THE IMPORTANCE, AND SUBSTANCE, OF ARCHIVES

In Salvador, the transformation of what are usually unmarked, everyday habits into cultural property by technicians from the Bahian Institute of Artistic and Cultural PatrimonyFootnote ⁵ (IPAC), or the institution in charge of rebuilding the Pelourinho's crumbling buildings and reforming the practices of its inhabitants, has turned on the ethnographic collection and social scientific evaluation of everyday lives. In fact, in Salvador's Pelourinho the preservation of monuments and cathedrals has often taken a back seat to ethnological and ethnographic attention to residents' lifeways. Thus the ways social scientists drawn from Salvador's bourgeoisie have evaluated the quotidian habits of working class residents of a neighborhood associated throughout Brazil with African heritage, as well as sexual immorality, have been key to the making of Bahian patrimony. These evaluative interactions between heritage officials and working-class Afro-Brazilians take place on two principal levels.

First, and most basically, correct behavior as defined by the state and its social scientists has been presented by sanctioned experts as a sign of residents' suitability to remain in a restored UNESCO World Heritage site so as to play the role of sanitized yet self-conscious, and thus what I have developed elsewhere as something called “properly historical,” living human ancestors to the nation.Footnote ⁶ Inhabitants who do not meet such painstakingly established yet subjective standards of hygienic comportment must thus leave the neighborhood, a collection of impressive baroque buildings that attest to Salvador's 1549–1763 status as Brazil's colonial capital. Nonetheless, and however much IPAC technicians have struggled across the 1990s and first decade of the new millennium to disqualify morally and thus dispossess residents from a valuable downtown space, I do not argue here that the state treats morality simply as a sign of something else, or thus simply as a cynical, explanatory justification for exclusion or inclusion in a Pelourinho that has undergone a US$100 million restoration and social cleansing over the last two decades. Instead, I present an argument inspired by residents' recognition that the ongoing, state-directed, evaluation of their supposed lack of moral probity has produced reams of social scientific reports, planning documents, and expert opinions. These comment in detail, and with scientific authority, upon people's everyday habits and ostensibly private, or interior, volitions and qualities. Such a conjuring of interior states through documentary evidence around residents' and social scientific fieldworkers' interactional coproduction of IPAC's archives of everyday life—something I have explored at length elsewhere—establishes in turn the second, and seemingly most influential and theoretically significant, level on which morality comes into play in the production of Bahian cultural properties today.Footnote ⁷

When read closely, and in relation to IPAC's ongoing gathering of information about the people it seeks either to displace or celebrate as symbolic ancestors to the polity, concerns with morality of the sort voiced against Carla Perez's dancing by women linked to the sex trades themselves seems an accurate assessment of the very substance of heritage-making: Cultural properties in the Pelourinho take form within an ongoing, ethnographically performed, state-directed assessment of Pelourinho residents' quotidian actions as moral or immoral. Such evaluatory activity means that a conceptual and evidentiary formation called morality fills, and permeates, the Pelourinho archives from which convincing stories of Brazilianness and national origins emerge. And the details and effects of this creation, and interpretation, of the informational storehouses that ground the production of cultural properties may help reconceptualize social scientific claims about the nature of property-making and the extraction of value today.

In what follows, I examine a number of interactions, and commentaries upon those engagements, so as to understand the importance to cultural property of the textualized representations of propriety and impropriety that fill state archives that emanate from, and configure, the Bahian heritage center. In doing so I am not so much interested in the details of the act of composing documents in the IPAC-Pelourinho resident ethnographic encounter since this is something I have analyzed at great length elsewhere.Footnote ⁸ Here I am fascinated instead by how local people wield and analyze these instruments, an approach that opens up the roles of future-oriented and often collective or reflexive, feedback-based actions in cultural property-making today. Such a claim about contemporary means of conjuring up cultural properties in Brazil turns on the possibility that the state-directed evaluation of residents' moral fitness for a UNESCO World Heritage site detaches that morality, transforming it into an entified thing and a type of supplementing bracket, or context for rendering culture valuable. And this process is made visible by the forms taken by Pelourinho residents' complaints about their state and linked behavior such as Carla Perez's dancing.Footnote ⁹

The argument that a reification of morality provides a framework that generates value appears to fly in the face of Lockean-inspired conceptions of property-making, and thus claims to ownership, in which the expression or projection of an individual or group's labor power across a prone or natural background transforms that previously unmarked background into a belonging of the active subject who becomes the subject on the basis of such exteriority. But before delving into how, and why, the moralizing coproduction of data about people's quotidian habits provides such a powerful road into understanding contemporary capitalism and alternative conceptions of property-making, it is worth focusing just a bit on the Pelourinho as a place, and an idea.

THE “CRADLE OF BRAZIL”

The Pelourinho Historical District, whose borders mark off just under 80 hectares of downtown Salvador, is today a stunning collection of mainly eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial buildings conceived of as a means of celebrating regional culture and drawing tourists and development moneys to the northeastern state of Bahia. First celebrated by modernist intellectuals in the 1920s, central to Brazil's earliest federal heritage initiatives of the 1930s, and the subject of US$100 million urban restoration project since 1992, the neighborhood is often referred to today as the nation's “cradle” or “brown mother.” Such designations gesture not only at the explicitly racialized girders of Brazilian modernity, but at the extent to which reproduction, sexuality, race, and gender are critical to the ongoing definition and uses made of a neighborhood registered as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1985 and Brazilian federal patrimony in 1984.

Nonetheless, and in spite of the extent to which Pelourinho residents and their quite specific lifeways have been celebrated in the visual arts, song, literature, social science, and journalism across Brazil and the Black Atlantic, when in 1992 the Bahian state began to employ monies gleaned from the privatization of its power and light company to reconstruct the neighborhood, the result was the expulsion of the majority of its working class residents. Over the last two decades, via a mixture of cash indemnification and police pressure coupled with stratagems that increased crime and discouraged residents' maintenance of their colonial homes, the Bahian state has managed to displace approximately 4000 people. The result is a gleaming historical center almost devoid of the street life and popular culture celebrated today in recent planning and development documents as goods that attract lending and tourist dollars.Footnote ¹⁰ In place of former residents and their practices, the state now stages musical and cultural events while permitting a small number of carefully chosen, long-term inhabitants to remain to play the part of folkloric ancestors. Such performances of Afro-Brazilian and Bahian identity typically involve what Bahians recognize as African-tinged clothing, dances, song, and foods, as well as recognizably Afro-Bahian cultural practices such as the dance/martial art capoeira, samba, drumming, and manipulations of symbols associated with the trance and possession-based religion known as Candomblé.

In spite, or perhaps as an effect, of the removal of the population, over the last 15 years a number of remaining and recently displaced residents have come to understand themselves as the subjects, as well as the objects, of cultural heritage. These people argue that their state's research and culling operations have established them as a species of living human ancestor to the polity, and thus both the proper folk of the Pelourinho Historical Center and a collection of heritage objects akin to historical monuments or UNESCO-registered dances and culinary arts. In their view they are both a piece of Brazil's patrimony and a group of technicians capable of constructing that collective heritage. This iconoclastic and at-times troubling embrace of neoliberal forms of “being ourselves for you” makes manifest the extent to which authorities have sought to distill some Afro-Brazilian essence, or grounded quality, from popular practices that IPAC has studied and documented since its inception in 1967.Footnote ¹¹ In short, locals and their lives stand as a type of property due to the extent to which their practices have been researched and then reconfigured by a cultural bureaucracy as evidence about the existence of essentialized and ostensibly interior, human qualities. This is one reason why, in a reinflection of Bahian state policy, residents of the Pelourinho often claim that they are themselves tombados, or “patrimonialized.”Footnote ¹² In making this argument, residents thus resignify the Portuguese verb tombar, a word employed by heritage professionals to denote the landmarking or patrimonialization of a cultural good as well as an everyday term that means to fall or to demolish a building. In this way the inhabitants of the Pelourinho seek to describe the strange, liminal state in which they are both living, human beings who seek empowerment on the basis of their patrimonialized status and a species of folkloric, almost phantasmagoric object of Bahian social science and cultural heritage planning.Footnote ¹³

The claim that people themselves are cultural properties is not entirely surprising in light of UNESCO's recent augmentation of its previously existing categories of “natural” and “cultural” heritage with what is now called “intangible” or “immaterial heritage.” According to Article 2 of the 2003 International Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Heritage, this new class of heritage,

While UNESCO's language does not focus on a medium called “human being” per se, immaterial heritage depends as a category on ideas about the inheritance of habits that function as something akin to a corporate community's essential character: As the UNESCO website makes clear today, “the importance of intangible cultural heritage is not the cultural manifestation itself but rather the … knowledge and skills … transmitted … from one generation to the next.”Footnote ¹⁵ And the keys to such transmission, and thus the “safeguarding” of this ostensibly enduring heritage are “Living Human Treasures … persons who possess to a high degree the knowledge and skills required for performing or re-creating specific elements of the intangible cultural heritage.”Footnote ¹⁶

I do not mention living human treasures so as to lament UNESCO's fetishization of traditional human figures or recourse to something akin to salvage ethnography. Nor do I suggest that in the Pelourinho immaterial heritage has been a recent, top-down imposition from outside. In fact, the initiative was not an explicit aspect of IPAC research in the 1990s. Additionally, UNESCO's contemporary immaterial programs bear a striking resemblance to aspects of the 1936 decree that established Brazil's first federal heritage institution.Footnote ¹⁷ And, finally, in August of 2000—in advance of UNESCO's 2003 legal and bureaucratic definition of its new category of intangible patrimony—Brazil's federal government augmented the 1936 proposal and specified that the nation's immaterial cultural heritage should be inscribed in four volumes:

1. 1. The Book of Knowledges (Livro dos Saberes)

2. 2. The Book of Celebrations (Livro das Celebrações)

3. 3. The Book of Expressive Forms (Registro das Formas de Expressão)

4. 4. The Book of Places (Registro dos Lugares)Footnote ¹⁸

It thus appears that the expansion of UNESCO immaterial heritage has come about in relation to still unclearly understood borrowings and influences that stretch across national and disciplinary boundaries to unite a shifting array of twentieth-century state policies, development initiatives, and institutional engagements with the epistemological foundations of modern nationalism. The present investigation does not attempt a history of conceptualization of immaterial heritage, but instead looks closely at one urban space that participates in what might be understood as a global heritage grid through which planners have sought to account for, and follow, culture's shifting valences within capitalism.Footnote ¹⁹

In late twentieth-century Bahia, social hygiene and purifications of popular culture collided in a uniquely Brazilian, almost eugenicist, social grammar that articulates with ongoing, worldwide theorizations of something called immaterial heritage. Here culture has come to stand alongside hygiene and morality as a sign of Brazilian civilization, its deficiencies, and its promises. And as supported by Dona Alicia's claims with which I opened, local people understand the culture that becomes deeply enmeshed with sanitary campaigns directed at everything from mosquitoes to AIDS outreach and prevention as somehow tied to their means of dwelling in historical buildings. Architects have recuperated these edifices at the same moment that social scientists collect and polish their inhabitants, thus encouraging residents to conflate the reconstruction of people and buildings in an urban space that has long played a key role in capitalism's unfolding. I understand this conflation as one motivation for people's recent claims that they are, themselves, a form of collectively held property that emanates from the past but looks forward, into the future. Residents argue that their patrimonialization permits them to challenge a view of the objects of heritage as either an inert background, awaiting activation by the labor of sanctioned experts, or a fetishized object characterized by an inauthentic relationship to politics and themselves. Such a situation underscores the significance of examining exactly how living human, and properly historical subjects, have come to engage the production of cultural and economic value in Salvador.

THE DETACHABILITY OF OBJECTS AND THE QUALITIES OF SUBJECTS IN LIBERAL THEORIES OF PROPERTY

One way of understanding the ways descendants of Bahian slaves who took over an urban space that once served as the command center of the world's richest seventeenth-century tropical plantation belt have come to describe themselves as living human patrimony, but not necessarily UNESCO's living human treasures, involves theories of property that emanate from chattel slavery and its aftermath. This points not only to the institution of slavery, but to its aftermath and transformation into ostensibly free labor in a postemancipation, classically liberal, nineteenth-century Atlantic world in which Salvador played a critical role: Commentators working in a multitude of genres, and across nearly five centuries, have explored the extent to which representational conventions in religious, legal, and literary spheres helped mold emergent conceptions of truth, connection, and freedom in an early modern Atlantic in which an inchoate capitalist order motivated a series of new approaches to possession and political power.Footnote ²⁰ Such semiotic technologies, or representational conventions, are important to understanding how I link personhood, property, and economy, via morality, in this essay. It thus seems important to note a series of debates waged in the decade spanning the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

In a series of polemics involving writers like Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, European thinkers focused on John Locke's argument in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding that there existed no a priori substance to humanity, but rather a wealth of historical, and thus empirically given and perceivable, experiences that constitute the human.Footnote ²¹ This debate about Christian souls and an inchoate, novel early modern approach to subjectivity, the possession of identity, and the labors that make that possession real are important in contemporary Salvador, a city that produced most of the world's sugar and received most of the Atlantic slave trade's human cargoes during Locke's and Defoe's lifetimes.Footnote ²²

A view of proper, or moral, human being as constituted through individuals' actions in the world is essential to Locke's arguments in “On Property.”Footnote ²³ There, possession, and thus the revolutionary, liberal right to property that Locke deploys to counter divine right, is predicated on a view of action akin to that which would later animate Karl Marx's labor theory of value. This labor, or a core capacity of the human and a fulcrum for understanding capitalist extraction, involves human extension, or effort, wrought upon a world construed as natural, and thus inanimate before that actor. Locke suggests that such efforts constitute that person as subject and the natural recipient of labors as a detachable property, or what would become wage labor under industrial capitalism. But I emphasize here that in light of such an optic, subjectivity arises as a function of the material world's apparently object status. And a right to objects conceived of as part and parcel of nature and the material world emanates from what is most basically a moral drama about the reach and obligations of the sovereign and the labors of subjects. Such a story of the correct, or righteous and rights-producing, manipulation of objects by human beings is in modern, Western thought, ultimately a narrative of the correct relations between people, things, and human power over them.Footnote ²⁴ This accident of history seems an important point in relation to recent moves in cultural heritage management and the politics of culture more broadly.

Around the world, and increasingly today, possession of one's culture and history, and not simply one's labor power, is construed as a political right by institutions like UNESCO and those multiculturalist, national constitutions and bureaucracies generally recognized as important vehicles for securing minority rights.Footnote ²⁵ In other words, the possessive logics so much a part of the entwined claims to personhood and property, so essential to a modernity predicated to no small degree on nature and culture distinctions, seem to have moved into a new realm. This involves the ownership of objectified culture as a productive resource. It thus seems significant to observe that that the labor of producing, marketing, and alienating everyday life as culture is not quite the same as plowing a field, cutting cane, or working on an automotive assembly line. Yet it also seems worthwhile to recall that, as Strathern observed, “objects are created not in contradistinction to persons, but out of persons.”Footnote ²⁶

As introduced above, a valuable cultural heritage fomented and coveted by the Bahian state emerged in IPAC's attempt to document, and then regulate the practices of an Afro-Brazilian populace. Such manners of cooking, washing, worshipping, fighting, raising families, and even flirting or having sex that developed in relation to Bahia's place in, and historical relationship to, the Atlantic Triangle Trade are, if not quite work, most definitively sources of value coproduced by state and citizen. How, then, might one analyze the production of value, and the nature of the cultural properties, marketed in the Pelourinho? How does one conceptualize extraction when, as I have observed on multiple occasions, a group of tourists passes a woman bathing her child in a tub set upon cobblestones and, touched, those visitors photograph this performance of motherhood in the ruins of the Portuguese south Atlantic? After all, their photographs are not postcards purchased from that Pelourinho resident, and the woman's actions are not necessarily scripted attempts to attract a tourist gaze. Instead, they are practices performed over the course of social reproduction. But the social reproduction of a labor force is not the primary task of the Pelourinho as neighborhood or historical center. Nonetheless, the woman's actions permit touristic or even social scientific engagements with difference, with anachronism, and with the exposition of affect and intimacy as public culture. They thus gird heritage's attractiveness to an international public and role as a motor for development dollars.

One approach to what appear to be the shifting status of work and value in certain world regions involves arguments about “immaterial” or “affective” labor. From this perspective, work in a post-Fordist creative economy is seen as an issue of coding, information, and branding. These immaterial developments lead supposedly to shifts in relations between individuals and collectivities, in the reach and value of idleness and knowledge, and in the ties between authors and their creations.Footnote ²⁷ In this light, I emphasize the role in the Pelourinho's restoration played by IPAC's removal of nearly 4000 people over the last two decades. Again, this move, accomplished mainly through IPAC's drawn-out process of calculating indemnifications necessary to induce inhabitants to give up their downtown living quarters and move to a peripheral neighborhood, has produced copious amounts of paperwork. The documents describe in great, if often erroneous, detail the habits of former inhabitants. They thus stand in for the population they signify. Yet they do not represent these now-largely absent people in some facile, one-to-one correspondence. Rather, the mass of reports about Pelourinho residents' use of domestic and public space, unfinished surveys of their economic activities and educational statues, never-instituted planning documents for community centers and museums, and tabulations of residents' kinship structures and household incomes stands as a resource, or data set, critical to the ongoing composition of histories of Brazil, the Atlantic, and a UNESCO-supported cosmopolitanism.

Like most data, IPAC's archive of everydayness is not simply the result, or “historical negative” of past research.Footnote ²⁸ It stands also as a future-oriented potentiality constructed through the amassing of sociological and ethnographic information. As such, it lies open to interpretation and exists as a key space of investigation for understanding the political economy of cultural properties in the Bahian cultural heritage center. This takes place at a moment when it appears that it is not simply the efforts of an individual or collective author that produce value, but rather the terms or mechanisms of a work's reception and dissemination. What happens, then, when a populace's everyday activities produce value not simply because they are directed at production, but because they can be archived, mediated, and received in specific ways that are perhaps most apparent in the circulation of cultural goods?

A recent emphasis on social capital within capitalist development seems a symptom of recent shifts in the ways humanity, labor, and property are imbricated in contemporary economic systems characterized by a “transfiguration of wealth through the ever more abstract commodification of its elements across time and space.”Footnote ²⁹ Here qualities such as education, dedication, and social networks—or even that more nebulous package that might be called skill—come to be treated as capital, or detachable social relations that might easily be translated into economic wealth. Under advanced capitalism, Marx's insistence that capital is not a thing equal to wealth, but rather a system of relations, tends to become even further obscured as the everyday habits or even hidden dispositions of a citizenry undergo recomposition as the reified, and thus visualizable, building blocks of development. Or, put slightly differently, and in a crystallization of Locke's arguments about the mutability of the contents of “man,” a citizenry's human qualities that have for so long been treated as intangible and inalienable aspects of being and identity become hardened as portable things.Footnote ³⁰ After all, immaterial heritage must become tangible so as to be recognized.

The example above of tourists who photograph a mother's attempts to bathe her child on a Pelourinho street may make clearer the processes analyzed in this essay's next sections: It is well-known that capitalists have long seized on social differences to pit populations against one another. It is also clear that race has long served as a diacritic that permits one group to be configured as subservient to another in ways that, as in slavery, make that group's labor power available to alienation. In fact, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Bahia, markers of African ethnicity were carefully “read” by plantation owners as signs of slaves' ostensible tendency to work hard or to rebel.Footnote ³¹ Yet such objectifications of race or ethnicity as a sign of individual, almost natural, qualities among slaves is somewhat different from what might be dubbed the detachability of affect, or motherly love, and health and cleanliness in Bahia's historical center today.

As in a case of branding, in which customer loyalty provides a copyrighted image with value on the basis of an interactive relationship, the Pelourinho-based scene of a woman's performance of maternal duties gains value in relation to a global market for multicultural difference as an effect of the audience's participation, and not as a second-order sign of what already exists within her.Footnote ³² For example, as Lisa Adkins points out in a study of gender as a detachable quality whose performance is not simply an index of a type or kind of person, but a stratagem deployed in the interactions that so often characterize service work, “lack of distance between products and customers may be understood as contributing to the more open character of economic action, since … as spectators or simple consumers of cultural products, customers are now ‘interactants’ in cultural production.”Footnote ³³ Indeed, what transforms a child's bath from a case of parental responsibility, which functions to further social reproduction into a form of culture work, is the presence of an audience that brackets the woman's everyday actions. A camera lens and a group of tourists thus participate in work in manners that add to, rather than simply consume, the fruits of the mother's labor. In the process, the borders between producer and consumer, like those between everyday life and productive labor in the Pelourinho, become relatively intangible.

Arguments about epochal shifts, especially when crafted over but a few pages, are often suspect or so spare as to raise more questions than they answer. Yet the practice of “being ourselves for you” in caring for a child seems different from being ourselves on an assembly line or in a cane field. The performance of self in these latter environments is but a sign of an ability, or disposition toward, an enactment of an abstract labor that creates a discrete product. Meanwhile, the product that emerges in the Pelourinho is, rather than a resolutely alienated thing called culture that belongs to a particular group, a powerfully co-constructed medium. In this culture, the experience of a person performing for others takes place in relation to a shared frame that includes the emotional cues and photograph-like, emotional, and often indexical linkages. These permit the bathing practices to be recognized as explicitly “cultural economic” in a context of mutual, albeit unequal, recognition.Footnote ³⁴ For this reason I turn to some of the ways the labors of exposing oneself are framed and discussed in the Pelourinho.

AUTHENTICITY, FARCE, AND OBJECTIFICATIONS OF BAHIAN CULTURE

The organizers of the January 1999 event that brought together some of Bahia's most important recording artists and attracted the acclaimed dancer Carla Perez to her city's colonial downtown christened this reunion “Youthful Action” (Ação Jovem). The social entrepreneurs reported that proceeds from the sale of resulting images would benefit homeless youth, or Brazil's infamous “street children,” and they claimed to have received backing from UNESCO, various nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) involved in education and youth outreach, the Ministry of Culture, and Brazil's Roman Catholic Bishops' council. Yet Salvador's newspapers soon revealed that Ação Jovem drew on no such support. Instead, it was a for-profit scam designed to produce footage of pop idols, which might then be marketed by a group of southern Brazilian businesspeople who had no ties to philanthropic organizations. Headlines announced that “Youthful Action” was in fact a “Doubtful Action” (Ação Duvidosa).

In contrast to the authorities who had sanctioned the performance, Pelourinho residents expressed little surprise at news outlets' revelations. After all, they pointed out, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the IPAC cultural heritage bureaucracy had sought to mold them into more docile, folkloric subjects who might stand as emblems of the origins of a nation supposedly predicated on the fusion of Lusitanian, indigenous, and African peoples. Yet in the 1990s, this bureaucracy employed police pressure and paltry indemnifications to remove inhabitants from their homes in valuable historical buildings in Salvador's colonial center. People thus tied Youthful Action's corporate organizers to what they described to me as IPAC's program of asistencialismo. They understood such assistentialism as involving a pedagogical and medicalized approach to poverty, the establishment of public health posts and, most importantly for the present argument, the fostering of patronage networks established around social scientific research that linked proper morality to culture.

Interpreted in light of its critiques, Youthful Action illustrates the extent to which culture is conceptualized as a valuable product whose contents gain value and form from a structure of care directed at Pelourinho residents' well-being. It does so in part because it is directed, falsely yet publicly, at the philanthropic uplift of homeless children. And as I have explored elsewhere, this biopolitically inflected approach to cultural property gives rise to a number of iconoclastic approaches to history and personhood.Footnote ³⁵ More specifically, a state's contradictory attention to the health of an Afro-descendant population alongside its removal of those people from a carefully managed temple to collective memory and Afro-Brazilian culture produces oppositional forms of subjectivity that often involve a scrambling of what are usually approached in modern political philosophy as natural or given relations between people and things.Footnote ³⁶ In the Pelourinho, human beings have become heritage in a way that blurs long-established boundaries between people and things. And residents' opposition to Carla Perez's ostensibly immorality seems to be one part of this larger concern with the processes of objectification so much a part of modernity.

If students of cultural property take seriously the etymology of iconoclasm, or a definition of creativity based on the overthrow of existing ideas traceable to historical events in eighth-century Byzantium, which were in turn related to the destruction of sacred images as part of attempts to get at the truths they did no more than represent, then it becomes clearer how much people's relationships to the sacred objects of heritage such as monuments, cathedrals, and even immaterial heritage, make up a moral problem.Footnote ³⁷ Yet as suggested by this article's introduction, in which Dona Alicia ties a sexualized Carla Perez to the eradication of mosquitos in her home, Pelourinho inhabitants direct their ire not simply at objects or their destruction, but at the details of cultural objects' production. It is not the mistaken identification of objects, as opposed to the people or beliefs or social processes behind them, that draws people's wrath. For example, residents of the Pelourinho do not really worry abstractly about the righteousness, or not, of the commodification of their identities. Instead, they seek to participate in such commodifications when they interpret them as openings for improving their lives. This means that people focus less on the vicissitudes of commodification—in fact, such a concept of the inauthenticity or a concern with the illusory nature of something they have seen packaged before their very eyes is not salient—and more on the process, or valuable techniques, through which people have become patrimony. In fact, such a focus on technique, as opposed to competing interpretations of supposedly unchanging or essential ontological states, is a hallmark of what I describe as “proper historicity.” And for this reason I now move a bit more deeply into Dona Alicia's life.

HOUSEHOLD HABITS AND PUBLIC LIFEWAYS: TECHNIQUES FOR RECONSTRUCTING ORIGINS

Dona Alicia is no stranger to dancing. Although we met only in the 1990s, when she was already a senior citizen, I have vivid memories of her beautifully executed sambas. Even in her advanced age, she would often begin to dance in her small bar located in the subsection of the Pelourinho known as the “28th of September”—one of the historical center's sections most tightly associated with prostitution, even in the first years of the new millennium—when a good friend stopped by, when a pleasing song came across her stereo system, or when a cool glass of beer touched her in just the right way. Those present would often go slack-jawed at the sight of this elderly woman moving so gracefully, so fluidly, and often so rapidly, across the polished floor. Here it is important to note that Dona Alicia loved to dance to Bahian samba, a variant of and, some would say, precursor to Rio de Janeiro's more famous version of samba and to the more explicitly sexualized pagode music to which Carla Perez danced on the Pelourinho Square.

Whenever I spoke with Dona Alicia about Carla Perez—or even when Perez's name came up in informal conversation or on the television Alicia left playing—she would deny affiliation to the younger woman. She would complain instead about the lack of subtlety in pagode and the skimpiness of Perez' outfit, which she argued, “serves only to show off her rear end.” Most of all, Dona Alicia suggested that Perez's problem was that she exhibited herself in public, “for all the world to see,” while cameras recorded her image. This publicness, and the capture of the performance on film, rather than simply the dancing or the state of undress, seemed problematic for Alicia. Once, while railing against Perez, Dona Alicia pointed out to me that when she worked as a dancer in infamous Pelourinho nightclubs, women who performed would stand behind backlit, translucent panels while a live orchestra provided music. “And we would never consent to a photograph in such a state!” Dona Alicia added, pointedly.

Irrespective of differences in technology, and the extent to which working class Bahians today have become accustomed to offering and seeing their images in an age of digital photography, Alicia's claims rest on contradictory approaches to images, their reproduction, and perceived differences between public and private spaces. Here it is significant that the Brazilian anthropologist Roberto da Matta has put forth an argument in which Brazil is characterized by a dichotomy between “casa e rua,” or “house and street.” For Da Matta, and in an inversion of North American configurations, the true space of Brazilian politics, of personhood, and hence of citizenship is not some idealized public sphere, but rather the patriarchal household. Those excluded from its ostensibly sheltering folds are subject to the impersonal demands of law, strangers, and violence.

Dona Alicia appears to draw on schema akin to Da Matta's “house and street” in condemning Perez' performance due to its publicness. Yet Alicia worked for wealthy Bahian families as a domestic before fleeing to the Maciel/Pelourinho. And in contradistinction to Da Matta's idealized and quite masculine images of Brazil's spatial imaginaries, from the perspective of a young, female servant, the middle-class household is not a space of safety opposed to the dangerous street.Footnote ³⁸ In fact, and as Dona Alicia and her age-mates emphasized to me, from the servant's perspective, the street may appear a freer space of affiliation. The street might even provide an escape from violence against women living as virtual slaves. In support of this, in the Pelourinho today, women associated with the sex trade often describe their move to the red-light district as a result of abusive employers. As former domestics put it in stories of fazendo vida (making a life/selling their bodies), they could rely on the support of colegas, or young women who maintained networks of solidarity in the Maciel/Pelourinho. This is precisely how Dona Alicia told me she arrived as a sixteen-year-old girl who, as she matured, earned enough money to begin a home and a family.

Does Dona Alicia, then, misidentify the sources of violence and accept a dominant Brazilian representation of house and street, which colors in turn how she interprets Carla Perez' performance? Does she internalize this as part of a moral economy that pits her, as a working class woman who never enriched herself on the basis of her dancing, against the well-paid Perez? It strikes me, on the basis of our friendship and years of conversations, that Dona Alicia does indeed speak in terms of house and street dichotomies, even as from the perspective of Salvador's bourgeoisie, she is definitively of “the street.” And as a former servant and long-term actor in Salvador's red-light zone, she understands that the middle class “house” is not a secure space of moral probity. Yet there is something more at play in her criticisms, something that cuts to the essence of heritage-making in Bahia. In order to make out this hidden aspect of, or even motivation for, Dona Alicia's critique, it is worthwhile to take seriously her rage and her focus on Carla Perez's self-presentation.

Again, for Dona Alicia, the presence of a skimpily clothed dancer was most problematic due to the extent to which Carla Perez was publicly visible: Alicia's denunciations of this publicness focused specifically on the presence of cameras, or instruments of mechanical reproduction, and the lack of specific media such as the screens behind which she danced in now-defunct Pelourinho institutions. Instead, she lamented, a nearly naked and rhythmically shaking Perez would appear on television screens located within families' living rooms across Brazil. “Children and families,” she argued to me, would be exposed to that which should be limited to adult interactions in specific spaces like the Maciel-of-old. Here it seems that Dona Alicia's understanding of her own personhood as constructed, and remembered, in the context of the UNESCO-sanctioned patrimonialization of her neighborhood and lifeways, or her transformation into a publicly held form of ostensibly collective property of a citizenry, focuses especially on the forms of mediation that catalyzed Perez's trip to the Pelourinho Historical Center. After all, as Alicia and her neighbors pointed out repeatedly, “that woman isn't here because she ‘cares about us,’ or because she cares about street children. It's because she wants to be on TV!” For Alicia, as for her elderly, mainly female neighbors who had danced in Pelourinho cabarets and maintained long-term liaisons with the city's most powerful men, but who now served as heads of families and controlled most of the Pelourinho's retail store and rental properties, which they sublet to working class Bahians as part of complex dealings with the Catholic religious institutions that actually owned the buildings, this mediated visibility of the female body in domestic space was quite troubling.

Perhaps, then, it is more than obvious that it was most probably only the presence, and the power, of the television cameras massed on the Pelourinho Square that drew the pagode dancer Carla Perez to the plight of Pelourinho children. Could it be that elderly Pelourinho women's critiques of Perez are not so much a critique of the dancer's morals, or lack thereof, as they are a spotlight on the techniques that generate the substance of humanity in a UNESCO World Heritage site? Are they a means of understanding and countering the ways people's everyday habits have become configured as the content of a form of culture increasingly alienated in a global market for multicultural difference? And might a focus on the techniques that mediate social relations and the social scientific data that describe and recode such relations as some discrete thing called morality, reveal something unexpected about this process through which cultural properties form in Bahia today?

“SAMBA IN THE BEDROOM” AND CULTURE IN THE HISTORICAL CENTER

Once I bumped into Dona Alicia as I visited my friend Coruja on the top floor of a building he shared with his wife, two children, and elderly mother, a woman neighbors claimed had in her youth drawn on her beauty to become a paramour to many well-known Bahian men. Alicia's presence surprised me since Alicia was “of the 28,” or the eastern side of the red-light district that would become designated as Salvador's Historical Center in anticipation of the reforms of the 1990s. And my friend Coruja's mother, Dona Erpidia, was “of the Maciel,” or the larger and better-known western side of the colonial downtown. Perhaps this is why I had never seen them together. But on that day early in 2001, the topic of their conversation—work in the Pelourinho's now-defunct dancing establishments—revealed how they had come to be friends in their youth. But as the two continued to talk, their experiences with IPAC began to inform the conversation. They soon started teasing me, saying,

“Yeah, that John. He's a social scientist,” pointed out Erpidia in a dry voice while licking a hand-rolled cigarette.

“Ah, but social scientists are good” responded Dona Alicia, pointedly, “Just look how nice John's pants are! Why Erpidia, I bet you'd give up your old lady moustache for a pair of pants like that!” Erpidia exploded in laughter, stamped her feet, and responded, deflecting the friendly insult, “I wish I had a pair of pants for every time I bothered good people with stupid questions about their business!”

All those present guffawed. As Coruja and I finished the beer we were drinking in a corner that looked over the Pelourinho's Praca da Anchieta, the square in front of the golden baroque Church of São Francisco, I piped up, “Yeah, I need a new pair of pants. Wanna do an interview with me so I can get 'em with all my social scientists dollars!?”

“Get outta here, John! Out, now! You and all your gold and dollars,” screamed Dona Erpidia, wiping tears from her eyes and guffawing at a silly joke that nonetheless demonstrated our shared communicative ground as put together around a pair of pants and the value of social scientific data. I responded, “Wait, seriously, while I have you two together I need to know something about this MOBRAL educational program during the military years. I know Coruja got to know Lucineide [a neighbor with whom I'd been discussing educational programs] in a handicrafts course. Was it MOBRAL?”Footnote ³⁹

As I spoke with less irony, Erpidia responded in kind and sought to help me. She reported that she didn't know whether or not her Coruja had done much with MOBRAL as a child, but that in the early 1970s she had learned to write through classes she thought MOBRAL had run. She announced that she could now sign her identity card, but that she learned little else. Since I was interested in how military-era literacy programs may have played a role in attempts to inculcate something called “Bahian culture,” I asked about pedagogical units on carnival or popular festivals, subjects I had seen in state archives. Pointing to the plywood-walled (tabique) rooms surrounding us that she rented out to short-stay couples, Erpidia responded, “Carnival, carnival! I had carnival every night through the partition. I heard some serious samba every night. What is IPAC gonna teach me about carnival?!? They gonna dance some saint dances for me. Oxente!!”Footnote ⁴⁰ Chagrined and worn out by the rough humor, I stopped asking questions.

Dona Erpidia walked to an armoire and extracted a worn binder. Precious scraps of paper emerged. These included old gas bills, receipts, a rental contract with the Roman Catholic Church lay society that owned her home, and a number of folded greeting cards, many with romantic inscriptions or syrupy, battery-powered music. Neither Dona Erpidia nor her son Coruja could read with clarity what lay before them, so as they extracted each bit of paper they looked to me as a reader who might identify it. Erpidia told me she hoped she might find some diplomas so as to answer my questions. But nothing noteworthy emerged in relation to state attempts to educate her family in Bahian culture. Or, put slightly better, none of the documents so carefully guarded, but so infrequently read, contained any content directly relevant to my quest. Yet the act of getting the folder, something that Erpidia's son accompanied by opening his wallet and showing me his citizenship papers, military service card, and tourist guide credentials, reveals much about the universe in, and techniques through, which property is alienated in the Pelourinho.

PROPERTIES IN AND OF THE BAHIAN ARCHIVE OF EVERYDAY LIFE

Cultural heritage is a genre of commemoration that objectifies social relations as signs and objects that social scientists often refer to as a “secular sacred.”Footnote ⁴¹ This is due to heritage programs' reliance for content and authority on public performances and archival techniques that set off material culture and social relations as purified, communal objects whose decontextualizations and recontextualizations open them to resignification within manipulations of tradition.Footnote ⁴² Yet the Pelourinho, while filled with monumental architectural treasures, gains much of its power and aura of authentic roots from the state-sanctioned reification of its populace's everyday habits as folkloric possessions of the nation. In other words, the Bahian historical center as construed over the last four decades does not so much commemorate battles, heroes, and monuments, as it celebrates an everyday life called up in some way by the textual fragments of interactions between residents and researchers.

As should be clear from my interaction with Dona Erpidia and her friends and family, when residents speak about IPAC they typically emphasize the extent to which representatives interviewed them and penetrated or gazed upon their domestic spaces. They often pantomime how researchers would mark down answers. This suggests that the back and forth between interviewers gave rise not simply to linguistic and interactional conventions, but to specific genres and records. In fact, residents' comments and familiarity with researchers push for a focus on ethnographic interactions in the form of interviews. But these interviews are also implicated in a larger process, one essential to the making of cultural heritage through fabrication and collation of data in written form.

In a recent discussion of media and religion, Birgitte Meyer points out that specific types of sign vehicles, or media, are intrinsic to religion and belief in ways that vitiate form and content divisions and suggest that anthropologists focus not simply on the messages contained in heritage, but on the materiality of their transmission.Footnote ⁴³ Pentecostal Protestant belief cannot be separated easily from its transmission via sensible forms whose pragmatic effects on the world arise in no small part from the very nature of their materiality. From such a perspective, signs participate in a range of meanings and provoke effects not simply by pointing at meaning, or signifieds, but because signifiers are themselves material entities. Their material states, even as they mean little or nothing on their own prior to interpretation, link signs to other signs which share those qualities, and thus a potential to take on new meanings in relation to those characteristics of the sign vehicle itself.Footnote ⁴⁴ With this in mind, the IPAC researchers' chart may be viewed as a specific type of graphic system stretched across a clipboard and a page, and accompanied by an artifact like a pencil or pen. This chart gains efficacy not simply in relation to content inscribed on its surfaces, but in terms of the texture of paper, the hardness of its base, and the smudge of a leaky pen.

Soon after beginning fieldwork in the Pelourinho, I discovered that simply by holding a pen and a clipboard with some paper I could attach myself symbolically to IPAC, and thus take on the role of sanctioned researcher. Through the use of the instruments, and thus the sign vehicles—but not the data—produced by the state's ethnographers, I could link myself to a powerful formation called social science. As a result, I could hide behind aspects of the state's mantle in order to avoid the violence that accompanied the neighborhood's drug trade. Paper, clipboard, and pen, through their very materiality, literally altered who and what I was in the Pelourinho. And this alteration had important effects. Yet my act of defensive prestidigitation emerged not from a consciousness of the power or content of social science in the Pelourinho, but from my feeling that, somehow, pens and clipboards were important items in the neighborhood. They were important because as signs of the mediation, and as agents of the transformation, of habits into a fungible entity called “Bahian culture,” pens and paper could quite literally alter one's identity.

My status as a social scientist—as opposed to, say, a tourist who just happened down a Pelourinho street where, lacking the protection of a paternalistic IPAC, which as a state institution could draw on Bahia's feared military police more efficiently than an individual, arose from a manipulation of scraps of paper and writing instruments. Somewhat like inventions of tradition and supposedly fixed origins made real by heritage techniques that purport to safeguard objects passed down across time, a manipulation of sensuous objects permitted me to conjure an ontological state that protected me and permitted me to realize my goals.

My experience with the media through which I represented people's lifeways, and came to reinvent or at very least reinscribe myself as a researcher, mimic formally the experiences of Dona Patricia and her family. Their statuses as different sorts of persons—citizens, residents of the Pelourinho, workers, students, and tourist guides—depend not on a taxonomic slotting as emphasized by theorists like Michel Foucault, but on the manipulation of documents as objects.Footnote ⁴⁵ The documents produce retrospectively and through analogy an identity that comes to make sense in relation to those material signs. This is a process quite similar to the conjurings of origins and the inventions of tradition analyzed so insightfully by ethnographers of cultural heritage zones around the world.Footnote ⁴⁶ But it is not usually tied to the forms of subjectivity or personhood that arise in heritage, and which I have argued are themselves a species of cultural good fabricated on the basis of the state's ability to reify human qualities as alienable goods.

ATTACHMENT AND DETACHMENT IN HERITAGE ECONOMIES

While they quibble about the construction, meaning, and place of place in social theory, it seems probable that few social scientists would argue today that place-making occurs without emotional attachment. Yet Pelourinho residents almost never invoke any sentimental bond to buildings or homes. This denial, which is itself a form of affect, is a very different orientation from IPAC officials who speak fondly about interior spaces, architectural details, and even haunting and other unhomely apparitions and feelings. But residents tell me repeatedly that houses are simply shells in which one rests, and dwells. This dwelling, a question of survival and an apparent expression of the violence of Bahia's economy rather than a deep metaphysics, requires that buildings be reconstructed, but never preserved, since many Pelourinho residents live in colonial edifices that were once abandoned. In a very Lockean logic, these became homes after, in the local parlance, being “invaded” by squatters who then break them up into rental units of which these squatters proclaim themselves “owners.”

My nearly a decade spent in the Pelourinho, first as an artisan and later as an ethnographer, suggests that a positive, sentimental attachment to objects is almost entirely absent among long-term residents. People insist that things, and especially homes, mean little since they come and go. To mark oneself in relation to them seems ridiculous since they are but objects. Meanwhile, memories lie in people and, even as people, and things have become confused in Bahian heritage, residents point out that one cannot imagine that possessing a thing can make up for the loss so much a part of lives in the Pelourinho, a beautiful neighborhood of gaiety and sadness that accompany poverty, the sex trade, disease, illicit drugs, and high levels of interpersonal violence. Nostalgia, that structure of feeling so essential to the heritage industry in its denial of, and thus desire for, a return to an impossible origin, is, along with pity, perhaps the most explicitly, and thus perhaps incompletely or necessarily, rejected of feelings: “Why would one mourn that which is gone when loss is such a standard part of life? It's what gives it flavor!” Dona Erpidia's son once asked me in a hopeful formulation, perhaps intended to mask his loneliness in the face of the dispersal from the Pelourinho of his childhood friends and the familiar colonial ruins in which he raised fighting cocks and avoided the police by taking advantage of steep alleys and twisting stairwells. In any case, and in spite of the complexity of such common rejections of sentimental attachment to neighborhood, homes, and objects, Erpidia, Alicia, and their neighbors typically deploy talk of loss quite instrumentally when meeting with visitors from abroad like social scientists, United Nations (UN) officials, and journals or human-rights groups.Footnote ⁴⁷

As with the Pelourinho's transvestites, or travestis, who Don Kulick argues take on their identities not as a function of their desire for men, but by attracting the desire of men, Pelourinho residents typically position themselves as the objects of desire of those who visit their neighborhood. Young hustlers of both sexes seek to attract tourist affections and thus secure a ticket to Europe or the United States. At the same time, they resolutely deny an attachment to their vehicles for escape.Footnote ⁴⁸ People who harbor no plans to leave the neighborhood encourage visitors to return, arguing that “Bahia is good” or “When you go away, you miss this land so much!” and then in their next breath curse the violence and poverty that surrounds them. In other words, feelings of attachment are for foreigners, or are something to be inculcated so as to gain an upper hand or win out in a commercial transaction. Instead, those who visit the Pelourinho are induced to supply the emotion that wraps exchanges in meaning in ways that bring people back, again and again, to its winding alleyways, gilded colonial buildings, and exotic populace. It is almost as if those who consume the Pelourinho, and its populace, graft onto these vessels an affective labor, or love, that renders them valuable.

The special ways Pelourinho residents approach buildings find their complement in inhabitants' approaches to history. Put simply, the inhabitants of the historical center with whom I interact care little for or about history.Footnote ⁴⁹ I have never, since I first set foot in the neighborhood in 1987, experienced any claims about the importance of contesting official histories even as my interlocutors find the histories sanctioned by IPAC ridiculous and offensive. It is much more common for people to claim, “History is not for us. It's for experts, like you, John!” In a sense, then, Pelourinho residents' historical consciousness revolves around an effort to make sure that they are present when IPAC technicians visit their homes to survey their lifeways and assess their moral fitness. By making themselves available to inscription in field notebooks and sociological forms that IPAC staffers will translate and situate subsequently in their institution's ledgers, residents maintain the possibility of either remaining in, or being paid to leave, their now-valuable downtown abodes. They may thus profit from their synecdochical relation to the histories told around the Pelourinho. Hence people's status, and value, as heritage emanates from their ability to be described, and transcribed, in IPAC archives. From this perspective, it usually matters little what inhabitants actually do, since the idea that bathing or cooking might become a source of value through its representation via media like archives, cameras, or the tourist gaze would have seemed patently ridiculous just a few decades ago. But today such valorizations establish the reality of everyday life, and archived life, in the Pelourinho Historical Center.

Michel Callon and his associates have argued that as markets for “intangible” products evolve and become differentiated, they rely increasingly on an attunement of producers to “consumers [who] are attached to, and detached from, goods … proposed to them.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Thus consumers' efforts help structure relations of similitude and dissimilitude among goods offered. This is important to a tourist industry, and the development of heritage sites, in which Afro-Brazilian culture becomes a key diacritic for differentiating, and thus setting the comparative price of, a vacation in the beaches and colonial buildings of Salvador from their counterparts in, for example, Havana, Cuba; Sigiriya, Sri Lanka; or Macao, China. Read alongside Pelourinho residents' tendency to attract desires and sentiments, but not perform them as some sort of sincere product of their own selves, such observations resituate the fetishization of paper, and archived information, by inhabitants of Salvador's historical center.

It would be an oversight to fail to note that, like residents, researchers are active coproducers of an archived, highly supervised, quotidian around which people's qualities and habits take on value in a marketplace for culture. It is equally clear that attunements, and overlaps, akin to those between producers and consumers identified for the service industry by Callon et al. and which I have described in relation to the engagements between camera-toting tourists and a woman washing her child are an integral part of the workings of capitalist markets more generally. Nonetheless, an uptick and an increasing proximity between producer and consumer, and thus a greater ambiguity in relation to those two subject positions in the face of market reflexivity, tends to mean that there arise a number of hybrid realms for qualifying products as, for example, something specifically Afro-Bahian. IPAC as an institution that cares for heritage and the politicized life of the Pelourinho population seems one such hybrid. And IPAC's emphasis on sanitizing both Afro-Brazilian culture and the immunological and quotidian ways of being of the producers of such culture illustrate how a detachable thing called “morality” upholds and supports the value of an alienable good called “culture.” In other words, the moral status of residents in not simply the target of IPAC policies, but their effect.

A moralization, which like a care-based or biopolitical IPAC, straddles the boundaries of nature and culture, has become integral to producing an imagined populace that embodies a form of Afro-Brazilianness palatable to an international public. This is not to disqualify the Pelourinho as a Disneyfied simulacrum of Afro-Brazilian life. On the contrary, it is to highlight the power of the archive as one source of evidence for the stories of Afro-Brazilianness told, and sold, in and about the Pelourinho.

When experts like foreign researchers, students, journalists, NGO officials, and UN technocrats visit, helpful IPAC staff members direct them to the institution's well-appointed library, or its publicly available archive.Footnote ⁵¹ There they may make themselves at home with the heavy binders of newspaper clippings, social scientific reports, and even the raw material from fieldwork that has done so much to entify the Pelourinho as historical center. And they may step outside the data-filled storehouse into a cobblestone plaza to find a variety of people performing Afro-Brazilianness and a rooted attachment to the Pelourinho. They do so through ever-evolving and often brilliant stratagems. One salient means involves the deployment of documents. Long-term residents, especially those recently displaced, carry plastic folders stuffed with items ranging from their social security cards to their indemnification agreements and original letters signed in 1994 by then-IPAC director Vivaldo da Costa Lima. which promise the bearer a right of return following the state's reconstruction of his or her abode. In other words, as with Dona Erpidia and her family, the manipulation of documents by a variety of working class, often illiterate, and relatively subaltern actors, has become a form of valorizing human qualities that plays a significant role in what the Pelourinho is, does, and valorizes. This distributes the work of representing and differentiating oneself in a market for multicultural difference away from the individual “cultural producer” and toward the archive. At play here is not individual labor as crystallized in mediatory forms like money, but a social context in which morality plays a key role in marking, or making valuable, what might otherwise pass for an everyday life. For Callon, the key to his analysis of the ways novel forms of economic agency arise in today's service or affective economies is the realization that “because the questions posed by researchers and economic agents are to a large degree identical, cooperation between them is inevitable.”Footnote ⁵² While I have not suggested that the questions enunciated by residents and researchers are identical, I have argued that the objects manipulated by the both are analogous and, at times, isomorphic or even shared.