The creative constraints of tradition: Ethnic art and social intervention in the Afro-Brazilian context

Abstract

The historic 2002 election victory of the Workers Party in Brazil promised a more democratic cultural policy. A key symbol of change was the appointment as Minister of Culture of Gilberto Gil, pop star of the 1960s tropicalist counter-culture movement, organic activist of the Afro-centric carnival of Bahia state and Green Party politician. In racial and cultural politics, the moment coincides with steady assimilation into the Brazilian academic landscape of both North American quantitative sociological approaches and of British and other North-Atlantic Cultural Studies movements, and separately, with consolidation of cultural tourism predicated on Afro-Brazilian ethnic identity, both as heritage and performance. This essay elucidates relations between these heterogeneous progressive strands informing cultural policy, explores implicit divergences in their respective understandings of ethnic identity and outlines subjacent theoretical contradictions. Ethnicity is then considered in pragmatic instances, first in its contrastive acceptations as a term in common parlance in Brazil versus the US, then in terms of subjective awareness and creative implementation of ethnic identity in popular practice, notably in Afro-Brazilian religion. Such living traditions orient prospective creative agendas as much as they invoke the past and thus dialogue with contemporaneous critical views. The pragmatics of performative competence constitutes a third domain in the composite construction of ethnicity. Whereas ideological values inform academic and consumer constructions of ethnicity, the symbolic language of the stylistic repertoire of performative modes linking to ethnic identity—in this case, percussion—partly eludes both incorporation in ideological rationalizations and commodification, with the crucial incidental effect of sustaining the mystery of ethnic essence. Ethnicity is predicated on subjective associations and appropriations between abstract values, creative practices, and social effects; the complexity of these elements and their relations affords considerable autonomy, particularly to ethnic art.