Cultural Models of Raça: The Calculus of Brazilian Racial Identity Revisited

Nearly 50 years ago, Marvin Harris published a seminal paper that examined how Brazilians create taxonomic categories of racial identity. In the intervening decades, new cognitive theories and analytical approaches have enabled researchers to investigate cultural domains with increased sophisticatio...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of anthropological research 2019-06, Vol.75 (2), p.157-182
Main Authors: Dengah, H. J. François, Gilmore, Jason, Brasileiro, Marcus, Cohen, Anna S., Thomas, Elizabeth Bingham, Blackburn, Jenni Budge, Law, McKayle, Swainston, Jae, Thomas, Richard
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cognition
Cognitive theories
Portraits
Race
Racial identity
Social sciences
Sophistication
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Summary:Nearly 50 years ago, Marvin Harris published a seminal paper that examined how Brazilians create taxonomic categories of racial identity. In the intervening decades, new cognitive theories and analytical approaches have enabled researchers to investigate cultural domains with increased sophistication and nuance. In this paper, we revisit, replicate, and extend Harris’s research by utilizing modern cognitive anthropological approaches such as multidimensional scaling and cultural consensus analysis. Utilizing the same facial portraits as in the original study, we ask a contemporary sample of 34 Brazilians to identify and sort these images by racial identity. We then compare Harris’s original data, reanalyzed with modern techniques, to show that Brazilians had, and still hold, structured and coherent models of race. This finding has important social ramifications for race in Brazil and highlights the importance of replicability in the social sciences.
ISSN:0091-7710
2153-3806
DOI:10.1086/702707