The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature between the Wars

NEW WORLD STUDIES

J. Michael Dash, Editor

Frank Moya Pons and

Sandra Pouchet Paquet,

Associate Editors

The Specter of Races

LATIN AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGY AND LITERATURE BETWEEN THE WARS

Anke Birkenmaier

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2016 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2016

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Birkenmaier, Anke, author.

Title: The specter of races : Latin American anthropology and literature between the wars / Anke Birkenmaier.

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2016. | Series: New world studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015045230 | ISBN 9780813938783 (cloth : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780813938790 (pbk. : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780813938806 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Latin American literature—History and criticism. | Literature and anthropology—Latin America. | Race awareness in literature.

Classification: LCC PQ7081.A1 B56 2016 | DDC 860.9/868073—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015045230

Cover art: Emiliano di Cavalcanti, Mulata, 1938. Oil on canvas, 93 × 74 cm.

(© Elisabeth di Cavalcanti. Museu de Arte Brasileira da FAAP, São Paulo, Brazil)

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Americanist Years

1Fernando Ortiz and the Meanings of raza

2Paul Rivet’s Museum Matrix and the Drama of Inadaptation

3Jacques Roumain, Haiti, and the Margins of Latin America

4Gilberto Freyre and the Science of Culture

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

THIS PROJECT took shape over a number of years, and many institutions and people have assisted me generously with aspects of my research and thought process.

In Havana, I want to thank Araceli García Carranza and Ileana Ortega at the Biblioteca Nacional José Martí, who guided my search through Fernando Ortiz’s archive, as well as José Doll Pérez. At the Instituto de Literatura y Linguística, Cira Romero made the impossible possible and introduced me to the Cuban scholars Sergio Valdés Bernal and Patricia Motorola and to José A. Matos Arévalos, from the Fernando Ortiz Foundation. In Paris, I was fortunate to have office space at Reid Hall, with the wonderful Mihaela Bacou. In Paris, too, I consulted the Paul Rivet Archive at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle and at the Bibliothèque du Musée de l’Homme, which at that point had closed already, and where I was assisted by Adrien Mattatia. I’m particularly grateful to Christine Laurière, now at the CNRS, for her expertise and generous orientation in all matters concerning Paul Rivet. At the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale I am grateful for having been able to consult the Fonds Alfred Métraux and even to have had a brief conversation with Claude Lévi-Strauss. In Mexico at the Colegio de México, Clara E. Lida and Andrés Lira shared their knowledge on anthropology, literature, and European exiles in Mexico, and Adolfo Castañón took time to talk about Roger Caillois. Sibylle Fischer introduced me to Jean Casimir, who opened doors for me in Port-au-Prince in 2008; in Haiti I also thank Rachelle Doucet, Suze Mathieu, and Rachelle Beauvoir-Dominique and the staff of the Bibliothèque Haitienne des Frères de l’instruction chrétienne and at the Petit Seminaire of the Collège Saint-Martial for letting me consult their collection. My Brazilianist colleagues at Indiana University, Darlene Sadlier and Luciana Namorato, gave me important feedback and recommended additional bibliographic works. Finally, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York offered all the resources that I had not been able to find in Haiti, Cuba, or Brazil, and it has been a privilege to work there.

My research travels were made possible by three generous field research grants from the Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University, under the directorship of Thomas Trebat and then Pablo Piccato. Much of the writing and rewriting was done during junior faculty leaves from Columbia University and from Indiana University.

I’m grateful for conversations with colleagues at Columbia University, in particular Vincent Debaene, Maja Horn, Alfred MacAdam, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Pablo Piccato, and Alessandra Russo, and at Indiana University with Deborah Cohn, Melissa Dinverno, Patrick Dove, Lessie Joe Frazier, Ilana Gershon, Edgar Illas, Eden Medina, Alejandro Mejías-López, Kate Myers, John Nieto-Philips, Estela Vieira, and Steve Wagschal. Also at Indiana University, I received assistance from my undergraduate research assistant, Rachel Colegrove, and from graduate assistants Olivia Holloway Salzano, who took care of translations from Portuguese into English, and Krista Weirich.

My friends Rubén Gallo, Jacqueline Loss, Viviane Mahieux, and Rafael Rojas listened and commented on versions of this project; Viviane in particular was a great friend in all walks of life and a patient reader of a number of chapter drafts. Parts of the project were presented at the Caribbean Studies Group of New York University, Brown University, the Université d’Etat d’Haïti in Port-au-Prince, and the Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association in Providence, at a seminar hosted by Charlotte Rogers.

I am deeply appreciative also of the comments that I received on the entire manuscript from Emily Maguire of Northwestern University, and from two anonymous readers. They all have contributed to making this book much better, even though its flaws are, of course, still mine. I also thank my editors at the University of Virginia Press, Cathie Brettschneider and Eric Brandt, for their expertise and decisiveness, as well as Ellen Satrom and Mark Mones.

Finally, my parents in Germany and my partner, Roman, have been like rocks in my life, and I thank them for having stayed with me, all the way.

Introduction

The Americanist Years

THE BRAZILIAN artist Jonathas de Andrade’s 2013 installation at the Guggenheim Museum, Posters for the Museum of the Man of the Northeast (Cartazes para o Museu do Homem do Nordeste), is a jumble of allusions to the past. Founded by Brazil’s perhaps most recognized anthropologist, Gilberto Freyre, the Museum of the Man of the Northeast opened its doors in 1979 in Recife, during the military dictatorship. Yet, de Andrade’s installation is less interested in the politics of the museum itself than in shifting the focus away from the racial construction of Brazilian society that had been central to Freyre and other early anthropologists, to questions of masculinity.¹ De Andrade’s seventy-seven posters of randomly selected men living in Recife, serving as alternative advertisements for the museum, amplify at once the nineteenth-century tradition of physiognomist portraits and what Jossianna Arroyo has termed the masculine ethic of early Latin American anthropologists like Freyre and Fernando Ortiz, exaggerating Freyre’s conspicuous identification of Brazil’s northeastern culture with Brazilian Man. He uses the photographic, objectifying perspective of the anthropologist but then invites visitors to randomly arrange the posters. A projector with slides of diary entries again compares anthropological method and artistic manipulation by letting the visitor view documents of de Andrade’s process of chronicling his interviews with men willing to pose for his photographs. De Andrade’s installation turns the exhibition craze that anthropology became from the 1930s on into a metaperformance, having museum visitors act as participants in the process of fabricating racial- or gender-inflected cultural identity. In doing so, he also turns the museum into an open source archive, where this time around, all the materials collected by the artist-anthropologist get exposed to public view, effectively deauthorizing the artist’s work and opening it up to play.

Fig. 1. Jonathas de Andrade, Cartazes para o Museu do Homem do Nordeste, 2013. Installation: seventy-seven c-prints, mounted on acrylic panels, ten inkjet prints, and six photocopies on acetate with overhead projector. Dimensions variable. Photo: Joerg Lohse. (Image courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York)

De Andrade’s installation piece speaks to the enduring attraction of earlier anthropological paradigms of race and culture in a time when it falls increasingly to artists to reflect in publicly visible ways on the visual and discursive regimes of regional identity formations. In gesturing back to Freyre’s controversial ideas about Brazil as a multiethnic society without racism, de Andrade’s revisiting of the Brazilian Museum of the Man of the Northeast brings to mind the enduring question of what role anthropologists and artists have played in challenging ideas about race and gender in Brazil and other Latin American societies.

This book studies Latin American anthropology as a powerful discourse that for better or worse has given shape to many contemporary ideas about Latin American culture and race, in ways that I attempt to reconstruct and analyze here. Surprisingly, the historical rise in the 1930s and 1940s of Latin American anthropology as a field of knowledge has been relatively little studied. While there are famous anthropologistwriters such as Gilberto Freyre and the Cuban Fernando Ortiz, whose works have received a lot of attention from critics and historians of Latin America, there is great reason to study how their works developed in dialogue with other currently lesser-known anthropologists such as the French Americanist Paul Rivet and the Haitian Jacques Roumain, better known today as a novelist and poet. (Each one of those four anthropologists is the focus of one chapter in this book and will be introduced in greater detail below.) Not much has been said, for example, about their move to establish new methods in the study of Latin American culture—the museums founded in the 1920s through the 1940s; the new journals, critical editions, and archaeological excavations; and the international conferences and lecture series through which discussions circulated. We know that Ortiz’s and Freyre’s views on race and culture were, just like any other fiction of unity, fraught with problems, but we know much less about the larger discussions on race and culture at the time, taking place on the shifting grounds of an anthropology that was relatively young as a scientific discipline, especially in Latin America. Their anthropology was admittedly different from how the discipline is understood today. The U.S.-based American Anthropological Association (AAA), for example, defines anthropology broadly as the study of humans in the past and present, with a view to solving human problems and training anthropologists in one of four fields, either biological, sociocultural, archaeological, or linguistic. In the interwar period that I consider fundamental for the anthropology movement in Latin America, cultural anthropology was just beginning to be accepted as a field of inquiry in the United States and elsewhere, and many anthropologists combined expertise in all four branches. Anthropologists like Ortiz, Freyre, Rivet, and Roumain also often relied on archival study and extensive readings of colonial chronicles, testimonies, novels, and other documents more so than on the field research and individual community studies that were to become the dominant approach in cultural anthropology later on. Their combination of skills has been institutionally separated out today in most cases. Most important, perhaps, the way they study race often seems influenced still by biological definitions that are reductive in the way they focus on the origins of individual ethnic groups and on the effects (or lack thereof) of racial mixing. Yet, as one studies the diverse -isms of the time, it becomes clear that between evolutionism and diffusionism, cultural relativism and scientific racism, some of the questions these anthropologists asked haven’t changed that much today—how cultures evolved in relation to each other and how cultural contact under conditions of slavery or imperial domination impacted societies in the long term. One question they confronted was indeed how best to account for human biological differences in skin color or shape as responses to natural and social conditioning, all the while debunking deterministic notions of race. Another concern was the role of a shared language or shared languages in the formation of communities and their ways of remembering. Standing at the beginning of a discipline, these anthropologists asked fundamental questions, using a multipronged arsenal of analytical methods that, even if not always up to contemporary scientific standards, profited from the lack of disciplinary divisions that existed at the time.

LATIN AMERICAN anthropologists were placed at a special vantage point from which to discuss the relation between race and culture. Even though postemancipation Latin American nations had drafted constitutions granting equal rights to indigenous, racially mixed, and European-descendant people, Creole elites remained predominantly white, whereas the lowest classes consisted largely of black and indigenous populations, with mixed race groups occupying an ambivalent place. While during the Spanish colonization the Spanish statutes of limpieza de sangre ironically had allowed for a considerable degree of social mobility (Bernand), this was no longer the case from the nineteenth century on. Latin American intellectuals and scientists became influenced by social Darwinist or positivist European writers such as Arthur de Gobineau, Madison Grant, and Herbert Spencer (Helg 62–63). The Argentine intellectuals Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Carlos Octavio Bunge based their theories of national culture on racialist distinctions between superior pure-bred and inferior mixed or colored human races.² Many came to believe that the whitening of countries like Brazil, Cuba, and Argentina by way of inviting a massive European immigration would help societies to advance socially and economically.³ Toward the end of the nineteenth century this belief gave rise to eugenics, a social movement focused on hereditary laws and human breeding.⁴ At the same time, the mixedrace mulata acquired an erotic lure as a signifier of precisely that cultural otherness that places like Cuba and Brazil seemed to offer (Kutzinski). The focus on race and anthropometric analysis carried over well into the twentieth century, with a number of eugenicist organizations and conferences being founded in Latin America and the United States to address notions of racial hygiene. Nineteenth-century anthropologists were often complicit with the eugenics movement. As Edward Said and others have argued, British, French, and German anthropology was used well into the twentieth century to account for supposedly irrefutable biological indicators of cultural inferiority or superiority, functioning as an imperial science that made the colonized racial other manageable for colonial officials.⁵

The move of Latin American social scientists away from race to a less deterministic culture concept happened gradually over the first few decades of the twentieth century. It can be read in part as a response to the crises of the two World Wars, which translated in Latin America into enthusiasm for a New World that seemed full of promise and in stark contrast to the destruction that had been wreaked upon the old world during World War I and the conflicts that ensued. Encouraged by Oswald Spengler’s philosophy of decline and by the rising field of sociology and anthropology in Europe and the United States, many began to look at the New World with new eyes.⁶ The 1920s through the 1940s were for many middle- and upper-class Latin Americans a period of expansion in terms of cultural and scientific horizons, of reflection at multiple levels on the values of an international world system and on the limitations of isolationist approaches to culture. This expansion of horizons also meant for Latin American scientists that they wanted to be on a par with others in the United States or in Europe, where a new anthropological culture concept was beginning to replace studies of physical differences between human races. As a result, culture became in the 1920s an anthropological spectacle, represented through museum exhibits, concerts, lecture series, academic conferences, and novels by those scientists and writers who were eager to integrate their countries into larger international circuits of knowledge. Still, even in 1946, Ortiz himself was aware of the uncanny continued existence of race studies and racism on an international scale. In his book El engaño de las razas (1946), he wrote: Certainly, one can speak of the ‘racial specter’ in more than one sense. Races are unreal like specters, but they inspire very strong emotions. That is why racism is so fearsome.⁷ It became his strategy to simply deny the word race a place as a scientific concept, hoping that to eliminate the word from the dictionary would eliminate the problem of racism. Antiracism became a rallying point for many Latin Americanist anthropologists and intellectuals, mobilizing a new interest in syncretic religious practices, popular music, dance, folklore, and other everyday practices.

Following Rivet, I have found it useful to think of the interwar period as the Americanist years because the entire western hemisphere, North and South America, arguably became during that time a laboratory for antiracist theories about cultural sameness and difference. During this period the work of French Americanists and Latin American anthropologists overlapped in many aspects, in their shared interest in the long-term history of the Americas, from the first settlements through colonial history until the present, but also in the comparative ethnography of individual culture areas, something that the Boas school of anthropology, for example, deemphasized. There was also a considerable degree of idealism that became attached to the idea of a Latin America where the indigenous and Afro-American past was mobilized to craft new, uniquely American histories of individual nations. The question of what united Latin American nations beyond their common language and colonial heritage was more urgently posed than ever, and it came to comprehend in some contexts the Americas at large. As the Mexican philosopher Leopoldo Zea wrote in 1945: It is now and not before that the American man, inserted in the situation called America, has posed himself the question whether there exists an American culture, and if so what that culture might be.⁸ There was a shared sense among U.S. and Latin American anthropologists about the necessity to work together. The term Americanist years circumscribes then a triangulated network of contacts among Latin American, U.S. American, and French Americanist anthropologists, who rallied around the cause of antiracism, attempting to devise an applied cultural anthropology that would represent to the public at large a culture without racism.

In Spanish America, this new kind of anthropologically informed Americanism was motivated by a changing relation with the former imperial power Spain. In the aftermath of the independence movements, Spain had managed to hold onto a certain cultural presence in the new nations by insisting on its legacy of language and religion in the former colonies. It also profited from Spanish American writers and essayists, who in response to positivist race theories began to talk about a Hispanic race as a way to refer not so much to biological races, but to the aesthetic and cultural contributions of Hispanic traditions to Spanish American societies. In the twentieth century, however, anthropologists and historians began to resist the Spanish emphasis on language and philology. While some Spanish American writers such as the Dominican Pedro Henríquez Ureña and the Mexican Alfonso Reyes still went to study in Madrid under the Spanish philologist Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Spain, having remained on the sidelines of World War I, had a brief decade or so of renewed cultural prestige in the 1920s but, with the Spanish Civil War and the onset of Franco’s dictatorship, definitively lost its clout in Spanish America. The major Spanish philologists and writers dispersed, with many of them spending long years in exile. Ortiz, a member of the new generation of Latin Americanist anthropologists, had repeatedly criticized Spanish philological or other pretensions at exercising control over Spanish Americans and turned in the 1930s entirely toward cultural anthropology and away from Hispanic philology.

For the sake of clarity I will distinguish among three interconnected scientific and intellectual networks of the interwar period that proved crucial for the development of Americanism. First, there is a group of Latin American anthropologist-writers (Freyre, Ortiz, Roumain) who were known as authors and public intellectuals but whose connections and collaborations as anthropologists were less well known. They constituted an elite network of their own, exploiting international connections in the United States and Europe; spending extended periods abroad; and occupying important academic, editorial, or other positions in their countries. They had shared interests with diaspora networks of black intellectuals, writers, and artists living in the Caribbean and the United States, who were negotiating through performances and through their literature new racial and transnational identities.⁹ However, Freyre, Ortiz, and Roumain moved in academic and intellectual worlds that were distinct, separated by privilege and by the way in which they were able to publicly represent their views through nationally or internationally funded institutions, museums, book series, journals, and individual publications.

Second, perhaps the most tightly knit network, and the least known by Latin Americanists today, was that of Paul Rivet’s French Société des Américanistes. This comprised the Journal de la Société des Américanistes (JSA) and regularly scheduled international conferences bringing together, from the 1910s on, scholars from across the Americas and Europe. I dedicate a chapter to Rivet’s work and contacts in Latin America, because Rivet is a prime example of how a progressive, antiracist anthropology was built into a cross-Atlantic alliance including local and foreign Latin Americanists. Rivet’s approach was diffusionist; that is, Rivet studied Latin American cultures comparatively, positing cultural centers from which cultures had extended through trade, conquest, or exploration to other areas. A medical doctor by training, Rivet built a sophisticated matrix of institutions in Paris that were to study discrete world areas: the Institut d’ethnologie (at the Sorbonne); the Bureau d’ethnologie, where objects were cataloged and classified; a book series; the journal; the society; and the flashy Musée de l’Homme (Museum of Mankind), which opened its doors under his directorship at the Palais de Chaillot in 1937. Part of Rivet’s network were a number of Latin American intellectuals and scientists who studied with him in Paris, among them Roumain. As a committed socialist, Rivet embraced a policy of internationalist outreach from early on, and he traveled and made contacts in many Latin American countries and in the United States with similarly committed anthropologists, among them Franz Boas. I will also mention in this book another crucial member of Rivet’s network, the Swiss anthropologist Alfred Métraux, a student of the Swedish anthropologist Erland Nordenskjöld, who spent several years in Tucumán, Argentina, to build an anthropological museum, institute, and journal there following Rivet’s matrix. Métraux in turn made close connections with a number of Argentine intellectuals and studied the indigenous Chaco populations in the north of Argentina. He later traveled to Haiti, where he met Roumain and began to study Haitian vodou, publishing his classic Voodoo in Haiti in 1959. After his stay in Haiti, Métraux went to live in Washington, D.C., working for the Handbook of South American Indians until the end of World War II.

A third network referenced here at several moments is Franz Boas’s U.S. American anthropological network. Even though Boas himself took only a fleeting interest in anything to the south of the United States, his four-branch approach to anthropology as a science covering physical anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, and cultural anthropology was perhaps taken more seriously in its interdisciplinary ambition in Latin America than it was in the United States.¹⁰ Boas not only trained a number of Latin American anthropologists, among them Freyre and the Mexican Manuel Gamio, but exerted, through his writings, his antiracist activism, and the generation of anthropologists he trained, a continuous influence. More than anyone else perhaps, Boas dedicated himself to combating racial prejudice, introducing ideas crucial to the modern anthropological culture concept, such as historicity, plurality, behavioral determinism, integration, and relativism (Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution 230). His studies, published in 1911, of the changes in the bodies of immigrant children in New York were revolutionary in using anthropometrical methods to challenge the belief in the United States in stable racial types and thus countering concerns in the United States about the racial deterioration of its population with the latest immigration waves.¹¹ Boas’s student Melville Herskovits became one of the first anthropologists to study Haitian rural life, doing field study in Mirebalais and publishing his seminal book Life in a Haitian Valley (1937), where he made a passionate argument not only for paying attention to the complex organization of Haitian peasant society but for the importance of analyzing society with a historical perspective in mind, paying attention to the process of acculturation Haitian peasants had undergone. Throughout the 1940s and later, Herskovits was in contact with Latin American anthropologists, sending students to Haiti and Cuba and also having the Mexican anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán study with him at Northwestern University. Ruth Benedict, another student of Boas, also made a great impact in Latin America through her study Patterns of Culture (1934; El hombre y la cultura, 1939), where she employed a comparative method to argue that all cultures developed individual styles or patterns that characterized them uniquely, like great artworks, and were a result of largely unconscious behavioral attitudes evolving over time.

The conversation between Latin American and U.S. American anthropologists came to center most notably on the concept of acculturation, the term coined by Herskovits to describe the ways in which African slaves had adjusted to but also impacted U.S. American culture. Ortiz, in his Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (1940; Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, 1995), famously referred to Herskovits’s concept of acculturation but insisted that a new term, transculturation, was needed to better describe the two-way process of cultural change that he had studied in Cuban culture. He also had his book prefaced by the functionalist anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, who had popularized the synchronic study of communities and a focus on kinship relations more so than on historical change. The French- and U.S.-based networks were thus referenced in an often eclectic and idiosyncratic manner by the Latin American network of anthropologists that I study.

The personal bonds with French and other European anthropologists, on the other hand, became stronger as the 1930s went on, and more and more scientists and intellectuals, including Rivet himself, had to escape Germany or France, or Civil War Spain, seeking exile in the Americas. A number of today lesser-known European scholars and