Whiteness and Miscegenation: Ethnographic Notes, Social Classifications and Silences in the Brazilian ContextPosted in Anthropology, Articles, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, Media Archive on 2016-04-01 18:47Z by Steven |
Studi Culturali
Volume VII, Number 1, April 2010
pages 87-102
DOI: 10.1405/31883
Valeria Ribeiro Corossacz
Dipartimento di studi linguistici e culturali
Università degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia
This article presents some reflections from ongoing research on white upper-middle class men in Rio de Janeiro. The analysis of the construction of whiteness as an object of ethnographic enquiry permits us to consider the specificities and difficulties of ethnographic research on a category that in Euro-Western and Brazilian contexts represents the Self through which the social and cultural Other is defined. From these premises the article investigates what it means to classify him/herself and to be classified as white in Brazilian society, historically characterised by a valorisation of miscegenation and currently by a heated debate on anti-racist policies. The material presented shows how the invisibility of whiteness is associated on the one hand to the perception of the privilege connected to it, on the other hand to the pre-eminence of social class as an interpretive category.
Read or purchase the article here.