The Spectacle of the Races: Scientists, Institutions, and the Race Question in Brazil, 1870-1930 - Hardcover

Schwarcz, Lilia Moritz

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809087898 ISBN 13: 9780809087891

Publisher: Hill and Wang, 1999

Synopsis

A provocative analysis of racial identity and nationhood.

"We are a half-breed country . . . We are half-breeds, if not in our blood, then at least in our souls." With these words, the literary critic Silvio Romero summed up the impression of Brazil a century ago as a "festival of colors." The spectacle of a mixed-race society in a world that prized racial purity was horrifying to European travelers as well as to Brazil's intellectuals, who were soon crying out for "one hope, one solution: the whitening of the population within one century."

But however attractive European notions of racial superiority might have been to Brazil's elite, they were not easily adapted into the Brazilian context. In The Spectacle of the Races, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, a leading cultural anthropologist and historian, shows how Brazil's philosophers, politicians, and scientists gratefully accepted social Darwinist ideas about innate differences among the races yet could not condemn the miscegenation that had so long been an essential feature of Brazilian society-and was at the very heart of a new state-building project as the country modernized. Schwarcz shows how the work of these "men of science" became crucial to the development and survival of Brazil's basic national structures, affecting the country's destiny in ways that still apply today, when race remains the basis of Brazil's self-image.

About this title

About the Author

Lilia Schwarcz is a sociologist at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. This is her first book.

Reviews

The important issues of race and miscegenation in Brazil have been of interest to scholars for many years. Schwarcz (anthropology, Univ. of Sao Paulo) here examines turn-of-the-century Brazilian scientific views on race. After discussing the prevalent 19th-century European ideas of human evolution that condemned miscegenation, Schwarcz looks at the reaction of Brazilian scientists to those ideas. She suggests that though they accepted the fundamentals of the racist theories of the day, they discarded those ideas that condemned the racial mixture so prevalent in Brazil. Schwarcz's revisionist work rejects the accepted view that 19th-century Brazilian scientists merely borrowed European theories. She suggests that instead they adapted foreign ideas, keeping those theories that appeared to have application in Brazil and rejecting those that were problematic. Of value for libraries with Latin American and multicultural collections.AMark L. Grover, Brigham Young Univ. Lib., Provo, UT
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Hill and Wang
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0809087898
• ISBN 13: 9780809087891
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224