Hostname: page-component-5c6d5d7d68-wbk2r Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-18T21:06:11.890Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘Puffy, Ugly, Slothful and Inert’: Degeneration in Brazilian Social Thought, 1880–1940

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

Dain Borges
Dain Borges
Affiliation:
visiting scholar at the Centro de Estudos d demografia de demografia Historica da América Latina, Universidad de São Paulo.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Brazilian discussions of race between 1880 and 1940 were partly a use of European scientific theory to rationalise the native system of colour discrimination. When scientific orthodoxy turned against ‘race’ between 1920 and 1945, much of the intellectual racism of Brazil also dispersed. Quite rightly, most intellectual histories of race in Brazil stress a disjuncture around 1930. However, from the 1870s onward, and most clearly after abolition, there was also a medical-psychiatric strand to ‘race’ that can be unravelled from the rest of the skein. Part of racial thinking in Brazil reflected the general medicalisation of social thought that began when early-nineteenth-century physicians called for hygienic reforms within upper-class families to protect children from hereditary or environmental contaminations. The Spencerian and Comtean positivist social science that became fashionable in Brazil after 1870 also contributed to medicalisation. It saw society as an organism, and compared the role of the social scientist to the role of the physician: to examine symptoms of disease and propose therapies. From the 1880s through the 1920s, the national ailment that the medicalised social thought of Brazil most often diagnosed, an ailment that connected individual health to national well-being, was degeneration.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , May 1993 , pp. 235 - 256
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Skidmore, T., Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought (New York, 1970)Google Scholar; Costa, E. Viotti da, ‘The Myth of Racial Democracy: A Legacy of the Empire’, inThe Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories (Chicago, 1985), pp. 238–40Google Scholar.

2 Borges, D., The Family in Bahia, Brazil, 1870–1945 (Stanford, 1992), pp. 90–9Google Scholar; Costa, J. Freire, Ordem médica e norma familiar (Rio de Janeiro, 1979), pp. 171–5Google Scholar.

3 Morse, R. M., ‘Latin American Intellectuals and the City, 1860–1940’, Journal of Latin American Studies 10, 2 (1978), pp. 219–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hale, C. A., The Transformation of Liberalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Princeton, 1989), pp. 210–15Google Scholar.

4 Chamberlain, J. E. and Giltnan, S. L. (eds.), Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress (New York, 1985)Google Scholar, presents a range of approaches to the understanding of degeneration. See also Nye, R. A., Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pick, D., Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–c. 1918 (Cambridge, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 de Gobineau, A., The Inequality of the Races (New York, 1967), p. 25Google Scholar. Morel, B. A., Traité des dégérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de Pespèce humaine (Paris, 1857Google Scholar; rpt. New York, 1976), p. 4. See also J. A. Boon, ‘Anthropology and Degeneration: Birds, Words and Orangutans’, pp. 24–48, and E. T. Carlson, ‘Medicine and Degeneration: Theory and Praxis’, in Chamberlain and Gilman, Degeneration, pp. 121–44; Starn, R., ‘Meaning-Levels in the Theme of Historical Decline’, History and Theory 14, 1 (1975), pp. 1–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Skidmore, Black Into White; Viotti da Costa, ‘Myth’. In this, Brazilian intellectuals were quite different from those in the United States; cf. Frederickson, G. M., The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York, 1971), pp. 265 and 321Google Scholar.

7 Davis, J. A., Conflict and Control: Law and Order in Nineteenth Century Italy (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nye, Crime, Madness and Politics, pp. 310–40; Rosenberg, C. E., ‘George M. Beard and American Nervousness’, in No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought (Baltimore, 1976), pp. 98–108Google Scholar; Beard defined neurasthenia in 1869, and popularised it in books in 1880 and 1881; Jones, G. S., Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society (New York, 1984), pp. 330–3Google Scholar.

8 Nordau, M., Degeneration (New York, 1968)Google Scholar. Bon, G. Le, The Crowd (New York, 1960)Google Scholar; Nye, R. A., The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave Le Bon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic (London, 1975)Google Scholar; Barrows, S., Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven, 1981)Google Scholar; McClelland, J. S., The Crowd and the Mob: From Plato to Canetti (London, 1989)Google Scholar.

9 Stoler, A. L., ‘Making Empires Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th-century Colonial Cultures’, American Ethnologist 16, 4 (1989), pp. 634–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harris, M., The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture (New York, 1968)Google Scholar.

10 Tytler, G., Physiognomy in the European Novel: Faces and Fortunes (Princeton, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Curtis, L. P. Jr, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Washington, D.C., 1971)Google Scholar; Honour, H., The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. iv, From the American Revolution to World War I, Part 2, Black Models and White Myths (Cambridge, Mass., 1989)Google Scholar; Mosse, G., Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York, 1978)Google Scholar.

11 Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics, pp. 103–9; Pick, Faces, esp. pp. 139–43; Carlson, , ‘Medicine and Degeneration’; Kevles, D., In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York, 1985)Google Scholar.

12 C. E. Rosenberg, ‘The Bitter Fruit: Heredity, Disease, and Social Thought’, in No Other Gods, pp. 257ndash;53; Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics; Stepan, N. L., The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800–1960 (Hamden, Conn., 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harris, Rise of Anthropological Theory.

13 There were certainly exceptions, including the criminal anthropological work of Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, and the bacteriological work of the Oswaldo Cruz Institute; see M. Corrêa, ‘As ilusões da liberdade: A Escola Nina Rodrigues e a antropologia no Brasil’, PhD diss., Universidade de São Paulo, 1982; and Stepan, N. L., The Beginnings of Brazilian Science: Oswaldo Cruz, Medical Research and Policy, 1890–1920 (New York, 1976)Google Scholar.

14 Borges, Family in Bahia, pp. 96–104. The most cited early nineteenth-century medical text on wet nursing was the manual of Imbert, J. B. A., Guia médica das mães de família (1843)Google Scholar, excerpted in Conrad, R. (ed.), Children of God's Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil (Princeton, 1983) pp. 135–6Google Scholar. On views of consanguinity, see Botelho, J. da Silva, Heranca (Salvador, 1878)Google Scholar, and one of the first Mendelian treatises in Brazil Moniz, G., A consangüineidade e o Código Civil Brasileiro (Rio de Janeiro, 1925)Google Scholar. See also Freire Costa, Ordem médica; Machado, R. et al. , Danaçao da norma: Medicina social e constituição da psiquiatria no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1978)Google Scholar; Graham, S. Lauderdale, House and Street: The Domestic World of Masters and Servants in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro (Cambridge, 1986)Google Scholar.

15 See Needell, J., A Tropical Belle Époque: Elite Culture and Society in Turn-of-the-Century Rio de Janeiro (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 1–22 and 185–96Google Scholar; Skidmore, Black Into White.

16 Rodrigues, R. Nina, ‘Metissage, dégénérescence et crime’, Archives d' Anthropokgie Criminelle 14 (1899), pp. 477–516Google Scholar; see also ‘Os mestiços brasileiros’, in Ramos, A. (ed.), As collectividades anormaes (Rio de Janeiro, 1939), pp. 195–218Google Scholar.

17 Rodrigues, R. Nina, Os africanos no Brasil (São Paulo, 1976)Google Scholar, and O animismo fetichista dos negros bahianos (São Paulo, 1935).

18 Rodrigues, R. Nina, As raças humanas e a responsabilidade penal no Brasil (Salvador, 1957)Google Scholar; Corrêa, ‘llusões da liberdade’.

19 R. Nina Rodrigues, ‘A loucura epidémica de Canudos: Antônio Conselheiro e os jagun¸os’, in As colkctividades anormaes, pp. 50–77; Nina Rodrigues, ‘A loucura das multidões: Nova contribuição estudo das loucuras epidémicas no Brasil’, in As collectividades anormaes, pp. 78–153.

20 R. Nina Rodrigues, ‘Lucas da Feira’, in As collectividades anormaes, pp. 153–64.

21 Süssekind, F., Tal Brasil, qual romance? Uma ideologia estética e sua história: o naturalismo (Rio de Janeiro, 1984)Google Scholar; Loos, D. Scott, The Naturalistic Novel of Brazil (New York, 1963)Google Scholar. On medical education and literature, see Borges, Family in Bahia, pp. 87–90 and 102–3; on literature and social sciences, see Candido, A., ‘Literatura e cultura de 1900 a 1945’, in Literatura e sociedade: Estudos de teoria e história literária (São Paulo, 1976), pp. 109–38, esp. 120–1Google Scholar.

22 Matta, R. Da, Carnivals, Rogues and Heroes: Toward an Interpretation of the Brazilian Dilemma (Notre Dame, Ind., 1991), pp. 137–97Google Scholar. See Schwarcz, L. Moritz, Retrato em branco e negro: Jornais, escravos e cidadãos em São Paulo no final do século XIX (São Paulo, 1987)Google Scholar, on science, appearance, and illusion in the popular press, pp. 11–12, 85, 100–11, 232 and 237; Engel, M., Meretrizes e doutores: Saber médico e prostituição no Rio de Janeiro (1840–1890) (Sāo Paulo, 1988), pp 80–1Google Scholar, 89–90, on the association of prostitution with disguise.

23 Imbert, , Guia médica; Pereira, J. Leite de Mello, Breves considerações sobre a educação physica e moral dos meninos (Salvador, 1853), p. 3Google Scholar. See conventional advice in Bahiense, L. A. de Souza, Da alimentação das criancas na primeira infâ (Salvador, 1898), p. 22Google Scholar; and Albemaz, P. de Barros, Primeira infância (Hygiene e aleitamento) (Salvador, 1898), pp. 24 and 48–53Google Scholar.

24 Nina Rodrigues,‘Loucura das multidões’, pp. 131–2. He also found seeming normality in the skull of the bandit Lucas da Feira, which led him to conclude that Lucas was not a born criminal, but the type of an African chief misplaced in a European civilisation; Nina Rodrigues, ‘Lucas da Feira’, pp. 158–62. On beliefs, see Animismo fetichista, pp. 13–20.

25 de Azevedo, A., O homem (São Paulo, 1970), pp. 36 and 202Google Scholar.

26 [J.B.] Monteiro Lobato, letter to Carlos Rangel, 1908, cited in Patai, D., ‘Race and Politics in Two Brazilian Utopias’, Luso-Brazilian Review 19, 1 (Summer 1982), pp. 66–81, p. 73Google Scholar. Freyre, G., ‘Preface to the Second English-Language Edition’, in The Masters and the Slaves (New York, 1956), p. xxviiGoogle Scholar; Freyre, G., Tempo motto e outros tempos: Trechos de um diário de adolescência eprimeira mocidade, 1915–1950 (Rio de Janeiro, 1975), p. 112Google Scholar.

27 Souza, L. de Mello e, Desclassificados do ouro: A pobreza mineira no século XVIII, 2nd edn. (Rio de Janeiro, 1986), pp. 55–7Google Scholar, 64 and 215–22, traces an ‘ideologia da vadiagem’ (an ideology of laziness) regarding poor freemen, from eighteenth-century Brazil back through fourteenth-century Portugal.

28 Pereira, Mello, Breves considerações (1853), pp. 18Google Scholar and 20–: ‘Servile treatment turns the character vile and low.’; Carteado, E., Da cultura d' alma na infâ (Salvador, 1913), p. 79–79Google Scholar.

29 Marques, X., Ofeiticeiro (São Paulo, 1975)Google Scholar, first published as Boto & Cia, in 1897, revised as O feiticeiro in 1922; de Assis, J. M. Machado, Memorias póstumas de Brás Cubas [translated as Epitaph of a Small Winner (New York, 1990)]Google Scholar; on Braz Cubas, see Schwarz, R., Um mestre na periferia do capitalismo: Machado de Assis (São Paulo, 1990)Google Scholar.

30 de Azevedo, A., O mulato (Rio de Janeiro, 1938)Google Scholar [translated as Mulatto (Rutherford, N. J., 1990)] homem, O; O cortiço (Rio de Janeiro, 1948)Google Scholar [translated as A Brazilian Tenement (New York, 1926)]. See also, P. Fry, ‘L'eonie, Pombinha, Amaro e Aleixo: Prostituição, homossexualidade e raça em dois romances naturalistas’, in Eulálio, A. et al. , Caminhos cruzados: Linguagem, antropologia e ciâncias naturals (São Paulo, 1982), pp. 53–63Google Scholar.

31 de Azevedo, A., Casa de pensã (Rio de Janeiro, 1940)Google Scholar.

32 Peixoto, A., Epilepsia e crime (Salvador, 1898)Google Scholar; Barros, E. da Rocha, Estygmas da degeneração psychica (Salvador, 1893)Google Scholar; Corrêa, ‘Ilusões da liberdade’.

33 On therapies, see Warren, D., ‘A terapia espfrita no Rio de Janeiro por volta de 1900’, Religião e Sociedade 2, 3 (1984), pp. 1–36Google Scholar, and ‘The Healing Art in the Urban Setting, 1880–1930’, paper presented to the Symposium on Popular Dimensions of Brazil, University of California at Los Angeles, 1–2 Feb. 1979; Hess, D., ‘The Many Rooms of Spiritism in Brazil’, Luso-Brazilian Review 24, 2 (1987), pp. 15–34Google Scholar.

34 Nina Rodrigues, ‘Loucura das multidões’.

35 Rio, J. do [P. Barreto], As religiões do Rio (Rio de Janeiro, 1904)Google Scholar. Süssekind, TalBrasil, pp. 142–4, argues that Domingos Olfmpio's naturalistic novel, Luzia-Homem (1903) cuts across the conventions of naturalist scientism by subversively showing the triumph of folk wisdom and folk magic over science in the plot. It may be that costumbrista conventions (or rural, ‘regionalist’ settings) gave Brazilian authors leverage to satirise science, as in de Oliveira, Cardoso's Dois metros e cinco (Rio de Janeiro, 1905)Google Scholar.

36 Marques, O feiticeiro, p. 209; see also the claims of Nina Rodrigues, in 0 animismo fetichista, pp. 71 and 91–2, that many upper-class Bahians were clients of candomblé.

37 For an example of a reading emphasising ‘race relations’, see Skidmore, Black Into White, pp. 103–9; cf D. Borges, ‘El reverso fatal de los acontecimientos: Dos momentos de la degeneration en la literatura brasileña’, in Ciplijauskaité, B. and Maurer, C. (eds.), La voluntad de humanismo: Homenaje a Juan Marichal (Barcelona, 1990), pp. 121–33Google Scholar. for revisionist accounts of Canudos see Cava, R. Delia, ‘Brazilian Messianism and National Institutions: A Reappraisal of Canudos and Joaseiro’, Hispanic American Historical Review 48, 3 (08 1968), pp. 402–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Levine, R., Vale of Tears: Revisiting the Canudos Massacre in Northeastern Brazil, 1893–97 (Berkeley, 1992)Google Scholar.

38 Da Cunha, Rebellion in the Backlands, pp. 117–18.

39 Ibid., p. 129; Nina Rodrigues, ‘Loucura epidémica’.

40 Da Cunha, Rebellion in the Backlands, pp. 277, 279, 230–1 and 234.

41 See, e.g., de Castro, Viveiros, Attentados ao pudor (Estudo sobre as aberraţões do instincto sexual) (Rio de Janeiro, 1895), pp. xi–xiiGoogle Scholar: ‘Any superficial observer notes immediately that the Brazilian character has a propensity to sensuality and to love … Is there, however, merely an exuberance of the sexual instinct or are we already in degeneration?’

42 de Azevedo, C. M. Marinho, Onda negra, medo branco: O negro no imaginário das elites, século XIX (Rio de Janeiro, 1987)Google Scholar; Conrad, R., ‘The Planter Class and the Debate over Chinese Immigration to Brazil, 1850–1893’, International Migrations Review 9, 1 (Spring 1975) PP. 41–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Meade, T. and Pirio, G. A., ‘In Search of the Afro-American “Eldorado”: Attempts by North American Blacks to Enter Brazil in the 1920s’, Luso-Brazilian Review 25, 1 (Summer 1988), pp. 85–110Google Scholar; Skidmore, Black Into White.

43 Social-control policies seem to have taken on a new urgency around 1890. On prostitution, compare Engel, Meretrizes, and Rago, M., Do cabaré ao lar: A Utopia da cidade disciplinar; Brasil, 1890–1930 (Rio de Janeiro, 1985)Google Scholar; on domestic service, Graham, House and Street.

44 Needell, A Tropical Belle Epoque; Sevcenko, N., Literatura como missão: Tensões sociais e criacão cultural na Primeira República (São Paulo, 1983)Google Scholar; de Carvalho, J. Murilo, Os bestializados: O Rio de Janeiroea Repüblica que nãofoi (São Paulo, 1987)Google Scholar; Needell, J., ‘A Revolta Contra Vacina’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 67, 2, (05 1987), pp. 233–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 Bomfim, M., América Latina: Males de origem (Paris and Rio de Janeiro, 1903)Google Scholar; Süssekind, F. and Ventura, R., Históriae dependência: Culturae sociedade em Manoel Bomfim (São Paulo, 1984)Google Scholar.

46 Querino, M. R., ‘O africano como colonisador’, in A raça africana e os seus costumes (Salvador, 1955), pp. 121–52Google Scholar; translated in Querino, M. R., The African Contribution to Brazilian Civilisation (Tempe, Arizona, 1978)Google Scholar, Special Studies no. 18, p. 19.

47 de Assis, Machado, Epitaph, p. 172; ‘The Psychiatrist’, trans, of ‘O alienista’, in The Psychiatrist and Other Stories (Berkeley, 1963)Google Scholar.

48 de Castro-Santos, L. A., ‘Power, Ideology, and Public Health in Brazil, 1889–1930’, PhD. diss., Harvard University, 1987Google Scholar.

49 Lobato, Monteiro, ‘Urupês’, in Urupês, 9th edn (São Paulo, 1923), p. 254Google Scholar; and prefaces, pp. vii and x.

50 Lobato, Monteiro, ‘Jeca Tatú: A resurreição’, collected as ‘O problema vital’ in Mr.Slange O Brasil e O problema vital, Obras completas vol. 8 (São Paulo, 1948)Google Scholar. Monteito Lobato said that the story ‘Jeca Tatú’ had been reprinted as a pamphlet by a pharmaceutical company, which circulated” 15 million copies in the countryside, and became known as the ‘Jecatatuzinho’. This was not Monteiro Lobato's last word on race; in 1926 he published O presidents negro, ou, O cheque das raças, a cynical potboiler of eugenic science fiction in which all American blacks are sterilised by a hair-straightening ray. See Patai, ‘Race and Polities’.

51 Penna, B., Saneamento do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1918)Google Scholar.

52 Carlson, ‘Medicine and Degeneration’, pp. 134 and 138; Degler, C., In Search of Human Nature: Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York, 1991)Google Scholar: Proctor, R., Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge, Mass., 1988)Google Scholar.

53 Hughes, H. S., Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930 (New York, 1961)Google Scholar.

54 Gomes, Angela Maria de Castro, Burguesia e trabalho: Politico e legislaçao social no Brasil 1917–1937 (Rio de Janeiro, 1979)Google Scholar.

55 Prado, Paulo, Retrato do Brasil: Ensaio sobre a tristeza brasileira (São Paulo, 1981), pp. 93Google Scholar and 136–8.

56 Ibid., p. 94.

57 Freyre, ‘Preface’, pp. xxvi–xxvii.

58 Stepan, N. L., ‘Eugenic s in Brazil, 1917–1940’, in Adams, M. B. (ed.), The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil and Russia (New York, 1990), pp. 110–47Google Scholar, esp. pp. 138–44.

59 Freyre, Masters, p. 428.

60 Freyre, Masters, p. 278.

61 Candido, A., ‘Prefá;cio’, in de Holanda, S. Buarque, Raises do Brasil, 14th edn (Rio de Janeiro, 1981)Google Scholar.

62 Freyre, G., ‘Acerca da valorização do preto’, in Tempo de aprendiz: Artigos publicados em jornais na adolescência e na primeira mocidade do autor (1918–1926) (São Paulo, 1979), 2, pp. 329–30Google Scholar.

63 de Andrade, Mário, Macunaima, trans. Goodland, E. A. (New York, 1984), pp. 76–7Google Scholar; Macunaima (São Paulo, 1944), p. 103.

64 Cunha, M. C. Pereira, O espelho do mundo: Juquery, a história de um asilo (Rio de Janeiro, 1986), pp. 178–83Google Scholar; P. Fry, ‘Febrônio Indio do Brasil: Onde cruzam a psiquiatria, a profecia, a homossexualidade e a lei’, in Caminhos cruzados, pp. 65–80.

65 Corrêa, ‘Husões da liberdade’ M. Corrêa, ‘Antropologia e medicina legal: Variações em torno de um mito’, in Caminhos cruzados, pp. 53–63; Stepan, ‘Eugenics’.

66 Stepan, ‘Eugenics’ Costa, J. Freire, História da psiquiatria no Brasil: Um corte ideológico (Rio de Janeiro, 1976)Google Scholar; Luz, M., Medicina e ordem politica brasileira: Politicas e instituiçõco de saude (1850–1930) (Rio de Janeiro, 1982), esp. pp. 173–88Google Scholar; Castro-Santos, ‘Power, Ideology’.

67 de Araújo, R. Benzaquem, Totalitarismo e revolução: O Integralismo de Plinio Salgado (Rio de Janeiro, 1987)Google Scholar.

68 Schwartzman, S., Bomeny, H. M. Bosque, and Costa, W. M. Ribeiro, Tempos de Capanema (Rio de Janeiro, 1984)Google Scholar; Matos, C., Acertei no milhar: Malandragem e samba no tempo de Getúlio (Rio de Janeiro, 1982)Google Scholar.

69 Lenharo, A., Sacralização da politico (Campinas, 1986)Google Scholar; Lamounier, B., ‘Formação de um pensamento politico autoritario na Primeira República: Uma interpretação’, in Fausto, B., ed., História geral da civilização brasileira, Tomo III, O Brasil republicano, vol. 2, Sociedade e instituções (1889–1930) (Rio de Janeiro, 1977), pp. 343–74Google Scholar.