The Mystery of Samba: Popular Music and National Identity in Brazil

By Hermano Vianna

Samba is Brazil's "national rhythm," the foremost symbol of its culture and nationhood. To the outsider, samba and the famous pre-Lenten carnival of which it is the centerpiece seem to showcase the country's African heritage. Within Brazil, however, samba symbolizes the racial and cultural mixture that, since the 1930s, most Brazilians have come to believe defines their unique national identity.
But how did Brazil become "the Kingdom of Samba" only a few decades after abolishing slavery in 1888? Typically, samba is represented as having changed spontaneously, mysteriously, from a "repressed" music of the marginal and impoverished to a national symbol cherished by all Brazilians. Here, however, Hermano Vianna shows that the nationalization of samba actually rested on a long history of relations between different social groups--poor and rich, weak and powerful--often working at cross-purposes to one another.
A fascinating exploration of the "invention of tradition," The Mystery of Samba is an excellent introduction to Brazil's ongoing conversation on race, popular culture, and national identity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Nov 9, 2000
• ISBN: 9780807898864

Hermano Vianna

Hermano Vianna is a Brazilian anthropologist and writer who currently works in television.

Book preview

The Mystery of Samba

A BOOK IN THE SERIES

Latin Americain

Translation /

en Traductión /

em Tradução

Sponsored by the Duke-Uniuersity of North Carolina

Joint Program in Latin American Studies

The Mystery of Samba

Popular Music & National Identity in Brazil

Hermano Vianna

Edited and Translated by

John Charles Chasteen

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill & London

© 1999

The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Originally published in Portuguese with

the title O mistério do samba (Rio de Janeiro:

J. Zahar Editor and the Universidade Federal

do Rio de Janeiro, 1995).

Designed by Richard Hendel

Set in Quadraat and Matra

by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Translation of the books in the series Latin America

in Translation / en Traducción / em Tradução, a

collaboration between the Duke-University of

North Carolina Joint Program in Latin American

Studies and the university presses of Duke and the

University of North Carolina, is supported by a

grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for

permanence and durability of the Committee on

Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the

Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Vianna, Hermano, 1960-

[Mistério do samba. English]

The mystery of samba : popular music and national

identity in Brazil / by Hermano Vianna ; edited and

translated by John Charles Chasteen.

    p. cm. — (Latin America in translation/en

traducción/em tradução)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8078-2464-x (cloth: alk. paper).—

ISBN 0-8078-4766-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Samba (Dance)—Brazil. 2. Popular music—

Brazil—History and criticism. 3. Music and society—

Brazil. I. Chasteen, John Charles, 1955–

II. Title. III. Series.

ML3465.V5313 1999

784.18’88-dc21 98-22170

CIP

MN

03                                5 4 3

For

Herbert and Helder,

my brothers, who lend

continuity (onstage and

backstage) to the history

of Brazilian music

We never finish arriving,

the moving island and I.

Mobile earth, uncertain sky,

world never discovered.

—Jorge de lima

It’s nothing like they say.

Samba moved to the favelas later on.

Anyway, it went wherever we went:

Wherever there was a party!

—Donga

Contents

Translator’s Preface

Author’s Preface to the U.S. Edition

Acknowledgments

1 The Encounter

2 The Mystery

3 Popular Music and the Brazilian Elite

4 The Unity of the Nation

5 Race Mixture

6 Gilberto Freyre

7 The Modern Samba

8 Samba of My Native Land

9 Nowhere at All

10 Conclusions

Notes

Index

Translator’s Preface

Samba is Brazil’s national rhythm, its prime symbol of cultural nationalism. Samba is also the centerpiece of Rio’s world-famous pre-Lenten carnival, when samba dancers, who are predominantly black, from the city’s poor neighborhoods parade all night under the glare of sophisticated all-night telemedia, broadcast nationwide.

To the outsider, samba and carnival seem to showcase Brazil’s African heritage. Within Brazil, however, they stand for mixture—mestiçagem, racial and cultural mixture. Since the 1930s, Brazilians have, overall, enthusiastically adopted the notion that racial and cultural mixture define their unique national identity. Samba is the great metaphor for the mixture. Brazilians without a trace of African ancestry proudly claim something African in their sensibility.

How did Brazil become the Kingdom of Samba only a few decades after abolishing slavery in 1888? Anthropologist Hermano Vianna shows that samba traditions were invented through complex cultural mediations. This postmodern approach sets Vianna’s work apart from most writing on samba. For Vianna, authenticity is always a social construction. Meanwhile, authenticity is the holy grail of most samba research: the authentic location of samba’s birthplace, the authentic samba instrumentation, the authentic identities of its creators.

When I first met Hermano in 1994, he invited me to join him while he filmed some old guard samba players (sambistas) for Brazilian television. We drove to a clubhouse in the poor northern neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro where, after everyone enjoyed an unhurried black bean feast, the old guard sambistas were interviewed and then showed their stuff for the cameras. Their stuff was old-fashioned, lightly tripping, string-driven samba, delivered with seemingly effortless pleasure—although some venerable dancers, too wise to attempt the normally lightning-fast steps, compensated with expressive grace what they lacked in speed. The young, hip film crew watched with quiet respect. Then the musicians were joined by Marisa Monte, a top singer of Brazilian popular music, who had recently recorded some sambas but was in no sense a traditional sambista. Hermano, who had created this show for Brazilian television, seemed particularly interested—even a touch apprehensive—when Marisa Monte sang English lyrics to a traditional samba accompaniment. The song, Lou Reed’s Pale Blue Eyes, was untraditional, indeed. If Hermano worried about the veteran sambistas’ reaction, though, he need not have. Their smiles remained relaxed and gracious as they played on. Only later, after reading The Mystery of Samba, did I fully appreciate the moment.

The cultural politics surrounding samba signal its continued symbolic importance. Traditional samba is not played much on Brazilian radio anymore except at carnival time. The closest often-played popular genre would be pagode (or suingue), which, the purists would insist, is not really samba. Ordinarily, most Brazilians prefer listening to various genres of Brazilian popular music—including homegrown rock, country, funk, blues, and new dance music from Bahia, the capital of Afro-Brazil—as well as music from the United States. But nothing has so far threatened to replace samba as Brazil’s national rhythm, and a great deal is invested in its purity and authenticity.

Hermano Vianna, on the other hand, personally revels in cultural hybridity. His first book was about Brazilian funk. One might logically anticipate iconoclasm in his study of samba, but Vianna is not gleefully smashing icons here. Like the earlier Brazilian intellectuals who appear in his pages, Vianna lives (and travels) in an international world of ideas: hence, the invention of tradition. Nevertheless, his loyalties are Brazilian. And nothing (except maybe soccer) has made more Brazilians proud of their country than samba, symbolizing, as it does, the hopeful fiction that Brazil has transcended race prejudice. Vianna does not believe the fiction. But he does not scorn it, either.

Scorn for official platitudes about Brazilian racial democracy has animated a number of recent U.S. multiculturalist views. They emphasize that, when racial and cultural mixing becomes a nationalist ideology, other racial identities (especially indigenous and African ones) remain marginalized and may be snuffed out altogether. In Brazil, the multiculturalist critique has circulated only in narrow intellectual circles and seems unlikely, for now, to diminish the popular appeal of mixed-race (mestiço) nationalism. After all, it was not so long ago—in the 1930s—that mestiço nationalism overthrew and replaced the official doctrines of white supremacy. Nor is white supremacy gone from Brazil, except officially. Therefore, the basic nationalist message—It’s okay not to be white and European—retains its value in many people’s lives. The mestiço category is so loose as to exclude almost nobody who seeks an authentic Brazilian identity.

In The Mystery of Samba, an English-speaking audience will encounter Brazil’s century-old intellectual conversation on race, popular culture, and national identity. Because Vianna reviews its highlights so accessibly and ruminates on its future so open-endedly, The Mystery of Samba provides an excellent introduction to that conversation. But Vianna is not an impartial outsider. This book is itself part of this conversation overheard, and its author is, in some respects a modern (postmodern?) counterpart of the public intellectuals whom he studies. The Mystery of Samba is not a reply to U.S. multiculturalists. Nor does it speak internationally in scholarly jargon, anthropologist to anthropologist. For the most part, this anthropologist (who today works in television) is addressing Brazilians about Brazil. The text under explication is "the story that Brazilians once so liked to tell themselves about themselves: Once upon a time we discovered the pride of living in a mestiço country where everything is mixed together."

Vianna wonders aloud, toward the end of his book, whether the we in that story remains meaningful. In the meantime, though, he uses the first-person plural inclusively and unselfconsciously to mean we Brazilians. Somehow, with or without samba, globalization, multiculturalism, or mestiço nationalism, Brazilians seem safer from anomie than most people I know.

John Charles Chasteen

Chapel Hill, March 1998

Author’s Preface to the U.S. Edition

This book is about the transformation of samba into Brazil’s national music, a process that centered on Rio de Janeiro. The city of Rio has long been—and perhaps remains—utterly central to representations of Brazilian national unity. As a narrative and interpretive thread, I use the intellectual trajectory of anthropologist Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987), whose vast and controversial influence makes him, necessarily, a central figure of social thought in twentieth-century Brazil. Freyre’s home was the Brazilian northeast, not Rio de Janeiro, but that does not matter. This book is about movement, about back-and-forth flows of influence that connected Rio not only to Pernambuco, but to France, the United States, and the rest of the Atlantic world as well. Various kinds of cultural mediation, spanning geographical and social distances, became crucial to the nationalization of samba. Freyre was one of the mediators.

Freyre was the ardent intellectual exponent of a unified Brazilian national culture, symbolized by samba and rooted in race mixing, or mestiçagem. My purpose is to argue neither for nor against Freyre’s vision of mestiço nationalism. Instead, I take this ideology as an unavoidable fact of Brazilian life in the second half of the twentieth century and examine its genesis. How and why did Brazilian authenticity become essentially Afro-Brazilian? This proliferation of quotation marks suggests my emphasis on the social construction of our supposed cultural essence.

The invention of Brazil’s national essence, at least in the version symbolized by samba, turns on the importance of popular culture. Popular culture tends to mean something different in the United States and in Brazil. David Riesman’s pioneering 1950 article Listening to Popular Music loosely defines popular culture as radio, movies, comics, popular music and fiction.¹ On the other hand, the Brazilian discourse on popular culture has either ignored radio and movies or considered them foreign, even hostile, terrain. Popular culture and pop culture have never blurred together in Brazilian studies. They have not been considered allied cultural forms, nor subjected to a similar analysis. Samba, despite its long and intense association with the Brazilian mass media, is never thought to have originated (or even really to belong) there. Pop culture has been viewed, to the contrary, as a corrupting, alienating influence: the worst enemy of authentic popular culture. During the 1960s, the radical defenders of Brazilian authenticity refused to accept pop culture diversions as a valid method of communication with the masses, concluding that only political art can be truly popular.² The defense of authentic popular culture in Brazil has often gained its energy from anti-U.S. cultural nationalism accompanied by revolutionary vision.

This book has its origins in my doctoral dissertation, defended at the Museu Nacional de Antropologia Social, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, in 1994. I am still surprised to have written a book about samba. That was not my interest when I began my doctorate in anthropology. To the contrary, my plan was to study the place of rock music—Brazilian rock, that is—in our national culture. But research on music and national identity in Brazil led me, inevitably, to samba, and I ended up (almost) totally seduced. The change in topic occurred during my stay at Northwestern University, in the United States, when I had the experience—trite but true—of observing Brazil from a distance. Never before had I felt so Brazilian. The result was an exploration full of discoveries and surprises. The occasional tone of intellectual recklessness that I find upon rereading these pages for the English-language edition reflects the excitement with which they were written. I hope to share some of that excitement with the reader. My own initiation into the mystery of samba began when I happened to read of a little-known gathering that brought together two circles of friends—friends of Gilberto Freyre and friends of Pixinguinha, the famous samba player. The encounter took place in Rio de Janeiro in 1926.

Acknowledgments

The Italians say that translation equals treachery, but there are exceptions. John Chasteen’s translation is simultaneously careful and creative, never treacherous. If anything, the English-language version of this book clarifies the ideas expressed originally in Portuguese.

Many others, too, have helped along the way. I gratefully acknowledge my friends and teachers at the National Museum of Social Anthropology (Universidade Federal of Rio de Janeiro) for the superb intellectual climate that I enjoyed during my studies there. Among the friends, I thank Luís Rodolfo Vilhena, Celso Castro, Jayme Aranha, Miriam Goldenberg, and Maria Laura Caval-canti for an always healthy exchange of ideas, along with the members of my doctoral committee—Gilberto Velho, Giralda Seyferth, Lília Schwarcz, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and Peter Fry—for their stimulating comments. The National Council for Scientific and Technological Development generously provided me scholarship support, both during my studies in Rio and during my time at Northwestern University.

During that time (1991), my U.S. adviser, Howard S. Becker, enriched my understanding of anthropology and of Brazil. Also at Northwestern, Paul Berliner introduced me to ethnomusicology and to the mbira, an inebriating African percussion instrument. I was pleased to be associated institutionally with Northwestern’s Department of Sociology. Many friends helped me feel at home in the United States: Julian, Erik, Matthew, Arto, Doug, Tunji, Norman, Tetê, Glória, Esther, and Dianne.

Other friends, at home, contributed in ways they often little suspected: Luiz, Barrão, Serginho, Sandra, Sílvia, Fausto, Caetano, Carlinhos, Branco Britto, and Lau. I owe a lot to Regina, who read early versions of the manuscript and made suggestions that continue to inspire my research.

For the Brazilian version of the published book, I benefited from the skilled editing of Cristina Zahar and Heloisa Buarque de Holanda. At University of North Carolina Press, I got help and encouragement from David Perry and Elaine Maisner.

Finally, I am grateful to my dissertation adviser, Gilberto Velho, for unfailing intellectual stimulation, for unstinting friendship, for inevitably firm deadlines, for phone calls in the wee hours (like 10 A.M., which for me is a wee hour), and above all, for his own pioneering work on the anthropology of complex societies. To contribute, in whatever way, to developing his original ideas would be, for me, the greatest honor of all.

1 The Encounter

In 1926, Elegant News, a regular social column in Rio de Janeiro’s Revista da Semana, first recorded the presence in that city of a young anthropologist from the northeastern state of Pernambuco: Doctor Gilberto Freyre, as the columnist called him, making a special point of his title. The soon-to-be-famous Freyre was visiting the capital of Brazil for the first time at the age of twenty-six, after completing his university studies in the United States and after touring several European countries. In various autobiographical passages of his book Tempo morto e outros tempos, Freyre mentions this odd fact almost proudly. He first set foot in the principal city of his own country only upon returning from his travels in the First World, making plain that his intellectual training had depended not at all on Rio de Janeiro or, in general, on the Brazilian south, economically and politically the central region of the country.

In another passage of the same book, Freyre records a singular event that occurred during his stay in Rio. Sergio and Prudente, he wrote enthusiastically, "really do know modern English and French literature. They’re tops. I went out for some bohemian fun with them the other night. With