Race, Science, and Social Thought in 20th-Century Brazil (fragmento)

eugenicists like Renato Kehl. However, with the publication of Casa-grande & senzala in 1933, a landmark text written by the sociologist Gilberto Freyre, the debate on racial miscegenation would acquire a new form. Brazilian racial diversity was acclaimed by the author as a positive and distinctive element of national identity. As section “A Laboratory of Civilization and Miscegenation” discusses, in reconciling anthropological and sociological questions with modernist thought, Gilberto Freyre’s work not only sought to resolve the enigma and uncertainties that racial mixture posed for Brazilians, he also introduced the notion of culture as fundamental to comprehending the importance of ethnic diversity in Brazil’s formation. A Laboratory of Civilization and Miscegenation, 1930–1945 As discussed in section “A Eugenic and Anthropological Laboratory,” one of the main clashes to occur during the First Brazilian Congress of Eugenics in 1929 was between Renato Kehl and Edgard Roquette-Pinto, especially in relation to the products of racial mixture. At the same time, both complained that the majority of the congress’s participants had failed to understand the precise meaning of eugenics as the search to improve the race through recourse to the biological sciences. This criticism was targeted at the persistence of arguments insisting on the biological inheritance of characters acquired from the environment. It implicated not only neo-Lamarckists, but also those participants less concerned with the biological improvement of the population. The latter saw education, hygiene, and health as ends in themselves, as means to improve the population’s living conditions. A broader paradigm shift was taking place. A few years later, this trend was consubstantiated in Casa-grande & senzala, the book in which Gilberto Freyre (1900–1987) switched the reflection on the country from the racial paradigm to a cultural paradigm. The book was a result of the scientific and political environment cultivated by the anthropology of Franz Boas at Columbia University, where Freyre had studied at the start of the 1920s, as well as the modernist debates concerning Brazil’s singularity that had unfolded over the same decade, and the 19th-century 53 environmentalist medical tradition. Additionally, the author drew from a dialogue with Rüdiger Bilden, his German colleague during his time spent in New York, who, in a text from 1929, wrote that if some kind of problem existed in Brazil, “the cause . . . is not race: it was 54 slavery.” Gilberto Freyre valorized the Brazilian experience of civilization, beginning with the Portuguese colonizers, presented as the best prepared for colonization of the tropics, since they had been capable of geographic “mobility,” “miscibility” with people from other races, 55 and adaptation to the warm climate. These characteristics, condensed in the idea of “plasticity,” had, he argued, been acquired through the closer coexistence of the Portuguese with the Moors on the Iberian Peninsula during the Late Middle Ages, their frequent contacts 56 with North Africa, and their commercial relations on the coasts of Africa and Asia. Racial mixture began to be seen, therefore, from a positive perspective and as a constitutive characteristic of the colonizers. Even syphilis—conceived by the eugenicists of the 1920s as a racial poison—became the symbol of the civilizing process undertaken by the Portuguese and 57 the syncretic Brazilian civilization that emerged from it. At the same time, the biological weaknesses found among Brazil’s population—previously referred to as racial “decadence” or Page 9 of 34 Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Latin American History. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 26 January 2021 “inferiorities”—were explained sociologically and historically by the malnutrition caused by a diet low in nutrients and proteins, a result of the system of land ownership and the 58 monocultural production of sugarcane in the Northeast. The years that immediately followed the “1930 Revolution” were politically uncertain but marked by a more centralizing government along the lines of what had been advocated, among others, by the movement for sanitation since the previous decade. In terms of demographic issues, the National Constituent Assembly, established in 1933, was dominated by discussions on immigration with an emphasis in the debate on the Japanese. The assembly eventually approved a constitutional article that, inspired by the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act in the United States, set immigration quotas by country. Brazil’s immigration policy was directed toward supplying the country with workers, especially rural laborers, and simultaneously, through racial mixture, toward the formation of a Brazilian type by 59 whitening. The valorization of racial mixture thus maintained a hierarchical view of the 60 races. As the physician Arthur Neiva summarized, “there are limits to miscegenation policy.” Political uncertainty, an intensification of the fights between integralists (a Brazilian version of a fascism), communists, and anti-fascists, as well as the political acumen of Getúlio Vargas, 61 eventually led to the dictatorial government of the Estado Novo, inaugurated in 1937. The new Constitution maintained the immigration quotas and the new regime made efforts to control foreigners and their descendants already living in the country, including a curb on “ethnic enclaves” through a ban on publishing newspapers or teaching in foreign languages, a 62 policy that affected the Japanese, German, and, to a lesser extent, Jewish communities. Vargas’s Estado Novo was characterized by the desire to create a homogenous sense of nationality by means of an authoritarian “cultural policy” and the introjection of a unifying 63 “political culture.” Brazilian identity would be forged through the mixture of races and the meeting of cultures, while the indigenous population, bearing the true roots of Brazilianness, would provide the “basis of the new national character,” in the words of the positivist 64 indigenist and director of the SPI, Marechal Rondon. This project contained various dilemmas and ambiguities. Gustavo Capanema, Vargas’s Minister of Education and Health, held a competition to make a statue representing the 65 Brazilian man, which would decorate the courtyard of the new ministry building. After much polemical discussion over the features of racial mixture and degree of whitening to be shown in the work, the design by the sculptor Celso Antonio—the initial winner of the competition— was rejected by the minister for appearing too miscegenated. Concomitantly, the building also acquired a series of inspiring murals representing regional types. Made by the renowned modernist painter Candido Portinari, the tiled murals in the antechamber to the minister’s office represent the gaúcho, the sertanejo, and the jangadeiro, among others, rather than the Brazilian man in general. This episode illustrates the fact that while Vargas’s policy of political centralization and the affirmation of a national identity reduced the power of the states 66 hugely, at the same time regionalisms were becoming stronger in the 1930s. The biotypological studies begun in Brazil by Juvenil Rocha Vaz (1881–1964) in the 1920s in dialogue with the methods of the Italian researchers Nicolas Pende, Mario Barbára, and Giacinto Viola, involved “gauging physiological and anthropometric indicators such as chest67 limb ratio, thyroid metabolism, head shape, pulse, and ergonomic response.” In applying the detailed Italian method of classification, the biotypologists Isaac Brown and Waldemar Page 10 of 34 Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Latin American History. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 26 January 2021 Berardinelli (1903–1956) noted that, given the population’s heterogeneous makeup, it was very difficult to arrive at the “average Brazilian man,” making it more plausible to study 68 regional types. Thus, while Álvaro Ferraz and Andrade Lima Junior researched A morfologia do homem do Nordeste, Rafael de Paula Souza and Joaquim Lacaz de Moraes tried to uncover 69 the constitutional anthropometrics of the São Paulo population. The valorization of this regional specificity in the arts and sciences did not occur in an egalitarian form since the types were marked by different modalities of racial mixture, some 70 more valued than others. The miscegenation that had taken place on the São Paulo plateau between white and indigenous populations seemed to have resulted in the most modern and prosperous region, in contrast to the Northeast, with an economy in crisis, where either the 71 mixture of black and indigenous or the mixture of black and white predominated. The regional dispute that had been growing over the course of the First Republic and the shift away from the dynamic hub of the sugar-growing Northeast toward São Paulo and its coffee plantations tended to be translated, explained, and refed by arguments that transformed 72 economic and political inequalities into biological differences. At the same time as it sought to affirm a cohesive nation, the central government negotiated with the regional centers of power and valorized regional identities, in an ambiguity visible in the journal Cultura Política, a mouthpiece and media outlet for the Estado Novo, published by 73 the Department of Press and Propaganda. The work of Gilberto Freyre, ranging from Casagrande & senzala to Nordeste and Região e tradição, reflects this same ambiguity of affirming 74 nation and region simultaneously. His valorization of the Portuguese colonial enterprise and the Brazilian culture resulting from the mixture of whites, blacks, and indigenous peoples was a kind of cement for national identity, while at the same time his books affirmed the specificity 75 of the Northeast. For their part, the ideologues of the Estado Novo like Almir de Andrade (1911–1991)—director of the journal Cultura Política—and Cassiano Ricardo (1895–1974)—a member of the modernist Verde-Amarelo group in the 1920s—strove to present Getúlio Vargas 76 as the maestro capable of orchestrating all these ambiguities. The end of the war and the defeat of the Axis powers exposed a fundamental contradiction: an internally authoritarian government whose foreign policy simultaneously allied the country 77 with the democratic nations. The end of the Estado Novo, in 1945, did not mean the end of an optimistic vision of national culture marked by miscegenation, an ideology that had been forged since the modernist movement of the 1920s and consolidated during the first Vargas government. Casa-grande & senzala, by Gilberto Freyre, became the biggest symbol of this vision. Science, UNESCO, and Race Relations in Brazil, 1945–1955 The terms of the discussion of the “race problem” in Brazil saw a shift in intellectual orientation after the Second World War when social scientists turned from questions of race and national identity to interpretations of the process of modernization and their accelerated social changes, evinced by the persistence of social and racial inequalities. Page 11 of 34 Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Latin American History. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 26 January 2021