Open-access Patrimonial Citizenship

Cidadania Patrimonial

Abstract

In this article, I present the concept of ‘patrimonial citizenship’- based on my trajectory as an anthropologist working in the field of cultural heritage, articulating a conceptual repertoire with the field experiences, accumulated in my academic research well as the production of technical reports required by authorities managing patrimonial policies. I revisit James Holston’s notion of insurgent citizenship and dialogue with anthropological approaches to cultural management. The notion of patrimonial citizenship is inspired by the concepts of insurgency and agency. In my analysis, the myth of the nation and its operability in affirming the hegemony of national culture are thought through the lens of cultural patrimony. I associate this with the idea of social action, or praxis, in which the adhesion or the resistance to and the negation of totalizing patrimonial policies frames the action of social and ethnic collectives modulated between the myth and anti-myth of the nation.

Keywords: Cultural heritage; Citizenship; Anthropology

Resumo

Apresento nesse artigo o conceito de cidadania patrimonial tendo em vista a minha trajetória antropológica no campo do patrimônio cultural convergindo o repertório conceitual com o acúmulo de experiências de campo relacionadas às pesquisas acadêmicas, assim como na produção de relatórios técnicos demandados da gestão de políticas patrimoniais. Resgato a noção de cidadania insurgente de James Holston e dialogo com autores antropológicos e de gestão cultural. Com inspiração nos conceitos de insurgência e agência para construir a noção de cidadania patrimonial. Na análise, o mito da nação e sua operacionalidade na afirmação da hegemonia da cultura nacional são pensados por via do tema do patrimônio cultural, mas associado com ideia da ação/práxis social em que a adesão ou resistência/negação às políticas patrimoniais totalizadoras da nação configuram ações dos coletivos sociais e étnicos moduladas entre o mito ao anti-mito da nação.

Palavras-chave: Patrimônio cultural; Cidadania; Antropologia

From heritage to citizenship

I have thought about cultural heritage both within an academic context - through my lectures, student supervision, the coordination of institutional research projects and the constitution of the network of anthropologists making up the Brazilian Association of Anthropology (ABA) - and also outside academia, in actions materialized as technical reports, heritage education workshops and formal applications to register Brazilian intangible heritage.

From the standpoint of the anthropologist’s knowhow, I have produced various reflections on the interaction and friction between the anthropological concept of culture and the notion of cultural heritage as seen from the State’s perspective (Lima Filho 2009, 2012, 2013 and 2015).

Years of professional activity in this field have encouraged me to seek a dialogue between the theoretical repertoire (concept) and the (technical) practice of anthropology. In countries like Brazil and others in Latin America, as well as Africa, the themes of race, ethnicity, gender, violence and subalternity resonate with a past of colonial conceptions and practices. Moreover, anthropological practice does not shy away from confronting political issues directly related to human rights, social justice and democracy. Heritage is clearly no different. Setting out from this perspective, the concept that I denominate patrimonial citizenship now deserves to be narrated through writing, one of the vectors making up the anthropologist’s work (Cardoso de Oliveira 2000).

Participating in a study group on the situation of Latinos living in the United States, which put to work concepts such as identity, multiculturalism and cultural citizenship, Renato Rosaldo (1997) observed that, the notion of citizenship is understood as a universal concept in which all citizens of a particular nation state are held equal before the law. However, he argued, it is also necessary to distinguish the formal level of a universal theory1 from a substantive level of exclusionary practices directly related to race, gender and class. Rosaldo argues that contemporary citizenship policy must necessarily take into account the role that social movements have played in exercising the claim for rights in new areas such as feminism, black and indigenous movements, ecology and vulnerable minorities such as children (Rosaldo 1997: 27). While Hall & Hell (1990, quoted in Rosaldo 1997) warn of an increasingly quantitative view of cultural citizenship, for Rosaldo this expansion is more qualitative in kind because the idea of ​​citizenship is traversed by the notion of culture: “we need to understand the way citizenship is informed by culture, the way that claims to citizenship are reinforced or subverted by cultural assumptions and practices” (Rosaldo 1997: 35).

Antonio Augusto Arantes (1996) adds another dimension that permeates the contemporary theme of citizenship: the right to information and the access to symbolic goods, substantiating the field of social communication, the market and the interpenetration of the public and private spheres. Arantes argues that “citizenship does not have an ‘essence,’ but it is a movable and changeable political-cultural artefact” (Arantes 1996: 10).

Here it is worth recalling the Marilena Chauí’s reflections on the topic (2006), building on her experience working in the São Paulo Department of Culture as manager of the city’s policy for the supports of social memory and cultural heritage. Public power as a cultural subject and, thus a producer of culture determined “the forms and cultural contents for society, defined by the ruling groups in order to reinforce their own ideology” (Chauí 2006: 47). Mass communication was used by the cultural with the aim of producing and operating an official culture, exhibited nationally and internationally, in which authority and the monumental marked an authoritarian tradition. The hegemony of this tradition provoked Marilena Chauí to ask: Are the politics of historical, cultural and environmental heritage condemned to the miserable and pompous form of memory and the celebration of the victor’s history?” (Chauí 2006: 123). Discerning another conception of cultural policy, historical, cultural and environmental heritage became acknowledged, in the implementation of São Paulo’s public policies, as the social and cultural practice of many different social agents and memory as a right of the citizen, seen as an action involving all social subjects, not as the official production of history. Based on her experience in cultural management, lists the following propositions inherent to the practice of cultural citizenship as a process: the right to information, the right to cultural enjoyment, the right to cultural production and the right to participation (Chauí 2006: 96-101).

Roberto Da Matta (1991) takes citizenship as a central theme of his interpretations of Brazil, presenting the categories of variation and perversion of citizenship, which, in the Brazilian case, combined with practices of power, hierarchy and social relations. Consequently, the anthropologist distrusts any notion of universal citizenship:

Can we speak of a single conception of citizenship as a hegemonic form of political participation, or we compelled to discuss the hypothesis of a society with multiple forms and sources of citizenship? (Da Matta 1991: 85)

And he concludes:

[…] there is a form of universalist citizenship, built upon modern roles that are linked to the operation of a bureaucracy and a market, and other forms of membership to Brazilian society - other typically relational forms of citizenship emanating from the spaces of the house. In other words, there is a Brazilian nation that operates on the basis of its citizens, and a Brazilian society that works on the basis of traditional mediations. (Da Matta 1991: 93, author’s emphasis)

Moving forward on the topic of citizenship, I turn to James Holston’s ethnographic research in Brazil, including his historical analysis of the urban context of São Paulo city. For him, the Brazilian case combines the formal notion of citizenship, based on the principles of the nation state, with a more substantive character marked by the distribution of rights, meanings, institutions and practices to some citizens only - that is, certain categories of citizens. In other words, there is a social production of citizenship, which generates a paradox or even an aporia: the aim is citizenship for all, but citizenship produces citizens of distinct classes, women, the elderly, pregnant mothers, among others. I highlight two central ideas of Holston’s study that seem to me useful to correlate with the theme of cultural heritage. For him, the agency of the citizens studied in Brazil is not just one of resistance: it also produces commitment, persistence and inertia. Citizens, therefore, actively maintain a committed regimen of citizenship as much as they resist it. The other concept is that of insurgency applied to citizenship. In the author’s words, “insurgence describes a process that is an acting counter, a counterpolitics, that destabilizes the present and renders it fragile, defamiliarizing the coherence with which it usually presents itself” (Holston 2009: 34), coining the term insurgent citizenship. Although James Holston thinks citizenship informed by the conjuncture of a localized and comparative urban anthropology, here I am interested in the connotation of the term insurgency that includes engagement but also inertia, and that in some ways approximates what Antonio Arantes calls ‘cultural inflection’ and what Renato Rosaldo identifies as the strengthening or subversion of citizenship by cultural practices and assertions. Marilena Chauí aligns citizenship as a process that connects information, enjoyment, production and participation of social actors, while Roberto Da Matta employs the categories variation and perversion to describe a sub-citizenship in the Brazilian case.

Such positions some extent compliment each other from different directions studies of districts of São Paulo; the ethnographic mapping of Latinos in the United States; the organization of a book on citizenship edited by Brazil’ National Heritage Institute (IPHAN)2; the experience of cultural management as a state policy; and, finally, the variations of the citizenship theme in Brazil in the relational perspective between house and street. One cannot think of the concept of citizenship and its applications without taking into account the conception and the cultural and historical trajectories of the social and ethnic groups that experience them and their respective agencies. I particularly identify myself with the definition formulated by Emirbyer & Mische (1998), who conceptualize agency as3

…a temporally embedded process of social engagement, informed by the past (in its ‘iterational’ or usual aspect) but also oriented toward the future (as a ‘projective’ capacity to imagine alternative possibilities) and toward the present (as a ‘practical-evaluative’ capacity to contextualize past habits and future projects within the contingencies of the moment). (Emirbyer & Mische 1998: 962)

The above in mind, I apply these anthropological and managerial considerations to the topic of how social collectives have responded to the patrimonial policies of the State, internationally idealized through UNESCO, primarily in relation to the policy of registering4 and recording intangible or immaterial patrimony.5 In this sense, insurgency, inertia, engagement or cultural modulation set the tone of the confrontation between such groups and national state policies, particularly in Latin America where all countries are signatories to the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Framed in this manner, I consider patrimonial citizenship to be the highly plastic operational capacity for social action that social and ethnic groups possess, in their collective or individualized dimensions, to build strategies to interact with (adhere to or resist) patrimonial policies at international, national or local level, thereby demarcating a field in which identity becomes constituted, either through the alignment of equals or through the radicality of difference. These kinds of cognitive abilities and agencies make use of categories developed in the epistemic construction of anthropology, including culture, nature, territory, tradition, kinship and identity, in interaction with patrimonial categories like registration and inventory and, finally, framed by native categories such as us and not-us, objects, myths, rites, human and nonhuman, relatives, consanguineal and affinal relatives, chiefs, shamans, artists, the body, painting, the young and the old, those with know-how, and many other categories indexed by specific linguistic and cultural systems. In other words, heritage is inserted in the myth of the nation and through it one can aspire to cultural citizenship by means of intercultural modulations. However, patrimony may equally reside outside the myth (as non-patrimony) and may not legitimize the discourse of national culture replicated by hegemony of the nation, as marked by some of the Brazilian anthropological literature on national culture, as Mônica Pechincha has astutely observed (2006: 35). What place does the subaltern occupy in the representation of Brazil’s national heritage, the figure who cannot be categorized under exceptionality or relevance/representativeness? The reverse of heritage takes place in patrimonial citizenship, bolstering forms of insurgent citizenship. This possibility has been neglected by other authors when they write about heritage. And yet an analysis of heritage that distances itself from the myth of the nation is only possible if we consider notions of conflict and insurgency as integral to the concept of citizenship. In this sense, patrimonial action generates a scale that spans from the nation’s myth to its refusal/negation by social actors who situate themselves politically on the margins, in the cleavages - that is, towards an idea of the anti-myth6 of the nation.

The operational elasticity that I impute to patrimonial citizenship allows individuals and collectives to enter a field marked by the asymmetric production of state power, instructed by a colonialist historical practice and by the maintenance of a liberal economic model, which is nourished by the maintenance of hierarchies fantasized by an uncritical multiculturalism adhering to the conceptual framework of the culture industries - a phenomenon already denounced by the Frankfurt School, notably by Adorno (2002). The notion of registration (tombamento) and recording is embedded in this bias, legally indexed by the Brazilian State under notions of exceptionality and relevance, and previously analysed by myself in an earlier text as conceptual and pragmatic reducers:

I perceive a conceptual trap from which the creators of the decree were unable to escape. In its first article, second paragraph, the legal text says: “Entry in one of the books of record will take as a reference the historical continuity of the good and its national ‘relevance’ to the memory, identity and formation of Brazilian society’. [...] Now, it is notable that the word ‘relevance’ is for the Law of Intangible [Heritage] as the word ‘exceptional’ is for the Law of Registration [Decreto de Tombamento]. Both are selective, exclusive. (Lima Filho 2009: 622)

In this power game, whether in order to restrict the reach of the net of patrimonial policies, or as a resource ultimately determined by the human condition of survival in the social contexts of countries like Brazil where the basic conditions of life such as health, safety, housing and education are often lacking, social actors either assume themselves to be participants in a game of political action (Bourdieu 1997), reminiscent of Weber’s instrumental rational action, or they subvert order within politics itself and turn culture into a resource of cultural economy, a convenience (Yúdice 2006) or weapon:

[…] ‘natives’ from the four corners of the planet have appropriated the category [culture], in the name of the value of their own ‘culture,’ in order to defend their specific ways of being in relation to human and institutional alterities with their own distinct parameters. There is often an unexpected agency, the formation of networks and spaces of sharing with horizons that open or close […] the metaphor of ‘culture as a weapon,’ the capacity for ‘objectification’ of the recognition of culture, something that occurs when someone from the outside is willing to represent what communities live and experience. More than this, we have a continuity in reverse of this process, as when the ‘objectified’ subject appropriates the representation and presuppositions of the observer […]. (Mafra 2011: 607)

The complexity of this intercultural weaving on a case-by-case basis averts falling into the trap of a totalizing heritage policy of registration or recording. Here a more horizontal conception of heritage is conceived, one which is not equivalent - although this may occur - to the collections. Thus heritage is not necessarily a category of universal recurrence, as Pomian (1997) thought, an idea that also seduced Gonçalves (2009 26 and 2007: 45). Heritage is a Western category and what non-Westerners do with it involves a modulation of the encounter of history with culture. This is why heritage policies anchored in representativeness, exceptionality or relevance, as UNESCO advocates and as adopted by Brazilian policies, are imploded - to echo an already classic insight of Marshal Sahlins (1990 and 2003) - by the cultural thinking of otherness: closely connected or radically distant from us, but in permanent effervescence within a plethora of cultural re-appropriations, marking the construction of social subjects by means of a mythical/historical, intercultural narrative identity.

On one hand, therefore, we have the Weberian cartography of the economic sphere, alerting us to a totalizing Western dimension of heritage with the semantic/ideological use of a category of diversity imbued with colonialism and with what José Jorge de Carvalho has called an ‘aesthetic impunity’:

While a choreographer from the Rio-São Paulo axis can ‘anthropophagically’ appropriate a particular performative knowledge of a Creole drum from Maranhão, for example, no Creole drummer can exercise this same cultural cannibalism over an ‘erudite’ dance group performing at the Municipal Theatre of Rio de Janeiro. […] The anthropophagic motto works, in practice, as a kind of secret code of aesthetic impunity (my emphasis) and the maintenance of the privileges of the Brazilian ruling class. In this anthropophagy (obviously, a one-way anthropophagy), two interconnected classes celebrate, through national symbols themselves, their privileges vis-a-vis the artists of indigenous and Afro-Brazilian communities: the class that has always felt impunity to accomplish the always celebrated modernist cultural synthesis (based on cultural loans that, over time, become theft) and the class (which is its historical continuation) that now proposes and executes the inventories of Brazil’s intangible cultural heritage… (Carvalho 2004: 07)

But I also think that the Other, the target of anthropophagy in its cultural referents, is not passive, and if positioned only at an extreme pole of passivity, runs the risk of being essentialized. While Mônica Pechincha (2006: 62) argue that Roberto Da Matta, in his interpretation of citizenship in Brazil, creates room for representation but not for the voice of the Other, I would note that in the patrimonial processes of registering cultural referents, social groups have assumed a topos in the relational conjuncture with State policies.

Hence the notion of insurgency attached to citizenship can help us think about the game of heritage or the ‘weapon of culture’ in intercultural praxis. We have, therefore, the configuration of an intercultural operability driven by a native habitus, an alterity more or less close to us, mixed or distant, but in factual interaction. In this way, heritage is useful whether or not the Portuguese language, non-indigenous schools and political offices are useful to indigenous peoples in the intercultural power play. The Karajá doll7 can and should be sent to the Museum and its patrimonialization can increase the empowerment of women and domestic arrangements in an ethnic group strongly marked by the gender dimension. The Aruanã masks, however, should be burned - they involve not a native collection, but the manufacture for ritual usage circumscribed by the principle of culture. When found in museums, the Aruanã masks are examples of colonialist, unethical, violent practice, whatever level of interaction may have occurred among the Karajá, travellers, ethnologists and bushmen.8 Heritage is good to play when the players are disposed to do so.9 Otherwise, heritage will be refracted by social groups. This capacity to refract - or to choose how far the patrimonial game should proceed - is another aspect of the malleability of the notion of patrimonial citizenship. That is, refraction/choice breaks with the passivity of inertia.

It is through the exploration of these social and ethnic cleavages and fractures that patrimonial citizenship works to extract from heritage an infusion of performative and identificatory energy in the sense of “…activating local knowledge, discontinuous, disqualified, non-legitimized, against the unitary theoretical instance that would purport to purify them, to hierarchize them, and order them in the name of a true knowledge, in the name of a science held by some” (Foucault 1979: 171). This means being aware of the Bakhtinian location of speech or non-speech or, in Spivak’s terms (2012), the knowledge of the subaltern: indigenous people, bushmen, the peasants, Maroons, river-dwellers, slum-dwellers10 and the multiple ways of being present in a world crisscrossed by cultural polyphony and by a permanent power production game.

With this in mind, I turn now to examine some processes involving the registration of cultural heritage within and outside the official policies of Brazil’s intangible heritage registry in order to make visible the connotations of what I have called modulation and its connections to the concept of patrimonial citizenship.

Modulations in heritage practices

Patrimonial citizenship is directly related to the Weberian notion of social action (Weber 1979) whose rational and irrational dimensions (in the field of subjectivity) comprise a methodological strategy to understand and interpret the movements of social and ethnic collectives in contact with patrimonial policies. Likewise, the notion of agency broadens and complements the effectiveness of the Weberian strategy since it includes the complexity of the contemporary world, governed by information flows, the high permeability of social subjects, and multiple identity affiliations (gender, religious affiliation, class, and ethnicity), which are in permanent contact with increasingly available sources of information and enable these same social subjects to break from cultural/political/citizen inertia. The notion of agency proposed by Anthony Giddens (2009), which combines the ability of people (agents) to do something (action) with the notion of power exercised by social subjects, even in cases of subordination (Long & Ploeg 2011), also supports the operability of patrimonial citizenship. The same applies to Emirbyer & Mische’s (1998) proposal, which connects engagement to temporal forms by articulating the present (capacity for evaluation), past (memory) and future (projects).

The notion of modulation that I attach to the concept of patrimonial citizenship allows the response of rupturing this inertia in accordance with the personal/collective biography of the actor(s) targeted by patrimonial policies. A biography traversed by historical, economic, political, gender, race, class and social identity dimensions. Hence the modulation.

I begin with two distinct examples of modulation inherent to patrimony citizenship. When I presented the proposal to the Karajá of the village of Santa Isabel do Morro, in the House of Men, about registering the Karajá (ritxòò) dolls as Brazilian cultural heritage, a man at the meeting argued in favour of the idea, claiming that if they were to be classified as Brazilian then everything was fine. Now, the history of the Karajá from this particular village is directly related to the mid-twentieth century government Westward March program,11 receiving visits from presidents Getúlio Vargas in 1940 and Juscelino Kubstichek in 1960 (Lima Filho 2001). In the case of the ceramic dolls, the modulating factor was the prestige of the nation: the past gave meaning to the present (Lima Filho 2015). But things were different when, some time later, a young leader from the same village saw a photograph of an Aruanã mask on the website of the National Museum: annoyed, he warned me that he would prosecute the National Museum as these masks - according to the strict cultural principles of the Karajá - cannot be shown to women. Here the same group used the artifice of the nation (a lawsuit) against the nation itself in the form of a federal research and postgraduate education institution. Differential modulations with patrimonial policies, via patrimonial citizenship. As an example of the same kind of reasoning,12 I would cite the statement made by a young Tapirapé student from a Tupi village in Mato Grosso, enrolled on the intercultural graduate program at the Federal University of Goiás: he said that he was at the University to learn only what he was interested in applying in his community, the rest was irrelevant. An intriguing case of intercultural modulation. This modulation is also exemplified in the control exerted by the mãe-de-santo Mãe Meninazinha d’Oxum at São João de Meriti in the Baixada Fluminense, Rio de Janeiro, during the recording of candomblé music, telling the anthropologist Edmundo Pereira (2016) what could or not be recorded, where to record, and which photos to use in the CD project - in other words, what was restricted to the field of the sacred and its members, and what could be made public:

The first decision was that the recordings would be made at Ilê itself, where a small mobile studio was mounted. […] It was up to Mãe Meninazinha d’Oxum, with suggestions from other members of the [candomblé] house, to choose the repertoire to be recorded. The cover was chosen so as to represent, via the objects, the two patron Orishás of the house: the necklace of beads of Oxum and the popcorn offered as food to Omolu” (Pereira & Pacheco 2004: 01).

I turn now to the first steps taken by the Brazilian State to install a national intangible heritage registration policy. The initial movement was to register Kuarup registry, a mythological/ritual complex of the indigenous peoples of the Upper Xingu River (Agostinho 1974), but they: Body Painting and Graphic Art was included in the Registry Book of Expressive Forms in 2002, which, the following year, also received the title of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity from UNESCO at the initiative of the Council of Wajãpi/Apina Villages.

In November 2003, UNESCO selected ‘Graphic Expressions and Orality among the Wajãpi of Amapá’ as a Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. This registration represented another step in the Wajãpi’s long process of thinking about their ‘culture.’ It was, and continues to be, a stimulus to resume discussion in the villages of a whole series of problems related to the disinterest of the young generations - and of many adults - in their traditional knowledge and practices, devalued or even held in suspicion by virtue of living in close proximity to the bitter prejudices of most of the representatives of the surrounding society who interact with the Wajãpi. Their expectation is not to ‘eternalize’ their culture but to consolidate their capacity to appropriate new objects, techniques and knowledge in a way that does not, as has occurred hitherto, hinder their own cultural practices. The ‘Integrated plan for valuing traditional knowledge for the sustainable socio-environmental development of the Wajãpi do Amapá community’ presented to UNESCO aims to mobilize the community around actions that value, in the villages, both oral forms of transmission and the knowledge related to resource management, health, village history, cosmology, rituals…” (Gallois 2006: 69-70)

Notably, the first patrimonial actions follow a trajectory from a pole of rejection (by the Xingu people) to a pole in favour, led by the Council of the Wajãpi/Apina Villages. However, even with the adherence of the Wajãpi to the purpose of Brazilian heritage policies and after the UNESCO listing, attention should be paid to anthropologist Dominique Gallois’s reflection on the experience of registration with indigenous peoples:

The safeguarding of indigenous oral traditions, as well as the practices associated with them, is a new field for public policies, especially in Brazil. In some indigenous communities, strategies are being tested that supranational programs and national agencies seek to improve with the collaboration of universities and nongovernmental organizations, forming a still fragile panel of very diverse and sometimes contradictory experiments. The difficulties refer, above all, to the conditions made available for the protection of indigenous intangible heritage, which fluctuate in accordance with the political and economic contexts. Thus, the adequacy of protection measures always involves complex negotiations. Who are the agents responsible for the inventory of these cultural traditions? Who has the power to choose between one or another tradition, between one or another community? What is meant to be preserved in a tradition: the productions, the recording of these productions, or their means of expression? How to effectively engage a community in preservation policy? […] the ‘conservation’ procedures commonly used for the protection of material assets are inadequate for the preservation of intangible heritage, which requires a much more complex set of procedures. (Gallois 2006: 72)

The exercise of patrimonial citizenship in the first cases of intangible heritage registration in Brazil already presents the characteristic of modulation. A modulation that can be better observed when we focus on the cleavages of the groups and the peculiarities in their responses to public heritage policies. I turn now to the first two cases of registration of Brazilian intangible heritage, which possessed in common the issue of conflict, contextualized by the application of patrimonial policies.

The first registration was the local pottery craft in Goiabeiras (ES) in 2002. As Dias (2006) describes, the potters association - which had already undergone a singular organizational process characterized by family arrangements and the threat of losing the plots of land from which they extracted the clay, having ceded some areas for the construction of a state water treatment plant - experienced tensions within their political organization when they became interlocutors with state agents during the ritual performance for obtaining the registration of their craft as Brazilian intangible heritage:

During the period when Berenícia was president of the APG [Associação de Paneleiras de Goiabeiras: the Goiaberas Potters Association], the group consolidated its presence in the regional political context. It was Berenícia, as a representative of the association, who passed on the suggestion [of the local IPHAN] to the Minister of Culture, Francisco Welfort, while he was in Goiabeiras, in a document requesting its inclusion in the cultural heritage list of the National Institute of Historical and Artistic Heritage [IPHAN]. In 2002, clay pottery, made by women from Goiabeiras, was the first registration listed in the Book of Knowledge. (Dias 2006: 132)

Like the potters from Vitoria (ES), the baianas of Salvador (BA)13 had their craft of acarajé making14 listed in IPHAN’s Book of Knowledge in 2005. The conflict was not internal to a specific association, as observed among the potters, but centred on the tense interactions with another group of baianas who represented a dimension of the sacred (Protestantism) different and opposed to the Afro-Brazilian tradition:

When the registration of intangible heritage was instituted in 2000, the activity of tray selling15 was embroiled in a controversy with evangelical vendors […]. In 2001, a picturesque but very striking episode - since a large number of the baianas selling acarajé mentioned it in our conversations - seems to have prompted the traditional baianas and their supporters to embark on a more energetic performance. The promoter Lícia Fábio […] created the Golden Acarajé award for the best seller in Salvador, with voting via the internet. Surprisingly, the winner was the Blonde,’ [...] a street vendor with dyed hair, according to some saleswomen, with a little known tray in a remote and unpopular neighbourhood, which was also evangelical. It was the height of the visibility of the controversy with the evangelicals. A woman who least represented, because she wanted to look blonde and modern, and because she followed a religion contrary to the roots of the delicacy, had been rewarded the prize precisely because of the delicacy from which she made her living but which at the same time she disdained, in the opinion of the other acarajé baianas. Most of the baianas and others […] remembered the indignation generated by the fact that the blonde had snatched the prize. After this episode, Abam, which had been in business since 1992, initially to help obtain social security benefits for vendors, reacted institutionally to the controversy. It joined forces with one of the Candomblé houses […] listed by IPHAN, Opô Afonjá, and the CEAA (Centre for Afro-Asian Studies) to apply for the registration of acarajé, a product representative of the Bahian crafts, in the Book of Knowledge. The request was made almost immediately after cultural heritage registration was instituted in 2002, and there seemed to be a certain urgency, not only due to the one-off indignation over the prize awarded to the evangelical seller, but much more probably due to the constant daily controversy with evangelicals setting the precedent for another form of commercializing acarajé, disconnected from the women’s tradition. (Martini 2007: 238-239)

The registration of the Samba de Roda in Bahia’s Recôncavo region in 2004 also presents ethnographic aspects of relations between the groups belonging to the Association of Sambadores and Sambadeiras of the State of Bahia (ASSEBA) and those groups outside the latter, based in the Bahian hinterland, as Silveira (2015) explains.16 In this case, patrimonial citizenship only became effective when the group becomes part of the association and its institutional and political dimension. In the hinterland, however, the groups continue to promote their festivals like the Festa dos Reis, establishing strong relations between spaces and people, outside patrimonial politics:

The critique relates, then, to the type of patrimonialization that presents a harmonic ideological justification but in practice excludes some groups from this process. However, for the groups of the Recôncavo this process has benefited many people, from the visibility of the samba to taking care of the health issues of the masters. However, it is not a process free from contradictions and exclusions. Some groups from the Bahian hinterland end up being pushed to the margins of this whole process. (Silveira 2015: 07)

Finally, I turn to one last example of heritage registration, in this case the office of masters, listed by both Brazil and UNESCO. The particularity of this case is that one capoeira master claimed that this cultural reference was equally African, thus amplifying the notion of the myth of nationality:

[…] during the registration process, a renowned Bahian master disagreed with its recognition as cultural patrimony of Brazil, since he wished capoeira to be registered as ‘Afro-Brazilian cultural heritage,’ even though there was no legal instrument which would allow such a prerogative. The master organized an event to discuss the matter, convening the IPHAN representatives who were coordinating the registration process, capoeiristas, intellectuals and black leaders from Bahia. This fact reveals the complexity of patrimonialization processes and the variety of possible identifications and perceptions that capoeira can have. It also draws attention to a possible need to create instruments that extend beyond the borders of national identities. Capoeira here simultaneously marks and is marked by a discussion that goes beyond its practice. [...] How can the discourse of diversity been maintained under homogenizing labels like those of national patrimony and humanity? [...] complexity emerges when we perceive that the formation of national identity can no longer be seen as singular and watertight, perceived instead as multiple and taken up by new actors of various kinds, who have appropriated the culture, legitimizing it in the search for policies of reparation and recognition. (Castro & Vidal 2016: 185-197)

I think these examples are sufficient to demonstrate the elasticity of the actions of social and ethnic groups when interacting with patrimonial policies, whether negating them - as happened with the indigenous peoples of the Xingu and the Roma of Trindade (Goiás state). The actions in internal disputes or with representatives of the nation state exemplified by the Goiabeiras potters and the Bahian street sellers, or the demand for inclusion of sambadeiro groups from the hinterland of the Bahian Recôncavo, work to extend patrimonial citizenship beyond the borders of the nation, just as in the cases of capoeira and the Wajãpi. Patrimonial experiences already processed and those still under way invite us to observe both epistemic and practical caution, listening to the voices of alterity that imbue the complex game of cultural heritage with diverse meanings. Seen from an anthropological perspective, the notion of patrimony, like culture, is always slipping between our fingers. Dealing with this poses a permanent challenge to the anthropologist’s work.

References

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  • 1
    The majority of sociological studies exploring the term citizenship refer to T. H. Marshall (1950) who in turn drew from the publication of Hobhouse of 1916 in associating the rights and duties of the citizen of a certain State. Marshall related citizenship to the notion of social class and presented a description of the development of civil, political and social rights in Great Britain between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, as Morris (2010: 41) and Svarlien (1987: 177) point out.
  • 2
    TN: IPHAN is the acronym for the Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional.
  • 3
    The concepts of action and agency are correlated and a traditional theme in the social sciences. The debate has explored the relationship between structure and agent - in other words, the tension between society and individual - with theories that emphasize the social order, structure or dynamics of agents. Thus the reflections of symbolic interactionism, pragmatism, phenomenology and the notion of networks have all contributed to this debate. Emirbayer & Miche associate the ‘interactional,’ ‘projective’ and ‘practical-evaluative’ (Stones 2010: 13-17) elements with the phenomenon of agency and give conceptual impetus to the term. In anthropology, the writings of Marilyn Strathern have had great impact because, different from the previous theories that associate structure and subject, Strathern, inspired by her studies in Melanesia, calls attention to native theories of the agency in which the relational principle of the subject is operated by a Native decoder (Strathern 2006). I particularly think that the notions of agency developed by Strathern, Emirbayer & Miche, and Giddens also, can be modulated to the types of case analysed.
  • 4
    In Brazil, the heritage registration law, based around the notion of exceptionality, was instituted by Decree No. 25, of November 30, 1937. The decree establishes that cultural goods must be inscribed in four Books of Record: Book of the Archaeological, Ethnographic and Landscape Record; Book of the Historical Record; Book of Record of Fine Arts; and Book of Record of Applied Arts.
  • 5
    Decree No. 3,551 of August 4, 2000 established the registration of intangible cultural assets as a component of the Brazilian cultural heritage, based on the notion of relevance. The decree establishes that intangible assets must be entered in the following books: Book of Knowledge; Book of Record of Celebrations; Book of Registration of Forms of Expression; and Book of Registration of Places, The same decree created the national intangible heritage program.
  • 6
    The notion of anti-myth was developed by Roberto Da Matta (1970) in his analysis of two myths: the conquest of fire and the civilized origin of the Timbira. Here, though, I refer to the interpretation of anti-myth associated with ideology, which, in the words of Julio Cesar Melatti, is “a myth of a more dynamic character, which makes possible the creation of new categories and the passage to a more complex order, that of political ideology” (Malate 2016).
  • 7
    The Karajá dolls were registered as Brazilian intangible heritage on January 25, 2012, in the Book of Knowledge (Knowledge and Practices Associated with the Modes of Making Karajá Dolls) and in the Book of Celebrations (Ritxoko: Artistic and Cosmological Expressions of the Karajá People) (Silva 2015).
  • 8
    As an example, we can turn to how the Aruanã masks were negotiated between the Karajá and the ethnologist Ehrenreich (1948) in the constitution of museum collections: “It was thanks to the help of the boss Pedro Manco that I was able to bring some interesting masks. Without his intercession, the superstitious distrust of the members of the tribe could hardly have been overcome, for a series of travellers, especially Spinola himself, had been imprudent enough to desecrate these sacred objects.” He continues: “nevertheless, they did not allow us to carry the masks found in the forest in any old fashion since they thought there were women in the vicinity. To transport the masks to our camp, our comrades had to wear them especially for this purpose” (Ehrenreich 1948: 72-77).
  • 9
    As an antidote to being lured by a romanticized vision of the patrimonial game, we can turn to the critique made by Coombe & Bairde (ou Baird, (2015) of the uses and limits of cultural heritage, shaped by the complex network of neoliberal actions at work behind categories such as community protection, human rights and indigenous knowledge, while still employing professionals to implement practices of self-interest in ‘heritage’ areas: “Heritage is obviously being taken up as a political resource in new and surprising ways. As international heritage bodies are called upon to involve and engage local communities in the project of protecting heritage and safeguarding intangible cultural heritage, their work is increasingly imbricated in encounters with corporate, indigenous, and transnational actors who have incorporated heritage norms into their own agendas. If such intersections pose limits to the emancipatory expectations we should have for heritage governance in some instances, they also suggest that heritage governance on resource frontiers is a site of intensified struggles whose outcomes are unpredictable. Industry actors are using international heritage vocabularies in new exercises of corporate social responsibility that might be considered novel forms of public-private policy in which industrial and community agents voluntarily take up and reframe global legal principles of sustainability, community, and heritage for their own ends. […] Mining companies have attempted to usurp or co-opt global norms that position heritage as a development resource by funding tenure-track faculty positions, endowing research chairs, and offering their own staff as experts to serve in global heritage institutions” (Coombe & Baird 2015: 349).
  • 10
    TN: Favelado in the original, meaning someone who lives in a favela (slum). The term is usually used with a pejorative intention.
  • 11
    N: The so-called ‘Westward March’ was a project led by the Getúlio Vargas (1882-1954) government in the Estado Novo period (1937-1946) to occupy and develop the interior of Brazil, where indigenous groups were seen as non-existent. This project was launched on the eve of 1938.
  • 12
    had access to this information in a lecture by the anthropologist Mônica Pechincha about her experience with the indigenous intercultural graduation of the Federal University of Goiás in 2015.
  • 13
    N: Baiana (feminine noun and adjective) refers to a woman from the state of Bahia. In this context, it refers to the black women who sell a particular street food, acarajé, and thus relates to a specific form of popular culture.
  • 14
    TN: Acarajé is a popular savoury cake made from mashed beans, fried in palm oil and filled with vatapá, a paste of bread, shrimp, peanut and palm oil. It may be spiced with pepper, coriander and cumin and it is considered to be of Yoruba origin. It is also a ‘saint food’ - that is, an edible offering in Afro Brazilian religious practices.
  • 15
    TN: Acarajé is sold on trays. Each vendor has her own tray consecrated to a specific entity in a particular Candomblé House, with whom she shares her successes.
  • 16
    TN: Samba de Roda is a specific form of Samba from the region called Recôncavo Baiano in the state of Bahia. Sambador (masc. adj.) Sambadora (fem.adj.) man and woman who do samba.

Publication Dates

  • Publication in this collection
    28 Nov 2019
  • Date of issue
    2019
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