Anadelia Romo - First Afro-Brazilian Congress of 1934

Rethinking Race and Culture in Brazil's First Afro-Brazilian Congress of 1934
Author(s): Anadelia A. Romo

Source: Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Feb., 2007), pp. 31-54
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4491775
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J. Lat. Amer. Stud 39, 31-54 o 2007 Cambridge University Press 3 I
doi:Io.1o17/Soo2221i6Xo6oozoz Printed in the United Kingdom
Rethinking Race and Culture in Brazil's

First Afro-Brazilian Congress of 1934*
ANADELIA A. ROMO
Abstract. Bringing together diverse scholars such as Arthur Ramos, Edison Carneiro
and Gilberto Freyre, Brazil's First Afro-Brazilian Congress of 1934 encapsulated a
pivotal transition in the history of the social sciences and race in Brazil. The
Congress, organised by Freyre, represented an attempt by many scholars to break
with racial determinism and to emphasise the importance of culture rather than race.
This approach seemed to offer increased potential for social equality. However, the
new focus on culture reproduced the same hierarchies that scholars were trying to
escape. As this article demonstrates, scholars at the Congress redeemed the black
race through the use of a new cultural framework, but the role ascribed to African
culture was still bound by the same concepts of superiority and inferiority.
Keywords: Brazil, race, intellectual history, social science, diaspora, Afro-Brazilian,

scientific racism
The publication of Gilberto Freyre's Casa grande e senzala (The Masters and the
Slaves) in 1933 marked a turning point in the critique of scientific racism
within Brazil.1 While Freyre's analysis in Casagrande incorporated elements of
Anadelia Romo is Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Texas State

University - San Marcos.
* The research for this article was funded in part by a Research Development Grant from
Texas State University. Janet Olson of the Melville J. Herskovits Collection at
Northwestern University and the ILL Department of Texas State offered prompt and
friendly research assistance. I wish to especially thank Patrick Barr-Melej, James
McWilliams, Allison Tirres, Dwight Watson and the anonymous reviewers at JhI.S for
their insightful comments on early drafts of this article.
1 There is an extensive bibliography on Freyre and I highlight here only the most relevant
works. Maria Lficia G. Pallares-Burke examines Freyre's intellectual debt to the British in
Gilberto Fregre: umt vitoriano dos tropicos (Sdo Paulo, 2005zoo); Jeffrey D. Needell traces the early
biographical and psychological background of Freyre's work in 'Identity, Race, Gender,
and Modernity in the Origins of Gilberto Freyre's Oeuvre', The Almerican Historical Review,
vol. Ioo, no. I (1995); Thomas E. Skidmore sketches the historical context for Casagrande
with 'Raizes de Gilberto Freyre', Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 34, no. I (2002);
Ricardo Benzaquen de Arauijo studies the relation of Casa grande to the modernist move-
ment in Guerra epa7: Casa Grande e Sen ala e a obra de Gilberto Frygre nos anos3o (Rio de Janeiro,
1994). The recent critical edition of Casa grande provides a useful comparison between
Freyre's first edition and his later revisions, as well as the role and reception of Casagrande
in Brazilian intellectual history. Guillermo Giucci et al. (eds.), Casa grande e senzala: edidao
critica (Madrid, 2002).
3 2 Anadelia A. Romo
the reigning scientific views on race and race mixture, his focus on a Brazilian
creole culture signalled a shift away from the biological effects of racial
mixing, or mestifagem, and a new emphasis on the cultural results of this
mixture. By emphasising the African and indigenous contribution to
Brazilian culture, alongside that of the Portuguese, Freyre challenged ideas of
racial mixture that privileged only whiteness in Brazil's future population.
Freyre insisted that, whatever the tone of Brazilian skin, the Brazilian soul
retained black imprints: 'every Brazilian, even the light-skinned fair-haired
one, carries about with him on his soul ... the shadow, or at least the birth-
mark, of the negro'.2 Whatever the biological result of racial mixture, elements
of indigenous, Portuguese, and African culture remained etched in Brazilian
identity and these contributions, including those of the negro, would not
gradually disappear through repeated mixing.3
In the preface to his work Freyre claimed Franz Boas as a central influence
in shaping his views of the primacy of culture. A leader in American
anthropology, Boas concluded from his studies of immigrant children that
culture and environment were formative, while categories of 'race' were less
stable and significant than scientists had assumed.4 Freyre had studied with
Boas for his master's degree at Columbia University in 19z22z, but he was far
from alone in his admiration for Boas and his emphasis on culture.5 Indeed,
the 1930S witnessed a dramatic shift as many Brazilian scholars began to
2 Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the S/aves (Casa-grande & senzala) : A Study in the Development qf1
Bragilian (viilization (1933), trans. Samuel Putnam, 2nd English ed. (New York, 1966),
p. 278. In quoting from Casagrande I have used the translations of the English edition but
made certain to reconcile them with the original first edition in Portuguese. In cases of
discrepancies I have sought to preserve the language of the first 1933 Portuguese edition.
This particular citation in later editions had been changed to 'a sombra, ou pelo menos a
pinta, do indigena ou do negro' but I retain here the version of the first edition, which
specified only 'a sombra, ou pelo menos a pinta, do negro'. Unfortunately the recent
critical edition of Casa grande does not note this significant shift.
3 It is important to note, however, that while some of Freyre's arguments repudiated
whitening, the ideas of Portuguese survival were certainly paramount for Freyre. The use of
racial terms in discussing Brazil is admittedly problematic. Here I attempt to use, whenever
possible, the terms as used by contemporaries and rely principally on categories of negro and
branco, or black and white, as used by authors of the era. I use Afro-Brazilian as a current
term to refer to the culture and peoples of Brazil with African heritage.
4 Freyre, Casa grande (1933), p. xi-xiii. 'Culture' at this time was broadly defined, en-
compassing notions of environment and social setting. I use the term throughout the paper
in this wider sense. George E. Stocking argues that Boas was a transitional figure in the
evolution of the concept of culture within anthropology, and helped imbue it with its
modern meaning. See Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution (Chicago, 1982), p. 233. For a
broader assessment of Boas, see Stocking (ed.), The Shaping ofAAmerican Anthropology I&8-I9ii
(New York, 1974)-
5 Pallares-Burke stresses that Freyre's break from racially determinist ideas dated only from
the mid-I92os. See Um vitoriano, pp. 269-327.
Rethinking Race and Culture in Brazil 33
reconsider ideas of race and to see new salience in the role of culture.6
Historians have generally celebrated this transition as breaking the deter-
minism of racial science and shattering the eugenic pessimism that had
doomed Brazil, as a racially mixed nation, to be forever degenerate.
Questioning the prevailing racial doctrine appeared to open new possibilities
of social and legal equality.7
Yet the promise of equality was in many ways elusive. I argue here that the
shift away from racial categories was significant, but that hierarchies of race
were largely replaced by hierarchies of culture. Though historians have often
glossed over this transition, this turning point in the analysis of race in Brazil
deserves more critical attention. While the move away from racial deter-
minism has often been portrayed as a sharp break with egalitarian impli-
cations, this perceived sea-change may be better viewed in terms of its
continuities.s I argue that the rejection of racial determinism ushered in what
can be seen as a new determinism, this time based on culture. Furthermore,
as this article shows, a more critical look at this turn to culture reveals
that the ranking of cultures effectively reproduced former rankings of race.
Thus scholars redeemed the black race through the use of a new cultural
framework, but the role ascribed to African culture was still bound by the
same concepts of superiority and inferiority. Blacks, now re-labelled as
Africans, retained an inferior position in a hierarchy of cultural influence and
worth.
The debate over African culture came to the fore in 1934 at the First Afro-
Brazilian Congress, organised by Freyre in his hometown of Recife.9 The
6 For the evolution of Brazilian racial thought in this era, see Dain Borges, 'The Recognition
of Afro-Brazilian Symbols and Ideas, 1890-1940', Luso-Brazilian Review, vol. 32, no. 2
(1995); Thomas E. Skidmore, Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought
(Durham, i993) ; Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, The Spectacle of the Races: Scientists, Institutions, and the
Race Question in Brazil, 187o-r93o (New York, 1999); and the essays in Marcos Chor Maio and
Ricardo Ventura Santos (eds.), Rafa, ciencia e sociedade (Rio de Janeiro, 1996).
7 Elazar Barkan, for example, highlights the egalitarian significance of this break in his
study of American and British social scientists. Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism:
Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars (Cambridge,
i992), p. 344.
8 Mariza Correa likewise argues for intellectual continuities during this period in Brazil but
traces a more diffuse notion of determinism that served to restrict individual liberties.
Correa, As ilusies da liberdade: a Escola Nina Rodrigues e a antropologia no Brasil (Braganpa
Paulista, zooi), pp. 257-8. Lourdes Martinez-Echaz bal proposes that continuities were
important to the transition in racial thought across Latin America as well as Brazil in 'O
culturalismo dos anos 30 no Brasil e na Am&rica Latina: deslocamento ret6rico ou mu-
danFa conceitual?' in Rafa, ciencia e sociedade.
The papers for the congress were published in two successive volumes: Estudos Afro-
Brasileiros (Rio de Janeiro, 193 5) and Novos estudosAfro-Brasileiros (Rio de Janeiro, 1937), both
reprinted in Recife in 1988.
34 Anadelia A. Romo
event brought leading scholars of race together just at the time when notions
of racial determinism were beginning to be questioned and ideas of culture
were gaining new currency. As the French scholar Roger Bastide later
wrote, the congress 'lay the foundations for a distinctive Africanology'
as Brazilian scholars began to 'break the umbilical cord to Europe [and]
suddenly became aware of the value of cultural traits which had come
from Africa'.1? Although contemporaries regarded its significance as para-
mount for shaping the field of race studies, the congress, along with
its successor held in Bahia in 1937, has been largely neglected by later
scholars."
I examine here three central figures at the Congress who highlight the
tensions in the field generated by the new turn to culture: Gilberto Freyre,
Arthur Ramos and Edison Carneiro. Though these scholars were anxious to
reject the biological determinism of racial categories, cultural categories
proved no less damning. In agreement on the importance of culture as a
concept, they differed dramatically on the role that they would grant African
culture in Brazil. The Congress, intended to consolidate a field in its infancy,
was in fact more remarkable for revealing the roots of a deep rupture in
approaches to the study of Afro-Brazilian culture. These splits developed
along regional as well as methodological lines, and most contentious was the
role and place of Africa.12
Clustered in state museums and other institutions, early scholars of race
met primarily outside the academy and these types of congresses represent
precious evidence for the development of the social sciences.la Historians
have overlooked the importance of the Afro-Brazilian Congress as a forum
to share new approaches, despite the explicit attention devoted to developing
'0 Roger Bastide, 'The Present Status of Afro-American Research in Latin America', I)aedalus
103, no. 2 (1974), p. 112.
11 An overview of the state of the social sciences in Brazil in 195 2 ranked the congress and its
successor among the most formative events in the development of the field, although the
ranking was admittedly carried out by one of the former participants, Edison Carneiro.
L. A. Costa Pinto and Edison Carneiro, As ciincias sociais no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 195 5),
p. 21. As I note below, Carneiro would come to be highly critical of the congress, but still
apparently continued to view it as significant.
12 Freyre, in hosting the Congress in Recife, attempted to establish the region as the geo-
graphical and intellectual centre of Afro-Brazilian studies. For the regional rivalries stimu-
lated by the Congress and the development of Afro-Brazilian studies, see Anadelia A.
Romo, 'Race and Reform in Bahia, Brazil: Primary Education 1888-1964', Ph.D., Harvard
University, 2004, esp. pp. 82-1o5. Correa also agrees on the importance of regional rivalry:
see Antropologas, p. 167.
13 For the modern development of the social sciences in Brazil, see Schwarcz, Spectacle
of the Races, and Sergio Miceli (ed.), Historia das ciincias sociais no Brasil, vol. i (Sio Paulo,
1989). Fernando de Azevedo gives a vibrant portrait of the Brazilian social sciences at
mid-century in Brazilian Culture: An Introduction to the Study of Culture in Brazil (New York,
195 0).
the outlines of a new discipline.14 For social scientists the opportunities for
intellectual exchange centred upon such meetings: Brazil was still a young
republic without a university tradition. Scholars of race in this era were
forced to train in medicine or law, the only options for higher education until
the foundation of the first Brazilian university in 1934. In 1929 the First
Brazilian Eugenics Congress had been a critical forum to hash out contro-
versies over the meanings of race.15 The First Afro-Brazilian Congress, only
a few years later, offers an ideal site to analyze the changing conceptions of
race in Brazil at a key moment of transition.
Intellectual foundations
The congress represented a transition in racial thought, but one that built
upon significant intellectual precedents. By the mid-9g2os and early 1930s
scholars across the disciplines had begun to reconsider the bleak assessment
of Brazil's future dictated by theories of racial science. Such theories, after all,
had offered only the most abysmal possibilities for Brazil's population. For
racial scientists who subscribed to beliefs of white superiority, Brazil's con-
siderable African origins constituted an insurmountable obstacle to progress,
while racial mixture, extensive throughout Brazil's history, had been linked
by racial science to problems as diverse as criminality, sterility and degener-
acy.16 Such a dismal view held little hope for Brazilian intellectuals interested
in constructing a positive and cohesive national image.
The first critical response to racial theories in Brazil rejected the de-
generation predicted by racial mixture but determinedly continued to
champion a white ideal. The head of Brazil's National Museum, Joao Batista
de Lacerda, granted official sanction to a particularly Brazilian solution that
challenged pessimistic views of racial mixing. Lacerda, along with others,
14 For a general overview see Robert Levine, 'The First Afro-Brazilian Congress:
Opportunities for the Study of Race in the Brazilian Northeast', Race, vol. 1 5, no. 2 (1973)-
Beatriz G6is Dantas cites the congress in Recife, as well as the Afro-Brazilian Congress of
1937 in Bahia, as critical events in the process of idealising and reifying 'pure' African
traditions
1988), pp.in192-201.
Brazil inMariza
I 'oL.,i Correa
Ntago epapai
has a branco: usos e abusos
more recent, albeitdebrief,
,- ficaappraisal
no Brasilof
(Rio de congress
the Janeiro,
in Antropdlogas e antropologia (Belo Horizonte, zo2003), p. 167; and Ilusoes, pp. 223-9. Livio
Sansone marks the congress of 1934 and its successor in Bahia in 1937 as the initiation of a
contentious field of race studies, but does not analyse the congresses themselves. Sansone,
'Um campo saturado de tens6es: o estudo das rela?6es raciais e das culturas negras no
Brasil,' Estudos Afro-A siaiticos, vol. 25 (2002), p. 7.
15 Nancy Stepan, 'The Hour of Eugenics:' Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America
(Ithaca, 1991), pp. 53-4.
16 Dain Borges, "Puffy, Ugly, Slothful, and Inert': Degeneration in Brazilian Social Thought',
Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 2 5, no. 2 (i 993). Stepan traces the use of racial science
in Latin America in 'The Hour of Eugenics'. For the development of racial science more
generally see Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution.
proposed that Brazil's population, though mixed, was progressively whiten-

ing and that the superiority of white blood would ensure white dominance in
the make-up of the future nation. In 191 I, Lacerda claimed confidently to an
international audience of scientists that the mixed race would gradually dis-
appear and would 'coincide with the parallel extinction of the black race in
our midst'.1 This ideology of whitening came under increasing criticism, but
continued to be advanced in the work of Brazilian scholars into the 1930s.
Oliveira Viana, for example, one of the most avid proponents of whitening,
published his definitive statement on the issue in 1920 with his landmark
Populapfes meridionaes do Brasil and continued to emphasise the idea of black
inferiority in his preface to the second edition of 193 318
Ideas of racial determinism had been contested in Brazil in the early
twentieth century by isolated figures. The physician Manoel de Bomfim and
statesman Alberto Torres both wrote passionate appraisals of Brazil's
problems, insisting that they were not racial in origin.19 The greatest chal-
lenges to racial science began to gather in the early 1920s, however, spurred
by a public health movement that offered a new diagnosis of Brazilian so-
ciety. The problems in the Brazilian population were not racial, they argued,
but medical, and therefore might be cured.20 The anthropologist Edgar
Roquette-Pinto, who later replaced Lacerda as the head of the National
Museum, echoed the conclusions of the public health movement. In his role
as president of the Brazilian Eugenics Conference of 1929, he refuted much
of the science on the dangers of racial mixing and insisted that issues of
hygiene and education were more important than those of race.21 Racial
science as a whole began to suffer increased questioning from scientists
within Brazil as well as from outside scholars. At the same time, a powerful
nationalist movement advocated that imported doctrines be replaced with
closer analysis of Brazilian realities. Intellectuals in Sao Paulo's Modern Art
Week of 1922 as well as the North Eastern regionalist movement of the late
17 Cited in Skidmore, Black into White, p. 66. Immigration of white Europeans would speed
this process of whitening and thus the race of potential immigrants was an important factor
for policy makers. See Jeffrey Lesser, Negotiating National Identity: JImngrants, Minorities, and
the Struggle for Ethnicity in BraZil (Durham, 1999). For Brazilian theories of whitening, see
Skidmore, Black into White, esp. pp. 64-77 and 2oo-5. For the role of Lacerda, see Giralda
Seyferth, 'A anthropologia e a teoria do branqueamento da raga no Brasil: a tese de Jodo
Batista de Lacerda', Revista do Museu Paulista, vol. 30 (198 5).
18 See Jeffrey D. Needell, 'History, Race and the State in the Thought of Oliveira Viana',
Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 75, no. I (199 5), P. 2.
19 See Skidmore, Black into White, pp. 1x 3-23.
20 Gilberto Hochman, A era do saneamento: as bases dapolitica de sazideptblica no Brasil (Sdo Paulo,
1998).
21 Stepan, 'The Hour of Eugenics', p. I6o-2. The role of Roquette-Pinto in challenging these
racial ideas at the congress is also cited by Freyre in his preface to the first edition of Casa
grande (Rio de Janeiro, 193 3), p. xii.
I920s strove to uncover and promote particularly native ideals.22 With the
revolution of 1930 such efforts gained official sanction. Get'lio Vargas and
his advisors sought to define and promote a new sense of Brazilian national
identity, or brasilidade, as questions of nationalism and race took an increas-
ingly central role in state policy and rhetoric.23
The Afro-Brazilian Congress of Ip94
In 1934 the American anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits received an in-

vitation for Freyre's ambitious First Afro-Brazilian Congress. The invitation
proclaimed that the purpose of the event was to 'study problems of race
relations in Brazil and to trace African influence in the cultural development
of the Brazilian people'. The congress would examine the 'problems of
ethnography, folklore, art, sociology, and social psychology' and would also
include exhibitions by artists.24 The effort to 'trace African influence' was
not entirely new, as social scientists had long struggled to pinpoint the nature
of African impact in Brazil. Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, for example, a
specialist in legal medicine and one of the earliest scholars of Brazilian race,
dedicated his research in turn-of-the-century Bahia not to negros, pretos or
pardos, but to africanos.25 The questions that plagued scholars of race in Brazil
revolved not just around questions of where Brazilians fit within a colour
22 Wilson Martins stresses the nationalist link between the regionalist and modernist move-
ment in 71e Modernist Idea (Westport, I979). JoO() Cruz Costa highlights the nationalist
preoccupation of the interwar period in A. History f Ideas in Bra i/ (Berkeley 1964), p. z6'.
23 Daryle Williams traces the conflicts in defining brasi/idade in Oilzure Wars hi Brazil: 7be firs!
I argas Regime, y93o-i94y (Durham, 2001).
24 The invitation highlighted the participation of Arthur Ramos, Gilberto Frevre, Edison
Carneiro, Mario Marroquim, Ulysses Pernambucano and Renato Mendonpa. Jose
Valladares to Melville J. Herskovits, 20 September 1934, Melville J. Herskovits Papers,
Series 35/36, Northwestern University Archives, Evanston, Illinois. Jos& Valladares was
the secretary for the event and he, rather than Freyre, issued the invitation to Herskovits.
The role of Herskovits in Brazilian anthropology is significant, although I do not address it
here as it is more relevant to the second Afro-Brazilian Congress in Bahia. See Romo,
'Race and Reform', pp. 125-37.
25 Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, Os africanos no Brasil (1932) 8th ed. (Brasilia, 2004). Nina
Rodrigues was a follower of the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso. Though he pro-
vided valuable ethnographic studies that later scholars would often return to, he ap-
proached African culture as a problem to be solved. Corr&a examines his career and his
legacy for other scholars, particularly Arthur Ramos, in Ilusies. Another pioneer in the study
of race in Brazil was the late nineteenth-century literary critic Silvio Romero. Romero
famously argued that Brazil needed to study blacks as an object of science and was one of
the earliest intellectuals in Brazil to embrace miscegenation as a potentially positive force.
See Marshall C. Eakin, 'Race and Identity: Silvio Romero, Science, and Social Thought in
Late i9th Century Brazil', Luso-Brazi/ian Review, vol. 22, no. 2 (1985). The amateur eth-
nologist Manuel Querino in Bahia continued much of Nina Rodrigues' focus into the
1920s, but as a whole, there were few national studies of race in the early decades of the
twentieth century.
38 Anadelia A. Romo
spectrum of preto, pardo or branco, but also around the question of African
culture and influence in Brazil: questions of race had long been intertwined
with questions of origins.
Freyre was deeply concerned with African origins in organising the Afro-
Brazilian Congress and his influence was clearly visible in the papers selected.
As a whole these focused on the past, on the institution of slavery, and on
the nature and impact of racial mixing in Brazil, concerns that also domi-
nated Freyre's own work. Many of the scholars remained mired in the bio-
logical concerns of an earlier era and still attempted to assess the results
of mestigagem in rigorous scientific terms, using extensive anthropometric
measurements. Geraldo de Andrade, for example, a recent graduate from the
Recife Medical School, used cranial indices and colour indices to conclude
that the mulatto population of Pernambuco was whitening.26 His research
represented one branch of scholarship that sought to quantify the results of
racial mestifagem and report back optimistic findings that minimised black or
'regressive' influences.
Other authors departed from this concern over physical indicators, how-
ever, and questioned the ultimate relevance of race. The work of Juliano
Moreira, former director of the National Mental Asylum in Rio, used intel-
ligence tests and other evidence to argue that environment, not race, was the
most important factor in mental development. Moreira had passed away in
1933, but his research was seen as so relevant to the conference that his
widow presented a paper with selections from his work over the previous
thirty years.27 Moreira argued repeatedly that the negro and mestifo bore little
responsibility for their current status; rather, Brazil's specific historical and
cultural tradition had created the context for contemporary social problems,
problems that had been mistakenly blamed on race and mestiFagem.28 The
summary of his research concluded with a ringing endorsement of nurture
over nature. In his opinion, barring cases of physical defects, 'it is certain in
every case that an individual removed from a socially inferior setting and
moved to a better environment at an early point will develop in a surprising
manner'.29
While Moreira thus stressed the role of social and environmental factors as
more important than race, other authors began to question implicitly the
validity and usefulness of racial measurements, and reported difficulties in
finding original, pure racial types: the 'pure' negro could not always be found
and isolated in the laboratory. Jose Bastos de Avila, an anthropologist from
26 Geraldo de Andrade, 'Nota anthropologica sobre os mulatos pernambucanos', in Estudos,

p. 262.
27 WidowJuliano Moreira, 'Juliano Moreira e o problema do negro e do mestipo no Brasil', in
Novos estudos. 28 Ibid., p. 15o0. 29 Ibid.
Rethinking Race and Culture in Braml 3 9
Rio's National Museum, began with the assumption that racial differences
did indeed matter. His research sought to refine a reliable biometric index to
measure the extent of African influence and heritage.30 The Director of the
National Museum, renowned anthropologist Roquette-Pinto, had used such
an index to categorise adults and Bastos de Avila attempted to replicate the
findings in the children of Rio's public schools. He was forced to conclude,
however, with some frustration, that obtaining precise measurements was
almost impossible. This stemmed, he believed, not only from miscegenation
within Brazil, but also racial mixing that had occurred in Africa. Pure racial
types proved difficult to quantify and uncover and pointed subtly to the
futility of trying to isolate Brazil's diverse racial origins. All of these authors
then, searched for African influence and found it to be unimportant to
understanding the larger context of Brazil; in one formulation it might be
rapidly disappearing, in another mediated by a benevolent environment, and
in a third, impossible to isolate and thus a dead end for study. Freyre's own
contribution would echo many of these conclusions.
Fregre: redemption of the African ?
Freyre's intellectual trajectory has perhaps been the most studied of those
scholars participating in the conference, but his role in the conference has
not received as much attention. He presented only one formal paper to the
Congress. Entitled, 'Bodily Deformations in Negro Fugitives', the paper
dedicated close study to runaway slave advertisements from Brazilian
newspapers in the nineteenth century.3a Freyre argued that the physical de-
scriptions of the slaves' bodies shed light on the conditions of Brazilian
slavery; slave-owners, anxious to ensure the return of their human property,
carefully documented injuries, deformities and distinguishing marks to help
authorities identify individual slaves. In an exhaustive and sometimes over-
whelming catalogue of physical ailments and problems, Freyre attempted to
diagnose the ills faced by slaves in Brazil. Some assessments bore medical
30 Jose Bastos de Avila, 'ContribuiFio ao estudo do Indice de Lapicque (nota previa)', in

Estudos. Bastos de Avila was engaged in services for the prominent educational reformer,
Anisio Teixeira. Teixeira occupied his post in Rio during this time and expressed con-
siderable interest in studying Rio's students scientifically, also engaging the assistance of
Arthur Ramos, who served as chief of Mental Hygiene for Rio's public schools. For these
educational reformers in Rio, see Jerry Divila, Diploma of Whiteness: Race and Social Poligy in
Brail, i917-i94y (Durham, 2003), esp. pp. 35-42. For a study of Teixeira's reforms in his
native Bahia, and their deeply racist underpinnings, see Romo, 'Race and Reform',
pp. 48-63 and pp. 199-23 5.
31 Gilberto Freyre, 'Deformag6es de corpo dos negros fugidos', in Novos estudos. His essay
was expanded and published much later in O escravo nos anuincios de'jornais brasileiros do siculo
XIX(Sio Paulo, 1979 [19631).
40 Anadelia A. Romo
insight and others seemed purely speculative, an effect heightened by his

failure to use footnotes or cite sources.32
The paper highlights Freyre's efforts to refute racial science as well as his
struggle with the retention and role of African culture. Freyre acknowledged
that negros in Brazil were assumed to have significant problems, but insisted
that racial or national origins played little role in their creation. His writing
attempted to address common misconceptions directly, as when he argued
that the advertisements 'show that the negro imported from Africa to Brazil
did not bring bad genes or transmit African ills and diseases, as is so often
heard, but has been corrupted (desprestigiado) in his eugenic qualities and
native virtues by deformations which clearly stem for the most part from
social and Brazilian causes'.33 Freyre worked to dispel notions that the
African contribution to Brazil had been a negative one: 'although of course
we cannot forget that in some cases [negros] are carriers of African defects and
illnesses, these are found in far less significant numbers than the carriers of
illnesses and vices acquired here - in contrast with the image of the socially
pathological negro, the figures who appear throughout the announcements
are, in great number, admirably eugenic: negros and negras who are strong, tall,
attractive, well-formed, their teeth white and perfect'.34 These 'admirably
eugenic' praises make it clear that Freyre did not dismiss the role of race and
biology altogether, but rather specified that his research had found blacks to
be a noble rather than an inferior race. While for the most part Freyre used
the terms negro or preto rather than africanos to describe runaway slaves, these
passages reveal a deep underlying concern with African origins.
For a better understanding of the tension between ideas of race and cul-
ture in Freyre's work it is worth returning to the stance taken by the author
only a year earlier, in Casa grande. Freyre's stated objective in Casa grande was
to give priority to ideas of culture, not race, although this intention was not
carried through consistently. Freyre began the work by explaining that his
understanding of race had been transformed by Franz Boas. From Boas he
had 'learned to regard as fundamental the difference between race and cul-
ture, to discriminate between the effects of purely genetic relationships and
those resulting from social influences, the cultural heritage and the milieu. It
is upon this criterion of the basic differentiation between race and culture
that the entire plan of this essay rests, as well as upon the distinction to be
made between racial and family heredity'.35 As Ricardo Benzaquen notes,
32 The medical arguments used by Freyre in his article also received attention in Casa grande
and were important in supporting his views that the problems of Brazilian blacks might
ultimately be cured, or changed. For the influence of the public health movement in Casa
grande see Luiz Antonio Teixeira, 'Da rapa a doenpa em Casa-grande e senzala', Histeria,
Cincias, Sadide, vol. 4, no. 2 (1997). 33 'Deforma?6es de corpo', pp. 247-8.
34 Ibid.; p. 248. 35 Freyre, Masters and the Slaves, p. xxvii.
Rethinking Race and Culture in Brazil 4 I
this desire to substitute culture for race accounts for the fact that in Casa
grande we see Jews rather than Semites, Europeans rather than Aryans, and
notably, an involved discussion of the African origins of Brazil's slaves rather
than discussion of blacks as a race.36 Though it may have been intermittent,
the emphasis on cultures meant that Freyre was forced to turn to Africa to
sketch the traits of blacks in Brazil.
Yet in this transfer from ideas of race to culture the concept of rank and
superiority remained. In Freyre's assessment, Africa contained a wide spec-
trum of cultures and some were clearly superior to others. He insisted that to
see all Africans as inferior was a mistake and set about to prove that while
inferior cultures might exist within Africa, their impact, luckily, had been
limited within Brazil. Freyre explained that, as a whole, Brazil had been
highly selective in incorporating members of African culture: 'It is the
anthropo-cultural and historico-social aspects of African life that seem to us
to indicate that Brazil benefited from a better type of colonist from the 'dark
continent' than did the other countries in America'.37 It is often claimed
that Freyre's work celebrated the African contribution to Brazil, yet this is
not entirely true. Indeed, as he claimed, it was important 'to determine the
cultural area in which the slaves originated and to avoid the mistake of seeing
in the African the single and indistinct figure'.38 His objective in delineating
different cultural groups of Africa was to uncover 'not only the degree but
the moment of culture that they brought with them'. The concept of 'de-
gree' of culture revealed Freyre's preoccupation with rank. But the 'mo-
ment', or timing, proved equally important because in Freyre's view the
regions of Africa most influenced by Islam 'were culturally superior' to other
regions and cultures and the intensity of Islamic penetration spread and
changed over time.39 In his view Muslims' sophisticated literate religion el-
evated them above practitioners of 'animistic' religions that he considered
more primitive.40 Freyre, in his effort to emphasise the 'elite' nature of
African immigration to Brazil, therefore devoted extended time to docu-
menting the presence of African Muslim slaves.
Freyre's praises of the 'civilizing function' of some African cultures were
thus set against his dismissal of a large contingent of Africans, and in par-
ticular, the Bantu, as inferior and brutish.41 Though Brazil had long been
36 Benzaquen, Guerra e pa. pp. 40-I. Benzaquen notes, however, that the section on African
origins is somewhat of a counterpoint to this trend. In fact Freyre used racial terms
extensively to characterise peoples from different areas of Africa. His research on the
region relied principally on the work of Melville J. Herskovits and his sketch of African
cultural zones in 'A Preliminary Consideration of the Culture Areas of Africa', American
Anthropologist, vol. 26, no. I (1924). 7 Freyre, Masters and the Slaves, p. 30o6.
38 Ibid., p. 298. 39 Ibid., p. 298. 40 Ibid., see especially pp. 314-21.
41 This discussion of African origins placed Freyre in the middle of a long-standing debate
concerning Brazilian slaves, one that began at the turn of the century. At that time Silvio
42 Anadelia A. Romo
assumed to have a predominant Bantu element, Freyre used Nina Rodrigues

and others to argue that this view was mistaken: 'Slaves were brought in
large numbers from other African cultural areas as well, and many of these
areas were superior to that of the Bantus. Brazilian society in its formative
stage benefited from the best that African Negro culture had to offer'.42
Freyre attempted to account for this selectivity by claiming that Brazilians
sought out slaves for sexual purposes and mining rather than brute agricul-
tural labour. Brazilians had chosen more attractive Africans from metal-
working societies that 'accordingly possessed a higher degree of culture'.43

Freyre's emphasis on culture rather than race meant a shift away from racial
assessments of blacks, but brought a new attempt to pinpoint the nature of
different African contributions using cultural labels as substitutes for racial
categories. A search for roots meant that hierarchies could be reinforced, but
this time through inferior and superior cultures rather than races.
Yet ideas of both culture and race in Casa grande were always mediated by
ideas of environment, though Freyre's view of the transformative power of
Luso-tropical culture would reach its fullest expression only later.44 By I93 3,
Freyre had developed a neo-Lamarckian view that granted a significant role
to the influence and inheritance of traits with origins in the surrounding
environment and society.45 This view, indeed, is also present in Freyre's
paper for the first Afro-Brazilian Congress and it allowed him to give great
priority to Brazilian culture. Freyre's understanding of Lamarckian ideas had
two important implications for his analysis presented at the Congress. First,
it allowed him to insist that Africans had arrived in good form, but that their
physical and social advantages had been altered by the effects of slavery and
the Brazilian setting. Freyre's views of heredity understood that these ills
from slavery had been passed down and inherited by current generations; his
diagnosis within the article, therefore, addressed the present condition of
blacks as much as their previous situation under slavery. Abuses under
slavery were significant not only for their original impact, but also for their
continued and still-present role in degrading the black population of Brazil.
Neither race nor African culture could be blamed for this degradation,
Romero had asserted the predominance of Bantu Africans in Brazil, while Nina Rodrigues
had countered with an emphasis on the Sudanese, at least in the context of Bahia. This
debate betrayed concerns far beyond those of basic geography, and touched upon ques-
tions central to Brazilian national identity. 42 Ibid., p. 299. 43 Ibid., p. 308.
44 Ricardo Benzaquen also notes the contradictions in Freyre's continued stress on climate
and environment. Guerra epa, pp. 3 8-40. The idea of climate then, ironically, came to play
a greater role in Freyre's work as it came to lose its explanatory power for social scientists
as a whole.
45 For the importance of neo-Lamarckian thought in Latin America, see Stepan,' The Hour of
Eugenics '.
however, Freyre instead viewed the corrosive influence of slavery and the
Brazilian social setting as the source of contemporary problems.
Freyre finished his paper by warning that while Brazil's African ancestors
should not be romanticised as faultless 'demi-gods,' it was time to absolve
them from blame for the 'ills and diseases they developed since they would
have probably developed in another race imported and subjected to the same
regime of slavery in a nation of mono-culture'.46 For Freyre, African origins,
though introduced to address potential counter-arguments and anticipated
protests of African inferiority, were a mere backdrop to the Brazilian scene,
where their importance became relevant only in a general, distant way. Any
group of people, according to Freyre, would show the same results if ex-
posed to the Brazilian setting and forced into Brazilian slavery. In the end,
for the purposes of his article, Freyre saw little use in tracing African
characteristics or discussing problems of race: Brazilian culture and the
abuses of slavery were the most important factors in shaping the Afro-
Brazilian population and trumped, indeed, any distinctiveness about African
culture as a whole. In this way, Freyre once again engaged in a ranking of
cultures: Brazilian culture, the article implied, was by far the most formative
and important. The message for African culture was paradoxically both re-
demptive and dismissive as Freyre attempted to dismantle racial arguments
for the state of blacks in Brazil.
Arthur Ramos and the search/for the primitive African
The psychologist Arthur Ramos agreed in many ways with Freyre's portrait
of Afro-Brazilians as a degraded group, but gave priority to the continued
relevance of African culture. Ramos had studied at Bahia's school of medi-
cine, with a focus on psychiatry and psychoanalysis. After heading the

Nina Rodrigues Institute in Legal Medicine in Bahia, he moved to Rio in
the early 1930s and became the Secretary of Mental Hygiene for Rio's
public schools and later the first chair of Social Psychology at the newly
created Federal University in Rio.47 He published his first works on race
in this period: in 1934 O0 negro brasileiro: etnograjia religiosa e psicanialise (The
Brazilian Negro: Religious Ethnography and Psychoanadysis), and, in the following
46 Freyre, 'Deformag6es de corpo', p. 2o0.

47 There is little work done on Ramos. Correa examines his early career in Ilusdes, pp. 230-52.
For his later career, see Olivia Maria Gomes da Cunha, 'Sua alma em sua palma: identifi-
cando a 'rafa' e inventando a napio', in Dulce Pandolfi (ed.), Repensando o Estado Novo (Rio
de Janeiro, I999). His ambiguous legacy in Brazilian anthropology is made clear by the
critical assessment of his work in his obituary by scholars Florestan Fernandes, Octavio de
Costa Eduardo, and Herbert Baldus: see 'Arthur Ramos, 1903-1949', Revista do Museu
Paulista, N. S. vol. 4 (1950).
44 Anadelia A. Romo
year, a volume on black folklore and psychoanalysis.48 In 1934 he also

participated in the first Afro-Brazilian Congress and, three years later,
Freyre would ask him to write the introduction to papers published from the
congress.49
Ramos was deeply influenced by Sigmund Freud and by the French psy-
chologist Lucien Levy-Bruhl, who had postulated that 'primitive' peoples
were guided by a view of the world that was mystical and illogical.50 An
interest in the idea of primitive mentalities guided much of Ramos' early
research, and the fact that this interest led him to study Afro-Brazilian re-
ligion tells much about his theories about race.51 His characterisation of
Afro-Brazilian culture as primitive suggested several potential assumptions:
either that blacks as a race were primitive, or that Brazil offered a primitive
environment, or that blacks in Brazil retained significant elements from a
primitive region such as Africa. Ramos generally skirted the issue of race and
biology; it was not his chief interest nor was he particularly eager to make
social critiques of Brazil. Instead he turned to the world of mentalities and
the subconscious and argued that these elements had survived the journey
from Africa and remained central to Afro-Brazilians. Ramos' methodology
is not outlined in any detail in the article presented at the Congress, but
his larger work published in the same year does give us a better sense of
his methodology and assumptions. As he wrote in the preface to his book
0 negro brasileiro:
In this essay studying 'the collective representations' in the religion of the back-
wards classes of the Brazilian population, I absolutely do not endorse, as I have
repeated various times, the theories of negro inferiority or incapacity for civilization.
These collective representations exist in any culturally backward social group. They
are a consequence of magical and pre-logical thought, independent of any anthro-
pological-racial questions, since they could arise in other conditions and in
any ethnic group - in backward cultural groups, the poor social classes, children,
nervous adults, in dreams, in art. ... These concepts of 'primitive' and 'archaic'
48 Ramos, 0 negro brasileiro: ethnographia, rel/'iosa e pyschanalnyse (Rio de Janeiro, 1934), and
OJo/k-lore egro no Brasil: .demopsycho/ogia e psychoanalnyse (Rio de Janeiro, 193 5).
49 Ramos wrote the introduction for the second volume of papers which was not published
until 1937.
50 Ultimately Levy-Bruhl's position was in fact relativist, as he did not insist on the superiority
of a logical worldview, but this was not widely acknowledged at the time. Levy-Bruhl
ultimately came to recant his theory and, in notebooks published posthumously in 1939,
argued that logical and illogical thought was common to both worldviews. Robert A. Segal,
'Review: Relativism and Rationality in the Social Sciences', Journal of Religion, vol. 67, no. 3
(1987).
51 By later years this emphasis on the primitive would come under attack. See the response by
Ramos to his critics in 0 negro brasileiro: ethnographia religiosa, znd ed., rev. (So Paulo, 1940).
His work would later move beyond his early emphasis on psychology to a focus on theories
of acculturation.
are purely psychological and have nothing to do with the question of racial inferi-
ority.52
For all of his endorsements of racial equality, the view that primitive men-
talities stemmed from the presence of 'backwards' culture implied a clear
hierarchy of culture.53
In fact Ramos based his study on the belief that a hierarchy existed
between advanced, sophisticated religions and more primitive beliefs.
Despite this supposed distance, however, the two might co-exist in the same
culture. Ramos stressed that research had demonstrated the persistence of
primitive beliefs among the less educated classes (incultas) and that scholars
of folklore in Western Europe had shown the continuation of pagan beliefs
among the lower classes. This finding held important implications for
Brazil, for in the view of Ramos, 'it would be even more logical to find
modes of primitive religion among peoples that suffered contact with con-
temporary savages. Brazil fits within this case, with the direct influence of
African fetishism, introduced with the traffic in slaves'.54 In this statement
Ramos made several key assumptions clear: that primitive mentalities might
coexist within a modern population; that African religion, or fetishism, came
from savages; and that the religious beliefs brought by African slaves to
Brazil were primitive beliefs that continued to survive despite the more
'advanced' setting. To uncover the collective psychology of Afro-Brazilians
therefore Ramos turned his attention, as Freyre had, to African cultural
origins.
Ramos' methodological assumptions are essential to understanding the
larger context of his paper at the Recife Congress. His paper, entitled 'The
Myths of Xang6 and their Degradation in Brazil', examined a puzzling
phenomenon. The orixdc Xang6 held considerable status among candomble
followers in Brazil and had come to exceed the role ascribed to him in
African practice. In African contexts Xango held importance as the orixda of

thunderbolts and thunder, but was far superseded by many other religious
figures of greater power. As Ramos remarked, his centrality and importance
in the new Brazilian setting was such that many regions of Brazil even used
the name Xango to designate the site of candomble ceremonies. Xango, he
concluded, had become synonymous with the religion itself.55
52 Ramos, O negro brasileiro (1934), p. 23. The preface was probably composed before Ramos
knew about the upcoming Congress.
51 Indeed, changing these mentalities was the chief aim of educators, and Ramos was himself
in the midst of an extensive reform effort in Rio's public schools. His preface comes from
this position of institutional authority, and is signed from the Institute of Educational
Research: Section of Orthophrenia and Mental Hygiene. 54 bid., p. z8.
55 Arthur Ramos, 'Os mythos de Xango e sua degradapgo no Brasil', in Estudos, p. 49.
46 Anadelia A. Romo
Ramos wrote that this shift in power could be seen not only in Brazil but
also, according to the Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz, in Cuba. Ortiz had
attempted in his own work to account for this change of belief in the
Americas by emphasising the immense and frightening power of thunder-
storms in inter-tropical regions. Ramos conceded that this environmental
influence was 'true to a certain point', but that such an 'explanation should
not, however, content the psychologist'. Instead, he argued, 'the prestige of
Xango resides in the mythical motives retained by the collective uncon-
scious'. In his formulation, the 'transformation of the Yoruba fetishism in its
Brazilian habitat' could be accounted for by recalling that Xango had long
held a predominant role in Yoruba hero myths. In Brazil the myths them-
selves had been forgotten, but their power remained.56
As a logical explanation this could not, of course, be entirely convincing.
Ramos, after all, never developed the reason for the shift or explained its
timing in the Americas. In fact the paper as a whole was far from complete
and Ramos presented evidence only in a cursory fashion. He included a long
folktale to show that Xango had been integrated into Brazilian folk tradition,
and then made brief mention that he had also been assimilated to the cult of
the Catholic Saint Michael. Ramos used these examples, along with the
linguistic evidence of Xang6o as site of worship, to conclude that Xang5 had
moved beyond the realm of Yoruba religion and into a larger context of
Brazilian life. Ramos' paper ended dramatically: 'Xang5^ is a point of psychic
union between Africa and Brazil'.57
Ramos' article showed the heavy emphasis he gave to psychology and
notions of an enduring subconscious cultural realm. Ramos afforded little
importance to the medical or eugenic problems of Africans before they
reached Brazil and paid no attention whatsoever to racial mixing. Instead, he
tried to understand the psyche of Africans in the Americas, finding deep
cultural continuities.58 These types of continuities obviously pointed to the
importance of understanding the origins of African cultures, but equally
important was uncovering 'survivals' of these same beliefs across the
Atlantic. Ramos did allow, however, for the idea of change in the American
context: he posited a strong role for African culture as well as important
influence from Brazil's setting. His primary intent, however, was not to
56 Ibid., p. 5o. 57 Ramos, 'Os mythos de Xang6', p. 54.

58 Thus, although he allowed for American alterations, his focus was in fact very similar to
that adopted by Melville J. Herskovits who also looked for links to Africa. Ramos, how-
ever, at this point, apparently was not familiar with Herskovits' work: the authorities cited
in his article beyond that of Nina Rodrigues and the Bahian Manuel Querino included only
a few international African specialists, and the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz.
Herskovits' approach receives critical attention in Walter Jackson, 'Melville Herskovits and
the Search for Afro-American Culture', in George W. Stocking Jr. (ed.), Malinowski, Rivers,
Benedict and Others: Essays on Culture and Personali?y (Madison, 1986).
Rethinking Race and Culture in BraZl 47
analyse Brazilian culture, but rather to delineate a subaltern mental stratum.

His conclusions therefore reinforced the impact of African culture, but not
necessarily the Brazilian factors and elements which had altered it.
Edison Carneiro: a rejection ofAfrica
The young ethnologist Edison Carneiro presented two papers at the Recife
Congress that differed considerably in both tone and emphasis. Carneiro,
only twenty-two years old, lacked the formal academic and scientific affili-
ations held by many of the other Congress participants. He made his living
as a journalist, but also had considerable contacts with practitioners of
candomble in Salvador.59 Carneiro's interest may have stemmed from
his own mixed racial background, but it had probably been furthered by
his immersion in the culture of Salvador, as well as the interests and guidance
of his father, Dr. Souza Carneiro, a local expert in Afro-Brazilian folklore
who collected folktales in Salvador and its environs.60
Carneiro contributed an article on candomble to the congress and offered
a more general paper on the status of Afro-Brazilians. Despite the difference
in approach, one principal conclusion was clear: Africa had little bearing on
the lives of Afro-Brazilians. In his article 'Xango', Carneiro analysed the
practice of candomble, but in a very different vein than Arthur Ramos. The
bulk of the article was dedicated to a description of Xango and built upon
previous ethnographic work of a Bahian associate of Nina Rodrigues, the
self-trained ethnologist Manuel Querino. Carneiro wasted little time in dis-
cussion of Africa and instead emphasised that whatever the origins of Afro-
Brazilian religion, it had changed considerably in the context of its new
environment. Its mythology, he emphasised, had been 'created under dif-
ferent conditions than that of the primitive habitat'.61 Afro-Brazilian beliefs
preserved some basic associations of the African deity Xango but, he argued,
the deity had gathered new associations in its new context, many of them
with Catholic saints.
Carneiro's work seems at first absent of methodology and his approach

more descriptive than analytical. Yet in fact the article provides a powerful
9 There is little biographical information on Carneiro and he has not been studied suf-
ficiently. An exceedingly brief outline of his life may be found in the introduction to his
collected correspondence with Arthur Ramos. Indeed, the relationship between the two
was formative, despite significant intellectual divergences. Edison Carneiro, Cartas de
Edison Carneiro a Artur Ramos: de 4 dejaneiro de 6936 a 6 de dezembro de 1938 (Sio Paulo, 1987).
60 This activity by Edison's father later proved controversial when he published a volume of
folklore that was harshly criticised by Arthur Ramos in 1937. Luitgarde Oliveira Cavalcanti
Barros provides the original critique by Ramos, although without an exact date or source,
in Arthur Ramos e as dinamicas socias de seu tempo (Macei6, zooo), pp. 189-92.
61 Edison Carneiro, 'Xango', in Novos estudos, p. 139.
48 Anadelia A. Romo
rejoinder to the work of Arthur Ramos. Carneiro looked at the practice of

Afro-Brazilian religion not as a psychiatrist, but as an ethnologist. His article
demonstrated that he saw mentality as largely irrelevant and social environ-
ment as paramount. Perhaps anticipating that African culture might well be
assessed as primitive, Carneiro neatly argued it had little influence in what
was essentially a Brazilian creation. The focus on mentality and the sub-
conscious had allowed Ramos to trace long connections back to Africa.
Alternately, Carneiro's social focus placed all responsibility and causality on
the Brazilian environment.
Carneiro emphasised the Brazilian setting throughout the article and

worked to ground the beliefs of candomble in a specifically Bahian geogra-
phy. He focused attention not on the spiritual or mental landscape of the
Afro-Brazilian, but rather on the physical and geographical landscape,
drawing connections between beliefs and everyday life and practice. His
conclusion served to emphasise this point, as he wrote 'Xang6 lives mixed
among the lives of thousands of negros and mestifos, even whites'."62 The world
of candomble was not a primitive mental state that flowed uninterrupted
from Africa; it was an active and living social practice with extensive ties to
the community and real-world, Brazilian context. Furthermore, his mention
of white practitioners and believers may have been intended to highlight the
fragility of African roots. After all, if even whites participated in the practice
it could not be linked with an exclusively African mentality and participation
could not require a connection to a long-distant African past. His research
throughout was also careful to specify the location of devotion, mentioning,
for example that the onrix Yemenji, the second most popular in Bahia (after
Xango), resided in a particular lake within the city. In this way Carneiro's
focus on the physical landmarks of belief further underlined his point that
the religion was no longer purely African and indicated his interest in in-
tegrating a study of religion with practice: an approach that differed from
interest in the psychoanalytical and mental heritage displayed by Arthur
Ramos. Carneiro's focus was not African continuities, but rather the
everyday realities and beliefs of practitioners in Brazil, and more specifically,
in Bahia.
Concern with contemporary realities is even more evident in another

paper by Carneiro, entitled 'The Situation of the Negro in Brazil'. In an
assertive opening he charged that abolition of slavery had 'resolved the
problems of brancos, but not of negros'.63 According to Carneiro, legal equality
granted empty privilege and meant only that 'negros, as well as proletariat
brancos and indios, had the right to die of hunger'.64 Capitalism, he proposed,
62 Ibid., p. 44. 63 Edison Carneiro, 'Situapdo do negro no Brasil', in Estudos, p. 237.

64 Ibid., p. 238.
Rethinking Race and Culture in Brazl 49
had provided simply another form of slavery and while Carneiro did not
romanticise Brazil's slave past, he argued nonetheless that it had at least
provided basic food and a bed to sleep on. The market, he insisted, rarely did
even that. According to Carneiro, blacks, exploited through market capital-
ism, had foundered, and had fallen into alcoholism, vagrancy, fetishism and
criminality. Carneiro's communist leanings shaped his belief in the power of
market forces, but much of the degradation he lamented was social and
cultural.65
Carneiro addressed Freyre's ideas of cultural borrowings with a cynical
eye. He argued that if Brazil had incorporated Afro-Brazilian elements into
its culture and its society, it happened almost always against the will of the
'white master'. In direct opposition to Freyre's ideas of a cultural and social
mestiFagem, Carneiro stated: 'The negro has been, and continues to be, a being
apart, almost an animal [bicho] that the mayors permit only to pass through
the streets and work for the branco. And nothing more'.66 Freyre's ideas of
cultural fusion were confronted with a stark vision of separate races and a
powerful statement of existing racial prejudice.
This separation, according to Carneiro, formed the root of contemporary
problems. He stated emphatically that there were deep social problems faced
by the black community, but that these stemmed not from racial difference,
but from economic difference. He explained:
The deplorable situation that negros find themselves in within Brazil absolutely does
not testify against the rafa negra. We know today that race does not have the im-
portance in social development that one [often] wants to give it. ... What exists is
not fixed racial inferiority or superiority ... but inequality of economic development
.... the lack of conditions to help [blacks] effectively, humanely, meant that the negros'
absorption process of the superior culture of the branco suffered a slowdown that set
negros even further back.67
This focus on culture rather than race fit with the trend of the rest of the
congress, but Carneiro set himself apart by arguing that the solution to
economic inequalities and resulting social problems rested with the need for
blacks to accept and integrate themselves into mainstream (white) culture.
For him, fusion represented a solution, but it was far from being a reality.68
65 Carneiro became active in the communist party of Bahia in the I930s, actions which later
provoked persecution by the police, forcing his relocation to Rio. See the description by
Ruth Landes in her ethnography of the era, City of Women, introduction by Sally Cole
66 Carneiro, 'Situapdo do negro', p. 239.
(Albuquerque, 1994 [9471), P- 61
67 Ibid., p. 239-40.
68 Scholars such as Kim D. Butler have pointed to the cultural focus of the Afro-Brazilian
movement in Bahia, but the radical political stance of this statement fall more in line with
the approach taken in Sdo Paulo. Butler, Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won: Afro-Brazlians in
Post-Abolition Sao Paulo and Salvador (New Brunswick, N. J., I9998).
5o Anadelia A. Romo
His argument represented a line of analysis parallel to that of sociologist

E. Franklin Frazier in the United States: the race problem was a cultural one,
and rested upon an incomplete acceptance of white culture.69 Carneiro per-
haps went one step further in his Marxist emphasis on poverty as a barrier to
this mainstream culture, but his focus on problems of culture, rather than
race or biology, was central to his view of race relations. Yet the evaluation of
culture was by no means a positive one. Carneiro believed the position of
blacks had fallen to a low and humiliating level and his proposals for inte-
gration were marked as much by disdain for black culture as by righteousness
for equality.7v In the candomble article, he concluded that the magnitude of
Xango's remarkable feats were further heightened by Afro-Brazilian tend-
encies toward exaggeration and over-dramatisation. Similarly, his critique of
post-abolition inequalities highlighted not only an exploitative economy but
also problems of cultural and social degeneracy. The radical and frank tone
of Carneiro's statement differed considerably from the other papers. Its
treatment of a political present as well as its denouncement of inequalities
stood apart from the rest of the studies which, if not focused on the past,
were focused on trying to minimise difference and current inequalities
(if often in biological terms).71
Although Carneiro did not explicitly draw attention to a methodology, his
work was significant as much for what it omitted as for its actual content.
Significantly he made no use of the medical eugenic approaches of many of
the other conference participants and concern with mestifagemn was absent
69 Lee D. Baker places E. Franklin Frazier within a wider circle of black intellectuals at
Howard University, all of whom emphasised a rejection of African influences and a focus
on the incomplete assimilation of 'legitimate culture'. This school of thought was often at
odds with the New Negro Movement as well as many of the followers of Franz Boas,
particularly Melville J. Herskovits. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the
Construction of Race I8p6-iyy4 (Berkeley 1998), pp. 176-9. In fact the debate between Frazier
and Herskovits would be carried abroad as both later conducted research in Bahia. Their
findings, not surprisingly, were diametrically opposed. See their exchanges on the Brazilian
family in Frazier, 'The Negro Family in Bahia, Brazil', A, merican Sociological Review, vol. 7, no.
4 (1942); Herskovits, 'The Negro in Bahia, Brazil: A Problem in Method', American
Sociological Review, vol. 8, no. 4 (i943); and Frazier, 'Rejoinder', American Sociological Review,
vol. 8, no. 4 (1943). See also David J. Hellwig, 'E. Franklin Frazier's Brazil', WesternJournal
of Black Studies, vol. 15 (Summer 1991). Herskovits' controversial role in American race
studies is traced in Jackson, 'Melville Herskovits'.
70 Ari Lima notes the ambivalent position taken by Carneiro toward black scholars such as
Manuel Querino. Lima, 'Blacks as Study Objects and Intellectuals in Brazilian Academia',
Latin American Perspectives, vol. 3 3, no. 4 (uly 2oo6), pp. 91-5.
71 It is intriguing that Carneiro's paper is punctuated by three ellipses in its published form,
and it is not clear if these represent cuts from the original version. Although it is certainly
possible that Carneiro himself edited out sections he was dissatisfied with, it is worth
wondering whether it might have been Freyre himself, as editor for the volume, who may
have made the changes.
Rethinking Race and Culture in Brazil 5 I
from his work. Bio-typologies and other measurements were irrelevant to
Carneiro; more important were critical assessments of the economic and
social opportunities available to blacks. It would become even clearer in the
next congress that his approach advocated a political awareness of the
present, and that he saw himself not only as a scholar but also as an activist
and advocate for the populations he intended to study.
The debated role of African culture
The first Afro-Brazilian Congress revealed deep divisions about the state of
Afro-Brazilian studies and its methodology. Indeed, the concept of race was
still being considered in vastly different ways by different participants, and
approaches ranged from the biological, to the sociological, to the psycho-
logical and often combined elements from across the social sciences as a
whole. Yet it was not just eclecticism that motivated such different ap-
proaches, but fundamentally very different ideas and views of race.
Scholars such as Freyre, Ramos and Carneiro passionately asserted the
equality of the races and attempted to move beyond the biological contro-
versies of mestifagem. In doing so, they all turned to culture as a category to
replace that of race, though as we have seen, these categories and their
importance continued to overlap. The priority given to culture ushered in
new attention to culture in Africa rather than racial studies of the 'negroid',
but it brought with it new dilemmas. Arthur Ramos, for instance, in trying to
redeem turn-of-the-century scholar Nina Rodrigues, would later claim that
though the work of Nina Rodrigues was grounded in the scientific racism of
his time, it retained all of its relevance if modern readers simply substituted
the concept of race with culture.72 This substitution of terminology, how-
ever, did nothing to eliminate the prevalent idea that some groups were
superior to others, whether it be due to racial background or culture itself.
Though the shift to culture turned away from racial determinism, it was
still not a relativist position. Brazilian or 'white' culture came to the fore as
most prominent and most advanced, while African culture sank to the
primitive level envisioned by Ramos or Carneiro or had to be swept away by
assertions of the primacy of Brazilian culture. Brazilians, and indeed most
scholars, were not yet ready to embrace a culturally relativist position that
gave equal status to all cultures. Racial equality was an admirable and noble
idea; cultural equality was an idea that had not yet gained currency. Indeed,
Freyre, Ramos and Carneiro all acknowledged at various points that African
72 Ramos, The Negro in Brazil (Philadelphia, 1939), p. 179. Ramos often reused portions of his
writings and this statement is also repeated in his introduction to the republished work of
Nina Rodrigues in the same year.
culture was primitive and sometimes savage. Highlighting Brazilian identity

as the most formative allowed these thinkers increased relevance in a highly
nationalistic moment. For Freyre and Ramos, whether intentional or not, it
allowed a continued hierarchy of Brazilian culture that in some ways chal-
lenged the status quo, but by no means overturned it. Alternately, for
Carneiro, asserting the force of the Brazilian context and culture seemed the
surest way to offer inclusions to all Brazilians, and spark unification under
one, redeemed, de-Africanised culture.
Legacies of the Congress
The first Congress spawned a successor organised by Carneiro and other

Bahian intellectuals in 1937, albeit an event that would be challenged by
Gilberto Freyre as illegitimate.7" As a whole the second congress, held
in Bahia, succeeded better in moving beyond the still medicalised and
racialised worries of the first. Yet Carneiro, participant of the first congress
and organiser of the second, remained unsatisfied with the state of Afro-
Brazilian studies during this era, and in particular, the approach to African
culture. Throughout the i930s and 1940s, scholars such as Arthur Ramos
had continued to mine for African roots in Brazil and Melville Herskovits,
an American anthropologist who sought to chart African survivals across
the Americas, gained renown in Brazil. It was not until the next generation
of studies of race in the 195os, shaped by the UNESCO project on race
relations, that scholars would leave behind the question of Africa and instead
turn to contemporary interactions.74
By the early fifties Edison Carneiro would suggest that scholarly focus
on the 'African' marked a tendency to view blacks as foreigners within
their own countries, rather than equal citizens.75 Radical critics such as the
73 These charges were originally made in a newspaper interview with Freyre and the column is
reprinted in Carneiro, Cartas, pp. iz28-9. The Bahian congress papers were published in O
negro no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1940). For further analysis of the tensions of the second
congress and Carneiro's role in organizing and overseeing the event, see Romo, 'Race and
Reform', pp. 97-1o6.
74 Marcos Chor Maio provides the best study of the project as a whole; see '() projeto
UNESCO e a agenda das ciencias socias no Brasil dos anos 40 e 50o', Revista Brasileira de
C'encias Sbociais, vol. 14, no. 41 (i999). For the divergence between the path imagined by
Freyre and that taken by the UNESCO project see Maio, 'Tempo controverso: Gilberto
Freyre e o Projeto UNESCO', Tempo Social, vol. iI, no. I (1999).
75 Carneiro elaborated this charge in an essay written in 1953 and originally presented to the
first Brazilian Anthropology Association meeting. His charges may have had limited dif-
fusion at first, however, as it appears that the essay was published only in 1964 in a
collected work of his early writings. See Carneiro, 'Os estudos brasileiros do negro', in
Carneiro Ladinos e crioulos (Rio de Janeiro, 1964).
sociologist Guerreiro Ramos and the activist Abdias de Nascimento joined

with Carneiro and charged that an approach that looked only at Afro-
Brazilian culture failed to capture the political realities of exclusion and
discrimination.76 Carneiro in particular viewed the congresses as chief cul-
prits in the process of alienating blacks in Brazil. They were representative,
he charged, not of scholarly achievements but of an era in which scholars
had promoted 'negros as spectacle'.77 Carneiro charged that Brazilian in-
tellectuals never attempted 'to see the negro in his present reality, nor the
processes by which he assumed the lifestyles of our people but [in his place
saw only] the African, a strange and foreign element with unfamiliar ideas,
appearance, and habits'.7" This attitude and the resulting focus on the most
characteristically 'African' practices had 'disgraced the study of the negro'.79
In his view, in these studies 'the search for Africa turned into something
more pernicious and prejudicial over the long term'.80 For Carneiro these
pernicious results could be seen partly in the narrowness of the field and
its focus on African roots rather black realities. In the end, he concluded,
science had failed to serve the nation. The Congress, with its element of
spectacle, had 'disastrous effects for public opinion' and failed 'to contribute
towards the positive solution of the problems of our people [nosso povo] '.81
Carneiro dismissed what he termed the 'Afro-Brazilian stage' of black
studies and concluded that thankfully, by the 195os, it had finally been put to
rest.82
Conclusions
American anthropologists Sidney Mintz and Richard Price in i990 deplored

what they viewed as a disturbing 'desire to polarise Afro-Americanist
scholarship into a flatly "for" or "against" position in regard to African
76 Carneiro collaborated in 195o with Nascimento to organise another type of congress in

Rio, the First Black Brazilian Congress. Relations between the two later soured and
Nascimento ultimately dismissed Carneiro's work as picturesque and irrelevant. His bitter
critique charged that Carneiro had maintained an excessively scientific perspective that
limited any social impact for his work. Nascimento (ed.), O Negro revoltado (Rio de Janeiro,
198 2), p. 48. Notably, Nascimento would claim a central role for Africa in his leadership of
sectors of the black movement in Brazil. See, for instance, Abdias do Nascimento, Brazil:
Mixture or Massacre? lEssays in the Genocide of a Black People (Dover, 1989).
77 Carneiro, 'Os estudos', p. Ii 5. Carneiro did acknowledge that there were also some works
of top quality presented at the Congress. Of his own role in presenting at the first congress
and organising the second he remains somewhat vague, though he writes: 'Even I couldn't
escape the current in these early times, but I believe I destroyed the esoteric nature of black
studies with my Candomblis da Bahia, written [in 1948] with the declared intention of serving
the comprehension and fraternity between Brazilians'. Carneiro, 'Os estudos', p. io8.
78 Carneiro, 'Os estudos', p. 103. Emphasis in original. 79 Ibid., p. 104.
8so Ibid. 81 Ibid., p. ii5. 82 Ibid., p. I 6.
54 Anadelia A. Romo
cultural retentions'."8 In Brazil the failure to come to any resolution on the

contentious role of African culture may have been a significant factor in the
shift to a new, though soon equally contentious, direction for studies of race:
The I950S turned to critical reappraisals of the racial harmony portrayed
in much of Freyre's work but ignored the question of African heritage.84
The role of African heritage remained untouched in part because of lingering
tensions between African identity and national identity, as highlighted by
Carneiro in his later work. But it may have also disappeared from debate due
to the cultural hierarchies set up by the Afro-Brazilian congress, a cultural
minefield that proved still difficult for scholars to navigate.
Ultimately the dismissal of the role of Africa by Carneiro, a Brazilian of
African heritage, spoke to the tremendous force of cultural rankings estab-
lished in the 1930s. Associations with Africa signalled a sure association with
inferiority and a culture widely acknowledged as primitive, or savage, or both.
Carneiro, an activist fighting for equal opportunities, thus saw no advantage
in the use of African cultural categories. For Carneiro, the congress and
increased attention to the African in the social sciences had concurrently
restricted the role of blacks in the Brazilian nation. In his view the shift
from race to culture was still, ultimately, prejudicial to national integration.

Though the terms of exclusion had changed, the reality of exclusion
continued.
83 Sidncy W. Mintz and Richard Price, 7he Bir/h o/f/.rfican--.Imerican Caltl/ure (Bcoston, 1992),
p. viii. Robin D. G. Kelley examines the tensions between nationalising and diasporic
tendencies of scholarship in African-American studies in "But a Local Phase of a WoCrld
Problem': Black History's Global Vision, I883-195o', 7heJournaal of'.lmeriecanf Hisftog, vol.
86, no. 3 (1999). Kevin Yelvington asserts that this debate is still unresolved in studies of
African-American culture in Latin America and that it continues to follow much of the
same early divisions between Herskovits and Frazier. Yelvington, 'The Anthropology of
Afro-Latin America and the Caribbean: Diasporic Dimensions', zInnual Reiewn o/f
inthropol/og, vol. 30 (2001).
84 The UNESCO studies generally ignore the question of African culture. See, for example:
Roger Bastide and Florestan Fernandes, Re/acies raciais entre negros e brancos em ,Siao Paulo (Sio
Paulo, 19 5 5); Charles Wagley, ed., Race and Class in Rural Brai/ il(Paris, 19 5 2); and Thales de
Azevedo, J.es I/ites de collear dans une rille brisilienne (Paris, 195 3). For the critique of Freyre's
ideas of racial democracy, see Emilia Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian I'Empire: Myths and
Histories (Chapel Hill, 2000).

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Rethinking Race and Culture in Brazil's First Afro-Brazilian Congress of 1934

Author(s): Anadelia A. Romo

Rethinking Race and Culture in Brazil's

Keywords: Brazil, race, intellectual history, social science, diaspora, Afro-Brazilian,

Anadelia Romo is Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Texas State

proposed that Brazil's population, though mixed, was progressively whiten-

The Afro-Brazilian Congress of Ip94

In 1934 the American anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits received an in-

26 Geraldo de Andrade, 'Nota anthropologica sobre os mulatos pernambucanos', in Estudos,

Fregre: redemption of the African ?

30 Jose Bastos de Avila, 'ContribuiFio ao estudo do Indice de Lapicque (nota previa)', in

insight and others seemed purely speculative, an effect heightened by his

assumed to have a predominant Bantu element, Freyre used Nina Rodrigues

working societies that 'accordingly possessed a higher degree of culture'.43

Arthur Ramos and the search/for the primitive African

cine, with a focus on psychiatry and psychoanalysis. After heading the

Brazilian Negro: Religious Ethnography and Psychoanadysis), and, in the following

46 Freyre, 'Deformag6es de corpo', p. 2o0.

year, a volume on black folklore and psychoanalysis.48 In 1934 he also

African practice. In African contexts Xango held importance as the orixda of

56 Ibid., p. 5o. 57 Ramos, 'Os mythos de Xang6', p. 54.

analyse Brazilian culture, but rather to delineate a subaltern mental stratum.

Edison Carneiro: a rejection ofAfrica

Carneiro's work seems at first absent of methodology and his approach

rejoinder to the work of Arthur Ramos. Carneiro looked at the practice of

Carneiro emphasised the Brazilian setting throughout the article and

Concern with contemporary realities is even more evident in another

62 Ibid., p. 44. 63 Edison Carneiro, 'Situapdo do negro no Brasil', in Estudos, p. 237.

His argument represented a line of analysis parallel to that of sociologist

The debated role of African culture

culture was primitive and sometimes savage. Highlighting Brazilian identity

Legacies of the Congress

The first Congress spawned a successor organised by Carneiro and other

sociologist Guerreiro Ramos and the activist Abdias de Nascimento joined

American anthropologists Sidney Mintz and Richard Price in i990 deplored

76 Carneiro collaborated in 195o with Nascimento to organise another type of congress in

cultural retentions'."8 In Brazil the failure to come to any resolution on the

from race to culture was still, ultimately, prejudicial to national integration.

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