney’s recent film Hercules
(1997). The cake itself, sliced in rectangular pieces, each
individually wrapped, is hidden within, ready for distri-
bution after the singing of ‘‘Happy Birthday’’ at the end of
the party. On the wall above, a brightly colored panel
depicts the Disney-animated Hercules as a baby and
various characters and scenes from the film, as do a num-
ber of polystyrene models placed on the table, amid the
display of hundreds of handmade doces (sweets) in conve-
nient mouth-sized shapes and individually wrapped boiled
sweets. These include the children’s favorite, brigadeiros
(small balls of chocolate fondant made with condensed
milk) and also more sophisticated concoctions—prunes,
grapes, strawberries, coconut, and other such ingredients
enveloped in milk toffees, fudges, or sugar shells. Occa-
sionally, children swoop past to pocket a sweet or gulp
down a brigadeiro. For now, they obey an unspoken rule:
No one touches the main displays of food until invited.
Balloons decorate the main salon and the external
area, which is full of rented plastic tables, each draped
with a pink tablecloth, surrounded by four plastic chairs
(similarly clad in pink) and decorated with a floral display
and a plate of salgadinhos. Later, a waiter will distribute
plates of doces. In another, smaller, salon a sound system
plays Xuxa’s latest record of children’s music.12 A small
group of children play at dancing. Behind a tiled bar at the
end of the external area, under the supervision of Rogério’s
young mother, servants put the finishing touches to trays
laden with the first round of drinks: ice-cold beer; Guaraná
(the Brazilian soft drink) and Coca-Cola, and, because this
is a chic event, white wine (a national liebfraumilch) and
Johnny Walker Red Label, served neat over ice. The maids
are all negras or morenas escuras (dark tans), except for
Rogério’s babá (nanny), whose pale skin, smooth and
mousy brown hair, and country accent bear witness
to her origin in the sertão, the interior of Bahia state.
Rogerio’s mother, elegant and sexy in a new, dark-toned
silk dress, high heels, and gold jewelry, smoothes her long,
blond hair, and sends out the laden trays. The waiters,
overheated in their white jackets, dark faces slightly moist
with sweat, circulate among the crowds of expensively
perfumed adults, offering the drinks. Most of the women
are dressed in chic clothes, which cling to their mostly
well-toned bodies (shaped by diet, programmed exercise,
or liposuction). The men are elegant in well-pressed in-
formal social wear, of the category ‘‘esporte.’’ They wear
leather moccasins with white socks. A few, mainly youn-
ger, people stand out because of their less-formal appear-
104
ance. They are the rebels, family members drawn to
alternative lifestyles, the hippies, the surfers, the artists,
and others disenchanted with the status quo. They inter-
mingle freely, at ease like the other guests, drinking, eating,
chatting, and laughing, enjoying the opportunity to see so
many family members gathered together.
All of the generations are present. Elderly women sit
at the tables, waiting for kin and friends to greet them.
New faces appear regularly, exuding bonhomie. ‘‘All OK,
Auntie? How good to see you!’’ Warm hugs, swift kisses on
each cheek, and the new face drifts off or sits down at
the table for a few minutes. Gendered groups form in a
spontaneous fashion, but the homogeneity is regularly
interrupted when a woman goes to talk to her partner or
a relative, or when a man takes a seat briefly with the
women. Mixed groups occupy some tables, at which there
is less coming and going. Couples sit together, sometimes
holding hands or touching each other.
The children run and shout ceaselessly, dodging be-
tween the adults’ legs and playing on the toys specially
rented for the occasion. These are of U.S. manufacture: a
plastic castle, a fully equipped Wendy House, a large air-
inflated trampoline. The youngest children are shadowed
closely by their babás. Some babás are dressed fashion-
ably, in new clothes, generally body-hugging gear of the
sort bought in the Baixa de Sapateiros, a working-class
shopping area. They wear cheap but modish new shoes,
paid for in several installments out of their limited sala-
ries. Others, recently contracted, do not yet possess party
clothes of their own choice and wear hand-me-downs
given them by their patroas (female employers), the
mothers of their charges. A little dark-skinned girl, in
a white frilly dress ornamented with pink bows, her ‘‘hard’’
hair tied in many small plats, plays with the smooth-
haired children. She is Rogério’s mother’s goddaughter,
the child of a maid of long-standing service in the family
who ‘‘fell pregnant’’ and refused to name the father. She
is being brought up alongside Rogério and his cousins.
Her mother also takes part in the festivities, almost as
an honorary member of the family.
The bigger girls, of age about seven or eight, are
already in the salon, where the sound system is set up.
They change the Xuxa CD, which they consider infantile,
for one by É o Tchan, a Bahian pagode samba group.13 The
girls dance the sexually suggestive movements of pagode
admirably. The music and the dance style, once associated
with low-income black Soteropolitans, were fashionable
in middle-class circles by 1997, in large part because of
the national success of É o Tchan, in particular its blond
star dancer, Carla Peres, featured regularly on TV Globo.
Peres’s popularity symbolized as it enacted the whitening
of Bahian pagode.14
But the girls at the party are unaware of this. As the
girls dance, the babás, most of whom are expert pagodeiras
 Racialized bodies, naturalized classes
themselves (and spend hours dancing and singing pagode
with their charges), glance occasionally at them, concen-
trating on following the little ones. Their tense postures
suggest that they feel out of place.15 They speak little,
limiting themselves to the task of controlling or pacifying
the toddlers. Sometimes a guest addresses one by name,
asking, ‘‘Tudo bem?’’ [All well?], but mostly they are ig-
nored. They do not participate in the frequent exchanges
of kisses and hugs. Meanwhile, Rogério, in his Hercules
outfit, rushes from one parent to another and back again to
the toys.
Some members of Rogério’s family also bear traces of
African or indigenous American ancestry. One aunt could
be classified as mulata of the sarará variety (pale skin,
freckles, reddish, very curly African hair, although she
wears it escovado, i.e., brushed straight using a blow-
dryer). His grandfather seems to have a mixed racial
background, too. He is a typical coronel do sertão—a
‘‘colonel,’’ or rancher – landowner, from the backlands.
He has thick, curly, white hair and moustache, an upright
posture, and a well-tanned complexion, at present slightly
reddened with the whisky and bonhomie. And the hus-
band of one of Rogério’s mother’s cousins, with his light-
colored skin, is clearly a mulato of the ‘‘Branco da Bahia’’
(Bahian White) type. All three of the couple’s children
inherited his ‘‘bad hair,’’ although no one in the family
comments on the fact, beyond occasionally suggesting
ways that the hair might be treated to improve it. The
cousin’s husband is an excellent member of the family,
a successful professional, serious and a high earner—a
good pai de famı́lia (father of family; family man). Another
young uncle (blond like his sister, Rogério’s mother)
arrives with a new girlfriend, whom he met at law school.
She is morena cor-de-canela (cinnamon-colored tan), or (if
less precision is required) she could be described as
morena clara (light tan). Slightly African features and
curly hair make it difficult for her to attribute her skin
color to an indigenous American great-grandmother, as
people with her coloring sometimes do. If a recent such
relationship in the family is anything to go by, this one
will not reach the stage of marriage. In the earlier case,
the couple moved in together but suffered barely con-
cealed hostility from key members of the family and
separated after an unhappy few years.16
But the new girlfriend, like other black guests, is made
quite welcome. The hosts make a special fuss of ‘‘Aunt’’
Alice, for example, who is a blue-black negra and might be
described as morena escura (dark tan). She is the mother of
Rogério’s father’s compadre, his business partner of many
years’ standing.17 Dona Alice is a skilled cook and, al-
though she is a domestic servant, in this environment she
is considered a friend. On arrival she sits at a table with
other women of her generation, alongside Rogério’s grand-
mother. The latter’s husband, standing nearby, goes to
n American Ethnologist
embrace her and exclaims with pleasure, ‘‘Dona Alice, how
good that you have come!’’ adding, in a joking tone, ‘‘Did
you bring me my coconut and pineapple jam?’’ ‘‘Of course,
my son!’’ she replies, ‘‘How could your aunt forget?’’ She
feels at home in this milieu, as long as she does not spend
too much time.18 At a certain point, she begins to miss the
quiet and normality of her little one-roomed house in an
alleyway in Plataforma (a low-income area of town). Her
sister, by contrast, who has also been invited to Rogério’s
party, feels less at ease among the brancos. She prefers to
sit behind the bar with the maids who are serving drinks
and preparing the trays for the waiters.19
Dona Alice’s son sits among his old friends, com-
pletely at home, his dark color unimportant, a mere fact
about his appearance, only worthy of commentary at
moments of joking. His cell phone rings, and he covers
an ear to be able to hear the caller. It is his wife, telling
him that she is arriving. She parks her brand new Fiat Tipo
(a chic car in 1997) and climbs the stairs to the entrance-
way. The porter, himself black, immediately recognizes
her as a guest. She is a negra, cor de formiga (ant-colored),
extremely elegant in high-heeled pumps and a white linen
suit, of the sort bought in an upscale shopping center or in
São Paulo. Her long, smooth, brown hair conjures up an
expensive beauty salon. She vanishes among her friends
and former faculty colleagues, telling stories of her day’s
work as a judge in Salvador’s Forum.
At the party, hosts and guests are all Bahian together.
They meet in a harmonious and convivial atmosphere,
seeming to demonstrate not only the absence of racial
prejudice that Brazilians (and especially Bahians) some-
times claim as their distinctive feature (Wade 1997;
Winant 1992) but also a lack of friction between mem-
bers of distinct economic classes and between genders.
All share the same language, communicating not just with
words and silences but also with gestures, postures,
and body movements, in the flow of changing bodily
juxtapositions and separations between the guests and
the family. Talking about Bahian identity, such people
may contrast themselves with other Brazilians such as
the Paulistas, people from the more European and (so it
is sometimes said) the more racist city of São Paulo. But
if they all feel a temporary unitary identity in some
sense—if they are all Bahians together—then they are so
in a time and space in which the hegemonic aesthetic
elevates whiteness and all that is associated with it to
higher social value. Even black guests incorporate some
degree of white identity here, if only by inhabiting it
momentarily, in a metonymic sense. And the servants’
muted presence reinforces the sense that to belong is
to be white. But the party is, after all, just a transitory
everyday moment. When it is all over, when all have
finished singing and clapping ‘‘Happy Birthday’’ for the
by now exhausted Rogério, each guest or servant will
105
American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 1 February 2005
head off to another place, one that is distinct not only
in the geographic ordering of the city but also on the
social map.
Social maps of Salvador
Land settlement in Salvador reflects and reinforces its
extreme social and economic divisions. Dramatic popula-
tion growth after 1940 resulted in expansion to the north,
far beyond the old divided city of the 1930s, with its ridges
occupied by the wealthy and its valleys by slums (see
Landes 1947; Pierson 1942). In general, the upper and
middle classes are progressively occupying the Atlantic
coast and the eastern region of the city, whereas the
povão (the masses) are expanding into the Cidade Baixa
(Lower City) along the Bay of All Saints to the west.20 The
Cidade Alta (Upper City) is the area high above the sea
on the escarpment. The term originally designated the
Figure 1. The Upper City: High-rises along the Corredor de Vitória with the port and the Lower City in the distance. Photograph by Edmilson Costa Teixeira.
106
Portuguese-built district of Pelourinho. The Lower City is
the long, narrow strip of flat land beneath it, stretching
from the port area and commercial district to the residen-
tial area of Bonfim. The area of inclusion expanded as the
city grew. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, new
avenues, replete with imposing mansions, were built fur-
ther along the escarpment, in Vitória and Graça, districts
that were also included under the rubric ‘‘Upper City.’’
Subsequently, most of the mansions were demolished as
luxurious skyscrapers took their place. With this high-
rise architecture (Figure 1), the middle and upper classes
formed the modernist skylines of many new districts fur-
ther afield, such as Pituba along the Atlantic seafront.
Recently there has been a spurt of interest in the construc-
tion of a ‘‘fortress city,’’ as developers offer lots in as yet
unbuilt protected and serviced condominiums.21 Most
middle-class people no longer live along the escarpment,
then. But the notion of upper and lower cities still has
 Racialized bodies, naturalized classes
dense symbolic relevance, for it captures the social and
spatial division that cuts across the modern city.
Some Soteropolitans, such as the architect and urban
planner Angela Gordilha Souza, are acutely concerned
with this division.22 Souza documents the development
of the ‘‘socio-spatial segregation of poverty’’ in the city’s
configuration, showing that in the latter half of the 20th
century, during the formation of the modern metropolis,
this process has intensified. Rich and poor are increasingly
separated in two ‘‘differentiated and juxtaposed cities’’
(Souza 2000:167). This separation, one might add, has
helped to fix the symbolic contrast between upper and
lower cities in residents’ embodied understanding of
the city.
City dwellers acquire a cognitive social map of their
environment, knowledge sedimented over years of resi-
dence and constant movement through and across it.
Experiences of the urban landscape vary dramatically.
One can circulate in the central swathe of Salvador on its
fast-moving highways by air-conditioned car without com-
ing into direct contact with the poor areas of town. One
passes by kilometers of densely settled poor districts, their
unfinished red-brick dwellings endlessly growing upward
as floor is added onto concrete floor, their untidy jumble
faintly resembling some Mediterranean hill town. Yet one
never need drive through their narrow streets. These
images, streaming past on the other side of the car win-
dow, may be the closest physical contact children like
Rogério have ever had with the ‘‘other’’ city, the contours
of which they may draw most clearly from stories told by
maids and porters.23 Many of the latter’s neighbors, by
contrast, spend their entire lives in a low-income neigh-
borhood, rarely venturing beyond the ambit of a few
streets and alleyways, often too poor to buy a bus ticket.
Such was the case of Dona Bianca, a grandmother and
retired school cook. At the age of 60 she took a bus ride
to the city airport for the first time, at the invitation of
a sociologist who had been conducting research in her
neighborhood. When she saw the planes, Dona Bianca
burst into tears, overcome, she said, by happiness at fi-
nally seeing with her own eyes what she had only seen
on television.
Despite such radical diversity in experiences of the
city, residents have important conceptual overlaps about
relations between the areas. The contrast between presti-
gious bairros nobres and the vast expanses of bairros
populares (working-class neighborhoods) is clearly de-
limited in the general social map that most share. In talk,
this contrast is often expressed with clarity, although the
terms of description vary depending on the standpoint of
the speaker (McCallum 1996). The meanings that individ-
uals ascribe to the contrast also vary, but, whether rich or
poor, and however they express it and experience it, all
residents share knowledge of the divided city.
n American Ethnologist
In contrast, the internal differentiations on the other
side of the divide are often only dimly grasped. This can be
attributed to the lack of mutual representation of the
accumulated understandings afforded by day-to-day expe-
riences. Thus, residents of the bairros nobres have a far
subtler understanding of the gradations in value attributed
to distinct spaces and dwellings within these prestigious
zones than do poorer people. Many middle-class people
suffered the consequences of stagnation in the property
market during the 1990s as they struggled to make good
and move to better, higher-status homes. Knowledge of
value gradations is class specific, so that poorer people
only have a vague notion of the distinctions made by
upper- and middle-class people and vice versa.24 In gen-
eral, the longest-settled working-class districts, closest to
the center of town, are highly valued for their comparative
safety and functioning urban infrastructure—paved roads,
street lights, water, sewerage, and electricity. People also
value those familiar areas populated with kin, affines and
ritual kin. Hence, low-income neighborhoods may be
semiendogamous (McCallum 1997).25
Residents’ cognitive maps populate the streets and
dwellings with distinct kinds of people. Color is a crucial
component of this mapping. For example, working-class
informants may refer to the residents of Graça or Pituba
interchangeably as os brancos or os ricos (the rich). The
latter may talk either of o povão (the plebs) or os pretos (the
blacks).26 But sight more than talk is important here—or,
rather, the accumulated memories of sight. Euro-Brazilian
whiteness is visually hegemonic in the districts of the
city where the better off live and work. Blackness and
brownness are patently normal, unmarked, elsewhere, a
visual effect of the multiplication of bodies seen in pub-
lic spaces. Crowds are colored distinctly and, thus, the
spaces that they inhabit acquire their own hues. So the
social maps of the city that residents embody come to
be color coded.
The body in space
Yet these maps will not hold still, for the symbolic pro-
cess is refractory. The meanings that attach to spaces
feed back on the inhabitants as they move through
these spaces. Thus, when bodies of all sorts move through
a space that situates them in relationship to a hege-
monic Euro-Brazilian whiteness, they are engulfed in
some sense by the signifying force of that space. The
form of encompassment depends on the messages con-
veyed by body presentation and the language of their
bodily accoutrements. For example, a person may be
whitened and placed higher up along the social scale, as
is the case for the black guests (but also the lighter
and whiter guests) at Rogério’s party, or may come to
stand as outside the social scale, as Other, like the
107
American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 1 February 2005
servants at the party and the boys who would take care
of the guests’ cars.27
The power of the visual presence of bodies to alter the
meaning of spaces is constant. Bus stops and the interiors
of buses are a case in point. As buses speed through the
city, the symbolizing process takes a fluctuating or cyclical
form. Although bus riding ‘‘darkens’’ passengers, bus stops
and buses in the central areas of the city are associated
with whiteness at certain times of the day. Many high
school and university students, office workers, and middle-
class matrons ride the buses for relatively short distances.
But in the early mornings or at 6:00 p.m., bus stops are
filled with poorer and distinctly darker people going to or
from work. At the end of the line, most passengers are
darker skinned, and they alight in bairros where normality
is brown or black in color. Thus, the presence of bodies of
one type or other within the bus or within a city district
seems to sustain, by a metonymic process, a racial sym-
bolism that is already carried by the values attributed to
spaces themselves.28
I return now to the subject’s engagement with this
effervescent symbolism. The relationship between race
and class is lived intensely as subjects move through the
city. Dona Alice, for example, takes a bus after the party,
telling her son and daughter-in-law that they need not
worry about giving her a lift. ‘‘Stay here with your friends,
your mum knows how to look after herself!’’ she says. Well
kissed, having taken her leave of the other guests, carrying
her bag with a large piece of cake (larger than most, a sign
that she is well liked by Rogério’s mother and family), she
waits patiently at the bus stop with two white students
who are going to an Asa de Aguia gig at the Clube Espanhol
and a black porter who is going home to Uruguai at the
end of his shift.29 During the half-hour journey, she feels
relieved to return to the neighborhood where she lives
(and where she was born). A group of unruly young people
are drumming on the sides of the hard seats, singing and
cracking jokes in loud voices, but she pays them no heed,
nor they her, although she clasps her bag more tightly out
of instinct and checks that her cash is hidden in her
waistband. The lads are dressed in long Bermuda shorts
barely held up at the hips, the girls in tight-fitting tank tops
and minuscule shorts cut high at the buttocks. As she
climbs down off the bus, Dona Alice looks carefully around
before walking on, away from the relative safety of the
corner bar by the bus stop. She looks for the vagabundos
(ruffians, good-for-nothings) who hang out on the street
opposite. She is almost home, but things are not as they
were when she was young. At that time, everyone knew
everyone, the young people respected their elders, and
men respected women. A group of men sitting at the bar
joke with her: ‘‘Come over here, Auntie, and have a drink
with us!’’ She laughs and says, ‘‘Another day.’’ She is
among neighbors and friends.
108
For Dona Alice, then, the bus journey home is not
simply a trip from whiteness to blackness. Certainly this
aspect is self-evident, and the presence of the students on
their way to the gig serve to remind her of the color-coded
starting point of her journey, as does the point where
they jump off the bus (just before it takes the dip down
the Contorno into the Lower City). But many more sto-
ries than that about race and class are told to her by
the other passengers and passersby as the bus hurtles
through the night. For example, generational differences,
told by the scanty garb of the noisy youth; social de-
generation (‘‘The young have no respect for their elders
any more,’’ Dona Alice might say); and the rise of crimi-
nality (‘‘There are vagabundos everywhere now’’).30 As she
returns to her own neighborhood, the important tale that
the sights around her tell is that she is within a space of
familiarity. Each door and entrance to an alleyway evokes
named persons, some of whom are kin or ritual kin, many
of whom she has known for a very long time. That the
familiar faces and voices she encounters as she arrives at
her own doorstep are in the main black or brown might
only come to her as an afterthought, an effect, perhaps,
of her evening spent in Alto das Flores. Thus does racial-
ization wane—or, rather, the simple form of racialization
that occurs in everyday time and space and impresses
itself on a subject’s consciousness. But, of course, the
buildup of impressions over time is fundamental to racial-
izing processes as a whole.
If asked directly, Dona Alice probably would not say
that her bairro is black. She might claim that real racial
democracy is only found in the bairros populares, where a
mixture of colors and phenotypes live together and inter-
marry, in contrast to the elitist exclusivity evident among
residents of the bairros nobres (McCallum 1996). In mak-
ing such statements, she will be appealing creatively to the
discourses available to her. But the foundations of her
positioning with regard to them will be the depth of her
own accumulated experience, to which she makes refer-
ence as she thinks and speaks.
The wavering embodiment of racial identity
From the perspective of the subject, racial and other
meanings stick to bodies as they populate the urban
landscape, as they move through it, and racial meanings
conferred by bodies also attach to the landscape. Bodies
do not simply stand for themselves, for the meanings of a
particular location help define the meanings attached to
a body. This semiotic interaction is apparent to Sotero-
politans, too, who may comment on it. Early on in my re-
search, a Bahian friend, a white university lecturer (he
is what might be described as swarthy, of southern Medi-
terranean appearance) helped me to understand this. I
asked him, ‘‘Is there an identifiable black middle class in
 Racialized bodies, naturalized classes
Salvador?’’ At once, he said no. Then he added that, to him,
middle-class people are branco, even if individuals may be
described as negro, preto, or moreno (brown, tan, or
brunette). For example, he said, he never thought of a
black colleague as negro. The negros live in poor areas of
town. His colleague, he felt, was ‘‘like me.’’ This unmarked
category denominating ‘‘us’’ refers, of course, to white-
ness, if only by the logic of opposition, although it may also
stand opposed to morenidade, in the sense evocative of
that emblematic suntanned Brazilian identity.31
These comments are not part of any identifiable
discourse, although the failure to name a black middle
class could conceivably be held to express a racism by
omission or the effects of a ubiquitous silence about ra-
cial inequality in Brazil (Sheriff 2001). But my friend, no
fool and something of a radical, might name such a group
in another context. In this instance, he was merely
being honest to me about his own day-to-day subjectivity.
His reply was an expression of a normally unstated knowl-
edge that conditions and impinges on the elaboration
of many kinds of discourse. For example, if he were to
agree in a political meeting that the black middle class
should be consolidated and strengthened (as he might), he
would be running counter, consciously and deliberately, to
his own intuitions. I think my friend was expressing a
sense shared by those who live and work in the more
affluent areas of Salvador. But this sense forms part of
knowledge shared by all longer-term dwellers in the city,
whatever their class affiliation, although it is uncomfort-
able to put into words.
My friend’s black colleague, by contrast, was unequiv-
ocal in claiming for himself an identity as a negro and as a
member of a black middle class. In claiming for himself an
identity drawn from the discourse elaborated within the
Movimento Negro, which challenges and denounces any
claims to the absence of blackness in Brazil, he did not
reject whiteness in his day-to-day life or feel the need to
engage in problack militancy. Like Rogério’s godfather
(Dona Alice’s son), he spent much time in symbolically
white spaces or with white people, in the natural course of
middle-class social living. Moreover, he felt perfectly at
ease in these circles. When he was among such friends
and colleagues, his sense of self was not perturbed by
his identification with blackness. He did not feel out of
place or Othered, whether by the subjects with whom he
interacted or by any inward-looking feeling of bodily
difference from those around him. One might say that
his identity as negro is just one of several that he might
claim for himself (among them, a Christian activist, a
Bahian, a successful academic, a father, etc.). I cannot say
what personal experiences lay behind his self-knowledge
as black. But the ease with which he lay claim to a negro
identity speaks of important historical changes in the
public discourses on race circulating in Bahia in the late
n American Ethnologist
20th century. The development of social spaces associated
with blackness were crucial to this process.
Michel Agier, a leading student of 1990s Salvador,
shows how delimited social spaces are important to the
construction of distinct social identities.32 His studies of Ilê
Aiyê, the Afro-Brazilian bloco (carnival association) based
in the district of Liberdade, an old, relatively central low-
income area, include a detailed examination of the work
done by its members in constructing and successfully
disseminating a positively valued black identity. Such
blocos provide a space, available for most of the year, in
which Soteropolitans and tourists can participate in mu-
sical and other cultural events. ‘‘Ilê,’’ as it is affectionately
known, has been an important force in the negritude
movement and, indeed, it is iconic of these associations’
success in refiguring attitudes to blackness. In events such
as an annual black beauty festival, they promote pride in
African heritage and awareness of black Brazilian history,
especially resistance to slavery. The discourse elaborated
in the public speech of the leaders of the blocos and in the
lyrics of songs inverts a once openly expressed devalua-
tion of black culture and people in Salvador (Agier 2000).
Ilê’s effect on the city has been multifaceted, both help-
ing reshape political rhetoric about culture and establish-
ing paths of self-discovery along which individuals may
travel (Figure 2).
Ilê and other such blocos appeal directly to Afro-
Brazilian subjectivities but also to nonblacks. Their success
in attracting members, however, is varied. Most of Ilê’s
members are from Liberdade and are working class; a
majority are female. Middle-class blacks figure among its
directors. Some intellectuals and professionals, like Dona
Alice’s daughter-in-law, are also attracted by Ilê. I return to
Dona Alice’s son and daughter-in-law, at the point when
the party ends.
Figure 2. Afro-Bahian style: A couple at Ilê Aiyê’s Night of Beleza
Negra. Photograph by the author.
109
American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 1 February 2005
As the couple leave Alto das Flores, they begin a
sociogeographic transition that differs from Dona Alice’s.
From the Alto they drive home to their two-bedroom flat in
the older but still sought-after bairro of Graça to change
their clothes. They are going out with two French friends
they met on a trip through Europe, whom they had
promised to take to the ensaio (rehearsal) of Ilê Aiyê at
Fort Santo Antônio. They explained, ‘‘It’s a povão thing. It
won’t do to go dressed chic or as a barão.33 It’s better to
wear simple clothes.’’ They have already warned their
friends (who insist on going about the town on ordinary
buses) to keep their jewels and watches in the hotel, not to
carry large bags, and to wear T-shirts, shorts, and sneakers,
to avoid calling attention to themselves in the street. For
each space in the city, they explained, there is an appro-
priate dress code, a body language (one that gringos usu-
ally ignore). On this occasion, though, Dona Alice’s son
and daughter-in-law choose different styles of clothes.
He prefers to wear smartly pressed jeans and a T-shirt.
He puts his wallet in the back pocket and leaves his
wristwatch on—he will be among ‘‘his people,’’ just like
those among whom he grew up. She takes from the
wardrobe a dress in Afro-Bahian style, with a geometric
design in strong colors. She loves these moments, and
she can feel at ease, beautiful in her African disguise,
together with people who resemble her. She feels nos-
talgic for the time in her youth when she used to go with
her mother to the candomblé festas (parties; her mother
was an initiate).34 She cannot afford to go these days
because her husband does not care for such things and
because she has so many social engagements. The
two childhood friends from her home neighborhood who
also managed to get to university do not care to associate
themselves with the black cultural movement. They
prefer new, modern social spaces dominated by the aes-
thetics of whiteness. She has explained to her French
friends that this preference is not rooted in ideological
motives and that her childhood friends are not prejudiced
against dark-colored people like themselves but, rather,
they feel a greater affinity with persons who work, like
themselves, in the liberal professions. She herself always
feels a surge of excitement when she hears the powerful
rhythms and melodic songs of Ilê.
Most of the people present at Ilê Aiyê’s ensaios are
black and low income in origin. On such occasions, the
aesthetics constructed by the black cultural movement
prevail. White or light mulatto people are welcome, but
they do not set the tone. Black faces and bodies, dressed
in a variety of fashions, are resplendently prevalent.
Everywhere Afro-Bahian styles are present. Blackness is
hegemonic in a total sense, not just as an effect of a
consciously articulated discourse but also through sheer
copresence. Each person must then put her or his self
into a relationship with the identities that are offered.
110
So Dona Alice’s daughter-in-law may make her own
sense of black identity uppermost. Her French guests
luxuriate, perhaps, in a temporary connection with the
wonderfully exotic and sensual (and thereby know them-
selves as antiracists). And Dona Alice’s son is content to let
his body take over, as he sambas to rhythms that he has
known since he first came to consciousness.35
In spaces such as Alto das Flores, by contrast, guests
and employees are willy-nilly put into contact with an
aesthetic system in which Euro-Brazilian whiteness is
hypervaluated. That this takes place in an upper-middle-
class setting is no coincidence. Spend a night at home in
Brazil watching the television and one is left in no doubt as
to the hegemonic aesthetics of color. Whiteness, in the
form of fashionably clad blond or smooth-haired, sun-
tanned young men and women, stands for the normal
(normal), the modern, and the socially valued. Flick
through studies of the media or of the ‘‘image of the
negro’’ in Brazil and this impression confirms itself (see,
e.g., Fonseca 2000 and Sodré 1999). On occasions such as
Rogério’s party, the dominant aesthetic seems to parallel
or imitate representations of race in the media. Thus does
the visual and sensory production of meanings in the flow
of day-to-day life ensure that the normative and valued
nature of whiteness takes a thoroughly embodied form.
The space where the party takes place—upscale Alto das
Flores—encloses Rogério’s family’s new, modern apart-
ment building. Access to the building’s salão de festas
itself may be read as a mark of white privilege; and, of
course, the guests and family who come to the party
exemplify or aspire to ideals of beauty that emphasize
blondness, smooth hair, and European or North American
styles and accoutrements.
In Ilê’s ensaios, a black identity is created and given
value in opposition to the hypervaluation bestowed on the
Euro-Brazilian body elsewhere in the city or in the media.
The conscious, discursive construction of blackness is a
vital component to Ilê’s activities, whereas the construc-
tion of whiteness is implicit and unspoken in events like
Rogério’s party and refers only indirectly to its public
hypervaluation. Whiteness is a semiotic subtext, an effect
of what is done, not what is said. A similar effect operates
at the ensaios. Much of the force of Ilê Aiyê’s message
is generated in the stunning imagery of performers and
participants and in their rhythm and lyricism. The ex-
periences of subjects in both contexts is total, a sensory
immersion in a profusion of racializing symbols. So one
should hardly be surprised that messages about difference
are absorbed as embodied knowledge that holds as natural
the class – color configuration experienced in the city. In
this sense is class naturalized.
The constitution of racial and class identity cannot be
treated as epistemologically distinct from the processes
operating particular subjectivities (Mama 1995). If one
 Racialized bodies, naturalized classes
looks at these processes in more detail, one sees that
several simultaneous operations are at work. Subjects do
not simply choose between available identities on their
personal journeys through the semiotic overproduction of
the world around them. Each bus passenger, party goer, or
participant in Ilê’s ensaios searches for his or her self’s
place in the newly entered semantic space but brings to
this self-placing the weight of past experience. The knowl-
edge embodied over a lifetime is a key factor and much is
already established beforehand, although the process is
also infinitely recursive. A two-way interchange takes place
with the world, in which agentive appropriation of mean-
ing for the self is always generated against meanings
thrown back by others. Myriad cues and impositions
are encountered on the way, thrown up endlessly in
intersubjective activity (especially intense during such
special events as the party or the ensaio). These may
include direct racialization, that is, the imposition of
a racial identity imbued with meanings and values (per-
haps unwanted) by one subject on another.
The cue for this form of racialization is usually the
other’s bodily appearance, although I point to a need for
caution here. Dominguez refers to body differences as the
starting point for racialization. Speaking of a more inclu-
sive level than the simple intersubjective one I describe,
she says that racialization takes place ‘‘when differences
between human beings are simplified and transformed
into Difference’’ and, she continues, through ‘‘overvaluing
particular bodily differences by imbuing them with lasting
meaning’’ (Dominguez 1994:334). In Salvador, too, racial
alterity may arise out of certain readings of the body. But
what body is this?
In general, in Salvador the body is not seen as a
finished or closed entity. It is always in production, main-
tenance, and transformation, changing its form and
meaning, whether through spiritual or magical techno-
logical intervention, through diet and exercise, or by medi-
cal means. From a religious perspective, for example,
spirits may descend on a body and make use of it to
communicate with living beings, a point that may be made
in relation to Afro-Brazilian religions, Pentecostalism, or
spiritism.36 The body must be kept ‘‘closed’’ against ill-
nesses or the evil eye by charms and prayers. Although
proponents of biomedicine often clash with religious
specialists who preach an unstable integration of spirit
and flesh, they also take an active part in constructing a
view of the body as mutable, through plastic surgery and
other forms of intervention, such as hormone replace-
ment therapy. The aesthetics industry dedicates itself to
corporeal transformation of skin and hair and figure,
whether in beauty salons, gyms, or special clinics. So the
body is involved in a constant process of ensuring closure
and effecting or delaying change. Biology, although pres-
ent as a discourse, need not signify destiny.
n American Ethnologist
As I have described, the meanings that stick treach-
erously to space change the meanings generated by
bodies, and, thus, the subject’s apprehension of self is also
affected as he or she moves through the city. Martin
Sokefeld (1999) argues that this sense of self is a steady-
ing force in such transitions.37 Racializing meanings arise
in constantly changing configurations as subjects move
through time and space. Thus, from the perspective of
intersubjectivity, progress from difference to Difference
is not simply one way. It also involves fluctuation and
(in many individual cases) a welcome lack of fixity. Stuart
Hall has made a similar point in his work on racial
identity (Morley and Chen 1996). The relations that
make identity and alterity—in other words, that consti-
tute subjectivity—are frequently unstable (Gupta and
Ferguson 1997). One could describe a subject’s relation
with a particular identity as the temporary assumption
of a subject position within one of the competing dis-
courses on race circulating in the city. But this is not
enough. As I have shown, some racializing meanings are
simply not expressed in discourse. One also needs to
describe how such work of identification takes place in
social interaction. This is because identities emerge
strongly or wane in real time, that is, in temporally
delimited spaces of intersubjectivity, or sociality.
Subjective transitions may involve the conscious
transformation in outwardly projected identity when a
person passes from one symbolizing field to another, for
example, in the manipulation of clothing (Tarlo 1996) or
in the consumption of food (Sokefeld 1999). Subjects like
Dona Alice’s daughter-in-law can at some moments
identify themselves openly with the Afro-Bahian black
identity offered by Ilê. At other moments such identifi-
cation is merely latent, as, for example, when an alter-
native class-based identity, linked metonymically to
whiteness, comes to the forefront. Dona Alice’s daughter-
in-law changes her clothes appropriately for each occa-
sion. Her self-knowledge flows effortlessly from one space
to another as long as she is able, bodily and otherwise, to
dominate the hegemonic languages of the different
domains. She can sit in judgment at court, dance with
suingue (swing) like any negona do Ilê (black woman of
Ilê), and make conversation and appropriate bodily ges-
tures with her friends, compadres, and colleagues at the
party in Itaigara, like any other upper-middle-class person.
It is this capability that underlies her ability to transfer
between spaces of intersubjectivity and to sequentially
bring to the forefront one social identity after another.
Whereas a black judge enjoys considerable leeway to
shift assumed identities or to move between fields of
identification in this way, a person such as Dona Alice at
first sight has more restricted possibilities open to her. I
do not mean by this to imply that the judge would be
immune to experiencing the imposition of unwanted
111
American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 1 February 2005
identities. Most black people I have interviewed in Salva-
dor, including powerful figures such as judges, politicians,
and hospital administrators, are able to recall one episode
or situation in which they were subject to racism. Yet class
position must limit the exploratory possibilities for sub-
jects such as Dona Alice to those spaces that are financially
and socially available. Many of these are black spaces, such
as the candomblé centers that her daughter-in-law fre-
quented as a teenager. Others allow the construction of a
nonracialized self-identity, for example, Pentecostalist
churches (Burdick 1998).38 As one might expect from the
literature on racial identity in Brazil, Soteropolitans do not
respond to experiences of racialization in any simple way.
Growing numbers affirm a positively valued identity as
negro, rather than the disparaged preto of old (Sansone
1993), but many Afro-Brazilians prefer to term themselves
moreno. So, too, do many Euro-Brazilians, to whom the
term connotes an attractive Brazilian identity, which
branco does not.39 Although they are less mobile, often
confined to the Lower City, poorer people in Salvador do
find ways to manipulate, counteract, or disrupt unwanted
forms of racialization.
Attention to the processes operating particular sub-
jectivities need not deflect one from the way that the
racialization of the subject is embedded in the structures
of power. Judith Butler writes:
To conceive of racism primarily as a problem of
psychic projection requires that dyadic structure by
which a dominant subject projects and a subordi-
nated Other is projected upon. But the complex dis-
tribution of institutional processes of racialization and
racism are not simply matters of psychic projection;
the racialization of the subject requires an account of
subject formation through the terms of race (Omi and
Winant 1986), but this account could not take place
within the terms of an analysis in which a subject
status were taken for granted as a ‘‘ground’’ or a
‘‘presupposition.’’ [1995:443]
Indeed, I have argued that the process of conferring
racial meanings is informed by psychic projection because
it is in the first instance an intersubjective one, occurring
within the making of sociality (Toren 1996). Following
Christina Toren, whose theoretical approach is informed
by a social anthropological reading of phenomenology,
especially of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I understand that
the process whereby a subject makes sense of the lived-in
world is social—that is, intersubjective—and that it takes
place over time. In this sense it is microhistorical (Toren
1999).40 Throughout the ethnographic discussion above,
my point has been that such psychic projection cannot
take place on neutral ground, given that each subject
brings a particular microhistory, with important overlaps
112
of shared knowledge achieved through past engagements
with other people and places, to such encounters. This
bears direct relevance to the naturalization of class, to
which I now return.
Conclusion
At first sight, an incident involving the person on whom
the Dona Alice character is based seems illustrative of the
apparently naturalized state of class as racial difference
in Salvador. Walking along a sidewalk in a residential area
of the Upper City, she stopped at the gates of the Baiano
de Tênis (an upscale sports and social club) to allow a car
to exit across the pavement. The driver, a branca, think-
ing the road to be clear of traffic, advanced into it and
‘‘Dona Alice’’ walked behind the car, continuing on her
way. At this point, the driver spotted a bus hurtling down
the road and hastily backed up, without bothering to
check if anyone was behind her, missing ‘‘Dona Alice’’ by
a hair’s breadth. Later, ‘‘Dona Alice’’ told me this story
with great indignation. I asked her, ‘‘Did she apologize?’’
and she retorted, ‘‘Since when does a branca apologize to
a preta?’’
Other aspects of the naturalization of class are also
contained in this incident—not least, the powerful sym-
bolism of car ownership. White people walking along
the pavements of Salvador are also likely to be run over
by their peers. The incident brings to mind, moreover,
Sheriff’s view that the bottom-line discourse governing
class relations in Brazil turns on a black – white opposition.
‘‘Dona Alice’s’’ retort cold be read as bringing this deep,
hidden sense of the color coding of social difference to
the surface of speech. But I have tried to build beyond
this formulation of class as ultimately constituted in
language by looking at the embodied microhistory of
creating meaning that each person brings to such fleet-
ing relationships. The argument is not a rebuttal of dis-
course analysis or the investigation of classification
systems. Indeed, the ethnography developed here is only
possible because of this work. But by altering the angle
of ethnographic vision to highlight the movement of
subjects through lived time and space, I am able to suggest
a rephrasing of the analysis, away from terms that evoke
the debate about whether Brazil is or is not ‘‘different.’’
From this perspective, language, in the form of concepts
that may be linguistically formulated, is a constitutive
aspect of experience. It is part of all social practice, but
not in a uniform sense. ‘‘Dona Alice’s’’ retort would
certainly not be appropriate or necessary to describe
interactions in an event such as Rogério’s party, although,
as I have described, subjects’ experiences of such happy
occasions are also not free of color coding.
As Soteropolitans encounter each other in the
city their common, often unspoken knowledge about
 Racialized bodies, naturalized classes
difference—about race, gender, and class—although
emerging from different perspectives, enables events such
as the birthday party or the ensaio at Ilê to take place. The
various nuances of racial meanings and their attach-
ment to class are often understood and acted on in such
contexts in an unproblematic sense. Everyone knows
what to do and what their actions and speech mean.
The embodied production of culture takes place in a social
mode, rather than being confined to the workings of
single subjectivities (Csordas 1993; Wade 1999). Interac-
tion seems effortless and natural. One consequence, in
Salvador, is that race relations may appear as harmonious
and conflict free.
But this is an illusion. In any local field of semantic
production, the embodied knowledge borne by subjects
overlaps and communicates at many junctures, generating
the content and style of intersubjective encounters. This
means that, as well as unspoken agreement, many gaps,
failures to connect, or points of dissonance and friction
are thrown up out of the disparity between the stand-
points of engaging subjects. My point here is that social
differences matter. Both the points of encounter, fruit of
living together in one place and time, and the points of
disjuncture may reflect and reproduce social inequalities.
So class is not just naturalized because of ‘‘what goes
without saying’’ or because of ‘‘what may be said.’’ One
way to describe what else is at work is to say that the
spaces of intersubjectivity are encompassed by a structural
level. This formulation (suggested to me by Butler’s evo-
cation of ‘‘the complex distribution of institutional pro-
cesses of racialization’’ in the above quote) is problematic,
however. If racially inflected class differences are experi-
enced as natural and as describable in a common set
of behaviors that people ‘‘know’’ and do, the practices
of which they are part (such as the birthday party) consti-
tute structuring processes, in a wider sociological sense
(Bourdieu 1977, 1990, 1998). But care must be taken not
to render class unnecessarily rigid. Note, in this regard
that, although the analysis developed in this article is
deeply marked by the theory of practice, it does not
support the adoption of a concept of ‘‘habitus,’’ if by this
is meant a set of embodied ‘‘unconscious dispositions.’’
As critics remark, used in this sense, the notion does not
leave space for subjective agency or for change (Gell 1992).
The methodological focus developed in this article has
allowed an investigation of the dynamic and sequen-
tial intersubjective constitution of race and class. I have
shown that racialization is enacted within social practice.
I wrote the ethnography to pay special attention to ‘‘non-
discursive’’ practice, counterbalancing the greater atten-
tion to discourse in the available literature. This focus
on practice entailed semiotic analysis of spaces as well
as of bodies, which concluded that the interaction be-
tween the two provides the dynamic driving racialization
n American Ethnologist
processes. The argument then turned to the question of
subjectivity and identity. People do not just learn race and
class, I argued, they constitute it intersubjectively.
The naturalization of class occurs as people experience
fluctuations in identity while moving around in the
urban environment. One important aspect of this is
the tension between racialization of bodies by space and
racialization of space by bodies, described through eth-
nography of different subjects’ journeys through the
city. This description showed that class is naturalized
as each subject’s oft-unspoken knowledge of how to act
is put to use in endlessly repeated practice. But the
focus on intersubjectivity highlighted that the process
does not stop here. It is open-ended, even though the
gaps in the web that binds class to race are at times hard
to discern.
The events and practices that racialize bodies in
Salvador appear to be hardened and fixed over the years.
As they are repeated daily and in many versions across the
urban landscape, they give real content to the naturaliza-
tion of class difference. But time does not stand still. Thus,
when Soteropolitans move through the city, they are
engaged, both wittingly and unwittingly, in a process that
operates at various levels. They constitute their own
subjective identities, seated in the body; they mold the
subjectivities of others; and they participate in the struc-
turing, practical work that underlies the social and eco-
nomic hierarchy. Yet, at the same time, they may also
contest that hierarchy. Identity as movement is also
promising in this sense, offering not only a rift in the
subject but also glimmerings of a rupture in the unequal
social system.
Notes
Acknowledgments. Research was financed by the Research
Institute for the Study of Man through an RISM Landes Award
in 1993, and by the Economic and Social Research Council of
Great Britain from 1994 to 1997 (R000234961). I am grateful to
both institutions. Thanks also to the Nuffield Foundation and to
the British Academy for grants enabling further research. An
earlier version of this article was written while in receipt of the
ESRC award and was presented at the 22nd Encontro Anual de
ANPOCS in Brazil in 1998. I am grateful to Livio Sansone, the
organizer, and all the participants who commented on that
version. It was rewritten thanks to support from the Simon Fund
of the University of Manchester, where I was a Simon Fellow
from 2001 to 2004. I gave a version as a seminar to the
Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester,
in the series ‘‘Anthropology of and in the City,’’ on November 12,
2001. Thanks to the organizers, Penny Harvey and Sarah Green. I
gratefully acknowledge the comments and the help given me on
that occasion by colleagues in the department. Special thanks to
Karen Sacks, Luisa Elvira Belaunde, Peter Gow, and Marcio
Goldman for their critical comments and encouragement as
the article neared completion. I also benefited from anonymous
readers’ comments and the excellent advice of the editor of this
113
American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 1 February 2005
journal. My greatest debt is to informants, family, and friends in
Salvador. Final responsibility is my own.
1. Salvador is the capital of the northeastern state of Bahia and
the third-largest city in Brazil. Its population expanded from ca.
348,000 in 1945 to nearly two and a half million by 2003 (see
www.ibge.gov.br). By census classification, 80 percent of its resi-
dents are black or brown, making it the largest concentration of
visually marked Afro-descendants in Latin America. The newly in-
dustrialized economy, based on a petrochemical complex estab-
lished in the 1970s, acted as a pull factor for in-migration, rural
stagnation as a push factor. Economic expansion fostered a new if
small black working class, whose members earned on a par with
the mainly white middle class, which expanded greatly at that
time (Guimarães 1998; Guimarães and Castro 1990). Many women
acquired higher employment qualifications and entered the
job market. An extended recession in the 1980s and 1990s
led to severe job losses and an expansion of the informal sector
(Guimarães et al. 1995). Growth in the service sector gave
greater employment opportunities to women. Gender and racial
inequality persisted (Castro and Barreto 1998). In 2002, women
earned much less than men, and blacks and browns much less
than whites. Many women were employed as domestic servants,
and over 25 percent of the lower-income female population
were heads of households. Extreme and widespread poverty was
a cruel and persistent feature of the system. Unemployment
stood at over 20 percent, ranking as the highest among Brazilian
major cities (Veja 2001).
2. Some claim that the Brazilian color classification system’s
distinctive feature is its multipolarity, whereby the plethora of
terms describe color and phenotype differences on a scale from
darker to lighter. See, for example, Harris 1970 and Harris and
Kottack 1963. Much critique and discussion have focused on the
implications of this view; see, for example, Fry 2000, Goldstein
1999, Hanchard 1999, Maggie 1991, Reichmann 1999, Sanjek 1991,
Sheriff 2001, and Twine 1998.
3. For overviews of the extensive literature on race in Brazil
and comparison of the Brazilian and U.S. racial systems, see, for
example, Wade 1997 and Winant 1992. Denise Ferreira da Silva
(1998) questioned the idea that a Brazilian ‘‘racial formation’’ is
a weaker version of the system operating in the United States, a
point made by Peter Wade (1997) about Latin American racial
systems, in general. In an irenic extension of the view that
Brazil is different, the supposed national disposition toward
cordiality was said to lie behind ‘‘racial democracy’’ and har-
mony there (Freyre 1959; Pierson 1942). Marvin Harris (1970)
linked classificatory multipolarity to a supposed absence of clear
racial categories, arguing that social difference was based on
class, not race. These views were widely accepted in Brazil, but
critics demonstrated that dark-skinned Brazilians have little
access to political power and consistently fall at the bottom in
terms of all the main socioeconomic indicators. They argued
that the myth of racial democracy is, in fact, a camouflage for
racism. Michael Hanchard (1994), in particular, attacked the
idea of ‘‘racial exceptionalism’’ (see also Twine 1998). In a
rebuttal, Peter Fry (2000) defended faithfulness to the canon
of ethnographic specificity. (On this debate, see also Goldstein
1999.) The current consensus is that racial democracy, although
important as a founding myth and also as a project for the
future (Sheriff 2001), cannot be considered descriptive of any
supposed overall racial formation in Brazil.
4. See, for example, Agier 2000; Burdick 1998; Butler 1998;
Caldeira 2000; Cunha 2001; Goldstein 1999; Guerreiro 2000;
Lehmann 1996; McCallum 1996, 1999; Sansone 1992; Shapiro
1995; Sheriff 2001; Silva 1993; Twine 1998; Wafer 1991.
114
5. I am in agreement with Wade (2002), who calls for a careful
examination of the applicability of the term essentialism in any
particular ethnographic context.
6. Intent on thoroughness, Sheriff sought to understand multi-
ple points of view, interviewing black activists and also middle-
class persons living in apartment blocks near the favela. She
discusses their narratives using techniques of discourse analysis.
This works to enrich and contextualize the study of race in the
favela, but Sheriff’s does not pretend to be an ethnography of
activism or of the middle classes. This reliance on discourse
analysis, combined with the limits of the material on cross-class
interaction, results in a skewed appreciation of class relations
outside the favela.
7. See the work of phenomenological geographers and archae-
ologists, such as Yi-fu Tuan (1977) and Christopher Tilley (1996),
who explore ‘‘human engagement with the meanings of place’’
(Wade 1999:458). This focus on the symbolic constitution of place
is one that has recently taken the foreground in critical anthro-
pology, offered as a solution to the collapse of the notion of
‘‘spatially territorialized culture’’ as a theoretical tool (Gupta and
Ferguson 1997).
8. See Poewe 1996:179 and Richardson 1996. McClusky 2001 is a
recent example of the use of memory and imagination in ethno-
graphic writing.
9. Over the 1990s and up to 2004, new apartment buildings
usually received names evoking aristocratic themes and referring
to Europe.
10. The name of the area and all personal names are fictitious.
11. On the Movimento Negro (Black Movement) in Brazil there
is an extensive literature. On the Bahian movement, see, for
example, Agier 1995, Butler 1998, and Cunha 1998.
12. Xuxa, a tall and charismatic blond, is a children’s tele-
vision star and a sex symbol. On the Xuxa phenomenon, see
Simpson 1993.
13. On Bahian popular music and pagode, see Guerreiro 2000.
14. Peres was known as the ‘‘Loira do Tchan’’ (the blond of the
Tchan). Deborah, the black female dancer who partnered her, was
known as the ‘‘Morena do Tchan,’’ but she left the group a year
after its first national hit album. TV Globo held a nationwide
competition to replace her. The winner, Scheyla Carvalho, is an
olive-skinned brunette with long, smooth hair. In effect, the public
face of samba – pagode was further whitened.
15. Conversations on a number of occasions with different
babás support this observation.
16. This portrait of an upper-middle-class family’s rejection of
marriage between one of its members and a black person is based
on several actual cases. In a number of interviews, middle-class
whites told me of their own or other families’ hostility to accepting
a nonwhite member.
17. A compadre relationship is constituted between a couple
and the person who becomes the godparent of their child.
18. I have accompanied the person on whom this character is
based to many parties, witnessing such interactions. She often
expresses affection for her white friends, willingness to take part in
festivities, enjoyment during the proceedings, and a sentiment of
relief when the party is over.
19. Members of the family of the person on whom this charac-
ter is based comment on her preference for sitting in the kitchen
or an equivalent space on such occasions, attributing it to her lack
of ease in a more formal space.
20. See Souza 2000 for a detailed analysis of this process over
the past decades.
21. For example, in 2002, lots in the projected Alphaville con-
domı́nio, located beside the Paralela, the main road through the
 Racialized bodies, naturalized classes
northern part of the city, went on sale. The lots sold out on the first
day. Interest in living in such walled communities seems to be a
trend in much of Brazil. See Caldeira 2000 on the fortress city in
São Paulo.
22. Souza (2000:157) quotes the 1997 National Household
Survey (Pesquisa Nacional Domicilar, or PNAD) to illustrate the
size of the divide. Residents of the symbolic Cidade Alta included
those 9.6 percent of people over ten years old who earned
between $600 and $2,000 and the 2.5 percent who earned more
than $2,000. By contrast, 43.8 percent of the population over ten
declared earnings of less than $200 and another 43 percent had
no earnings whatsoever—these were the residents of the sym-
bolic Cidade Baixa.
23. Antônio Risério (1981) describes how, as a child on car rides
through the Cidade Baixa, he would shut the windows, pretending
that the ‘‘Indians’’ would attack.
24. For example, distinctions between districts in the bairros
nobres take into account factors such as length of occupation and
age of the buildings. The older the bairro, the less prestigious it is,
unless some other factor intervenes, such as the proximity to one
of the main upper-middle-class shopping centers. In conse-
quence, new apartments, such as Rogério’s in Alto das Flores,
fetch high prices on the property market, whereas older, more
spacious ones are undervalued. Access by car is important to
buyers on middle-class incomes, whereas those on low incomes
value neighborhoods where there is good access by public trans-
port to places of work and study.
25. On kinship and the social structure of low-income areas,
see, for example, Agier 1990, 2000; Woortman 1987.
26. Preto (black) is the color term used in the census and
sometimes in day-to-day discourse in Salvador. Overall, it has
negative connotations there. The black movement prefers the
term negro, said to refer to race, not color.
27. Olivia Gomes da Cunha (2001:122 – 123) makes a similar
point about residents leaving the favela Vigário Geral in Rio to
travel into the city.
28. Such values are also, on occasion, challenged or inverted—
for example, during ritual events, such as carnival (Serra 1999),
or historical upheavals, such as the renovation of Pelourinho
(Butler 1998).
29. Asa de Aguia is a well-known band that plays a variant of
axé music. See Guerreiro 2000.
30. These quotes and musings are direct citations from the
person on whom the character is modeled.
31. The positively valued term moreno connotes Brazilianness.
Although it is used to denote persons of all kinds of racial types, it
acquires higher value when attached to the brancos of European
origin. When used to describe dark-skinned people with African
features, it works as a euphemism.
32. See Agier 1990, 1991, 1992a, 1992b, 2000. On the racializa-
tion of space and place in working-class Salvador, see also
Guimarães et al. 1995, Sansone 1992, and Silva 1993.
33. The term barão (baron) is a popular euphemism for a
wealthy or simply middle-class person.
34. Candomblé is an Afro-Brazilian religion. The terreiros
(religious centers) organize festas open to the public on cer-
tain occasions.
35. I attended Ilê’s ensaios at Fort Santo Antônio on a number
of occasions between 1991 and 1996. I also accompanied the
group ‘‘going out’’ during several carnivals and took part in several
‘‘Nights of Black Beauty’’ between 1995 and 2002. The descrip-
tions of thoughts, feelings, and sensations I present here are based
on my own reactions and on the comments and behaviors of my
companions at these events.
n American Ethnologist
36. On Afro-Brazilian religion in Salvador, see, for example,
Shapiro 1995, Teles dos Santos 1992, and Wafer 1991; on Pente-
costalism, see, for example, Lehman 1996.
37. Sokefeld (1999) argues that a reflexive sense of self consti-
tuted in action is a stabilizing force, in the face of the pull of
multiple possible identities.
38. John Burdick’s (1998) study in Rio de Janeiro found that
black Protestant women sought subjective fulfillment through
religious practice, not through constructing a racial identity, but
that their past experiences of racialization were an important
aspect of their searches. He also found that many women appre-
ciated the possibility for ‘‘whitening’’ afforded by their involve-
ment in the church, including the availability of lighter-colored
marriage partners.
39. For a discussion of the increasing popularity of the term
moreno, see Guimarães 2002.
40. The influence of phenomenology in the theoretical ap-
proach espoused here is evident. Although certain notions
developed by sociologists such as Alfred Schutz and other phe-
nomenologists, for example, ‘‘stocks of knowledge,’’ ‘‘indetermi-
nacy,’’ or ‘‘sedimentation,’’ are relevant to the argument here, a
proper discussion must be left to another opportunity.
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