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

Abstract

The concept of transculturation, introduced in 1940 by Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, responded to prevailing models of acculturation by shifting critical focus away from racial mixing to the convergence of cultures. The term is perhaps most studied in relation to the formative role it played within the multiple theories of hybridity developed by Latin American cultural studies during the 1990s. In The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature between the Wars, Anke Birkenmaier examines the origins of this lineage of Latin American cultural anthropology through a comparative lens. Creating what might best be described a cultural history of anthropology between World Wars I and II, Birkenmaier draws upon archival research to examine four key scientist-writers' approaches to the Americas, including the well-known figures of Ortiz and Brazilian Gilberto Freyre as well as the less canonical Frenchman Paul Rivet and Haitian Jacques Roumain. Her goal is to demonstrate how each scholar's reconsideration of the study of race led to formative shifts in both disciplinary and social attitudes. She argues that these two decades were formative to cultural anthropology as a scientific pursuit, for European and American scholars idealistically looked to New World cultures to provide models of renewal in the face of conflict affecting other global regions.In addition to tracing each thinker's key shifts in practice during the interwar era, along with primary intellectual networks of influence, Birkenmaier also draws attention to the institutional advancements the men helped initiate, from the creation of ethnological museums and the initiation of interdisciplinary journals to political service on both national and international levels. As Birkenmaier notes, the four anthropologists did not practice field research in the way scholars accept as a standard today, yet while the reductive understanding of race in biological terms may date their intellectual paradigms, the basic questions they asked remain pertinent to twenty-first century preoccupations in the field.Although the four chapters that constitute the book all feature to varying degrees a response to mestizaje as an appropriated form of racial identity politics, they are not designed to be cumulative, but rather are primarily independent case studies. Chapter 1, for example, follows Ortiz's emerging rejection of pan-Hispanism, which he understood to be based on deterministic European academic models. This is particularly evident in his opposition to the recent push to celebrate Christopher Columbus' arrival in the New World in terms of “Día de la Raza.” From his study of Cuban folklore in the 1920s to his attempt to update the Royal Spanish Academy's dictionary of the Castilian language through the inclusion of local etymology, Ortiz's cultural turn brought to public attention both the important role that African language and customs had upon shaping contemporary Caribbean society and the promise of addressing issues of social injustice. Along the way, Birkenmaier considers other contemporary Cuban anthropologists influenced by Ortiz, before concluding with a discussion of Ortiz's public critique of the racial logic supporting José Martí's foundational manifesto of pan-Hispanism “Our America” (1891).Chapter 2, by contrast, examines the work of Americanist Paul Rivet, both in his native France and during his World War II exile in Colombia and Mexico. Founder of the French Institute of Anthropology, Rivet sought to unite opposing methodologies of sociology and ethnology through his interest in the Americas, thus Birkenmaier focuses primarily upon the impact generated by his creation of the Museum of Man in 1937 along with his examination of Amerindian cultures' influence upon contemporary society (54). While Rivet eventually became involved with UNESCO, Berkenmaier suggests that awareness of his contributions faded in postwar Latin America in part because Claude Lévi-Strauss's popular structuralist approach more directly dialoged with US models and shifted focus away from the culture of specific regions to explore universal organizing concepts.Returning to the Caribbean, Chapter 3 is organized in a slightly different format to analyze “how different factions in Haiti used anthropology and literature in order to create a new discourse about Haiti as a modern nation after the end of the U.S. American occupation” (76). In order to contextualize the racial theories of Jacques Roumain, who is better known for his fiction than his anthropological work, Birkenmaier dedicates a significant part of the chapter to a different intellectual, Jean Price-Mars, whose rejection of French models in the early twentieth century led to the promotion of vodou and folklore as important cultural practices. The second half of the chapter traces Roumain's contributions to the awareness of African heritage within Haitian national rituals through the legacy of the ethnographic museum he founded, his scientific essays, and his exploration of peasant life in the novel Master of the Dews (1944).If Roumain's technique alternated between essay and fiction, the final chapter instead features Gilberto Freyre's incorporation of literary techniques into his influential study The Masters and Slaves (1933). His response to reductive eugenic associations between the tropical climate and race gave rise to the lasting concept of “racial democracy,” which was ironically appropriated by the authoritarian state during the 1930s. Birkenmaier structures the chapter around a contrastive reading of Freyre's interpretive and Arthur Ramos' empiricist applications of anthropology. Freyre hoped to integrate the humanities and the social sciences, though much like the three previous anthropologists studied, the Cold War period after end of the war had negative repercussions for his interdisciplinary projects.Birkenmaier addresses the “problematic” nature of making claims about Latin America through examination of case studies primarily within the Caribbean and Brazil, noting the importance of marginal, underrepresented spaces, which, in this case, coincide with the areas in the region most historically marked by sugar plantations and the importation of slaves. This interstitial attitude is appropriate to her subject, given that more than one of her scientist-writer subjects rejected racial definitions of pan-Latin American identity. Indeed, despite the regional specificity of her title, Birkenmaier's book could well be understood as a particularly productive form of inter-American studies, which rather than examine issues from a holistic or hemispheric perspective, utilizes points of intersection—in this case, culture and antiracism—to reconsider how the Americas were conceptualized during a specific historical period. Birkenmaier gives particular credence to this understanding by describing the two decades between world wars as the “Americanist years,” a means of describing “a triangulated network of contacts among Latin American, U.S. American, and French Americanist anthropologists, who rallied around the cause of antiracism” (6). Her book is therefore recommended not only for Latin Americanists, but also hemispheric Americanists, historians, and anthropologists. Birkenmaier's writing is clear and accessible, making it appropriate for interdisciplinary scholars as well as students seeking an introduction to the origins of twentieth century cultural studies in the New World.

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