BRAZIL: Carnival in the Northeast

Kitty Royal (in Portuguese Katarina Real), is one of my former students. The daughter of a US admiral, she spent come of her youth in Pernambuco and got to know the community well and since has made the black folklore groups there her main research field.. They normally view outsiders with suspicion, but they came to regard Katarina as one of them. Her book Eudes O Rei do Maracatú ( (Recife: Fundaçao Joaquim Nabuco, pp. 133; appendix of illustrations) describes Eudes Chagas, elected King of the Carnival, which is what the title of the book means. Actually he is really prince consort since the Queen dominates. Maracatú is a Brazilian dance of African origin. In Pernambuco (Recife) it means a group of street dancing merrymakers at Carnival time, according to the Portuguese-English Dictionary of James Taylor, the distinguished lexicographer of Portuguese who lectured at Stanford's Bolivar House. It is an excellent example of religious syncretism, a world of which most of us have caught only a glimpse in our visits to the Brazilian Northeast. The book focuses on the carnivals of 1967 and 1968. The account of the disputes concerning the carnival seems very distant to us, but the photographs are striking. The text in Portuguese is not easy to read since it contains many words referring to the special feature of carnival. Many of these words are, like the people in the carnival, of African origin. The first photograph shows a light skinned cleric with miter blessing the various kings and queens. There is a whole hierarchy of them. The second shows a woman with a crown described as "the Lady of the Palace of the Maracatu King of the Congo". She is holding what appears to be a typical statuette of the Virgin Mary. It is called a "calunga", translated by Taylor as " runt; a small rat; a heathen divinity". Combine these meanings and you get a runt of a heathen divinity, i.e. a statuette. Another photograph shows Katarina Real placing a gold collar on the calunga of Inęs de Castro. Remember Inęs de Castro, the sad Portuguese queen who appears in the Lusiads of Camoens? How did she get into the act? Another photograph shows a man dressed up as a Bear of the Carnival. There are no bears in Africa, and the only bear in South America is the ·"spectacled bear". I don't know where that scholarly bear lives, but I do not think it is the Northeast of Brazil. Another photograph shows Eudes raising the sword of Ogum. An African sword? Many of my questions are answered in the text. For example, it seems that the story of Inęs de Castro was picked up when a ballet about her was played in Rio in 1950. At least, that was when Katarina saw it in 1950. Clearly the ingredients for this folklore came from different places at different times.

Anthropologists love such folk customs, but they will disappear, or at best be kept alive for tourists. When I came to the US in 1937, the favorite radio program was "Amos and Andy", in which two whites spoke like Negroes (then a politically correct term). Of course on the radio they were not seen by the public, who assumed they were genuine. Blacks began to protest that that they no longer spoke that way, and the program disappeared. A similar development has affected American Indians. Right now there is a national move to get rid of Indian mascots for football teams, viewed as demeaning. Stanford did this sum years ago, over the protests of many white alumni. In those days it was inconceivable that both the US Secretary of State and the National Security Adviser would be black, as well as professors in most universities. Blacks want to move up to the professional level and no longer be viewed as exotic curiosities. This is true of all the peoples of the world, so cultural anthropology which studies them will cease to be academically of primary relevance. At the same time, world statistics of various groups will be more plentiful, adding thus to the materials used by sociologists. The prospect for universities is therefore a decline in anthropology and an increase in sociology.

All this is to be welcomed, with one caveat. American Indians have become major players. or rather owners in the gambling and casino world. This is in line with the tendency of other peoples to adopt the worse features of Western "civilization". The Christian black tradition in the US has been an admirable source of social uplift, and many successful blanks come from that background. Christian black churches in America also cultivated beautiful music. The National Security Adviser is the daughter of a minister and a music teacher, and she herself is a good musician. The black tradition in Brazil as represented by carnival is neither a source of social betterment nor of great music. Is that due to the American Protestant tradition and the Brazilian Catholic one? When we discussed this a long time ago, the point was made that the Brazilian carnival, time-consuming and expensive, consoles the Brazilian blacks for their miserable living conditions. Let us sincerely hope those conditions improve, and that American Blacks display the best in their tradition, not the worse in ours.

Ronald Hilton - 5/19/02