Issuu

It is better to make carnival than to define it. (João Ternura)

This research began when I watched the documentary film, Carnival Bahia, produced by Granada Video as part of the anthropology series Vanishing Worlds. The inclusion of Carnival in Bahia, a dynamic and accelerating cultural phenomenon, with ethnographic "time capsules," recording for posterity the rites and rituals of remote tribes on the verge of extinction, mirrors my dissatisfied viewing experience; the film left far more questions than answers in my mind, and seemed riddled with apparent inconsistencies. At the same time, I wondered how did carnival in Bahia, long viewed as the poor, black sore in Brazil's cultural landscape, become the huge tourist draw that it is today?1

Admittedly, it is difficult both to capture and to find carnival in the domain of the written; as the delirious invasion of the street, it is something felt, sung, danced. But the extent to which generations of writers— especially over the past half-century—have cast carnival as the frenzied figure of Brazilian identity suggests that it typifies much of the hybridity and contradiction that is Brazil. Rather than an attempt to define carnival, this research seeks to understand it. As such, it is less a linear argument than kaleidoscopic overlay of the amalgamated layers of history, geography and cultural identity mixed up in Bahia's carnival, dissected.2

Who was it that invented Brazil? — It was Cabral! It was Cabral! On the 21st of April… Two months after carnival!3

In the mind of the West, Brazil did not exist until Europeans “discovered” it. Spanish navigator Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, commander of the Niña during Columbus’ expedition of 1492, surveyed the mouth of the Amazon River in January 1500.4 However, Pedro Álvares Cabral is generally credited with the discovery of Brazil, when months later he landed in Bahia and claimed it for Portugual.5 Martin Afonso de Souza’s 1532 settlement on the island of São Vicente launched the organized Portuguese colonization of Brazil. 1

Jorge Amado cites the number of tourists who join the Bahian carnival each year as in excess of 200,000. See his introductory remarks in the photographic collection, Carnaval by Claudio Edinger, 1996. 2 This approach is similar in some ways to Roberto DaMatta's continued attempts (he says, indebted to Gunnar Myrdal's The Brazilian Dilemma of 1944) to challenge the predominantly linear and rationalized depiction of Brazil's history. Rather, he seeks to explore Brazilian identity through a more "kaleidoscopic" interplay between drama and ideology. 3 Lyrics from Lamartine Babo's popular 1934 marchinha (carnival song), História do Brasil [History of Brazil], in Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil's exhibition catalogue Carnival (ed. Alfons Hug), 121, 126. 4 "Pinzón, Vicente Yáñez," The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed, 2005. www.encyclopedia.com/html/P/Pinzon-M1.asp 5 Roberto DaMatta and Lívia Neves de Holanda Barbosa have questioned the “discovery” of Brazil (similar to Columbus’ “discovery” of the New World), when compared to the “founding” of the United States. In the endnotes of his article, For an Anthropology of the Brazilian Tradition, DaMatta cites Barbosa’s observation as part of his ongoing interest in social characteristics of individualism versus holism, and the degree to which Brazilian society exhibits both.

Natural

Martin Waldseem端ller, Tabula Terre Nove, (Strassburg 1513), in Bentili Verlag Bern, Brasilien: Entdeckung und Selbstentdeckung, 45. 7 Sebastian M端nster, Novae Insulae/ Nova Tabula, XVII (Basel, 1540), in Bern, 45.

Portugal’s vast new territory in the Americas immediately became central to the academic and popular debate, taking place within the university halls and club rooms of the Old World, regarding the nature of the tropics. Nancy Leys Stepan, in her book Picturing Tropical Nature, has documented a specific genealogy unique to the European construction of “tropical nature.”10 Tracking post-Enlightenment developments in the fields of natural history, the human sciences and medicine, she argues that “the identity of ‘tropical nature’ in the European mind depends upon its visual representations.”11 Brazil, Stepan suggests, typifies the European understanding of “tropicality”; and, by the mid-19th century, emerged as combined symbol for “tropical environment and race mixture.”12 This “imagined nation,” although derived from study of Brazil’s physical land and population, received new meaning through the reciprocal and sometimes collapsed relationship between the real (scientific expeditions, systematic cataloguing, and tropical disease on one hand) and the imagined (embellished nature art, social and racial theory, and cultural perception on the other).

Historically, Western imagination formulated Brazilian nature as an exotic, superabundant and overwhelming environment beyond human control. Stepan points out that artists who visited Brazil, such as Dutch painter Franz Post in the 1660s, exploited imagery of serpents and indigenous peoples to amplify the primordial character of the landscape. Similarly, she highlights a 1502 Portuguese map, in which the Brazilian coast exists as brightly-colored macaws against a field of water and trees, as an example of exoticizing iconography.13 Further analysis of European map-making supports the trend Stepan identifies. While in a German map of 1513 South America is simply Terra Incognita, by 1538 a Swiss edition shows Brazil as a grove of trees with a suspended leg, labeled “Canibali.” The Miller Atlas of 1519 includes far more detail, although limited to the coast; in the mysterious interior the macaws are joined by half-naked Indians and a winged dragon. As European settlers and naturalist-explorers ventured further inland, they found the unfamiliar fauna and the scale of flora both forbidding and fascinating. Stepan attributes to this experience the Western representation of Brazil in terms of a symbolic nature: Unlike Mexico and Peru, the European conquest of Brazil revealed no remnants of ancient civilizations, no grand monuments that could be interpreted as distant or faint analogues of those of ancient Greece or Rome. Nature, it seemed, was the country’s most important sign.14

Unknown Portuguese cartographer, Cantino-Karte (1502), in Bern, 41. Cartographer unknown, Atlas Miller (1519), in Bern, 47. 10 Nancy Leys Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2001). 11 Stepan, 18. 12 Stepan, 124. 13 Stepan, 19. 14 Stepan, 211. 9

The absence of “civilized” man—equated, according to the European model, with perdurable and monumental architectures—made nature the absolute authority. Indigenous peoples were subordinate to this universe of plants and animals, having never conquered it. Brazilian nature as cosmological sign may also be seen as reflecting Humboldt’s hugely influential conception of the tropics (developed not in Brazil, but in regions of Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela and Peru), in which the force of vegetation generates the sublime landscape.

The Portuguese colonization of Brazil thus became the challenge of conquering this all-powerful nature, in order to introduce (build) Western civilization. If the Pampas was empty plain, the Amazon was teeming jungle. Stepan considers this project, essentially one of deforestation, as the primary narrative behind Brazil’s transformation from primitive nature to modern nation: The real history of the last five hundred years in Brazil is one of the massive destruction of its natural environment and the chaos of many of its cities. The Atlantic forest, which once covered the entire eastern coastal seaboard, has been cleared successively for commodities—sugar, wood, coffee—until today, it is a mere 10 per cent of what it was in 1500, when Cabral first saw the country and gave it the name of a tropical tree (the red tree, ibirapitanga in Tupi, pau-brasil in Portuguese).15 Significantly, the representation of Brazil as boundless nature in many cases outlasts the physical environment, and ignores the tension between land and capitalist growth. Stepan notes that Roberto Burle Marx, the paradigmatic Brazilian landscape modernist, has childhood memories of “not the jungle of the European imagination but a scarred and charred landscape cleared for urban development.”16 This uncompromising exchange of nature for urbanism began with the first European settlements and encapsulates the problematic of Brazil’s social history. Two paintings by Jean Julien Deltil from his 19th century travelogue, Les Vues du Brésil (1829-30), although not referenced in Stepan’s book, capture the historical dilemma of tropical nature in Brazil: Edenic Indians dwarfed by the forest primeval; in a clearing, a proper plantation mansion, with a farmer of European descent and his African slaves in the foreground.

Simultaneous with an aesthetic interest in these two contrasted scenes, the European mind increasingly became concerned with the scientific implications of the Brazilian experiment. Consistent

15 16

Stepan, 213. Stepan, 13.

with the global research at the time, as European powers sought to understand the alien situations they confronted in overseas colonies, formal scientific expeditions followed in the tracks of earlier Latin American exploration. Stepan suggests that these scientific studies served to expand the European representation of tropical nature from not only a fantastical otherworld of tropical plants and animals, but also that of a dangerous realm of racial mixing. In light of the racial and evolutionary theories of Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin, and later of Louis Agassiz, Alexander von Humboldt's scientific determination of â€œtropics,â€? J.A. de Gobineau's conclusion that miscegenation inevitably doomed the Euro-Brazilian aspirations toward "civilizing" the tropics, the Brazilian elite became increasingly concerned about implosion due to the degenerative influence of their racialized society and of tropical nature itself. Consequently, Karl Friedrich P. von Martius' winning entry in a competition held by the Brazilian Institute of History and Geography ("How Should the History of Brazil be Written?") triggered a significant and essentially Brazilian revision of scientific racism. His 1817-21 comparative study of Brazil's ethnological and natural histories led to a conclusion that race mixing in the country could lead to "positive amalgamation," essentially placing the Brazilian situation as a territory similar to the historical (and assumed beneficial) blending of European ethnic groups. A decidedly profound demonstration of 19th century eagerness to "purify" the image of Brazil, not only in the sense of restoration to a white, European bloodline, but also to a level of social decency in the eyes of the International (Western) community, is JoĂŁo Batista Lacerda's pamphlet presented at the 1911 Universal Races Congress held in London, on behalf of the government of Brazil. His theory of "The Negro passing into white, in the third generation, by the effect of the crossing of the races," was accompanied by a painting by Brazilian painter Modesto Brocos y Gomes, The Redemption of Ham.

In terms of the nature of the Brazilian reality, at the same time that the plantation, the wealth of which ultimately enables the city, emerges as the conquering of environment, its dependence on a system of slavebased agriculture collectively implicates European landholder and African farmhand in a reciprocal history. However, ongoing reservations about the legitimacy of a mixed society forced the question of how Brazil should conceive of common national self-identity against a backdrop of hybridity.

Sociological At the beginning of the 20th century, the Western image of “tropical nature” in the Brazilian context was damning—a dilution of European blood that precluded modern or civilized society. Sílvio Romero, during the first three decades advanced a Brazilian interpretation of race theory, based on the mestiçagem (mixed population), that the "biological and psychological transfer" inherent in interracial mixing could move towards a common racial denominator and hybridized national identity. However, it was Gilberto Freyre, “Father of Brazilian sociology,” who saved national self-identity by drafting a new master narrative of Brazil's social history which largely still persists to the present-day. Starting with the primary question of how the amalgamation of three races—European, African, Indian—could produce an acceptable hybrid (namely, one equivalent to the European type), Freyre’s analysis of Brazil’s history unearthed a series of dialectical couplings: e.g., the plantation and the city square, the house and the street. His landmark attempt to authenticate a Brazilian civilization reveals this technique in the title of both volumes: The Masters and the Slaves [Casa-Grande e Senzala] (1st ed. 1933), and The Mansions and the Shanties [Sobrados e mucambos] (1st ed. 1936). These pairings suggest that for Freyre social relationships in Brazil are embedded in, or at least represented by a “social landscape" built around architectural typologies. For this paper, the goal is to deploy Freyre’s construction of Brazil at the macro level, to map an image of Brazilian society by means of these architectural pairings and their structural relationships.

Such a reading of Freyre seeks first to project his historical analysis as a set of spatialized dialectial relationships onto a socio-geographical plane, at which point it becomes possible to critique his particular agenda with respect to race theory, miscegenation and tropicology, his proposal that because the problems of life in the tropics differ from the dominant European model, they give rise to an entirely new set of racial, social and environmental constraints. Taking the premise of tropicology as a given, he proceeds to argue that “civilizing activities” in Brazil must occur within a territory of hostile “physical conditions”:

Man and the seed that he plants, the houses that he builds, the animals that he breeds for his use or subsistence, the archives and libraries that he founds for his intellectual culture, the useful or beautiful products that he fashions with his hands—all this is a the mercy of the larvae, worms, and insects, gnawing, boring, corrupting. Grain, fruit, wood, paper, flesh, muscles, lymphatic glands, intestines, the white of the eyes, the toes of the feet, all are a prey to these terrible enemies.17

Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves, 23.

Thus, as a function of the adverse condition of tropical nature, it becomes not only entirely acceptable, but also—even more important (for the European audience)—rational, to pursue a program of racial intermixing. This process would over successive generations move towards an idealized type, assuming all the advantageous characteristics of each constituent race, which resultantly is most suitable for life in Brazil.

Having established a legitimate basis for Brazil's racial hybridity, Freyre is able to articulate a vision of Brazil as capable of civilization comparable to that of Europe. The foundation for Freyre’s construction of Brazil is that an historical link between land and slavery drives a subcontinental Brazilian heritage: “a monoculture based on latifundism and slavery.” (6) The first waves of Portuguese settlers battled inland from the coast, fighting acre-by-acre against the forest, the native Tupi tribes, and French and Dutch competition. From the end of the 16th century, the semi-nomadic paulistas [bandeiras ] extended this fight into the interior, from Sao Paulo, and pushed the Spanish presence further West. Given the difficult nature of realizing Portugal’s claim to the vast territory, Dom João III organized the colony under a feudal system of hereditary captaincies in 1533, and by founding a capital city at Salvador in 1539 consolidated this new colonial administration. This early strategy on the part of the crown to pursue colonization in Brazil not as a state enterprise, but as a project primarily planned and financed by private groups (investors and wealthy families) have a profound effect on the Brazilian social landscape in the long-term. Historically, Brazil developed under an agrarian system, in which a class of landed gentry controlled vast plantations, on one hand, and the legislative bodies which controlled the colony and later, state. This class, which operated essentially as a feudal structure placed the center of power in the family. The first round of clearing the jungle and transforming Brazil into parceled plantations was embodied physically in the relationship between on the most basic level nature and man (plantation), and as Freyre argues, Master and Slave, the former secluded in the Big House, the latter represented by the slave barracks (senzala).

"The city square triumphed over the sugar plantation, but gradually."18

However, the overwhelming dominance of the rural aristocracy was challenged through rural-urban competition, beginning in the 17th century, for economic and political supremacy. Several key factors played a role in the shift of Brazil's power base from the sugar plantation and its "Big House," to the city square. At the same time as the international decline in sugar prices threatened the profitability of the plantation, the arrival of 18

Freyre, The Mansions and the Shanties, 26.

Dom João VI from Portugal (fleeing Napoleon's invasion) upset the colonial grandeur of the rural patriarchy. Especially once Brazil ceased to be a colony, in 1815, when it was merged (together with the Algarve) as the Kingdom of Portugal itself, and by 1822, when Dom Pedro ascended as the first emperor of Brazil, the monarchy allied itself with the urban merchants in order to mitigate the strength of the rural power base. Similarly, from the 18th century, new competition for slaves and royal support contributed to enervate the plantation. Freyre suggests that by the 19th century, the plantation had been replaced by the city square as the center of the Brazilian power.

This reconfiguration was largely contingent on the slave economy. Because plantation owners found it cheaper to overwork slaves, they became increasingly dependent on urban creditors who would sell them slaves annually on credit. Greater organization of the urban banks in time led to the system whereby—if under the old system, wealthy plantation aristocrats removed themselves from the country to their city mansions during the rainy season, for health and leisure—now debt-collectors plied the route previously reserved for small-time peddlers, and in opposite directions, slave imports and agricultural exports, to the rural Big Houses. The matrix of oppositional relationships that Freyre catalogues proceeds from that of kingdom/colony to master/slave; this in turn is displaced by competition between plantation/city square. However, the focus of his second volume, The Mansion and the Shanty concerns the typology of the city itself. The urban wealthy, having wrested economic power and political favor from the rural aristocracy, retained a similarly patriarchal hierarchy, which conceived of the house as a vault to "safeguard women and valuables": Brazilian patriarchialism, when it moved from the plantation to the townhouse, did not at once come to terms with the street; for a long time they were almost enemies, the house and the street. And the greatest struggle was that which was joined over woman, whom the street enticed, but whom the paterfamilias tried his best to keep shut up in her room among the slave girls, as on the plantation…19 Freyres positions the house, and the treasured European civilization it represented to the male Brazilian elite, in opposition to the street, the contaminated domain of negro slaves, prostitutes and common peddlers. Thus, to the upper-class Brazilian woman, gazing from her window at the street "like a songbird…[from] behind grilles, lattices, screens, shutters" the street represented an illicit freedom. This last, confrontational relationship between house and street, positioned socially as enemies, is Freyre's most well-recognized image of the Brazilian social landscape and the city, and is one which, because he also collapses it with that of the mansion and the shanty (urban wealthy versus the urban poor, i.e. blacks and recent immigrants), particularly relevant in the case of Bahia.

Freyre, The Mansions and the Shanties, 30.

Architectural Significantly, the slavocratic and agricultural beginnings of Bahia state generated the most extreme conditions for what came to emerge as the hybrid identity of Brazil. Bahia was the largest sugar-producing region in the world, and consequently, biggest source of colonial wealth for Portugal, prior to the reorganization of the international sugar trade as the Caribbean colonies stabilized; this movement from center of Brazilian cultural and economic life is apparent in the 1763 transfer of the capital of the colony of Brazil from Salvador da Bahia to Rio de Janerio. In the 19th century the city and the state entered a period of economic stagnation followed by decline that led by the 20th century to an image, elsewhere in Brazil, of poor, black backwoods. Estimates on Brazil's share of the number of African slaves imported to the Americas range between 50 and 90 percent, while Stepan quotes that Brazil received 9 to 12 times more than were brought to the United States.20 A huge percentage of this slave population was directed towards Bahia, for labor on the sugar plantations. According to Butler, in 1775 whites constituted 62 percent of the free population in Salvador, but by 1872, only 32 percent. 21 However, the 20th century saw a dramatic shift in the cultural paradigm within Brazil, from that of imitative impulse and obsessive fascination with a Eurocentric aesthetic canon (as Roberto Schwarz has said, "In Brazil, all good things come on ships…") to a new cultural awareness that privileged artistic production derived explicitly, organically and totally from within Brazil itself.

Critical moments in this development came with the Oswald de Andrade's modernist-surrealist "Pau-Brazil Poetry Manifesto," presented at Modern Art Week in São Paulo in 1922, and "The Cannibalist Manifesto" (Antropofágico) of 1928, as well as the magical realism of Mário de Andrade's novel Macunaíma. The line "Tupy or not Tupy, that is the question," came to symbolize this moment, and its agenda of strengthening Brazilian autonomy through the (cannibalistic) process of consuming the foreign and thereby overcoming the tyranny of external aesthetic domination. However, it is the contribution of a foreign-born adoptive Brazilian, that of architect and total designer Lina Bo Bardi that coincides immediately with analysis of carnival in Bahia and its representations both in Brazil and abroad. When she arrived in Brazil, after surviving, and being dynamically influenced through her resistance to, fascist Italy, she described her personal discovery of Brazil: Dazzle of an unimaginable country with no middle class, just two great aristocracies: that of the Land, of Coffee, of Sugar Cane, and…the People.22 20

Stepan, 124. Butler, in Afro-Brazilian Culture and Politics (ed. Hendrik Kraay, 1998), 163. 22 Ferraz, Marcelo Carvalho, ed., Lina Bo Bardi (Milan: Edizioni Charta and São Paulo: Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi, 1994). 21

Although trained as an architect, her influential impact derived not from her few, isolated built works in Brazil, but rather her energetic and optimistic redefinition of what art could and should mean in Brazil. In certain cases in partnership with her husband, who headed several art initiatives in the country, including the SĂŁo Paulo Art Museum (which she designed), Lina became increasingly involved with curatorial projects in Brazil. In Italy, Lina had already written, in first issue of "A" Magazine, 1946: We must go back to the beginning, to the letter A, to build a happy life for everyone. We try to create in every man and woman the awareness of what is a house or a city. To make everyone recognize the problems of construction, so that everyone, and not just the technicians, participates.23 Once she adopted Brazil as her new home, she transferred her socialist project of a more inclusive and egalitarian society to this new "unimaginable country," seeking a revolutionary inversion of its binary and unjust structure ("the Land" and "the People"). One her main platforms toward this goal was the museum exhibition. In 1959, along with Martim GonĂ§alves, she organized an exhibition at the V Biennal in Sao Paulo, entitled "Bahia in Ibirapuera." She describes the overall goal of this project as a questioning the boundaries of art: That which is generally defined as 'popular art', 'folklore', 'primitive art' or 'spontaneous art' implies, tacitly, a classification of art that, excluding man, considers art itself to be something individual, an abstract activity, a privilege. Where does art begin and where does it end? What are its boundaries? This 'no man's land' that limits man in the expression of his total humanity, depriving him of one of his most necessary and profound manifestations, such as esthetics, this limit between Art and art, is what suggested this Exhibition.24 She adds that, "It is not by mere chance that this Exhibition is presented by a Theater School, as the theater gathers together all the requirements of esthetic manâ€ŚWe present Bahia. We could have chosen Central America, Spain, Southern Italy, or any other place where what we call 'culture' has not arrived." While she went on to curate a large body of other exhibitions, including the temporary "School-Museum" of Modern Art the same year, in Salvador, and internationally, for example at New York's Museum of Modern Art, her message remained the same. Similarly, it is entirely consistent with combined view of art, life and nature that she, in addition to her architectural work, was extremely active in theatrical and cinematic production. For her, art was indeed equivalent with theater, but by necessity a theatrical world that was not the private domain of a self-appointed elite, privileged guardians of artistic truth. Instead, she aggressively promoted the folkloric and the "primitive" as not anti-art situated outside the boundaries of authentic Art, but complicit with an expanded humanist worldview. Bahia's role as the agent for delivering this message further eroded the division between the House and the Street (in Lina's terms, "Art and art"), and placed the syncretic Afro-Brazilian cultural heritage into the foreground as representative of the "authentic" Brazil. The explosive popularity of carnival in general, but especially in Salvador da Bahia is a trend consistent with the aesthetic revolution Lina initated. 23 24

Ibid, 30. Ibid, 134.

Carnival Roberto DaMatta is the first Brazilian critic (he situates his work between social anthropology and comparative sociology) to fully engage the issue of carnival and both its relationship to and representation of Brazilian social history. It is interesting to note the nontrivial number of compilations of photographs of Brazil in general or of carnival specifically, that begin with an enigmatic foreword by DaMatta. His particular view of carnival has become by default the predominant interpretation, and one which a new generation of authors is currently challenging. Carole Boyce Davies phrases this newer critique as an effort to destabilize "Roberto DaMatta's reading of a flattened Carnival in which race, gender and a host of identities are of little consequence in the context of Carnival."25

His text, Carnivals, Rogues and Heroes, specifically, examines Brazilian carnival through the lens of ritual and rite, arguing that carnival does not invent, but rather foregrounds existing social relationships through their recombination. His conclusions align with a structuralist attitude, very much in the vein of Levi-Strauss' linguistic approach. Maintaining that carnival, like life, is entirely relative (for example poverty: "Even without money, I have music, love, carnival and happinessâ€Ś") and that it is the basic, underlying mechanism of carnival which is key to its understanding: If there are different Carnivals, they all follow the same rules and use the same crucial elements for dramatization. They are like soccer games played by different teamsâ€”some poor, some rich, some white, some black."26 He argues that unlike other rituals, which demand a specific center and motive, carnival exists as decentralized, in which a constellation of personal decisions and individual agendas predominates. The unifying theme, then, lies in the dichotomy that is carnival: that of everyday life (realidade do dia-a-dia), which is hierarchical and routine, against the extraordinary, when the spontaneous supercedes the planned and ordered. If the military parade, with that of Independence Day being the absolute "limit of formality," then carnival is the opposite pole of informality. unraveling. At the same time, because carnival exists as ritual, and is therefore of limited duration, it must be bracketed by a beginning and end, i.e. everyday life, even

Davies attributes Stam (1988, 1989) with initiating a renewed carnival theory; however, much of this new research parallels the rise (and methodology) of cultural studies. Representations of Blackness and the Performance of Identities (ed. Jean Muteba Rahier, 1999) includes two thorough studies which argue that the tourist-view of carnival (hypersexuality, exoticism) tends to deny the multiple identities which carnival itself has: Carole Boyce Davies follows the success of a female blocos-afro, "Re-/Presenting Black Female Identity in Brazil: 'Filhas d'Oxum' in Bahia Carnival," and Myrian Sepulveda do Santos considers Rio's samba schools from an internal perspective, "Samba Schools: The Logic of Orgy and Blackness in Rio de Janeiro." 26 DaMatta, 61.

before the religious inventions of Advent and Lent. While carnival begins as an organized event, it anticipates its own unraveling through inversion as a social mechanism, a unified praxis in drama.

DaMatta too, discusses the dialectic of the house and the street, but from the premise of a Jorge Amado novel, O PaĂs do Carnaval [The Land of Carnival] (in which one day the main character, Paulo Rigger, dances samba in the street with a mulatto woman, and the next day beat his French mistress, who had cheated on him with one of his own black employees):

The street is to lack of control and mixing with a multitude of persons as the house is to control and authoritarianism.27 What is remarkable is that he derives his analysis of the "many levels of carnival" from a fictional character's aspirations to Brazilian-ness, yet takes as his basic framework the ideas of Gilberto Freyre's The Mansions and the Shanties (oppositional domains of social life), without including his earlier The Masters and the Slaves (racial underpinnings of these relationships)â€”or, for that matter, mentioning Freyre's name. From this, and other instances in the literature, it seems that if Freyre was the first to consolidate his social universe of Brazil, much of that logic remains (or, has become) the general understanding of Brazil.

DaMatta sets 1840 as the turning point of a shift from a domestic carnival, along the lines of Freyre's patriarchal model of the aristocratic Brazilian house, toward the more contemporary street carnival (a date he cites from Eneida 1958). Such a distinction between carnival rua and carnival de clube and carnival de salĂŁo, and the fact that a process begun in the mid-19th century still persists as unresolved complication (and remains uncontested in the public sphere) collimates carnival itself with Brazil's historical race and class crises. While the origins of carnival in Brazil are more closely aligned with the precedent of entrudo in Portugal, a more modest celebration confined to domestic and controlled spaces of either the house or "high society" private venue, social forces progressively erode this segmented and hierarchical paradigm to resituate carnival in the more egalitarian public space of the street.

In the catalogue for its Carnival exhibition, the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil places the critical importance of the exhibition in the language of "providing fresh insights into this singular expression of cultural resistance."28

DaMatta, 66. Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, preface to the exhibition catalogue Carnival (2004), 121. Included is a contribution by DaMatta: "Endless and Repetitive Reflections on an Always Misunderstoond and Overly Publicized Carnival," 126.

Editor of the catalogue, Alfons Huys, elaborates on this theme by relating carnival as platform for collective social experience with the eternal Brazilian conflict of self-identity:

â€Śwe are interested in the Brazilian carnival as a forum of social expression, a seedbed of political movement and a means of intercultural communicationâ€Śit creates an alternative aesthetic current contrasting strongly with Eurocentric middleclass 'sophisticated culture' which it often surpasses in authenticity, creativity and emancipatory potential. Generated from Black, White and Indian sources, carnival mirrors the threefold ethnic nature of Brazilian society and reflects a kind of social history of the country, mapped out in an intercontinental triangle between Europe, Africa and America. Consequently, if carnival is "multicultural" and "anti-elitist," it operates not only as opportunity for reflection and reinvention, but as societal release valve: because during carnival "anything goes," it establishes an imagined space in which inter-class dialogue may transpire without the threat of open confrontation, e.g. through the masked rites of carnival, lower classes can challenge the cultural monopoly of the elites, etc.

Huys cites a number of European precedents (all German, which probably is not incidental, given that the publication of the book and exhibition catalogue was funded largely by the Goethe-Institut in Rio de Janeiro), such as the Swabian-Alemannic Fasnet in the Black Forest (origins: pre-Germanic and pagan), Rhineland carnival, and KĂślner Geisterzug (Cologne Ghost Parade). Relating Brazilian carnival to international examples, suggests a universal aspect of carnival, that of its functioning as an artistic operation which liberates the city from the (normal) life of the everyday and allows for a public and shared critique of society. Huys also acknowledges the implications of carnival with respect to the architectural image of the city, which can be traced back to Freyre (Huy says, "Openness prevails and all divisions between casa and rua disappear throughout the carnival period"), and suggests that this relationship is inverted, along the lines of DaMatta's critique through "the absence of rule [and] the conquering of public spaces."29

While the exhibition sponsored by Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil covers carnival throughout Brasil, Huys makes specific mention of the unique conditions of Salvador as site for carnival: Despite a certain trend toward commercialization, carnival there [Salvador] is now considered the guardian of the grail of Afro-Brazilian culture, the starting point for social involvement and, in similar fashion to hip-hop, a vehicle for Black self-discovery.30 "Black power" as a social and political movement, which Huys says remains less organized than North American and Caribbean counterparts, finds in Salvador "Black carnival's laboratory."

29 30

Huys, in Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil's Carnival, 123. Huys, in Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil's Carnival, 122.

At this point, it becomes possible to think more critically not only about the material for Carnaval Bahia, the documentary film produced by Granada Video, assembled by Peter Fry, professor of social anthropology at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, but also its presentation. The film follows Zecarlos, a 22-year-old black resident of Salvador, capital of Bahia state, in his efforts to found a new blocos—essentially a social club, with dues-paying members, centered around annual participation in the carnival parade. Interestingly, the narration never dates his effort beyond "Zecarlos is determined to make his mark on this years carnival," thereby reinforcing the typical characterization of carnival as a timeless utopia, which coincides momentarily with the real world each year; the specific year does not matter, since carnival is a static event, changing on it the sense of its cyclical (yearly) revelation. Zecarlos group, Olodum, is now a vibrant, if not dominant, player within the competitive world of carnival blocos. However, the exact year of Olodum's founding remains unclear: Christopher Dunn (Afro-Brazilian Carnival: A Stage for Protest, 1992) offers the date 1979, counter to the claim on the part of the film (made in 1982) that Zecarlos is establishing a new blocos.

Carnival Bahia collages a revealing cinematographic collection of scenes; while to a certain extent the narration refrains from painting the less-pretty sides the pictures, the situations of the persons and groups documented expose their different relationships with respect to carnival. Most generally, the film's explanation that people in Bahia see themselves "first as Bahians, then as Brazilians," reinforces the cultural specificity of the region, born of a unique regional history. At the same time that it discredits tourist stereotypes, the film agrees that, "as in many third world countries, blacker tends to mean poorer, and white richer." The incredible subtext here—that, unlike the case of tourists and the film's audience, associative race and class inequality persists in Bahia because Brazil retains "developing nation" status—has been massively discredited over recent decades.31

A comparative study of Brazil and the United States is The Brazilian Puzzle: Culture on the Borderlands of the Western World (ed. David Hess and Roberto DaMatta, 1995). Specific to the point at hand is Kim Butler's afterword, "Ginga Baiana—the Politics of Race, Class, Culture, and Power in Salvador, Bahia," in Afro-Brazilian Culture and Politics (ed. Hendrik Kraay, 1998).

Parallel to issues of race and poverty are contrasting views of agency, in terms of how members of different backgrounds perceive their power over and direct benefit from carnival. For example, the film opens (after a "stereotypical" sequence of jump shots depicting all things "Bahian") with comments by Milton Da Silva, whose day job as driver for the municipal government is temporarily replaced each year when as King Momus he serves as master of the carnival ceremonies: My name is Milton Da Silva—Brazilian, married, 56 well-lived years old…and I play the role of 'King Momus.' It's great to be king—a real nobleman…and enjoy the good things in life. Carnival is everything for the people. They can forget daily life. For five days of madness, they can forget the other 360 days. They can give free rein to their fantasies. Men dress as women, women dress as men. They sleep in the streets, they make love…They let themselves go. Comparatively, the governor of Bahia state says: When Carnival is well organized, when the government gives the people the chance to have fun, especially in the streets, the people are pleased with the government. Everyone forgets their daily problems. Everyone takes to the streets: rich and poor alike, politicians of all parties—everybody forgets…I myself, even when I'm taking part in Carnival, I'm always thinking politics. If Carnival is good, then it's good for me politically. While on one hand, they both agree that Carnival allows the public a collective, even if fleeting, denial of the tyranny of everyday life, they also demonstrate two contrasting perspectives on the benefits. For Da Silva, carnival represents his chance to, in his words, live like a nobleman, i.e. be in power. There is clearly an enormous, personal significance in those five days, and his prominent role during the festivities. The Governor, however, openly presents his strategy of exploiting the power of carnival as political, and potentially manipulative, mechanism. From the point of view of the government, implicitly tied to the status quo, any anesthesia that helps the public forget the inequalities or injustices of everyday life is hugely beneficial.

The glaring contrast between two carnival blocos shown in the film captures many of the tensions in Brazilian society. Zecarlos' organizing committee (which consists of a policeman who directs traffic, an unemployed friend who washes windows of stopped cars to solicit money, and himself, a typist) meets in the street of Pelourinho-Maciel (one of the poorest and majority black neighborhoods of Salvador), just behind the old slave whipping post, now a tourist attraction. The named themselves Olodum, which they say means "God of gods," in the West African language of Yoruba, and adopted a strongly Afro-centric theme for their blocos. The film also shows one of the oldest, most well-established and most affluent carnival blocos, Os Internacionais, during their preparation phase. They meet in a well-kept private clubhouse, around a board room table and selected an "Aztec" theme. This group, composed of men who Zecarlos would invariably consider white,

would be less inclined to emphasize an African heritage and turns instead to the remaining "exotic" aspect of Brazil's tripartite heritage—consistent not only with Gilberto Freyre's argument that it has been easier historically for Euro-Brazilians to identify with the Native American (i.e. "Indian") in the figure of an idealized "noble savage," than with the black African, but also in keeping with Stepan's observation that Brazil's forest lacked the indigenous "civilization," in the Western sense, of Mexico and Peru. While the Os Internacionais costume is displayed on a manikin bust, Olodum's organizing committee spends a weekend screen-printing their own clothes, designed and tested on themselves.

At the same time that there is nothing wrong or shocking about these contrasted realities, what is surprising is Carnival Bahia's refusal, in light of the film's own internal evidence, to admit that there is an explicit political dimension to Olodum. The documentary already gives an historical example of the politicization of carnival in the interview of one of the founding members of perhaps the most prestigious blocos-afro, The Sons of Gandhi, founded in 1949: Many British ships came to Bahia in those days. The crews were from India. It was a time of struggle; the Indians were suffering. For us too, things were difficult: we couldn't afford a Carnival costume, so we remembered how Gandhi was humble, and with that in mind we founded the 'Sons of Gandhi.' Far from accidental or incidental, such a deliberate choice of name illustrates an alliance between oppressed peoples of the world. Poor blacks in Bahia could identify with poor Indians (a majority of whom were also dark-skinned Tamil's, disproportionately represented in the British colonial merchant marine). During a dance competition to decide the "African Queen" for the Olodum trios eléctricos (huge, over-amplified parade floats), the narration gushes how amazing it is that the panel of judges includes "a black movement leader and a man from Coca-Cola, seated side-by-side." However, to the overwhelming of beat of Afro-Brazilian drumming and lyrics of the Olodum anthem ("All the blacks—every single one—will be dancing reggae on Friday, the Friday of Olodum"), the "black movement leader" (which movement? does it not have a name, like Coca-Cola does?) delivers the award, proclaiming: "Olodum's prettiest black girl!"

Carnival in Bahia generates an incredible cultural density to the verge of a total transfiguration of the city. This process of inversion, which suspends public standards of normalcy/decency and levels cultural hierarchies, operates simultaneously and at the scale of the urban to subvert modernity. From within the perspectival space of this counter-reality, the perverted logic of carnival renders the social landscape neutral and equivalent. However, the most significant dimension of this event is that it lasts only five days.

The debate over the meaning of Brazil, trapped in an ambiguous cultural and ethnic history, is grounded most fundamentally in a transformation of the natural landscape. Salvador's urban condition, specifically, emerged from half a millennium of natural reconfiguration: coupled deforestation and mega-agriculture made possible by a racialized structure of injustice. While carnival in Bahia has become a contemporary product for the global marketing of Brazil as "racial democracy," the value of this brand bears different currency for visiting tourists and for Bahians themselves.

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