In this ambitious work, John F. Collins sets out to accomplish three things. First, and probably most important for the readers of this journal, he offers a cautionary tale of cultural heritage management gone awry in the historic Pelourinho district of Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. Second, he documents the manner in which ongoing state-sponsored study of the lifeways of the largely Afro-Brazilian population of the Pelourinho has transformed their culture into a commodified product to be consumed by the emerging global heritage industry. Third, Collins frames these processes within the larger history of the Brazilian nation’s embrace, both celebratory and sanitizing, of its African heritage. These key themes are interwoven with lively, sympathetic portraits of the people of the Pelourinho as they work with or against government efforts to turn them into what Collins calls “human heritage objects” (39).

Salvador de Bahia was established in the mid-sixteenth century as the administrative capital of Portugal’s American colonies. It served as a center for the sugar industry and the associated slave trade until 1763, when Brazil’s capital was relocated to Rio de Janeiro. Thus began a long economic slide that resulted in Bahia’s elite leaving the historic city center, the Pelourinho, in favor of seaside locations, abandoning their elegant colonial residences or leasing them to former slaves and working-class immigrants. By the twentieth century, the Pelourinho had become the most flamboyant red-light district in Brazil’s northeast, “a fantastic cauldron of behaviors felt to be impossible in other areas of Brazil” (27). Many of the once grand mansions were reduced to ruins in which squatters lived amid rotting floors and collapsing walls.

In addition to its attractions as a demimonde where classes and races mixed freely, by the end of the twentieth century the Pelourinho came to be seen as the birthplace of Afro-Brazilian culture and of the cultural fusion increasingly embraced by Brazilians as a key element of their national identity. This shift coincided with growing global interest in the restoration and management of cultural heritage sites.

Collins was drawn into the life of the Pelourinho in 1987 while traveling in Latin America as a recent college graduate. By his own account, he lived and worked there as a small-time artisan and fell in with a network of neighbors, many of whom were involved in one facet or another of the informal economy. This gave him a level of access that proved invaluable when he returned a decade later as an anthropologist studying government efforts to scrub the Pelourinho—architecturally and socially—as part of its transformation into a world heritage site and a place of pilgrimage for Brazilians in search of their roots.

How does a government restore a neighborhood of derelict buildings fully occupied by thousands of people struggling to make a life amid the ruins? One element of the restoration plan was to relocate many of them to other parts of the city. This decision was justified both in terms of the logistics of restoring the district’s colonial architecture and a desire to rescue the inhabitants from their perceived moral degradation. Many of the displaced were given cash settlements and access to alternative housing. The identities of the remaining residents were transformed into “communal properties” (78) which, like the ancient buildings around them, were destined for reconstruction in a form more palatable to middle-class Brazilians and affluent tourists from abroad.

The pivotal organization in the Pelourinho’s facelift was the Bahian Institute of Cultural and Artistic Patrimony (IPAC). In keeping with the bureaucratic nature of the project and the government’s parallel goal of saving Pelourinho residents from themselves, IPAC undertook countless surveys and ethnographic studies of the district’s inhabitants. Collins argues that the investigators who conducted this research were effectively rewriting the history of their subjects in a way that empowered outsiders—“usually male social scientists, politicians, and cultural managers”—by turning them into “Negrologists” (331) and “authentic connoisseurs and purveyors of Bahianness” whose knowledge was considered more authoritative than that of the people they studied (174).

As the restoration advanced, cultural bureaucrats from other nations began to criticize IPAC for turning Pelourinho into a tropical theme park founded on the destruction of the very culture the project was intended to preserve. Collins worries about a more subtle effect, however. Brazil has long been known as a nation in which racial categories are fluid and contextual rather than reflections of a supposed essence. Do projects such as the restoration of the Pelourinho threaten to transform race into a “shared substance, transmitted by specific instruments and actions” (342)? The author admits that he is not certain, but he sees the project’s essentialization of race as a significant risk.

There is much more addressed in this long, sometimes densely worded work: trenchant reflections on sexuality, bureaucracy, Brazilian politics, the semiotic dimension of heritage claims, and prospects for racial democracy in a nation marked by pervasive inequality. What readers will not find is a prescriptive program, a set of guidelines for avoiding the errors and injustices that Collins documents so meticulously. Good ethnography need not be prescriptive, of course, but in reading Revolt of the Saints one wonders what could have been done to make things turn out differently. In an era marked by ever-growing demands for transparency and accountability, could a project of this scale be justified without first mobilizing an army of social scientists and heritage bureaucrats to undertake necessary studies? Can we reasonably expect that those professionals would not harbor the prejudices of their time, place, and social class? On balance, would it have been more humane to leave the residents of the Pelourinho alone to live their lives in the decaying majesty of Bahia’s colonial architecture? One infers from the book that the answer is yes, especially when Collins likens their present situation to that of hospital patients or prisoners “subject to concentrated regimes of discipline and normalization” (361).

Woven throughout the book is a fair amount of what Clifford Geertz calls “epistemological hypochondria”—that is, angst about the production of scholarly knowledge and the investigator’s own subject position. ^{Footnote 1} For some readers, these and other forays into recondite social theory may vitiate the book’s impact as a comprehensive ethnographic study of a deeply flawed heritage-restoration project. For others, Collins’s far-reaching meditations will lend the story greater depth and resonance. There can be little doubt, however, 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.