Gender, race, and life writing in the ethnography of Ruth Landes in Bahia
American anthropologist Ruth Landes (1908-1991) conducted ethnographic fieldwork in candomblé centers, terreiros, in Salvador, Bahia, in 1938-1939. In her book City of Women (1947) and journal articles she recorded her observations on matrifocality and gender variance and portrayed Afro-Brazilian cu...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Société des américanistes
2024-09-01
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| Series: | Journal de la Société des Américanistes |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/jsa/23077 |
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| Summary: | American anthropologist Ruth Landes (1908-1991) conducted ethnographic fieldwork in candomblé centers, terreiros, in Salvador, Bahia, in 1938-1939. In her book City of Women (1947) and journal articles she recorded her observations on matrifocality and gender variance and portrayed Afro-Brazilian culture as dynamic and innovative. This article examines how Landes’s theory of culture, methods of fieldwork, and personal writing style went against the grain of the approaches taken by leading scholars at the time who treated Afro-Brazilian culture in terms of race-based psychological characteristics and “African survivals” and harshly critiqued her work. |
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| ISSN: | 0037-9174 1957-7842 |