Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Wiley, American Anthropological Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to Cultural Anthropology
This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Thu, 14 Apr 2016 10:36:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Rio de Janeiro, many Brazilians and foreigners agree, is a monumental city. The
capital of Brazil until 1960, Rio has both an illustrious history and natural splendor. Steep granite hills, some of them populated by the city's poor, share space
with modern high-rise buildings. The crescent-shaped beaches of the wealthy
South Zone continue to draw tourists from as far away as Europe and the United
States, despite international reports of violent street crime. When I arrived there
in the last weeks of 1990, I felt a tingling sense of achievement. Even poor migrants, whose reasons for leaving the impoverished countryside are anything but
abstract, are drawn to Rio partly by its glamour.
The allure of Rio de Janeiro may be an effect produced less by its startling
topography and breathtaking vistas than by what tourist brochures are apt to call
its "spirit." The magic of Rio is constructed, really, from a collectively imagined
and ideologically managed enchantment. Accepted within everyday discourses
throughout Brazil as something of a metonymic enactment of national culture
and character, Rio is portrayed as exuberantly spontaneous, "racially mixed,"
egalitarian in its ethos (if not in its objective structures), free spirited and casual,
and, during certain days of the year especially, just a little bit shameless. As is
the case with all such national showcases, the magic of Rio is simultaneously
produced within and directed toward both local and transnational contexts.
Rio's claim to represent the most appealing and uniquely Brazilian aspects
of national culture is based largely on the city's performance of the pre-Lenten
about, Rio's samba-driven caraval and its relationship to national representation and racial politics. With "racial politics" I do not refer to more explicit
Cultural Anthropology 14(1):3-28. Copyright ? 1999, American Anthropological Association.
3
This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Thu, 14 Apr 2016 10:36:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
4 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
example, Linger 1992; Queiroz 1985, 1992; Raphael 1981; Vianna 1994), and
anyone who "plays" or participates in the carioca carnaval can perceive that it is
shot through, in ideological terms, with ambiguous and contradictory inflections. I am concerned, rather, with a vision of carnaval-and its historical embedment in visions of Rio and the Brazilian nation-that is articulated from a
particular angle, that of poor people of color residing in the favela, or hillside
shantytown, of Morro do Sangue Bom, where I lived and conducted research between 1990 and 1992.'
The Hill of Good Blood
I first entered the community of Morro do Sangue Bom in 1988, fortuitously, I thought, during the centennial of the abolition of slavery in Brazil. I was
searching for a field site where I might later return to conduct research on the
ways in which poor people of color articulate their understandings of color, race,
or marginais ("criminals"). For their part, people on the hill look down toward
the city with as much trepidation as envy. Unlike the morro, where "todo mundo
se conhece" [everyone knows each other], the city is made dangerous by its anonymity. It is not only crime that might give the parents of teenagers concern but
also the ever present possibility that the overwatchful eyes of shopkeepers, the
subtle avoidance gestures of white middle-class shoppers, or the arrogant harassment of the police might undermine one's self-confidence, one's sense of
rightful cidadania, or citizenship. People living on Rio's morros call the city as
This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Thu, 14 Apr 2016 10:36:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
CARNAVAL IN RIO 5
a whole o asfalto, or the asphalt, a term that highlights the distinction between
the infrastructural investments made in middle-class residential and business ar-
eas and the muddy pathways and open sewers of the morro.
Like many similar communities, Morro do Sangue Bom had a residents' association with elective offices and a day care center. Much of the de facto politi-
cal control of the community, however, was in the hands of the local drugtrafficking gang. The people of Morro do Sangue Bom, many of whom had been
born and raised in the community, spoke disparagingly of crime and its seem-
ingly inevitable consequences, but they were thankful-until 1992-to be living in an epoca de paz, or period of peace. The present leader, unlike the previ-
ously incumbent one, was a son of the community in more than a merely
technical sense; he and his men did not harass the community's five thousand or
so residents, nor did they brandish their guns or engage in public drug use outside of those occasional days that followed police shakedowns.
Jorge, the first person I met in Morro do Sangue Bom, was an unemployed
man of color who had lived in the community since his birth 28 years before. He
occasionally acted, through an informal arrangement, as the assistant to the
president of the residents' association. He was warm and welcoming on my first visit,
and, in response to my question about the predominant concerns and preoccupations of the community's residents, he began to talk about carnaval. Although
peace had settled over the community, the good old days, Jorge told me, were
clearly over. Until recently, Morro do Sangue Bom had had an award-winning
bloco, or carnival parade group. There were several exceptionally talented sambistas, or samba composers, on the hill, and their songs, animated by the beautiful mulatas ("women of color") of the morro, had been the pride of the community. To better illustrate the tragedy of his community's loss, Jorge led me to a
tiny cement structure that housed the ruins of carnavals past. As he pointed out
with a weary gesture, a few fantasias, or costumes, glittering with sequins and
piled haphazardly on the dirt floor, were all that remained. The bloco of Morro
do Sangue Bom was one of the first victims of a deepening recession; the municipal funds that made such local productions possible had evidently dried up.
After our first meeting, Jorge arranged for me to spend a week in the home
of his twin sister, Joia. Married to a man named Daniel since she was 17, Joia had
two sons and lived with her family in a dilapidated house close to the hill's summit. One evening during my stay she began to talk about carnaval, something
that was very close to her heart. The blocos, she explained, were small local
groups composed of the men, women, and children who lived in particular communities or neighborhoods. Although some had received funds from the city,
their creative management and production were in the hands of local people.
Preparations began months in advance as those who composed the music and selected a theme met to hammer out a unifying vision for their parade. Others designed and sewed costumes, choreographed the dancing, and organized the participants. The blocos were competitive, and, as Joia suggested, the creative and
organizational processes, as well as the final parade, were highly emotional focal points that were significant in producing what Joia and others called a sense
This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Thu, 14 Apr 2016 10:36:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
6 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
of unido, or union, in the community. Although the women and men of Morro do
Sangue Bom worked hard all year long "just to survive," their exuberant carnaval parades had provided the one context in which their labor and creativity
were recognized and applauded not only by middle-class cariocas but by foreigners who came to the city as well. No longer just "slum dwellers" and "criminals," they danced, spun, and sang their way down the streets, leaving a feeling
of dizzy enchantment in their wake.
As Joia explained, however, these local blocos were not the real "bigstakes" caraval. The major competition was between the much larger escolas
de samba, or samba clubs. Like the blocos, each of the escolas-composed of
literally thousands of participants-developed an original samba composition,
costumes, choreography, and a theme. The parades of the escolas were dominated by massive floats that were flanked by alas, or wings, each with its own
conventionalized role, costumes, and choreography. Although the big escolas
de samba were still associated with the hillside communities where they originated, their members were often far flung. They were managed by professionals
and funded by Rio's powerful tourism department and by bicheiros, the million-
have a bloco right here on the morro, did you know that?" I was repeatedly
asked.
though Brazilian "race relations" and "black culture" had fascinated anthropologists and sociologists for half a century, there was as yet no systematic
This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Thu, 14 Apr 2016 10:36:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
CARNAVAL IN RIO 7
examination of discourses of color, race, and racism among urban poor people
of color. Like the country it describes, scholarship on race in Brazil has had a
dramatic history. Particularly after the publication and translation of the works
of Gilberto Freyre, Brazil's preeminent sociologist-historian, Brazil enjoyed a
reputation as a democracia racial, or racial democracy. Although Brazil was the
last New World country to abolish slavery, Freyre, like so many of his compatriots, believed it to be immune to the antagonistic, systemic forms of racism that
plagued countries such as the United States.
Following the bloodshed and genocide of World War II, UNESCO sponsored anthropological and sociological research in Brazil, with the hope of
documenting how this enormous nation-composed of the descendants of
"Europeans, Africans, and Indians"-accomplished and maintained its celebrated harmony. The results of these studies were equivocal. Those who studied
the industrialized urban centers of the south-most of whom were Brazil-
especially, Azevedo 1955; Bastide and van den Berghe 1957; Bastide and Fernandes 1951,1955; Cardoso and Ianni 1960; Costa Pinto 1953; Ferandes 1965,
1969, 1972; Ianni 1966, 1978; Nogueira 1955; Pereira 1967). However, Florestan Ferandes, the most frequently cited author in this body of literature, argued that racism was but an archaic cultural holdover from the era of slavery,
one that would inevitably wither away as Brazilians of color became more fully
incorporated into the developing capitalist economy.
U.S. researchers, who focused on the rural areas of Brazil's northeast, also
documented the existence of racialized prejudice, but they maintained that the
behavior associated with discriminatory practices was based not on color but on
class (see, especially, Harris 1952, 1956, 1964, 1970; Harris and Kottak 1963;
Hutchinson 1957; Kottak 1967; Pierson 1942; Wagley 1963a, 1963b; Zimmerman 1963). While acknowledging rigid class boundaries and the profound poverty of most of Brazil's people of color, Charles Wagley concluded that "Brazil
remains as a lesson in racial democracy for the rest of the world" (1963b:2).
Summarizing both popular and scholarly assumptions, Harris concluded, "Racial identity is a mild and wavering thing in Brazil" (1964:64).
More recently, scholars from a variety of disciplines have offered unequivocal and cogent challenges to what is now more often than not called the
"myth of racial democracy" (for example, Andrews 1991; Burdick 1993; Fontaine 1985; Hale 1997; Hanchard 1994; Hasenbalg 1979; Skidmore 1974;
Twine 1998). Central to this revisionist scholarship are those studies that use the
analysis of census data to demonstrate the existence of systemic racialized dis-
crimination (for example, Hasenbalg 1979,1985; Lovell and Dwyer 1988; Silva
1981, 1985; Wood and Carvalho 1988). Nevertheless, many of the questions, assumptions, and debates that animated scholarship from the 1950s through the
1970s continue to be recycled both within and outside of the academy. Partly because many Brazilians avoid using words such as negro and preto, which refer
directly to blackness, it is assumed, for example, that people of color do not
identify as black. The failure of Brazil's small black movement organizations to
This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Thu, 14 Apr 2016 10:36:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
8 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
attract the "masses" is frequently taken as evidence that people of color do not
experience or do not recognize racialized oppression. The salience of miscegenation-itself difficult to define in a country in which so many refer to themselves as "mixed"-is often taken as prima facie evidence that racism is not a
homegrown Brazilian ideology or set of practices but an imported product, an
aberration of those who are, in one way or another, "not truly Brazilian." Within
the popular imagination certainly, the carioca carnaval continues to embody,
and, in a sense, to enact, the ideology of democracia racial, in that it is thought
to celebrate the "African contribution" to Brazil at the same time that it demands
with the police; there can be violence," Tomas said. He chuckled softly and
added, "I don't have much luck when I go out." This type of encounter was very
familiar to Tomas-he knew that he must not only cooperate but maintain a respectful, even obsequious demeanor-but his attempt to laugh off his fear and
wounded sense of dignity was only partially successful.
Like others on the morro, Tomas believed that it was his color, even more
than his poverty, that made him constantly vulnerable to such harassment. I
asked him if he ever discussed such incidents with his mother. "No, no, I didn't
tell anyone, no. I got really sad about what happened," he responded in a soft
voice. For Tomas, as for others on the hill, there was no point in talking about
This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Thu, 14 Apr 2016 10:36:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
CARNAVAL IN RIO 9
racism, even among one's intimates. "I know that we have human rights, right?"
he said; "But to complain-there's no way, so you have to let it go. It doesn't do
any good."
The dance that Tomas and his cousin had gone to featuredfunk, largely imported music of the North American rap and hip-hop genres. Such dances, usually held in Rio's morro communities and working-class subutrbios, were typi-
cally frequented by black teenagers, but they were not, for the most part,
conceptualized as a part of cultura negra, or black culture. Tomas's mother and
others of her generation had no fondness for the music, sartorial accessories, and
ritualized leisure activities associated with funk-nor, indeed, did they care for
most genres of foreign pop music. While the raucous and sometimes violent
nighttime world of the funk dances may have represented a kind of generational
hearts of the middle-class people living on the asphalt. Tomas respected his
community and the neighborly ethos that held it together, and, contrary to much
of the conventional wisdom about the nature of racialized identity in his country, he embraced a notion of negritude that was not only peculiarly Brazilian but
carioca. When I asked Tomas if he thought there was something in his country
that one might call cultura negra, he said, without hesitation, "There is Macumba,
African music, pagode, samba, our space within popular Brazilian music."
Tomas had named the dominant contexts and cultural genres that conventionally define black culture in Brazil. "Macumba," a catchall word for the West
African-derived religions of Umbanda and Candombl6, provided a context for
the nurturance and modification of sacred music, which in turn constituted what
some historians of Brazilian music believe to be a point of origin for the secularization, popularization, and hybridization of what Tomas called "African music." The term pagode, while sometimes referring to a particular style or styles
of music, is used more generally to describe the informal and playful gathering
of small groups of musicians in more or less public areas; those in the "audience" often add their voices to the chorus and dance singly or in pairs. Although
pagode shares much, in historical terms, with Iberian musical traditions and
street life, it is often associated, in Rio at least, with poor people of color.
Pagode, for Tomas and his neighbors on the morro, is in turn associated with
samba, the world-famous musical and dance genre that was "invented" by the
povo, or people, and more specifically by the negros, or blacks. When Tomas referred to "our space within Brazilian popular music," he meant not only samba
and samba-inspired rhythms but also popular artists of color.
Samba, as Tomas suggested, was more than the beat that animated the activities of caraval week. Although the bittersweet nostalgia that samba seemed
to invoke almost inevitably was anchored in the magic of caraval, it was also,
for people on the morro particularly, a rhythm that accompanied everyday life.
This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Thu, 14 Apr 2016 10:36:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
10 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
groups. It was only in his role as a sambista, Tomas suggested, that he was
treated decently by the people of the asphalt:
There are many ways, many ways, many ways like this, that we citizens of color
don't have much opportunity. We can be musicians. Because I am a musician and
when I arrive at a place they treat me well, but when I'm not playing, it's another
thing, they treat me differently.... It's a bit difficult for us; it's difficult because
we don't have time to study. We have to work. So, it's difficult for us to open a
window. Because we're workers; most are domestics, women as much as men.
And he who has a better job is the one who knows someone, who has a contact. But
the person who doesn't have that and isn't educated doesn't do anything. So,
there's no chance in life for anything. We don't have a chance, do you understand?
Tomas understood that his tiny professional niche-based on his "authenticity" as a very dark skinned, drum-playing man from the favela-was symbolically and discursively constructed through an ideologically dubious route, but it
was, as he suggested, all he had to bank on as a poor and uneducated black man.
He savored the modicum of respect that the role afforded him and lamented the
fact that because their "instruments weren't good enough" his pagode group had
little success in playing for clubs and other more lucrative venues. When he left
middle-class parties in the wee hours of the morning, he told me, the police, as
though attempting to justify their harassment, often called him a nego safado
("no-account nigger").
As a 19 year old from a very poor family, Tomas had never gone out with a
caraval bloco, nor had he ever been to the Samb6dromo. As a musician for hire,
however, he had a sophisticated sense of the racial and class politics of samba.
"The only thing we receive support for here in Brazil is samba," Tomas told me,
chuckling sardonically: "They gave that to the negros, samba and pagode. And
caraval. ... I play pagode. But we don't have many chances.... There's no investment. No one invests in this. They give us a chance to run along behind but
we are very poor and there's no investment in anything."
Tomas's sense of himself as a sambista who was permitted to "run along
behind" what had become someone else's party was hardly unique. Jorge, who
saw himself as a sambista almost by birthright, also performed for middle-class
patrons. Like Tomas, he was likely to experience a disturbing combination of
pride and humiliation when he was hired to entertain at parties. "The guys, myself, for example-" Jorge said, describing his intimidation on arriving at the
house of a wealthy patron, "I have, even, a feeling of shame when I see this guy's
house. You know how it is?" As Jorge described the occasion, he and his fellow
musicians were initially shown respect. They performed tirelessly, but after a
time they were subjected to racist comments that they were clearly meant to
hear. They were called crioulos, a humiliating racial term that made Jorge's
This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Thu, 14 Apr 2016 10:36:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
CARNAVAL IN RIO 11
blood boil. "He spoke like this," Jorge explained, referring to one of the guests,
The precise history of samba is disputed, but its roots are traced ultimately
to West Africa, the homeland of Brazil's colonial slave population. Batuque (or
batucada), conventionally defined as the rhythmic drumming that accompanies
the Afro-Brazilian religious ceremonies of Umbanda and Candomble (and their
predecessors in both Africa and the New World), is thought to represent the basic model from which more explicitly social and secular music and dance styles
developed. Although contemporary samba incorporates the complex blending
of many strands of influence-which involve dance styles, musical genres, and
the evolution of pre-Lenten festivities in the city of Rio de Janeiro-popular accounts continue to emphasize its association with the city's morros. Martha GilMontero, Carmen Miranda's biographer, echoes the romantic language in which
samba's beginnings are conventionally imagined and described:
From 1870 to 1930 the piquant dance and beat developed in the destitute hillside
favelas of Rio de Janeiro-while in town the highbrow Carioca elites listened to
French and Italian opera . . . [T]he orchestras of the former slaves forfeited the
religious essence of their rituals and the batucada became a profane dance and a
melody with a choreography and a rhythm distinctively Carioca. It was in the
splendor of the morros that the batucada also softened and turned into samba....
The blacks clapped their hands or percussion instruments in three tempos-two
fast and one slow-and danced in a circle. The samba had a relaxing, pleasurable,
funny, thoroughly ludic intention.... Social life in the favelas up on the morro
centered around it, and the sambistas who created this music acquired the attributes of gods among the black population. The rest of the town ignored the pleasures of the very poor and considered the sambistas as noxious elements.
[1989:25-26]
batuque" (1996:39). Chasteen argues that the lundu and the maxixe, popular
dance crazes of the 19th century, represented the "intermediate stages" and "so-
This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Thu, 14 Apr 2016 10:36:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
12 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
whom Chasteen quotes, described the lundu as "a national dance" in which "all
classes, when they put aside formality, restraint and, I might add, decency, sur-
render themselves" (1996:36). White Brazilian men were similarly said to "imitate the movements of the blacks a good deal" (Chasteen 1996:36). The maxixe,
which eclipsed the lundu in the 1870s, was, like its predecessor, associated with
the popular classes, but during the carioca carnaval of the following decade the
dance became, "with its air of subversive wickedness ... a general diversion of
Histories of the Rio carnaval, in fact, emphasize its origins in European traditions. Entrudo, evidently the earliest form of pre-Lenten festivities in the city,
involved neither dance nor music but centered, rather, on unruly water fights
and the general suspension of social norms. Slaves playfully mocked their masters, and women pelted passing men with balls of wax containing scented water.
Partly because civic authorities objected to the social threat implied by entrudo's general mayhem, it slowly waned, and in the 1840s Rio's wealthy imitated the Parisian carnival-exclusive masked balls that involved dancing. The
festivities moved back to the street a decade later, however, as elite men of the
city created parading societies. Although the Rio carnaval is now associated
with the povo, these parading societies and their elite participants originally
the Mardi Gras festivities. They 'entertained the people,' who were relegated to
the role of simple spectators and were forbidden the possibility of gathering on
the street" (1985:14).
Published sources provide different dates for the collapse of this elite control of Rio's public carnaval, but by the latter part of the 19th century, "groups
ple of color-variously called Congos, Cucumbys, cordoes, Ze Pereiras, ranchos, and yet later blocos-emerged from clandestine contexts into public visibility. It was during the 1890s that Rio's journalists began to use the term samba
to describe the dancing performed by these groups (Chasteen 1996:41). Although such groups and their hybrid, evolving polyrhythmic music/dance genres
were officially outlawed, they were particularly difficult to quell by the turn of
the century. "The authorities were doing their best," Chasteen writes, quoting
the newspaper Jornal do Brasil, "but who could police that crowd?" (Jornal do
This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Thu, 14 Apr 2016 10:36:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
CARNAVAL IN RIO 13
Festa da Penha and samba generally were associated with promiscuity, vagrancy, and roguery-the same set of associations that supposedly characterized the hillside communities from which the music and many of its talented
composers had come.3
Journalists and their readerships were divided and ambivalent in their reactions to samba, the increasingly public nightlife associated with it, and the pene-
This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Thu, 14 Apr 2016 10:36:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
14 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
away from dependence on European styles and a focus on the themes and images
thought to be "indigenous" to Brazil-including those "African" cultural mani-
festations previously labeled as "barbaric" and "uncivilized." By the mid1930s, foreign record producers were rushing to capitalize on samba, and the
white "Ambassadress of Samba," Carmen Miranda-the stage name of a Portuguese immigrant who had her start in the more "humble" neighborhoods of
Rio-was born. In the context of the U.S. Good Neighbor Policy and its burgeoning music industry, commercially produced images of Brazil's fruity, sensuous exoticism and hip-swinging dances soon became commonplace in North
America and Europe.
The first escola de samba was organized in 1928, and others were quickly
formed (Queiroz 1985:15). Merging the formal internal structure and pageantry
of the elite parading societies with the samba do morro, the escolas competed for
the prizes offered by Rio's newspapers. During the decade of the 1930s, which
began with the coup of Getulio Vargas-who did much to promote certain forms
sentation. Moura, whose book emphasizes the relationship between Rio's diverse and lively neighborhoods and the development of samba, notes that since
the turn of the century Rio was the "principal center for the production and
consumption of culture" within Brazil and that "the city was the best expression,
and the vanguard of the moment of transition that was then Brazilian society"
This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Thu, 14 Apr 2016 10:36:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
CARNAVAL IN RIO 15
(1983:30). Samba itself, he asserts, was inspired by the "fascination of the city
... and seized every opportunity to conquer the world" (Gil-Montero 1989:25).
Samba and the carioca caraval have long been recognized as critical elements in the conventional discourses and imagery of Brazilian national culture,
The years following the First World War saw the development of a widely endorsed vision of national identity founded on the idea of racial mixing. To many
Brazilians, the post-1917 apotheosis of samba, understood as a blend of African
and Portuguese musical ideas, stands as one of the most persuasive emblems of a
cherished vision of Brazilian identity, linked through carnival to a myth of social
leveling which, though confined to the few days of the festival, still forms part of
The cooptation and repackaging of samba by members of the predominantly white middle and upper classes, and its promulgation as a symbol of national culture and sensibility, suggest remarkable parallels with other histori-
This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Thu, 14 Apr 2016 10:36:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
16 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
anonymous outside of their own communities, have been offered-if anything-a pittance for their compositions. Poor sambistas recall the injustice that
lies at the heart of the history of samba, and, in a far more general sense, contem-
porary discourses among poor cariocas of color suggest that they have never relinquished what might be called a kind of "spiritual stewardship" of samba.
For people such as those in Morro do Sangue Bom, samba may be embraced by the world-and at the present moment, may be commercialized almost beyond recognition-but it remains an invenado do povo, or an invention
of the people, and, more specifically, a coisa dos negros, a black thing. Although
what my informants called the "true sambista" would readily admit that samba
is not really "African" but a uniquely Brazilian, or even specifically carioca,
synthesis, its "authenticity" is nonetheless conceptualized as rooted in blackness and the sensibilities of pessoas humildes, or humble people.
main incomplete. As I would argue is the case for many of the everyday dis-
courses, contradictory ideological currents, symbolic forms of self-representation, and social and political practices that characterize contemporary
Brazilian culture, deeply racialized meanings and oppositions lie just beneath
the surface of public claims of harmony and unity (Sheriff 1997).
Sambodromo Politics
tas of Morro do Sangue Bom the decisive moment came in 1984 with the construction of the Samb6dromo.4 Designed, like the monumental city of Brasilia,
by the modernist architect Oscar Niemayer, the arena marked a massive shift in
carnaval's local and national cultural ecology. The populist governor, Leonel
Brizola, liked to imagine that the Sambodromo was his gift to the working
classes who supported him, but by the early 1990s people in Morro do Sangue
Bom had begun to speak of it as the final straw that broke the back of authentic
samba and the Rio carnaval. Previously the spotlight had been on the public
squares and the broad thoroughfares where the larger escolas de samba shared
space with the smaller blocos in a more loosely organized street pageant in
which the border between participants and spectators was blurred or even, at
moments, nonexistent. The escolas that paraded in the Samb6dromo were being
"invaded," as many people said, by middle-class whites searching less for magic
than for fame and fortune.5 As before, the spectacle was bankrolled by the city's
powerful tourist department and by organized crime. With the construction of
the Samb6dromo, Brazil's major television networks and their "sponsors"-for
whom, arguably, the arena was built-provided additional promotion and generated even more private profits.
This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Thu, 14 Apr 2016 10:36:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
CARNAVAL IN RIO 17
Conversations about the theft of carnaval, as I have previously noted, represented one of the few everyday contexts in which people on the morro explicitly invoked the issue of racism. Daniel, as a former passista in one of the oldest
and most successful escolas de samba in the city (and thus, one must remember,
in the nation and the world), spoke about racism in his country in a very general
and vague way until he hit on the subject of samba. "Samba is a part of black culture," Daniel explained:
Generally the negro is more involved in samba; he has more facility than the white.
It comes from the root, from the blood really.... In the past, there were more ne-
gros in samba. Now it is very commercialized. The true sambista, the sambista
with roots, now he doesn't have the opportunity to parade in an escola de samba
because, monetarily, he doesn't have the conditions. Not even to watch [the carnaval] because it's very expensive, right? Camaval used to be very good. There was a
carnaval of the street.... Now it is very expensive; you can't buy a costume....
You don't participate.
As Daniel would have been the first to admit, parading with the top escolas
de samba had always required an investment of time, sweat, and money. Although most of the clubs' rank-and-file participants were working-class people
of color, the poorest of the poor had always been locked out. In 1977, the majority of those who participated in the big clubs earned between two to five times
the minimum wage (Ribeiro 1981). Club members not only paid monthly dues
but usually had to produce their own funds to pay for the elaborate hand-sewn
costumes. As an air conditioner and refrigerator repairman, Daniel had once
been able to manage. By 1990, as he sadly pointed out, he could no longer afford
the costume of the escola to which he had been devoted, and, adding insult to injury, he could not pay the price of the Samb6dromo tickets, which were by then
sold for at least half of a minimum monthly salary. Daniel hardly relished his
role as a critic on the sidelines, and even could he have afforded the privilege of
observing the spectacle from a seat in the arena, he probably would have disdained it. People like him, he suggested more than once, were supposed to be in
the spotlight, and what was the point of paying hard-earned money to watch
other people having a good time? He had literally been priced out of his own parade.
During the time that I lived in Morro do Sangue Bom, Joia tried to teach me
how to samba. I was, at least, given points for trying, which I was expected to do
This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Thu, 14 Apr 2016 10:36:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
18 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
she would samba with her swollen belly bobbing up and down, clowning. Sometimes she did this at parties, sometimes when she was doing chores around the
house. "You see?" I exclaimed many times: "Your baby is learning to samba before she has learned how to breathe!" After she was born, Daniel held his daughter in his arms and took small gentle samba steps as he softly crooned samba lyrics into her attentive, up-turned face. Joia, I realized, did not think of any of this
behavior as pedagogical but simply as what one did with small children, like
kissing them loudly on the cheek or tickling their toes. Like Daniel, she thought
that perhaps samba really might be "in the blood," a thing of "roots."
As the carnaval season of 1991 approached, Joia fell more and more to ridiculing the white women-often from middle-class and even elite families-who in recent years had begun to monopolize the carnaval floats and the
greedy eye of the television cameras. Although she had expressed wonder and
even irritation at my failure to learn to samba properly, everyone knew, she suggested, that it was mulatas, women of color like herself, who traditionally performed and personified the samba as a dance form. Somehow, skinny blondes
had literally stolen the show. Joia suggested that her pique was hardly idiosyncratic. Her words were part of a generalized commentary-what she called, in
fact, a polemica ("controversy")-that evidently circulated among the morros
of Rio. "This is a bad controversy," she explained, bringing out the magazines
once again: "It is because they are preferred. They're all white and they have
these nice bodies, you know? None of them are dark. It's bad, you know, because samba is a black thing. It began with the negros.... Look at them!
They're all white, very pretty, but can they samba? No! They can't samba at all!"
Like Daniel, Joia had sacrificed to parade with the big escolas. Carnaval
had always demanded sacrifice from poor people, she told me; but with the advent of the Samb6dromo and what appeared to be the increasing gentrification
and "bleaching" of the Rio carnaval, it had gone from difficult to impossible.
As carnaval drew nearer, Jorge asked me how I was planning to celebrate.
Although I would have a friend visiting from the United States, I refused to consider the possibility of going to the Sambodromo. I was waiting for a plan to congeal among my friends on the morro. Jorge, who was chronically unemployed
(except for his occasional gigs as a sambista at private middle-class parties) had
once had the alternative of going out with the community's bloco. Although
modest and small next to the big escolas, the local bloco had been intimate and
unsullied by the ambitions of outsiders. Jorge's own contribution had been significant, and when he performed disciplined work with the bloco, he became an
This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Thu, 14 Apr 2016 10:36:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
CARNAVAL IN RIO 19
artist-far more than the image that people in his own community had of him as
a washed-up malandro, or rogue, who was given to drinking himself into a stupor on Saturday afternoons. But the days of the bloco, as Jorge explained when
we first met, were over. Waving his arm dismissively, he told me how he was
neighborhoods-seemed dispirited and exhausted. Several days before carnaval, Daniel had fallen in the shower and cut his hand; he could neither play his
tambourine nor mix alcohol with the antibiotics he was taking. I had never seen
him so reserved at a party. Other than her freshly marcelled hair and an extra
layer of lipstick, Joia had not gone to any lengths to outfit herself for the festival.
We sat toward the end of the avenue, off to the side, where Tomas and several of
his musician friends played old samba tunes for anyone who would listen.
When the caraval season of 1992 arrived, the comments I heard echoed
those of the previous year. Yvonne, who like Joia and Daniel had spent her teens
and twenties in the thick of Brazil's biggest party, also entered her thirties to find
herself priced out and full of nostalgia for the days when poor, dark-skinned
women such as herself were treated, for the five days of carnaval, like the beloved muses of a nation beside itself with adoration. Like most people on the
morro, Yvonne did not like to talk about the prejudice and discrimination that
dogged her attempts to climb out of poverty, but for her, too, the theft of carnaval was racism writ large. "It has ended," she said, her voice edged with a kind
of patriotically inspired anger; "This thing of the carnaval of the negros-it's
over."
As had many others, Yvonne explained that carnaval had been stolen not
just by the wealthy people of the South Zone who bought their way into the more
visible positions in the escolas de samba. To see the floats dominated by white
women from the elite neighborhoods gravely offended Yvonne, but she knew
that the larger processes of the theft were more complicated than the penetration
of what people called the "white model of beauty" into the one area where
women of color had been given a chance to demonstrate their valor, or value.
"Only the rich," I heard over and over again, "only the ricos can get into the
Samb6dromo." Many of these ricos were gringos, or foreigners, Yvonne told
me, who, with their easy money, contributed to the commodification of carnaval
while understanding nothing of what had once been its deeper meaning.6
People on the morro often expressed ambivalence about carnaval's allure
for gringos. It was the beauty and "hot" sensuality of the mulatas and the morenas
("brown-skinned women") of Brazil that brought droves of foreign men to Rio,
many on the morro implied, not the pale offerings of the city's middle-class
This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Thu, 14 Apr 2016 10:36:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
20 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
citizens and its pricier venues. Even foreign women, I was told, came to Rio in
search of sexual adventures with o negro brasileiro ("a black Brazilian man").
The erotic enchantment of foreigners gave imprimatur to their traditional role as
the stars of carnaval. It was only right that people starving for the sensuous
magic of Brazil should come to the Rio caraval, those on the hill suggested;
and, for their part, they were honored to entertain and charm an appreciative
audience. When I told Joia that the nudity that characterized so much of the modem carioca carnaval would be considered pornographic in my own country, she
about it-when she responded with laughter, "Yeah, right, you all won't show
your own bundas [buttocks], but you come down here to look at ours!"
Scholarly debates about the ideological role(s) of the Rio caraval and the
racialized meanings that inform them partly overlap with, while remaining distinct from, discourses among the city's poor people of color. Chasteen, summarizing this scholarly debate, defines it as centering around the political thrust of
the festival and its use of samba as a national symbol:
The negative view foregrounds socially and racially exploitative dimensions of
current carnival activities in Rio de Janeiro. Other authors have sprung to the defense of the popular carnival, however, finding in it expressions of resistance to
the cultural hegemony of the dominant class. ... To skeptics the glorification of
an Afro-Brazilian dance is a kind of theft, an appropriation of black culture out of
context.... What does all this imply about samba as a national symbol? In the final analysis, does it represent a boisterous triumph or a subtle subversion of racial
equality in Brazil? Does the ostensible celebration of Afro-Brazilian culture actually undermine the struggle for equity by suggesting that it already exists, as many
For the people of Morro do Sangue Bom, I would argue, this kind of "final
analysis" has little bearing on the negotiation of racial meanings in either everyday life or in the extraordinary and ephemeral life of carnaval. Samba may "belong" to negros, it may be a "black thing," an inventao, or invention, of "humble
people," but it is its very role as national symbol that makes it such a valuable
contribuiqdo, or contribution. Without local, national, and international recognition and the commodification that has surrounded it since the 1930s, the "little
bird" of samba, as its traditional stewards know, would never have taken flight.
When people in Morro do Sangue Bom critique the carioca carnaval of the
1990s, they rely less on notions of resistance and cooptation than on the more
concrete and practical processes of theft-those that limit or preclude their actual (as opposed to merely symbolic) participation. The point for them is not that
black culture has been appropriated and depoliticized but that their role as the
nationally and internationally recognized representatives, producers, and performers of the samba-driven carioca carnival has been usurped. Although this
role is based, to a large degree, on racialized stereotypes and gendered, sexualized forms of objectification, it is one that-with something like an ironic wink
This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Thu, 14 Apr 2016 10:36:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
CARNAVAL IN RIO 21
samba since its inception as a modem genre. The contemporary carioca carnaval, which is conventionally understood as a demonstration of democracia ra-
derstandings of the carioca caraval of the 1990s reflect and echo more longstanding struggles, their perception that the construction of the Samb6dromo
marked a dramatic shift in the political economy of the festival is certainly accurate. At the turn of the century, the public performance of poor people of color in
the carnaval was controlled largely through state-sponsored repression-streetlevel practices that involved intimidation, violence, and imprisonment. At the
present moment, the struggle for public space is located within the more "impersonal" forces of intensified commodification. The inflated costs of costumes
turally racist processes are part of a larger pattern that characterizes the realidade, or reality, of modern Brazil. "They used to beat you with the whip," he
said, explaining the continuity between slavery and the racialized conditions of
modem wage labor: "Now they beat you with hunger."
It was during the carnaval season of 1992-when the poorest people on the
morro prepared to honor the nation and drown their sorrows without leaving the
hill-that I at least imagined that I understood the depth of bitterness and longing that Jorge had conveyed when he told me that he now celebrated carnaval by
watching television and getting drunk. Although the surviving blocos still paraded on the Avenida Rio Branco, the national and international spotlight, the
glory, the money, and the power were, as everyone knew, focused elsewhere.
Rede Globo, Brazil's widely watched television network, broadcast the tightly
packaged Samb6dromo spectacle throughout the nation, mesmerizing viewers
not only in the urban centers of the south but in the farthest reaches of the Amazon.
For people on the morro, I realized, it was not that Rio had ceased to represent
and enchant the nation-if anything, the televised spectacle catapulted the
This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Thu, 14 Apr 2016 10:36:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
22 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
carioca carnaval into nationalism's truly moder age-it was simply that it had
sold its soul.
Seeing the spectacle for the first time on the television in Joia and Daniel's
home, I was transfixed, and, in empathy with my companions, I felt nearly simultaneous surges of pride and sadness. There on the morro, I was literally rubbing shoulders with people who had actually gone out with the escolas, who had
participated, who had stood (and danced beyond exhaustion) for something. "I
didn't know!" I kept exclaiming. Out of loyalty I had adopted a dismissive attitude to high-stakes carnaval and had not, until then, imagined the truly monumental scale of its production: thousands of people, adorned with sequins, feathers, and metallic fabrics that caught the klieg lights as they whirled about, their
movements obviously choreographed less for the occasional close-up shots than
for the bird's-eye telephoto views. "Sonhar nao custa nada" [To dream costs
nothing], the members of one escola sang over and over, their central float illuminated by enormous gold dollar signs and reclining women wearing g-strings
and hair-to-toe golden body paint. If I stuck my head out the window of Joia and
Daniel's house, I could hear the bass notes of the samba percussion all the way
tive mastermind of each competing escola, was shown with tears streaming
down his face.7 I asked Daniel why he was crying. "It is very emotional," he responded in a low and uneven voice. He seemed close to tears himself.
Although their approach to the issue of carnaval may be more pragmatic
This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Thu, 14 Apr 2016 10:36:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
CARNAVAL IN RIO 23
"They're all thieves!" Daniel was fond of remarking. Sometimes he referred to the rich, sometimes to the government, and sometimes, it seemed to
me, to the economic and ideological forces that had mangled samba and turned
the city of Rio de Janeiro into a money-grubbing advertisement not for the nation's fragile and redemptive dreams but for its increasing cynicism and moral
decay.
Soon after that year's carnaval was consigned to memory, Rio de Janeiro
began to prepare for the Earth Summit. Heads of state and their representatives
would, for the first time, meet to hammer out a series of global environmental
policies. Representatives from nongovernmental organizations devoted to protecting the natural environment were also convening in Brazil. The city of Rio,
with its magnificent beaches and breathtaking vistas, was an obvious setting for
the meetings. Perhaps, many in Rio hoped, the city could recoup some of the
tourist dollars that had been lost as a result of the highly publicized street crime
and violence of recent years.
Ominously, several weeks before the summit, many of Rio's street children
seemed to have disappeared. The military and civil police began what would
come to be called a limpeza, or cleansing, of the favelas. The charismatic chefe,
or gang boss, of Morro do Sangue Bom was one of their first victims. His death
left the community vulnerable to the incursion of massive, imperialist drugtrafficking gangs, and, a year after I left, the cohesive and vibrant community of
Morro do Sangue Bom became memory. The war that led to its demise was so
explosive that it drew the attention of international media.
The "spirit" of Rio de Janeiro and, more specifically, of the carioca carnaval, as I have suggested, is taken to be metonymic of what is most alluring in
Brazilian culture and character. As my informants pointed out, the Rio carnaval
is (and perhaps always has been) metonymic of darker forces as well. My informants spoke of carnaval in much the same way that they spoke of racism and
other injustices-including the violence preceding the Earth Summit-that de-
trast between public visions of the nation and the racialized political economy
that trapped people of color in what they called miseria ("misery") and fome
("hunger"). The glittering surfaces of carnaval, like the polite discourses of democracia racial-both of which are performed not only for Brazilians but also
for a transnational audience-conceal complex forms of contestation that engage both the political and the moral economy of race in Brazil. Although we are
growing increasingly accustomed to discourses that assert the evaporation of
national boundaries in the context of postmoder globalization, the traffic in
commoditized nationalist symbols and performances, and the often subterranean struggles that surround it, continues to bend local experience to its will.
In the wake of the gang war of 1993, which consumed Morro do Sangue
Bom, most of those who survived fled-some with nothing more than the
clothes on their backs. Nearly everyone I knew, including Joia and Daniel, left
the city of Rio de Janeiro altogether. In their new home in Niteroi, where I later
This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Thu, 14 Apr 2016 10:36:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
24 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
visited them, their teenage son Alberto had learned to play the guitar. "What's
goin' on?" he crooned soulfully, miming the English lyrics of a foreign rock
group called Four Non-Blondes. Daniel, visibly aging and worn but not yet 40,
kept telling me that the younger generation was abandoning its raizes, its roots.
"They disdain the music of their own country!" he lamented; "Samba! Samba is
the best music, our gift to the world!" Although I begged Alberto and his parents
to meet me on the morro, now depopulated and occupied by the military police,
or in the city-anywhere, just to kill saudades, or homesickness-they insisted,
over and over, that they did not miss Rio at all.
Notes
as sites of conflict and contestation over such representation, was proposed by Owen
Lynch, the organizer of the session. I thank him for this and additional insights and for a
close reading of an earlier version of this article. The article also benefited from the com-
ments of Richard Handler, the session's discussant, and from the comments and assistance of Mario Bick, Vincent Crapanzano, Peter Craumer, and Stephen Fjellman. Dan
Segal provided invaluable editorial assistance, and the anonymous reviewers for Cultural Anthropology provided many helpful and insightful comments. The research on
which this article is based was supported by a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation
for Anthropological Research.
1. Morro do Sangue Bom, and all the names I use to refer to informants, are pseudonyms. Sangue bom is a slang expression that literally translates as "good blood." To
say that someone is sangue bom is to suggest that they are "one of us," trustworthy, and
humilde, or humble. For many, the term also has a racial connotation, but unlike so many
other terms that refer to blackness, it has a distinctly positive spin.
2. See Sheriff 1997 for a detailed analysis of the experiential bases and political implications of this silence.
3. Histories of samba, especially Roberto Moura's (1983), also highlight the importance of Tia Ciata, a middle-class woman from Bahia. Her home was said to operate
as both a temple of the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomble and as something of a nightclub and dance hall. Married to a doctor with political connections and thus protected
from the police raids that plagued other such gatherings, Tia Ciata not only acted as a
kind of patron to budding samba composers but also served as hostess to the more daring,
middle-class whites who clung to the fringes of popular nightlife.
This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Thu, 14 Apr 2016 10:36:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
CARNAVAL IN RIO 25
middle-class and elite whites in the planning and performance of carnaval has been
documented elsewhere as well, although it has occurred in somewhat different historical
and ideological contexts. For example, Fry, Carrara, and Martins-Costa (1988), referring to the period of the early 1980s, detail the strongly racialized competition among
carnaval groups in the northeastern state of Bahia. Focusing on an earlier period, von
Simson (1987) examines the forced adoption of the carioca model in Sao Paulo and emphasizes the competition between more traditional carnaval groups and newer ones,
which were increasingly dominated by wealthier, politically connected whites.
6. Many of Rio's middle-class whites, in fact, flee the city during carnaval. As
many well-heeled cariocas told me, they do this not only to take advantage of the fiveday national holiday but also to escape the noise and lewdness. (Not all cariocas approve
of the explicit eroticism, sexual license, and cross-dressing that stereotypically characterize the modern carioca carnaval.) Although people on the morro insist that middleclass whites have stolen carnaval, many of these whites suggest, usually in polite and
implicit language, that they cannot bear the suspension of everyday etiquette that demands that "favelados" maintain a respectful distance from gentefina, or refined people.
Those who escape to quiet mountain and seaside resorts are replaced, however, by North
American and European tourists, as well as by Brazilians from other cities. Both poor
people of color and middle-class cariocas increasingly complain that the Rio carnaval
has become a spectacle "for the gringos."
7. Each escola de samba has its own caravalesco. Much celebrated by the Brazilian media, carnavalescos are responsible for the design, organization, and creative management of the escolas' themes. Guillermoprieto traces the professionalization of the
carnavalesco role to 1959 (1990:66). Usually middle-class white men with artistic training, carnavalescos are often said to be "from outside." Cavalcanti (following Volvelle
1987) has suggested that carnavalescos are "cultural mediators" who construct and con-
trol the complicated interchange between "elite culture" and "popular culture"
(1990:30). They have thus played a pivotal role in the production of the carioca carnaval
Alencar, Edigar de
1968 Nosso Sinho do samba. Rio de Janeiro.
1991 Blacks and Whites in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1888-1988. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press.
Azevedo, Thales
1955 As elites de cor: Um estudo de ascen9ao social. Sao Paulo: Companhia Editora
Nacional.
1957 Stereotypes, Norms and Interracial Behavior in Sao Paulo, Brazil. American
Sociological Review 22(6):689-694.
Bastide, Roger, and Florestan Fernandes
1951 Brancos e negros em Sao Paulo. Sao Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional.
Bastide, Roger, and Florestan Ferandes, eds.
1955 Relac6es raciais entre negros e brancos em Sao Paulo. Sao Paulo: Editora Anhembi.
This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Thu, 14 Apr 2016 10:36:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
26 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Brown, Diana
1994 Umbanda: Religion and Politics in Urban Brazil. New York: Columbia University Press.
Brown, Diana, and Mario Bick
1993 Looking for God in Brazil: The Progressive Catholic Church in Urban Brazil's
Religious Arena. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, and Octavio Ianni
1960 Cor e mobilidade social em florianopolis. Sao Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional.
1990 A tematica racial no carnaval carioca: Algumas reflex6es. Estudos AfroAsiaticos 18:27-44.
1984 On Carnaval, Informality and Magic: A Point of View from Brazil. In Text,
Play and Story: The Construction and Reconstruction of Self and Society. Edward
M. Bruner, ed. Pp. 230-246. Washington, DC: American Ethnological Society.
Ferandes, Florestan
1985 Race, Class and Power in Brazil. Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American
Studies, UCLA/University of California Press.
Fry, Peter
Gil-Montero, Martha
1989 Brazilian Bombshell: The Biography of Carmen Miranda. New York: Donald
I. Fine.
This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Thu, 14 Apr 2016 10:36:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
CARNAVAL IN RIO 27
1994 Orpheus and Power: The Movimento Negro of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo,
Brazil, 1945-1988. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Harris, Marvin
1952 Race Relations in Minas Velhas. In Race and Class in Rural Brazil. Charles
1970 Referential Ambiguity in the Calculus of Brazilian Racial Identity. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 26:1-14.
Harris, Marvin, and Conrad Kottak
Hasenbalg, Carlos
1981 The Hungry Imagination: Social Formation, Popular Culture and Ideology in
Bahia. In The Logic of Poverty: The Case of the Brazilian Northeast. Simon Mitchell,
1957 Village and Plantation Life in Northeastern Brazil. 2nd edition. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Ianni, Octavio
1966 Racas e classes sociais no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Civilizacao Brasileira.
1978 Escravidao e racismo. Sao Paulo: Editora Hucitec.
Jomal do Brasil
Kottak, Conrad
1988 The Cost of Being Nonwhite in Brazil. Sociology and Social Research
72(2):136-138.
Moura, Roberto
1983 Tia Ciata: A pequena Africa no Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Fundacao Nacional de Arte.
Nogueira, Oracy
1955 Rela9oes raciais no municipio de Itapeteninga. In Relacoes raciais entre negros e brancos em Sao Paulo. Roger Bastide and Florestan Ferandes, eds. Pp.
164-179. Sao Paulo: Editora Anhembi.
1967 Cor, profissao e mobilidade: O negro no radio de Sao Paulo. Sao Paulo:
Livraria Pioneira Editora.
This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Thu, 14 Apr 2016 10:36:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
28 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Pierson, Donald
Diogenes 129:1-32.
1992 Carnaval Brasileiro: O vivido e o mito. Sao Paulo.
Raphael, Alison
1981 Samba and Social Control: Popular Culture and Racial Democracy in Rio de
Janeiro. Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University.
Ribeiro, Ana Maria Rodrigues
1981 Samba negro, espoliagao branca: Um estudo das escolas de samba do Rio de
Janeiro. M.A. thesis, Universidade de Sao Paulo.
Sheriff, Robin E.
1997 Negro Is a Nickname that the Whites Gave to the Blacks: Discourses on Color,
Race and Racism in Rio de Janeiro. Ph.D. dissertation, City University of New York.
Silva, Nelso do Valle
Brazil. Pierre-Michel Fontaine, ed. Pp. 42-55. Los Angeles: Center for AfroAmerican Studies, UCLA/University of California Press.
Skidmore, Thomas
1974 Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought. New York: Oxford University Press.
Twine, France Winddance
1998 Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Valenca, Raquel
1983 Palavras de purpurina. M.A. thesis, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro.
Vianna, Hermano Pa es Junior
1994 A descoberta do samba: Misica popular e identidade nacional. Ph.D. dissertation, Museo Nacional do Rio de Janeiro.
Volvelle, Michel
1987 O carnavalesco e sua longa trajet6ria em busca da cidadania. Estudos AfroAsiaticos 13:61-78.
Wagley, Charles
1963a Race Relations in an Amazon Community. In Race and Class in Rural Brazil.
Charles Wagley, ed. Pp. 116-141. New York: UNESCO/Columbia University Press.
Wagley, Charles, ed.
1963b Race and Class in Rural Brazil. 2nd edition. New York: UNESCO/Columbia
University Press.
Wood, Charles H., and Jose Alberto M. De Carvalho
Zimmerman, Ben
1963 Race Relations in the Arid Sertao. In Race and Class in Rural Brazil. Charles
This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Thu, 14 Apr 2016 10:36:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms