COLLINS But - Madame - What - If - I - Should - Need - To - Def PDF

CA
“BUT WHAT IF I SHOULD NEED TO DEFECATE IN

YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD, MADAME?”: Empire,
Redemption, and the “Tradition of the Oppressed”
in a Brazilian World Heritage Site
JOHN COLLINS
Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center
The city of Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia, is typically celebrated as

the mythic site of Brazil’s African soul. It thus appears in nationalist thought as the
proper place for defining tradition and locating blackness in “racial democracy,” or
the purportedly redemptive claim to Portuguese, African, and Native American hy-
bridity essential to Brazilian modernity. The State Government of Bahia has sought
to reinforce this contested narrative through a reconstruction of the Pelourinho,
Salvador’s colonial-era downtown. Nonetheless, the conversion into a UNESCO
World Heritage Site of a red light district filled with crumbling colonial buildings
has faced a variety of challenges.
In 1999–2000 “Governor” Antônio Carlos Magalhães, the reconstruction’s
iron-fisted patron and Brazil’s most feared populist politician, became embroiled
in scandal not long after his son suffered a fatal heart attack.1 Because of Mag-
alhães’s waning influence, opposition to the neoliberal policies of then-President
Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the death of the younger Magalhães whom Cardoso
had groomed as a successor, residents’ ongoing undermining of government initia-
tives in the city center, and development agencies’ contention that reforms focused
on monuments, rather than inhabitants’ welfare, the reconstruction stalled. The
Bahian state was unable to capture monies to complete the reconfiguration of the
approximately 30 percent of the Pelourinho still awaiting the reworkings of colo-
nial legacies around which Magalhães derived legitimacy. This kink in carefully laid
plans became especially visible from May 29 to June 2, 2000, when SIRCHAL, a
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 23, Issue 2, pp. 279–328. ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360. C 2008 by
the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1525/can.2008.23.2.279.
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 23:2
for-profit cultural heritage firm staffed by development professionals subservient

to France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, organized a conference in Salvador.
SIRCHAL’s urbanists sought to cajole Bahians into qualifying for the sev-
eral million dollars the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) earmarked for
the project. But to receive these funds Bahia’s government needed to demon-
strate attention to the neighborhood’s populace. This proved challenging because
the Bahian Institute of Artistic and Cultural Patrimony (IPAC), the institution in
charge of what the Bahian state typically calls the Pelourinho’s “regeneration,” had
in the 1990s expelled thousands of residents and transformed their homes into
boutiques, museums, and NGO headquarters (Butler 1998; Nobre 2002). As a
result, French delegates dubbed the project a “Disney” and an “ethnocide” directed
at Afro-Brazilians. Other non-Bahian participants lambasted IPAC for commod-
ifying heritage, for displacing residents, and for ignoring restoration protocols
(Rojas 1998, 1999). The problem, they agreed contradictorily, was “that planners
subordinated the needs of . . . inhabitants to technical, economic, and political
criteria.”2
To this an outraged Bahian participant replied, to applause from Brazilian
colleagues, “You do not understand the conditions under which we operate. Ours is
more a political process than one determined by planning and economic needs.” This
provoked a generalized shouting, during which I heard a French urbanist whispering
words I made out as fou, incroyable, and désastre. As I smiled conspiratorially, hoping
to learn more, a Chilean planner from SIRCHAL’s Paris office took command of
the meeting, suggesting that this was a long-awaited opening for getting Bahian
heritage planning back on track.
In the wake of the destruction of New York’s World Trade Center and
the invasion of Iraq, perceptions of empire may rest forcefully on claims about
catastrophe, disaster, individualized negligence, and thus “states of exception”
(Agamben 2006). It may even appear that the emergency has become the rule
(Benjamin 1969). Nonetheless, claims about informal or indirect colonialism and
insecure boundaries between trusteeship and domination have long helped except,
or insulate, the United States from comparisons to European empires (Kramer
2006; Smith 2003; Stoler 2006a, 2006b). This points to exceptions’ roles in
shutting down accurate assessments of empires and suggests that it is important to
look closely at what they actually do.
Partha Chatterjee argues that today, in a world in which empire is imma-
nent in the nation-state, the “imperial prerogative . . . is the power to declare the
colonial exception” (2005:495). From this perspective, attention to pedagogical or
280
EMPIRE, REDEMPTION, AND TRADITION OF THE OPPRESSED
ameliorative projects by international bodies legitimated through their ability to

claim to resolve putative emergencies may present one way to specify imperial
actors even if “actually existing empire” (Harvey 2005) appears remarkably dif-
fuse.3 Might the ethnographer, then, by attending to trusteeship, claims about
global responsibility (McGranahan 2007), and the “will to improve” (Li 2007)
pinpoint the imperial entanglements of institutions like IPAC, the United States
Agency for International Development (USAID), the World Bank, the IDB, and
UNESCO?4 Could declarations of exception and the reactions they provoke be
examined, in a manner akin to what Aihwa Ong (2006) argues for neoliberalism,
so as to present effective ways of tracing imperial formations instantiated, for ex-
ample, in international gatherings directed by Chileans working for French mixed
public–private corporations that advise UNESCO and the IDB?5 And, even more
specifically, might an ethnography of the tutelage of ostensibly problematic pop-
ulations in Bahia today augment recent considerations of non-European empires
(Perdue 2007) and imperial domination’s apparent endurance in the nation-state
(Duara 2007) by revealing something of the ways class politics help make apparent,
and emerge in relation to, imperial formations today?
In the pages below I follow, across multiple articulations and scales, just a
few of the implications of a remarkable example of backtalk by a woman coded
as exceptional and hence subjected to a myriad of both state-sponsored and non-
governmental forms of tutelage in Salvador’s Pelourinho. In exploring this “gutsy
insurrection” by a woman named Topa, I track genealogically what might otherwise
pass as disparate phenomena and unrelated movements in imperial history, Brazilian
nationalism, and UNESCO World Heritage programs. I try not to present Topa as
a romanticized subaltern actor who mobilizes a truth that might assuage my erudite
blindness. One way I do so is by emphasizing that this account, written after her
death, is nonetheless in many ways a coproduction and the perspectives explored
here arose during Topa’s state’s social science-based attempt to transform her
crumbling neighborhood and stigmatized habits into sanctioned symbols of cultural
heritage, or what is usually called patrimony in Brazil. This lopsided patrimoni-
alization, carried out through the identification and then elevation of quotidian
practices to the status of treasured objects, occurred over the course of decades
of interactions between social scientists and the Pelourinho’s populace. Thus, a
specific group did not decide at one moment to both stigmatize and celebrate
the Pelourinho so as to subject it to some tributate-taking imperialism. Rather,
the Pelourinho takes form in an increasingly rapacious, neoliberal moment in
which culture (Weffort 2000), social networks (Elyachar 2005), and even people’s
281
ostensible inner essences (Coronil 2000), are commodified in a distributed imperial

setting. For this reason I approach empire here not as a thing in itself, but as sets
of “imperial formations” or “polities of dislocation, [and] processes of dispersion,
appropriation, and displacement” (Stoler and McGranahan 2007:8) that turn on
the mobility and veilings afforded by multiple exceptions.
In the next section, I describe more of what I seek to accomplish by following
exceptions and exploring patrimony in Bahia. I then produce, with relatively
broad strokes, a portrait of the Pelourinho, its residents, the IPAC state cultural
institution in charge of its restoration, and the Brazilian racial ideologies within
which all three take knowable form. I show how both heritage planning and Brazilian
racial ideologies share certain cultural logics and I analyze the roles of emotion and
circumscription in fragmenting imperial landscapes. This leads to a moment when
a man, his life quite literally fragmented, nonetheless reveals one way Pelourinho
residents resignify cultural heritage’s techniques. Residents’ engagements with
heritage carry the account into a deeper historicization of Brazil’s exceptional
racial ideologies and national project in light of imperial conflicts and Victorian
science. This in turn prepares the reader to interpret Topa’s gutsy insurrection
catalyzed by a piece of street theater intended to teach her about hygiene. I then
conclude by seeking to understand how Topa’s manner of making connections
might be employed to augment the insightfulness and reduce the paucity of existing
ethnographic accounts directed at empire.
ON THE IMPORTANCE OF THE EXCEPTION

This article is about human beings and colonial ruins made both marginal and
central to the construction of Brazil and UNESCO claims about common humanity.
Because of years of interactions with a heritage burueacracy that sought to configure
them as symbolic ancestors and then, in a neoliberal period in which culture
managers removed the majority whose unruly habits threatened the UNESCO
site’s tranquility, a number of current and former Pelourinho residents have come
to argue that they are a form of patrimony, or possessions of the nation. This
suggests that heritage, more than just a technique for reifying social relations as a
communal property, is a labile technology for charting the borders of, and making
claims to, that belonging.
My goals in exploring the restoration of the Pelourinho, a neighborhood
made glorious in the Atlantic triangle trade and then, after a period of decadence,
“regenerated” during a moment usually understood as neoliberal, are multiple.
Most basically, I explore ways of identifying the workings of empire from a locus
282
of enunciation whose existence depends on its object of analysis. I begin from a

suspicion, catalyzed by Topa, that given the extent to which today’s institutions,
ethics, modes of interpretation, racial ideologies, and political economic structures
emerged in relation to a colonial world, much of the physical and metaphorical
landscape upon which we all tread is an imperial effect. But another imperial effect
involves a blindness to one’s entanglements that arises in relation to both “epistemic
murk” (Taussig 1992; see also Price 2006; Stoler 1992) and segmentations that
fragment perceptions of what are in fact entwined geohistorical processes (Coronil
1996; Kaplan 1993; Smith 2003).
Another goal is to think through this imperial myopia via exceptions, or
those phenomena configured as out of the ordinary and, hence, within influential
currents in social thought, constitutive of the system, sovereignty, or legality. I do
so by emphasizing exceptions’ eventfulness as well as their ties to specific forms
of emotion. I build on Didier Fassin and Paula Vasquez’s treatment of the state of
emergency as a “political act that runs throughout society as a whole” (2005:402),
owing to a sympathy that, they argue, coalesces around the circumscribed event.
But I suggest that concentrating on the event writ large (whether a delimited
moment in time, a spatially circumscribed community, or a physical heritage
object of the type preserved as world patrimony by UNESCO) generates a certain
amnesia as to its conditions of emergence. Emotional attachments compound this
elision. In the Pelourinho, sentiment separates populations and exacerbates the
experience of disaggregation (see also Stoler 2002, 2006b). Sentiment can also,
as Topa demonstrates, provoke reconfiguration—although not of the sort urban
planners have intended for the Pelourinho.
CONVERGENCES: “BRAZIL’S BROWN MOTHER” AND HERITAGE

AS EXCEPTION
Salvador’s bourgeoisie largely ignored their city center during Brazil’s post-
World War II period of state-led developmentalism. But in the 1990s the state and
elites refocused on colonial mansions abandoned at the end of the 19th century to
servants, charities, and impoverished relatives. Why Bahia’s bourgeoisie returned
has much to do with Afro-Bahian cultural movements that captivated outsiders
and Bahians alike, changing class structures under neoliberalism, Antônio Carlos
Magalhães’s political coalition’s initiatives, the allure of UNESCO branding as a
mark of cosmopolitan distinction, and movements in capital accumulation that
stimulated a focus on culture as resource. But how actors reappropriated colonial
ruins by tapping into heritage, thus altering the direction of Brazilian nationalism
283
and modernist planning in Salvador, is a different issue.6 And it is one tightly related
to the history of Brazilian nationalism, regional differentiation, and engagements
with colonial legacies.
Salvador has been portrayed for over a century as an African pole in the accounts
of tropical creativity and racial mixture that prop up modern Brazil. Its importance
to these myths is in great part a function of the struggles of its Afro-descendent
population and the ways nationalist thinkers have interpreted these practices in the
context of powerful narratives of interracial intimacy that continue to make Brazil
imperfectly, unequally, and exceptionally complete (Goldstein 2003; Guimarães
2002; Sheriff 2001).7 One such nationalist figure is Gilberto Freyre, Franz Boas’s
student, the scion of a planter family from the adjoining state of Pernambuco,
and author of The Masters and the Slaves (1986), Brazil’s most influential account
of colonial histories and national futures. In 1927, after a visit to Salvador, Freyre
penned the following:
Bahia of all saints (and almost all sins)
Houses climbing licentiously atop one another
Houses, colonial mansions, churches . . .
All of Bahia is one fat maternal city
As if out of her taut wombs
From which there have arisen so many of Brazil’s cities
with still more to come
in the oily soft air filled with smells of food . . .
People of Bahia!
Black, tan, purple, brown
The color of plantation hardwoods
Of Brazil
(wood that termites can’t chew)
a place without faces the color of pale salad
nor visages like cold turkey
without the lumps of French butter
(red hair of Englishmen and Germans)
Bahia burning with hot colors
Warm meat and spicy tastes
Old Black women of Bahia
Selling gruel, manioc paste and bean fritters
Old Black women in scarlet shawls
284
With soft fallen breasts

Mothers of the most beautiful mulattoes . . .
Mulatas with angelic hands
Making little boy children grow bigger
Creating great Sirs almost equal
To those of the Empire
Freyre’s poem “Bahia,” like the 1933 Masters and the Slaves it rehearses and the
Pelourinho’s late-20th-century reconstruction, turns on buildings, people, and
commingled sensory perceptions. It Brazilianizes the Pelourinho as a jumble that
spawned a nation that, because of its racial makeup, is different from the Europe
signified by the neighborhood’s Portuguese baroque architecture.8 Freyre’s verse
thus presents an argument reminiscent of The Masters and the Slaves, which appeared
in Portuguese as Casa grande e senzala (The Big House and the Slave Quarters). In this
allegory of regeneration, kitchens and bedrooms enframe what Freyre presents
as intimate relations between Portuguese-descendent, male slaveholders and non-
white, enslaved nursemaids, cooks, and concubines.9 In this way the representative
of a faded planter aristocracy disseminated and authorized a narrative of imagined
unity around what Freyre portrayed as affective contact between occupants of the
Big House and the slave quarters.10
In “Bahia” the Pelourinho’s plazas function, as does plantation architecture
in The Masters and the Slaves, as sites for producing a putatively shared culture
around an interracial communion across thresholds crisscrossed by odors, tastes,
caresses, and sex. Freyre’s seigniorial verses construe mixture as propelling Brazil
into a brown, hybrid future beyond its ostensibly sullied African, and indolent
Portuguese, beginnings. In his disturbing—or, as some argue, exceptional (Fry
2007; cf. Goldstein 1999)—version of national improvement, Freyre depicts “Old
black women” giving birth to mixed-race, Brazilian children healthier and more
attractive than their mothers. And this story of a Brazil apparently overcoming, but
never forgetting, its African origins that Freyre metaphoricizes via the Pelourinho
and the plantation generates, “Mulatas with angelic hands” under whose care mem-
bers of the elite become “great Sirs almost equal/ To those of the Empire.” This
claim, and its accompanying portrait of a national people “whitened” (Skidmore
1974) through a miscegenation that elides centuries of violence and exploitation,
has faced vociferous challenges by Brazil’s Black Movement (“MNU”) and sectors of
academia and the state (Nascimento 2005). Nonetheless, and however problematic
it may be, racial democracy remains a powerful imaginary in Brazilian life today.
285
It has gained currency not simply as a result of encouragement by the federal

and local states and elaborations by different intellectual movements, but in relation
to its making public of ostensibly private and affective practices (Collins 2004,
2007a). And in this way racial democracy articulates with Bahian cultural planning
which opens the houses of the mostly female-headed families in the Pelourinho to
observation by a social science that by the 1990s had helped fix the neighborhood
as a supposed site of interracial national love (Sommer 1991). As a result, the
construction of 20th-century Bahian heritage is not simply a story of the landmarking
of buildings and the protection of monuments. It is a narrative of the regeneration
of a neighborhood in a nation where ostensible degeneracy has been overcome
through an account of national hybridity.
But such a story of seemingly affective communion is also a tool for policing the
boundaries of belonging available to a differentiated citizenry. Even in 1987, when
I first visited Brazil as a backpacker partaking of the experiences that seem to accrue
naturally to certain of empires’ disaffected children (Forster 1965), “respectable”
Bahians avoided the Pelourinho. Locals usually referred to the neighborhood as the
Maciel—the name of one of its subregions associated with prostitution—or the
mangue (mangrove) or brega, two synonyms for red light district. Yet by this late-
1980s moment the colonial center was already on the way to the block-by-block
reforms catalyzed by residents’ cultural production and political organization and
begun by IPAC in 1992. In fact, the mangrove began to take shape as a historical
center in part through efforts during the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s by
social scientists from the Federal University of Bahia, an institution that expanded
significantly during the 1964–85 dictatorship.
Ethnographers spent the better part of the 1970s documenting, and rela-
tivizing, the lifeways of the red light zone’s inhabitants.11 This paved the way
for Antônio Carlos Magalhães’s son-in-law—whose company’s acronym, OAS,
residents recast as Obras Aranjadas pelo Sogro, or “Public Works Arranged by His
Father-in-Law”—who would enrich the family in the 1990s as his workers gutted
buildings, restored facades, and rebuilt interiors with poured concrete. Yet not
everyone in the Maciel–Pelourinho of the 1970s was involved in the sex trade.
IPAC’s ethnographers made this point repeatedly from the late 1960s to the early
1980s (Bacelar 1982; Caroso Soares 1979; Espinheira 1984; Moreira 1982). They
argued that neighborhood moral orders, while puzzling to the bourgeoisie who
defined themselves against mangue residents, made sense in the context of cap-
italist transformation. Nonetheless, except for researchers and “bohemian” men
who frequented its brothels and cabarets, by the 1970s most middle-class Bahians
286
ignored the colonial center and focused on the malls and residential developments
popping up under the influence of the petrodollars cycled through Brazil by North
American banks.
In the 1980s—a “lost decade” in much of Latin America owing to debt crisis—
Brazil returned to civilian rule and Bahian industry expanded. Incentives established
by the military in the 1970s spurred, for the first time, a relatively well-paid, Afro-
descendent industrial working class (Castro 1998; Kottak 2005). And when barred
because of their race from existing leisure organizations, this proletariat invented
blocos afros, or African-themed associations. Among the most popular was Olodum,
begun in the Maciel at the end of the 1970s (Rodrigues 1995, 1996). Within a
decade Olodum became one of Brazil’s most popular musical groups and thousands
attended its rehearsals, stimulating a movement of working-class youths between
the Pelourinho and periphery that would politicize both while helping to convince
the Bahian state of the value of Pelourinho culture (Sansone 1995).12
The Pelourinho’s centrality to Bahia’s “re-Africanization” (Risério 1980),
coupled with deindustrialization caused by expiring incentives, appears to have
alerted Magalhães’s coalition to culture’s possibilities. It had, since the 1960s,
anchored appeals to the populace in signs of Afro-Bahian culture (Dantas Neto
2006; Santos 2005) and sought to restore the Pelourinho. But UNESCO offered
technical advice alone: Only when Magalhães regained Bahia’s governorship in the
neoliberal 1990s could the state dedicate $100 million to cultural heritage. It did
so with funds derived from privatizing Bahia’s banking system, major highway,
ferryboat service, and power and light companies.
In the next section, I describe what happened when IPAC, funded by the sale of
industries, dispossessed residents and restored their former abodes after November
of 1992. To understand that moment, it is important to recognize how Freyre’s
writings, IPAC gathering of information about the red light district, and heritage
planning in general turn on the making public, and subsequent protection, of
previously unmarked and often domestic habits. The heritage-based recuperation
of what supposedly happened in kitchens and bedrooms, and its exposition on
Pelourinho plazas from the time of Freyre’s poem “Bahia” through the Pelourinho
restoration of the 1990s, is formally similar to the retrieval and reinvention of
everyday practices as heritage by IPAC ethnographers. And in the Pelourinho they
are tied even tighter by the fact that, as I discuss at length below, the neighborhood’s
domestic spaces served as sites for unions between newly cash-rich, working-
class—as well as elite—Bahian men and their mistresses. Memories of this process
allowed IPAC’s colonization of affect through social science to give rise during
287
the post-1992 reconstruction of the Pelourinho to “longstanding intimacies . . .

reforged as abstract attachments to categories of progress, modernity, and nation”
(Anderson 2006:96) or what Michael Herzfeld (1997) calls the transformation of
indexical, deictic attachments into a more iconic, material sense of community (see
also Birth 2008; Daniel 1996; Foster 2002; Orta 2004). But why are such basic
aspects of symbolization and nationalism important to understanding exceptions,
and elisions of connections that might allow observers to make out empire more
clearly?
One criticism of racial democracy enunciated by the MNU is that it natu-
ralizes violence and exploitation as affective bonds. This points to a question that
brings together conceptually heritage, Bahian racial ideologies, and my genealogical
method: “What unites, and hence makes, Brazil?” In light of the MNU critique it
may even be reformulated as “What makes Brazil special or exceptional in light of
the Freyrean parable: violence or love?” Cultural heritage, a UNESCO-sanctioned
means of cataloguing objects and practices that “must be of outstanding universal
value” to be included on the World Heritage Site List,13 functions similarly when
specifying what makes a practice special or exceptional. In fact, that is precisely
what UNESCO guidelines do; they provide technical criteria for demonstrating
exceptional value by naming and revealing what is presumed to individuate or
make special because of its organic or natural association with a community and its
objects (Handler 1988, 1991).14 Hence whether one answers that racial democracy
particularizes Brazil via violence, or love, the fact remains that Brazil has become
special through techniques for policing the boundaries between public and private
that crystallize quotidian practices as community essences.
This convergence between heritage in general, and Bahia’s racialized approach
to its heritage, is important to this article in two ways. First, it begins to demonstrate
something basic to the exception, namely the way it signifies through ostensible
purification and through elisions purporting to specify the essence of an event or
phenomenon. Heritage supposedly exhibits universal value by clarifying essences.
In this way it mimics the argument that the state of emergency strips life to its
most important functions, like survival. As Neil Smith argues for Hurricane Katrina
(2007; see also Dynes 2000), that disaster was not so much about the meaning
of some bare, biopolitical life as it was about capitalism, or the very system from
within which analyses of the emergency were formulated. Similarly, both heritage
planning and claims about exception tend to stamp out knowledge of their historical
situatedness through simplification and recodification within claims to essence that
are in fact reflections of the very conditions that spurred the emergency or the
288
claim to exception. In the case of Katrina, whose strength was magnified not
by nature, but by the ways humans built and ran New Orleans, this would be
real estate speculation, racism, and generations of poor planning and governance
(Colten 2006). For Bahian heritage, the elision of context (and hence an inability
to recognize the Pelourinho Historial Center as an ongoing attempt to resolve
social differences that separate Bahia’s multiple political subjects and occasion real
exploitation) wipes out memories of the removal of the neighborhood’s population,
their subjection to sanitary surveillance, and IPAC connivance with military police
sent to arrest lawbreakers in advance of the payment of indemnification.
Both a disaster like Katrina and a cathedral registered by UNESCO emerge as
exceptional in relation to their own conditions of possibility: The exception is not
an outside that gives rise to the system, but rather part and parcel of that system’s
ongoing functioning.15 And my disagreement here with Agamben’s (1998, 1999)
situation of homo sacer—that being who purportedly produces sovereignty by
remaining outside or at the borders of the social order, liable to be killed but
not sacrificed—becomes more apparent in relation to my second point about the
convergences between racial democracy’s and cultural heritage’s disseminations
of private habits. Put simply, the apparent constriction of reference I associated
above with the exception as event is both exacerbated and undermined by emotion
in ways that help us understand the segmentations of knowledge within imperial
formations.
This might be introduced via the words of Bahia’s Governor César Borges at
a March 1999 inauguration of a restored Pelourinho plaza:
The primary duty of every citizen is that of preserving his or her land. During
this celebration of the 450 years of our city the very best present we might
give to Salvador is to make sure that things and identities become more and
more untouchable. The point is to permit them to last centuries by means
of an economy of signs that we should cultivate as sacred. There is nothing
that particularizes more our city than its good populace. For those who have
been here since the cradle as well as those who might stop by here for a
time, whether short or long, whether to put down or not to put down roots,
to care for Salvador is to incorporate into your personal world a piece of
this spirituality, singular in its essence but plural in its manifestations—of
affectivity, hospitality, sincerity and solidarity.
Borges seeks to fix “economies of signs” as shared, sacred, and hence relatively
permanent symbols around which citizens might internalize putative essences,
289
namely “affectivity, hospitality, sincerity and solidarity.” These claims speak to

the argument that, rather than imagining the state of exception as a dialectic
of law and anomie (Schmitt 2006), it be tied to emotion in such a way that it
appears as “the concrete modality of collective redemption acquired at the price
of . . . violence” (Fassin and Vasquez 2005:403). Emergency is thus delimited by
collective sentiment. This mitigates against Carl Schmitt’s sovereign decisionism
as well Agamben’s contention that, “In every case, the state of exception marks a
threshold at which logic and praxis blur with each other and pure violence without
logos claims to realize an enunciation without any real reference” (2006:40).
Exception for Agamben is thus “an anomic space in which what is at stake is a force
of law without law” (2006:39). In response, Fassin and Vasquez, like Smith (2007),
look for “real reference,” as I do here.
The question of whether a catastrophe that produces suffering can be pro-
ductively compared to exceptionalism within UNESCO World Heritage projects
warrants interrogation. But SIRCHAL delegates did call the Pelourinho project an
“ethnocide,” a charge leveled also by Bahia’s opposition party senator and MNU
delegate in a speech to the national congress in January of 1999.16 And the rapid
removal to distant slums of thousands of working people from a historical center in
which they were able to survive in ways impossible on Salvador’s periphery appears
catastrophic. My more than a decade spent accompanying their moves, and the
death, suffering, and limited possibilities that resulted, backs up this conclusion.
It is also a reason I juxtapose Borges’s, Fassin and Vasquez’s, and residents’ treat-
ments of emotion. Sadness associated with loss of life is distinct from the euphoric
nationalism of Pelourinho commemoration. And for this reason I end this section
with a discussion of differentially situated Bahians’ emotional responses, or lack
thereof, to the Pelourinho’s patrimony.
Throughout the 20th century residents cooked, raised families, and made do
in buildings with “strong and serious seigniorial lines, with polished rock doorways
and family crests, doors of deep hardwoods and baroque peacock’s tails” (Andrade
et al. 2000:332) that they propped up with ingenious scaffolding and then, every so
often, fled when these homes crashed to the ground. Overwhelmingly, inhabitants
treated these architectural icons of Brazilianness (Williams 2001) instrumentally, as
shelters. Residents, as opposed to people from Salvador’s neighborhoods or visitors
and social scientists from around the world, were not curious about buildings’
former uses and rejected stories of hauntings and ghosts.17 They did, principally at
moments when IPAC excavated plazas and uncovered skeletons and architectural
items, dig under floors and into walls in attempts to discover hidden treasure they
290
FIGURE 1. A Pelourinho resident cuts wood in front of his home in preparation for the
installation of a new front door. Photograph by John Collins.
claimed lay around them (Collins forthcoming). But they dug not out of interest,
nor love, nor curiosity about the architecture IPAC presented as revelatory of
national essences. They dug in attempts to survive (see Figure 1).
Monuments of Brazilianness the state sought to make compelling through racial
mixture and national sentiment were for residents little more than ruinas, or ruins
made significant only by their own labor. This familiarity that leads to a rejection of
objects’ walled-off, sacred status, and the emotion that the nation-building process
imposes on these symbols, is not surprising. But it is significant: For residents the
291
heritage, or exceptional, object was not a sacred symbol, well-spring of affect, or

walled-off sign vehicle open to emotional infusions and separate from the political
economy of an everyday life. It was an instrumental aspect of the everyday, used
to obfuscate, exploit, and empower. Residents thus recognized that heritage was
never cut off from their quotidian or from the political relations and bureaucratic
calculations they knew their state employed to incorporate them differentially in
the nation.
Before turning to some surprising ways people reinterpreted patrimonializa-
tion, I emphasize that the history offered above is intended to push discussions of
sovereignty and exception onto new ground while also providing a background to
Pelourinho exceptionality. Because I am writing at a moment when the term state of
emergency so often invokes the work of Giorgio Agamben, I thus seek to undermine
the dichotomous casting of the political and the exceptional. Agamben’s line of
political philosophy threatens people like Pelourinho residents—caught in limbo
throughout the 1990s as they awaited indemnification and found themselves subject
not to normal law but to the bureaucratic whims of IPAC that oversaw everything
from children’s care to whether or not they paid their rent—with a categorization
as permanent outsiders whose patrimonialized state as sacrificial ancestors to the
nation might be understood as generative of the politicized space of cultural pat-
rimony. Not only is such a claim noxious to the truth of residents’ struggles, but
it is part and parcel of the problem of imperial veilings. By rendering the space of
the exception permanent, and almost transparent in terms of the sacrificial victim
who occupies it, Agamben has help cover up the extent to which exceptions are the
norm of imperial domination (see also Stoler 2006b). I turn now to the exception
as interpreted, and performed, by Pelourinho residents.
TOMBAMENTO AS REDEMPTION
In April of 2000, as the excesses of carnival turned into Holy Week commem-
orations of Christian resurrection, I found myself in front of Salvador’s São Joaquim
market. Soaked by showers, I sat in a Volkswagen alongside Indio, a 26-year-old
former “street child.” This normally stoic friend, confidant, and former resident
of Salvador’s colonial downtown who, before he died in 2004, asked that I some
day represent him “as he was,” quivered with emotion. His head lay on Rita, his
wife whose thrust of a paring knife in repayment for his philandering had left him
quadriplegic. The two shed tears as three friends from Rita’s birthplace, the pe-
ripheral neighborhood of Sussuarana, slouched in the back seat suffering alongside
us.
292
The day had begun before dawn as I parked above the polymer-roofed house on
the embankment in Sussuarana to which Indio had moved after receiving an IPAC
indemnification. He had thus returned to the sort of neighborhood he fled as a child.
Yet even as Indio’s state sought to banish him from its efforts to capture resources
and cultivate citizens by restoring ruins, he had managed to document his HIV+
status and claim a disability pension. As his health deteriorated, he gained a place
in CAASAH, an NGO dedicated to the treatment of HIV infection and high on the
list of philanthropies supported by Governor Magalhães’s coalition, whose politics
involved a combination of patron–clientship and neoliberal governmentality (Biehl
2007).18 By the time we found ourselves in front of the market trying to convince
Rita to leave her new boyfriend, Indio had abandoned CAASAH for the freedom
of the distant home he and Rita purchased with IPAC funds. But Rita experienced
her removal from the Pelourinho in a quite different manner.
Rita refused to enter the car, moaning, “I just can’t! I can’t go back to that
place [Sussuarana]. There’s nothing there for me. Just tedium. And death . . . I
love you, Indio, but I can’t go!” Indio, allowing Rita to smooth his hair, asked
me to drive to his brother Gaginho’s home in another peripheral neighborhood,
Fazenda Grande do Retiro. As we pulled up, Gaginho came bounding up to
the car. Like Rita and Indio, he was HIV+. Also like his brother, Gaginho had
been evaluated by IPAC and removed from the Pelourinho, receiving $1,100 in
exchange for the home he had shared with his common-law wife, Topa, on the
street known as the Ladeira da Misericórdia. After this ran out Gaginho could
not maintain contact with former neighbors because of fragile health and a lack of
money.
Gaginho was thus overjoyed to see his brother. As greetings melded into
reminiscences he introduced a woman whose features recalled another, by then-
deceased, Misericórdia resident. “This is my mother-in-law,” Gaginho announced
as the woman sobbed, “Topa was so beautiful, so smart . . . too smart for the
[Fazenda Grande do Retiro] neighborhood.” Rivaled only by her brother-in-law,
Indio, Topa had been the Misericórdia’s most respected inhabitant. Her kindness
permitted me to conduct fieldwork among residents of this hillside street, a group
reviled by respectable Bahians, feared by neighbors, and wary of outsiders because
of attacks by death squads hired by local business owners. And now her mother
explained how her daughter had run away to the red light district. During one
excursion home she met the younger Gaginho and convinced him to join her,
arguing, like Rita when denying Indio’s pleadings years later, that the Pelourinho
offered an alternative to her natal neighborhood (see Figure 2).
293
FIGURE 2. Gaginho looks across Salvador’s financial center from his home in the Historical
Center. Photograph by John Collins.
Many working-class women, often expected to labor as servants or to perform

domestic tasks for male relatives, portray the Pelourinho as both a decadent space
and a medium for reinventing selves. This highlights its role as a zone of moral
exception: Since the end of the 19th century, poor and “dishonored” women from
throughout Brazil have fled to its brothels and boarding houses where they survived
by washing, cooking, vending, and caring for the children of other women in
this city within the “city of women” (Landes 1994). Stories also abound of men
from Bahia’s “best” families who left wives to live there with Eastern European
mistresses who passed as French, or with black Bahians who had often traded
domestic service for prostitution. The Pelourinho has thus played a vital role in a
nation where alleged intimacy between powerful men and nonwhite women—the
294
so-called racial democracy described above—constitutes an ideological backbone

that engenders community. Yet it also points to the extent to which the supposedly
degraded exception may be, even prior to state authorities’ attempts at sanitization,
a means of redemption.
By the mid-1990s moment when Rita traded Sussuarana’s tedium for a life
in the Pelourinho with Indio, a famous thief who claimed to be the son of a bank
robber killed “on the job,” the Pelourinho no longer served as a site for purportedly
shared senses of belonging created through interracial and interclass sexual relations
(Skurski 1996). Changing sexual mores, the rise of suburban centers for diversion,
buildings’ poor condition, and residents’ growing pauperization, together with an
illegal drug economy that made streets increasingly dangerous, meant that by the
1980s middle-class men no longer frequented Pelourinho bawdy houses.
From the early 1980s to the early 1990s, IPAC’s ethnographers, together
with public health researchers such as the leaders of the NGO called CETAD
discussed below, became virtually the only members of the local bourgeoisie
who continued to exercise a presence downtown. Their research generated in-
teractions between men portrayed as experts and a community configured as
composed of informants. This produced an archive of reports, planning docu-
ments, questionnaires, and blueprints for reforms that codified people’s habits as
culture. These could be redeployed by IPAC in construing poverty as tradition
and community. Thus, suffering and the ability to make do within capitalist ex-
ploitation became, by the 1990s, incorporated into the “global heritage grid” that
supported such inequalities (Hill 2007). Hence, this “tradition of the oppressed”
(Benjamin 1969) became reconfigured as a possession of the nation and, upon
UNESCO’s 1985 acceptance of the neighborhood onto its World Heritage List, of
humanity.
When, in November of 1992, IPAC began a block-by-block eviction, the pop-
ulation that IPAC had configured in the 1970s as an Afro-Bahian community became
increasingly divided. Those like the members of Olodum who produced “culture,”
found they could walk the tightrope between empowerment and exploitation by
taking advantage of connections outside the neighborhood. Yet residents who could
not configure themselves as exceptional producers of Afro-Brazilianness came to
be portrayed as dangerous backdrops to the exhibitions of Bahian folklore sanitized
by IPAC and disseminated by the Magalhães family’s media holdings. At this time
IPAC shifted its activities. No longer did social scientists craft relativistic studies.
Rather, undergraduate interns surveyed people’s occupation of space, ability to
produce expressive culture, and household economic activities as IPAC sought to
295
price lifeways so as to ascertain how much it needed to pay to convince inhabitants

to leave.
Officially, IPAC employed an “objective” formula to calculate the size of
indemnifications based on square meters occupied, number of household mem-
bers, length of residence, and whether the space was used as a domicile, place
of business, or both. But much of residents’ business fell outside IPAC defini-
tions. And, when I ask the head of IPAC’s legal division about the formula she
replied, “Simple: No transvestites, no thieves, and no drug dealers.” Yet I knew
plenty of people who would argue they fell into one or more of these categories
who nonetheless received indemnifications, and usually more than once. As IPAC
began to quantify and indemnify, residents created fictitious personas or fantas-
mas; invited relatives and friends to live with them so as to take a percentage
of these allies’ indemnifications; moved quickly into new quarters just ahead of
IPAC’s efforts so they could profit multiple times; and blackmailed IPAC per-
sonnel into including them on payment rosters. The result was a fetishization of
interior essence that mimicked the valorizations of culture going on at wider levels
(Collins forthcoming). And its effects were apparent on the day I drove to Fazenda
Grande.
As we rolled up, relatives greeted Indio. Beer circulated and Gaginho in-
troduced me to Topa’s mother as Indio announced, “Yeah, people. Here I am,
patrimonialized in this passenger seat. Looking good, ain’t I? That’s why the gringo
takes such good care of me.”19 Read in English, Indio’s words indicate that as
patrimony he was able to attract a foreign chauffeur. Yet “patrimonialized,” or the
Portuguese adjective tombado, has a number of meanings relevant to the discussions
of difference and its reification with which Indio enmeshed himself that day and
throughout his life in the Pelourinho.
Linked to the Latin tumulum, or storehouse, the verb tombar is traceable to
Portugal’s national archive, the Torre do Tombo. “Tombar” means to crystallize or
to freeze, to fix the form of something, to fall, to knock down, or to drop dead. In
the Pelourinho, both IPAC employees and residents employ the word to describe
registry in IPAC and UNESCO archives. Indio, Gaginho, and Rita joked frequently
about what it meant to tombar, or patrimonialize, people, habits, places, and
dwellings. The claim, “Está tombado,” or, “He/she/it’s patrimonialized,” often
served as a way of explaining a building’s poor condition because in anticipation of
eminent domain owners halted maintenance. Likewise, residents, exasperated by
IPAC, would exclaim, “Espero que eles tombem meu predio antes de eu tombar
morto,” or “I hope they patrimonialize [tombar] my building before I fall down
296
[tombar] dead.” And people often argued that their identities, or inner essences,
constituted properties of the nation and were thus tombado.
This rendering static crystallizes possessive logics critical to the construal of
difference as economic resource. For residents who faced ethnography and then,
via indemnification, the placing of a price on habits, to be patrimonialized is to be in
a sense dead or immobile. But this is also a state of preservation and evidence of the
value of one’s being. Hence tombamento is a desirable entombing that empowers
even as it exploits: Indio, weakened by AIDS and unable to walk, sat in a car seat
and recuperated himself by arguing that he was a bit of patrimony that, despite its
frozen state, had value. Residents interpreted patrimonialization as a purification
based on a gathering of essences. But they resignified IPAC’s designation of the
neighborhood’s population as in need of recuperation, or exceptional, by arguing
that subjection to such pedagogies was simply the state’s method of recognizing
their intrinsic specialness.
A language of recuperation around cultural essence is apparent in newspapers,
speeches, government public relations literature, and IPAC planning. Yet as illus-
trated by Indio’s strategies in impressing his relatives, claims about reconfiguring
formerly stigmatized or no longer useful origins—ruins, if you will—are polyva-
lent. The downtown to which people fled to reinvent themselves has now been set
off as exceptional through purification, rather than denigration. In an example of
this process’s diffusion, I overheard Indio say about me as I walked toward Topa’s
mother’s house, “Eh, and that guy’s from antiquity [antiguidade] too. I’ve known
him since I was a [street] kid.”20
As part of UNESCO’s late-20th-century “Living Human Treasures” program
which seeks to valorize producers of cultural knowledge, and which gave rise in
2003 to the augmentation of existing natural and cultural patrimony by a new cate-
gory of “intangible” heritage, people may be construed as possessions of humankind
(Collins forthcoming). Overseen by UNESCO, which separates out natural, cul-
tural, and intangible registers, each with distinct archival registries and preservation
protocols, heritage thus links places, phenomena, and life forms through property
regimes (Ferry 2002, 2005). It establishes a transnational framework that mediates
metadiscursively different scales and sites within, and for, the invention of tradition
(Bissell 2005; Briggs 1996; James 2006). Indio’s statement suggests he compre-
hends the power of this spiraling technology. He thus points to the redemptive
power of heritage, a technique employed by nation-states and transnational orga-
nizations to lift objects out of impoverished contexts and burnish them so that all
members of society may make out some shared, if factitious, basis for belonging.
297
And what makes heritage special, is, tautologically speaking, its exceptionality (Hill
2007).
But the pricing of moral aptitudes and uses of space does more than create
a fetishized essence within people. Instead, indemnifications link people into a
community not simply of consumers, or neighbors, but networks tied together in
an “avalanche of numbers,” or a “moral science” of statistics in which “probabilities
represent our ignorance rather than any objective reality” (Hacking 1991:190).
Without an ability to calculate a mean there can be no deviants or deviance.
Hence the invention of probability illustrates that the exception can arise only
within regimes of calculability, and might best be approached in relation to such
assemblages rather than more constricted definitions of context. These need not
be explicitly numerical, but they are necessarily normative. Like markets, they
are explicitly related to specific times and places. In other words, deviance from
the rule is not a function of objective reality, of calculations that describe that
reality, but rather of a specific viewpoint generalized across space and time that in
turn determines its own characteristics of deviance, or exception. But I am in no
way suggesting that Pelourinho residents reside in a zone of indistinction “included
solely through exclusion” (Agamben 1998:11).
In the 1990s, residents became increasingly aware of the ebb and flow of
exception and exceptionalism. This was due to more than their familiarity with
social scientists and, until the 1980s, elite men who maintained second families
downtown and thus sometimes fathered (but rarely recognized) people whose
stories contribute to this account. It arose also from people’s transit between a
relatively secure downtown where “money flows” (corre dinheiro) and the poverty
of Salvador’s periphery. Residents who fancied themselves malandros, or rogues,
skilled with fists, knives, and capoeira kicks in downtown confrontations found
themselves in new neighborhoods facing shotguns and neighbors who broke down
their front doors with crowbars. Unlike in the former Maciel, they could not
turn for help to roving police patrols. Pickpockets who argued that they could
filch a billfold and then return it empty to a drunk’s pockets complained about
having to live with gente bruta or rude (brutal, rude people) on the city’s outskirts.
Such accounts indicate how a population configured by IPAC as a bit of Brazil’s
patrimony, and hence somewhat sacrosanct even as it faced the symbolic death of
removal from the city center, represented life on the periphery as indeed much
starker, if not barer. They understood just how special, and easy, life in the
supposedly denigrated downtown really was, at least in comparison to the rural
districts and slums many had fled, alone, as “street children.” And many struggled,
298
even as few succeeded, to convince IPAC to allow them to remain in or reenter

the city center following the indemnification process of the 1990s.
As it became apparent how Salvador’s spatial apartheid hurt their life chances,
it also became clearer to residents how much life was forged around continually
shifting, nuanced gradations of privilege and privation (Telles 1992). Like the
Pelourinho itself, claims about tombamento, the status of former denizens of the
red light zone, and arguments about knowledge and intercourse with powerful
politicians became not spaces for carving out new subjectivities in a context of
poverty but rather relations within much larger webs of favor and exclusion that
constitute Brazil (Holston 2008). There was, then, no zone of exception. It became
clear that Pelourinho residents were not exceptional people who, either degraded
or exalted, stood askance, outside of the polity like sacred signs. Rather, all moved
both inside and outside in a continual struggle to survive. The exception could never
suspend or authorize the norm because of the fact that the exception was not a
space, but a relation woven in and out of the social fabric. Hence there was no norm
counterposed in a fixed manner to the emergency or figure in need of tutelage.
Rather, much like the baroque details of people’s former abodes celebrated by
some as untouchable signs of Brazilian antiquity and employed by others as toilets
and kitchens, sacrosanct status was but an effect of one’s positioning, or a question
of multiple, shifting plays of shadow and illumination rather than reified zones of
exclusion and inclusion (Jay 1994). In this sense people’s experiences mimicked
the historical development of the Brazilian nation that did so much to temper their
outlooks. And I turn now to this historical engagement with entwined exception
and redemption.
AT THE MARGINS OF HISTORY

After I left the gaggle surrounding Indio, I sat with Topa’s mother and
mourned. Gaginho dropped a paperback into my lap, saying, “When Topa died she
was reading this. She wanted you to have it.” Perhaps he was being kind, inventing
a story and a gift. But at the time, touched, I did not entertain this possibility. I was
curious: “What was this gift I could never return?” And, moving beyond the logic
of the gift, “What was Topa reading?”
The book, a minor work by Euclides da Cunha, one of Brazil’s most impor-
tant nationalist thinkers, astounded in part because it was unknown to me. In a
retrospection made possible by Topa’s gift, I have realized that da Cunha’s rep-
resentation of the late-19th- and early-20th-century making of a Brazilian people
configured in tension with landscapes painted as brutal and degenerative has done
299
much to inflect my own understanding of the Pelourinho’s restoration: Sanitation

and redemption mean something quite special in a Brazil where urban renewal
purifies a Pelourinho from which the nation emerges symbolically today (Santos
1998). But here I get ahead of myself.
When I received the gift, its title, À Margem da História (At the Margin of
History), struck me as significant. “At the margin of history,” I thought, “Topa and
the margins, or edges, of history. Topa, a woman called a marginal throughout her
life and then exiled from the Pelourinho.” I wanted, in that ostensibly inclusionary
move so much a part of modernist anthropology, to prove that Topa was more
than marginal, and thus make her part of universal history. But as I thought about
the contradictions at the heart of the recuperative operations I became dispirited.
I cradled À Margem da História and remained silent as this token, sent by a friend
now in her grave, lay weightily on my rainsoaked shorts that had begun to dry in
the midday heat.
The book’s objectness faded as conversation resumed. I struggled to make
sense of this addition to my knowledge. Topa, who her neighbors used to tell me
had once been renowned as a beautiful prostitute and then become adept at suadeiro,
or the robbing of colleagues’ clients via hidden doors or duplicate keys, had come
to survive through scams and donations from AIDS prevention organizations. She
frequently searched the city center’s trash at night. She shared with me castoff
books and articles, including printouts of indemnification data she cajoled from
street vendors who employed them to wrap their products. Such uses of writings
demonstrate the particularity of my language ideologies and desire to know À
Margem da História by interpreting its contents rather than by packaging peanuts.
But Topa and I had discussed and read together many books. And Gaginho had just
made a point of telling me Topa was reading da Cunha when she passed away.
Here was a text by the engineer and newspaper reporter who, in 1902,
published Os Sertões. Translated as Rebellion in the Backlands, Os Sertões describes da
Cunha’s travels to hinterlands with troops sent to quell a rebellion by former slaves
and peasants in the Bahian village of Canudos, a space inscribed in the nation’s
consciousness as a sign of barbarity as well as resistance ever since. The positivist
ethnography of a community of sertanejos, or backlanders, slaughtered by an army
in which the author was embedded stands as one of the clearest expressions of
the 19th-century dialectic of “civilization and barbarism.” This civilization and bar-
barism is usually understood as an attempt to describe relations between cities and
rural regions depicted as savage spaces antithetical to European civilization. Fears
of oscillation between the two, or of a degeneracy understood as part of a Latin
300
American nature, are usually approached as stimulating in response Lamarckian

theories of racial redemption like Brazilian racial democracy.21 In this understand-
ing, both cosmopolitan denunciations of ostensible infection by nonwhite peoples
and degenerative landscapes spurred, by the 1920s, a countermovement in which
Brazil’s deviance from European norms was instead celebrated by Brazil’s nation-
alist thinkers as a just and cleansing vision of national progress (Schwarcz 1994;
Skidmore 1974).
Da Cunha’s À Margem da História, like Rebellion in the Backlands, examines an
ostensibly barbarous corner of the nation, in this case the Amazonian borderlands.
And, again like its antecedent, the description is ambivalent and strategic: Da
Cunha worries about Peru’s nomadic, “wastrel adventurers . . . opening up with
rifle balls and machete strokes new paths . . . where they would leave behind . . .
in the [form of] fallen-in buildings or the pitiful figure of the sacrificed Indian, the
only fruits of their . . . role as builders of ruins” (2006:55, emphasis added). But then
he celebrates Brazil’s Amazonian territories’ colonization by sertanejos, the same
people whose supposed backwardness and slaughter fascinates him in Rebellion in
the Backlands. And even as he laments the destruction of indigenous lifeways, da
Cunha draws on models gleaned from the Union Pacific, from comparisons of the
Punjab to the Amazon, and from the British projects in India he took as indicative
of state-of-the-art engineering. However, in working to authorize Brazilian control
by importing ideas from European imperial ventures, he celebrates the sertanejos’
“practical knowledge” (da Cunha 2006:82), rather than Europeans’ calculations.
But again, these sertanejos are the putative barbarians who captured his fancy as
they were wiped out by the troops with whom he traveled to Bahia in the 1890s.
Da Cunha’s account of Amazonian settlement, rather than the fanaticism he at-
tributed to sertanejos, reveals an ambivalently postcolonial Brazil whose emergence
runs contrary to the imaginings of community in its Spanish-speaking neighbors.
Brazil spent 1808 to 1888 as an American regency and empire: In a maneuver
catalyzed by Napoleon’s 1807 invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, the British Navy
transported Portugal’s Royal Court to Brazil. There Emperor Dom João VI over-
saw, albeit fitfully, possessions stretching from the Amazon to Angola and on to
Macao and India until his return to Lisbon in 1822. Thus Rio de Janeiro served as a
metropole, and an independent monarchy, at a moment when British troops sacked
Washington and Latin America’s creole republics waged wars of independence.
And by the time João’s son, Dom Pedro I, took over his father’s American throne
in 1831, Brazil had surpassed its degenerately metropolitan overseer Portugal in
terms of geopolitical and cultural importance.22
301
Nonetheless, even as João’s grandson, Pedro II, would take power in 1841 as
an emperor born and raised in Rio, the Brazilian empire does not enter and leave
its exceptional status through a story of monarchical succession. Nor do I lead my
reader into Luso-American history to prove that Brazil is an imperialist nation. It
is true that the tropical monarchy threatened its neighbors and appropriated large
swathes of territory. And the extent to which histories of internal dissent, interclass
and interracial struggle and love, anti-Portuguese sentiment, and eventual national
consolidation around racial ideologies silences accounts of this expansionism is
astounding. Yet an attempt to forge a perspective for contesting imperial mufflings,
and this endeavor’s relationship to Topa’s life and cultural heritage, is what most
interests me here.
I began this article with observations about exceptions like patrimonialized
objects, treating these as nodes that make aspects of the everyday special while re-
flecting a society’s techniques for narrating social bonds into existence. At the same
time these heritage-based techniques are potentially discriminatory ways of manag-
ing the overlaps between different aspects of political life. I then moved to show how
the restorative technique of heritage is reworked by its subjects. At each nexus de-
scribed, then, I have struggled to show how that which is exceptional is not outside
society, but rather a way of constructing shifting forms of inclusion and exclusion
selectively available to differentially situated actors. The argument revolves around
civilization and barbarism as a trope reanimated, reimplanted, and at times denied in
varying spheres of social life at distinct points in the construction of the Brazilian na-
tion (Caldeira and Hoslton 2005; Holston 1989). And this civilization and barbarism
was imperfectly resolved within Brazilian history through an array of purificatory
emphases on racial hybridity brought together under the umbrella of so-called
“racial democracy.”23
Meanwhile, today, at a moment when racial democracy is under sustained
attack and hence offers an increasingly weak way of including, and excluding,
citizens (Guimarães 2002; Telles 2003), cultural heritage has come to the fore.
Cultural heritage as exception, however, covers up its real links to the sustaining
paradoxes of Brazilian life. And for this reason the exchange between Topa, a
woman who lived much of her adult life in the midst of sustained state and
NGO-based attempts to transform her everyday into patrimony and to sanitize
her in the process, presents a powerful way to reconstitute the history of the
Pelourinho as well as to indicate how this history can help people understand empire
today.
302
DELINEATING SELF, OTHER, AND BAHIANNESS ON THE HILL OF

MERCY
The Ladeira da Misericórdia (Hillside of Mercy, herein “Misericórdia”), where
I came to know Topa, Gaginho, Indio, and Rita, connects Salvador’s waterfront
to the Pelourinho. In keeping with its location behind the Hospital of the Santa
Casa da Misericórdia (Holy House of Mercy), the Americas’ oldest philanthropy,
the Misericórdia appears notably in 18th-century concerns with public health.24 A
center of houses of prostitution by the 1930s, the street plays a prominent role
in 20th-century landscape painting, newspaper reports, and bohemian histories.
For example, Godofredo Filho, the director of the Bahian office of Brazil’s federal
heritage bureaucracy (IPHAN) for much of the postwar period, published “Ladeira
da Misericórdia” in 1948. According to Filho, the Misericórdia is,
the hill without an origin
or in its very origins, it is without an end . . .
the hill of Bahia . . .
That in the greatest irony
Claims that it arises from mercy . . .
the hill of negressess,
Of syphilitic mulattas,
Of soldiers and drunks
The street of miserable whores . . .
It is I who kisses your stones
I, who, in an agentive lamentation
Find myself thickening, becoming densely real, through your mystery;
Who lashes myself to those, your lips . . .
And who translates it in the light of the pre-dawn
Of impossible redemption
Yet Filho’s memories of carousing and bohemian desires to know Others and selves
had been replaced by IPAC ethnographic research by the time I visited Dona Niza
and Seu Jorge in August of 1998. This couple had invaded a house that readers
of Godofredo Filho’s poetry may recognize as a midcentury brothel. And they
were therefore concerned with access to indemnifications paid in exchange for
Pelourinho buildings.
As Niza gossiped about indemnifications with Topa, a microbus, tires spinning,
caused residents to shout about “the Ministry of Health doctors.” The van, from the
NGO known as the Centro dos Estudos e Terapia do Abuso de Drogas ([CETAD]
303
Center for Studies and Therapy of Drug Abuse), stopped at the Coaty Nightclub,
a building restored in the 1980s and invaded by squatters in the 1990s.25 The
CETAD group, composed of medical doctors and community outreach workers,
has long worked in Salvador’s Historical Center and, especially, on the stigmatized
Misericórdia, which, although it no longer functioned as a location for widescale
prostitution, was home to many prostitutes and an open drug trade.
Personnel handed out folders, pads, pens, and AIDS education literature
designed to encourage participation in a theatrical exercise. They even listed Topa,
a resident of the Coaty, as an event organizer and handed out a sheet entitled,
“Awareness: Preventive Information about STDs/AIDS, Drug Abuse, and Quality
of Life.”26 Asked to define “health” and to draw a body, we scribbled while listening
to lectures about taking responsibility for our bodies.
As residents sketched while mumbling that it was strange that the bourgeoisie
should speak about bodies, Topa drifted in and out of the room. She told me later
she was upset that her space had been penetrated by people who judged her habits,
and hence pessoa (person). Agitated, she pulled out a paper, wrote something, and
walked over to me to drop the sheet in my lap. It read, “For those who know, 2 +
2 = 4.” Farther down she had written, alongside the number four, “I am José. No,
I am nena, neno,” as she allowed her pen to trail off in a squiggly line.27
Soon a nurse from the Pelourinho’s health center asked residents to act out
“private” activities like bathing, cooking, and washing dishes. My notes, taken on
CETAD paper, indicate that she emphasized that “Each person is the owner of
her body” and “You have value.”28 In response to a question about parasites, the
nurse encouraged proper disposal of feces and toilet paper because “uncivilized”
habits might infect water supplies.29 Topa huffed and puffed as friends silenced
her, embarrassed by their “problematic” neighbor (“Pare de ser pobremática [sic] e
deixe de bulir!”) who frightened “Ministry of Health” doctors.30
As the nurse finished, Topa remarked, “Doutora . . . I have just one doubt that
needs to be cleared up about this issue of feces. Doctor, you say that we should
not throw our shit-laden—sorry, I mean soiled—paper on the ground. This is an
important issue. I just want to understand it a little better.”
The nurse responded, “Yes, I’m glad you’re asking about this. I think we really
need to talk about hygiene.”
Topa went on, “So as I understand it. Well, let me ask it this way. If I am
walking on a Saturday afternoon, out looking for useful items in the trash in your
neighborhood . . . and I need to defecate, I should look for a bathroom. There’s no
way I should crap—I mean defecate—in the street. Right?”
304
FIGURE 3. Topa on the Ladeira da Misericórdia, November 1998, wearing a touristic shirt
depicting Afro-Bahian figures appropriated by the Bahian state in its fomenting of Pelourinho
culture. Photograph by John Collins.
“Right!” answered the nurse.

“Well, OK, so let’s say that I walk up to your house on a Sunday and knock
on the door because I really need to defecate. Or rather, if I am in danger of soiling
my pants [pause] No! What I really mean is, what I’m really going to do is to
make poop. If I am going to make [pause] No! Not poop! If I am going to shit all
over myself and the street, and instead I walk up to the door and knock, and you
answer the door [pause] No, sorry, not you, but your maid, answers the door.” (See
Figure 3.)
305
“Eh, eh, eh, eh,” sputtered the nurse as Topa continued, “And I say ‘Excuse
me, I need to use your bathroom so that I don’t shit all over the sidewalk and soil
the street and endanger public health,’ what do you think your maid is going to tell
me? Is she going to let me in to use your bathroom that she’s been scrubbing all
morning? Or when she calls back and you answer, ‘Who is it?’ Are you going to tell
her to let me into your house to use your clean toilet so I don’t get shit and toilet
paper on the sidewalk? What if I should need to defecate in your neighborhood,
madame?!?”
The educator stood speechless until a social worker asked, “Well, what would
you do in that case, Topa?”
Topa hissed, “Don’t butt in! I’m doing the asking!”31
The nurse, a kind professional I came to know later through my son’s checkups
at the Pelourinho health post, responded, “Ah ah ah ah ah, well, I would hope that
anyone who answered the door in my house would let you in.”
“But would you tell your maid to let me in?” insisted Topa.
“This is truly a difficult question,” responded the nurse, honestly. A long
silence settled over CETAD and the people among the most prone to new HIV
infection of Salvador’s poor. Friends hushed Topa as Gaginho pulled her from the
room. She began crying, refusing to rejoin the end of the lesson. At that moment,
another woman announced, “I just want to know when the doctors are going to
come see us. I’ve had enough with this education stuff. When are the doctors
coming?” At this, the CETAD team announced that the meeting and street theater
were over. Promising to stop by again next week, they returned home via “the
hill without an origin / or [that] in its very origins . . . is without an end” (Filho
1987:287).
A MARGINAL AT THE EPICENTER

There is much to say about acting up in the midst of a public health drama
designed to convince Topa she “has value” at a time when IPAC construed her
habits as patrimony. On one level, it permits the anthropologist to present himself
as occupying an “outside” more real than the circuits of knowledge production
activated by CETAD or IPAC. But if such a position were possible it would configure
Topa and her neighbors as authentic exemplars of a popular consciousness, a claim
I struggle imperfectly to contest. Nevertheless, as should be apparent, I enjoyed,
and find inspiration in, Topa’s creativity. But backtalk did not prevent her from
losing her home or from serving as fodder for IPAC and accounts such as the one
306
my reader digests here. This is a contradiction I cannot resolve or square at this

point.
Topa underscores the importance, and the inequalities and contradictions,
of the intersubjective space between the two of us and between institutions like
CETAD and IPAC and the Pelourinho’s population. CETAD of the 1990s seems to
have taken on something of the role of the IPAC of 1970s. Even as it did not involve
itself in heritage, it offered a holistic care as its doctors ministered to the sick
and outreach workers passed out condoms. IPAC helped residents obtain medical
care in the 1970s. But almost 30 years later IPAC sought to configure people as
problems. In fact, when I first visited IPAC offices as a new researcher in 1994, the
director of public relations immediately offered a story from the Magalhães family’s
newspaper, Correio da Bahia, that discussed AIDS infection among transvestites in
the Pelourinho (see Kulick 1998). He told me,
Look how the press treats these people. For the press, the people of the
Pelourinho are a problem. They are marginals, a scourge, diseased. But here
at IPAC we understand the social nature of these problems and we work to
find them homes, to valorize them, and to get them into treatment centers.
Regardless, or perhaps as a result, of these words, IPAC forced a number of HIV+
people out of the Pelourinho around the time of my visit. But in spite of IPAC’s
attempts to employ a language of care to paint residents as a diseased scourge to
be removed from the city center, it is not obvious that the contact zone between
CETAD and IPAC is expressive of, or directed at, anything resembling empire. Yet
issues of obvious resemblance, or of how connections come to seem obvious but
unavailable in other contexts, are precisely what I have been trying to connect to the
segmentations of knowledge effected by empire around exceptions and sentiments.
And they are why, in addition to its brilliance, I focus on one interaction between
a subject population and the institutions that claim to represent and mold that
group.
In speaking to CETAD, Topa mimics adroitly hygienists associated with patri-
monialization, drawing professionals out of their pedagogical roles and transforming
them into actors within, and hence of, their own educational theater. This rupture
of the naturalized position of actor and social scientific pedagogue is significant in
itself, and one that Topa performed on me on multiple occasions (Collins forth-
coming). Topa then draws in her teachers by voicing, “just one doubt that needs to
be cleared up about this issue of feces” before moving through a glossary of slang
for excrement. She does so while narrating her approach to the nurse’s home.
307
Here Topa, who once worked as a servant, raises the possibility of the wrong type
of working-class woman’s entrance into the bourgeois home, precisely the scene
of the narrative of national purification/hybridity crystallized by Freyre. A maid
who guards this space greets the interloper and checks whether or not to admit
the woman from the Pelourinho. Yet Topa, a former prostitute and hence the
doorkeeper’s immoral doppelganger, paralyzes the patroa (nurse) by performing
an imagined interaction on the threshold of house and street. And this solicitation of
a toilet allows Topa to interpellate the hygienist who arrived on the Misericórdia so
as to educate, or from the perspective of an IPAC that would benefit from CETAD
activities, to render palatable to the public that would soon flock to the historical
center, some of Salvador’s most marginalized and diseased quasicitizens.
From residents’ perspective, CETAD and IPAC are both state institutions.
Topa’s “gutsy insurrection” may thus be read as an analysis of her state’s appro-
priation of her quotidian through surveillance of hygiene, sexuality, and domestic
habits. The inversions permit Topa to situate her own objectification within a
history of IPAC cleansing. More than a Rabelasian overturning of official cul-
ture or even an anthropological fetishization of abjection, Topa’s challenge re-
calls Begoña Aretxaga’s description of political prisoners’ “dirty protest.” These
IRA partisans’ complaints—forged around feces, urine, and menstrual blood—
reconstituted colonial representations of Irish filth “as [instead] a materialization
of the buried ‘shit’ of British colonization, a de-metaphorization of the ‘savage,
dirty Irish’” (Aretxaga 1995:35; see also Feldman 1991). In something akin to
Topa’s upending of IPAC constructions of belonging through the materialization of
racial democracy around her own habits, Irish prisoners’ manifestations of excreta
made public relations to the state, colonial history, and contemporary society. Yet
Topa never manipulates feces in the face of surveillance. She employs witty figures
of speech to uncover how her role in the production of origins is hidden. What
is key here is not simply the instantiation of biopolitics, or Topa’s rejection of
the objectifications of exceptionality, but how Topa makes visible the normaliza-
tions and fragmentations of critical-perceptual landscapes that pave the way for
“accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey 2005).
IPAC relies, as do historical centers in general, on monumentalized “signs
of history” that “instantiate general patterns of meaningful order” (Parmentier
1987:308) typical of nationalism’s widening of indexical relations into iconicity.
These signs call up their objects arbitrarily, in a Saussurean sense, in manners that
tend toward the establishment of lawlike generality on the basis of the fixing of their
material states (Daniel 1996). For example, when, in interactions with a post-1990
308
IPAC, a resident answers a questionnaire designed to fix her as a problem to be

resolved, she may become a manipulable datum whose form is constituted within
the play of the questionnaire and the archive. As such, she is a sign of something
else, standing in for origins or for a now absent population. Such signs of history, or
symbols which array that which is said to have happened in a manner amenable to
detached comparison, arise in abstraction. This is one reason that heritage has been
described as a secular sacred set off from the everyday. And it is also an example of
a linking of sign vehicle and referent, or Pelourinho practices and the degeneracy
IPAC employs them to represent, on the basis of arbitrary association rather than
the actual relationship between, for example, Topa and the health professionals
who would represent her.
What I describe as arbitrary in light of sign vehicles and referents, or Topa
and meanings imposed upon her by sanitary surveillance, may be conceptualized in
relation to James Holston’s description of the interplay of legality and illegality in
Brazil. Rather than arguing that illegality constitutes a kernel outside the law, and
that this differend produces law as law, Holston alleges that “elites have used law
brilliantly . . . to sustain conflicts and illegalities in their favor, force disputes into
extralegal resolution where other forms of power can triumph . . . and deny most
Brazilians access to basic . . . resources” (2008:19). Here law, an idiom that both
mirrors social processes and alters or orders that which it reflects, and illegality,
a practice about which the same may be said, seem to step back and forth, in a
complex imbrication. Rather than two spheres in which the excluded legitimates
the sovereign, we see the both standing in for one another. Thus signs of history
may, under certain circumstances, become deployed in social action in such a way
that they stand mimetically within or closer to that action. As such they evince
a “token-level contiguity with ongoing social processes” that they constitute and
become signs in history (Parmentier 1987:308).
There is an enormous difference between standing in monumentalized relation
to history like a bit of patrimony that calls up an event arbitrarily and standing,
iteratively deployed, within history. And this difference lies at the center of my
attempt to make out empire’s workings in light of Topa’s interventions.32 Put
simply, a sign of history represents what happened. But a sign in history makes
clear how that which is said to have happened represents. Topa, as Parmentier
has argued for “signs in history,” works to illustrate her own role in producing
the narratives that in turn exclude her. Rather than demonstrating the relationship
between a context and an event, she shows how relations are hypostasized as events
or delineated spaces. And if these segmentations produced by empires engaged in
309
the production of mini events called crises, emergencies, and exceptions are raised
to the level of consciousness, there exists the possibility that all involved, whether
CETAD pedagogue, anthropological analyst, or ethnographic subject, may be able
to make out not simply what is arbitrarily available but, rather, a spectrum of social
processes in which all participate. But how?
When Topa inhabited IPAC and CETAD discourses in the Coaty she revealed
performatively how these institutions entify people and events as both problems
and monuments that produce Brazilian identity and history. By bringing to the fore-
front the hubris of middle-class people who would police her own domestic space,
Topa makes clear the distinct bases of her own and the researchers’ and educators’
participation in a project configured as pedagogical and restorative. The issue is no
longer one of making out what Bahian origins really are. Rather, Topa forced all
present, as the Pelourinho nurse and I discussed in subsequent meetings, to recog-
nize how erudite knowledge and popular practice become entwined in producing
a particular version of Bahian origins around the Pelourinho as exception. Topa,
then, helps make apparent the sedimentation of IPAC representations that make up
the ground from which she must speak and from which her state configures her as
a source of information about Bahian society. This ability to demonstrate history’s
constructedness in real time and alongside its production of materiality around
human figures may appear a small contribution by one woman, especially when
viewed in light of the weight of some undifferentiated, or even quite specifically
defined, entity called empire. But it is an important aspect of understanding, and
perhaps even altering, empire in all its contradictions and ambitions.
CONCLUSION
Topa did much in life. How capably she could open new perspectives became
apparent more than a year after her insurrection. As the nurse examined my son
during a routine checkup, we talked of the Misericórdia and she exclaimed, “These
people are quite difficult. They’re really needy. One never knows what they put
in their bodies and how those substances are going to make them react.” I had, for
an instant, felt a kinship with the nurse because her facial expression suggested a
recognition of the pain Topa felt on the day CETAD sought to teach her hygiene and
value. However, this attachment dissipated as the nurse focused on “these people”
and their neediness. Perhaps Topa was needy. But middle-class anthropologists and
public health professionals who make a career traveling to the Misericórdia are, in
their own, special ways, needy.
310
The nurse’s explanation of Topa’s practices through an argument about un-

controlled emotions contrasts with Topa’s actions. On that day in the Coaty, Topa
did not claim in a categorical sense a difference from the nurse who interpellated
her. Rather, she illustrated, through rich metaphor, how she imagined that the
nurse would, and has, construed her in the past, present, and future as an ex-
ception in light of public morality, or the sentiment at the core of Brazil’s racial
democracy and the Pelourinho restoration. She did so by inviting the nurse to
answer clearly how she would receive, or wall herself off from Topa, in her own
home. In other words, she asked the nurse to reflect on how her configuring of
Topa would permit her in turn to appear civilized, or not, in contradistinction to
the figure she worked to perfect on the Misericórdia. On the terrain of the elite
home and its servants, precisely that from which racial democracy was materialized
and then generalized, Topa, a denizen of the red light district, thus began a history
of her ties to other citizens. And impossible ties to other citizens are what I have
argued racial democracy and cultural heritage function, at different moments, to
resolve or cover up. In other words, Topa’s challenge to CETAD is something of a
history. It is not a quibble over facts and interpretations, but rather a working out
of a positioning in the world, or a “deictics of historical remembering,” which, be-
yond “any referential representation of the past . . . legitimates action in the present
through the alignment of remembering agents within a spatiotemporal field” (Orta
2002:488; see also Daniel 1996).
Deictics, or indexical means, of historical recollection through the alignment
of remembering agents in a given field—a basic feature of cultural heritage cen-
ters’ experiential “histories of the present” (Foucault 1972, 1979; see also Handler
and Gable 1997)—are a significant area of dispute, co-optation, and even new
forms of commodification in Latin America today. The Pelourinho is one such
landscape in which commemorations constructed around patrimony produce links
to the past with little, if any, referential content (see also Price 2006). In fact,
IPAC’s expulsion of residents unable to claim an Afro-Bahianness amenable to
Magalhães’s coalition’s representations underscores how state-sanctioned, con-
stricted versions of cultural inclusion may work as dissimulatory signs of broader
attention to democratic rights and political economic justice.33 In a Bahia in which
the Pelourinho supposedly represents a new type of inclusiveness and attention to
the needs of a citizenry inspired by UNESCO’s humanistic guidelines, citizenship
has become configured as an indexical, presentist relationship to specific forms
of belonging to ethnic and racial groups associated in Latin American national-
ism with prior states. Here, under what Charles Hale (2002) dubs “neoliberal
311
multiculturalism,” the Bahian state arbitrates “correct” markers of ethnic identity

and national history that qualify bearers for political rights while residents who
exhibit incorrect behaviors face exile on Salvador’s periphery. And this neolib-
eral multiculturalism “thrives on the recognition of cultural difference, and by
extension, on high-stakes distinctions between those cultural rights that deserve
recognition and those that do not” (Hale 2006:35). This describes also a situation
in Bahia more generally where peasants who argue that they are part of quilombola
(maroon) communities gain land titles whereas neighboring communities do not
(French 2006). Yet, as should be apparent from the pages above, such exceptions are
not limited to neoliberalism: similar gradations of “sovereignty and sliding scales of
differentiation are hallmark features of imperial formations” (Stoler and McGrana-
han 2007:9).
I have sought to explore such sliding scales, and their manipulation, by think-
ing empire alongside Topa, Indio, and their families and neighbors in and around
a Misericórdia of the 1990s tamed, in a sense, through hygienic projects that both
continue a Brazilian engagement with civilization and barbarism and prepare the
Pelourinho’s landscape as a site for the production of value around cultural differ-
ence. This helps “make the human and material face and frailties of imperialism
more visible, and . . . make challenges to it more likely” (Lutz 2006:594) while re-
vealing how scaled differentiations “framed as unique cases . . . are ‘exceptions’ in a
context in which such exceptions are a norm” (Stoler 2006b:139). And the over-
laps between the apparent ubiquitousness of exceptions, an interest in approaches
to empire that would go beyond macro perspectives, and the blurred boundaries
between everyday life and cultural products essential to Bahia’s political economy
suggest in turn the importance of an ethnographic engagement with empire today.
Empire seems to have leapt to the fore in relation to colonial studies, to
changes in United States policy, and even the publication of works like Hardt and
Negri’s Empire, rather than through specific ethnographies (cf. Lutz 2002; Silver
2007). Ethnographers, even those working in Latin America, where an insistence
on United States imperialism has long been put forth vocally (Coronil 2007), have
until quite recently subsumed discussions of empire within talk of neoliberalism.
This is an especially glaring omission for those of us who work in cultural heritage,
a technology that links sites and peoples across the globe by means of a transnational
grammar whose content UNESCO nonetheless leaves to national authorities. Such
a hybrid grid, hailed and filled in at multiple scales, points to issues of governance
that, while coeval with and supportive of capitalist extraction, are not exactly the
same as capitalism (Coronil 2007; Grandin 2007; Harvey 2005; Steinmetz 2003).
312
In this way heritage points not simply to the global influence of UNESCO, and
the development projects that piggyback on its engagements with culture, but to
the extent to which debates over the entanglements of politics and economy are
also, like categories of heritage itself, questions about the details of boundaries
constructed by humans. In this light discussions of imperialism that fail to take
into account issues like Freyre’s concerns with the smells of kitchens and domestic
relations between masters and slaves fail also to specify how value is produced and
hegemony instantiated in places like the Pelourinho. But my point is not to argue
that the domestic is politicized, something long a staple of social scientific analysis.
It is instead to stress the importance of following political contexts and specifying
analytical trajectories in response to what it is that people really do, rather than
in relation to that which analysts imagine, or hope, they might do. This is a very
simple and long-standing anthropological point. But it is one that bears repeating
and one that I have sought to update in the pages above.
I have built on Smith’s (2007) and Fassin and Vasquez’s (2005) attempts to
relate emergencies to their social and political contexts. But I have approached
context differently: I have not plotted, as in Saussure’s theorization of parole
in relation to a langue that lies at the heart of Agamben’s arguments about a
constitutive exclusion (2006:39–40), the effect of an emergency in relation to a
context determined by physical or temporal proximity. Instead, following Topa,
I have linked multiple crises or abnormalities and attempts at their amelioration
or resolution. But I have struggled to make out this space of ongoing emergency
through microarguments about people’s embodied practices. Topa looks, from
within her own house invaded by sanitarists, across space and time at multiple
exceptions by means of questions put to a wealthier woman who would teach her
correct behavior. She pushes for an analysis that is so dispersed that it leads the
nurse to explain away Topa’s unruliness in terms of neediness and the influence of
illegal substances. Topa does not respond to the AIDS crisis, or the threat of feces,
as a problem of her own, delimited context on the Misericórdia. Instead, she pushes
into new contexts, including the nurse’s house and blurred gender boundaries, as
she writes a note to me saying “I am Nena, I am Neno.” And I have sought to do
justice to the brilliant openings she provides by following her genealogically, via
an exploration that examines the formation of exceptions as linked solutions to
enduring problems, rather than through a consideration of individual exceptions
and their discrete contexts.
In an imagined dialogue with a now deceased Topa, and drawing on the gift
of a copy of da Cunha’s text that she may or may not have willed me, I have
313
FIGURE 4. Topa kisses her neighbor, JoJo. Photograph by John Collins.
thus extended our shared yet still disparate analyses into the Bahia sertão of the
1890s and the Iberian Peninsula of the first decade of the 19th century. And this
rethinking of context both in terms of people and spaces that supposedly have
nothing to do with empire, and also in terms of a theorization of context that does
not fall into a structure–event dichotomy, recalls Bruno Latour advice that when
anyone speaks of system or structure the researcher’s “first . . . reflex should be to
ask ‘In which building? In which bureau? Through which corridor?’” (2005:183).
Here I emphasize that Topa did not denounce the CETAD nurse. She did not slot
314
her interlocutor into a category of personhood. Nor did she explain that she indeed
knew all about something called “public health.” Rather, she asked the nurse if she
would allow her to cross her home’s threshold if she needed a bathroom. This
is a narrow query. But it is also one that might be followed through a variety of
corridors and across a number of spaces and moments, as Topa demonstrated. And
it is a question that is quite fitting from a woman who knows well that, “For those
who know, 2 + 2 = 4.” Perhaps some day we may all begin to realize how 2 + 2
= 4. But the trick will be to begin to understand on what basis, and to what effect,
we have begun to recognize the truth of such an apparently simple statement. (See
Figure 4.)
ABSTRACT
In this article, I examine systems of care aimed at improving citizens and ruined colonial
buildings in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil’s Pelourinho World Heritage Site. Such UNESCO-
sanctioned trusteeship, or the identification of buildings, bodies, and practices in need
of a tutelage that would recuperate them as signs of a common humanity, maintains
and exacerbates segmentations of knowledge essential to imperial control. I thus work
to reconsider the Pelourinho, and cultural heritage, as imperial formations in light of
UNESCO’s system of producing world heritage through the specification of “exceptional
universal value” in which the exceptional object obfuscates not simply as an emergency,
but through its monumentalization as an ostensibly shared property. This attempt
to gain a clearer understanding of empires’ real effects is catalyzed by a number
of residents of the Pelourinho who, in their subjection to decades of state-directed
surveillance intended to make them into living human ancestors, have come to reject
sentimental attachments to buildings or the purveyors of philanthropy. Yet the ways
they do so are revelatory of new approaches to exceptions: Residents reject victimhood
as a state of being injured and instead weave accounts of the structures that engender,
and continue to reproduce, such violence. I follow in the path of this quite iconoclastic
version of “historical reconstruction” as a way to draw out an ambivalently postcolonial
Brazil whose own claims to exceptionality may be understood, like those put together by
the woman I call Topa, as forced by entwined historical processes, rather than isolated
emergencies or remainders beyond the political. My aim is to show how empires can be
linked across space and time, without relying on empirical mapping of their constitutive
parts and ideological props—recognizing, instead, the specificity of empire’s effects.
Keywords: Brazil, cultural heritage, empire, sovereignty, segmented
knowledges
NOTES
Acknowledgments. Research for this project was made possible by grants from IIE Fulbright, the
Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the
Brazilian PIBIC Program, and PSC-CUNY. This was presented as a paper at the Queens College
315
Faculty Workshop organized by Donald Scott as well as the New School for Social Research’s October,
2006 “Charred Landscapes/Imperial Debris” conference put together by Ann Laura Stoler and David
Bond. I thank these organizers, and in particular Ann Stoler, together with three anonymous reviewers
and Kim and Mike Fortun at Cultural Anthropology, for pushing my arguments as they developed. The
text draws also on discussions in the CUNY Graduate Center’s 2006–07 Center for Place, Culture
and Politics’ seminar on disaster. For this, I am grateful to Neil Smith and Omar Dahbour. Additional
comments by E. Valentine Daniel, Nubia Bento Rodrigues, Hylton White, Kevin Birth, Hugh
Raffles, Jacqueline Brown, Leith Mullings, Mandana Limbert, and Jeff Maskovsky helped me tie my
arguments more complexly to keen insights offered by Topa, Indio, Gaginho, Bebel and their families
and neighbors, especially the Famı́lia Gomes de Jesus. I am indebted also to Dr. Tarcı́sio Matos de
Andrade and the health professionals working with CETAD and the Pelourinho’s São Franciso health
post in the 1990s.
1. Magalhães, who died in July of 2007, is an example of the continuing salience, if not the
accentuation, of certain types of right-wing populism (Power 1998) and political forces based
on patron–client relations during neoliberalism, or what so many commentators portray
erroneously as the subsumption of “traditional” forms of Latin American politics to market
logics. Instead, the Pelourinho case demonstrates how, within “actually existing neoliberalism”
(Brenner and Theodore 2002), states may in fact become even more involved in regulation.
This may be, as is the Bahian case in the 1990s, a shift in attention away from, for example,
industrial production, power and light, and other infrastructure projects and toward new
forms of infrastructure, like the Pelourinho’s restored landscape, directed as culture. I place
Governor in quotation marks because by 1999–2000 Magalhães had already resigned the
governorship he won in 1997 and taken a position in the Brazilian Senate. A wily politician,
Magalhães was both revered and despised in the Pelourinho and throughout Brazil as a strong
patron who controlled the right-wing Party of the Liberal Front. And in part for this reason
he is still called “the Governor” in the Pelourinho today, a neighborhood where his portrait
hung obligatorily in all commercial establishments throughout the 1990s.
2. All translations are by the author. Accounts of statements made during the SIRCHAL
meetings emanate from field notes taken during presentations and working groups.
Copies of SIRCHAL working papers may be found at http://www.archi.fr/SIRCHAL/
seminair/sirchal4/frameRapport.htm, accessed February 4, 2008.
3. Even as Chatterjee offers a creative solution to the issue of the identification of apparently
imperial relations in a world without “classical” 19th-century, northern European empires, his
suggestion that indirect control is new misses the insight that empire has long been “dependent
not on stable populations so much as on highly moveable ones” (Stoler 2006b:137).
4. Anthropologists attentive to exceptions have done much recently to explore politics under
neoliberalism. Charles Hale (2002, 2006) suggests that by means of a “neoliberal multi-
culturalism” Latin American states withdraw from the provision of basic services to their
citizenries by offering instead, on a selective basis in relation to minority subjects’ ability to
articulate resonant claims to difference, rights based on difference itself. João Biehl, working
in Salvador with Pelourinho residents institutionalized in an AIDS hospice has argued that
under neoliberalism the space of politics and the social and the poor are left with little more
than networks of relatively isolated spaces where they might partially transform a “diseased
biology, marginal and excluded, into a selective means of inclusion” (2007:326). And Aiwa
Ong (2006) has performed for neoliberalism something akin to what Chatterjee suggests may
be revelatory of empire: she examines a number of oftentimes contradictory, global, spaces
of exception to argue that neoliberalism depends on the construction of multiple exceptions
as well as its claim that it is exceptional.
5. The IDB was involved because, by means of its “Monumenta” Program, which is intended
to combine an interest in Brazilian historical sites and their human populations within a
development perspective, it has begun to work closely with UNESCO which, in turn,
is moving toward a greater engagement with development projects that configure cul-
ture as an economic resource. Monumenta, as of the end of 2007, had provided funding
to 17 projects throughout Brazil but IPAC, owing mainly to its exclusion of residents,
316
has not yet qualified for the program. For an IDB outline in English of Monumenta see
http://www.iadb.org/exr/doc98/apr/br1200e.pdf, accessed January 14, 2008.
6. For discussions of temporality, appropriations of ruins and heritage sites, and differential
interpretations of history, see especially chapter 3 of Bruner 2005; Castañeda 1996; Handler
and Gable 1997; Limbert in press; and Price 2006.
7. Historian Barbara Weinstein defines this narrative of collective belonging as positing a “harmo-
nious fusion of European, African, and Indian cultures in a single nationality that, despite the
‘principal’ role played by Brazilians of European descent, rejected racial discrimination and
valorized non-European cultural traditions” (2003:238). Although the formulation is often
attributed to Gilberto Freyre following the publication of The Masters and the Slaves, Bahian
sociologist Antônio Sérgio Guimarães argues that it was in fact the French anthropologist,
Roger Bastide, who first coined the term in 1944. Guimarães understands racial democracy
as divided into three main periods. Even as ideas abut miscegenation appear in the first years
following 1888 emancipation, Guimarães tracks the national ideology to 1930, and Getúlio
Vargas’s presidency. This mandate would culminate in the 1937–45 New State (Estado Novo)
dictatorship that consolidated Brazil institutionally and ideologically as a modern nation. For
this reason Guimarães argues that during the period from 1930–64, generally called a period
of “national developmentalist pact,” racial democracy was dominant and accepted by a major-
ity of Brazilians. During the 1964–85 military group, however, society started to polarize in
relation to race. Proponents of the dictatorship sought to hold onto the concept as a nationalist
prop whereas Afro-Brazilians employed a critique of racial democracy as a critique of the
regime. Finally, during redemocratization, which began in 1978 with the military’s “easing”
(abertura) and culminated in the end of martial rule in 1985, racial democracy lost most of its
previous, broad appeal, in part because of a global interest in racial justice, civil right, and
multiculturalism. Today, according to Guimarães, it is in steep decline as an accepted “myth”
(2002). Whether or not this is true, it has been under intense assault over last three decades.
Yet since the end of the 1980s, contestations have taken on a new tenor and analysts have
begun to recognize that racial democracy is not some mask that might be ripped away to reveal
a true substrate of blackness (Collins 2007b; Goldstein 2003; Sheriff 2001). Nonetheless,
this does not mean that a majority of social scientists or citizens believe it should be held on
to, even as some appreciate the formation as an ideal. But what is most apparent in terms
of so-called racial democracy’s influence is how much this claim to redemptive mixture has
done to make Brazil special, notable, and, yes, exceptional in the social sciences and popular
opinion across the 20th century.
8. Salvador is one of the few carefully planned, Lusitanian colonial urban grids in the Americas.
And this status as a planned city is important because Sérgio Buarque de Holanda (1999) has
argued that poor, jumbled Portuguese planning is a mark of its empire’s degeneracy. Hence
Salvador, as a site organized in the gridlike Spanish fashion Buarque de Holanda contrasted
to haphazard Portugeuse planning, enters Freyre’s verse not as a degraded space, but as a
European space that does not quit fit its environment.
9. For a detailed, historical refutation of claims that this seigniorial house, as opposed to public
space, presented domestic servants with an intimate environment see Sandra Lauderdale
Graham (1988).
10. Brazil has long been divided by geographers, policy analysts, and popular opinion between
five major regions. Of these, the northeast, consisting of nine states with a combined area
over three times the size of France, was home to over 30 percent of Bazil’s population but
produced only 13 percent of its GDP at the end of the 20th century. Wages, life expectancy,
formal employment for women, and educational levels are thus substantially lower than in
southern states. In what is perhaps an overstatement and a lack of recognition of capitalism’s
varied but interlaced effects on distinct locales, one political scientist claimed recently that
“The persistence in the region of traditional, clientelistic, paternalistic, and corrupt politics,
in a weak civil society in which many principal political figures resist fundamental reform
and the development of pluralism, confounds the success of the national democratization
process” (Selcher 1998:32). Although I do not find this a particularly in-depth analysis of the
northeast’s political economic role in Brazilian national consolidation, it is exemplary of the
317
sorts of claims about the region’s backwardness that are common, and built upon analyses of
development indicators, in Brazilian and Brazilianist representations.
11. I point out the social scientists’ documentation of the red light zone inhabitants’ lifeways not
as a part about claims about residents, and what they were really like, but, rather, as evidence
as to how ethnographers perceived, and represented, this reality in the 1970s.
12. And in the 1990s, Olodum, and the Pelourinho as backdrop, starred in Paul Simon’s Rhythm
of the Saints album and Michael Jackson’s music video “They Don’t Care about Us.”
13. See “World Heritage Centre—Nomination Process” at http://whc.unesco.org/en/ nomi-
nationprocess, accessed November 25, 2007.
14. UNESCO agreed that the Pelourinho be included as number 309 in UNESCO’s list of World
Heritage Sites on the basis of its criteria IV and VI for inclusion on the World Heritage List.
Under criterion IV, which requires that a site “be an outstanding example of a type . . . of
ensemble . . . which illustrates . . . significant stages in human history” (UNESCO 2005:20; see
also 1972, 2002), Salvador was dubbed “an eminent example of Renaissance urban structuring
adapted to a colonial site” (ICOMOS 1985:2). And under criterion VI, which requires that
sites be “associated with events or living traditions . . . of outstanding universal significance”
(UNESCO 2005:20), Salvador is described in the document inscribing it in the UNESCO
list as “one of the major points of convergence of European, African and American Indian
cultures” (ICOMOS 1985:3).
15. Disasters like Katrina actually provide insurance companies and developers with new op-
portunities for turning a profit. For this reason it is virtually “an axiom among disaster
researchers that postdisaster recovery efforts follow and even exacerbate predisaster trends
and trajectories” (Smith 2007:776),
16. Luiz Alberto Santos, “Por um Brasil com os dois pés no chão,” Congressional Speech, Brasilia,
January 29, 1998.
17. It is here perhaps significant that Freyre (1970) dedicated a book to the ghosts of great colonial
homes in the city of Recife, capital of the neighboring state of Pernambuco and a recent site
of significant state-directed cultural heritage efforts. Nonetheless, I am unsure as to how the
residents and former residents of the downtown neighborhood restored interpreted their
dwellings.
18. CAASAH, or the Casa de Apoio e Assistência aos Portadores do Vı́rus HIV/AIDS (House
for the support and assistance of HIV/AIDS carriers), is the subject of João Biehl’s (2007)
moving ethnography of pharmaceutical governance and people’s ability to cobble together
lives in zones of exception in Brazil today. For histories of AIDS treatment and pastoral
institutions in Salvador, see Biehl 2006a, 2006b, and 2007. See also the institution’s website
at http://www.caasah.com.br/novo/quem_somos.htm, accessed July 21, 2007. CAASAH
is important to understanding the Pelourinho’s gentrification, and my arguments about ex-
ceptionality, in light of Biehl’s argument that it represents one node in a string of “salvational
economies” that increasingly replace civil society at a moment when neoliberal assemblages
increasingly replace or deform a broader “civil society” in Brazil. This does much to explain
why, in the 1990s, despite contentions from within CAASAH that the institution languished
in poverty, it came to attract significant attention from Antônio Carlos Magalhães’s po-
litical machine. In fact, CAASAH’s close relationship to the Bahian state is revealed by
the state of Bahia’s own website which details the Bahian Ministry of Health’s “reform”
of its new headquarters and which solicits volunteers to work with its AIDS patients. See
http://www.bahia.ba.gov.br/voluntarias/reforma.htm, accessed July 21, 2007. Nonethe-
less, note also that Biehl quotes CAASAH’s director as complaining, in 1993, that “TV Bahia
[belonging to conservative Governor Antônio Carlos Magalhães] came to interview me. It
was horrible. They did not let me say anything about the help Mayor Lı́dice da Matta is giving
us. The media is a true mafia” (2007:293).
19. “Sim, pessoal. Aqui estou, tombado na garupa. Estou bonito, não e não? É por isso que o
gringo cuida bem de mim.”
20. “Esse aı́ é da antiguedade Eu conheco ele desde pivete.”
21. As Nancy Stepan outlines (1991), Brazilian racial thought turns on Lamarckian theories of
ongoing mutability rather than Darwinian natural selection. Thus the manipulation of milieu
318
during a subject’s or a population’s lifetime is understood to produce moral and physical

redemption in manners that may seem quite strange in contexts in which more genetype or
genealogical conceptions of racial belonging operate.
22. I write “degenerately metropolitan” because Portugal, since at least the beginning of the 18th
century, had been understood as an incompetent and tradition-bound, and thus backward,
colonial power quite unlike British, French, and Dutch empires.
23. The reader unfamiliar with Brazil may find it difficult to believe that hybridity purifies.
Nonetheless, within racial democracy mixture is configured as leading away from originary
infections and toward a modern, forward-facing and hence cleansed, nationalist “brownness”
unique to Brazil. This is also called “whitening” in its more extreme manifestations. For an
overview, see Skidmore 1974.
24. It was also a place denounced by virtuous citizens who opposed the “dumping of animal
carcasses and performance of libidinous acts at night.” See, for example, the May 23, 1742
petition from the Santa Casa da Misericórdia bureaucrat Francisco de Oliveira Telles to
Salvador’s municipal council requesting that a gate be erected at the upper entrance of the
Misericórdia Hill (Arquivo da Santa Casa da Misericórdia, Book 14, 3rd register, 1742), so
as to attend to citizens’, and the Santa Casa’s, concerns over the “immoral” acts perpetrated
on the Ladeira da Misericórdia.
25. In 1985, Salvador’s municipal government began a restoration program soon after Salvador
entered the UNESCO World Heritage List as entry number 309. The reforms were begun
under Mayor Mario Kertesz, an ally of Magalhães who, after breaking politically with his
mentor found his funding cut off and hence the possibility of even a minor Pelourinho reform
made impossible. The stunning, hillside Misericórdia, had been at the center of this effort and
five buildings were recuperated under the guidance of noted Italian-born and São Paulo–based
modernist architect, Lina Bo Bardi. Her plans, which incorporated rippling concrete effects
into colonial buildings, are apparent in photos of the Coaty that appear here.
26. “Sensibilização: Informações Preventivas Sobre DSTs/AIDS, Abuso de Drogas e Qualidade
de Vida.”
27. The words nena and neno are a feminization and masculinization of the Bahian term for baby,
or nené. I understand her use of these words as referring to her own ambiguous gender identity
as well as her infantilization by the CETAD social workers.
28. “Cada pessoa é dono do seu proprio corpo” and “você tem seu valor.”
29. Feces left on hillsides may indeed infect water supplies. Nonetheless, as Briggs (2004) points
out in relation to Venezuela’s 1992–93 cholera epidemic, most important to protecting
water, and hence populations, are major infrastructural projects and not issues of personal
sanitation which are something of a red herring when directed at the individual level.
30. CETAD was founded in 1985. I am not familiar with its early history, but by the late 1990s it
was codirected by Antonio Nery Alves Filho, a graduate of the Federal University of Bahia’s
medical school who received his psychiatry degree and doctorate in sociology in France, and
Dr. Tarcı́sio Matos de Andrade, a medical doctor and graduate of the Federal University of
Bahia, who Misericórdia residents respected greatly and always called “Dr. Tarcı́sio” In fact,
before I met him on that day we crossed paths on the Misericórdia I had been told multiple
times by people throughout the Pelourinho that he was not only an excellent doctor, but a man
with whom “people can talk easily” (a gente conversa legal). Biehl (2007) reports that in 1996
Andrade carried out a rigorous clinical and ethnographic study of 100 IV drug users and found
that almost 60 percent of both men and women were seropositive. According to the UN Office
on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), CETAD negotiated with military police and in 1995 opened
Bahia’s first needle exchange which functioned in the Pelourinho and a number of working-
class neighborhoods. After 1997, as crack began to replace intravenous injection, CETAD
branched out and began to widen its services. Today it maintains a harm-reduction program,
mobile prevention educational service, a community program in outlying neighborhoods,
and a prison program designed to reduce the spread of AIDS in Salvador’s penitentiary.
In 2002, at which point it had a staff of slightly more than thirty professionals
and provided almost 50,000 occasions of service annually, UNAIDS declared CETAD
a “model program.” CETAD has received funding from a number of institutions and
319
private donors, including the Bahian Ministry of Health, USAID, and a number of “so-
cial marketing” corporations such as DKT International, a Washington, D.C.-based char-
itable organization that associated with UNAIDS and UNICEF that employs market-
driven mechanisms to deliver AIDS-prevention materials, including female condoms, in
11 nations. In fact, as part of a much broader trend, much of USAID activities are
channeled through such corporations today. For information on CETAD personnel, its
non-Brazilian funding, and its activities in Bahia, see http://www.ufba.br/pautaas/10–
12-2002.html, accessed July 25, 2005; http://www.dkt.com.br/html/proj_004.html,
accessed July 25, 2005; http://www.dktinternational.org/accessed July 25, 2005;
and http://www.usaid.gov/pop_health/aids/Countries/lac/brazil.html, accessed July 25,
2005. Also see Burrows 2006 and WHO–UNAIDS 2004.
In addition to its support from international institutions, CETAD is funded by Bahia’s State
Health Department, attached to the Federal University of Bahia and its teaching hospital,
and draws personnel, like the nurse who engaged Topa, from public health posts. In this
respect Topa’s acting out during the CETAD theater is somewhat surprising in light of
the training and dedication of its personnel. Nonetheless, given Bahia’s extraordinary social
inequalities—in 2006 the United Nations identified Salvador as one of the world’s most
economically segregated and unequal regions, indicating that if Salvador were a nation it
would have the world’s second worse Gini coefficient after Namibia. Although such statistics
are just that, statistics, they give some idea of the social gulf between middle-class educators
and residents of the Misericórdia, Topa’s target precisely. And Topa, by speaking of the nurse’s
maid, also make explicit the extent to which such inequalities coexist in Bahia alongside quite
intimate everyday relations.
31. “Não se meta! Estou perguntando!”
32. In other words I am, in a sense, repeating salient aspects of IPAC and CETAD research
techniques as I seek to gain insight into an “Other” world via Topa as a symbol deployed in the
present text. I do not have a solution to this conundrum at this point. But to ignore it would
be to commit even more violence against Top and my memories of her. Furthermore, to
take the position that I cannot learn from and alongside Topa, despite the extent to which the
geopolitics in which all social scientists are involved in different ways does indeed configure
her as a datum for the appreciation of the outsider, would be to shut down one avenue into
the possibility of challenging such an unequal system.
33. Bahia’s population is usually estimated to be approximately 80 percent Afro-descendent
while, in light of Brazil’s specific racial ideologies, the percentage of the national population
that calls itself black is, according to the 2000 federal census, only about 6 percent.
Editor’s Note: Cultural Anthropology has published a range of articles on the politics of
urban spaces. See, for example, Danny Hoffman’s article on the organization of violence in
postcolonial African cities (2007), Öykü Potuoĝlu-Cook’s article on neoliberal gentrification
and urban renewal in Istanbul (2006), and Benjamin Chesluk’s article on community policing
in New York City (2004). A more extensive list of CA articles on cities and urbanism can be
accessed here at http://culanth.org/?q=node/60.
Cultural Anthropology has also published a number of articles on Brazil. See, for example,
Robin Sheriff’s “The Theft of Carnaval: National Spectacle and Racial Politics in Rio de
Janeiro” (1999), James Holston’s “Autoconstruction in Working-Class Brazil” (1991), and
David Hess’s “Disobsessing Disobsession: Religion, Ritual, and the Social Sciences in Brazil”
(1989).
REFERENCES CITED
Agamben, Giorgio
1998 Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Daniel Heller-Roazen, trans. Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press.
1999 Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Daniel Heller-Roazen,
trans. New York: Zone Books.
320
2006 State of Exception. Kevin Attell, trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Anderson, Warwick
2006 States of Hygiene: Race “Improvement” and Biomedical Citizenship in Australia
and the Colonial Philippines. In Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy
in North American History. Ann Stoler, ed. Pp. 94–115. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Andrade, Mário de, Manuel Bandeira, and Marcos A. de Morães
2000 Correspondência: Mário de Andrade and Manuel Bandeira. São Paulo: Editora da
Universidade de São Paulo.
Aretxaga, Begona
1995 Dirty Protest: Symbolic Overdetermination and Gender in Northern Ireland
Ethnic Violence. Ethos 23(2):123–148.
Bacelar, Jeferson
1982 A famı́lia da prostituta. São Paulo: Editora Atica.
Benjamin, Walter
1969 Theses on the Philosophy of History. In Illuminations. Pp. 253–265. New York:
Schocken Books.
Biehl, João Guilherme
2006a Pharmaceutical Governance. In Global Pharmaceuticals: Ethics, Markets,
Practices. Adriana Petryna, Andrew Lakoff, and Arthur Kleinman, eds. Pp. 206–
239. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
2006b Will to Live: AIDS Drugs and Local Economies of Salvation. Public Culture
18(3):457–472.
2007 Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Birth, Kevin
2008 Bacchanalian Sentiments: Musical Experiences and Political Counterpoints in
Trinidad. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Bissell, William
2005 Engaging Colonial Nostalgia. Cultural Anthropology 20(2):215–248.
Brenner, Neil, and Nicholas Theodore
2002 Cities and Actually Existing. Neoliberalism 34(5):1021–1024.
Briggs, Charles
1996 The Politics of Discursive Authority in Research on the “Invention of Tradition.”
Cultural Anthropology 11(4):435–469.
2004 Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profiling during a Medical Nightmare.
Berkeley: University of California Press
Bruner, Edward
2005 Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Buarque de Holanda, Sérgio
1999 Raizes do Brasil. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
Butler, Kim
1998a Afterward: Ginga Baiana—The Politics of Race, Class, Culture, and Power in
Salvador, Bahia. In Afro-Brazilian Culture and Politics: Bahia, 1790s to 1990s.
Hendrik Kraay, ed. Pp. 158–176. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.
Caldeira, Teresa, and James Holston
2005 State and Urban Space in Brazil: From Modernist Planning to Democratic Interven-
tions. In Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological
Problems. Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier, eds. Pp. 393–416. Malden, MA:
Blackwell.
321
Caroso Soares, Carlos Alberto

1979 Expedientes de Vida: Um Ensaio de Antropologia Urbana. M.A. Thesis, Federal
University of Bahia.
Castañeda, Quetzil
1996 In the Museum of Maya Culture: Touring Chichén Itzá. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Castro, Nadya Araújo
1998 Trabalho e Desigualdades Raciais: Hipoteses Desafiantes e Realidades por Inter-
pretar. In Trabalhos e Desigualdades Raciais: Negros e Brancos no Mercado de
Trabalho de Salvador. Pp. 15–21. São Paulo: Annablume Editora.
Chatterjee, Partha
2005 Empire and Nation Revisited: 50 Years after Bandung. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies
6(4):487–496.
Chesluk, Benjamin
2004 “Visible Signs of a City Out of Control”: Community Policing in New York City.
Collins, John
2004 “X Marks the Future of Brazil”: Protestant Ethics and Bedeviling Mixtures in
a Brazilian Cultural Heritage Center. In Off Stage/On Display: Intimacy and
Ethnography in the Age of Public Culture. Andrew Shryock, ed. Pp. 191–222.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
2007a Recent Approaches in English to Brazilian Racial Ideologies: Ambiguity, Research
Methods, and Semiotic Ideologies. Comparative Studies in Society and History
49(4):997–1009.
2007b The Sounds of Tradition: Arbitrariness and Agency in a Brazilian Cultural Heritage
Center. Ethnos 72(3):383–407.
In press The Revolt of the Saints: Memory and Redemption in the Twilight of Brazilian
“Racial Democracy.” Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Colten, Craig
2006 An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press.
Coronil, Fernando
1996 Beyond Occidentalism: Toward Nonimperial Geohistorical Categories. Cultural
Anthropology 11(1):51–87.
2000 Towards a Critique of Globalcentrism: Speculations on Capitalism’s Nature. In
Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism. John Comaroff and Jean
Comaroff, eds. Pp. 63–87. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
2007 After Empire: Reflections on Imperialism from the Americas. In Imperial For-
mations. Ann Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter Perdue, eds. Pp. 241–274.
Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press.
da Cunha, Euclides
1944 Rebellion in the Backlands. S. Putnam, trans. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
2006 The Amazon: Land without History. R. Sousa, trans. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Daniel, E. Valentine
1996 Charred Lullabies. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Dantas Neto, Paulo Fábio
2006 Tradição, autocracia e carisma: A polı́tica de Antônio Carlos Magalhães na
modernização da Bahia (1954–1974). Belo Horizonte: Universidade Federal de
Minas Gerais.
322
Duara, Prasenjit
2007 The Imperialism of “Free Nations”: Japan, Manchuko, and the History of the
Present. In Imperial Formations. Ann Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter
Perdue, eds. Pp. 211–240. Santa Fe: School for Advance Research.
Dynes, Russell
2000 The Dialogue between Voltaire and Rousseau on the Lisbon Earthquake: The
Emergence of a Social Science View. International Journal of Mass Emergencies
and Disasters. 18(1):97–115.
Elyachar, Julia
2005 Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Espinheira, Gey
1984 Divergência e Prostituição. Salvador: Tempo Brasileiro.
Fassin, Didier, and Paula Vasquez
2005 Humanitarian Exception as the Rule: The Political Theology of the 1999 Tragedia
in Venezuela. American Ethnologist 32(3):389–405.
Feldman, Allen
1991 Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern
Ireland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ferry, Elizabeth
2002 Inalienable Commodities: The Production and Circulation of Silver and Pat-
rimony in a Mexican Mining Cooperative. Cultural Anthropology 17(3):331–
358.
2005 Not Ours Alone: Patrimony, Value, and Collectivity in Contemporary Mexico.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Filho, Godofredo
1987 Irmã poesia: Seleção de poemas, 1923–1986. Salvador: Secretaria da Educação e
Cultura da Bahia, Academia de Letras da Bahia.
Forster, E. M.
1965 A Passage to India. New York: Harvest Books.
Foster, Robert
2002 Materializing the Nation: Commodities, Consumption, and Media in Papua New
Guinea. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Foucault, Michel
1972 The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. A. M. Sheridan
Smith, trans. New York: Pantheon Books.
1979 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Alan Sheridan, Trans. New
York:Vintage Books.
French, Jan Hoffman
2006 Buried Alive: Imagining African in the Brazilian Northeast. American Ethnologist
33(3):340–360.
Freyre, Gilberto
1970 Assombrações do Recife velho: Algumas notas históricas e outras tantas folclóricas
em tôrno do sobrenatural no passado recifense. Rio de Janeiro: J. Olympio.
1986 The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization.
S. Putnam, trans. Berkeley: University of California Press
Fry, Peter
2007 Divisões perigosas: polı́ticas raciais no Brasil contemporâneo. Rio de Janeiro:
Civilização Brasileira.
Goldstein, Donna
1999 “Interracial” Sex and Racial Democracy in Brazil: Twin Concepts? American
Anthropologist 101(3):563–578.
323
2003 Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown.
Berkeley: University of California Press
Graham, Sandra Lauderdale
1988 House and Street: The Domestic World of Servants and Masters in Nineteenth-
Century Rio de Janeiro. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Grandin, Greg
2007 Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New
Imperialism. New York: Holt.
Guimarães, Antônio Sérgio
2002 Classes, raças e democracia. São Paulo: Editora 34.
Hacking, Ian
1991 How Should We Do the History of Statistics? In The Foucault Effect: Studies in
Governmentality. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds. Pp.
189–196. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hale, Charles
2002 Does Multiculturalism Menace? Governance, Cultural Rights and the Politics of
Identity in Guatemala. Journal of Latin American Studies 34:483–524.
2006 Más que un indio/More than an Indian: Racial Ambivalence and Neoliberal
Multiculturalism in Guatemala. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.
Handler, Richard
1988 Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec. Madison: University of Wis-
consin Press.
1991 “Who Owns the Past? History, Cultural Property, and the Logic of Possessive
Individualism.” In The Politics of Culture. Brett Williams, ed. Washington, DC:
Smithsonian Institution Press.
Handler, Richard, and Eric Gable
1997 The New History in an Old Museum. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Harvey, David
2005 The New Imperialism. New York: Oxford University Press.
Herzfeld, Michael
1997 Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. New York: Routledge.
Hess, David J.
1989 Disobsessing Disobsession: Religion, Ritual, and the Social Sciences in Brazil.
Hill, Matthew
2007 Reimagining Old Havana: World Heritage and the Production of Scale in Late
Socialist Cuba. In Deciphering the Global: Its Scales, Spaces, and Subjects. Sassia
Sassken, ed. Pp. 59–78. New York: Routledge.
Hoffman, Danny
2007 The City as Barracks: Freetown, Monrovia, and the Organization of Violence in
Postcolonial African Cities. Cultural Anthropology 22(3):400–428.
Holston, James
1989 The Modernist City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1991 Autoconstruction in Working-Class Brazil. Cultural Anthropology 6(4):447–465.
2008 Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. Berke-
ley: University of California Press.
ICOMOS
1985 World Heritage List No. 309: Historic Centre of Salvador de Bahia. Paris: ICO-
MOS.
James, Jason
2006 Undoing Trauma: Reconstructing the Church of Our Lady in Dresden. Ethos
34(2):244–272.
324
Jay, Martin
1994 Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kaplan, Amy
1993 Left Alone with America: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture.
In Cultures of United States Imperialism. Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, eds. Pp.
3–21. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Kottak, Conrad
2005 Assault on Paradise: The Globalization of a Little Community in Brazil. New York:
McGraw Hill.
Kramer, Paul
2006 The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Kulick, Don
1998 Travestı́: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Landes, Ruth
1994 City of Women. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Latour, Bruno
2005 Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Li, Tanya Murray
2007 The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Limbert, Mandana
In press In the Ruins of Bahla: Reconstructed Forts and Crumbling Walls in an Omani
Town. Social Text 95.
Lutz, Katherine
2002 Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century. Boston: Beacon
Press.
2006 Empire Is in the Details. American Ethnologist 33(4):593–611.
McGranahan, Carole
2007 Empire Out of Bounds: Tibet in the Era of Decolonization. In Imperial Formations.
Ann Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter Perdue, eds. Pp. 173–210. Santa Fe:
School for Advance Research.
Moreira, Vicente Deocleciano
1982 Jovens ladrões: O caso do Maciel/Pelourinho. M.A. Thesis, Division of Social
Sciences, Federal University of Bahia.
Nascimento, Elisa Larkin de
2006 The Sorcery of Color: Identity, Race, and Gender in Brazil. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press.
Nobre, Eduardo A. C.
2002 Urban Regeneration Experiences in Brazil: Historical Preservation, Tourism De-
velopment and Gentrification in Salvador da Bahia. Urban Design International
7(2):109–124.
Ong, Aihwa
2006 Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Orta, Andrew
2002 Burying the Past: Locality, Lived History, and Death in Aymara Ritual of Remem-
brance. Cultural Anthropology 17(4):471–511.
2004 Catechizing Culture: Missionaries, Aymara, and the “New Evangelization.” New
York: Columbia University Press.
325
Perdue, Peter
2007 Erasing the Empire, Re-Racing the Nation: Racialism and Culturalism in
Imperial China. In Imperial Formations. Ann Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and
Peter Perdue, eds. Pp. 141–172. Santa Fe: School for Advance Research.
Parmentier, Richard
1987 The Sacred Remains: Myth, History and Polity in Belau. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Potuoĝlu-Cook, Öykü
2006 Beyond the Glitter: Belly Dance and Neoliberal Gentrification in Istanbul. Cultural
Anthropology 21(4):633–660.
Power, Timothy
1998 Brazilian Politicians and Neoliberalism: Mapping Support for the Cardoso Reforms,
1995–1997. Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 40(4):51– 72.
Price, Richard
2006 The Convict and the Colonel. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Risério, Antonio
1980 Carnaval Ijexá. Salvador: Editora Corrupio.
Rodrigues, João Jorge Santos
1995 O Olodum e o Pelourinho. In Pelo Pelô: História, Cultura e Cidade. Marco Aurélio
A. de Filgueiras Bomes, ed. Pp. 81–92. Salvador: Editora da Universidade Federal
da Bahia.
1996 Olodum: Estrada da paixão. Salvador: Grupo Cultural Olodum/Casa de Jorge
Amado.
Rojas, Eduardo
1998 Heritage Conservation in Latin America and the Caribbean: Recent Bank Experi-
ence. Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank.
1999 Old Cities, New Assets: Preserving Latin America’s Urban Heritage. Washington,
DC: Inter-American Development Bank.
Sansone, Livio
1995 O Pelourinho dos jovens negro-mestiços de classe baixa da grande Salvador. In
Pelo Pelô: História, Cultura e Cidade. Marco Aurélio A. de Filgueiras Gomes,
ed. Pp. 59–70. Salvador: EDUFBA.
Santos, Jocélio Teles dos
2005 A cultura no poder e o poder da cultura: A construção da disputa simbólica da
herança cultural negra no Brasil. Salvador: EDUFBA.
Santos, Luiz A. de Castro
1998 As origens da Reforma Sanitária e da Modernização Conservadora na Bahia durante
a Primeira República. Dados—Revista de Ciências Sociais 41(3).
Schmitt, Carl
2006 Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. George Schwab,
trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Schwarcz, Lilia
1994 O espectáculo das raças: Cientistas, institutições, e questão racial no Brasil, 1870–
1930. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
Selcher, Wayne
1998 The Politics of Decentralized Federalism, National Diversification, and Region-
alism in Brazil. Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 40(4):25–
50.
Sheriff, Robin E.
1999 The Theft of Carnaval: National Spectacle and Racial Politics in Rio de Janeiro.
326
2001 Dreaming Equality: Color, Race, and Racism in Urban Brazil. New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Silver, Patricia
2007 “Then I Do What I Want”: Teachers, State, and Empire in 2000. American
Ethnologist 34(2):268–284.
Skidmore, Thomas
1974 Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Skurski, Julie
1996 The Ambiguities of Authenticity in Latin America: Doña Bárbara and the Con-
struction of National Identity. In Becoming National: A Reader. G. Eley and R.
Suny, eds. Pp. 371–402. New York: Oxford University Press.
Smith, Neil
2003 American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geography and the Prelude to Globalization.
2007 Disastrous Accumulation. South Atlantic Quarterly 106(4):769–787.
Sommer, Doris
1991 Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America. Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press.
Steinmetz, George
2003 The State of Emergency and the Revival of American Imperialism: Toward an
Authoritarian Post-Fordism. Public Culture 15(2):323–345.
Stepan, Nancy
1991 “The Hour of Eugenics”: Race, Gender and Nation in Latin America. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
Stoler, Ann Laura
1992 In Cold Blood: Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives.
Representations 37:151–189.
2002 Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule.
2006a Introduction. In Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American
, History. Ann Laura Stoler, ed. Pp. 1–22. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
2006b On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty. Public Culture 18(1):125–146.
Stoler, Ann, and Carole McGranahan
2007 Introduction: Refiguring Imperial Terrains. In Imperial Formations. Ann Stoler,
Carole McGranahan, and Peter Perdue, eds. Santa Fe: School for Advanced
Research Press.
Taussig, Michael
1992 Culture of Terror—Space of Death: Roger Casement’s Putumayo Report and the
Explanation of Torture. In Colonialism and Culture. N. Dirks, ed. Pp. 135–174.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Telles, Edward
1992 Residential Segregation by Skin Color in Brazil. American Sociological Review
57:186–197.
2003 Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
UNESCO
1972 Convention for the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage.
November 12. Paris: UNESCO.
327
2002 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. October 17.
Paris: UNESCO.
2005 Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention.
February 2. Paris: UNESCO.
Weffort, Francisco
2000 A cultura e as revoluções da modernização. Rio de Janeiro: Fundo Nacional de
Cultura.
Weinstein, Barbara
2003 Racializing Regional Diversity: São Paulo versus Brazil, 1932. In Race and Nation
in Modern Latin America. Nancy Appelbaurm, Anne Macpherson, and Karin
Rosemblatt, eds. Pp. 237–262. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
WHO-UNAIDS
2004 Advocacy Guide: HIV Protection among Injecting Drug Users. Geneva: World
Health Organization
Williams, Daryle
2001 Culture Wars in Brazil: The First Vargas Regime, 1930–1945. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
328

COLLINS But - Madame - What - If - I - Should - Need - To - Def PDF

Încărcat de

Informații document

Titlu original

Drepturi de autor

Formate disponibile

Partajați acest document

Partajați sau inserați document

Opțiuni de partajare

Vi se pare util acest document?

Este necorespunzător acest conținut?

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

COLLINS But - Madame - What - If - I - Should - Need - To - Def PDF

Încărcat de

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

CA

“BUT WHAT IF I SHOULD NEED TO DEFECATE IN

The city of Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia, is typically celebrated as

for-profit cultural heritage firm staffed by development professionals subservient

ameliorative projects by international bodies legitimated through their ability to

ostensible inner essences (Coronil 2000), are commodified in a distributed imperial

ON THE IMPORTANCE OF THE EXCEPTION

of enunciation whose existence depends on its object of analysis. I begin from a

CONVERGENCES: “BRAZIL’S BROWN MOTHER” AND HERITAGE

With soft fallen breasts

It has gained currency not simply as a result of encouragement by the federal

the post-1992 reconstruction of the Pelourinho to “longstanding intimacies . . .

namely “affectivity, hospitality, sincerity and solidarity.” These claims speak to

heritage, or exceptional, object was not a sacred symbol, well-spring of affect, or

Many working-class women, often expected to labor as servants or to perform

so-called racial democracy described above—constitutes an ideological backbone

price lifeways so as to ascertain how much it needed to pay to convince inhabitants

even as few succeeded, to convince IPAC to allow them to remain in or reenter

AT THE MARGINS OF HISTORY

much to inflect my own understanding of the Pelourinho’s restoration: Sanitation

American nature, are usually approached as stimulating in response Lamarckian

DELINEATING SELF, OTHER, AND BAHIANNESS ON THE HILL OF

“Right!” answered the nurse.

A MARGINAL AT THE EPICENTER

my reader digests here. This is a contradiction I cannot resolve or square at this

IPAC, a resident answers a questionnaire designed to fix her as a problem to be

The nurse’s explanation of Topa’s practices through an argument about un-

multiculturalism,” the Bahian state arbitrates “correct” markers of ethnic identity

FIGURE 4. Topa kisses her neighbor, JoJo. Photograph by John Collins.

during a subject’s or a population’s lifetime is understood to produce moral and physical

Caroso Soares, Carlos Alberto

S-ar putea să vă placă și