Abstract
The ethnographic study of tourism in Latin America and the Caribbean offers the opportunity to examine the ways that racial ideologies perpetuate social inequality, debunking the myth of racial democracy in countries such as Brazil. In the case of Brogodó, in Bahia, Brazil, structural inequality and racial ideology limit the equal participation of Brazilians of African descent in the local ecotourism industry. This article draws on evidence from ethnographic research to investigate the relationship of structural inequality, racial ideology, and cultural and symbolic capital. In the ecotourism industry, employer discourses emphasizing the limits of local community members’ cultural capital conceal their preference for employees exhibiting both the habitus and phenotypic traits associated with whiteness, reflecting broader social and economic practices that discriminate against African-descendent Brazilians. The ability to naturalize habitus and disguise racial ideology behind discussions of education and qualifications reflects employers’ and members of the dominant classes’ symbolic power.
Highlights
O estudo etnográfico do turismo na América Latina e o Caribe oferece aos estudiosos a oportunidade de examinar as formas pelas quais as ideologias raciais perpetuam a desigualdade social, suplantando o mito da democracia racial em países como o Brasil
We argue that in the ecotourism industry, employer discourses emphasizing the limits of local community members’ cultural capital conceal those employers’ preference for employees exhibiting both the habitus and the phenotypic traits associated with whiteness, a reflection of broader social and economic practices of discrimination against African-descendent Brazilians
Our findings are consistent with studies of occupational segregation that examine the ways in which employers use racial ideology and discourses to justify their employment practices and treatment of their employees (Harrison and Lloyd 2013; Holmes 2007; Maldonado 2009; Zamudio and Lichter 2008), as well as studies demonstrating that race relations in Brazil consist of exclusionary structures and practices—including black Brazilians being considered unqualified for certain forms of employment (Damasceno 2000; Mikulak 2011; Santos and Inocêncio 2006; Soares 2000; Baran 2007)
Summary
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Brazilian elites carried out a national project to usher Brazil into modernity (Weinstein 2015). Class and disposition are embedded in the classification of race, which seems to indicate the potential for individuals to be upwardly mobile irrespective of their phenotypic traits (Degler 1986), African-descendent Brazilians face significant obstacles to achieving an upper-class status or prestige This is largely due to the legacy of slavery, persistent racial discrimination, and structural inequality that has resulted in unequal opportunities in education and employment, among other challenges, for generations of black Brazilians. Whiteness affords dominant groups symbolic power, “that invisible power which can be exercised only with the complicity of those who do not want to know that they are subject to it or even that they themselves exercise it” (Bourdieu 1991, 164) This power includes the ability to naturalize and racialize habitus, rather than acknowledge that it is the product of social and structural inequality (McKnight and Chandler 2012), and to reinforce racial domination (Hancock 2008). Bourdieu (1986, 245) stated that cultural capital is “predisposed to function as symbolic capital,” in the Brazilian context, to fully understand the complex structural, ideological and discursive pathways by which the exclusion of rural, working-class, black Brazilians from certain types of employment is justified and naturalized, the theoretical lenses of cultural capital and symbolic capital and power should be examined separately, but in close relationship to one another
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