Brazil has long been known for the diversity of its social and racial identity, with lots of ways for people to identify along racial and ethnic dimensions, in contrast to the US where the social identity of race was forced into a binary black-white contrast. More recently a US style black-white oppositional style of political identity has been growing in Brazil. This project involves the dissertation research of an anthropology student from the University of Michigan, studying race, class and collective political action in Brazil. The student will study political activities and social implications of membership in three neighborhood carnival and political associations in Salvador, a focal point for Afro-Brazilian political mobilization. One group represents the while elite, another traditional black culture, and the third represents contemporary a black power movement. The project will test three hypotheses, that the salience of a new `black` Brazilian identity is growing at the expense of intermediate racial-ethnic-cultural categories with which a majority of local people have traditionally identified; that the common racial identity will be more salient as a ground for common interest than the diverse class, educational, residential, gender or age identities; and that the newer `black identity` organizations will weaken the older vertical, patron-client relations that have structured local politics in the past. The student will conduct participant observation in the groups as well as administer questionnaires to a sample survey of 60 members of each. In addition formal life histories will be elicited from a smaller number of members. This research will expand our knowledge of this important region of the world, advance the training of a young social scientist, and provide new knowledge about changes in race as an organizing principle in Brazilian society.
