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.
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