« An eBay dilemma | Main | Brazilian Racial Quotas "Debate" is out of Control »
May 27, 2006
Brazilian "Race" and the Latin American Studies meeting
Well, I see it's been over two months since my last posts on this blog. I returned from the late March Latin American Studies Association Congress in San Juan writing a report in my head to post here, but like so much of what I want/need to write about my first and still, unfortunately, major research area, I've been blocked. The field of of racial studies in Brazil has just become so damn unpleasant. Specifically, anyone who suggests publicly, here or in Brazil, that race is not the major, overriding, irreducible category of Brazilian social experience gets chastized. I use the term "political correctness" with great reluctance, owing to its hijacking by US conservatives since the early 1990s, but that is exactly what this is.
I gave an intentionally strong and polemical paper, as an antidote to the mind-numbing acquiescence to the raciological orthodoxy that prevails at these meetings. Michael Mitchell, one of the deans of Brazilianist raciology, sits there shooting daggers of stares at me the whole time, and a young guy, apparently one of his graduate students, patronizingly suggests that I need to read the "literature," by which I presume he means the unempirical, circular, intellectual pyramid scheme that is Brazilianist "race relations" research today. Then, my commitment to social justice is challenged by a woman who identifies herself as an attorney, professes ignorance of the literature, and misinterprets my argument about the ethnographic data on race and color by 180 degrees. (It turns out that describing Brazilian society as "prejudiced" "discriminatory," "unequal" and "pigmentocratic" about two dozen times and arguing that accurate and honest data will help the struggle for social justice isn't enough to innoculate oneself against this particularly hurtful canard.) Then, my argument is labeled "neo-Freyrean" by my panel chair, who has just given a paper about race and space in Rio Grande do Sul using the most slippery, vague, and deceptive term in the race theory arsenal: "racialization."
This, of course, is what anthropologists Peter Fry, Yvonne Maggie, and their allies have had to put up with Brazil for over a decade. It was the most infuriating experience I've personally had of it, though, and it reminded me of why I've been trying to move myself out of this increasingly dismal subfield for a few years.
Ah well. The conference was fun. Record high attendance due to its location in San Juan (one colleague joked that it was all she could do not to write the words "Puerto Rican junket" into the text of her talk), record low attendance, it seemed, at panels, although I can't be sure because I didn't make it to many myself. Hey, I was there with a four-month-old baby!! He needed to see the beach!
Cuban scholars weren't allowed to attend, by the way, and I think the Association will vote to move the 2007 meeting from Boston to Montreal. That's how I voted, anyway.
Posted by johnn at May 27, 2006 09:12 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.anthroblogs.org/mt/mt-tb.cgi/320
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)