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

The Spectacle of the Races: Scientists, Institutions, and the Race Question in Brazil, 1870-1930. By Lilia Moritz Schwarcz (New York: Hill & Wang, 1999. ix plus 358pp. $35.00).

One hates to see a book begin by egregiously and injuriously misquoting the most important previous work in its field. Here the field is Brazilian racial thought, and the work in question is Thomas Skidmore's Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought. [1] Schwarcz quotes, and condemns, Skidmore's "conclusions" that Brazilians uncritically accepted European racial thought because they were "derivative in their culture, self-consciously imitative in their thought, ... [and] ill-equipped to argue about the latest social doctrines from Europe." (14) But this passage is drawn, not from Skidmore's conclusion, but from his introduction. That introduction, and indeed that specific passage, make clear that, in describing Brazilians' supposed intellectual passivity, Skidmore was referring to the mid-1800s. Between 1880 and 1930, he shows--indeed, it is the central theme of his book--, Brazilian intellectuals effectively challenged, reworked and reinvented racial doctrines emanating from Europe and Nor th America. Far from dismissing Brazil's role in that process of international intellectual exchange, Black into White was the first systematic examination of it. This same topic is now taken up again in Spectacle of the Races.

There were compelling reasons for Brazilian thinkers to challenge turn-of-the-century racial theories, which argued the irredeemable inferiority of the African, Indian, and racially mixed peoples who made up the bulk of Brazil's population. If Brazilian elites and intellectuals accepted the validity of such dictates, they inevitably had to accept as well Brazil's permanent second-rate status in the community of Western nations--or even worse, as one turn-of-the-century French writer suggested, the country's eventual "reversion, as seems likely, to barbarism."

Especially worrisome to Brazilian elites were the perils of race mixture, which, according to North Atlantic scientists and intellectuals, produced "degenerate" populations with all the defects of the inferior races and few, if any, of the strengths supposedly associated with European racial heritage. Brazilians countered this proposition with a new and quite original interpretation of race mixture that stressed the strength and superiority of "white" genes, and their ability to neutralize and eventually eliminate nonwhite racial traits. Far from weakening and undermining the nation, Brazilian thinkers argued, miscegenation could actually strengthen it through a long-term process of racial "whitening."

Schwarcz seeks to examine how these debates played out in a variety of scientific, educational, and cultural institutions: ethnographical museums, historical and geographical societies, law schools, and medical schools. (Brazil did not develop its first comprehensive universities until the 1930s.) This in turn requires her to devote a good deal of attention to the vicissitudes of creating scientific and educational institutions in nineteenth-century Brazil. In the absence of locally educated scientists, museums and scientific journals depended heavily on hired guns brought in from Europe: Herman von Ihering at the Sao Paulo Museum; Emilio Goeldi at the museum in Para, later renamed in his honor; and other sojourners from Europe. Regional institutions in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and Recife competed relentlessly for prestige, political connections, and scarce funding. Other resources were in short supply as well: in 1887 the journal of the National Museum in Rio reported despondently on the difficulti es of obtaining Indian skulls for phrenological research. What with "the superstitious ideas of the Indians on one hand and ... the scruples of the missionaries on the other," good skulls were hard to come by. (81)

After surveying the growth and development of these institutions, Schwarcz tries to get at the ideas and theories that circulated within them. She does so by cataloguing the contents of each institution's journal, counting up the articles and assigning them to various categories. Much of the analysis is thus quantitative in character, and here Schwarcz's use of numbers does not inspire complete confidence. Surveying articles in the Journal of the Historical and Geographical Institute of Brazil, she notes that 40 percent of them dealt with the colonial period (1500-1822); the publication thus displays a "bias," she concludes, toward studying "the most distant moments of the country's history." (130) But as of 1900, the colonial period represented fully 80 percent, in chronological terms, of Brazil's post-1500 history. If anything, that period was under-represented in the journal's coverage, not over-represented. She asserts at one point that 47 percent of the articles in the Recife law review dealt with crimi nal law, when in fact only 17 percent fell into this category (190-91); articles on "internal and surgical medicine" did not make up "the bulk" of articles published in Medical Brazil, but rather only one-third (274-75); and so on.

The categories into which Schwarcz aggregates the articles are broad and not always consistent from journal to journal. They also tend to suggest, curiously, the opposite of what she is arguing. While the book posits the centrality of racial thought to Brazilian scientific discourse during this period, race in fact emerges as a purely secondary concern, at least to judge by the number of articles devoted to it. In the publications of the scientific museums, fewer than one-tenth of the articles (50 out of 515) fell into the category of anthropology, where articles on race were concentrated (and not all of these, of course, dealt with racial questions). In the law reviews, 15 percent of articles dealt with criminal law, the area where commentary on race was concentrated--and again, not all of those pieces dealt with race. In the medical journals, fewer than 5 percent of articles dealt with "medical law," which "analyzed the correlation between 'criminality and degeneracy'," the latter of which was believed to be largely racial in origin.

Though race did emerge as a theme or topic of interest in these publications, other topics received much greater attention and apparently weighed more heavily on the collective mind of Brazilian intellectuals. The law reviews devoted more articles to the internal affairs of their respective law schools than to any legal topic, including that of criminal law; the medical schools were far more interested in questions of public health and sanitation than they were in "racial degeneracy." It was this interest in public health, in fact, that helped move Brazilian scientific discourse away from racial determinism in the 1920s and 30s and toward a more hopeful set of ideas about how enlightened public policy--sanitation, medical care, education, and other forms of social provision--might "rehabilitate" and strengthen a weak and ailing population. These ideas also argued strongly for the beginnings of the Brazilian welfare state in the 1930s and 40s; that welfare state was in turn supported by multiracial unions and political parties that brought together black and white workers intent on preserving and expanding their newly won benefits. By 1950 the turn-of-the-century "spectacle of the races," never a genuine crowd-pleaser, had been displaced by electoral democracy and the spectacle of the masses.

ENDNOTE 

(1.) (2nd ed., Duke University Press, 1993 [1994]).