Brazil's Living Museum: Race, Reform, and Tradition in Bahia.

Kraay, Hendrik

Brazil's Living Museum: Race, Reform, and Tradition in Bahia, by Anadelia A. Romo. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2010. xi, 221 pp. $59.95 US (cloth), $24.95 US (paper).

A history of Bahians' (and influential foreigners') thinking about race, social reform, and the nature of culture and tradition in Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia, this book is a useful contribution to the burgeoning literature on Afro-Bahia. The central argument is that, in the face of relative twentieth-century political and economic decline, Bahian elites abandoned their disdain for Afro-Brazilian culture and came to celebrate African contributions to their culture and society, thereby turning the state (and especially Salvador) into the "Black Rome" that capitalizes on its African heritage as a tourist attraction and a symbolic centre of Brazilian culture. At the same time, Bahian governments have systematically failed to address the poverty and marginalization from which Afro-Bahians continue to suffer.

This is broadly familiar terrain, and Anadelia A. Romo's contribution is to elucidate the complex Bahian political and intellectual debate that resulted in this revalorization of Afro-Bahian culture. In five linked essays she traces key phases of this cultural transformation. In the 1890s, Bahian medical doctors known as Tropicalistas rejected doctrinaire views of racial inequality and advocated public health reforms. As Lamarckians, they held that improving the environment could better the population and that such improvements would be inherited. Even Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, notorious for his espousal of scientific racism in his work on legal medicine, supported progressive public health measures (and conducted the first serious research into Afro-Bahian culture).

Little came of this, and in the 1930s scholars recast the study of race as the analysis of culture, as exemplified by the work of Gilberto Freyre and the Afro-Brazilian congresses of 1934 (in Recife) and 1937 (in Salvador). Romo traces the complex politics surrounding these two pioneering meetings and particularly the efforts of ethnologist Edison Carneiro and Bahian Candomble (Afro-Bahian religion) leaders to win primacy for Bahia by emphasizing the authenticity of its African heritage. Hierarchies of culture replaced those of race and Candomble leaders highlighted their putative Yoruba cultural purity to win status for their religious houses. Their active role in the 1937 congress did much to foster greater acceptance for African culture.

Nevertheless, limits to this acceptance remained, as the chapter on the state museum shows. Between 1938 and 1942, director Jose do Prado Valladares presented a "radically inclusive vision of Bahian history" (pp. 92-93) that juxtaposed Afro-Bahian artifacts with elite memorabilia. Valladares's vision drew criticism, however, and in preparation for Salvador's quadricentennial in 1949, the museum was reorganized to present a more congenially elitist interpretation of Bahian history.

The last two chapters examine the mutual influence between Bahian and foreign academics who together cemented the view of Bahia as a preserve of African culture and a society refreshingly free of racial discrimination. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, four North Americans researchers navigated their way through Afro-Bahia with the guidance of Carneiro and Valladares. Sociologist Donald Pierson's emphasis on what he saw as Bahia's racial harmony fitted well with Brazilians' emerging view of their country as a racial democracy and his 1942 Negroes in Brazil was translated into Portuguese in 1945. Anthropologist Ruth Landes and sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, both of whom emphasized the creative adaptation of Afro-Bahian culture to the larger social context, were bitterly criticized for questioning the dominant paradigm of African survivals. By contrast, Bahians celebrated Melville J. Herskovitz. To be sure, the anthropologist was then developing the concept of acculturation, but in his 1941 address to inaugurate the philosophy faculty, he stressed that "numerous African institutions and modes of conduct were conserved" in Bahia (p. 128).

The next wave of foreign researchers came in the early 1950s, under the auspices of the UNESCO research program on race relations best known for the questioning of racial democracy that emerged from its studies on Sao Paulo. The work on Bahia, led by Charles Wagley and several of his graduate students in collaboration with Bahians, however, resulted in three community studies that repeated Pierson's "curiously optimistic assessments of race relations" even as they documented extensive racial prejudice (p. 146). Bahians like Thales de Azevedo joined his foreign collaborators in worrying that modernization would exacerbate racial tensions, which in turn reinforced their commitment to preserving traditions.

Romo's conclusion provides a brief overview of contemporary Bahia, without delving into the full range of current academic and political debates about Afro-Bahian culture, whose antecedents she has ably analyzed. On occasion, she gets carried away with her denunciation of stubbornly persistent racial inequalities. It is simply not true that "Afro-Brazilians themselves remain excluded from participation in public schools" as her later evidence on improving education levels clearly shows (pp. 8, 157). Her remark that the contemporary "dynamic of a vibrant black culture combined with a stagnant, paternalistic, and white political elite ... remains to some extent inexplicable" (p. 156) exemplifies the frustration that so many activists feel. However, if "the image of Bahia and its social realities, far from being natural or inevitable outcomes, remain subject to reform and change" (p. 159), but have not done so since the period that Romo focuses on, then scholars need to investigate how those in power maintain their position at least as much as they study those who advocate change.

Hendrik Kraay

University of Calgary