Legalizing Identities
Legalizing Identities
Becoming Black or Indian in Brazil's Northeast
Contributors: Jan Hoffman French (author)
Format: Paperback, 235 x 156 x 23mm , 256 pp, 18 illustrations, 2 maps, notes, bibl., index
Publication date: 15 Jul 2009
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
ISBN-10: 0807859516
EAN: 9780807859513
Related black communities claim different ethnoracial identities based in laws. Anthropologists widely agree that identities - even ethnic and racial ones - are socially constructed. Less understood are the processes by which social identities are conceived and developed. "Legalizing Identities" shows how law can successfully serve as the impetus for the transformation of cultural practices and collective identity. Through ethnographic, historical, and legal analysis of successful claims to land by two neighboring black communities in the backlands of northeastern Brazil, Jan Hoffman French demonstrates how these two communities have come to distinguish themselves from each other while revising and retelling their histories and present-day stories.The invocation of laws by these related communities led to the emergence of two different identities: one indigenous (Xoco Indian) and the other quilombo (descendants of a fugitive African slave community). With the help of the Catholic Church, government officials, lawyers, anthropologists, and activists, each community won government recognition and land rights, and displaced elite landowners. The positive outcome of their claims demonstrates that authenticity is not a prerequisite for identity. French draws from this insight a more sweeping conclusion that, far from being evidence of inauthenticity, processes of construction form the basis of all identities and may have important consequences for social justice.
Reviews:
""Legalizing Identities" details the complex and contingent histories through which residents of two towns who were not in fact very different from each other came to be legally recognized as indigenous (the Xoca) and black (the quilombo). This powerful and historically rich ethnography speaks to issues of race, ethnicity, identity, inequality, and law, and does so in a way that is both analytically compelling and engaging to read."
-- Susan Bibler Coutin, University of California, Irvine
Author Biography:
JAN HOFFMAN FRENCH is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Richmond. Before becoming an anthropologist, she practiced law.
Available Editions of Legalizing Identities