Vital properties and Afro-Brazilian lives: on promiscuities of gentrification and personhood in Salvador, Bahia’s Pelourinho Historical Center

ABSTRACT

To argue that gentrification is one facet of capitalist property regimes is rather obvious. But to demonstrate how the relations usually bundled as gentrification come to play a key role in the conjuring of human qualities and even essences–and thus persons, families, their abodes, and their politics–is to begin to gesture at the real effects of imbrications of property and personhood in heritage centers today. Drawing on the making of Salvador, Brazil’s Pelourinho Historical Center, I argue that, more than an exchange of existing properties, gentrification involves webs of relation whose alterations impact people’s very notions of who and how they are. Gentrification is a part of a broad set of mutually-implicating knowledge practices and semiotic ideologies that habituate how humans perceive the world, and themselves. Property is thus a key moralizing idiom through which people compose themselves and their worlds. Seen in this light, gentrification is much more than an exclusionary market relationship to be bewailed. Rather, it is a pathway into understanding more clearly how human perspectives on selves and the world emerge in dialogue, or at least as touched by, property discourse and techniques for fostering often highly unequal property relations.

KEYWORDS:

• Brazil
• semiotic ideologies
• gentrification
• trans
• sexuality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Freyre’s 1926 poem appeared in the Rio de Janeiro newspaper A Manhã on 10 September 1944 and then in Antologia de Poetas Brasileiros Bissextos, edited in 1946 by the modernist poet Manuel Bandeira.

2. ‘Eu nao vou embora não. São Pedro me disse “volte, não é a sua hora não. Ainda tem que dar muito cú la em baixo”’.

3. See Oliveira (1994).

4. I do not argue that a burgeoning emphasis on property in the Pelourinho means that residents have come necessarily to essentialize their identities – while there is little doubt that relations and qualities come to be bundled in new ways, often related to epistemologies emanating from or girding property relations, this need not be an ‘essentialization.’ In fact, the often contradictory meanings and uses of tombamento suggest how much a property-inflected conceptualization of identity in the Pelourinho is not a simplification or essentialization, but a new modality for describing human beings that, like other modalities explored by philosophers and more vernacular thinkers across millennia, resists simplification and generalizations.

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Notes on contributors

John F. Collins

John F. Collins is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Revolt of the Saints: Memory and Redemption in the Twilight of Brazilian Racial Democracy, (Duke University Press, 2015) a historical ethnography of the making of a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Salvador, Bahia, and co-editor with Carole McGranahan of Ethnographies of United States Empire (Duke University Press, 2018). Collins is currently working on Under English Eyes, a study of emancipation, re-enslavement, state-sponsored philanthropy, and liberalism in the mid-19th C. South Atlantic, as well as Hunters of the Sourlands, an ethnography of hunters of white tail deer in exurban New Jersey. He is the author of numerous articles on cultural heritage and racial politics, nationalism, urbanism, critical theory, gender and sexuality, and the intersections of anthropology and history. His research and writing has been funded by Fulbright, the National Science Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Mellon Foundation, the Brazilian PIBIC Program, and PSC-CUNY.