We must understand the individual as living in his culture; and the culture as lived by individuals.
(Franz Boas 1934, p. xvi)Race is an attitude … an emotional attitude … racial prejudice, is a group phenomenon, a social phenomenon. It is based on traditional backgrounds and is inculcated unconsciously into us early in life … we cannot get rid of it unless we become, to a great extent, individualists, independent thinkers, persons who can stand on their own two feet intellectually and emotionally, who are detached and capable of viewing things “above the battle.”
(Alexander Goldenweiser 1924, p. 127, 134)For more than a decade anthropologists have agreed upon the value of the life history … [as] the essential tool in the study of a culture … The unique value of life histories lies in that fraction of the material which shows what repercussions the experiences of a man’s life—either shared or idiosyncratic—have upon him as a human being molded in that environment. Such information, as it were, tests out a culture by showing its workings in the life history of a carrier of that culture.
(Ruth Benedict 1966 [1948], p. 468)
1American anthropologist Ruth Landes (1908-1991) published one book, City of Women (1947), and three articles, “A cult matriarchate and male homosexuality” (1940a), “Fetish worship in Brazil” (1940b), and “Negro slavery and female status” (1953), based on ethnographic fieldwork she conducted in Salvador, Bahia, in 1938-1939. Trained by Franz Boas (1858-1942) and Ruth Benedict (1887-1948), Landes received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University in 1937. During graduate training, she conducted research in indigenous North American communities, where, like other Boasian anthropologists, her approach to fieldwork was to immerse herself in everyday life and to work with key informants to record individual life histories and communally shared stories that were repositories of local knowledge. The topics Landes studied were those the people told her were important to them and that they chose to talk to her about: personal spirit-guardians, dreams, and healing visions; marriage practices, women’s lives, and gender diversity; and the autonomy of the individual (1937, 1997 [1938], 1968a, 1968b, 1970a).
- 1 For further biographical details and discussion of Landes’s relationship with Carneiro, see Andres (...)
2Landes followed these Boasian methods of fieldwork in Salvador, where self-taught Bahian folklorist Edison Carneiro (1912-1972) became her intellectual collaborator (Carneiro 1940, 1948, 1964). Carneiro accompanied her to Afro-Brazilian neighborhoods and introduced her to key figures in the candomblé world.1 From August 1938 to February 1939, Landes interviewed candomblé leaders, attended rituals in the terreiros (candomblé centers) and participated in popular festivals. City of Women is a personal account of her daily life in Salvador. The book offers vivid descriptions of individuals and accounts of conversations. In City of Women, Landes celebrates the cultural dynamism and innovativeness of Afro-Brazilian shantytown dwellers. According to Carneiro, Landes was the first scholar to develop “so much intimacy with the Candomblés of Bahia” (1964, p. 225). It was Carneiro who oversaw the translation and publication of City of Women in Brazil, adding an appendix to include his translations of Landes’s three articles that call attention to women’s leadership in the established terreiros and to the gender variance of leaders in the burgeoning caboclo terreiros. Landes’s presentation of Afro-Brazilian culture as creative, dynamic, and continually in-the-making under contemporary urban conditions of poverty and criminalization diverged from the Brazilian school of Afro-Brazilian studies then led by social psychologist Arthur Ramos (1903-1949), where candomblé was treated as a biologically inherited race-based pathology (Ramos 1942). Her approach also disputed the research program of American anthropologist Melville Herskovits (1895-1963), who argued that the “search for African survivals” was the goal in Afro-Brazilian anthropological research (Herskovits 1943, 1948). Herskovits and Ramos vehemently criticized Landes and her work, helping to ensure her a marginal place in the discipline.
3After she returned to the United States, Landes lived in economic precarity for three decades, moving back and forth from New York to California for short-term teaching and research contracts. She secured a permanent academic appointment at a Canadian university in 1965 when she was 57 years old. A second edition of City of Women was published in 1994 after her death. Criticized as “unscientific” by Herskovits in 1947, Landes’s personal writing style and her ethnographic attention to gender were precisely what feminist scholars appreciated half a century later (Behar and Gordon 1995; Cole 1995).
4In Brazil, Arthur Ramos had sought to censure Landes’s work, but Edison Carneiro toiled tirelessly to see the Portuguese edition, A cidade das mulheres, finally published in 1967. In the preface to the 2nd edition, published in 2002, historian of anthropology Mariza Corrêa inscribes the book as a “record that preserves in vivid form the memory of so many important figures in the construction of an anthropological field of studies on race relations in Brazil” (2022, p. 13). In his 2015 biography of Edison Carneiro, Gustavo Rossi (2015) describes Landes’s work as um espelho—a mirror—on class and race relations in Brazil. Peter Fry (2002), in his introduction to the 2nd edition of Cidade das mulheres, reminds readers that the topics that Landes turned ethnographic attention to—women’s autonomy and leadership; homosexuality; and the dynamic cultural production of Afro-Brazilian freed slaves—were feridas, raw nerves, in debates on national identity in Brazil in the 1930s. As Corrêa (2000, p. 241) summarized, Landes’s ethnographic observations “crossed a threshold into a minefield of theoretical, methodological and political dissensions” that made her a “polluting” presence in Brazilian anthropology at the time.
5The topics that interested Landes and her writings on them remain lively fields of study and debate in the 21st century. My intent in this paper, however, is not to review the literature, but instead to recall the era of anthropology in Brazil in the 1930s and the contested terrain that Landes entered when she chose to write about the then-little-addressed topics of women, gender, race, and social inequality.
6Ruth Landes, née Schlossberg, was born in New York City in 1908. Her parents, Joseph Schlossberg and Anna Grossman, were Russian Jewish immigrants active in the trade union and labor Zionist movements. Joseph Schlossberg was co-founder of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and devoted his life to organizing for labor rights. Landes attended Brookwood High School, a co-educational school for children of garment workers. She received a bachelor’s degree in sociology from New York University in 1928 and, like many young Jewish women of the era, she was encouraged to become a social worker. As a master’s student at the New York School of Social Work in 1928-1929, Landes conducted research on the storefront churches of Afro-Caribbean immigrants in Harlem (Landes 1967). She received her master’s degree in 1929 and married Victor Landes, the son of family friends. After marriage, she was disappointed to discover that her parents and husband expected her to leave social work and devote herself to “wifehood and domesticity” (Landes 1970b). She soon left the marriage and launched on a lifelong, often lonely, search for professional and personal fulfillment.
7When her youthful marriage ended, Landes sought to return to the Harlem research. She consulted Alexander Goldenweiser (1880-1940), a family friend she knew through labor socialist circles who taught anthropology at the New School for Social Research and had been one of Franz Boas’s first students. Goldenweiser introduced Landes to Boas who encouraged her to enter the anthropology Ph.D. program at Columbia University and assigned Ruth Benedict as her thesis supervisor (Cole 2002).
8Following then-standard practice in anthropological training at Columbia, Benedict advised Landes to conduct doctoral research with an indigenous group. Benedict allocated funding and arranged logistical support through the National Museum of Canada for Landes to go to the Ojibwa Manitou Rapids reserve (today Rainy River First Nation) in northwestern Ontario to study the guardian spirit concept (Landes 1968b). There, Landes worked intensively with Maggie Wilson, an elder who was a visionary, midwife, healer, and spiritual leader in the community. Landes and Wilson recorded dozens of life histories, another standard Boasian practice (Wilson 2009). As a student of Benedict’s, Landes was especially attentive to the lived experience of women and the possibilities for personal autonomy and gender diversity.
9Ruth Landes (1970b) described herself as a “disciple” of Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict. At Columbia, Boas had built the discipline around: the principles of cultural relativism and cultural particularism; the culture area concept; the critique of biological determinism and race classifications; the investigation of the relation of the individual to culture; and the quest for the “native point of view” (Boas 1920, 1932). When Landes arrived at Columbia in September 1931, Benedict was at work on her book Patterns of Culture (1934), moving the discipline away from lists of culture traits and consolidating her key idea, from Gestalt psychology, that cultures are “configurations” shaped by a dominant theme or pattern. Benedict portrayed cultures as wholes integrated by an inner spirit that knits traits together into a way of life that is meaningful and coherent for those who live it. For Benedict, the work of the anthropologist is interpretive and the search is to understand the shared meanings of cultural rules and behaviors from the point of view of participants. Benedict saw humans creating culture over and over and in widely varying ways from an “arc” of possible human behavior. Her theory of cultures as wholes that integrate individual traits together into patterned and coherent ways of life that are meaningful for participants relied on fieldwork and first-hand knowledge of the experience of individuals recorded in life histories. Benedict trained her students to pay attention to the choices, negotiations, and agency individual life trajectories reveal. Because she saw cultures as selections and organizations of behavior from a shared human arc, she understood that behaviors that did not conform to a particular culture pattern—that were labeled “abnormal” in one cultural context—would under other conditions, in other cultural contexts, be “culturally provided for” and “socially placed” (1966 [1934], p. 268). For Benedict, ideas of “the abnormal”—“the culturally un-provided for”—are cultural constructions not intrinsic to the behavior itself. Landes, following Benedict’s theorizing of the “abnormal,” paid attention in the field to divergences between cultural prescriptions and actual behaviors, and especially to gender variance.
10Boas’s and Benedict’s empirical focus on individual experience as a pathway to understanding culture resonated for Landes, who was experiencing the weight of social norms and stigma as she embarked on life as a divorced woman. Landes was herself asking: What makes a life? How is meaning found in life? How does the individual move forward in difficult situations? Landes writes about individual lives in particular times and places based on her first-hand encounters and conversations with individuals and her own experiences of the conditions they live in. Her ethnography may be understood as life writing, consonant with the writing of modernist women in the interwar years, who were, as Virginia Woolf declared, “beginning to write of women as women have never been written of before” (Wade 2020, p. 265).
11Women comprised almost half the student cohort in anthropology at Columbia in the 1930s and several published books about women’s lives (Bunzel 1929; Mead 1928, 1935; Reichard 1939; Underhill 1936; see Gordon 1993). Landes’s book The Ojibwa Woman was about to be published in the spring of 1938 when she left for Brazil. The Ojibwa Woman is distinctive for the critical theoretical priority Landes gives to the domains of work and marriage as key to understanding women’s lives and as the collaborative product of perhaps the first research team of a woman anthropologist and an indigenous woman consultant in the history of anthropology (Cole 2009; Hallowell 1938). The Ojibwa Woman presents life stories of individual women told to Landes by Maggie Wilson, her chief collaborator at Manitou Rapids. The stories document variations in household structures and gendered divisions of labor; marital conflict and divorce; gender and sexual variance; birth control, abortion, infanticide, and adoption.
12Portraits of lives in The Ojibwa Woman contrasted with the formalist kinship charts and prescriptive rules of marriage and residence that other anthropologists were then emphasizing. Following Benedict’s training and Wilson’s storytelling, Landes used the life history method to explore contradictions between norms and practices. Maggie Wilson’s stories illustrated how individuals negotiate cultural rules to address their particular circumstances. “The Ojibwa material,” Landes writes, “shows that the social norms institutionalized in even a simple nomadic culture do not provide for all the population, nor for the entire range of tribal activities” (1997 [1938], p. xix). For her part, Wilson told stories of women’s lives as testimony of how, through resourcefulness and sharing of knowledge, women survived the violences of colonization, relocation, and poverty (2009). This work is important to read as a precursor to Landes’s research in Brazil and to understand the ethnographic attention she gives to women’s agency, gender fluidity, and cultural resourcefulness in Bahia.
13Before going to Brazil, Landes taught briefly at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, a key center of black scholarship. When she was working as a social worker in Harlem in the late 1920s, Landes had met University of Chicago sociologist Robert Park (1864-1944). Park had since retired and was based at Fisk. He invited Landes to spend the winter of 1937-1938 there. Park’s student Donald Pierson (1900-1995) was also at Fisk writing his book Negroes in Brazil (1942) based on two years’ research in Bahia. Pierson encouraged Landes to study the women candomblé leaders, the mães de santo in Salvador. Park and Pierson gave Landes letters of introduction to key figures in Afro-Brazilian studies, including Edison Carneiro and the candomblé elders Eliseo Martiniano do Bonfim (1859-1943) and Anninha (Eugenia Anna dos Santos, 1869-1938) in Bahia and Arthur Ramos, Professor of Social Psychology at the Federal University in Rio de Janeiro.
14When Landes arrived in Rio de Janeiro in May 1938, she was a trained fieldworker with an ethnographic eye focused on women and on the experience of the individual and with a theoretical understanding of cultures as dynamic and subject to change, products of particular histories and material conditions. For Landes, cultures are symbolic universes of meaning for members and the purpose of fieldwork is to learn about meanings from the point of view of participants. Her own life experiences had also trained her to be a master observer of micro comportments that she took as clues to race, class, and gender relations and that she recorded as data through descriptions of her experiences and conversations in the field.
15Landes arrived in Brazil at the end of a decade of public debate on the place of Afro-Brazilians in the nation. Corrêa (2003, p. 167-168) writes that the terrain of anthropology in Brazil in the 1930s was riddled with tensions, theoretical debates, and territorial struggles between institutions and individuals during the years of repression after the fall of the liberal First Republic in 1930 and up to the establishment of the Vargas Estado Novo in 1937. Corrêa notes the dissension between Gilberto Freyre’s racial democracy/miscegenation thesis and the “Africanization” of Bahia in race relations studies under Arthur Ramos. During the 1930s, the discipline was also moving away from its historical roots in museum-sponsored field expeditions and into the domain of university training and research. Corrêa describes the tensions between Heloísa Alberto Torres (1895-1977), Director of the Museo Nacional de Rio de Janeiro (MNRJ), and Ramos, who had just been appointed Brazil’s first Professor of Anthropology at the Federal University in 1938, a position Torres had also sought. Like other Columbia University researchers in Brazil, Landes was affiliated with the MNRJ and was required to apply to the Museum for a scientific research permit. The MNRJ provided logistical support in the field and space to work when she was in Rio de Janeiro before and after fieldwork in Bahia.
16Columbia University had a long history of engagement in Brazil. Since the late 19th century, Brazilian students had trained at the Columbia University Medical School and the Columbia University School of Mines. Columbia Teachers College became involved in training teachers and developing public education in Brazil before the First World War. Portuguese language courses had been offered at Columbia since 1914 and, in 1926, the Rockefeller family began to provide fellowships for Columbia student and faculty travel and study in Brazil. In 1931, the Federal Director of Education in Rio de Janeiro, Bahian Anísio Teixeira (1900-1971), who had received a master’s degree from Columbia Teachers College in 1929, had launched a program to reform education in Brazil following principles of public education in the United States. Teixeira founded the Instituto de Pesquisas Educacionais (IPE), based on the Institute for Education Research in New York, and recruited Edgar Roquette-Pinto (1884-1954), then-Director of the MNRJ, to head the Department of Educational Radio and Cinema and Arthur Ramos to head the Department of Orthophrenology and Mental Hygiene Research (Dávila 2003).
17Edgar Roquette-Pinto, who had conducted extended periods of fieldwork with the Nambikwara, had begun the collaboration between the MNRJ and Department of Anthropology at Columbia University after meeting Boas in 1924 at the Congress of the Society of Americanists in Gotenberg, Sweden. Although Boas himself never traveled to Brazil or wrote about the country, his ideas circulated widely in Brazil in the interwar years. Roquette-Pinto presented Boas’s arguments against biological determinism and race classification at the 1929 Brazilian Eugenics Conference. Boas had supervised Gilberto Freyre’s (1900-1987) master’s studies at Columbia University in 1921-1922 and in 1933 Freyre had published his miscegenation thesis and portrait of Brazil as a racial democracy in his book Casa grande e senzala. Scholars have traced the idea of racial democracy to Boas and to Freyre’s meeting German student Rudiger Bilden (1893-1980) at Columbia University in 1921. The transnational dialogue between Boas, Freyre, and Bilden transformed international ideas about Brazil and ideas about national identity within Brazil itself and served as a critique of race relations in the US (Pallares-Burke 2018). Landes came to Brazil with Freyre’s racial democracy thesis in mind and expecting to find what she called “another scheme of living” (1994 [1947], p. 60).
18Arthur Ramos had studied legal medicine and psychiatry in Bahia and worked at the Instituto Nina Rodrigues and the Hospital São João de Deus in Salvador before moving to Rio de Janeiro in 1933. In 1937, Afrânio Peixoto (1876-1947), rector of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and also a graduate of the Bahia school of legal medicine, had first appointed Ramos as Professor of Social Psychology. Peixoto had published Ramos’s first books—Freud, Adler, Jung and Psiquiatria e Psicanálise in 1933 and Educação e Psicanálise in 1934—in a series he edited for the press Guanabara (Corrêa 2001 [1998], p. 375). He had also published a new edition of Os africanos no Brasil, a collection of essays originally written in the years 1900-1905 by Raimundo Nina Rodrigues (1862-1906), founder of the Bahian legal medical school of Afro-Brazilian studies (ibid., p. 283-285). Peixoto recruited Ramos to supervise re-editions of other works by Nina Rodrigues, including O animismo fetichista dos negros bahianos in 1935, originally published in 1900, and Coletividades anormais in 1939, originally published in 1901 (Correa 2003, p. 239).
19As Professor of Social Psychology at UFRJ, Ramos was building the field of Afro-Brazilian studies. He published his own contributions: O negro brasileiro. Etnografia religiosa e psicanálise in 1934, based on his clinical studies of Salvador’s Afro-Brazilian population; O folklore negro do Brasil in 1935; and As culturas negras no Novo Mundo in 1937. He also published Edison Carneiro’s first books, Religiões negras in 1936 and Negros bantos in 1937, as well as the proceedings of the Afro-Brazilian Congresses that took place in Recife in 1934 and in Salvador in 1937.
20Edison Carneiro was raised in Salvador in a mixed-race family with long-established ties to the liberal First Republic. His father, who had been a professor at the faculty of engineering, was removed from his position after the fall of the First Republic in 1930 when government and university appointments were reallocated to supporters of President Getúlio Vargas. Carneiro had graduated from the law faculty at the University of Bahia in 1930 but the Vargas regime and its entrenchment in the Estado Novo (1937-1946) thwarted a career in law. He had been a militant in the student communist movement and, with novelist Jorge Amado, poet Aydano do Couto Ferraz, and other students, had founded the literary society Academia dos Rebeldes, and edited a journal to publish their poetry and essays. Carneiro also wrote for the local newspaper and reported on the intensifying police surveillance of Afro-Brazilian neighborhoods and the candomblé terreiros.
21Carneiro presented his first contribution to Afro-Brazilian studies in 1934 at the 1st Afro-Brazilian Congress organized by Gilberto Freyre in Recife. The Congress brought together psychologists, including Arthur Ramos, and other medical and public health specialists who treated trance and spirit possession as race-determined psychological traits. In his paper “A situação do negro no Brasil” (1988 [1935]), Carneiro proposed instead that candomblé be understood as a cultural production of Afro-Brazilian proletarianization. He saw Afro-Brazilian culture as a product of specifically Brazilian historical, political, and economic conditions. Cultural symbols and candomblé trance and beliefs are forms of meaning-making, Carneiro said, that can be traced to material conditions and not to biological or race-determined psychological characteristics. Carneiro outlined Brazil’s post-slavery failure to incorporate Afro-Brazilians into national society, pointing to the unsanitary conditions, high rates of infant and maternal mortality, and poverty in the districts where black workers lived. Acculturation programs based on myths of racial inferiority had the effect of criminalizing poor Brazilian citizens, he said. Carneiro advocated instead for the formation of a cultural association to preserve Afro-Brazilian culture, especially candomblé. Carneiro organized the 2nd Afro-Brazilian Congress in Salvador in 1937 in collaboration with Martiniano do Bonfim, who had been Nina Rodrigues’s key Afro-Brazilian collaborator, and mãe de santo Aninha, leader of one of the most influential terreiros in Bahia, who died in January 1938, a few months before Landes arrived. The Congress in Salvador featured Afro-Brazilian dance and music performances (Morais 2020; Rossi 2015).
22In her book As ilusões da liberdade (2001 [1998]), Mariza Corrêa defines Nina Rodrigues’s work as the founding of a specifically Brazilian school of anthropology that interrogates the meaning of freedom for Afro-Brazilians in post-slavery Brazil. The “mental hygiene” (Corrêa 2001 [1998]) approach of Ramos and other psychologists and medical scholars followed Rodrigues in calling for education and acculturation. Carneiro, interpreting the work of Rodrigues differently, advocated for the cultural and religious freedom of Afro-Brazilians and for redressing conditions of poverty. Carneiro’s approach resonated with Landes’s labor socialism and Boasian training.
23When Landes arrived in Brazil in the spring of 1938, Heloísa Torres had just succeeded Roquette-Pinto as the MNRJ’s director. Ruth Benedict and Heloísa Torres were continuing the Department of Anthropology’s collaboration with the Museum that Boas and Roquette-Pinto had begun. Torres was keen to train Brazilian anthropologists in methods of field research and sought opportunities for them to work with American anthropologists in the field. Benedict’s student Jules (Henry) Blumensohn (1904-1969), accompanied by his wife Zunia, conducted two years of Ph.D. fieldwork with the Kaingáng in southeastern Brazil in 1932-1934 with support from the Museu Nacional. During the years 1937-1939, the Department of Anthropology with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and working with the MNRJ supported Walter Lipkind (1905-1974), Buell Quain (1912-1939), and Charles Wagley (1913-1991) in fieldwork with indigenous groups in Brazil’s Amazon basin. Benedict also allocated funds for Landes to undertake research on Afro-Brazilian religion in Bahia to continue to pursue research interests she had first explored in Harlem. Landes would be the only woman scholar and the sole Columbia anthropologist to enter the field of Afro-Brazilian studies in the 1930s and to conduct fieldwork in an urban setting (Figure 1).
Fig. 1 – From left to right: Claude Lévi-Strauss, Ruth Landes, Charles Walter Wagley, Heloísa Alberto Torres, Luís de Castro Faria, Raimondo Lopes da Cunha, and Edison Carneiro
(photo [unknown], Archives of Museu Nacional, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro [UFRJ], Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1938)
24Landes was based at the MNRJ when she arrived in Rio de Janeiro in May 1938 until she sailed to Salvador in August 1938. She studied Portuguese daily with a private tutor and met with Arthur Ramos at the Federal University to develop her plan for research. Ramos guided her to the key Brazilian sources on Afro-Brazilian culture and the candomblé religion and encouraged her to work with Edison Carneiro when in Bahia. Following Ramos’s advice, once in Salvador, she met with doctors at the legal medical faculty at the university and introduced herself to Carneiro, who took her to the Afro-Brazilian neighborhoods and introduced her to leaders of the candomblé terreiros. Carneiro accompanied her throughout the months of fieldwork as she participated in public festivals and private rituals and possession ceremonies in individual terreiros. Landes’s interest in candomblé, the days and hours she spent in the Afro-Brazilian neighborhoods, her close collaboration with Carneiro, and her Columbia University affiliation all made her a subject of interest to local police who kept the terreiros under surveillance. As police surveillance of the terreiros intensified, Landes worried that her fieldnotes and photos might be confiscated and, on Carneiro’s advice, she returned to Rio de Janeiro in February 1939 and began to write, again based at the MNRJ.
- 2 Correspondence between Ruth Landes and Ruth Benedict is in the Ruth Fulton Benedict Papers, File 3 (...)
25Landes sent drafts of her writing to Ruth Benedict from Rio and Benedict coached her to organize the material in two articles: one on “description of the gods” and the other exploring “the control of women.”2 In correspondence with Benedict, Landes developed her analysis of the innovativeness of the emerging new caboclo terreiros as social and public spaces that “culturally provided for” gender and sexual variance.
26In June 1939, Landes returned to New York to begin a research contract with the Carnegie-funded project directed by Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal (1898-1987) that would be published in 1944 as An American Dilemma. The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. Landes consulted with Melville Herskovits, who was also a contract researcher on the Carnegie project. Herskovits advised Landes that “the search for African survivals” was the “single most difficult problem in New World Negro studies” and asked if she had “checked [her] findings concerning the male priestly transvestites with Dr. Ramos.” Landes replied to Herskovits on October 26, 1939:
… the precise data on priestly transvestites I got from Edison Carneiro … I got the hunch, and then went after the data hammer and tongs … And no one else had got the hunch, not even Dr. Ramos, so no one else had relevant data … In long talks with Dr. Ramos at the beginning of my stay … he never touched on kindred matters, though I put questions to him about what looked like the androgynous character of some of the conceptions he reported in [his book] O negro brasileiro, etc. I should remark that he knew only one cult group well …
- 3 Correspondence between Ruth Landes and Melville Herskovits is in the Melville J. Herskovits Papers (...)
27Regarding the search for survivals, Landes disagreed with Herskovits. As Benedict’s student, she was interested in recording lived experience, not collecting lists of culture traits. “This is all a virile situation—no mere survival or crumbling character,” she wrote to Herskovits, “The blacks are citizens of the country, in the main stream of local civilization, and all they do is taken very seriously.”3 In 1940, Landes published two articles: “Fetish worship in Brazil” in Journal of American Folklore and “A cult matriarchate and male homosexuality” in Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. She later published a third article, “Negro slavery and female status” in the Journal of African Affairs (1953), written during the year, 1951-1952, when she was a Fulbright Scholar in Britain. The research memorandum she wrote for the Carnegie project was harshly critiqued by Melville Herskovits and Arthur Ramos and not published.
I wondered if any outsiders could have suspected her position. She sat in the shaded entrance to her house … a tray of sweets on a little stand beside her … she was about five feet tall … a large tooth missing in the front of her mouth … I felt dignity in her, diffident at the moment yet pervasive, accustomed to authority. I noticed her full, heart-shaped face, her small full nose and lips, her cool bronze skin … placing her palms on her thighs … suddenly she was remote … sitting in a loose cotton dress, her great breasts flowed over a great stomach which bulged over tremendous thighs supported by powerful legs tapering to small ankles and feet … “Minha senhora,” she said quietly … “you wanted to see me?” (Landes 1994 [1947], p. 79-80)
- 4 Landes’s evocation of baiana beauty was new. See Corrêa 2000 for analysis of the transition of the (...)
28Landes describes here meeting baiana, street vendor, and respected mãe de santo Mãe Menininha (Maria Escolástica de Nazaré 1894-1986). City of Women is a personal memoir of the months Landes spent in Bahia attending candomblé rites and popular festivals. It is also an ode to the baianas, the daughters and granddaughters of freed slaves, who, following abolition in 1888, moved from rural plantations into coastal cities, where they built new forms of kinship and culture in burgeoning shantytowns. Landes describes the conditions of urban poverty they lived in and their work as street vendors, washerwomen, domestics, and seamstresses. The men worked as stevedores at the international port of Salvador or as bricklayers or in other skilled trades. The people brought with them, closely meshed with the Catholic calendar of saints’ days and religious festivals, the rituals associated with the Afro-Brazilian orixas (gods, spirits) and the trance practices of candomblé. Landes presents the terreiros not only as religious centers but also as mutual support associations and shelters for women. She describes the social services the candomblé terreiros offered to women: loans of money and advice in times of difficulty; refuges from conjugal violence; cures in times of illness; and solace in times of death. Landes respected the responsibility the mães de santo assumed for the management of the candomblé terreiros, where they trained initiates and lived with their children. She admired their beauty, strong bodies, and ease of movement, their hard work and discipline, and their love of music and dance.4
29Landes did not publish City of Women until after the war. She made a decision to publish a popular book without footnotes or bibliography, thinking that writing might be an avenue to earning an income. During the war, like many other anthropologists, she had worked on short-term contracts. Anthropology at Columbia after the war was much changed and Landes found herself without a professional network there. Boas was dead and Benedict’s influence had receded when Ralph Linton (1893-1953) had succeeded Boas as Chair of the Department in 1937. Julian Steward (1902-1972) was at Columbia training a student cohort of male war veterans in his nomothetic theory of cultural ecology. The work of these students, who included Sidney Mintz (1922-2015), Robert Murphy (1924-1990), and Eric Wolf (1923-1999), would influence research directions in American anthropology away from Boasian cultural particularism for decades to come. Landes would teach on part-time contracts and move around the United States until 1965, when she received a permanent position at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, where she lived until she died in 1991.
30Landes’s writing style in City of Women is a unique contribution to Afro-Brazilian studies. The book reads as a personal account of the months she spent in Bahia and retains the direct style of her fieldnotes and diary entries. Landes is a character in the book. She describes her feelings, her responses to people and events, and her relationships to the people she writes about. She addresses race, class, and gender relations not in general theoretical terms but, specifically, through detailed ethnographic description of the micro behaviors through which gender, race, and class circulated in Bahia. She records the race prejudice American expatriates expressed at dinner parties and contrasts their prejudice with her personal and anthropologically trained perspectives. She describes her excursions guided by white elite Bahian men who admonished her that as a white woman she was not to go out in the city alone. As they drive her around Salvador, she notes and later records the condescension she observed in their interactions with Afro-Brazilians they meet. Raised in a working-class immigrant milieu, Landes was sensitive to invocations of class privilege: “The class sentiment of Brazilian society is something to which I never grew accustomed,” she writes (1994 [1947], p. 58).
31She describes her visits with the candomblé leaders, including Mãe Menininha and Martiniano do Bonfim, as well as relationships she developed with younger, emerging leaders. When the elderly Bonfim laments the new practices of the caboclo terreiros and criticizes the leadership styles of young candomblé practitioners who had not been trained in Africa as he had, Landes respects his sadness but she also celebrates the creativity of the new leaders. Landes understood that culture is dynamic: changing social situations and material conditions produce new cultural forms and behaviors. Her ethnographic interest was in these cultural innovations and in the new social spaces they provided for individuals.
32Landes also records her observations of Carneiro’s relations with Afro-Brazilian candomblé practitioners, and it is through her descriptions of Carneiro in City of Women that she explores nuances of class and race relations in Brazil.
He was a liberal … but he was distinctly not a man of the people. His class nature belonged to a system of thought that was different from his social and political ideologies. It showed in his dress and in his speech … He was totally unconscious of it, and he might be amused at my opinion … The quality came out in his relations with the blacks. He was their patron, and they wanted him to be their patron. By their mode of address and flattering ways, they set him above themselves. They were courteous to everyone, but they were more robust and humorous with their own than with him … They liked him because he was an aristocrat … Consequently Edison viewed the candomblé people as from across a gap. To him they were specimens, although of course with an inalienable right to live as they chose … However, the people understood Edison’s attitude, which was their own, and not mine, which came out of another scheme of living. And they respected Edison, knowing the risks he ran at the hands of the police, while they merely tolerated the good intentions Edison told them I had. When it came to trust and reliance, he was their man. (Landes 1994 [1947], p. 59-61; italics mine)
- 5 Correspondence between Ruth Landes and Edison Carneiro in the Ruth Landes Papers, Box 4.
33When City of Women was published in 1947, Carneiro wrote to Landes5:
I read your book and was amazed to see how “undying” are indeed the memories of that time—those beautiful and glorious days of Bahia. Even the simplest things—like the song of Master Domingos and the name Aydano and others called me, Mestre Antigo—were not forgotten by you. It’s wonderful … I think you said very little about your own studies and put to my credit many of your own findings. That is not loyal to you. In my opinion you made an honest, real, good, intelligent book and, although I’m not always satisfied with my portrait, as in the case of my aristocracy, it amuses me (or, in Portuguese, eu acho graça) to read the things you recall. I cannot accustom myself with the idea that you could not make the book you would have written—a scientific one. But I am grateful to you for not letting that year die, for reviving those incidents of our daily life among the blacks of Bahia, for upholding the dreamy, one-thousand-nighty tale of our friendly partnership. (Edison Carneiro to Ruth Landes, July 28, 1947, RLP, Box 4)
34In 1961, Carneiro was appointed Director of the Campanha de Defesa do Folclore Brasileiro, a new national agency for the protection of the country’s folklore and popular culture. One of the first projects he undertook was the translation of City of Women into Portuguese. Following the military coup in 1964, Carneiro was removed from the folklore agency. However, he remained committed to the book and completed the translation himself: “a labor of Hercules,” he wrote to Landes on December 22, 1966. On October 6, 1967, Carneiro wrote to Landes that the first Brazilian edition had finally appeared: “The great Cidade das Mulheres came out—veio à luz—exactly on the 24 of August, Saint Bartholomew’s Day.” Carneiro also translated the three articles Landes had published in academic journals and included these as an appendix, bringing together in one volume, and for a Brazilian readership, all of Landes’s writing on Brazil. It was Carneiro who ensured a place for her work in Brazilian anthropology.
35Landes aligned with Carneiro’s materialist analysis of Afro-Brazilian culture and not the mental hygiene approach of Arthur Ramos or the culture trait lists and classification of African “survivals” that preoccupied Melville Herskovits. She interpreted Freyre’s racial democracy thesis through her personal experience of race relations in Brazil, which she described as “another scheme of living” from race segregation in the US. “In our country,” she wrote,
we expect all persons of color to feel a mutual bond. We ignore the fact that this does not happen to be the case … In Brazil no such assumption is even dreamed of. Everyone knows that the differences of education, occupation and family distinction create a gap as yawning as the American one, which is based solely on color. (Landes 1994 [1947], p. 60)
Landes saw race as a shifting category that is mobilized in social relations but whose meaning is situationally dependent.
36Landes treated candomblé as a new institution under continual creation by freed slaves for everyday purposes in new urban settings. Her appreciation for the historical specificity and dynamic vitality of Afro-Brazilian culture and her expectations of the cultural diversity and heterogeneity of Afro-descendant populations in the Americas anticipate arguments Sidney Mintz and Richard Price would bring together two decades later (1976, p. 18). Her observations on the intersections of class and race in Bahia, out of step with the assimilationist school of race relations led by Ramos in the 1930s, reappear in the work of Columbia anthropologist Marvin Harris (1927-2001), who conducted fieldwork in Minas Gerais under Charles Wagley’s supervision after the war and argued that class establishes the meaning of race “in every real situation” in Brazil (Harris 1952, p. 63). Scholarly debate on the role of class and the unique construction of race in Brazil continues.
37Landes’s descriptions of women’s leadership in candomblé and of women-centered relationships in poor Afro-Brazilian neighborhoods in Salvador, Bahia, was affirmed in the work of black sociologist Franklin Frazier in the 1940s (Frazier 1942, 1992 [1942]). Her work also foreshadowed studies of matrifocality in working-class and Afro-American households that began to be published in the 1950s and the now-vast feminist scholarship on women-centered households in impoverished communities globally (Hoodfar 1997; Scheper-Hughes 1992). Landes’s descriptions of candomblé as “a subaltern space for female solidarity and alternative sexual and gendered expression” (McNeal 2016) presaged research on gender and sexuality in Afro-Brazilian studies that continues to this day (Birman 1995; Fry 1982). Finally, Landes’s anthropology was also a modernist project, shared with Benedict, to understand the gendered individual’s experience of culture as making a “life” in a particular time and place. Landes’s writing was life writing and her purpose as an anthropologist was ultimately and intrinsically humanist: to appreciate what a “life” is, what it is to be human, in all its possible variety.