SDLAP 110 - Cultural Post #2

For my cultural learning this week a lot of information I covered intertwined with my Cultural Anthropology course. Specifically, I focused on Chapters 5 and 6 of the book ‘Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age’. In these chapters I read and learned about the cultural construction of class, gender and race in Brazil. The book explicitly mentions that Brazil is a good location to explore the cultural basis of such ideas because it is one of two of the largest multiracial countries in the Western Hemisphere, with the other being the United States. My goal then was to try and compare the United States to Brazil and see how each country frames these different identities and social hierarchies. 

One amazing video that I watched to help me understand the Brazil’s system of racial classification was a TED-talk by Brazilian artist and photographer, Angélica Dass. In the video she talks about her photography and how it should challenge the way society views skin color and racial classification. Angélica Dass conducts a portrait challenge in which she takes photographs of different people with different colors of skin, and although some photographs contain members of “different” races, their skin tone and background color are exactly the same. 

I found this project by Dass quite interesting because it challenges the notion of race in great detail by color coding people who one would generally assume to be of completely different backgrounds. The project also speaks on the Brazilian system of racial classification, which has a much more expansive and detailed focus on color coding which in term bodes to a larger collection color terminology than here in the US. The US typically categorizes people into Black, White, and Brown but Brazil encompasses hundreds of different color categories. Some terms that I read about included alva (pure white), alva-escuro( off-white), alva-rosada (pinkish white), branca (white), clara (light),, branca morena (darkish white), branca suja (dirty white), café (coffee colored), café com leite (coffee with milk), canela (cinnamon), preta (black) and pretinha (lighter black). I think these racial categories show a continuum of appearance rather than the very structural and rigid color and race construction we have here in the United States, which was one of the biggest takeaways I had from this lesson.  

The next portion that I focused on was seeing how such racial categorization affects people in society. To do so, I read the beginning chapters in ‘Laughter Out of Place’ by anthropologist Donna Golstein. The book explores the relationship between poor working women of color in Brazilian favelas, and how such workers support the families and homes of middle-class and lighter skinned Brazilians. In general the book demonstrated a lot of similarities to the United States. For one, darker-skinned Brazilians face higher levels of exclusion and injustice, which I find to be a systemic correlation between color and a capitalist society, much like it occurs in the US. All in all I think both Brazil and the US face similar problems across society albeit reaching such problems through different paths. Brazil did not outlaw slavery until 1888, a full generation after the US outlawed slavery in 1863 and I wonder how much of that impacts how physical diversity is viewed across both countries. 

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  • This TED talk is really good! I have watched it last year. Brazilians like to give different names to different tons of skin, but when it comes the time to separate black and white, we know it very well. Her work is interesting to show the diversity in Brazil. Unfortunately, as you have studied, racism is still a huge problem in Brazil. One of the old common ways to call black people (and one of the most racist ones) is "da cor do pecado," which means directly translated "the color of sin." This has a sexual connotation that objectifies black bodies. In Brazil, black people fight to be defined as just black, not using any other term.

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