Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-nwzlb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T13:28:03.969Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Reconstructing the “Cradle of Brazil”: The Detachability of Morality and the Nature of Cultural Labor in Salvador, Bahia's Pelourinho World Heritage Site

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2012

John Collins*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. Email: john.collins@qc.cuny.edu

Abstract

This essay examines theories of value and property in relation to conceptions of morality, correct comportment, and their influences on Afro-Bahians subject to late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century cultural heritage initiatives in the Pelourinho neighborhood of Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. This urban space is the nation's most expressive site for the performance of Afro-Brazilian identity and the commemoration of tradition. In analyzing the role of morality in Pelourinho-based cultural property-making, I focus on popular critiques of heritage discourse to argue that, in conjuring a particular form of cultural heritage that bears a distinct resemblance to UNESCO's immaterial patrimony programs, the Bahian state has piggybacked on social scientific evaluations of local people's moral comportments in order to put together an archive of everyday life that exists as a standing reserve for histories of Brazil and the marketing of cultural heritage. This data produced in an effort to regulate the historical center has revolved around the state's evaluation of the moral probity and everyday habits of the Pelourinho's overwhelmingly Afro-Brazilian populace. The result is a conceptualization of cultural labor that emanates not from the capacities and struggles of producers, but from a decentered or distributed view of production, which I tie to the existence of this archive. Consumers, or visitors to the historical center, as well as historical archives thus play a critical role in this form of constructing property and understanding the sources and fungibility of labor in a global economy for multicultural difference that depends on an emphasis on futurity and market reflexivity.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © International Cultural Property Society 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adkins, Lisa. “The New Economy, Property and Personhood.” Theory, Culture and Society 22 (2005): 111–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Agnew, Jean Christophe. Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Armitage, David. “John Locke, Carolinas and The Two Treatises of Government.” Political Theory 32 (2004): 602–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. London: Vintage, 2000.Google Scholar
Baucom, Ian. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Bauer, A. A.Cultural Property: Internationalism, Ethics, and Law.” In Handbook of Postcolonial Archaeology, edited by Lydon, J. and Rizvi, U. Z., 285–94. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Biehl, João. Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, Michael F.Who Owns Native Culture? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Brown, M. F.Culture, Property, and Peoplehood: A Comment on Carpenter, Katyal, and Riley's ‘In Defense of Property.’International Journal of Cultural Property 17 (2010): 569–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bruman, Christopher. “Outside the Glass Case: The Social life of Urban Heritage in Kyoto.” American Ethnologist 36 (2009): 276–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Callon, Michel, Meadel, Cecile, and Rabehariosa, Vololona. “The Economy of Qualities.” Economy and Society 31 (2002): 194217.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caulfield, Sueann. “The Birth of the Mangue: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Prostitution in Rio de Janeiro, 1850–1942.” In Sex and Sexuality in Latin America, edited by Balderston, Daniel and Guy, Donna, 86100. New York: New York University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Translated by Ormsby, John, Jones, Joseph, and Douglas, Kenneth. New York: Norton, 1981.Google Scholar
Collins, John. Revolt of the Saints: Memory and Redemption in the Twilight of Brazilian “Racial Democracy.” Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Collins, John. “‘But What if I Should Need to Defecate in Your Neighborhood, Madame?’: Empire, Redemption and the ‘Tradition of the Oppressed’ in a Brazilian Historical Center.” Cultural Anthropology 23 (2008): 279328.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collins, John. “Patrimony, Public Health, and National Culture: The Commodification and Redemption of Origins in Neoliberal Brazil.” Critique of Anthropology 28 (2008): 237–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collins, John. “Culture, Content, and the Enclosure of Human Being: UNESCO's ‘Intangible’ Heritage in the New Millennium.” Radical History Review 109 (2011): 121–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collins, John. “Melted Gold and National Bodies: The Hermeneutics of Depth and the Value of History in Brazilian Racial Politics.” American Ethnologist 38 (2011): 683700.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coronil, Fernando. “Towards a Critique of Globalcentrism: Speculations on Capitalism's Nature.” Public Culture 12 (2000): 351–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dent, Alexander. “Piracy, Circulatory Legitimacy, and Neoliberal Subjectivity in Brazil.” Cultural Anthropology 27, no. 1 (2012): 2849.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferry, Elizabeth. Not Ours Alone: Patrimony, Value, and Collectivity in Contemporary Mexico. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foster, Robert. “The Work of the New Economy: Consumers, Brands, and Value Creation.” Cultural Anthropology 22 (2007): 707–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.Google Scholar
Graham, Sandra Lauderdale. House and Street: The Domestic World of Servants and Masters in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Grünewald, Rodrigo de Azeredo. Os índios do descobrimento: tradição e turismo. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Contra Capa, 2001.Google Scholar
Hale, Charles. “Does Multiculturalism Menace? Governance, Cultural Rights and the Politics of Identity in Guatemala.” Journal of Latin American Studies 34 (2002): 485524.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Handler, Richard. “Who Owns the Past? History, Cultural Property, and the Logic of Possessive Individualism.” In The Politics of Culture, edited by Williams, Brett. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Handler, Richard, and Gable, Eric. The New History in an Old Museum. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Handler, Richard, and Linnekin, Jocelyn. “Tradition, Genuine or Spurious.” Journal of American Folklore 97 (1984): 273–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hardt, Michael, and Negri, Antonio. Multitude. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Herzfeld, Michael. The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Hill, Matthew. “Reimagining Old Havana: World Heritage and the Production of Scale in LateSocialist Cuba.” In Deciphering the Global: Its Scales, Spaces, and Subjects, edited by Sassken, Sassia, 5978. New York: Routledge, 2007.Google Scholar
Holston, James. The Modernist City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Hull, Matthew. “The File: Agency, Authority, and Autography in a Pakistani Bureaucracy.” Language and Communication 23 (2003): 287314.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hull, Matthew. “Ruled by Records: The Appropriation of Land and the Misappropriation of Lists in Islamabad.” American Ethnologist 34 (2008): 501–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacob, Marie-Andrée, and Riles, Annelise. “The New Economies of Virtue: Introduction.” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 30 (2007): 181–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, Paul Christopher. “An Atlantic Genealogy of Spirit Possession.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 53 (2011): 393425.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keane, Webb. Christian Moderns. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Keane, Webb. “Market, Materiality and Moral Metalanguage.” Anthropological Theory 8, no. 1 (2008): 2742.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kulick, Don. Travestí: Sex, Gender, and Culture Among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lazzarato, Maurizio. “Immaterial Labour.” In Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, edited by Virno, Paolo and Hardt, Michael, 133–47. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Lees, Emma. “Intangible Cultural Heritage in a Modernizing Bhutan: The Question of Remaining Viable and Dynamic.” International Journal of Cultural Property 18 (2011): 179200.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government, edited by Macpherson, C. B.. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1980.Google Scholar
MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Manning, Paul. “Owning and Belonging: A Semiotic Investigation of the Affective Categories of Bourgeois Society.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 46 (2004): 300–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marazzi, Christian. Capital and Affects: The Politics of the Language Economy. New York: Semiotexte, 2011.Google Scholar
Meade, Teresa. “Civilizing” Rio: Reform and Resistance in a Brazilian City, 1889–1930. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Meyer, Birgitte. “Mediation and Immediacy: Sensational Forms, Semiotic Ideologies, and the Question of the Medium.” Social Anthropology 19 (2011): 123–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mitchell, Greg. “TurboConsumers in Paradise: Tourism, Civil Rights, and Brazil's Gay Sex Industry.” American Ethnologist 38 (2011): 666–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moore, Robert. “From Genericide to Viral Marketing: The Semiotics of Brands.” Language & Communication 23 (2003): 331–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Outtes, Joel. “Disciplining Society through the City: The Genesis of City Planning in Brazil and Argentina (1894–1945).” Bulletin of Latin American Research 22 (2003): 137–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perrons, Diane. “The New Economy and the Work–Life Balance: Conceptual Explorations and a Case Study of New Media.” Gender, Work and Organization 10 (2003): 6593.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peutz, Nathalie. “Bedouin ‘Abjection’: World Heritage, Worldliness, and Worthiness at the Margins of Arabia.” American Ethnologist 38 (2011): 338–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Price, Richard. The Convict and the Colonel: A Story of Colonialism and Resistance in the Caribbean. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Reis, João José.Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprisings of 1835 in Bahia. Translated by Brakel, A.. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.Google Scholar
Rogers, Douglas. “The Materiality of the Corporation: Oil, Gas, and Corporate Social Technologies in the Remaking of a Russian Region.” American Ethnologist 39 (2012): 284296.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sansi, Roger. Fetishes & Monuments: Afro-Brazilian Art and Culture in the 20th Century. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007.Google Scholar
Scott, James. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Serageldin, Ismail. Culture and Development at the World Bank. Washington, DC: World Bank, 1998.Google Scholar
Stanley, Nick. Being Ourselves for You: The Global Display of Cultures. London: Middlesex University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Stoler, Ann Laura. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and the Colonial Common Sense. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Strathern, Marilyn. The Gender of the Gift. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Taussig, Michael. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983.Google Scholar
UNESCO. Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, Paris 17 October 2003. ⟨http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=17716&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html⟩.Google Scholar
Welch, Dennis. “Defoe's ‘A True Relation,’ Personal Identity, and the Locke-Stillingfleet Controversy.” Studies in Philology 100 (2003): 384–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar