Preface and Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Being, through the Archive 1
1. "The Eighteenth Battalion of Love": Failure and the
Dissemination of Misinterpretation 44
2. Letters to the Amazons 102
3. Prostitution's Bureaucracy: Making Up People in the "City of
Women" 141
4. A Metaphysics for Our Time: Pelourinho Properties, Bahian Social
Bodies, and the Shifting Meanings of Rams and Fetuses 181
5. Treasure Tales and National Bodies: Mystery and Metaphor in
Bahian Life 215
6. "But Madame, What If I Should Need to Defecate in Your
Neighborhood?" 266
7. "Chatty Chatty Mouth, You Want to Know Your Culture"
305
Conclusion: Saints, Not Angels 345
Appendix: Acronyms Used 363
Notes 365
References 411
Index 443
John F. Collins is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.
"The rich and multifaceted analysis Collins presents in this book
is sure to be of interest to a wide range of readers. Its highly
original and provocative analysis of heritage politics and memory,
as well as racial politics in Brazil, makes it a must-read for
scholars in these fields. In addition, the book has much to offer
to a readership concerned with urban poverty and government efforts
to address it, tourism, and the deep entanglements of social
scientific scholarship with local politics of culture, race,
history, and morality. Finally, the manner in which Collins
translates sensitive ethnographic research and description into
thought-provoking theoretical insight speaks directly to recent
anthropological discussions on ethnographic theorization."
*Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology*
"...remarkably iconoclastic analysis of race, space, and
history.... ethnography that invades the minds and stirs the guts
of all those involved in its contents and consumption."
*AAG Review of Books*
"This is indeed a gringo who knows his Brazil; the analysis is
laced with poetry, with the plots of classic novels, with smells,
odd recollections, postcards, music, maps, numerous black-and-white
photographs, and with emotion—including a millennial version of the
sadness of the tropics..."
*Journal of Anthropological Research*
"There can be little doubt... that this important book will long
remain a touchstone for future research on the perils of top-down
management of a vulnerable community’s cultural heritage."
*International Journal of Cultural Property*
"[An] extraordinarily detailed and theoretically imaginative
exploration of how elite and nonelite ideas of Afro-Bahian history
and identity coincide, collide, and mutually refract in the decades
both before and after the UNESCO declaration."
*American Ethnologist*
"[Revolt of the Saints] succeeds in disturbing conventional
platitudes about race and history in the construction of a
Brazilian national identity. It is theoretically subtle,
methodologically extraordinary, and adds a healthy dose of cynicism
to the vast and often starry-eyed ethnography of black people in
Bahia."
*Anthropological Quarterly*
"Collins’s book is a Caribbean pepperpot stew, an ongoing accretion
of ingredients simmered for long periods. It is mature, flavourful,
surprising and rewarding. Its constant reflexive re-framings and
maze-like progressions fascinate, and occasionally produce an
Alice-through-the-looking-glass sense of (not unpleasurable)
disorientation."
*Journal of Latin American Studies*
"With this book John F. Collins explores the possibilities of
ethnography in a very elegant and sensorial way,
without neglecting to offer a novel and very well-illustrated
approach to the contemporary politics of patrimony and how it ties
with racial politics, turning race from quality into a historical
and historicised property."
*Social Anthropology*
"[Collins's] retelling of the contemporary reconstruction of
the Pelourinho is imaginative and unconventional. . .
. Collins enriches our understanding of contemporary shifts in
Bahian racial politics."
*H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews*
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