Triumphant Miscegenation: Reflections on Beauty and Race in Brazil

Abstract

In Brazil racial mixture, mestiçagem has been a dominant theme in the political and cultural re-imagination of the nation in the twentieth century. This paper approaches the role of mixture in Brazilian social life from the angle of aesthetics, looking both at Brazilian intellectual history and the commercial and medical beauty industry. It first discusses the aesthetics of race in the works of Brazilian scholar Gilberto Freyre. Second, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it shows how cultural constructions of race are reflected in the clinical practice of plastic surgery. Analysing cosmetic practices illuminates central tensions in the ideal of mestiçagem, but also reveals it as a distinct logic of race and beauty that contrasts with multiculturalism. As the beauty industry expands in the developing world, such cultural logics may not be erased but rather incited.

Keywords:

• Brazil
• Beauty
• Racial Mixture (Mestiçagem)
• National Identity
• Gilberto Freyre
• Plastic Surgery

Acknowledgments

The Social Science Research Council and a Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellowship provided support for fieldwork and writing. I am also grateful for guidance from Peter Fry and Hermano Vianna and for their inspiring work on race and national identity. My greatest debt I owe to those who generously agreed to participate in this research.

Notes

1. See Fry (2000) for a discussion of how racial democracy can similarly be read as a myth.

2. ‘The Mansion and the Shanties’ (translated into English as The Masters and the Slaves in 1956).

3. Remarkably the Brazilian state has also begun experimenting with affirmative action in public universities aimed at students who identify as negro (Fry 2005).

4. See Sansone (2004) for a brief review of literature on racial terminology.

5. The term moreno illustrates the relational quality and egalitarian aspirations of Brazil's classifications of appearance. Studies have found that color is defined relationally and contextually, so that depending on who asks, the response may differ (Sansone 2004).

6. The existence of such an aesthetic suggests not only that beauty is a matter of national identity but of course also normative femininity, which I don't have space here to address here (but see Edmonds forthcoming).

7. Here I also locate such ‘body contouring’ practices in relation to new notions of ‘aesthetic health’ and emerging management regimes of female reproduction and sexuality.

8. Another surgeon even claimed to trace the propensity to form keloid scars to particular ethnic groups in Africa. In doing so he oddly echoes a long colonial discourse in Brazil about the supposed inferiority of ‘Bantu’ (from Angola) in relation to the ‘Yoruba.’

9. Miscegenation is also discussed in relation to ageing. Surgeons and patients claim that ‘pure whites’ age more rapidly than people of some African descent, while the latter have a tendency to gain weight more easily (both ‘defects’ that can be offset by surgery).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alexander Edmonds

Alexander Edmonds is Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He has been conducting ethnographic fieldwork in urban Brazil since 1998 and is currently writing a book on Brazil's culture of beauty. His research interests include visual and medical anthropology, racial identities, and social change in contemporary Brazil