Race, color and culture: Questioning categories and concepts in southern Bahia, Brazil.

In 2003, some teachers at the municipal high school in Belmonte, Brazil began presenting students with a radically different ideology about racial categorization---an essentialized ideology that defines anyone not purely branco (white) as negro (black). This system of categorization, endorsed by most black movements, conflicts with popular belief in a mixed-race moreno (brown) identity based not only on ancestry, but also on observable physical features. Through a combination of ethnographic and experimental methods, I examine the apparent clash of ideologies in Belmonte and show striking similarities in the implicit thinking processes underlying people's espousals of these contrasting ideologies. Residents demonstrated high levels of agreement in sorting diverse pictures into groups; they reasoned in similar ways about how family ancestry would affect classification; and they considered physical features to be critical rather than superficial for classification in certain contexts. I also show that the way people think about race may be changing, that young people may be thinking about categories in novel ways even if they are not adopting new ideologies wholesale. High school children who are learning about new racial categories may implicitly be attributing stronger causal power to negro blood, and they may be more likely to reject the possibility of manipulating physical features to change racial classification. Belmonte residents of all ages construct categories that not only generalize about, but also causally explain disparate types of information such as visual appearance, family history, and social/cultural identity within specific cultural, historical, and situational contexts. Investigating the changes in Belmonte schools and black movement organizations, I propose solutions to the problems of (1) the reification of racial identities in anthropological theory and the tendency to take US-based definitions of race as analytic categories for cross-cultural analysis, (2) the separation of race, ethnicity, nationality, and region as analytically distinct domains of categorization, (3) the treatment of essentialism as a unified cognitive process, and (4) the scholarship that attempts to uncover a single way to understand race in Brazil without taking into account differences of historical trajectory, local context, age cohorts, and individual experience.PhDCultural anthropologyEthnic studiesSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/126884/2/3287451.pd