Fashioning Brazil: Globalization and the Representation of Brazilian Dress in National Geographic 9781350026599, 9781350026629, 9781350026605

Citation preview

FASHIONING BRAZIL

DRESS AND FASHION RESEARCH Series Editor: Joanne B. Eicher, Regents’ Professor, University of Minnesota, USA

ADVISORY BOARD: Vandana Bhandari, National Institute of Fashion Technology, India Steeve Buckridge, Grand Valley State University, USA Hazel Clark, Parsons The New School of Design New York, USA Peter McNeil, University of Technology Sydney, Australia Toby Slade, University of Tokyo, Japan Bobbie Sumberg, International Museum of Folk Art Santa Fe, USA Emma Tarlo, Goldsmiths University of London, UK Lou Taylor, University of Brighton, UK Karen Tranberg Hansen, Northwestern University, USA Feng Zhao, The Silk Museum Hangzhou, China The bold Dress and Fashion Research series is an outlet for high-quality, in-depth scholarly research on previously overlooked topics and new approaches. Showcasing challenging and courageous work on fashion and dress, each book in this interdisciplinary series focusses on a specific theme or area of the world that has been hitherto under-researched, instigating new debates and bringing new information and analysis to the fore. Dedicated to publishing the best research from leading scholars and innovative rising stars, the works will be grounded in fashion studies, history, anthropology, sociology, and gender studies. ISSN: 2053-3926 Previously published in the series Angela M. Jansen, Moroccan Fashion Angela M. Jansen and Jennifer Craik (eds.), Modern Fashion Traditions Heike Jenss, Fashioning Memory Paul Jobling, Advertising Menswear Maria Mackinney-Valentin, Fashioning Identity Magdalena Crăciun, Islam, Faith, and Fashion Kate Strasdin, Inside the Royal Wardrobe Daniel Delis Hill, Peacock Revolution Forthcoming in the series Nancy Fischer, Kathryn Reiley, and Hayley Bush, Dressing in Vintage

FASHIONING BRAZIL Globalization and the Representation of Brazilian Dress in National Geographic

ELIZABETH KUTESKO

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Paperback first published 2020 Copyright © Elizabeth Kutesko, 2019 Elizabeth Kutesko has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on pp. xiv–xv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design: Untitled Cover image: Woman walks dachshund across pavement with undulating wave patterns, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1955 (© Charles Allmon/National Geographic/Getty Images). All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-2659-9 PB: 978-1-3501-5948-8 ePDF: 978-1-3500-2660-5 eBook: 978-1-3500-2661-2 Series: Dress and Fashion Research, 20533926 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Jonathan, and in memory of my three grandparents: Władysław, Brenda, & Lois

CONTENTS

List of Figures xi Acknowledgments xiv

1 Introduction: Fashioning Brazil and Brazilian Self-Fashioning 1 Definitions 3 Global Dress Cultures 4 What Is Brazilian Dress? 5 National Geographic: Identification and Distance 8 The Contact Zone 9 Auto-Ethnography 11 Readdressing Scholarship on National Geographic 12 Looking, Touching, Feeling 14 Snapshots 15 Organization of Chapters 17

PART ONE BRAZILIAN DRESS IN NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC 23 2 Anthropophagy: The First Hundred Years of Brazilian Dress in National Geographic 25 The Representation of Brazil in National Geographic Over One Hundred Years 28 Snapshot 1: The Maku Woman’s “Old Piece of Cloth,” April 1926 29 Seeing and Feeling 33 Portraiture and Ethnography 35

viii

CONTENTS

Snapshot 2: Paulista Women’s White Sportswear, October 1942 38 Black and White 40 Identification and Difference 42 Snapshot 3: The Cinta Larga Women’s Black Body Paint, September 1971 45 Civilizado and Savage 47 Western and Brazilian Anthropology 49 Dress and Body 50 Clothed and Naked 55

3 Recycled Aesthetics: Globalization and the Representation of Brazilian Dress in National Geographic since 1988 59 The Representation of Brazil in National Geographic since 1988 62 Beyond the Yellow Border: A Heightened Phenomenology of Contact 63 Snapshot 4: Djaui’s Red T-shirt and Adidas Shorts, December 1988 67 Fluid and Fixed 69 Touching and Feeling 71 Light and Dark 72 Local and Global 73 Vogue and National Geographic 74 Snapshot 5: The Afro-Brazilian Girl’s Lycra Top and Denim Jeans, August 2002 76 African-American and Afro-Brazilian 78 White and Black 79 Traditional and Contemporary 81 Brazilian Lycra and Western Fashion 83

4 The Space In-Between: Brazilian Fashion in National Geographic since 2001 87 Snapshot 6: The Yanomami Boy’s Gaze at the National Geographic Photographer’s Clothing, September 2001 91 Academia and Commerce 93 Fashioned and Self-Fashioning 95 Western Fashion and Ethnic Dress 97

CONTENTS

Snapshot 7: Bianca Marque’s Bikinis and Victor Denzk’s Dresses, September 2011 98 Snapshot 7a: Bianca Marque’s Bikinis in the Magazine, September 2011 102 Snapshot 7b: Victor Denzk’s Dresses on the Website, September 2011 107 Print and Digital Media 108 Fiction and Reality 110

PART TWO HOLDING UP A MIRROR TO NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC 113 5 Misplaced Ideas: Brazilian Dress as Reflected in the First Ten Years of National Geographic Brasil 117 Misplaced and Displaced 121 The Representation of Brazil in National Geographic Brasil Over a Decade 122 Snapshot 8: The Mayongong Man’s Rawhide Bag and Cotton Loincloth, July 2000 124 Distance and Intimacy 126 Snapshot 9: Lourenço Loy’s Red-and-White Bandana and Gold Medallion, February 2003 128 African Past and Angolan Present 129 Local and Global Hip-Hop Cultures 131 Empathy and Otherness 132 Snapshot 10: The Japanese-Brazilian Women’s Cotton Yucata and Wooden Geta, June 2008 135 Japanese Past and Brazilian Present 136 Ceremonial Dress and Everyday Clothing 137

6 Mundialization: Brazilian Dress in National Geographic Brasil, August 2013 142 Snapshot 11: Guarani-Kaiowá Dress, August 2013 145 The Tekoha 146 Snapshot 11a: The Guarani-Kaiowá Woman’s “Feliz Natal” T-shirt and Polyester Skirt in the Magazine 147 Objectivity and Subjectivity 149

ix

x

CONTENTS

Individual and Communal Dress 151 Magazine Page and Digital Screen 153 Snapshot 11b: Ava Tape Rendy’i’s Cargo Shorts and Western-style Shirt on the iPad 155 Snapshot 11c: Ava Tape Rendy’i’s Headdress on Film 157

Afterword

163

Notes 165 References 168 Appendices 178 Index 191

LIST OF FIGURES

1.0 2.0 2.1

2.2

2.3 2.4 2.5

2.6

2.7 2.8 2.9

Photograph by Victor Virgile, models showcase Alexandre Herchcovitch’s Spring/Summer 2013 collection at São Paulo Fashion Week. 6 Photograph by Albert W. Stevens, a woman of the Maku indigenous group, Brazil, published in National Geographic in April 1926. 30 Author holding the April 1926 edition of National Geographic open to view Albert W. Stevens’s photograph of a woman of the Maku indigenous group, Brazil. 32 Author rotating the April 1926 edition of National Geographic to view Albert W. Stevens’s photograph of a woman of the Maku indigenous group, Brazil. 33 Anonymous, photograph of two women taken in Rio de Janeiro, 1926. 37 Anonymous, photograph of women at the inauguration of São Paulo Sports Stadium, Brazil, in 1940. 39 Author holding the October 1942 edition of National Geographic open to view photograph of women at the inauguration of São Paulo Sports Stadium, Brazil, in 1940. 41 Author rotating the October 1942 edition of National Geographic to view photograph of women at the inauguration of São Paulo Sports Stadium, Brazil, in 1940. 45 Photograph by Jesco von Puttkamer, group of Cinta Largas women, Brazil, published in National Geographic in September 1971. 46 Photograph by Henri Ballot, group of Txukarramaes women, 1953. 50 Author holding the September 1971 edition of National Geographic open to view Jesco von Puttkamer’s photograph of a group of Cinta Largas women, Brazil. 51

xii

LIST OF FIGURES

2.10 Photograph by John Dominis, a group of local women who entertain men working on the Trans-Amazonian highway, published in Life magazine, November 1971. 54 3.0 Author unfolding the September 1988 edition of National Geographic to view Wilbur E. Garrett’s article “Within the Yellow Border. . . .” 64 3.1 Author unfolding the September 1988 edition of National Geographic to view Wilbur E. Garrett’s article “Within the Yellow Border. . . .” 65 3.2 Photograph by Jesco von Puttkamer, Djaui and Caninde of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau indigenous group, Brazil, published in National Geographic in December 1988. 68 3.3 Author holding the December 1988 edition of National Geographic open to view Jesco von Puttkamer’s photograph of Djaui and Caninde of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau indigenous group, Brazil. 70 3.4 Author holding the June 1988 edition of American Vogue open to view Jean-Pierre Dutilleux’s photograph of Sting and Raoni of the Kayapo indigenous group, Brazil. 75 3.5 Photograph by Alain Benainous, Sting and Raoni, leader of the Kayapo indigenous group, in Paris on April 11, 1989. 76 3.6 Photograph by David Alan Harvey, girl dancing in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, published in National Geographic in August 2002. 77 3.7 Photograph by Christopher Pillitz, baianas celebrate the patron saint of the “Baiana do Acarajé” in Pelorinho’s church of Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Pretos, Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, November 7, 1999. 80 3.8 Author holding the August 2002 edition of National Geographic open to view David Alan Harvey’s photograph of a girl dancing at the “Noite da Beleza Negra” (the Night of the Black Beauty) in Salvador da Bahia. 82 3.9 Photograph by Mari Stockler, image from Meninas do Brasil [Girls of Brazil], 2001. 84 3.10 Author holding the March 2006 edition of American Vogue open to view Arthur Elgort’s photograph of Liya Kebede and a baiana in Salvador da Bahia. 85 4.0 Photograph by Michael Nichols, Yanomami father and son, Brazil, 1990, published in National Geographic Fashion (2001). 91 4.1 Author holding National Geographic Fashion (2001) open to view Michael Nichols’s photograph of a Yanomami father and son, Brazil. 96 4.2 Photograph by John Stanmeyer, women in Bianca Marques’s fashion boutique, Rio de Janeiro, published in National Geographic in September 2011. 99

LIST OF FIGURES

4.3

4.4

4.5

4.6

5.0

5.1 5.2

5.3 6.0 6.1

6.2

6.3

6.4

xiii

Photograph by John Stanmeyer, women in Victor Dzenk’s fashion boutique, Rio de Janeiro, published in National Geographic in September 2011. 99 Author holding the September 2011 edition of National Geographic open to view John Stanmeyer’s photograph of Bianca Marques’s fashion boutique, Rio de Janeiro. 103 Author holding the 2011 Holiday edition of T: The New York Times Style Magazine open to view Angelo Pennetta’s photograph of Raquel Zimmermann on Fernando de Noronha, Brazil. 105 Author using a MacBook to view the September 2011 digital edition of National Geographic featuring John Stanmeyer’s photograph of Victor Dzenk’s fashion boutique, Rio de Janeiro. 107 Photograph by Albert W. Stevens, a man of the Mayongong indigenous group, Brazil, published in National Geographic in April 1926 and in National Geographic Brasil in July 2000. 124 Photograph by Ricardo Beliel, rapper Lourenço Loy in Rio de Janeiro, published in National Geographic Brasil in February 2003. 128 Photograph by Marcio Scavone, “Miss Tanabata,” women in a beauty contest during the Tanabata Matsuri festival, 2007, Liberdade, São Paulo, published in National Geographic Brasil in June 2008. 135 Photograph by Marcio Scavone, “O Calendário,” a Japanese-Brazilian woman in 2007, Liberdade, São Paulo. 139 Photograph by Evaristo Sa, members of the Guarani-Kaiowá indigenous group, joined by students, protest in Brasilia, October 31, 2012. 146 Photograph by Paulo Siqueira, a woman of the Guarani-Kaiowá indigenous group, published in National Geographic Brasil, August 2013. 148 Author holding an iPad to view the August 2013 digital edition of National Geographic Brasil featuring Paulo Siqueira’s photograph of Ava Tape Rendy’i of the Guarani-Kaiowá indigenous group. 154 Photograph by Paulo Siqueira, Ava Tape Rendy’i of the Guarani-Kaiowá indigenous group, published in National Geographic Brasil, August 2013. 156 Author holding an iPad to watch the film, “Sem Solução: o governo federal nem indeniza os ruralistas nem regularize às terras indigenas,” featuring Ava Tape Rendy’i and produced by Paulo Siqueira to accompany the August 2013 digital edition of National Geographic Brasil. 158

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have encountered numerous people during the time spent researching and writing this book, which was generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I am incredibly grateful to the Courtauld Institute of Art Pasold Research Fund and Central Saint Martins, who kindly funded many of the images published within this book. I would also like to thank the Landmark Trust, which allowed me to spend a fantastic writing weekend at Augustus Pugin’s The Grange in Ramsgate, which was organized by Marie Collier and Katie Scott at the Courtauld. In London, I would like to thank Rebecca Arnold, whose critical advice, support, enthusiasm, and friendship I have benefited greatly from over the last seven years. I would also like to thank Sarah Cheang and Luciana Martins, who provided invaluable insight on previous drafts. I am very grateful to Virginia Rounding, for her thoughtful and critical comments, and continued support over the years. In Washington, DC, I would like to thank the following at National Geographic: Renee Braden, Susan Welchman, Cathy Newman, Cynthia Gorney, John Stanmeyer, Annie Griffiths Belt, and Amy Kolczak (in addition to part-time contributors, Valerie Mendes and Professor Joanne Eicher). In particular, I would like to thank Heidi Schultz, who was so interested in my project and put me in touch with colleagues in São Paulo. In São Paulo, I would like to thank the following at National Geographic Brasil: Ronaldo Ribeiro, Roberto Matsui, Matthew Shirts, Marcio Scavone, Ricardo Beliel, Nadia Shira Cohen, and Paulo Siqueira, who were so relaxed, helpful, and unremittingly enthusiastic. Marcio and Ricardo were unbelievably generous in allowing me to reproduce images free of charge. In Rio de Janeiro, I had useful and interesting conversations with Mari Stockler (who also kindly supported my project by allowing the use of her images), Deborah Reis, and Vincent Rosenblatt. Joanna at the Instituto Moreira Salles was also very helpful, as well as staff at the Biblioteca Nacional. Thank you to

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xv

Amanda Calazans, who helped me with my translations, and rescued me when my accommodation in Pavão Pavãozinho encountered difficulties. In Goiana, I would like to thank Rita Andrade for inviting me to give a paper to her students and for sharing ideas. I would also like to thank Professor Paulo Cesar at the Jesco von Puttkamer collection. I would like to thank Hannah Crump, Frances Arnold, and Pari Thomson at Bloomsbury, as well as the anonymous peer reviewers who provided insightful feedback on my initial proposal. Parts of the material in this book have been expanded from previously published material. This includes parts of Chapter 2 in Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture (2016) and parts of Chapter 3 in the Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion (2014 and 2015). Finally, I want to thank my parents, Chris and Steph, for allowing me to seek refuge out of London, and my best friend and sister, Charlie, for cheering me up and providing encouragement during lengthy phone conversations. Thank you to the girls—especially Lucy and Poppy—for asking how everything was going, and to Greg, for providing a welcome distraction. And thank you, of course, to Jonathan, who helped me to keep my feet on the ground, but also encouraged me to look, and to think, in a more nuanced light.

1 INTRODUCTION: FASHIONING BRAZIL AND BRAZILIAN SELF-FASHIONING

In February 2014, four months ahead of the World Cup which commenced on June 12, the Brazilian tourism board Embratur requested that a pair of limited edition T-shirts produced by German multinational Adidas be discontinued. The two offending articles were a yellow T-shirt, which displayed a curvaceous brunette wearing a tiny bikini on Copacabana beach (identifiable by the imposing Pão de Açúcar in the background) beneath the words “Lookin’ to Score,” and its green companion, which presented an upside-down thong bikini bottom encased within a heart, amid the slogan “I love Brazil.” Embratur argued that the T-shirts celebrated a stereotypical Brazilian sensuality, which touched upon the host nation’s problematic reputation as a destination for sexual tourism, and presumably bore little relation to the multifaceted image of Brazil that then president Dilma Rousseff (in office from 2011 to 2016) and her administration were keen to project to an international audience ahead of the games. This revealing altercation is but one example of how the Western fashion industry has capitalized on outsider stereotypes of tropical Rio de Janeiro for its own commercial gain, further to the very real and emotional insider reactions that they provoke within Brazil, whose local populace does not straightforwardly recognize such categorizations as part of their own lived experience of dress, body, and identity. This book aims to present a more holistic view of how dress and fashion in Brazil have been created, worn, displayed, viewed, and represented over the last one hundred years. It examines how the representation of Brazilian dress in National Geographic has been inextricably linked to culture, identity

2

FASHIONING BRAZIL

construction, the interconnected experience of globalization—as it has occurred in multiple and differentiated ways—and the shared histories of Brazil from inside and outside. As a popular “scientific” and educational journal, National Geographic, since it was established in 1888, has played a key role in imagining the world at large. It has divided and labeled that world into areas of greater or lesser importance, often using dress as a vehicle for national identity to be articulated and realized through an outsider gaze. Yet simultaneously, the magazine tells multiple insider stories, about how global subjects have used dress to understand and negotiate their place within the world, expressing local, national, and transnational identities through their personal style and clothing choices. National Geographic is a multilayered resource then, which reveals the deeper connections between different people and places on the map, as well as the power relations that underpin them. It provides a revealing lens—yet to be seriously examined by fashion historians—through which to grapple with the nuances and complexities of dress as an embodied cultural practice, as well as the sensory and affective capacities of its representation that are communicated to the viewer through the pages of the magazine. Anne Hollander developed the idea that fashion only exists through visual media, highlighting the reciprocal and mutually exclusive relationship between the projection of ourselves to the outside world through dress, and the “constant reference of its interpretation” that an imaged world reflects to us (1993: 350). While a global history of fashion is in the process of being pieced together, that dress scholarship to date has neglected to engage with National Geographic can still be understood as part of a larger scholarly tendency to privilege inquiries into Western high fashion. This book bridges a gap between existing scholarship on National Geographic— that has tended to view representations in the magazine as essentializing local cultures—and contemporary academic debate concerning non-Western dress and fashion, which strives to capture the complex history of cross-cultural contact as ideas and inspirations are appropriated from across the globe. In writing of transnational encounter and exchange, I move beyond dichotomous understandings of the power relationships between National Geographic and Brazilian subjects to uncover the complex dynamics of dress as an embodied practice of performing culture. By turning sustained attention to an underexplored region of fashion production, this book uses National Geographic to broaden our definition of what fashion is within a global context, while proposing a methodology with which to study it. My analysis does not simply apply Western fashion theory to a Brazilian context, but uses Brazilian scholars to contextualize and extend debates on the complex realities of dress and fashion practices in Brazil that have been documented by National Geographic’s vivid gaze over the last 125 years. While I draw upon Brazilian fashion scholarship throughout this book—an important and growing area of research, demonstrated by the work of Katia Castilho and Carol

INTRODUCTION

3

Garcia (2001), Nizia Villaça (2005), Rita Andrade (2005), Valeria Brandini (2009), João Braga and Luís André do Prado (2011), Maria Claudia Bonadio (2014), and Kelly Mohs Gage (2016)—my decision to use five Brazilian cultural theorists to frame the analysis of each chapter is motivated by a desire to open out the key debates on globalization, as well as the relationship between the local and the global, in a more interdisciplinary and unconventional way. Despite constituting a fascinating resource for the fashion historian, National Geographic is not a fashion magazine, nor is it predominantly read by a fashion audience. It is therefore more fitting to draw upon the work of Brazilian cultural theorists Oswald de Andrade (1928), Robert Stam (1998), Silviano Santiago (2001), Roberto Schwarz (1992), and Renato Ortiz (2000), who are not primarily concerned with dress or fashion but nevertheless touch upon these interrelated subjects within their writing.1

Definitions It is important to outline from the outset the terminology that I use to describe and analyze various dress practices in Brazil. The most widely used term throughout this book is dress, in accordance with anthropologists Joanne B. Eicher and Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins’s understanding of it as “an assemblage of body modifications and/or supplements” (1995: 7). This encompassing definition considers the material properties and expressive capabilities of all types and styles of clothing or garments worn throughout the world. I prefer the term dress to clothing or garment since it extends beyond single or several items covering the body, to acknowledge the numerous acts and products used on the body, including makeup, hairstyle, piercing, scarification, body paint, tattoos, and perfume. Dress is not simply cloth, but a multisensory system of communication, whose many meanings are not fixed but continually informed and to an extent, even performed, through both wearing and representation. I avoid the highly problematic term costume within an everyday context, except when describing carnival or theatrical attire. I also define fashion within an expansive framework, as the demonstration of change and flux within any dress practices, and an additional value that is attached to clothing and its visual representation to entice consumers (Arnold 2009; Kawamura 2011). Fashion can be fast and throwaway street-style, but also rarefied and elite haute couture. It exists in numerous locations across the globe—a potent reminder that challenges the myth that fashion is solely a Western phenomenon, intrinsically connected to industrialization, modernization, and capitalism, which is passively adopted by non-Western cultures as they become Westernized. In retaining the terms Western and non-Western throughout this book, I hope to problematize them from within, demonstrating that they are imaginary constructs, which are brought into sharper focus by examining the case study of Brazilian dress practices. My

4

FASHIONING BRAZIL

analysis seeks to develop a globally inclusive and expansive definition of fashion, which emphasizes non-Eurocentric narratives of cultural and sartorial exchange, as well as the multiplicity of fashion systems. Jennifer Craik (1993), Joanne B. Eicher (1995), Karen Tranberg Hansen (2000), Leslie Rabine (2002), Sandra Niesson (2003), Margaret Maynard (2004), Susan Kaiser (2012), and Sarah Cheang (2013) are but some of the scholars who have challenged the perennial distinctions drawn between Western fashion, perceived to be fluid and shifting, and purportedly non-Western dress, misunderstood as static and backwardlooking. Their work has highlighted the vibrant and dynamic fashion systems, both macro and micro, that exist and interact across the globe, giving rise to the interconnected processes of mixing, fragmentation, syncretism, multiplication, creolization, and hybridity. Hybridity is an important term that frames my analysis throughout. As Néstor Garcia Canclini has articulated, “No identities [are] describable as self-contained and ahistorical essences” (1995: xxvii); while material objects may have originated in a specific area or location, due to the forces of globalization they are no longer affiliated with one space or place, but rather with multiple spaces and places throughout the world. Everyday modes of dress that have originated within the West do not necessarily signify Western values, since this ignores their creative appropriation in local contexts (Cheang 2017). I use the term local to refer to dress practices that are smaller in scale, and more specific and familiar to a certain group, community, geographical region, city, or state. In contrast, the term global is used to denote the style of clothing, fashion trends, or dress practices that are worn more ubiquitously throughout the world. Throughout this book, fashion is understood as the cultural practice of dress, imbued with a sense of continuous change and the shared consensus of trends; both are intrinsically connected to our individual experiences of being in the world, and embodying multiple subjectivities, whether of race, gender, age, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and nationality.

Global Dress Cultures As a multifaceted form of cultural expression, dress is well equipped as a medium to analyze the widespread economic and cultural exchanges that have transformed contemporary social life and resulted in the interwoven processes of fragmentation, cross-fertilization, and hybridization. The adoption of massproduced Western-style clothing throughout the world might suggest that we are witness to a pervasive and homogenized global culture. This would equate globalization, which unequivocally takes place on uneven terms of power, with a one-directional force of cultural imperialism that has standardized, homogenized, Westernized, and Americanized more vulnerable cultures (Barber 1996; Huntington 1996; Friedman 1998). Yet this oversimplified perspective

INTRODUCTION

5

does not account for the numerous cultural and stylistic particularities that have been mobilized when Western-style dress is worn in ambiguous ways, often reconfigured for local tastes, or adopted for different reasons, possibly even as a form of resistance to the West. Arjun Appadurai (1986) has acknowledged that objects in cross-cultural networks have no intrinsic meaning but acquire new values through their exchange; in fashion, the different contexts in which Western-style clothing has been worn reveal articulations and negotiations that are variable and dialectical, based upon their new uses and requirements. Appadurai has theorized the complex interactions and exchanges of information and ideas since the late 1980s as a series of conceptual frameworks, comprised of overlapping flows and connections between economic, political, and cultural constructs that are continually in flux. He coined the terms ideoscapes, technoscapes, mediascapes, ethnoscapes, and finanscapes to describe these multiple realities, which shift in accordance with one another and establish tensions between the warp of cultural homogeneity and the weft of cultural heterogeneity (1996: 33). It is within this hybrid space, where the weft is drawn through the warp, that new sartorial expressions are generated as two hitherto relatively distinct forms, types, patterns, or styles of dress mix and match. Certainly, all cultures have been hybrid for a long time, due to trade, slavery, warfare, travel, and migration, but the development of media and information technologies throughout the 1990s and beyond have substantially expanded the contact that different cultures have had with one another, and accelerated the speed at which these global interactions have occurred (Kraidy 2005: 21). Jan Nederveen Pieterse has eloquently described hybridization, and the heightened connectivity of contemporary global culture, as a process by which multifarious identities are “braided and interlaced, layer upon layer” (2009: 145). His use of a dress metaphor is a crucial reminder that globalization, in its economic, political, cultural, and technological dimensions, is intricately woven into everyday life; it shapes, encloses, exposes, and interacts with different bodies, defining and expressing personal and collective identities.

What Is Brazilian Dress? The key focus of the analysis throughout this book is the impact of globalization on Brazilian dress practices. The development of Brazilian dress reveals a long history of cross-cultural contact, slavery, and immigration. It is a complex and fluid process by which Brazil, since it was first colonized by the Portuguese in 1500, has absorbed but also reinterpreted influences that stem from its indigenous populations, as well as from Europe, Africa, Asia, and the United States. Brazilian dress innovations illuminate Brazil’s role as an active participant in global fashion culture, unsurprising given that it is the fifth largest and fifth most populous country

6

FASHIONING BRAZIL

in the world. The success of Brazilian fashion designers such as Alexandre Herchcovitch (Figure 1.0) enables us to see the country as something far greater than just a source of exotic inspiration to the West. His darker designs, as Brandini (2009) has articulated, challenge recurring stereotypes in European and North American fashion magazines, which still resort to oversimplification in their representation of Brazilian culture as an exotic spectacle, failing to appreciate the internal subtleties of the country’s racial, religious, social, cultural, geographical, and sartorial diversity. From North to South, huge variables in culture and climate necessarily impact directly upon the everyday clothing choices made available to Brazilians. It leads one to question whether there is a form of dress characteristic of Brazilian culture or conspicuously national in character. Simplistic outsider reactions might suggest the bikini or Havaiana flip-flops, possibly even carnival costume, but this tells us more about foreign perceptions of Brazil—which have tended to treat Rio de Janeiro as a synecdoche for the entire country (Root and Andrade 2010)—than of the lived experience of dress for most Brazilians. Any attempt to define Brazilian dress in a sweeping brushstroke is a palpable reminder that national identity, like clothing, is a material construct, not an intangible essence—an ongoing social process of articulation and negotiation that involves both insiders and outsiders to the group. There is an incredible variation in dress styles in Brazil. The differing styles tell multiple stories about their wearers, revealing global networks of ideas and objects that are in dialogue

Figure 1.0 Photograph by Victor Virgile, models showcase Alexandre Herchcovitch’s Spring/Summer 2013 collection at São Paulo Fashion Week. Copyright: Victor Virgile/Getty.

INTRODUCTION

7

with local identities. The forms of Brazilian dress analyzed throughout this book include, but are not limited to, indigenous forms of clothing, such as the complex sartorial system of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau, who live in the state of Rondonia and combine jewelry and body paint with Western-style shorts and T-shirts, in addition to ceremonial dress, such as the white outfits worn by baianas in Salvador da Bahia, who adhere to the Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomblé and wear a hybrid fusion of sartorial elements that originate from Europe and West Africa (Mohs Gage 2016). I analyze not only low fashion, such as the localized use of Lycra among anonymous Brazilian designers influenced by international brands such as Azzedine Alaia and Giorgio Armani, which emerged in Madureira, a poor suburb in the North Zone of Rio de Janeiro (Stockler 2001), but also high fashion, such as the boutiques of designers Bianca Marques and Victor Dzenk in the affluent South Zone, which reinterpret international trends for a national audience. All the examples of Brazilian dress that I examine reveal cross-cultural networks of exchange and influence, processes which are far from exclusive to Brazil. Yet they do come into much sharper focus within this heterogeneous region, which sits so ambiguously between the Western and the non-Western, and embodies many of the tensions between these two artificial constructs. The history of Brazil raises interesting questions about how National Geographic has articulated a recognizable image of the country for its readers. In geographical terms, Brazil is certainly a Western nation. Moreover, it is affiliated with the West in terms of its developing free-market economy, its large export supplies of raw materials and manufactured goods, its transition to a democratic constitution following the end of the authoritarian military regime in 1985, its high cultural institutions, and its adoption of Christianity and the Portuguese language. Brazil also enjoys a regional hegemonic influence in Latin America that raises doubt about simplistic assertions of US cultural imperialism, which I define as the exaltation and spread of a dominant cultures’ values and habits, often supported by economic power. However, Brazil might still be considered a non-Western nation in terms of its incomplete infrastructure, socioeconomic disparities, unequal distribution of wealth and land, poor standards of public health, and its popular and material culture which constitutes, as David Hess and Roberto DaMatta have articulated, a unique site in which “Western culture has mixed and mingled with non-Western cultures for centuries” (1995: 2). Brazil must be understood then as a microcosm of the world as a whole. Just as National Geographic has attempted to encapsulate within its pages, “The World and All That Is In It,” Brazil provides a revealing case study through which to examine how global identities have been asserted, negotiated, and renegotiated in the magazine through the representation of Brazilian dress and fashion. The diversity that is evident within Brazilian borders, as this book outlines, casts light upon National Geographic’s search for difference across national boundaries.

8

FASHIONING BRAZIL

National Geographic: Identification and Distance National Geographic was first published in 1888 as a slim terracotta-colored technical journal produced by the National Geographic Society, which was based in Washington, DC, and comprised 200 members, “to increase and diffuse geographic knowledge.” Under its first full-time editor, Gilbert H. Grosvenor (1903– 54), National Geographic increased its outreach and developed into the popular glossy “scientific” and educational magazine, with its distinctive yellow border and color photography, which is familiar today. Within the contemporary global mediascape, National Geographic still casts a quasi-ethnographic gaze onto the purportedly exotic flora and fauna in the world each month to its 4,125,152 US and 6,855,235 international readers (Braden 2013). Although National Geographic’s mainstream cultural production is addressed at a predominantly heterosexual male, middle-class, and middle-aged audience, demonstrated by the advertisements published within it, the exact breakdown of readership statistics is difficult to ascertain, since a mixed, male and female readership, constituting a broad range of ages and social classes, has unquestionably encountered the magazine. This inability to pinpoint National Geographic’s readership is largely due to its ubiquity, memorably dramatized in Elizabeth Bishop’s 1971 poem, “The Waiting Room,” in which she recalled a crude memory of her six-year-old self, reading the February 1918 edition of the magazine while waiting for her aunt in a dentist’s surgery in Worcester, Massachusetts. To date, National Geographic produces forty editions in local languages, in addition to its English-language version, and is a global brand that encompasses television, radio, films, music, books, DVDs, maps, exhibitions, and merchandise. This book reflects upon National Geographic at a crucial point within the magazine’s history, the latter of which has been discussed in the work of Philip J. Pauly (1979), Alison Devine Nordstrom (1992), Lisa Bloom (1994), Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins (1995), Linda Steet (2000), Tamar Rothenberg (2007), and Stephanie Hawkins (2011). In September 2015, National Geographic merged with 21st Century Fox Media and abandoned its nonprofit status, mobilizing a new stage in the discussion of the magazine that brings into sharper focus the uncomfortable clash between research, education, and entertainment evident within its pages. To slide open the glossy cover of National Geographic is to be confronted with a recurrent repertoire of diverse expressions, gestures, poses, clothing, and colors. The magazine has synthesized and compressed diverse peoples and places— previously separated by geographical, temporal, cultural, and ethnic disjuncture— into a single compact entity. A pertinent example can be seen in the 125thanniversary edition of National Geographic, published in October 2013, which documented encounters with the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kuwait, Nigeria,

INTRODUCTION

9

Afghanistan, India, Peru, Iraq, China, and North Korea. Viewed in its entirety, the magazine presented a complex portrait of the world that oscillated precariously between homogenous identification of, and heterogeneous identification with, represented subjects. The interpretative emphasis shifted between two opposing poles: on the one hand, a distanced pleasure derived from the stereotypical exoticism manifest when privileged viewers observe geographically distant and often subordinate subjects but, simultaneously, a critical awareness of those diverse subjects as a site for potential, as knowing agents capable of constructing their own subjectivities through dress, pose, and deportment. Ariella Azoulay (2008) has complicated the one-directionality of power that Susan Sontag (1977) attributed to mass-media images and asserted that, rather than fatigued and image-saturated, viewers are global citizens: active, aware, and, by extension, politically informed and capable of alternative interpretation. The text within the 125th-anniversary edition catalyzed this palpable tension and contrasted, to cite one title, “Witness,” a noun suggestive of the distanced spectator, with “Relate,” an empathetic verb indicative of identification. Moreover, conflicting statements within the issue posited “Photography is a weapon against what’s wrong out there. It’s bearing witness to the truth” (37) against “I fall in love with almost every person I photograph. I want to hear each story. I want to get close. This is personal for me” (79). This complex disjunction between the standardization and differentiation of peoples and places has materialized from within the pages of National Geographic, presenting cross-cultural contact as an intricate and, crucially, continually shifting process of cultural exchange, not a static, deterministic state. Representation has emerged as a complex cultural process, comprised of numerous spatial and temporal continuities and discontinuities, in which meaning is not inherent only in the clothing choices made by subjects, but has also been fashioned by National Geographic in response to modulations in the balance of global power. To recognize this interactive dynamic enables the multiple subjects represented within the magazine to be understood as both interacting agents who self-fashioned, and subordinate subjects who were fashioned by National Geographic’s quasi-anthropological gaze.

The Contact Zone The methodological framework that binds this book together is the contact zone, to use a term coined by literary scholar Mary Louise Pratt (2008) to describe a space—such as National Geographic—in which different cultures encounter one another and establish ongoing relations. Pratt used it to describe real or imagined “spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination” (7).

10

FASHIONING BRAZIL

Inherent within this space of contact are notions of friction and conflict played out in a militant area, or amorphous zone, in which the spatial and temporal presence of previously disparate groups can be seen to intersect. The contact zone provides a fitting framework for this book, concerned as it is with encounter and exchange between the local and global agents and agencies that have shaped Brazilian dress and fashion throughout the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. My analysis argues that National Geographic’s centennial, celebrated in September 1988, marked a paradigm shift at the magazine. From an understanding of itself as an exemplar of objective science, it moved toward a more self-reflexive and performative subjectivity which was driven by the forces of contemporary globalization and most evident through the representation of dress. Crucial to this shift is that the magazine consciously encouraged its readers to experience diversely dressed Brazilian subjects in a heightened, multisensory way, centered on the fact that the act of wearing clothing, and the feel of it on our skin, is intimately linked to our tactile senses of interpretative looking. Photographs since National Geographic’s centenary edition in September 1988 have traced the beginnings of a different view of encounters within the United States-Brazil contact zone, which have resisted the processes of objectification, appropriation, and stereotyping frequently associated with the rectangular yellow border. This is because they have broadened our understanding of fashion to encompass locations beyond Europe and North America by providing evidence of a fluid and varied Brazilian population, which has selected and experimented with preferred elements of local and global dress, and used those elements to fashion multiple identities of its own. This book is structured as a contact zone. The first part (Chapters 2, 3, and 4) examines the representation of Brazilian dress in National Geographic, while the second part (Chapters 5 and 6) examines how the representation of Brazilian dress in National Geographic Brasil (the Portuguese-language version of the magazine, established in São Paulo in May 2000) casts a light upon these dominant representations of Brazil. The layout of the book therefore places the United States in direct contact with Brazil. In the following five interconnected chapters, the book mediates threads of thought from Oswald de Andrade (1928), Robert Stam (1998), Silviano Santiago (2001), Roberto Schwarz (1992), and Renato Ortiz (2000), each of whom have grappled with the auto-ethnographic construction of Brazilian identity in diverse and singular ways. This is unsurprising given their own mixed cultural identities and experiences of living and writing within different contact zones.2 My analysis draws out the tensions and competing impulses that are evident in Brazilian dress and its representation in National Geographic and National Geographic Brasil. It thus enables the ambivalent and asymmetrical relations of power presented in National Geographic to serve as a point of departure, but not the straightforward conclusion, of the magazine’s representational agenda.

INTRODUCTION

11

Auto-Ethnography My analysis identifies instances of auto-ethnography, which Pratt emphasized is a phenomenon of the contact zone (2008: 7). Auto-ethnography is an autobiographical mode of performing and reflecting upon the subjectivity of one’s own culture. The process encompasses an appropriation of the idioms of the dominant culture, but also an infiltration by indigenous modes, which enable the auto-ethnographic subject to actively self-fashion and self-present. Pratt’s thinking is clearly informed by that of Brazilian poststructuralist scholar Silviano Santiago. Santiago coined the term “writing back” to refer to the palimpsestic process whereby Western literary practices are modified by Latin American writers, to provide space for the reinscription of alternative modes of non-Western creative expression (2001: 31). Brazilian dress is a form of auto-ethnographic expression, a sartorial manifestation of “writing back,” which has enabled Brazilian subjects to represent themselves as they wished, and highlighted some of the tensions in their representation by National Geographic. Pratt acknowledged that “whilst subjugated people cannot control what the dominant culture visits upon them, they do determine to varying extents what they absorb into their own, how they use it, and what they make it mean” (7). Auto-ethnographic expressions are predetermined to be understood differently by diverse readerships, but this is not of primary concern, since they nevertheless “constitute a group’s point of entry into the dominant culture” (9). While my use of Latin American scholars throughout this book situates my own arguments derived from visual analysis in relation to contemporary writing on Brazilian national identity, my subjectivity as researcher provides an additional, self-reflexive gaze onto my primary material. I understand this gaze to be integral to the research process. It provides a means to examine—with a revisionist imperative—photographs of Brazilian dress published in National Geographic and National Geographic Brasil. By focusing on the images, first and foremost, I allow the various relations that constitute them to take center stage. There is a large amount of subjectivity present, not least on my own part. I recognize that these are not simply images of the world, but images that exist in the world. By considering the course of their mobility, I analyze the historical context in which the images were first presented and perceived, but also reflect upon my contemporary gaze, which inevitably re-presents them in the present day. A self-reflexive reengagement with my primary material holds the potential for a contested history of National Geographic to be revealed whereby, as Elizabeth Edwards has articulated, the photograph itself acts “both as a confrontation with the past and as an active and constituent part of the present” (2001: 7). The images—or snapshots—that I discuss are sites of potentiality, enabling me to identify points of fracture with the overdetermined arguments of scholarship to

12

FASHIONING BRAZIL

date, a point to which I will return. While it cannot be denied that an asymmetrical dynamic of power has been in operation between National Geographic and Brazilian subjects, by allowing the images themselves to perform on a broader stage across space and time, my analysis reveals a counter narrative from within the representation of dress and fashion. By peeling back these layers of meaning, I enter the contact zone, and by extension, research, write and form evaluations from within it, enabling new ideas, debates, and histories of the magazine to be produced. My analysis enables the totalizing and reductive view of National Geographic, as the ultimate popular ethnographic gaze, to be reengaged with in a way that can move beyond previous scholarship, which has undeniably constituted an important stage in the discussion of the magazine, but is by no means the definitive one. This book can be understood then as a moment of “writing back.” I position myself self-reflexively as the auto-ethnographic writer, who undertakes the process of reevaluating and re-presenting the historiography of National Geographic. My intent is to sculpt out a space for alternative histories of the magazine to emerge in-between Brazilian dress practices and existing academic discourse on National Geographic, enabling the creative sartorial expressions of Brazilian subjects to be foregrounded, as opposed to silenced.

Readdressing Scholarship on National Geographic My study of Brazilian dress and fashion as seen through the lens of National Geographic is interdisciplinary, fitting neatly into no single field but drawing instead on dress history, fashion studies, art history, anthropology, literary criticism, film studies, poststructuralist theory, and Latin American studies. My analysis builds on a sustained critical commentary on National Geographic that has emerged since the early 1990s, conducted so far by sociologists, anthropologists, feminists, and postcolonial theorists. Catherine Lutz and Jane L. Collins (1993), Linda Steet (2001), Tamar Rothenberg (2007), and Stephanie Hawkins (2010) have all condemned the primitivizing and exoticizing gaze that the magazine has routinely placed on non-Western subjects. They have equated the gaze of National Geographic with masculine, imperialist power, but failed to acknowledge the fundamental social, cultural, economic, and political role that dress and fashion have played within the magazine, whether as a form of submission, or crucially, of resistance to the magazine’s quasi-anthropological gaze. It is important to acknowledge the potential reductiveness of such critiques, which assert that National Geographic has fixed subjects within an imposed “ethnographic present” where, devoid of historical contextualization, they remain a spectacle of the unknown and exotic Other. This tantalizing commentary has

INTRODUCTION

13

disregarded the possibility that dress might operate in unexpected or strategic ways, sometimes even against the very representational contexts that have framed it. As a dress historian trained within an art history tradition, my analysis shifts the focus of study to the active subjects represented within the magazine. These subjects have participated in global culture and consciously chosen how to present themselves to the outside world. They have done this through self-fashioning, which I define as personal style and clothing choices, and selfpresentation, a term I use to describe the expressions, gestures, poses, and gazes that Brazilian subjects have enacted before the camera’s gaze. Although not an exhaustive register of scholarship on National Geographic, the following publications provide a brief overview of a growing area of study. None of these female North American scholars has explicitly focused on dress. Nevertheless, the symbolic and semiotic function of clothing has been threaded throughout almost all their arguments. In Reading National Geographic (1993), for example, anthropologist Lutz and sociologist Collins conducted an ethnographic study of National Geographic from 1950 to 1986. They outlined its encyclopedic and oppressive arrangements of race, gender, sexuality, and identity. Lutz and Collins compared the magazine to Edward Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition at MOMA (1955), which featured 503 photographs from sixty-eight countries and was extensively criticized for its promotion of an undifferentiated form of universal humanism embedded in US Cold War propaganda. Lutz and Collins acknowledged that National Geographic has made a distinction between subjects wearing brightly colored “indigenous dress, tribal fashion, and/or ritual costume,” indicative of “an entire alien lifestyle, locale or mind-set,” and those wearing “Western dress,” which implied a desire for “social change, material progress, and . . . a forward-looking Western orientation” (91–93). Similar conclusions about the Orientalist role of dress were drawn by Arab-American feminist scholar Linda Steet in Veils and Daggers: A Century of National Geographic’s Representation of the Arab World (2001), which examined the magazine’s systematic coverage of Arab peoples and cultures from 1888 to 1988. She argued that National Geographic has explicitly used non-Western dress to symbolize Arab women’s alleged “domination and backwardness,” as opposed to Western-style dress, which has signified their “emancipation and modernity” (109). Tamar Rothenberg, meanwhile, has used dress more implicitly in Presenting America’s World: Strategies of Innocence in National Geographic Magazine, 1888–1945 (2007). She criticized the “strategies of innocence” used by National Geographic to present a utopian and altruistic vision of North American moral and technological supremacy abroad, and briefly outlined the exploitation of nonWestern clothing to highlight distance and difference (6). National Geographic photographer, Maynard Owen Williams, for example, posed individuals in “full-costume” for the “benefit of his camera” (112). Rothenberg’s own, limited

14

FASHIONING BRAZIL

use of the term “full-costume” constructed a binary opposition between fashionable, modern dress and fixed, traditional costume, and demonstrated that her understanding of dress within the context of a transnational world was rather limited. Most recently, literary scholar Stephanie L. Hawkins’s revisionist account of the magazine from 1896 to 1954 in American Iconographic: National Geographic, Global Culture and the Visual Imagination (2010) has provided an important critique of previous scholarship, namely for its assumptions that “readers are not reading the magazine so much as treating it as a picture book, mindlessly flipping through the photographs without pause for critical reflection” (10). National Geographic viewers, she asserted, were not passive receptacles of cultural stereotypes, but active and critical participants who, rather than endorse the magazine’s imperialist agenda, negotiated their own understanding of the multifarious identities in the world through the lens of this American “icon” (13). However, Hawkins failed to extend her analysis to understand active and critical National Geographic viewers as also embodied and clothed, who formed sensory and emotional connections with subjects represented in the magazine through the interconnected activities of looking, seeing, being, feeling, and wearing. Although the important work contributed by these scholars cannot be discounted, they do not consider the dressed body in the broader cultural sense as a tangible, three-dimensional site where complex forces meet. Rather than consider the subversive possibilities that are inherent in dress, and which demand a correspondingly multisensory response from viewers, Lutz and Collins, Steet, and Rothenberg concentrated on the ways the magazine has used dress as a tool to oppress non-Western subjects and construct stereotypical narratives of exotic difference. They have interpreted dress as a mere surface decoration, a secondary construction to the body. This book is concerned instead with the dressed body as a unified whole: how it feels to be dressed, the experience of dress, how Brazilian subjects have been dressed by National Geographic, but also their own, embodied practices of dress.

Looking, Touching, Feeling My analysis throughout this book focuses on the connections to be made between looking, touching, and feeling. Dress is a tactile layer that clothes the body, an exterior surface turned outward toward the gaze of the viewer. Yet it is simultaneously proximate to the wearer, who has an innate awareness of how clothing feels on the body and how it touches the body. This contradictory dynamic can be extended further to the viewer of a dressed body, since the viewer is also a wearer, who encounters the world through his or her own experience of dress (Entwistle 2000). Dress is a double layer that both has a material surface but also is an exterior surface. Phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty clearly

INTRODUCTION

15

indicated this entwining of body and clothing when he used a dress metaphor to foreground his understanding of sensory perception: “My body is the fabric into which all objects are woven, and it is, at least in relation to the perceived world, the general instrument of my ‘comprehension’” (2002: 273). He asserted that an individual’s experience of his or her body is the mediator for everything that he or she experiences in the outside world. Merleau-Ponty rejected a detached scientific and objective mode of viewing the world. Instead, he foregrounded the role of the dressed body in making sense of our surroundings, accounting for the thoughts, emotions, and memories evoked by touch. To make a phenomenological register of perception is to understand that contact between clothed National Geographic viewers and dressed Brazilian subjects was not disembodied and distanced, but a tactile and intimate encounter—whether acknowledged or unacknowledged by the viewer—which was woven into the sensory fabric of the magazine. Not only has clothing provided a tactile surface through which the National Geographic viewer has perceived dressed Brazilian subjects, but the magazine itself is also a corporeal object that has clothed original photographs of dressed Brazilian subjects within a second, glossy skin. To encounter National Geographic, whether it has been picked up, exchanged, sold, glanced through, read from cover to cover, collected, even thrown away, is to experience it as a sensory object, to feel its weight as it is held in the hands, to explore the texture of its pages. Contact is necessarily bodily, as Merleau-Ponty made palpably clear when he acknowledged that to touch is also to be touched (368–69). It is through handling that the magazine has communicated to viewers, not solely by means of linguistic signification of the two-dimensional image, but also via the sensations, memories, emotions, or affect evoked by the three-dimensional object. Laura U. Marks has insisted that the haptic and optic are not a dichotomy, but rather “slide into one another”; she uses haptic criticism as a means to “‘warm up’ our cultural tendency to take a distance” (2002: xii–xxiii). This book argues that the direct physical contact National Geographic viewers have had with the magazine has demanded, however unwittingly, an instinctively visceral response, which has counteracted an overdeterministic awareness of geographical distance, in favor of affective identification with multivalent Brazilian subjects. This approach marks a revisionist shift that departs from a reliance solely on distanced semiotic analyses of images of clothing in National Geographic as signified and textualized, and moves toward a more dynamic engagement with dress and fashion as image, object, text, idea, and experience intertwined.

Snapshots This book is organized around a series of eleven interconnected case studies, which I refer to as snapshots. The case studies that I examine open out to reflect

16

FASHIONING BRAZIL

change and continuity in Brazilian dress and fashion practices, as well as National Geographic’s shifting gaze onto Brazil, in relation to the specific social, cultural, political, economic, technological, and geographical contexts. I refer to these case studies as snapshots because they constitute, in the words of Alexander Nemerov, “a patchwork of glimpses,” which provide a means of coming into contact with Brazilian fashion history through the “photojournalistic precision of an instant in time” (2013: 2). I do not intend to provide an encyclopedic account of Brazilian dress practices as represented in National Geographic throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Rather, I seek to address with precision and depth the different gazes that the magazine has placed onto Brazil during particularly charged moments of cross-cultural exchange between North and South America, and to examine what this can tell us about Brazilian practices of self-fashioning and self-presentation. This approach parallels Hans Belting’s insistence that photography does not simply mirror the world but rather, synchronizes our shifting gaze with that world; it is “our changing gaze upon the world—and sometimes a gaze upon our own gaze” (2011: 146). Not solely a record of something that existed in the world, a snapshot opens up interpretative possibilities for the viewer, who invests his or her own memories, imaginings, epistemological knowledge, experiences, emotions, and preconceptions onto it, forming connections with broader systems of communication, whether verbal, visual, material, or textual. My use of the term snapshot extends beyond its common usage in photography, where it describes a spontaneous mode of amateur picture-making. I use it to refer instead to a complex combination of text and image that is manifest within particular examples from National Geographic and National Geographic Brasil, which are pregnant with meaning and as such tell us something broader about the processes of globalization operating within the specific context of Brazil. Clearly, none of the photographs published within the magazine have been taken as snapshots: they do not share the technical inaccuracies of the genre, nor, for the most part, do they employ the ordinary subject matter of amateur photography. Nevertheless, a crucial part of the interpretation of the snapshot lies in its selective editing and arrangement in the photograph album. It is in this respect that an unmistakable parallel can be drawn with National Geographic, which has recontextualized the family photograph album to perform as a documentary record of the world at large and as a trigger for memory and recollection. The magazine has provided a space to order and control the interpretation of these snapshots, altering and adding to their meaning through text, design, and layout. It has fabricated contradictory stories about Brazil, simultaneously promoting identification and empathy with subjects, as well as exoticism and Otherness. Patrizia di Bello, in her discussion of women’s popular culture in the nineteenth century, points to the intersensoriality of photograph albums and magazines, which were part of a complex process through which

INTRODUCTION

17

“vision was modernized .  .  . into a fragmented, subjective experience by new technologies and visual entertainment machines which were operated by and operated on the body of the observer” (2005: 14). Di Bello acknowledges the subjective vision of the embodied observer, who becomes an active producer in the experience and perception of meaning in the magazine, a notion that is extendable to a contemporary analysis of National Geographic and its varied, individual viewers. The eleven snapshots that this book examines were chosen following close content analysis of every issue of National Geographic and National Geographic Brasil within the Washington (DC) and São Paulo archives, during which time I carefully considered the visual and material qualities of each article that documented Brazil.3 During the numerous hours spent in the archive, further to the time spent thinking about and discussing the images through interviews with archivists, editors, and contributors, I was concerned first and foremost with the snapshots that revealed the nuances and complexities of dress and fashion practices within Brazil, as Brazilian subjects actively engaged with National Geographic’s shifting gaze. Rather than impose any assumptions onto the primary material, my starting point was always the two-dimensional images themselves, and the way that they communicate to the viewer as three-dimensional objects. This follows the thinking of Edwards, who reiterates that photographs are “both images and physical objects that exist in time and space and thus in social and cultural experience” (2004: 1). This book uses art-historical methods as a critical strategy to analyze images of dress heuristically; although focusing on only eleven snapshots, I make a richer analysis by allowing close examination of the magazine to open out a broader discussion that draws on contemporary writing on Brazilian national identity and historical context. Appendices 1 and 2 provide a broader view of National Geographic’s representation of Brazil in the period 1888 to 1988, and 1988 to the present day, mapping the magazine articles onto key events in the history of Brazil and Brazilian interactions with the United States.

Organization of Chapters This book is comprised of six chapters. The second chapter uses the work of Brazilian modernist author Oswald de Andrade (1890–1954) to examine the representation of Brazilian dress in National Geographic in the first hundred years since the magazine was established in 1888. Andrade used the term “anthropophagy,” or cannibalism, to conceptualize how the subordinate Brazilian subject consumed elements of a dominant European or North American culture, swallowed what was necessary, and defecated what was no longer of any use. This critical and creative process enabled the Brazilian subject to cannibalize the colonial cultural identity and to regurgitate an entirely new and distinctive

18

FASHIONING BRAZIL

one in postcolonial Brazil. Andrade deconstructed the negative connotations of cannibalism pervasive in popular Western discourses which, since Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” of the New World, have condemned the barbaric flesheating Savage. Instead, he offered a crucial antidote to such carnivalesque fictions of grotesquerie, creating a positive self-presentation of a Brazilian culture that creatively devoured dominant trends from abroad. This chapter applies anthropophagy to dress and uses it as a lens to open a critical discourse with the magazine’s representational politics. It analyses to what extent the magazine can be seen to have fulfilled a form of US-driven cultural imperialism in its representation of Brazil. Through a close reading of three case studies (April 1926, August 1942, and September 1971), each reflective of three different gazes that National Geographic has placed on Brazil throughout the course of the twentieth century, the chapter highlights the layers of complexity provided by a revisionist rereading of National Geographic through the lens of dress. It examines articles written and photographed by US Army Air Corps officer Albert W. Stevens; American author Henry Albert Phillips; and Brazilian documentary filmmaker and photographer W. Jesco von Puttkamer. I analyze the hybrid outfits worn by the Maku population, indigenous to the upper Amazon River basin in 1926; the Western-style fashions popular among the European-descended elite in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in 1942; and the painted clothing presented by Cinta Largas women, indigenous to the southwestern Amazon rainforest in 1971. The chapter acknowledges the disciplinary shifts in anthropology throughout the period and contextualizes National Geographic within the broader mediascape, drawing points of comparison and distinction with specific examples from Popular Mechanics, Life, and American Vogue. My third chapter uses the work of North American scholar of Brazilian film Robert Stam (1947–) to develop a complex and critical analysis of National Geographic’s representation of Brazilian dress following its centennial in 1988. Stam used garbage as a positive metaphor to describe the subversive potential of contemporary Brazilian culture, which recycled the remnants of Western capitalist culture and refashioned them in new contexts. Stam’s metaphor is comparable to anthropophagy in the sense that it provides a means to invert cross-cultural expressions previously seen as negative, and revalorize them as an anti-colonial trope, turning a premeditated disadvantage into a tactical strength. This chapter applies the metaphor of recycling to clothing and uses it as a framework to examine National Geographic’s shift in representational policy, toward a more performative and subjective approach. This was encapsulated by the September 1988 centennial edition of the magazine, entitled “Within the Yellow Border . . .,” written by the then editor of National Geographic, Wilbur E. Garrett (1980–90), which recognized photography as image and object intertwined. The hapticvisual qualities of photographs published in the centennial edition encouraged viewers to consider not solely how Brazilian clothing looked, but also how it felt,

INTRODUCTION

19

prompting identification between viewer and subject. My analysis demonstrates that National Geographic not only encouraged its readers to experience Brazilian subjects in an increasingly multisensory way since 1988, but also began to document a more multifarious Brazil. I make a close examination of two case studies (December 1988 and August 2002), which were produced respectively by W. Jesco von Puttkamer in collaboration with American photojournalist Loren McIntyre, and African-American journalist Charles E. Cobb Jr. in partnership with American photographer David Alan Harvey. The chapter analyzes the secondhand Western sportswear appropriated by the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau peoples, indigenous to Rondonia in northwestern Brazil in 1988. It moves on to examine the locally produced Lycra fashions worn by a young Afro-Brazilian girl in Salvador in 2002, part of an important fashion trend that emerged throughout Brazil in the 1990s, which was heavily influenced by the Western high-fashion bodycon designs produced by Azzedine Alaia, Claude Montana, and DKNY in the 1980s. This chapter is contextualized with examples from American Vogue. Rather than fashion an increasingly homogenous image of Brazil due to the interconnectedness engendered by globalization, National Geographic highlighted instead the subtleties of heterogeneous Brazilian dress forms, within which local and global elements interacted. The fourth chapter uses the poststructuralist thinking of Brazilian theorist Silviano Santiago (1936–) to examine National Geographic’s engagements with Brazilian fashion since 2001. Santiago developed the concept of the “space in-between” to articulate Brazilian cultural production as a hybrid construction that has mixed and synthesized aspects of Western and non-Western cultures. This chapter applies Santiago’s concept to fashion and marks a noticeable exception from the preceding and following two chapters. This is immediately evident from the title, which consciously employs the term “fashion,” as opposed to “dress,” as the primary medium for an examination of National Geographic’s representational strategies. In doing so, it explores scholarship surrounding “non-Western” dress and fashion, and offers new definitions of Brazilian fashion in a global context. The chapter presents two case studies from September 2001 and September 2011 which constitute the exception that proves (in the sense of tests) the hypothesis of the book as a whole—that since 1988 National Geographic has moved from cool, distanced viewing, toward an intimate and multisensory engagement with images as objects. It examines the photobook National Geographic Fashion (2001), which was the magazine’s first conscious engagement with fashion, as well as a 2011 article written by American journalist Cynthia Gorney and accompanied with photographs by American photojournalist John Stanmeyer. In these two case studies, which are contextualized with examples from Women’s Wear Daily and T: The New York Times Style Magazine, National Geographic presented a less complex picture of a global population, and fashioned Brazilian subjects more narrowly as either

20

FASHIONING BRAZIL

indigenous subjects ostensibly divorced from the realm of fashion, or Europeandescended elite Brazilian women in urban centers engaging only with high-end Brazilian couture. To acknowledge National Geographic’s enlarged and pervasive multimedia networks since 1995, the fourth chapter also extends the analysis to the representation of Brazilian fashion on the website, considering the sensory responses viewers may have had with digital fashion imagery. My fifth chapter uses the work of Brazilian literary scholar Roberto Schwarz (1938-) to extend the analyses made in the first three chapters to National Geographic Brasil, which arrived in Brazil in May 2000. Schwarz described a perpetual problem faced by Brazilians, who have repeatedly appropriated intellectual paradigms, cultural forms, and fashionable trends from the United States and Europe, regardless of their relevance to local circumstances and national needs. From his perspective, the importation of foreign thought and cultural products as “misplaced ideas,” or a set of ill-fitting borrowed clothing, is central to understanding the cultural, social, political, economic, and sartorial history of Brazil. On first assessment, the arrival of National Geographic Brasil might be misunderstood as a striking contemporary example of misplaced ideas, a demonstration of the process of cultural globalization by which a popular magazine established and developed within the United States has been made appealing and accessible to new audiences in so-called peripheral countries such as Brazil. Yet this pessimistic stance ignores the fact that no culture is static, since ideas are always departing from one context, and being appropriated and applied differently on their arrival in a new one. My analysis takes a closer look at National Geographic Brasil and reveals that the magazine’s wide-ranging and sophisticated production of local material has often complemented, and sometimes even challenged, ideas about Brazil produced by National Geographic. It examines three case studies from July 2000, February 2003, and September 2008, each of which present three different gazes that National Geographic Brasil has placed upon Brazilian subjects over the course of a decade. It examines articles written and photographed by Brazilian journalist Marina Moraes and accompanied with photographs taken by Albert W. Stevens (examined in the second chapter); Brazilian photojournalist Ricardo Beliel; and Brazilian portrait photographer Marcio Scavone. The chapter analyses the hybrid modes of indigenous dress worn by the Maku population in 1926, which were re-presented in National Geographic Brasil in July 2000. It moves on to analyze the cross-cultural hip-hop fashions worn by Angolan-Brazilian rappers living in Rio de Janeiro in 2003, and concludes by considering the appropriated forms of Japanese dress worn for ceremonial performances during the 2008 Star Festival, which is celebrated annually in the Liberdade area of São Paulo. Using archival evidence and interviews with staff and contributors to National Geographic Brasil, the analysis of this chapter is attentive to the representational agenda of National Geographic Brasil: how it has confronted and re-presented

INTRODUCTION

21

earlier representational paradigms produced by National Geographic, but also how it has produced original modes of representation. The sixth chapter draws together the different strands examined in the previous chapters, using the work of Brazilian cultural critic and sociologist Renato Ortiz (1947–). It examines National Geographic Brasil in the transitional period following 2010, when the magazine celebrated its tenth anniversary and began to position itself more dynamically and pragmatically in relation to National Geographic. Ortiz argued that it was inappropriate to refer to an autonomous global culture, which is hierarchically superior to national, regional, local, or individual cultural practices. He coined the term “mundialization,” which he argued is an overall social phenomenon; while there is a common background that we all share throughout the world, this must not be misunderstood as a pervasive homogenization or standardization of ideas, behavior, or cultural products. Rather, global culture is localized and indigenized through fashion and dress practices. My analysis uses mundialization as a framework to analyze a case study published in National Geographic Brasil in August 2013, which was written by American journalist Nadia Shira Cohen and accompanied with photographs taken by Brazilian documentary photographer Paulo Siqueira. It examines the localized forms of global dress worn by the Guarani-Kaiowá, indigenous to the central-Western state of Mato Grosso do Sul in Brazil. It extends the analysis to consider the representation of Guarani-Kaiowá dress in a short film produced for the digital iPad edition of National Geographic Brasil, considering its tactile qualities and making a link with the fourth chapter and its discussion of the National Geographic website. The medium of film provided an opportunity for GuaraniKaiowá subjects to represent and perform their subjective identities through dress, movement, gesture, expression, and gaze. It also provided a substitution for touch and encouraged the viewer to have an intimate haptic-visual relation to clothed Brazilian subjects. The chapter concludes with the suggestion that National Geographic Brasil’s representational strategies illuminate potentials for National Geographic to venture into new modes of digital representation, which are capable of continuing to resist the processes of objectification, stereotyping, and appropriation that have been associated with the magazine in scholarship to date. The key questions that all the chapters in this book grapple with are: what can National Geographic tell us about how Brazilian subjects have selffashioned, using items and goods exchanged through local and global networks to construct their identities? But equally, how have National Geographic and National Geographic Brasil used dress and clothing to fashion an idea of Brazil within the popular imagination of its readers?

PART ONE

BRAZILIAN DRESS IN NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

2 ANTHROPOPHAGY: THE FIRST HUNDRED YEARS OF BRAZILIAN DRESS IN NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

In March 1924 Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade published the “Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil,” wherein he argued that Brazilian identity was situated in between the modern and the tropical. This was followed in 1928 by his tour de force, the “Manifesto Antropófago” (MA), which resonated with the Brazilian aesthetic movement Modernismo’s desire for a new cultural identity that could engage with the primitivist art aesthetic currently fashionable in Europe. Andrade found inspiration in precolonial Brazilian culture and used the metaphor of anthropophagy to describe the process by which the Brazilian subject fashioned his or her modern national identity as autonomous and original, as opposed to dependent and derivative. This positive identification of giving a quality to something through the process of anthropophagy has been expanded upon by Beatriz Resende, who has pointed out that “enemies deserve to be eaten only if they demonstrate special qualities . . . such as courage in battle and in defeat” (2000: 207). The first seven sections of the MA highlight its interrupted form, contradictory sentences, various allusions, fragmented visual spacing, and use of parody and pun:

26

FASHIONING BRAZIL

Cannibalism alone unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically . . . * * * Tupi or not tupi, that is the question . . . * * * I am concerned only with what is not mine. Law of Man. Law of the cannibal . . . * * * What clashed with the truth was clothing, that raincoat placed between the inner and outer worlds. The reaction against the dressed man. American movies will inform us. (1991: 38) With no coherent narrative and numerous unfinished statements, the MA is difficult to interpret and must be understood, as Carlos Jauregui has emphasized, as “a collection of surrealist phrases” rather than “a systematic proposal” (2012: 25). Ambiguity is abundant throughout Andrade’s writing style, which weaves numerous meanings and interpretative possibilities together in fragmented form. This critical strategy may have been intentionally deployed by Andrade to relieve the writer of complete and overdetermined control over his text, which is instead offered up to the reader to extrapolate further meaning. Dress—as an ambiguous form of cultural expression subject to continuous repositioning— provides a fitting medium through which to tease out a few interpretative threads from the MA. The MA presents an innovative form of Brazilian artistic expression, which rejects European styles of writing. This is explicit in the cannibalization of the most well-known (and clichéd) phrase from Hamlet, as the protagonist contemplates his own existence: “Tupi or not Tupi, that is the question” (38). This line was written in English in the original Brazilian Portuguese version of the MA and refers to the common, generalized name (Tupi) for the various indigenous groups that live in Brazil. Andrade moved away from the negativity that the West has constructed around the oppressive figure of the savage cannibal Other who devoured his enemies, and toward an understanding of the process of anthropophagy as a creative act of appropriation (Barker, Hulme, and Iverson 1998). This line has become a cliché itself within academic literature and is the most explicitly quoted section of Andrade’s manifesto. Dress provides a subtler means to interpret what Andrade meant within the MA. He referred to dress directly only in the seventh section, when he expressed: “What clashed with the truth was clothing, that raincoat placed between the inner and outer worlds. The reaction against the dressed man. American movies will inform us” (38). Andrade drew an important connection here with the broader historical trajectory of travel and written accounts of it—both often inextricably linked to Western colonialism—wherein the unclothed “primitive” non-Western body was frequently used to construct and articulate fundamental social,

ANTHROPOPHAGY

27

cultural, political, and moral differences from the clothed and “civilized” Western body (Hendrickson 1996). In this regard, he may have equated colonialism with an oppressive attempt to dress the natural Brazilian “body.” His use of the term “raincoat” is noteworthy, since this item of clothing is both an impermeable barrier worn to protect the body from undesirable, outside elements, and a mediator, a second skin that enables the wearer to encounter the outside world, regardless of weather conditions. A raincoat can both create boundaries—separating and containing the “inner” world of the Self from the “outer” world of the Other—and deconstruct them; this utilitarian garment is, after all, a means through which the Other (the unknown, outside world) is tangibly experienced and brought into contact with the Self (our known, inside world). A parallel can be drawn here with Marks’s assertion that we “all live on the same surface, the same skin. If others are unfathomable, it is because it takes an infinite number of folds to really reach them” (2002: xii). It is not that Brazilian subjects are ultimately unknowable to the National Geographic viewer because of their ostensible differences in dress, but rather that it requires the unfolding of infinite layers of meaning to understand their sartorial practices, and therefore before Brazil can become knowable. From his disjointed phrases, one cannot be entirely sure of what Andrade was describing, except that there is a “reaction against the dressed man” (38). His assertion that “American movies will inform us” acknowledged the popularity of Hollywood films in Brazil throughout the 1920s, which reflected a deep fascination with US culture (38). If we reflect on National Geographic’s gaze through the prism of anthropophagy, we may detect the now active and clothed anthropophagic Brazilian subject. He or she becomes a site of potential to break down the barrier between Self and Other, by presenting an important subjectivity through which to rethink the magazine’s representational politics. Andrade celebrated anthropophagy as a critical strategy through which the Brazilian subject—rather than straightforwardly ape or reject US or European cultures—swallowed their positive strengths, defecated what was of no use, and incorporated foreign thought into the native self. He used the metaphor of digestion to reinterpret the traditional understanding of cannibalism in Western discourse in a wider sense to relate to that which is not his: “I am concerned only with what is not mine. Law of Man. Law of the cannibal” (38). This chapter uses anthropophagy as a critical lens through which to examine, firstly, what visual and textual strategies National Geographic has used to fashion an idea of Brazil over the course of the twentieth century. Secondly, I question to what extent Brazilian subjects can be seen to have self-fashioned, through their ability to selectively appropriate ideas, styles, and clothing derived from contemporary North American and European cultures.

28

FASHIONING BRAZIL

By highlighting the representational ambiguity of Brazilian dress that has been woven into the fabric of National Geographic, I will examine the complexities of clothing as both barrier and mediator. The three “snapshots” or case studies presented in this chapter span a period of forty-five years and are contextualized with contemporary examples from mainstream print media, to draw points of comparison and distinction. The first snapshot was written and photographed by US Army Air Corps officer Albert W. Stevens and published in National Geographic in April 1926, two years prior to the publication of Andrade’s MA. The second was written by the American author Henry Albert Phillips and accompanied with photographs from the Associated Press; it was published in the magazine in October 1942. The third was written and photographed by Brazilian photographer and documentary filmmaker (of German descent), W. Jesco von Puttkamer, and published in National Geographic in September 1971. Although the MA was published in 1928, it is relevant to a discussion of all three snapshots since the ideas discussed within it were being articulated and negotiated in Brazil throughout the twentieth century. For example, Oswald de Andrade’s “Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil” (March 1924) was published one month before the first snapshot was presented in National Geographic. The second snapshot was published the same year (in February 1942) that Mário de Andrade published the essay “O Movimento Modernista,” in which he retrospectively acknowledged how Brazil was created anew through the metaphor of cannibalism, while acknowledging some of the limitations of Oswald de Andrade’s argument. The third snapshot was published in September 1971 and coincided with the leftwing cultural and artistic movement in Brazil known as Tropicália, which recycled the theme of anthropophagy in the late 1960s as a reaction to the early years of the right-wing Brazilian military dictatorship (Dunn 2001).

The Representation of Brazil in National Geographic Over One Hundred Years It is useful to briefly contextualize National Geographic’s engagement with Brazil throughout the course of the twentieth century. Although established in September 1888, National Geographic first made contact with Brazil in April 1906, the same year that the Pan-American Conference was held in Rio de Janeiro. PanAmericanism emerged at the close of the nineteenth century as America actively sought to expand its commercial, social, political, economic and military contact with the nations of Central and South America (Smith, 2010: 4). From this point on and continuing until March 1987, National Geographic published thirty-seven articles on Brazil. Although they appeared to follow no regular pattern, three key trends can be noted over the course of the twentieth century. The first trend emerged between 1909 and 1933, when National Geographic focused upon the

ANTHROPOPHAGY

29

vast and unexplored Amazon region and its indigenous populations. A narrative of American expansionism was mythologized by articles that stressed active, masculine pursuits in the Amazon region. The second trend appeared between 1939 and 1945, a period of worldwide fragmentation and anxiety due to the events leading up to, and following, the outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939. Four articles on Brazil were published in National Geographic during this period and emphasized the modernization and industrialization of Brazil. Each focused on Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, outlining the similarities between Brazil and the United States in terms of magnitude, modernity, and capitalism, emphasized through dynamic architecture and busy streets populated by workers and shoppers of predominantly European descent dressed in Westernstyle fashions. This narrative must be understood as a manifestation of President Theodore Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, which was advanced during wartime and emphasized a less interventionist approach to interactions within the Western Hemisphere (Tota 2009). The third trend appeared between 1964 and 1984, during the throes of the right-wing military dictatorship in Brazil, which was politically aligned to the United States. Articles published during this period focused on the indigenous peoples of Brazil. These titles stressed a sense of loss, which presumed that the interactions of indigenous peoples with “civilization” were leading to their eventual demise. It was therefore apparently left to National Geographic to represent them before they disappeared, and in doing so, ensure that they did not vanish irretrievably. From April 1906 to March 1987 there was no representation in National Geographic of Afro-Brazilians, nor of the northeastern state of Bahia which, after the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888, established its continuing reputation as the region most populated by Afro-Brazilians.

Snapshot 1: The Maku Woman’s “Old Piece of Cloth,” April 1926 The first snapshot (Figure 2.0) that this chapter examines was published in National Geographic in April 1926, in an article entitled “Exploring the Valley of the Amazon in a Hydroplane: twelve thousand miles of flying over the world’s greatest river and greatest forest to chart the unknown Parima river from the sky.” The article was written and photographed by Stevens, “observer and aerial photographer,” and documented the Alexander Hamilton Rice Scientific Expedition (1924–25) to the upper Amazon River basin. This was the seventh expedition to the Amazon that the American explorer Alexander Hamilton Rice had directed and it was supported by the latest surveying technology, which included a bespoke hydroplane specially equipped to undertake aerial photography (Martins 2013: 40–70). The aim of the expedition was to “survey and map the Rio Branco and its western tributary, the Rio Uraricoera, following

30

FASHIONING BRAZIL

Figure 2.0 Snapshot 1. Photograph by Albert W. Stevens, a woman of the Maku indigenous group, Brazil, published in National Geographic in April 1926. Copyright: Albert W. Stevens/National Geographic Creative.

the latter to its source in the Serra Parima and to ascertain whether any passage existed between the headwaters of this river and those of the Orinoco, thus tying this survey to the one carried out on the leader’s 1919–1920 expedition” (Stevens 1926: 353). It also sought to gather anthropological data and conduct a medical examination of the indigenous peoples encountered. Despite conditions that made exploration physically and psychologically grueling, such expeditions were common in the early decades of the twentieth century. In an age of increased Pan-Americanism, North American scientists, geographers, and explorers—including ex-president Theodore Roosevelt and industrialist Henry Ford—were motivated by a desire to document and map uncharted terrain in South America, not to mention the possibility of commercial exploitation and economic expansion (Roosevelt 1914; Grandin 2010).

ANTHROPOPHAGY

31

Due to its veneer of objectivity and perceived indexicality, the camera was invariably used on such expeditions as an observational and recording tool: to document not only the terrain, but also the indigenous peoples and plant specimens encountered. A topographical photograph included in National Geographic was entitled “The fliers discover the camp of an unknown Indian tribe, skillfully concealed from all except the airmen” (370). It provided a visual reinforcement of dominance through its panoptic and privileged aerial perspective, which captured a huge swath of river among a blanket of rainforest, broken up only by a small clearing to the top-left of the frame. The caption informed the viewer that the hydroplane (itself an exemplary symbol of Western engineering) had enabled National Geographic to “discover” the previously hidden habitation of this unknown indigenous group. Since the introduction of the use of aerial photography for military purposes in the First World War, this form of photographic mapping has been equated with an ideological impulse to master and conquer an unpeopled landscape. Mary Louise Pratt has conflated this elevated and summarizing birds-eye view of the terrain with masculine power and termed it “the monarch-of-all-I-survey” trope (Pratt 2008: 201). This male gaze (which is invariably white and Western) resonates with the thinking of Michel Foucault (1977) and Allan Sekula (1981), who have associated this unifying and totalizing view with the authoritarian eye of the state, and of the individual voyeur. The uneven balance of power between the seer and the seen was reinforced within the text of the National Geographic article through continued reference to the hydroplane as “the eyes of the expedition,” as well as “we were privileged to view the jungle from the air” and “where the untrodden jungle presented a matted and almost impenetrable wall to men on foot, it surrendered its secrets readily to men in the sky” (353). The use of the camera—and its associations with scientific rationality—demonstrated competing impulses in National Geographic: to discover and learn, but equally, to master and order. In line with the scientific reordering of the Amazonian landscape from above, photographs taken on the ground rendered Brazilian subjects equally transparent to National Geographic’s anthropological gaze. The first snapshot was printed on the right-hand side (Figure 2.1) of a double-page view of the magazine. It captured an anonymous woman of the Maku population in a natural forest setting next to a river. In the full-length monochrome photograph placed to the right of her on the magazine page, a man stands tall and still with his shoulders pulled back, arms at his sides, and left leg placed in front of the right. There is an awkwardness in the way that the toes on his left foot seem to curl inwards into the ground. This gesture could express resentment at being scrutinized, or simply reveal the subject’s inexperience (and possible unease) before the camera. He gazes directly into the lens with a neutral, even serious expression. He has bobbed dark hair and wears a cotton loincloth passed between the legs and around the waist. In the photograph on the left—the focus of this snapshot—a pregnant

32

FASHIONING BRAZIL

Figure 2.1 Author holding the April 1926 edition of National Geographic open to view Albert W. Stevens’s photograph of a woman of the Maku indigenous group, Brazil. Courtesy of Jonathan Vickers.

woman with bobbed dark hair stands with her shoulders held back, arms by her side and legs apart. She is placed at an angle, somewhere between a full frontal and profile view, and gazes intently outside of the frame toward the river. She wears a patterned cotton apron tied around her hips and a cape made from a flimsy material that is draped over her shoulders and tied with string. Organized as a pair—with the subjects positioned separately in the frame, isolated in a bright, shallow space—these photographs are typical of the well-established nineteenth-century practice of photographing ethnographic “types” based upon their geographical location and physical appearance (Edwards 1997: 54–68). Compositional effort on the part of the photographer is reduced, and variability in the photographs rests on the particularities and peculiarities of the subject and his or her immediate environment. The classificatory white grid that framed these photographs on the double-page magazine spread—alongside two others, which also followed ethnographic conventions in their scrutiny of the subjects’ faces—encouraged the viewer to understand them in terms of their implicit or explicit relation to one another. This was reinforced by the title, “A Maku Squaw and Her Husband: Parima River,” which anchored a reductive reading by attempting to fix the individuals within the correct geographical location of the specific ethnic types that they were supposed to represent (397). Stevens’s detailed account of the appearance and characteristics of the Maku took the

ANTHROPOPHAGY

33

ethnographic examination one step further, conflating their corporeal cleanliness with psychological order and rationality: In facial contour they resembled Mongolian types, and their straight black hair was cut in a “soup-bowl” bob. .  .  . Each individual was scrupulously clean, and we observed that they bathed regularly. We found them to be keen mentally, sturdy, contented, helpful and kindly to each other, but each man thoroughly independent and self-sufficing. This was the first time, apparently, that they had had any contact with civilization. (400)

Seeing and Feeling Nevertheless, a certain amount of tactility was required to view this magazine spread (Figure 2.2), which placed these complex images in contradiction to the anthropological gaze that scrutinized them. The National Geographic viewer was required to rotate the magazine ninety degrees clockwise, and gently pull it apart at its seams to view the photographs in their correct and entire portrait dimensions.

Figure 2.2 Author rotating the April 1926 edition of National Geographic to view Albert W. Stevens’s photograph of a woman of the Maku indigenous group, Brazil. Courtesy of Jonathan Vickers.

34

FASHIONING BRAZIL

This tactile gesture brought the viewer into closer contact with the represented subjects, through the interconnected activity of touching and looking. As Patrizia di Bello has articulated: “For the touching subject, the object touched reciprocates the touching” (2005: 9). The embodied act of looking prompts a sensory encounter with the photographic object, blurring the artificial boundary between the Self and socalled Other. In April 1926, National Geographic was not the thin, glossy magazine recognizable today, but far heavier and thicker with textured, matte pages. It was akin to a scientific journal in that it set out to present a distanced and detached anthropological record of the Maku. Yet the magazine was also comparable to a family photograph album, since the proximity of viewing encouraged an intimacy with the represented subjects, potentially stirring memories and emotions in the viewer and prompting a more personal response (di  Bello, Wilson, and Zamir 2012). Dress enabled this dynamic to be extended to the physical sensation of wearing, so that touch likewise triggered tactile associations, responding to the viewer’s own heightened awareness of how clothing felt and how it moved on the body. This crossing over between the haptic and the optic encouraged National Geographic viewers not simply to see represented subjects (as scientific specimens), but to feel and fully comprehend them as living, breathing, digesting, cannibalizing, and self-fashioning human beings. It was not just the tactile sensations evoked by the magazine that constructed a more complete and intimate picture of Brazilian subjects in National Geographic. Although visually the photograph depicted the anthropometric body, the caption that accompanied it emphasized instead the anthropophagic subject. This is because it highlighted the subject’s adaptation of Western sartorial influences to present herself before the camera’s gaze. The caption read: “There is little in their costume to distinguish the men from the women in this tribe; they even affect the same style of hair ‘bob.’ The woman has decorated her shoulders with an old piece of cloth for the occasion of having her photograph taken” (397; my italics). Despite its naïve assertion that there are few distinguishing features between male and female dress, the caption drew attention to the female subject’s deliberate and conscious fashioning of herself “with an old piece of cloth” for the photographer. This act suggested not simply an awareness of being on display, but a knowing and consensual performance that undermined a deterministic reading of the image. It presented a shift of the hegemonic gaze to the indigenous subject, the habitual object of anthropology, who ceases to represent a fixed and unchanging essence, but now demonstrates an ability to digest foreign cultural references from the leftover materials that are available to her. The caption directed the viewer’s attention toward the subject’s clothing, employing what Roland Barthes termed “anchorage,” whereby text is used to illuminate the primary point of reference for understanding a photograph (1977: 38). The subject’s low-tech, “make-do” clothing solution highlighted the inventiveness and resourcefulness of the Maku, who are neither fragile or static

ANTHROPOPHAGY

35

in the face of National Geographic’s anthropological gaze, but able to consume outside influences and refashion them to fit their own ends. It is in this respect that the photograph encapsulates the symbolic and cultural meaning of the Portuguese word gambiarra, which can be understood as one manifestation of anthropophagy. Gambiarra has no English translation but is used colloquially throughout Brazil to refer to a makeshift contraption or improvised solution (Rosas 2008: 343–44). The woman’s recycling of an “old piece of cloth” to assemble an outfit deemed suitable for the photographer’s gaze is exemplary of gambiarra. This fragmentary, ready-made creation has been modified to fit a different use, demonstrating the sustainability of the subject’s practical and creative endeavor.

Portraiture and Ethnography The woman’s clothing rendered her an active as opposed to passive subject, and encouraged the National Geographic viewer to understand the ethnographic photograph in terms of a self-aware and individually styled portrait. Within the body of the article, Stevens acknowledged: “It was not difficult to get the natives to pose. Our problem was rather to get them to unpose. Once they struck an attitude which the photographer desired, they held it indefinitely. No Hollywood director ever had more patient subjects” (1926: 412). Even though Stevens admitted that he had directed each photographic subject, we can see evidence that the subject also contributed her own preferences to the making of the photograph; even just holding the pose indefinitely could be read as a subversion of the repressive measures of ethnographic photography. Tamar Garb has delineated this parallel between the tradition of portraiture and racialized ethnography: “Where the ethnographic deals in types, groups and collective characteristics, portraiture purports to portray the unique and distinctive features of named subjects whose social identities provide a backdrop for individual agency and assertion” (2011: 12). She highlights the parallel between characteristics that indicate the authoritarian measures of ethnography—full frontal exposure; visual uniformity; minimization of light and shadow—with the individualizing tendencies of portraiture. In National Geographic, this photograph can be viewed as a collaborative portrait that reflected the choices of the individual, who was clearly a willing participant in the image-making process, choosing her own props, pose, expression, and style of presentation. This subject’s self-fashioning displaces the institutionally imposed objectivity that is characteristic of National Geographic’s distanced anthropological gaze. To acknowledge the subject’s self-fashioning is to reveal the fluctuating nature of anthropological photographs, and mobilize a more complex dynamic that simultaneously presents the subject as a standardized visual spectacle and recognizes her personal lived experience of dress (Edwards 1997).

36

FASHIONING BRAZIL

A rather different image of the Maku was presented in Popular Mechanics one year earlier in November 1925. It appeared within an article written by H. A. Bruno, entitled “Airplanes Aid Explorers in Brazil,” which documented the same expedition directed by Hamilton Rice to the Amazon. Published on a singlepage spread, the caption read: “Dr. Rice measuring a five foot two inch Maku Indian” (1925: 788). It accompanied a photograph of Hamilton Rice—armed with a measuring device—as he methodically sizes up an anonymous Maku man who stands in profile, arms folded defensively across his chest, a resigned expression on his face. Christopher Pinney has referred to the measuring stick as the “anthropometrist’s talisman”; although ostensibly used to measure height, it is frequently employed as a “mere studio prop,” and carries with it a cargo of pejorative associations (1997: 50). In contrast to the indigenous man’s lack of Western-style clothing in Popular Mechanics—in which the crude cropping of the image on the magazine page displays only the very top of his loincloth—Hamilton Rice is completely protected from the elements in belted khaki trousers and a buttoned-up linen shirt. The striking differences in dress between the two men mobilize an unmistakable power dynamic—between fully clothed and purportedly civilized white American men and partially clothed “uncivilized” indigenous Brazilian men. During a meeting of the Royal Geographic Society on February 21, 1921, Hamilton Rice demonstrated that he equated the adoption of Western-style dress with an evolutionary and linear narrative of progress, from a state of primitivism to one of so-called civilization. Describing his 1919 expedition to the Amazon, he spoke of the imposition of Western-style dress on the indigenous population of São Gabriel (a municipality located on the northern shore of the Rio Negro River, in Amazonas state) as part of a civilizing mission set up in 1916 by Christian missionaries: “São Gabriel today with its clean, nicely dressed, courteous schoolchildren, neatly fenced gardens, cleared spaces and atmosphere of order and industry is in striking contrast to the squalid village of naked little savages and unkempt hoydens, neglected purlieus, and lack of municipal control and mission influence that prevailed up to three years ago.” The Maku man presented in Popular Mechanics is still dressed, albeit not in Hamilton Rice’s limited understanding of the term, which conflates wearing with the covering up of the body and consequent creation of a social order, rather than consider the full range of body modifications and manipulations that constitute dress (Eicher 1995: 7). By highlighting the female Brazilian subject’s selective appropriation of Western-style dress, which was combined with her own sartorial codes, National Geographic disrupted the representational stability of the ethnographic photograph and nudged the viewer’s attention toward a more personal narrative centered on the individual’s self-fashioning. It is evident, however, that National Geographic’s gaze still sought to present a Brazilian subject sufficiently distanced from its North American readership. This can be inferred from the advertisements

ANTHROPOPHAGY

37

that jostled for attention within the pages of the magazine. An advert for the American motor company Cadillac, published in the same edition of National Geographic, provides a fitting example. A fair-haired slim white woman—not so dissimilar, perhaps, from the female National Geographic viewer—wears a neat cloche hat and flowing dress with a dropped waist and frilled cuffs. With her art deco-style scarf draped casually over her shoulder, she symbolizes the “transcendent luxury” of the Cadillac, as described in the text of the advert (3). Had National Geographic sought to present a similarly fashionably dressed Brazilian subject to its viewers, it could have easily found one, as an anonymous photograph taken in Rio de Janeiro in 1926 attests (Figure 2.3). During this period, urban reforms saw Rio de Janeiro remodeled on European architectural ideas and the increasing adoption of Euro-American fashions by wealthy Brazilian

Figure 2.3 Anonymous, photograph of two women taken in Rio de Janeiro, 1926. Copyright: Instituto Moreira Salles.

38

FASHIONING BRAZIL

women (Carvalho 2014). In this photograph, two smart and modern Brazilian women with carefully constructed and coordinated ensembles are framed before a palm tree in a leafy environment that could be a landscaped European garden. They wear neat cloche hats, contemporary tailored fashions with dropped waists, stockings and high heels, and carry a collection of accessories, including a clutch bag and an umbrella. Photographed side by side in the center of the frame, the women face the camera directly and appear ready for its gaze. The woman on the left is of indigenous descent, wears an ornately embroidered dress, and smiles confidently. The woman on the right has more European features, wears a brooch on her right lapel, and enacts a more controlled, fashionable pout. Like the indigenous female subject in National Geographic, these women perform a “look,” but it is one that may have been more easily recognizable as fashionable to the National Geographic viewer. That National Geographic chose not to document this choice of subject reinforces that it either believed in, or wanted to disseminate an idea that, Brazil was geographically and temporally located outside the sphere of Western modernization. Rather than utilize the conspicuousness of European fashions, the magazine chose to present an inconspicuous example of sartorial anthropophagy performed by the indigenous female subject. It required the viewer to unfold independently the layers of ambiguity woven into the photograph. With no explanation within the body of the article about the process of self-fashioning being enacted, the meaning of this National Geographic snapshot remained as precarious and uncertain as Andrade’s MA. That ambiguity was not so pervasive in the second snapshot this chapter discusses, which presented a form of anthropophagy that National Geographic viewers would have been more easily able to identify with.

Snapshot 2: Paulista Women’s White Sportswear, October 1942 The second snapshot (Figure 2.4) was published in National Geographic in October 1942, within an article entitled “Air Cruising through New Brazil: A National Geographic reporter spots vast resources which the Republic’s war declaration adds to strength of United Nations.” The article was published two months after Brazil had broken off diplomatic relations with the Axis powers and officially declared war on Germany and Italy on August 22, 1942. Brazil was particularly important to the United States in 1942 on two accounts: her rich deposits of natural resources, which included rubber, manganese, uranium, nickel and iron ore, and the military and strategic significance of her protruding northeastern coastline, which was considered vulnerable to Nazi military attack (Smith 2010). National Geographic documented an airborne trip taken by the author, Henry

ANTHROPOPHAGY

39

Figure 2.4 Snapshot 2. Anonymous, photograph of women at the inauguration of São Paulo Sports Stadium, Brazil, in 1940. Copyright: Black Star/National Geographic Creative.

Albert Phillips, to produce a geographical survey of the country’s “struggle to improve its cities and create a New Brazil” (1942: 503). The relationship between the two countries had shifted from an early-twentieth-century North American perception of Brazil as a tropical site ripe for exploitation and expansion, to a wartime intensification of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy, which perceived the country to be a necessary ally and vital to the protection of the Western Hemisphere (Tota and Greenberg 2010). One example of the conciliatory attitude taken toward Brazil can be seen in the US propaganda film, Brazil at War, produced by the Office of Inter-American Affairs in 1943. It celebrated Brazil as “a powerful new friend” and drew a comparison with the United States in terms of size, population, industry and resources: “Brazil brings much to the Allied Cause, not only the weight of her resources and manpower, but the militant spirit of her people and the reaffirmation of her friendship for the people of the United States.” Correspondingly, there was a shift in National Geographic. Rather than continuing to place an anthropological gaze on the Amazon region, it began to focus on industrialized urban centers such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, and utilize more familiar documentary modes of exposure. The thirty-two monochromatic photographs selected to accompany Phillips’s article made dramatic use of light and shade, form and void, near and far to

40

FASHIONING BRAZIL

animate the static scenes of urban Brazil with a modernist, optimistic vision of transformation and progress. The crispness and clarity of the reportage panned a range of industrial, architectural, and ecological sites, rendered on a monumental scale and in minute detail, which included the twenty-six-story Marinelli building in São Paulo, the Lacerda elevator in Salvador, the grand opera house in Manaus, and Copacabana seafront. These were occasionally interspersed with images of the Brazilian population, in which the mise-en-scène visually supported a narrative that implied the social fabric of Brazil was comprised entirely of selfmotivated and determined individuals. In a letter to National Geographic editor, J. R. Hildebrand, dated June 18, 1942, Phillips explained his revisionist intent in compiling the article: I am glad we shall avoid the sappy Good Neighbor vein. Likewise we shall sidestep all touchy political inferences. No SA republic could have been better chosen for a complete turn-over as Brazil. Perhaps we should call the piece “NOVO BRASIL” and follow the general lines of innovations, which of course will cover the greater part of the great country. In this respect, Vargas is the outstanding figure in the whole of the continent. Phillips wanted to move away from an overtly sentimentalized representation of the Good Neighbor, personified in 1942 by the creation of the Walt Disney character Jose “Zé” Carioca, an anthropomorphized parrot from Rio de Janeiro who appeared beside Donald Duck in the cartoon Saludos Amigos. Instead, he emphasized the crucial role Brazilian president Getúlio Vargas (in office from 1930 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1954) had played in the modernization and industrialization of Brazil. He praised Vargas’s popularity, which resulted from the fact that “the people recognized him as one of themselves—a democratic, fearless Gaucho,” and presented him as the charismatic and paternalistic leader of the “New Brazil” (1942: 356). In accordance with Phillips’s intent to “sidestep all touchy political inferences,” that Vargas’s authoritarian Estado Novo (New State) dictatorship (1937–45) had many commonalities with fascism, and that his allegiance with the Allied Forces in October 1942 had taken many by surprise, went completely undocumented by National Geographic.

Black and White The second snapshot (Figure 2.5) was a full-page monochrome Associated Press photograph printed on the right-hand side of a double-page view. It captured a group of athletic young white women (who appear to be of European descent) standing to attention before the camera. The upward-looking gaze of the camera elevates and projects the women against an open, unobstructed sky.

ANTHROPOPHAGY

41

Figure 2.5 Author holding the October 1942 edition of National Geographic open to view photograph of women at the inauguration of São Paulo Sports Stadium, Brazil in 1940. Courtesy of Jonathan Vickers.

Tall and erect, their feet placed together, arms straight by their sides, shoulders back and stomachs tucked in, they gaze—for the most part—straight ahead. The women are organized into pairs with military precision, forming a uniform line that stretches seemingly without limit into the distance. Their supple limbs and pale skin are illuminated by a natural sunlight that radiates from the right-hand side of the frame and stretches across the image. The construction of Brazilian femininity based upon glowing white ideals was not unknown in the North American press. An example can be seen in a black-and-white photograph of Vargas’s daughter, Senhora Alzira Vargas do Amaral Peixoto, which was published in American Vogue in July 1941. The subject formed the centerpiece of an article—indiscreetly titled “South American Visitors: Five Beautiful Neighbors from Brazil, Peru and the Argentine . . . recent visitors to the U.S.”—that was clearly intent on supporting Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy through shared ideals of white, feminine beauty (Anon. 1941: 22). Captured side-on, the flash of fashion photographer Horst P. Horst’s camera illuminates the subject’s fair skin, carefully coiffured hair, and neatly tailored white cotton dress. Richard Dyer has examined how camera lighting and film technology are specifically calibrated to assume and privilege white skin. He has conflated the representation of white bodies with the photographic quality of “lightness,” in which bodies are “literally but also figuratively enlightened,” reinforcing an irreconcilable polarity between

42

FASHIONING BRAZIL

the colors—black and white—and the bodies—nonwhite and white (1997: 101). Looking ahead and contemplating the prospect of a brighter and by extension, whiter future, the women in National Geographic appear healthy and positive. They reflect the dynamism of a nation ready for war, a message of national unity conveyed through group activity. Just as in American Vogue, the light illuminates their identical clean and simple white sportswear: socks, plimsolls, and polo shirts, all of which appear relief-like, staged against their dark shorts and the flat grey background. The uniformity of their white skin, white clothing, and identical poses is reinforced by the monochromatic palette, which works to transcend Brazil’s diverse and multiracial population, both visually and ideologically. The presentation of multiple disciplined glowing white bodies— fused into a single powerful entity—can be understood as a metaphor for the unified global body: a powerful and cohesive Western Hemisphere comprised of reliable and self-motivated individuals, all working together in cooperation. Whiteness, as the visual manifestation of the complete erasure of impurities, is an important trope used by National Geographic during this period. It referenced the rigorous cleanliness central to contemporary ideology in the United States, in which mass-produced white products were perceived as smooth and sterile, rational and ordered (Hoy 1995). Advertisements for household and personal cleaning products highlight the virtues of whiteness as an attainable ideal, visually alluding to Mary Douglas’s assertion that the human desire for cleanliness must be understood as a process of environmental organization: the construction of a social order through the systematic process of bodily purification (2004: 2). A clear example is a monochrome advert for the denture-cleaning product Polident, published in National Geographic in May 1941. It featured the fixed bright, white smile of a pale-skinned, blonde-haired woman. She gazes directly at the viewer, the pure white of her eyes matching that of her gleaming teeth. The insistent rhetoric of the text questions: “Are you letting dingy teeth destroy your smile . . . perhaps your whole charm?” The answer to the perceived problem can quickly be solved by using “Polident—a product that magically dissolves all tarnish . . . purifies your plate—leaves it odorless, clean—attractive—as natural looking as the day you got it” (7). With its pared-down organization, the advert highlighted the virtues of whiteness as an attainable ideal, corresponding to the clean white lines of the Paulista women’s sportswear.

Identification and Difference Rather than capture the complex, hybrid social reality of contemporary Brazil—composed of multiple ethnic, racial, and regional identities—National Geographic chose to stage a vision of Brazilianness that erased any evidence of ethnicity that deviated from a “civilized” white norm. The magazine collapsed

ANTHROPOPHAGY

43

the differences between white skin and white cloth, portraying the New Brazil as a reborn white nation that National Geographic viewers would be able to recognize straightforwardly as belonging to part of their own world. The caption that accompanied this snapshot read: “Freed from the traditional chaperon of Latin America is the maid of Modern Brazil. Where formerly she sat at home with needlework, she now goes in for sports in a big way. Thousands of such sportsclad girls drilled at the inauguration of São Paulo’s stadium in 1940” (1942: 509). It described Brazil as a modern country liberated from Latin America, symbolized by young Brazilian women and their adoption of a simple and practical outdoors sportswear aesthetic. National Geographic drew attention to the processes of sartorial anthropophagy through which a well-established North American sportswear aesthetic had been adopted and re-presented in a Brazilian context, to serve as a potent symbol of a modern, white Brazil. The popularity of American sportswear (appropriate for both athletes and spectators) had risen steeply by 1940, liberating American fashion design from a dependence on traditional Parisian couture, by embodying an active, modern and streamlined new role for women engaged in a broader range of leisure pursuits and work tasks (Arnold 2009). For the women represented in National Geographic, however, sportswear no longer denoted Americanness but had become a potent symbol of Brazilianness, centered on the efforts of Vargas’s Estado Novo to institutionalize racial difference while creating rigid boundaries between masculine and feminine gender roles. White sportswear presented a literal and figurative endorsement of the political and ideological agenda of the Estado Novo regime. It epitomized Vargas’s desire for the rest of the world to perceive of Brazil as a white, European nation undergoing the necessary processes of modernization and industrialization. While the Vargas administration did not deny the existence of indigenous and African peoples within Brazil’s complex multiracial society, official discourse fashioned an image of the country that was unequivocally white, or in the process of becoming white. This was not a new phenomenon within Brazil. Racial and cultural “branqueamento” (“whitening”) had constituted a necessary process in the modernization of the country since the abolition of slavery in 1888; white European immigration was encouraged by successive Brazilian governments in the hope that it would ultimately “whiten” the face of Brazil and its culture (Lesser 2013: 11–14). The caption in National Geographic sidestepped any overt political references to the Eugenics-influenced policies of the Vargas regime, beyond acknowledging that the photograph had originally been snapped two years earlier at the inauguration of São Paulo’s Municipal Sports Stadium on August 27, 1940. A similar photograph of the event was published in the Brazilian newspaper O Estado de São Paulo on April 28, 1940. It captured the female subjects in motion, a blur of black and white marching in tandem, their distinguishing features blurred into a unified whole. An accompanying caption read: “Participating in the parade

44

FASHIONING BRAZIL

that inaugurates the Municipal Stadium, are numerous athletes from nearly all the São Paulo associations. One sees here, the contingent of the School of Physical Education” (7). The event had been attended by Vargas and was, as Christina Peixoto-Mehrtens has articulated, “an explosive political symbol of modernity and a metaphor to the ways urban works and politics were to fuse in civic events” under his authoritarian rule (2010: 151). The Paulista women’s consumption and re-presentation of American sportswear in National Geographic was complex, and it reinforces the ambiguity of dress as a cultural expression that can have divergent meanings to different groups of people (MacKinney-Valentin 2017). On the one hand, the women’s white sportswear reasserted Brasilidade (Brazilianness) under Vargas’s dictatorship, which openly glorified the country’s European heritage and forced Brazilians to subsume all other ethnic, regional and racial identities (Roth-Gordon 2017). On the other hand, however, the superficial similarities in the women’s white skin and white clothing smoothed over larger cultural, economic, and political differences between the United States and Brazil. During a wartime period characterized by fragmentation and anxiety, similarities in dress reassured National Geographic viewers, providing evidence of shared ideals and values between the two countries, while emphasizing that Brazil was a recognizable “Good Neighbor” to the United States. While dress promoted identification between National Geographic viewers and Brazilian subjects, there remained an unmistakable power dynamic in National Geographic. This was centered on the fact that to view the photograph in its correct landscape dimension the National Geographic viewer had to turn the page ninety degrees clockwise (Figure 2.6). Whereas in the first snapshot discussed, this material engagement with the image as object encouraged a more intimate gaze from the viewer, here it reinforced a distanced and disinterested gaze onto the women. This tactile action brought the image into direct dialogue with a photograph printed on the left-hand side of the doublepage view, which presented vast quantities of Brazilian beef lined up outside in rows at the Wilson and Co. Inc. packing plant near São Paulo, hung up to dry like garments on a washing line. The titles of the two images encouraged the viewer to perceive the women as objects of a powerful gaze, and posited “You can pick your own ‘Queen Coffee’ from this line-up of athletic beauties at São Paulo” against “Sun-dried Brazilian beef lures the American dollar into a venerable Brazilian industry” (1942: 518–19). Direct and overt, the captions highlighted the North American consumption of Brazilian goods such as beef and coffee. The female Brazilian subjects were advertised as mass-produced commodities displayed on a grocery store shelf, or at its most crude, as a harvest ripe to be gathered, encouraging the National Geographic viewer to select his or her preferred “Queen Coffee”: a distilled essence of Brazilianness neatly packaged for American consumption. Although National Geographic

ANTHROPOPHAGY

45

Figure 2.6 Author rotating the October 1942 edition of National Geographic to view photograph of women at the inauguration of São Paulo Sports Stadium, Brazil in 1940. Courtesy of Jonathan Vickers.

appeared to document an image of Brazil that was visually akin to the United States, this was tempered by the editorial decision to place the women on the magazine page opposite a topological photograph of drying meat. While this snapshot placed an ostensibly more intimate and familiar gaze onto the women—epitomized by their adoption of North American white sportswear— National Geographic was evidently still engaged in portraying an insidious form of dominance over Brazil. The final snapshot discussed presents a third manifestation of the complex interactions between Brazil and the United States in relation to the concept of anthropophagy and another shift in the fabric of National Geographic’s representation of Brazil.

Snapshot 3: The Cinta Larga Women’s Black Body Paint, September 1971 The final snapshot (Figure 2.7) was published almost thirty years later in the September 1971 edition of National Geographic. The article—entitled “Brazil Protects her Cinta Larga[s]”—presented a stark contrast to the modern, industrialized vision of Brazil with its thriving infrastructure that was impressed upon National Geographic viewers during the Second World War. Here,

46

FASHIONING BRAZIL

Figure 2.7 Snapshot 3. Photograph by Jesco von Puttkamer, group of Cinta Largas women, Brazil, published in National Geographic in September 1971. Courtesy of Instituto Goiano de Pré-História e Antropologia.

Brazil reverted to an underdeveloped nation of vast resources, drawing a parallel with the image of the country presented in the first snapshot. National Geographic’s shifting gaze during this period is unsurprising given that the article was published during the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964–85), which had begun when a coup d’état supported by US Cold War politics culminated in the overthrow of left-leaning Brazilian president, João Goulart, by the Brazilian Armed Forces. Throughout the early years of the dictatorship (which was in operation from April 1964 to March 1985, during which time 191 political murders and 243 forced “disappearances” took place) the US government frequently overlooked the systematic torture of political dissidents within Brazil (Green 2010). That National Geographic also turned a blind eye

ANTHROPOPHAGY

47

to dictatorial Brazilian politics and militarily patrolled urban centers to focus instead on Brazil’s rural indigenous populations suggests that it deemed them a “safe” and uncontentious topic.

Civilizado and Savage The snapshot appeared within an article written and photographed by W. Jesco von Puttkamer, “semiofficial photographer and diarist” (420). It documented the attempts made by the Fundação Nacional do Índio (the National Indian Foundation, or FUNAI) to “pacify” the Cinta Largas population—a task considered one of the “longest, hardest, most dangerous jobs ever undertaken” (420). In 1971, the Cinta Largas inhabited a territory in the southwest of the Amazon rainforest, covering the Brazilian states of Rondonia and Mato Grosso. Describing them as “tense wild tribesmen . . . who had escaped the encroachment of civilization,” Puttkamer categorized the Cinta Largas according to the wide sashes made of tree bark that male members of the group wear around their waists (420). There is a homogenization inherent in this typological gesture, which subjected the community to a level of scrutiny based entirely upon their external appearance, while overlooking the various ways that male and female members used dress to fashion their individual identities. Puttkamer also outlined the goals of FUNAI—which appeared more proprietorial than altruistic—and nurtured an idea of the Cinta Largas as a clearly differentiated Other requiring paternal protection: FUNAI’s mission is a dual one. First, it pacifies hostile Indians so that Brazil, an underdeveloped nation, may extract the riches of its vast wilderness area as efficiently and painlessly as possible. Secondly, it protects the Indians it pacifies against the harmful aspects of our civilization with which they cannot cope. . . . There is one thing that even the selfless, dedicated people of FUNAI cannot prevent. That is the erosion of a simple culture by a strong, complex one . . . and that is why each FUNAI sertanista, or Indian expert, carries in his heart saudade, a nostalgic sadness. (421; my italics) This patronizing comment is rooted in a discourse of salvage ethnography, a recurring anthropological trope concerned with capturing the essence of a presence before its presumed demise (Hestor 1968). Puttkamer constructed an idealized vision of an imaginary Brazilian past that reduced the Cinta Largas to an ineffable nostalgia, “saudade” (a Brazilian word for a nostalgic longing, which has no direct English translation), reinforcing the idea of the disappearance of their “authentic” culture. He wanted both to document the “lost” indigenous practices of the Cinta Largas, and insert them seamlessly into mainstream

48

FASHIONING BRAZIL

“civilized” Brazilian society. FUNAI workers, according to Puttkamer, “lived in daily peril of their lives [since] at any time, a civilizado might inadvertently do some small thing that could be misconstrued by the primitive mind and trigger a massacre” (42). Crude juxtapositions such as this were abundant throughout the article—clearly demarcating the “civilized” from the “savage”—and justified FUNAI’s neocolonial activities through an understanding of its cultural and moral superiority. Nevertheless, the twenty-three full-color photographs of the Cinta Largas that accompanied the article dissolved the division constructed with the text between “civilizado” and “savage.” They were distinct from the distanced and nonparticipatory scientific eye of the hydroplane that was seen in the first snapshot, which employed very measured and preconceived strategies to document (and subsequently organize) typologies of difference. Instead, these photographs had a relaxed quality and corresponding immediacy, which gave the viewer the impression that this was a spontaneous moment being documented in the day-to-day lives of the subjects, who were either blissfully unaware, or otherwise unconcerned, by the presence of Puttkamer’s camera. The photographs functioned under the quasi-ethnographic pretense of Puttkamer as a “participant-observer,” emphasizing that these are real people and real-life situations being documented (Jorgenson 1989). This shifting gaze at National Geographic was not solely a result of advances in camera technology but also reflected the magazine’s turn toward different methods of quasiethnographic study, replacing a distanced view of the anthropological subject with a more involved participation. The photographs were very self-reflexive about the encounter between FUNAI and the Cinta Largas, who were presented close together, talking, laughing, and occasionally even hugging. The overriding impression given was that FUNAI were directly involved in the social life of the indigenous group and had clearly formed relationships with them. This was enhanced by National Geographic’s editorial decision to print these photographs as full-page bleeds, a technique that collapsed difference and invited a more direct response from the viewer as the relation between two-dimensional image and three-dimensional object became increasingly blurred (Edwards 2004). The combination of glossy and matte paper that the photographs were printed on in the September 1971 edition of the magazine was also distinct from the matte, textured paper that had supported the previous two snapshots examined in this chapter. It provided the viewer with a heightened awareness of the texture and materiality of the magazine, potentially enhancing his or her responsiveness to the represented subjects and subsequent ability to identify with them as fellow human beings (Marks 2002).

ANTHROPOPHAGY

49

Western and Brazilian Anthropology It is important not to exaggerate the novelty in September 1971 of National Geographic’s more intimate gaze onto Cinta Largas subjects. Since the 1940s, anthropological practices in Brazil had shifted to encompass increasingly subjective approaches. The photographs and film stills produced by the SPI (the Indian Protection service, the state agency set up in 1910 for the protection of indigenous groups, which in 1965 became FUNAI) within the expansive three volumes Índios do Brasil (1946, 1953a, 1953b) exemplified this new aesthetic. Brazilian military officer and explorer Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon (1865– 1958), the first director of the SPI, assembled the 1,515 images as part of a state project to modernize and industrialize the more remote regions of interior Brazil. Rather than treat indigenous subjects as generic specimens of ethnographic difference—an obstruction getting in the way of progress—these official images presented, as Stephen Nugent has articulated, “human subjects rather than material culture objects . . . a partial yet compelling portrait” of a culturally and ethnically diverse Brazilian society (2007: 92–93). Many of the photographs reproduced in Índios do Brasil have a relaxed and immediate quality, which became a significant and established genre in the illustrated magazine O Cruzeiro (launched in 1928) throughout the 1940s and 1950s, distinguishing it from the mainstream Brazilian press (Carvalho 1996: 14). To fuel a widespread demand for visual documentation of a transforming Brazilian society, in 1943 O Cruzeiro overhauled its previous editorial values and began to accompany ethnographic expeditions—including those conducted by the Villas-Bôas brothers—to document first contact with indigenous groups. The empathetic portraits of Brazilian photojournalist Jose Medeiros and the candid shots of French-Brazilian photographer Henri Ballot (Figure 2.8) encapsulated the magazine’s new aesthetic of an intimate and subjective “realism.” André de Séguin des Hons has described how O Cruzeiro used the innovations of documentary photography (unusual angles, reflections to cause spatial confusion, close-ups, backlighting) to construct a humanized image of indigenous subjects, in the process of becoming integrated into Brazilian society (2001: 16). Images were no longer purely illustrative, but presented a subjective narrative, in which any notion of objectivity or distance was obliterated by the photographers’ close-up and intimate engagement with their subjects. This photographic genre was eclipsed not simply by the advent of film and television, but most abruptly by the start of the military regime in 1964, which heavily censored the mainstream press and closed numerous magazines and newspapers. In doing so, it provided a space for National Geographic to adopt these Brazilian methods of anthropological documentation, and incorporate them into its institutional (Western) canon.

50

FASHIONING BRAZIL

Figure 2.8 Photograph by Henri Ballot, group of Txukarramaes women, 1953. Copyright: Instituto Moreira Salles.

Dress and Body The full-color snapshot (Figure 2.9) that this chapter focuses on was published on the right-hand side of a double-page view of National Geographic. It caught the viewer’s attention since it was the only photograph within the article to document Cinta Largas women. Positioned opposite a blank page of text, the three female subjects stand side-on in a forest clearing next to the remains of a smoldering fire. They do not look at the photographer but appear to be posing for another photograph, taken by someone to the left of the photograph frame. They have short dark bobbed hair, wear necklaces of dyed tucum nuts and red string, and have painted geometric lines on their faces in genipap dye, which is made from the fruit of the Jenipapo tree. The subject in the center and her companion on the right have used black and red body paint to divide up and deconstruct their bodies, fragmenting them into separate parts. This sophisticated process isolates arms, chest, hips, legs, and ankle, and departs from the more prescriptive methods by which Western-style clothing tends to perceive the clothed body as a unified whole. For these women, painted and unpainted body parts become

ANTHROPOPHAGY

51

Figure 2.9 Author holding the September 1971 edition of National Geographic open to view Jesco von Puttkamer’s photograph of a group of Cinta Largas women, Brazil. Courtesy of Jonathan Vickers.

interdependent and have equal significance: both the positive shapes formed by the paint, and the negative spaces in between those shapes. This process of decontextualizing one’s own body parts, and perceiving each as an object in and of itself, demonstrates a self-reflexive gaze by which the women address their own bodies with a comparable level of scrutiny to that placed upon them by the photographic gaze. The women display a creativity and ingenuity in mediating new (and “foreign”) dress codes, while retaining local techniques of body painting that are customary to Cinta Largas culture. They appear to be interested in the shapes on the surface of their skin that exist between the painted items of clothing. The women have developed their own version of Western-style clothing, which renegotiates prescriptive Western regimes of dressing to cover, control, protect, and/or accentuate the body, and instead uses paint to highlight particular interconnecting areas of the body. Their resulting ensembles create shifting points of reference as the women represent (on the material surface of their bodies) the clothes that they see through interaction with Westerners, just as Puttkamer is documenting (on the photosensitive surface at the back of his camera) what he sees through his lens. Dress becomes a powerful communicative tool in the hands of the Cinta Largas women that resonates with an observation made by Claude Lévi-Strauss in his memoir Tristes Tropiques (1955). Lévi-Strauss described how the sophisticated

52

FASHIONING BRAZIL

Spanish American Caduveo Indians (also called the Mbayá) appropriated visual aspects of the uniform worn by Spanish sailors in the mid-nineteenth century, through their local practices of body painting: After the Indians saw a European warship for the first time, when the Maracanha sailed up the Paraguay in 1857, the sailors noticed the next day that their bodies were covered with anchor-shaped motifs; one Indian even had an officer’s uniform painted in great detail all over his torso—with buttons and stripes, and the sword-belt over the coat-tails. ([1955] 2011: 189) Lévi-Strauss acknowledged the Mbayá’s appropriation and re-presentation of the Spanish sailors’ uniforms, which retained their visual motifs and design details but transformed them using body paint. This process enabled the Mbayá to mediate new dress values—from these garments that were originally defined by colonial power—with relevance to the sociopolitical organization of their own contemporary culture. In National Geographic, the women’s painted clothing may well be a comparably fluid expression of the subjects’ creative self-fashioning, which refutes claims made within the text that the Cinta Largas are a static and “simple culture” about to be eroded by a “strong, complex one” (1971: 421). The subjects’ dressed bodies become a site of heterogeneous potentiality; rather than reinforcing the disintegration of Cinta Largas culture in the face of Western influence, their confident display and manipulation of Western-style clothing demonstrates their receptiveness to outside influences, in a fluid process of ongoing cultural renewal. The accompanying caption in National Geographic acknowledged that the women’s body paint was a form of clothing rather than mere surface decoration. It read: “Stylishly clad in painted ‘clothing,’ a feminine contingent arrives. Expedition members felt the women’s presence marked a new level of confidence. Impressed by their poise, the author named them the ‘Three Graces’” (421). The association with the Three Graces—the mythological daughters of Zeus, said to represent beauty, charm, and joy, who are frequently visually depicted in smooth, white artistic representations such as Antonio Canova’s neoclassical marble sculpture (1814–17)—implied both backwardness and potential. Classical culture in Western travel narratives, as Christine M. Guth has acknowledged, frequently constituted the starting point for Western civilization, but also the standard by which it was measured (2004: 31). While the caption did not explicitly highlight the women’s experimental form of sartorial anthropophagy, it acknowledged that an existing discourse of Western-style clothing had been refashioned using elements of Cinta Largas material culture. It prompted the viewer to distinguish the Western-style T-shirts, shorts, vests, and bodysuits that were evident within the photograph and had clearly inspired the shapes of the women’s body paint. This form of dressing demonstrated the women’s

ANTHROPOPHAGY

53

quick grasp of and adaptability to Western culture (rather than a passive submission to it), thereby subverting the claims made within the text that the Cinta Largas are “Stone Age Indians” (421). The performative aspect of their dress was enhanced by the poses adopted by the women, which suggest an awareness of posing conventions in Western-style photography. There is a palpable attempt at self-presentation—and a self-conscious exhibitionism—clearly being performed before the camera’s gaze. The subject in the center places one hand on her hip, tilts her face toward the left of the photograph frame (where we can presume another photographic gaze is documenting her), and places her weight on her left leg. The other two subjects are midway toward a pose. Posing is a selfconscious act of making oneself into an image for the photographer’s gaze, as Barthes critically recognized when he wrote: “I pose, I know I am posing, I want you to know that I am posing” (1981: 12). The presence of all three women is undeniably felt within the image, as living, breathing, digesting, cannibalizing, and self-fashioning human beings. They participate in the construction of their own presentation before the two camera gazes, which lend an ambivalent complexity to the image. The viewer’s awareness of these two photographic gazes may encourage him or her to imaginatively reconstruct the women in three-dimensional terms; the photograph is no longer simply a two-dimensional image, but bears the trace of the tangible interactions that took place between a group of people, who exist in time and space as well as in social and cultural experience (Edwards 2001). Puttkamer’s position within the text is one of nostalgic mourning for the loss of Cinta Larga culture yet this final snapshot, which appeared at the very end of the article, provides a glimmer of hope; it demonstrates the Cinta Largas’ creative and sustainable survival by implementing and adapting Western-style clothing into local dress practices. A rather different view of Brazilian women was published in Life magazine on November 12, 1971 (Figure 2.10), within an article written and photographed by John Dominis. Entitled “Taming the Green Hell: Brazil Rams a Highway Through The Wild Amazon,” it documented the construction of the TransAmazonian highway, a 4,000-kilometer road intended to unify Northern Brazil, which was completed by September 1972 and linked the Brazilian states of Paraíba, Ceará, Piauí, Maranhäo, Tocantins, Pará, and Amazonas (30–36). An image within the article captured five Brazilian women straightforwardly in the frame, against a dull background comprised of clouded sky, a wooden fence stretching seemingly without limit into the distance, and the green-and-white façade of a building. Each subject meets the photographer’s gaze directly and enacts a variety of poses, from straightforwardly presenting the body for scrutiny, to more stylized and performative gestures that reveal an uncovered thigh and high-heeled sandal. Their clothing is a combination of white nylon knee-high socks worn with white shoes, white and pink ankle-length dresses with thigh-high slits, and hot pants and overcoats in psychedelic printed

54

FASHIONING BRAZIL

Figure 2.10 Photograph by John Dominis, a group of local women who entertain men working on the Trans-Amazonian highway, published in Life magazine, November 1971. Copyright: John Dominis/Getty images.

fabrics. It stands out against the general degradation of their arid surroundings. The clashing colors and swirling patterns that adorn three of the women’s outfits demonstrate the influence of contemporary hippie fashions, with their penchant for exposing the body, vibrant hues, and mismatched prints (Issit 2009: 61). The women’s clothing and poses were not only fashionable in Western Europe and the United States, but also circulated in mainstream Brazilian magazines, newspapers, and soap operas. The women display an awareness of self-fashioning that connects them—despite their remote geographical location—to the outside world, and encapsulates the global nature of fashion as individuals negotiate different subjectivities through the transcultural exchange of goods and ideas. Yet the accompanying caption to the image simply read: “Towns along the road are booming with such by-products of civilization as electricity and bar girls. On Saturday, hundreds of workers come into Altamira, above. Girls entertain the men for about $3 each” (1971: 30). This oversimplified description understood the women solely in terms of their availability as objects for male consumption, refusing to acknowledge the layers of meaning embedded within their fashionable ensembles. To take these sartorial references into account would have enabled the viewer to read this image against the grain, and to understand the women as active and global fashion consumers—not simply passive objects of a male

ANTHROPOPHAGY

55

gaze—who are presenting themselves as they wished through dress. Unlike National Geographic in its documentation of the Cinta Largas women, Life magazine failed to acknowledge this crucial interpretative aspect of the image.

Clothed and Naked Letters written to National Geographic demonstrated that the reception and interpretation of the final snapshot this chapter has examined remained ambiguous and provocative in the minds of viewers, rather as the “Manifesto Antropófago” had been in 1928. One reader, who wrote to the secretary of National Geographic on September 3, 1971, praised the educational value of the magazine, but criticized it for displaying what she perceived to be “nudity”: We have subscribed to your magazine for several years. The September 1971 issue has prompted this note to you—22 pictures or pages of near-nude men and nude women! I have noticed an increasing trend in your magazine—and I am aware that this is the actual living pattern of these native tribes—of nudity. My teenage daughter refers to your magazine and has received invaluable assistance in her studies. Her friends also enjoy the magazine which occupies a prominent place on my coffee table—but this September issue will be put away. I’m sure that in the Brazilian jungle W. Jesco and von Puttkamer [sic] must have been able to find other interesting things—and been able to photograph these Indians more discreetly. Simply because these Indians wear no clothes at all should have prompted limited exposure of their bodies. I do not consider 22 pages of naked men suitable viewing for my teenage daughter. (Anon. 1971a) This reader did not perceive the three Cinta Largas women to be dressed, disregarding both their complex use of body paint as a form of clothing and the fact that nakedness is a form of culturally imposed perception. In response, although failing to outline that body paint is a form of dress, National Geographic noted on September 20, 1971, that it was not necessarily a mark of civilization to be clothed, and that it would be wrong to attempt to acculturate people by forcing them to adopt Western-style clothing: If we are going to portray the Cintas Larga of Brazil, or the Stone Age tribesmen of new Guinea, or many of the newly independent peoples of Africa, we must accept that a large number of them go around wearing very little indeed—as do also many a “civilized” American, Englishman or Russian today. To ignore this would, in our opinion, create just as false a picture of the world as if we did the opposite, and unnecessarily emphasized this aspect. Honesty, it seems

56

FASHIONING BRAZIL

to us, is key to this whole question. This is a very different thing from the deliberately pornographic (and essentially dishonest) publications so readily available these days in most drugstores. (Scofield 1971) National Geographic’s acknowledgment that “we must accept that a large number of them go around wearing very little indeed” still suggested an inability to critically recognize the cultural significance of the Cinta Largas’ divergent dress practices. Moreover, the magazine’s insistence on “honesty” may have been an attempt to smooth over the ambiguity inherent in ethnographic modes of photography, which inevitably reflect a gaze that is inextricably tied to the photographer, who has chosen not only the subject but also the composition, lighting, and framework within which that subject is captured. There were also letters that appeared to express opposing viewpoints. Another viewer wrote to National Geographic on October 5, 1971, criticizing the magazine for censoring its subjects: I wish to issue a complaint regarding the poor taste involved. .  .  . You will note when looking at the pictures, you have censored the sex organs of the males in every case bringing attention to the fact. I presume this is based on some puritan concept that we are not supposed to see such things. If so, you are way behind the times. We are not a swinging family, in fact, we are considered rather square, but when the kids say “tell it like it is,” you should sit up and take notice. If your readers are incapable of handling such visual information, then don’t put it in the magazine at all, but please do not degrade your magazine and degrade the readers’ intelligence in the manner that you have. (Anon. 1971b) National Geographic had not in fact censored the pictures; the viewer was inadvertently referring to Cinta Largas males’ technique of keeping their scrotums pulled up and secured with palm-leaf ribbons. In response, on November 2, 1971, National Geographic gave the viewer a detailed explanation of the procedure: Cinta Larga males repair that part of the anatomy which you question in a way which obscures it from view. That part which is normally extrinsic is made intrinsic, or to put it bluntly, tucked back in. Our best information is this aids fertility which you must consider in terms of a relatively nomadic tribe which engages in hunting in the jungle for its livelihood. The small reed is attached by inserting a piece of loose flesh into a conical pocket resulting from an angular overlap at the end of the reed. (Schneeberger 1971)

ANTHROPOPHAGY

57

The different viewpoints offered by these two readers provide an indication of the inconsistent or contradictory messages that the representation of dress provoked in the magazine, demonstrating that neither subject nor photographer—nor editor for that matter—ever has complete control over the making of meaning within an image. Andrade’s self-aware metaphor of anthropophagy—whereby Brazilian subjects have swallowed foreign elements of dress, selected aspects to consume, and incorporated them into their own sartorial systems—provides a constructive tool to examine three snapshots of Brazil that were published in the first hundred years of the publication of National Geographic. The contradictory and ambiguous nature of anthropophagy lends it the critical potential to rethink these three very different (geographically and historically: Roraima, Northern Brazil, in April 1926; São Paulo in October 1942 and Rondonia, Southwest Amazon, in September 1971) but particularly charged interactions between the United States and Brazil. I return to Andrade’s assertion that “what clashed with the truth was clothing, that raincoat placed between the inner and outer world” (1991: 38). In all three snapshots there has been a curiosity linked to National Geographic’s observation of Brazilian dress. This is unsurprising given that dress study itself is grounded in an encyclopedic interest in documenting diverse types of dress, exemplified by Italian scholar Cesare Vecellio’s expansive two volumes, Habiti Antichi, Moderni di tutto il mondo, which cataloged dress in different parts of the world as early as 1598. Yet dress has also enabled diverse Brazilian subjects to renegotiate their individual and collective identities with creativity in response to outside “foreign” influences. My close analysis has assessed the aesthetic singularities and creative innovations of female Brazilian subjects’ engagements with cross-cultural dress, which have become powerful tools of communication in the hands of these women. A revisionist rereading through the lens of dress articulates new frames of reference, potentialities, and subjectivities, which can interrupt more dominant narratives imposed by the male National Geographic correspondents within the language of National Geographic articles. An emphasis on clothing provides a rare opportunity—yet to be exploited by scholarship—to reread these complex images against the interpretative grain and, to challenge some of the straightforward assumptions that have been associated with the magazine in academic discourse to date. That it was Brazilian women who were most openly scrutinized by men raises issues of gendered authority, but, it was also female dress forms that exhibited the potential to challenge a hegemonic gaze: as with any act of resistance, the unstated norm has the potential to be affirmed at the same time as a new reading is generated. That Brazilian women may have been perceived as less important than Brazilian men to National Geographic correspondents during the timeframe under examination suggests that they also had a more fluid subjectivity to construct their identities in idiosyncratic ways.

58

FASHIONING BRAZIL

Gerardo Mosqueira has aptly characterized anthropophagy as being “not so fluid as it seems, since it is not carried on in neutral territory but rather . . . is subdued, with a praxis that tacitly assumes the contradictions of a dependence. In the end, who eats whom?” (2003: 31). His criticism of anthropophagy reveals a central paradox: although we cannot refuse, deny, or disavow the creative appropriations that have materialized through it, the process can only take place within asymmetrical relations of power. National Geographic fulfilled a form of US-driven cultural imperialism throughout the twentieth century to the extent that the magazine’s agenda was clearly connected to broader political interests advanced by the United States during the period, rather than Brazilian concerns (Hirst 2005; Smith 2010; Roett 2010). Despite instances in which Brazilian subjects articulated and negotiated their own identities by selffashioning, it was still National Geographic who appeared to have eaten, or rather fashioned, Brazil, and not the other way around. Sartorial anthropophagy took place both inconspicuously and conspicuously within Brazil during the period under examination, as we have seen through the lens of National Geographic, simultaneously forming a mediator and a barrier between the magazine and Brazilian subjects. As the next chapter examines, this unequal dynamic of power between the United States and Brazil shifted in the post1988 period, when National Geographic celebrated its centennial and sartorial expressions communicated by Brazilian subjects took on a new cultural form as “recycled aesthetics” (Stam 1997). This coincided with a fundamental shift at National Geographic, as the magazine departed from an understanding of its photographs as purely illustrative to the text, toward a more tactile awareness of imagery as key to the interpretation of its articles.

3 RECYCLED AESTHETICS: GLOBALIZATION AND THE REPRESENTATION OF BRAZILIAN DRESS IN NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SINCE 1988

While in 1928 Andrade used the metaphor of anthropophagy to conceptualize Brazilian Modernismo as an aesthetics of bricolage, in 1998 Robert Stam described postmodern Brazilian culture as an “aesthetics of garbage,” articulated through the creative and hybrid act of pastiche. Stam used garbage as a positive metaphor to articulate the subversive potential of Brazilian culture which, through increased global cultural exchange since the late 1980s, has recycled—but also refashioned—aesthetic codes and conventions discarded by the West: Another way that Brazilian culture is figured as a mixed site is through the motif of garbage. Garbage, in this sense, stands at the point of convergence of our three themes of hybridity, chronotopic multiplicity, and the redemption of detritus. Garbage is hybrid, first of all, as the diasporized, heterotopic site of the promiscuous mingling of rich and poor, center and periphery, the industrial and the artisanal, the domestic and the public, the durable and the transient, the organic and the inorganic, the national and the international, the local and the global. The ideal postmodern and postcolonial metaphor, garbage is mixed, syncretic, a radically decentered social text. (1998: n.p.; my italics)

60

FASHIONING BRAZIL

Stam’s conceptualization of an aesthetics of garbage contained three key aspects: hybridity; “chronotopic multiplicity” (a term that I will move on to examine in more depth); and the revalorization of an object, idea, or aesthetic that has previously been cast aside by one cultural group. I prefer to use the term “recycled aesthetics” throughout this chapter rather than an “aesthetics of garbage” because, although not intended by Stam, the latter has since evolved into a loaded term with pejorative connotations (Martin 2015). Firstly, Stam emphasized that hybridity is not a neutral term, but has recurrently been adopted by Latin American governments to articulate national identity within integrationist discourses that dismiss the existence of cultural, racial, and social discrimination. Latin America is often perceived as the hybrid region par excellence due to the various encounters, clashes, contact, interaction, miscegenation, and exchanges that have taken place between indigenous populations, Europeans, and Africans brought to the continent via the European slave trade (Burke 2009). Stam acknowledged an important critique of hybridity—that, as an anti-essentialist discourse, it often camouflages essentialisms, centered upon its ostensible failure to discriminate between diverse modalities and instead stress oversimplified notions of blending, assimilation, mimicry, co-option, imposition, exploitation, and subversion (Friedman 1997). Hybridity unquestionably unfolds in power-laden contexts, and Stam emphasized that it must not be reduced to a nebulous and “descriptive, catch-all term” (1997: n.p.). As a film scholar, he grounded his careful analysis in case studies from contemporary Brazilian cinema, which he used to analyze what he perceived to be a new and hybrid form of multi-temporal, cross-cultural aesthetics. As a dress historian, I would argue that a focus on Brazilian dress— which is an equally diverse and intertextual medium of expression—can enable us to articulate further still the complexities of global cultural exchange since the late 1980s. Secondly, Stam used the term “chronotopic multiplicity,” derived from Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, to describe the multiple and intertextual strands of world-time and world-space that are intertwined in Brazilian cinema. Bakhtin drew upon the temporally palimpsestic nature of literary expressions and their inseparable layering of spatio-temporalities. He coined the term “chronotope” to refer in a figurative, as opposed to mathematical or physical, sense to “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (1981: 84). A parallel can be drawn here with the intermedial nature of dress, which is the product of multiple historical periods; clothing styles continually hark back to the past and refabricate it in the present (Evans 2007: 9). Lynda Nead has used the dress metaphor of a “crumpled handkerchief” to articulate a topological concept of time and space as folded, whereby distant points can become close in proximity

RECYCLED AESTHETICS

61

or superimposed over one another (2005: 8). This experience of time as crumpled, as opposed to flat and linear, weaves together past, present, and future in continual and unexpected conversation. Time and space are abstract concepts, but dress enables us to pinpoint key examples when individuals have expressed a sense of who they are, in relation to when and where they are (Kaiser 2012: 1). It is significant that Nead used the metaphor of the crumpled handkerchief, suggestive of old and greying qualities, as opposed to a clean, crisp, and freshly ironed one. A correlation can be drawn with the final aspect that Stam discussed within his conceptualization of an aesthetics of garbage: the strategic redemption or recycling of second-hand objects, ideas, or aesthetics. Stam located these recycled aesthetics prevalent in film within the archive of Udigrudi (underground) Brazilian cinema of the late 1960s, which was heralded by Brazilian filmmaker Rogério Sganzerla’s O Bandido da Luz Vermelha (1968). Sganzerla developed innovative techniques that appropriated second-hand aesthetics from international cinema, and re-presented them in an irreverent, overtly affected manner. He used these borrowed elements to parody ideas from North American and European directors, which included Orson Welles and Jean-Luc Godard. While Sganzerla’s initial ideas were grounded in the late 1960s Brazilian counterculture known as Tropicália, Stam located a new form of these recycled aesthetics in three Brazilian documentary films from the 1980s and early 1990s: Ilha das Flores (Isle of Flowers) (Furtado 1989), O Fio da Memória (The Thread of Memory) (Coutinho 1991) and Boca de Lixo (Mouth of Garbage) (Coutinho 1993). Brazilian filmmakers, he asserted, were required to sift through the remnants of a global capitalist culture and appropriate leftover or salvaged elements “like the heterogeneous scraps making up a quilt” (n.p.). Stam identified positively with the transformative process of mending, altering, and recycling aspects of the West’s unwanted products. He valorized the process by which these unwanted fragments were used to construct a new product, which mediated between the local and the global, the subordinate and the dominant, the periphery and the center. A connection can be made here with the concept of gambiarra, which was introduced in the previous chapter and exemplified by the active female subject’s inventive recycling of an “old piece of cloth” (Snapshot 1) to self-fashion before the photographer’s gaze. Given the time frame under examination, Stam’s use of a dress simile to address the dynamics of creative agency in Brazil is significant; since the late 1980s, increased consumerism and the rise of fast fashion have led to a vast surplus of second-hand clothing that is no longer required by the West. These neglected items have been donated to charitable organizations, sorted and baled, and subsequently exported to Latin America, Africa and Asia (Palmer and Clark 2005). Through their reuse and transformation in diverse locations throughout the world, the cross-cultural meanings of these

62

FASHIONING BRAZIL

garments, as Karen Tranberg Hansen has articulated, “shift in ways that help redefine used clothing into ‘new’ garments” (2009: 116). This chapter uses the three key aspects of Stam’s concept of recycled aesthetics—hybridity, chronotopic multiplicity, and the strategic redemption of detritus—to unpack several threads from the representation of Brazilian dress in National Geographic since 1988. I examine the layers of meaning embedded within two snapshots or case studies of Brazilian dress, which span a period of fourteen years and are contextualized with examples from contemporary print media. The fourth snapshot this book examines was written by the American author and photojournalist, Loren McIntyre, and published in National Geographic in December 1988; it was accompanied with photographs taken by the Brazilian photographer and documentary filmmaker, W. Jesco von Puttkamer, whose work was examined in the previous chapter. The fifth snapshot was written by AfricanAmerican journalist, Charles E. Cobb Jr. and accompanied with photographs by American photographer, David Alan Harvey; it was published in the magazine in August 2002. These two snapshots must be understood in terms of the paradigm shift that took place at National Geographic following its centennial, which was celebrated in September 1988 with the publication of the article “Within the Yellow Border,” written by the then editor Wilbur E. Garrett. Garrett’s article encapsulated a crucial turn at National Geographic, as the magazine consciously departed from a purportedly objective, scientific approach to documenting the peoples and places of the world at large, and began to place an emphasis on the heightened multisensory and subjective engagement that viewers could have with dressed subjects represented within its pages. This chapter examines firstly, the visual and textual strategies that have been used by National Geographic to fashion an idea of Brazilian dress since 1988. Secondly, I use Stam’s concept of recycled aesthetics to question to what extent have Brazilian subjects selffashioned, demonstrated by their ability to engage in sartorial accommodations, appropriations, and negotiations with cast-off aspects of global culture.

The Representation of Brazil in National Geographic since 1988 It is useful to begin with a brief comment on the representation of Brazil in National Geographic since the magazine celebrated its centennial in September 1988. To date, seventeen articles on Brazil have been published during this period. Although they have appeared to follow no regular pattern, three key themes have emerged but, unlike the development tracked in the previous chapter, these themes do not run chronologically. The predominant theme has been indigenous peoples and places in the Amazon or ecological sites in Brazil, reflected in the titles of articles

RECYCLED AESTHETICS

63

such as “Last Days of Eden: Rondonia’s Urueu-Wau-Wau” (December 1988), “The Amazon: South America’s River Road” (February 1995), “Into the Amazon” (August 2003), “The Rainforest in Rio’s Backyard” (March 2004), “The Wild Wet” (August 2005), “Last of the Amazon” (January 2007), “Dazzling Brazilian Junes” (July 2010), and “Kayapo Courage: the rich and powerful Brazilian tribe is battling a dam project that will not die” (January 2014). The second theme has been Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, reflected in the titles of articles such as “Brazil: Flight to the Cities” (December 1988), “Cities: São Paulo” (November 2002), “Visions of the Earth: Rio de Janeiro” (April 2006), “Visions of the Earth: Brazil” (January 2007), and “A New Face for Rio” (October 2012). The third theme, also the least represented in the period covered by the previous chapter, was Afro-Brazilians, reflected in the titles of two articles, “Where Brazil was Born: Bahia” (August 2002) and, most recently, “Where Slaves Ruled” (April 2012). This chapter draws on two of these themes—indigenous peoples in the Amazon and Afro-Brazilians—while Chapter 4 delves into the remaining theme, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.

Beyond the Yellow Border: A Heightened Phenomenology of Contact To commemorate the hundredth anniversary of National Geographic, a foldout article written by Wilbur E. Garrett and entitled “Within the Yellow Border . . .,” was published in the September 1988 edition of the magazine. This was the first of three centennial editions published consecutively and distributed to the magazine’s 10.5 million members worldwide, 80 percent of whom lived in the United States, and 12 percent in the English-speaking countries of Canada, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand (Bryan 1987). Spread over eight interconnected pages that folded out of the magazine, to the left and right, back and front, the article (Figure 3.0) reproduced 360 National Geographic covers: every single cover published since September 1959 and each different cover design since October 1888. This foldout section was accompanied by a page of text, framed in the bold yellow rectangle that has characterized National Geographic’s gaze onto the world since February 1910. Viewed with contemporary hindsight of the unprecedented and accelerated geographical and political change that the end of the Cold War would engender, the title “Within the Yellow Border . . .,” which attempted to limit and confine the National Geographic viewer’s gaze onto the world, appeared eerily portentous. Constraint and fixity were encouraged by the formulaic and systematic placement of the covers, which were reproduced in an identical size and format, and ordered with precision in a linear chronology.

64

FASHIONING BRAZIL

Figure 3.0 Author unfolding the September 1988 edition of National Geographic to view Wilbur E. Garrett’s article “Within the Yellow Border . . .” Courtesy of Jonathan Vickers.

Yet the foldout section of “Within the Yellow Border . . .” (Figure 3.1), required a tactile, three-dimensional engagement with the magazine as a material object, which surpassed a solely empirical, two-dimensional detached and objective gaze. The tangible qualities of the article operated in opposition to the title’s rhetoric of containment and constraint, and urged viewers to venture on a multisensory excursion beyond the rectangular yellow border—something that may have been hinted at with the insertion of an ellipsis into the title, suggestive of an unfinished thought. The article unfolded as far as the arms could stretch and played with the affective capacities of the viewer. To scrutinize the covers in their entirety, the viewer was required to hold the magazine in his or her hands and realign his or her body in relation to it: to press the chest forward, to move the face closer to inspect the small printed details, to achieve a sensory relation with the textured surface and smell of the recently printed, thin glossy pages. “Within the Yellow Border . . .” was designed not just to be read, but to be held and felt. Art critic Andy Grundberg, writing in the New York Times on September 18, 1988, recalled his memory of National Geographic on its centennial: “From the perspective of small-town U.S.A., the wild animals, tribal cultures and mountain vistas pictured on its pages seemed utterly foreign and completely

RECYCLED AESTHETICS

65

Figure 3.1 Author unfolding the September 1988 edition of National Geographic to view Wilbur E. Garrett’s article “Within the Yellow Border . . .” Courtesy of Jonathan Vickers.

fascinating. They were far off but, with the magazine nestled in my lap, they were also tantalizingly near” (1988: 11–12; my italics). Indeed, the centennial edition of National Geographic ventured one step further than Grundberg’s observation, and attempted to fold the viewer into the magazine—akin to Merleau-Ponty’s observation that perception is a fold into the flesh of the world—and establish a visual excitation that was inextricably linked to touch but also to the body of the subject flattened in reproduction (2002: 378). Film historian Laura U. Marks has eloquently written of how “vision itself can be tactile, as though one were touching a film with one’s eyes” (2007: vi). She has acknowledged the importance of surface texture in evoking a range of experimental bodily responses, which stretch beyond cool, rational observation, and move toward a more dynamic subjectivity and bodily interconnection between viewer and image. With its smooth, glossy pages, “Within the Yellow Border .  .  .” consciously prompted a multisensory response from its viewers, who had the potential to reconstruct critically and singlehandedly the magazine’s linear history. The article had similar conventions to a folded paper map in the sense that, although the folding and unfolding gestures that it required of the viewer had a predetermined (in the sense of being pre-folded) structure, they were destined to generate inconsistencies, and potentially cause confusion, through the distinctive manner that individuals engaged with it. “Within the Yellow Border . . .” became

66

FASHIONING BRAZIL

an imaginative and ambiguous space, in which no single historical viewpoint was privileged, but rather a fragmented network of possible and overlapping histories. These reconstructed versions of the past were entirely dependent upon the National Geographic viewer, who unfolded and refolded, arranged and re-presented the article in accordance with their individually specific desires and whims, whether intentional or accidental. The viewer had the authority to deconstruct National Geographic’s very precise historiography of its documentation of “The World and All That Is In It,” exemplified by the neatly presented covers in a grid formation, and reimagine it through a series of folding gestures, which enabled disjointed time periods and diverse geographical locations to connect intimately with one another. The result was an innovative and fictional restaging of the magazine’s one-hundred-year history, which directly implicated the active viewer in the process of simultaneously looking and touching, folding and unfolding, fashioning and refashioning. “Within the Yellow Border . . .” reinforced the impossibility of a single definitive history and resonated with Garrett’s telling comment, printed in the textual accompaniment to the article, that in this centennial edition “we look not just at what’s old, but also at what’s new about our past” (270; my italics). “Within the Yellow Border . . .” fashioned a slipperiness between objectivity and subjectivity, factual and imaginary, past and present, which was reinforced by the ambiguous text written by Garrett that accompanied it. He commented: “Though I can’t relate to all of them, these covers mark a century of holding up to the world our uniquely objective publishing mirror” (270; my italics). Garrett privileged National Geographic’s definitive viewpoint, which had set out to disseminate an unmediated and faithful reflection of the world, acting as detached witness to the peoples and places observed for one hundred years. Yet “mirror” is an interesting choice of word; an ideal mirror would duplicate exactly what is seen in its visual essence, but a real mirror can only ever approximate that ideal since, as Wolfgang Coy has recognized, it is “necessarily reduced to two dimensions and more or less distorted in accordance with the laws of optics” (1996: 66). When we view our own image in a mirror, we are often aware, even if not at an entirely conscious level, that it is a mutable and distorted representation, which has blurred the boundary between reality and fiction. Garrett appeared to self-reflexively acknowledge this contradiction, when he proceeded to assert a point of departure from the magazine’s previous editorial objectives, and urgently called for “a once-in-a-century bit of introspection—holding up the mirror to ourselves for a change . . . we’re looking ahead to the next 100 years” (270; my italics). He deconstructed the notion of a singular, objective geographical or historical “truth,” acknowledging that it cannot exist beyond the author’s subjective point of view, nor the viewer’s interpretative understanding. He announced a reconstruction of the magazine’s mode of reportage in which, from this point forth, National Geographic’s own subjectivity—its mirror image— would be discernible within the magazine. Garrett self-consciously laid bare the

RECYCLED AESTHETICS

67

artifice prevalent in any form of representation that seeks to marginalize the other so-called proximate senses—in particular, touch—to foreground an objectified and essentialized vision of the world informed by science and technology. He highlighted the representational instability of National Geographic, which has not simply mirrored, but actively fashioned its subjects, manufacturing the objects of its gaze in so far as it has registered them. The performative and self-reflexive nature of “Within the Yellow Border . . .” had an inherent awareness of the plurality of overlapping narratives woven into the body of the magazine. Coupled with its focus on creatively re-presenting its own reportage history, assisted by the active National Geographic viewer, it encapsulated a paradigm shift. The magazine no longer viewed itself as an exemplar of objective science, but as a creative site where the direct documentation and dramatization of different subjects intertwined. This was reinforced by Jane Livingston’s acknowledgment, within the same issue of the magazine, that today “we are viewing National Geographic photography in a special way: holding it up by itself, full-frame, out of context, and away from words” (1988: 324). She celebrated the intrinsic and self-expressive value of National Geographic photography, which had been liberated from a prior understanding of it as directly illustrative of the accompanying text, to be praised for its own artistic imperative. The centennial edition of National Geographic, although a US cultural expression rather than a Brazilian one, encapsulated aspects comparable to Stam’s recycled aesthetics: it was a hybrid, which dissolved the border between text and photography, image and object, two dimensions and three dimensions, fact and fiction, past and present, objectivity and subjectivity, touch and vision. In creating new and imaginative constellations from an old historical trajectory, world-space and world-time were intrinsically interconnected and overlayered to form new palimpsestic, chronotopic multiplicities. When viewed with the luxury of contemporary hindsight, “Within the Yellow Border .  .  .” was unnervingly prescient of the intensification and expansion of images that would be produced by the global mediascape, and with which National Geographic would be required to compete. National Geographic’s increased focus on the importance of tactile imagery over detached text encouraged viewers to engage with images of peoples and places throughout the world in an increasingly multisensory way, and in doing so, to venture beyond the rectangular yellow border.

Snapshot 4: Djaui’s Red T-shirt and Adidas Shorts, December 1988 The fourth snapshot (Figure 3.2) this book examines was published in December 1988, in the last of the magazine’s celebratory centennial editions. Entitled “‘Last Days of Eden’: Rondonia’s Urueu-Wau-Wau Indians,” the article documented

68

FASHIONING BRAZIL

Figure 3.2 Snapshot 4. Photograph by Jesco von Puttkamer, Djaui and Caninde of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau indigenous group, Brazil, published in National Geographic in December 1988. Courtesy of Instituto Goiano de Pré-História e Antropologia.

“the predicament of one tribe” as they fought to protect their 7,000 square miles of land from encroachment by Brazilian pioneers—in the form of loggers, rubber tappers, miners, cattlemen, and their families, of whom 166,000 had settled in 1986 alone (McIntyre 1990: 138). Only 350 members of the UruEu-Wau-Wau (which is spelled in several ways, including Urueu-Wau-Wau) remained in 1988 (Hemming 2003: 296–97). As hunter-gatherers who speak Tupi-Kawahib, prior to official contact in 1981 by FUNAI (the federal agency responsible for the preparation of indigenous groups in Brazil for increased contact with the rest of the world), the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau were known as the “Black Mouths”; this was due to the group’s technique of using black genipap dye to tattoo their faces and the skin around their mouths. As a National Geographic memorandum written by the senior associate editor, Joseph R. Judge, on August 12, 1987, articulated, the magazine was particularly keen to document “the Indian tribes, who are sequestered now on a large island of forest paid for by World Bank Funds as conscience money for having paved an infamous road that opened the region to loggers and truckers.” Judge referred

RECYCLED AESTHETICS

69

to the newly built BR-364, which had been completed in 1984 with a loan from the World Bank to cover a third of the costs and which paved a main road through the entire state of Rondonia, from Porto Velho in the north to Cuiabá, 400 km to the southeast. The road had resulted in vast deforestation of a onceremote part of the Amazon rainforest, and mass settlement on previously UruEu-Wau-Wau territory (Wade 2011). Judge was concerned with the “salvage” of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau and in the same memorandum cautioned against “the headlong development of tropical forested regions and the consequences for indigenous peoples and irreplaceable flora and fauna” (1987). This prepared the stage for National Geographic, who appeared to operate on behalf of a broader anthropological concern to rescue a fragile and disappearing culture, and rendered the UruEu-Wau-Wau in a preserved, even memorialized, state for public scrutiny by the magazine’s concerned readership. The “salvage paradigm”—to reference a term used by James Clifford (1987: 122) and touched upon in the previous chapter of this book—finds a parallel in Pratt’s observation that colonial travel narratives frequently severed “contemporary non-European peoples off from their pre-colonial, and even colonial, pasts” (2008: 132). Pratt characterized this as a form of archaeology, in which actual living people were recognized not as part of the present, but of a separate pre-European era. The implication of Judge’s memorandum was that Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau culture represented an authentic primitiveness in need of being salvaged from extinction. However, National Geographic had also made its own archaeological find and rescued— from this “near-extinct-specimen-due-to-disappear”—an important sample of tike-uba, an anticoagulant that is extracted from tree bark in Uru-Eu-WauWau territory, which contains an important compound that can inhibit the growth of enzymes that cause blood-clotting (Cavalcanti 2000: 193). This was clearly detailed in a memorandum exchanged between Jon Schneeberger, the Illustrations Editor at National Geographic, and Jeffrey Lawson, a biochemist at the University of Vermont, on June 22, 1989, which contained a sample collected by the photographer, Puttkamer. This great pharmaceutical find was later commercialized by the US drug company Merck, who appropriated the knowledge of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau without any obligation to compensate them, during a period of great insecurity and uncertainty for the group when compensation would have proven greatly beneficial (Cavalcanti 2000: 193).

Fluid and Fixed National Geographic clearly had its own set of concerns in documenting the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau. While aware of the problems that the group faced because of large-scale developments in Brazil, the magazine nevertheless wanted to

70

FASHIONING BRAZIL

extract and capitalize upon their sophisticated scientific knowledge, as well as to document them before their anticipated demise. The memorialization of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau was cemented by McIntyre’s melancholic observation at the very end of the article. He recalled: “Jesco [von Puttkamer] mourned the passing of the Indians’ natural nudity, saying ‘Oh Loren, they’re not perfect any more’” (1988: 813). Puttkamer’s disappointment at the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau’s increased adoption of Western-style clothing—a replacement to their customary sparse dress—which supposedly rendered them “not perfect any more,” suggested a romanticized expectation that such a peaceful, quiet, and supposedly authentic lifestyle, with a strong sense of community, would be immune to the superficial attractions of Western sportswear brands and mass consumption. It reinforced a reductive belief that the Western world is characterized by fluidity—in the words of Zygmunt Bauman, “forever ‘becoming,’ avoiding completion, staying under defined”—as opposed to the non-Western world, typified here by Brazil’s Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau, which is stable, pure, and purportedly fixed within a timeless ethnographic present (2000: viii). Despite this uneven balance of power between National Geographic and its perception of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau, the fifteen glossy photographs that accompanied the article challenged this dichotomy between a “fluid” Western culture and purportedly “fixed” indigenous culture. A combination

Figure 3.3 Author holding the December 1988 edition of National Geographic open to view Jesco von Puttkamer’s photograph of Djaui and Caninde of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau indigenous group, Brazil. Courtesy of Jonathan Vickers.

RECYCLED AESTHETICS

71

of candid reportage and posed portraits, the photographs highlighted the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau’s sophisticated ability to fashion their own subjectivities through global items of dress as fluid and changeable, rather than static and fixed. Printed in large-scale, glossy color with minimal captions, the photographs took precedence over the written article, underlining National Geographic’s shifting focus post-1988 from using text as the primary vehicle to communicate the story to using images (Livingston 1988). The fourth snapshot this book examines (Figure 3.3) was published on a double-page spread and documented Djaui, the leader of the Urueu-Wau-Wau, next to another member of the group, Caninde. The photograph was placed on the magazine page beneath an orange heading that declaimed: “The End of Innocence” (812–13; my italics). The heading continued to build upon the canonical trope of the vanishing “primitive,” fashioning the Urueu-Wau-Wau within an evolutionary narrative that categorized and typologized them as a childlike society living in a state of barbarism, unwillingly being elevated into one of industrial civilization.

Touching and Feeling Yet the image itself capitalized upon the affective properties of dress as a situated bodily practice to communicate a more multifaceted message to the National Geographic viewer (Entwistle 2015). The image was given precedence over the text of the article; it was reproduced very close-up on the double-page spread, framed on three sides in orange. This editorial decision isolated and elevated the subjects, using much the same conventions as a framed studio portrait. The photographer’s close viewpoint from directly beside his subjects, so much so that he cannot capture the full length of their bodies within the frame, engenders a closeness and intensity—one that has the potential to collapse the geographical and temporal distance that exists between the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau and the National Geographic viewer, who observed this photograph months after it was taken. There is nothing casual or unengaged about the image, which seems to stem from the photographer’s deep knowledge of the subjects, who allow him to observe them unrestricted as they carry out commonplace activities in their daily lives. The photograph appears less constructed and less filtered by Puttkamer’s lens, and there is an overriding sense of mobility and fluidity. That the two subjects are contemplative consequently slows down the viewer too, encouraging a more measured response. In slowing down the processes of perception, the National Geographic viewer is encouraged to observe the tactile qualities of the image, and to discern the range of textures upon its surface: from Djaui’s soft red cotton T-shirt; his faded and rough blue-and-white striped Adidas shorts; the coarse blue tarpaulin against

72

FASHIONING BRAZIL

which the subjects are framed; to the smooth reed girdle worn by his companion Caninde. These contrasting surfaces are carefully captured by the photographic gaze, giving the image a depth, which the dressed viewer is prompted to experience mimetically and to relate to his or her own touch memories. The viewer may recall the distinct sensations evoked when contrasting fabrics touch the skin—whether soft, rough, smooth, or even scratchy—as well as the ability of these materials to restrict or enhance bodily movement. Gesture and dress invite empathy with the subjects on a bodily level, as the sensations of looking are extended to being, thinking, and wearing, collapsing the spatial and temporal boundary between the National Geographic viewer and Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau subjects through the everyday and universal preoccupation of dressing. It is impossible—as Eugenie Shinkle has pointed out—to view another dressed body performing gestures in a passive and detached manner, since we involuntarily “map these postures and gestures onto our body, feeling them in our skin and bones, muscles and viscera” (2008: 220). Such a visceral intimacy with the represented Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau subjects is enhanced by the glossy sheen of the magazine page, which enriches the colors and textures of the different fabrics documented, appealing directly to the National Geographic viewer’s tactile sensibilities and bringing his or her experience of embodiedness into sharp focus. The viewer is invited not simply to feel the subjects literally, in terms of the physical senses as fingers brush across glossy pages, but also to engage emotionally with them.

Light and Dark The placement of this image on the double-page spread directs the viewer’s attention toward the dressed figure of Djaui, who is placed in bright sunlight on the left-hand side of the page and can be fully observed. Caninde, in contrast, is placed on the right, shaded by the blue tarpaulin and partially obscured by the central crease of the magazine as it is held open in the viewer’s hands. Caninde is dressed in a broad girdle constructed from rattan and brown nuts; a necklace made of peccary teeth; and black genipap body paint. While both men’s faces are painted with black genipap, Caninde adopts no items of Western-style dress, and has also decorated the skin around his mouth in black. Djaui, on the other hand, is illuminated, to highlight his lighter skin color, incipient baldness, and greying hair—all characteristics that inform the viewer that he is of mixed Indian and Caucasian ancestry. Djaui’s hybrid identity is also clearly reflected in his dress, which suggests an ambivalence toward globalization on the part of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau; it demonstrates his ability to pick and choose preferred elements of global culture, thereby subverting any simplistic understanding of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau’s cultural dependency upon the West.

RECYCLED AESTHETICS

73

Djaui’s outfit is exemplary of recycled aesthetics, since these unwanted and ubiquitous items of Western-style dress—a red T-shirt and Adidas shorts—have been appropriated and transformed to serve a new function, where they  are accompanied with a jaguar teeth necklace and the facial paint customary to the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau. Simultaneously indigenous and Western, mass-produced and irreproducible, new and old, mainstream and alternative, local and global, Djaui’s ensemble embodies the paradoxes of hybridity. His dress challenges the prescriptive construction of Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau identity fashioned within the heading—“The End of Innocence”—that is writ large above these images on the double-page spread and places the so-called remnants of a disappearing Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau within a written salvage narrative. The visual representation of Djaui, instead, confirms not “The End of Innocence” for a previously uncontacted society, but rather the continuation of a sustained relationship between the UruEu-Wau-Wau and the outside world, which had already enabled Djaui to pick and choose preferred elements of cast-aside Western-style clothing, and use them to articulate his contemporary identity in accordance with the fluid demands of daily life. He demonstrates discretion from within the specific options that are available to the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau. Djaui’s clothing blurs the spatial and temporal disjuncture presumed to exist between the developed West and the purportedly underdeveloped non-West. He uses something old from one geographical place to create something new in a very different geographical space, thereby encapsulating the chronotopic multiplicities described by Stam.

Local and Global As opposed to a homogenization of the world through the exportation of global consumer goods, National Geographic presented a local appropriation of the West’s unwanted clothing. This resonated with Appadurai’s assertion that localized taste challenges the popular notion of the United States as the allpowerful controller of objects, commodities, and values (1996). Here, dress provides a countertendency to a simplistic equivalence of globalization with Americanization or, even, McDonaldization, a term coined by sociologist George Ritzer to describe the process by which “the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as of the rest of the world” (1992:1). This latter view was forcibly propounded by a dazzling advertisement printed on the back of the very same edition of National Geographic, which unnervingly repeated the mantra “None of us is as good as all of us” underneath a holographic image of the familiar golden arches imprinted with the sign “over 10,000 opened.” The advert presented a generic and homogenized image of the American restaurant and a car—plausibly denoting any time or space from the latter half of the twentieth century—which reinforced

74

FASHIONING BRAZIL

an idea of the standardized and imposed spread of US popular culture, which Ritzer pessimistically deemed ready to eclipse individual and localized forms of creativity throughout the world. Rather than the overwhelming force of American norms and lifestyles suggesting “sameness,” the fourth snapshot this book has examined demonstrated a local response to the homogenizing forces of globalization through the renegotiation of second-hand Western-style clothing. These items of dress did not originate in the sartorial culture of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau, and were no doubt an exchange item from FUNAI; yet what was initially an alien article has since been adapted and reinterpreted as a versatile vehicle for contemporary Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau identity construction. As Professor Paulo César Aguiar de Mendonça, senior researcher at the Jesco von Puttkamer collection in Goiana, has explained: Just as when white people travel, they adopt elements of other dress selectively. They [i.e. the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau] do it for diplomatic reasons, to negotiate, because white people won’t accept them without. When they return, they go back to wearing no clothes. (2014) While Mendonça acknowledged an asymmetry of power prevalent in the relationship between the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau and “white people,” he highlighted how the group integrates a sophisticated understanding of Western sartorial expectations, and appropriates and transforms these unwanted Western-style clothes to construct their varied and fluid identities in different cultural contexts. This process is not disingenuous since it enables second-hand global items of dress to be adapted to serve a new function, which works on behalf of Uru-EuWau-Wau needs too.

Vogue and National Geographic An interesting point of comparison can be drawn with an image (Figure 3.4) taken by Belgian film director Jean-Pierre Dutilleux, published in American Vogue in June 1988. The article documented the British musician Sting on his “South American tour across Brazil, up the Amazon, visiting Indian tribes who want nothing from the 20th century” (244–307). It featured the Kayapo, a Gê-speaking people who live in communities alongside the Xingu River and its tributaries the Iriri, Bacajá, and Fresco Rivers. Occupying a very large territory in central Brazil, they are renowned for having had extensive—but ambivalent—interactions with non-Indians and environmentalists. The article omitted to mention that the Kayapo were filmed for a Granada television documentary in 1987. In return for their cooperation, they demanded filming equipment for their own use, a shrewd negotiation that disrupted the quaint Western perception that the Kayapo enjoy

RECYCLED AESTHETICS

75

Figure 3.4 Author holding the June 1988 edition of American Vogue open to view JeanPierre Dutilleux’s photograph of Sting and Raoni of the Kayapo indigenous group, Brazil. Courtesy of Jonathan Vickers.

a romantic and authentic lifestyle divorced from “civilization” (Stam 1997). The subheading explicitly underlined this ignorant perception of the Kayapo: “For three days, Sting was one of them, then they sent him back to ‘civilization’ with a new look and an urgent message” (244). It accompanied a photograph of Sting with the leader of the Kayapo, Raoni Metuktire—already something of a celebrity in Europe (Figure 3.5), having appeared in Dutilleux’s film, Raoni: The Fight for the Amazon (1978) and traveled to Paris with Sting to publicize indigenous rights, when he adopted aspects of both Kayapo and Western-style clothing. In Vogue, both subjects face the camera wearing the customary body paint of the Kayapo, although Raoni also wears beaded red and blue jewelry and a lip plate. The notion that Sting can adopt a “new look” by appropriating nonpermanent elements of Kayapo dress—as and when he feels like it—reinforces his powerful position as a white man, with the money and leisure time to travel (Guth 2004). While American Vogue fashioned the Kayapo as inferior and existing in a primitive, backward, and underdeveloped past, a source of exotic inspiration to the purportedly civilized and “humanitarian” Western traveler, the visual representation of Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau dress in National Geographic embodied Stam’s understanding of recycled aesthetics; the latter demonstrated the vitality of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau and their ability to reuse items of dress that have originated in the West to challenge and resist reductive colonial and postcolonial narratives. This distinction may have been due in part to the different contexts in

76

FASHIONING BRAZIL

Figure 3.5 Photograph by Alain Benainous, Sting and Raoni, leader of the Kayapo indigenous group, in Paris on April 11, 1989. Copyright: Alain Benainous/Getty.

which National Geographic and Vogue circulate. Whereas National Geographic has an educational remit, Vogue is concerned primarily with commerce and celebrities. It was also a result, however, of the tactile sensations provided by the snapshot in National Geographic, which ventured beyond sight to prompt affective responses in the viewer that were communicated through dress. In Vogue, by contrast, the photograph of Sting and Raoni employed ethnographic conventions—it was very flat and had no depth in terms of light and shadow. This is particularly jarring within the confines of a magazine accustomed to selling clothes and products by illuminating and enhancing through photography their luxurious and tactile qualities. That Vogue chose not to emphasize the sensory qualities of the clothing presented by Sting and Raoni suggests that the editorial team considered Kayapo dress to be distinctly beyond the realm of “Western” fashion. In National Geographic, the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau’s distinctive utilization of second-hand clothing embodied Stam’s conceptualization of recycled aesthetics in a very literal sense. The second snapshot this chapter discusses encapsulates a far more conceptual interpretation of his theory, epitomized by the appropriation of cast-aside sartorial ideas as opposed to actual items of dress that have been discarded by the West.

Snapshot 5: The Afro-Brazilian Girl’s Lycra Top and Denim Jeans, August 2002 The fifth snapshot (Figure 3.6) this book examines was published in National Geographic in August 2002 and entitled “Where Brazil Was Born: Bahia.” The title

RECYCLED AESTHETICS

77

Figure 3.6 Snapshot 5. Photograph by David Alan Harvey, girl dancing in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, published in National Geographic in August 2002. Copyright: Magnum.

rendered the fourth most populous state in Brazil as a cradle of Brazilian tradition and reinforced, as Anadelia A. Romo has articulated, the popular trope of “Bahia as a museum, as a site of living tradition” (2010: 10). It is important to understand Bahia’s history in order to appreciate Romo’s comment fully. Salvador da Bahia was established as the Portuguese colonial capital in 1549, when the area was one of the largest sugar producers in the world. From the sixteenth century to the abolition of the slave trade in 1888, an estimated two million enslaved Africans—of the overall four million transported to Brazil—settled in Bahia. By the late nineteenth century Bahia was considered a provincial backwater, and today it is one of the poorest Brazilian states, with one of the highest national rates of unemployment and income disparity (Harding 2000). Despite this, a report revealed that by 2002 the development of Bahia’s tourism industry had surpassed that of any other region (Queiroz 2002). This was mainly due to the efforts of Bahiatursa, the main Bahian tourism organization, which emphasized Bahia’s strong Afro-Brazilian presence and advertised the state as the “birthplace of Brazil” (Santana Pinho 2008: 85). Paulo Guadenzi, the president of Bahiatursa, has affirmed that the uniqueness of Afro-Brazilian culture is a powerful tool used to market Salvador as having a strong and “authentic” allegiance to African tradition, as distinct from other tourist destinations throughout Brazil (Queiroz 2002). In seeking to examine the continued force of African heritage in Salvador through its substantial population of “descendants of the first slaves brought to the New World,” National Geographic correspondent Charles Cobb had clearly set out on a well-trodden path (63). It was a considered choice of National Geographic editor William L. Allen (1995–2005) to appoint Cobb as correspondent; the latter later acknowledged

78

FASHIONING BRAZIL

that his appearance and African-American identity had enabled him to blend in and bond with his predominantly black subjects in a fashion that would have been inconceivable had he been white. As he described on the National Geographic website, in a section entitled “On Assignment: Bahia. Field Notes from author Charles E. Cobb, Jr”: “I could meet whomever I wanted to meet and go wherever I wanted to go” (2015). In ethnographic parlance, field notes are generally aligned with a type of participant-observation fieldwork, which evades a detached and distanced mode of viewing in favor of, as Robert M. Emerson has acknowledged, “accounts describing experiences and observations the researcher has made whilst participating in an intense and involved manner” (1995: 4–5; my italics). It is widely accepted that field notes are subject to the conscious—but also unconscious— bias of the author who acts as a participant-observer, and potentially invests his or her own narrative and memories into the description of the events that took place. That National Geographic chose to include this type of information on its website can be understood as an attempt to highlight the paradigm shift that took place at the magazine since its centennial, away from an understanding of itself as an exemplar of objective scientific record, and toward a more subjective dramatization and documentation of non-Western subjects as an involved participant.

African-American and Afro-Brazilian Cobb described his ancestry as the primary motivation for his trip to Salvador, which clearly evaded any pertains to objectivity. He had selected Bahia for its supposed preservation and careful maintenance of traditional African culture, wherein he might hope to reignite a “lost” affiliation with his homeland, Africa: As an African-American, I had come to see what had sprouted in this place where Africa’s seeds were first planted centuries ago. I found a culture steeped in traditional religions brought by coloured peoples from West Africa, a place that remains key to the identity of this sprawling state. (63) This comment suggests that Cobb can provide an “authentic” connection with, and therefore documentation of, Bahia. Yet the author’s desire to exchange what he conceives of as his own, US-centric conception of black “African-American” modernity for the static preserve of the “traditional religions brought by coloured peoples from West Africa”—purportedly manifest in the lived experience of the local black Bahian communities with whom he interacted—exemplified the asymmetrical dimensions of power between the African-American author and his Afro-Brazilian subjects. A disparity is highlighted between Cobb, a black man located in North America, with a job that provides him with the opportunities and expenses to travel, and the Bahian communities living in South America, who

RECYCLED AESTHETICS

79

have far less access to global currents of power. Cobb’s travels to Bahia were not an isolated example. He even observed that Bahian tourism had recently “been boosted by increasing numbers of African-American visitors,” who were attracted by the promise of “a New World African culture that many find truer to its origins than their own” (77). His observation corresponded with Patricia de Santana Pinho’s examination of what she has termed “African-American Roots Tourism,” which has witnessed the movement of large numbers of AfricanAmerican tourists to Bahia in pursuit of “what they believe to be their roots but . . . in contrast to other tourists, who are usually interested in the exoticism of the ‘other,’ they crisscross the Atlantic hoping to find the ‘same’ represented by their ‘black brothers and sisters’” (84). This is part of a complex identity process whereby African-Americans cultivate a heightened sense of Africanness deemed essential for the perpetuation of their own contemporary diasporic black identities within the United States. While “roots tourism” has the potential to challenge the “traditional North-South flows of cultural exchange,” ultimately it often “confirms the existing hierarchy within the black Atlantic,” since it reinforces the semi-peripheral position of African and Latin American black communities in relation to those who are part of a dominant center of blackness “in terms of cultural and academic production,” such as the United States (84).

White and Black Although photography dominated this article—as it did in the previous snapshot examined—it is important to comment firstly on the Africanized image of Bahia that Cobb fashioned within the text. He made frequent reference to the black bodies of the baianas, the archetypal (though by no means exclusively) mature women who dress in voluminous white lace dresses and adorn themselves with colorful sacred beaded necklaces and bracelets (Gage 2016). Baianas (Figure  3.7) are associated with the Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomblé, the generic name that is given to several syncretic religions that were created in Brazil in the nineteenth century, centered upon Catholicism and facets of African religious traditions. The National Geographic reader was invited to imagine a seaside scene that Cobb recalled from his trip: Wearing the traditional white of Candomblé, some carry offerings to Yemanjá, the much beloved deity of the sea. Bearing their hopes for the future, they move freely toward the ocean that carried their forebears to these shores in chains. (80–81) Cobb described the rhythmic movements of the baiana priestesses, and the ease and grace with which they walked, moved, and danced toward the shoreline,

80

FASHIONING BRAZIL

Figure 3.7 Photograph by Christopher Pilitz, baianas celebrate the patron saint of the “Baiana do Acarajé” in Pelorinho’s church of Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Pretos, Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, November 7, 1999. Copyright: Christopher Pilitz/Getty.

bedecked in their magnificent white attire. This took place during an expressive form of worship that is used to summon the sea goddess Yemanjá—one of the deities, named orixás, to whom each Candomblé worshipper is dedicated—with the aim of incorporating divine energy into the human body. White clothing is adopted by the baianas because it is the color of the Candomblé spirit Oxalá and represents goodness and purity. From an outsider’s perspective, however, whiteness also serves to ideologically emphasize the blackness of the wearer’s skin (Van de Port 2007: 245). Cobb builds a historical disjuncture within the text—between the autonomy of the baianas in contemporary Salvador, who are merged as one and used to form an indivisible, homogenizing notion of black “Bahianness”—and their enslaved ancestors, who were brought to Bahia “in chains” (80–81). He neglected to acknowledge that the baiana’s ensemble is a hybrid fusion of sartorial elements that originate from both Europe and Africa. While the saia, the flowing full-length gathered skirt worn with petticoat and crinoline, and the camizu, the lace-trimmed blouse, stemmed from nineteenth-century European dress, the intricately wound head-wrap called the ojá and the contas or ilekes (beaded necklaces) have West African antecedents (Sterling 2012: 69). Cobb ignored the cross-cultural nature of the baianas’ dress and instead portrayed a frenetic image of them involved in worship: In the embrace of their gods, followers of Candomblé are possessed by African deities called orixás at a ceremony in Salvador. The multi-faceted god Omolu

RECYCLED AESTHETICS

81

moves in grass-shrouded mystery, his legendary power to induce or cure illness greatly respected. Punctuated by chanting and the pounding of drums, the ritual resembled those I’ve seen in West Africa . . . where worshippers are seized by the holy spirit. (74; my italics) He described the noisy gathering of baianas using powerful language that gave an overriding impression of a black and mysterious Bahia: a folkloric spectacle rife with primitive rituals, popular devotion, mysterious forces, and African spirits. Cobb ignored the contemporary appropriation of this mode of Afro-Brazilian dress by Bahian women employed strategically by the state government of Bahia as a source of revenue to “sell” merchandise and culinary delicacies to foreign tourists, who have an appetite for “exotic culture” and deduce the ensemble to be distinctively African and traditional (Williams 2013: n.p.; Gage 2016).

Traditional and Contemporary The accompanying photographs, however, which were captured by North American photographer David Alan Harvey, communicated something rather different to the viewer through the tactile qualities of dress. Rather than display Salvador da Bahia as a static cultural preserve, they demonstrated that AfroBrazilians were distinctly contemporary in their clothing choices, and inextricably connected to local and global fashion cultures. A pertinent example can be seen in a half-page photograph—the second snapshot this chapter focuses on—that captured a slender young anonymous Afro-Brazilian woman, who smiles broadly and dances to music in a crowded setting (Figure 3.8). She is positioned centrally in the frame and photographed from a low camera level that lends her greater stature. Caught in the background of the image are abstract out-of-focus shapes that delineate individuals seated in white plastic chairs at white plastic tables littered with drink cans and bottles. The location is the Noite da Beleza Negra (the Night of the Black Beauty), an event sponsored by the Afro-Brazilian musical group, Ilê Aiyê (House of Life). Ilê Aiyê originated in Bahia in the early 1970s as an aesthetic movement to promote pride and consciousness in the local black community (Valoma 2015). The woman appears confident, suggesting to the viewer that she is comfortable with her appearance and perhaps, pleased to be observed. The blank white space above the photograph as it is positioned on the page is filled with the words: “Everywhere I went, I heard the sound of samba, the high-spirited indigenous music of Brazil whose rhythms are African through and through” (79). While the heading reiterates the deep African cultural roots of the event, the woman’s clothing aligns her with cosmopolitan modernity and

82

FASHIONING BRAZIL

Figure 3.8 Author holding the August 2002 edition of National Geographic open to view David Alan Harvey’s photograph of a girl dancing at the “Noite da Beleza Negra” (the Night of the Black Beauty) in Salvador da Bahia. Courtesy of Jonathan Vickers.

contemporary global fashion trends. She wears large silver hoop earrings, a silver watch, and a collection of white string bracelets on her left hand. There is a silver ring on the fourth finger of her right hand, possibly an engagement ring, which in Brazil is traditionally worn on the right hand until the day of the wedding, when it is exchanged to the fourth finger of the left hand. Her long dark hair is pushed back with a wide elasticized purple hair-band and, neatly braided, swings as she dances. She wears a pair of close-fitting, low-slung denim jeans with a sparkly blue halter-neck top made from a clingy Lycra-blended material, the tactile qualities of which are emphasized by the photographer’s use of a bright flash. The bright flash as well as the glossy veneer of the magazine page enhances the sparkle of the sequins that adorn her top. The use of flash renders the subject slightly cut out from the background, a technique that is frequently employed in fashion photography. It is significant that Harvey made these photographs using a Fuji Velvia 50, a very fine-grained, high-color saturation photographic film that is often used by fashion photographers because it enhances the aestheticization of the subject through high picture quality and vibrant color reproduction (Harvey 2015). These technical choices draw attention to the subject’s self-fashioning, encouraging the viewer to interpret the image within the protocols of a fashion shoot, rather than an ethnographic study, and to understand the subject as a self-fashioning individual, not an anthropological object.

RECYCLED AESTHETICS

83

Brazilian Lycra and Western Fashion The subject’s clothing is a conceptual embodiment of Stam’s recycled aesthetics. It presents an interesting localized use of Lycra that emerged in Brazil in 1996 in Madureira, a poor suburb in the North Zone of Rio de Janeiro. By 2000 this trend had spread throughout Brazil, to the less affluent suburbs of São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Belém do Pará, and Salvador. Lycra manufacture in Brazil had been centered since 1975 at a DuPont production facility in Paulínia, a municipality in the state of São Paulo (O’Connor 2011). In 1999, a $100 million state-of-the-art renovation developed the processing techniques and automation, doubling the output of Lycra to meet intensified popular demand throughout Latin America (Kutesko 2015). Lycra-blended fabrics were used by low-end anonymous Brazilian fashion designers to create tight spandex trousers, tops, shorts, and bodysuits, in a variety of colors, shapes, structures, and sizes, all with different patterns, holes, transparencies, and mesh details (Stockler 2001). These designers were heavily influenced by the tightly draped, figure-hugging aesthetic of the Tunisian-born, Paris-based designer Azzedine Alaia and other international designers—including Giorgio Armani, Donna Karen, and Karl Lagerfeld—whose designs they had observed in second-hand European fashion magazines such as Vogue and Elle from the 1980s (Stockler 2001). With limited materials and economic means, the anonymous designers re-interpreted ideas derived from Alaia’s designs, which had minimal decorative detail or fuss, to cater to the tastes of contemporary Brazilian consumers, many of whom wanted the designs to dance in. Rather than an unsuccessful imitation of Alaia’s design, the designers demonstrated their ability to adapt and transform sartorial ideas that were initially foreign to them, using the materials and accessories that were available. Alaia always chose a clean and simple line, preferring dark or muted colors such as black, brown, beige, navy and soft pastels, whereas the Brazilian designers exploited the endless possibilities of color, whether an acid hue of green, a flash of silver woven into turquoise (as seen in National Geographic), or a lurid zebra print. They added chains, flesh-exposing zippers, cutout sections, and plastic elements to show off certain areas of the body, which subsequently became a part of the decoration of the clothing. Whereas Alaia had used Lycra to skim the body like a second skin—using discreet corsetry to make it look as smooth and streamlined as possible—the Brazilian designers emphasized the sexual appeal and voluptuousness of the wearer’s body, irrespective of size or shape. Brazilian artist Mari Stockler was the first to document this fashion trend. She has explained: “Brazilians are very sexy and this is independent of the size of their bodies. Fashion standards of beauty interfere little in the real life of the majority of Brazilians” (2014). The distinctive “Brazilian sexuality” that Stockler referred to becomes apparent in the situations these Lycra-blended fashions were worn in, since the freedom of movement permitted by the cloth enabled

84

FASHIONING BRAZIL

Brazilian women to move in an unrestricted way. A clear example can be seen in an image from Stockler’s photobook (Figure 3.9) entitled Meninas do Brasil [Girls of Brazil] (2001), which extensively documented the aesthetics of this hybrid fashion trend from its inception in 1996. The photograph captures an Afro-Brazilian girl in a Lycra-blended white strap top with a built-in bra that is adorned with metal chains. Wearing blue denim jeans and silver jewelry, she dances with her arms and hands spread, an action that draws attention to her torso. The flash of Stockler’s camera reflects off the bright white of her elasticated top, giving an indication of the tactile appeal of the subject’s sensuous clothing. This image is comparable to the National Geographic photograph in the way that dress is visibly animated through dance, expression, and gesture. While National Geographic correspondent Cobb attempted to fashion Afro-Brazilians textually within a generalized conception of “Africa,” the visual appeal of dress within this snapshot demonstrated how the techniques and methods of Western fashion design had been recycled and modified by these anonymous Brazilian designers, enabling the Afro-Brazilian subject to fashion her identity as local, global, traditional, and contemporary intertwined. An article published in American Vogue in March 2006, entitled “White Heat,” provides a revealing point of comparison (518–31). Photographed on location in Salvador by the American fashion photographer Arthur Elgort, it featured the Ethiopian model Liya Kebede, dressed in a cream Rochas column dress embroidered with tiny flowers, photographed next to an anonymous baiana who is seated at a piano and wears an unnamed white lace crinoline dress

Figure 3.9 Photograph by Mari Stockler, image from Meninas do Brasil [Girls of Brazil], 2001. Courtesy of Mari Stockler.

RECYCLED AESTHETICS

85

(Figure 3.10). Vogue omits to provide any information about the symbolic value of the baiana’s white dress, the color that is worn by adherents of Candomblé to dispel adversity and evil, while reflecting the purity and virtue of the spirit Oxalá (Sterling 2012: 81). Instead the baiana is used as a symbol of indigeneity to didactically lead the eye toward Kebede, who is almost two foot taller and stands poised with one hand on her hip, the other elegantly draped across the top of the piano. The cream of her dress, which the caption informs the viewer is available at New York department store Barneys for $29,380, is a subtle yet distinguishable contrast to the baiana’s starched white—the latter so spotless it might be associated with an unremitting struggle against dirt and sweat in the warm climate, through constant washing and bleaching. There is a recognizably asymmetric dynamic of power between globally successful supermodel Keybede and the indigenous baiana, comparable to that observed earlier in this chapter between the African-American National Geographic correspondent Cobb and the Afro-Brazilian subjects that he reported on. Yet whereas four years earlier National Geographic had visually presented Bahian women as young and fashionably dressed in a creative reinterpretation of European fashion, this Vogue fashion editorial provided a romanticized and mythical narrative about Salvador da Bahia (not so dissimilar, perhaps, from Cobb’s travel diary), which delineated a recognizable dichotomy between purportedly static “ethnic” dress, and continually shifting European fashion (Cheang 2013).

Figure 3.10 Author holding the March 2006 edition of American Vogue open to view Arthur Elgort’s photograph of Liya Kebede and a baiana in Salvador da Bahia. Courtesy of Jonathan Vickers.

86

FASHIONING BRAZIL

This chapter used Stam’s concept of recycled aesthetics, manifest both literally and conceptually, to examine two snapshots of Brazilian dress, which were published in National Geographic in December 1988 and August 2002. These two case studies have been considered in terms of the paradigm shift that took place at National Geographic since the magazine’s centennial in September 1988—from a detached and scientific mode of viewing the world, toward a more intimate and tactile engagement with that world. Stam’s theory has enabled linear and one-directional descriptions of time and space to give way to a more collaborative understanding of globalization, in which shreds and patches of the local and global interact and are woven together into the patchwork quilt that constitutes the contemporary world we live in. National Geographic documented the multidirectional flows in which items of dress, and ideas about dress, have traveled, enabling Brazilian subjects to mix, borrow, create, and differentiate between different contexts, in a process that is fluid and changeable, not static and fixed. Through an increasing focus on tactile imagery over distanced text, National Geographic communicated these complexities to its readers, incorporating within its pages a self-reflexive awareness of the way that dress not only touches the private body, but also faces outwards toward the public gaze. Comparisons with examples from American Vogue have demonstrated the overlaps between Western fashion photography, travel photography and anthropological practice; in the examples discussed, National Geographic has revealed a far more nuanced understanding of global dress practices and demonstrated an increased willingness to redraw the boundaries of the Western fashion world than Vogue. Stam’s concept of recycled aesthetics has enabled us to understand contact as both cultural exchange and sartorial resistance, demonstrated by the selffashioning and self-presentation of Brazilian subjects in the face of National Geographic’s shifting gaze. In the first snapshot, the recycling metaphor worked on a literal basis, enabling Djaui to appropriate select aspects of global dress and use it to fashion his hybrid identity, which resisted National Geographic’s attempts to situate the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau within a fixed ethnographic present. The recycling principle took a more conceptual form in the second snapshot, exemplified by the Afro-Brazilian subject’s Lycra-blended clothing, which was informed by, but also reinterpreted, the work of international fashion designers such as Azzedine Alaia and Giorgio Armani. Rather than emphasize binary dualisms, Stam’s concept has provided a more nuanced understanding of the exchanges and differentiations that have shaped Brazilian dress. Applied to the dressed body, recycled aesthetics has enabled the representation of Brazilian dress practices as seen through the lens of National Geographic to be reconsidered in a way that previous scholarship has neglected to consider: it is neither oppositional, linear, nor essentialist.

4 THE SPACE IN-BETWEEN: BRAZILIAN FASHION IN NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SINCE 2001

The previous chapter concluded by analyzing a snapshot that was taken in Salvador da Bahia and published in National Geographic in August 2002. It used stylistic techniques commonplace in fashion photography to highlight the female Afro-Brazilian subject’s performance of contemporary global fashion trends, fusing Brazilian street-style with elements of European high fashion. The subject’s Lycra top had an additional “value” that connected it to the seasonally shifting nature of fashion, as opposed to the more gradual changes that are associated with dress. While National Geographic did not explicitly refer to the subject’s outfit as “fashion,” the magazine commandeered fashion photography techniques—bright flash, vibrant color, high-resolution reproduction—that subconsciously prompted the viewer to interpret the snapshot within the parameters of fashion, and potentially, to recognize the subject as an active and self-fashioning individual rather than an ethnographic object. This chapter brings these tensions at National Geographic—between the discourses of fashion and ethnography, and their associated significations—into sharper focus, tracing them back to National Geographic Fashion, a large coffee-table tome edited by Cathy Newman that was published in September 2001. This was the first time that National Geographic had actively used fashion to engage with its photographic archive from 1888 to the present day. It marked a crucial exception in National Geographic’s historiography of “The World and All That Is In It” since September 1988 when, as the previous chapters of this book have underlined, the magazine departed from a focus on cool and detached

88

FASHIONING BRAZIL

viewing, and moved toward a more intimate and multisensory engagement with represented Brazilian subjects. An article written by Cynthia Gorney and accompanied with photographs by John Stanmeyer that was published ten years later in National Geographic, in September 2011, also used fashion as a tool to construct meaning within its visual and textual narrative. Although not addressing Brazilian fashion directly, it provides an insightful point of comparison and will be used to examine how and where National Geographic used fashion—in two pertinent examples over the course of a decade—to encourage its viewers to position themselves in relation to represented Brazilian subjects. This chapter expands upon the thinking of Brazilian novelist and poststructuralist theorist Silviano Santiago, whose collection of essays The Space In-Between: Essays on Latin American Culture was first published as an English translation in the United States in 2001. Santiago introduced the concept of the “space in-between” in 1978, amid pessimistic academic debate within Brazil that questioned how Brazilian subjects could negotiate their neocolonial entrapment and cultural dependency upon an alien and dominant Western culture. He drew upon Andrade’s metaphor of anthropophagy to describe how the Latin American writer devours Western literary works, consumes the original text, and regurgitates a second text within the same space. He used anthropophagy in a more developed way than did Andrade, attributable to the fact that he was writing during the latter years of the military dictatorship (in operation April 1, 1964, to March 15, 1985). This period coincided with the academic reevaluation of Brazilian literary modernism. Scholarship strove to express the peculiarity and transformative potential of contemporary Brazilian cultural production, which was understood as a hybrid synthesis of Western and non-Western cultures (Avelar 1999: 138). Santiago argued that the gaze of the Latin American writer is characterized by the liminal position of in-betweenness, which he poetically articulated as between sacrifice and play, between prison and transgression, between submission and aggression to the code, between obedience and rebellion, between assimilation and expression—there, in this seemingly empty place, its temple and its site of clandestinity, the anthropophagus ritual of Latin America is performed. .  .  . To speak, to write, means to speak against, to write against. (2001: 31) Within this “seemingly empty” and de-territorialized space, which is characterized by a perpetually shifting movement between binary oppositions, elements of North American and Western European cultural practices have been strategically assimilated by Brazilian subjects, and refashioned to address

THE SPACE IN-BETWEEN

89

local sensibilities. Santiago’s claim that “to speak, to write, means to speak against, to write against” (31) emphasized that this self-conscious strategy of subversion has copied the language of the dominant culture in order to deconstruct it from within. He coined the literary term “writing back” to denote this form of auto-ethnographic expression whereby Western literary practices have been modified, and re-presented in part, so as to give voice to Brazilian modes of expression that are constructed in response. Santiago advocated the critical potential of Latin American literary and artistic production; rather than an inferior imitation of Western art and literature, it is infinitely richer since it “contains within itself a representation of the dominant text and a response to that representation within its very fabrication” (31; italics in the original). His use of the noun “fabrication” is a reminder that “writing back” is intentional and involves elements of invention, storytelling, and dramatization, all of which work to complicate the boundary between reality and artifice. Fashion is a form of storytelling, often linked to the creative construction of the self; its narrative capacities render it a fitting medium to examine some of the transcultural stories about Brazil that have been entwined within National Geographic since 2001. Santiago directly referred to fashion—albeit in the broadest sense of prevailing trends, which is applicable to clothing—when he wrote: The major contribution of Latin America to Western culture is to be found in its systematic destruction of the concepts of unity and purity: these two concepts lose the precise contours of their meaning, they lose their crushing weight, their sign of cultural superiority. . . . Latin American artists’ creative production [is no longer reduced to] a work whose life is limited and precarious since it is enclosed in the radiance and prestige of the original, of the trendsetter (2001: 31–33). He used the postmodernist thought of Derrida and Foucault as an ideological tool to deconstruct the assumed binary opposition between original and copy, superior and inferior, pure and contaminated, which has characteristically framed debates regarding cross-cultural interactions between the West and the nonWest. Santiago interrogated the suggestion that fashion is originally a Western construct, rendering everything produced in Latin America an inferior copy. Latin American cultural production, he argued, held the potential to dislocate the ideological foundations of source and influence that Western modernity has been constructed upon. In the introduction to the English-language translation of The Space In-Between, Ana Lucia Gazzola and Wander Melo Miranda build upon Santiago’s fashion metaphor. They provide an eloquent summary of his concept: “The ideological fallacy in which notions like source and influence are

90

FASHIONING BRAZIL

often clothed is dismantled, and the value of the (peripheral) copy with respect to the (hegemonic) model is recovered” (2001: 3). Santiago’s text is not a huge advance on Stam’s; both provide a positive theorization and identification with the vexed topic of Brazilian national identity, foregrounding discourse and cultural expressions previously seen as deficient in relation to the West. Santiago’s concept of a flexible state of in-between is more adaptable than Stam’s recycled aesthetics, however, which was grounded in specific examples that engaged with Brazilian films as texts. His work provides a productive tool through which to untangle the complexities of global cultural exchange between the United States and Brazil, potentially revealing new narratives of Brazilian self-fashioning and self-presentation. The two snapshots examined in this chapter have been selected because they offer two case studies of transcultural dress through which to reflect upon the fashionable gaze that National Geographic placed onto Brazil over the course of a decade. The first part of this chapter examines the visual, textual and sensory strategies of representation used to construct an idea of Brazil in the photobook National Geographic Fashion (2001). National Geographic’s gaze, as my analysis outlines, oscillated in-between critical recognition of represented subjects as self-fashioning individuals—in line with contemporary academic discourse challenging the Eurocentric bias in fashion—and fashioning those subjects as an exotic spectacle, to cite Maynard’s acerbic observation in the context of Western fashion design, “worthy of appropriation, but beyond fashionable change” (2004: 69). I use Santiago’s concept to examine a snapshot of Brazil from National Geographic Fashion, questioning to what extent National Geographic’s dominant gaze may have been counteracted by evidence of the male Brazilian subject actively engaging with that gaze through dress. The second part of this chapter examines another fashionable gaze that National Geographic placed upon Brazil in a snapshot from September 2011, and unpacks the visual, textual and sensory strategies used by the magazine to construct an idea of Brazilian women in both print and digital formats. I analyze two examples from this snapshot, questioning to what extent female Brazilian subjects responded directly to National Geographic’s fashionable gaze, using dress to present new subjectivities and narratives of identity. By engaging with three different media—photobook, magazine and the National Geographic website (accessible at www.nationalgeographic.com)—this chapter builds upon the sensory analysis introduced in the previous chapters, accounting for the magazine’s shift to incorporate digital technologies throughout the 1990s (Hays 1997). I address how Brazilian identity may have been experienced by National Geographic viewers through the medium of fashion, as it has been represented in a variety of visual and material forms. I begin by outlining the characteristics of the fashionable gaze that National Geographic placed onto Brazil since 2001, and reflect upon the implications of this. I then use Santiago’s concept of a flexible

THE SPACE IN-BETWEEN

91

state in-between to analyze charged instances in which Brazilian subjects can be seen to have self-fashioned—sartorially “writing back” through dress, pose, gesture, expression, or gaze—in response to their dominant representation by National Geographic.

Snapshot 6: The Yanomami Boy’s Gaze at the National Geographic Photographer’s Clothing, September 2001 The first snapshot (Figure 4.0) this chapter examines was published in National Geographic Fashion, which reframed 145 photographs of diverse and anonymous subjects from the National Geographic photographic archive. Edited by Cathy Newman, the photobook contained a seductive combination of full color, monochrome, and hand-painted Autochrome prints reproduced on

Figure 4.0 Snapshot 6. Photograph by Michael Nichols, Yanomami father and son, Brazil, 1990, published in National Geographic Fashion (2001). Copyright: Michael Nichols/National Geographic Creative.

92

FASHIONING BRAZIL

high-quality satin-finish paper. It had a distinctly more tactile quality than the slim, glossy magazine and its large size (30 cm x 30 cm) required a desk and chair for viewing with ease. I refer to the magazine as placing a fashionable gaze upon its archival history because the subjects selected for inclusion are comparable only by their striking and symmetrical model-like faces and equally proportioned figures, whether slender, ample, or muscular. These subjects had unequivocally been chosen by an eye attuned to Western fashion and beauty conventions, which have tended to perceive symmetrical bodies and faces as more attractive than asymmetrical ones (Gilman 1999: 150). The overriding impression produced by National Geographic Fashion was that it is permissible to be different—so far as within that notion of difference there was a recognizable balance and symmetry that adhered to conventional Western ideals of beauty. Photo Editor Annie Griffiths Belt admitted that in choosing images for inclusion, she looked “for commonality and diversity. Mostly, I looked for self-expression” (2014). In collaboration with designer Ben Pham, she worked to create “pairings and spreads” although, beyond superficial formal similarities, the photographs appeared to bear little relation to one another. They were periodically interspersed with unreferenced quotations that lacked historical contextualization. A doublepage spread depicting an anonymous Dutch farming family photographed on the island of Marken in the province of North Holland in 1914, dressed in clogs and handmade clothing, was accompanied by a quote from Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, which read: “In difficult times fashion is always outrageous” (118–19). Taken from a completely different period and geographical context, the quote bore an ambivalent connection to the image, beyond meditating on the elusive nature of fashion. The editorial decision to reference images with only a short caption in minute print, providing the bare contextual essentials (photographer, location, date) reinforced the viewer’s understanding that the images—rather than the text—played a key role in constructing the narrative of the photobook. Nevertheless, National Geographic Fashion included an introductory essay by anthropologist Joanne B. Eicher, who set the critical tone for the book and cast doubt upon simplistic dichotomies that presumed the dominance of the seasonally shifting Western fashion system above purportedly static nonWestern dress cultures (2001: 26). She urged viewers to rid themselves of an “ethnocentrism that encourages the belief that we who live in technologically sophisticated cultures are the only ones capable of, or interested in, change” and instructed him or her to consider two themes when viewing the photobook: “First, the subtleties of fashion as change in dress, and, second, how we interpret change in dress as fashionable” (26). Eicher has since recalled: “I was allowed to write whatever I wanted. I wrote what I saw as my philosophy about fashion and dress” (2014). Eicher’s philosophy was most evident in her insistence that National Geographic Fashion had the potential to redefine and broaden our understanding

THE SPACE IN-BETWEEN

93

of fashion, as a dynamic of change that is evident within numerous dress forms and is imbued with a sense of the now, as well as an awareness of personal style and social belonging. By inviting Eicher to contribute to the photobook, National Geographic was clearly aware of contemporary academic discourse since the 1990s, which had begun to interrogate the intersections between identity politics, the lived experience of dress, and transcultural phenomena, emphasizing new narratives of fashion exchange that extend beyond Europe and North America.

Academia and Commerce Yet when quizzed as to why the photobook was titled National Geographic Fashion, rather than invoke Eicher’s holistic philosophy, Newman replied that “the title of a book—any book—is driven by marketing. I didn’t decide the title. . . . But I would imagine that it is much sexier to call a book—any book—on the subject of what we wear—Fashion, rather than Clothes or Dress or Costume” (2017). This disjuncture between academia and commerce was reiterated in the photobook’s flyleaf, which celebrated the all-encompassing nature of fashion: Fashion is dramatic, demure, colourful, quiet. . . . It’s timeless, it’s transient, shocking or soothing, surprising, exciting. It’s an instinct as old as Adam and Eve, and all over the world it’s wherever you look. Fashion is culture. Fashion is art. Fashion is us. On the one hand, this expansive definition encompassed fashionable modes of global dress in various manifestations throughout different time periods and cultures. On the other, it reduced fashion to a meaningless, undifferentiated and universal layer through which to gaze upon the world at large, and reframe National Geographic’s editorial history for commercial gain.1 National Geographic Fashion focused narrowly on “ethnic” dress, as opposed to high fashion or street-style.2 It encapsulated a palpable tension—between a critical recognition of diverse dress practices throughout the world as fashion, as underlined in Eicher’s introduction, and an analytical desensitization, through the visual emphasis on the multisensory spectacle of ethnic dress, which paralleled the discourse of popular ethnography, a continual source of exoticism to the Western fashion system (Cheang 2013). National Geographic Fashion fused a diverse catalog of expressions, gestures, poses, clothing, and accessories into a synesthetic spectacle of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations. The photographs encouraged the viewer not just to look at dress, but to imagine how it might feel, smell, sound, and move, and to reconstruct a three-dimensional image of dressed National Geographic subjects. Unlike in the previous two snapshots examined, however, there was an overriding sensation that the National Geographic Fashion viewer’s

94

FASHIONING BRAZIL

critical faculties threatened to be overshadowed by a dizzying, hyper-synesthetic overload of color, shape, pattern, and form. David Howes has used the term “hyperesthesia” to describe the commodification of multisensory values in late capitalist culture, which focuses on “seducing the senses of the consumer in the interests of valorizing capital” (2005: 287–88).3 A form of “multisensory marketing” is encapsulated by National Geographic Fashion, which attempted to engage as many of the viewer’s senses as possible, potentially creating a state of hyperesthesia in the viewer, who becomes distracted by the pleasurable, tactile qualities of the glossy representation of ethnic dress, but less concerned by its deeper significance for individual wearers. National Geographic Fashion resonated more closely with Santiago’s dismissal of the exotic representation of the Other as “an image of a smiling carnival and fiesta-filled holiday haven for cultural tourism” (2001: 38) than with the cautionary tone set by Eicher, who urged geographically removed viewers not to accept straightforwardly the representation of non-Western dress and fashion as an everyday contemporary reality, since “it may not even be an example of what most people wore at the time” and “photographers may have a specific purpose for documenting a certain type of dress” (2001: 20). One viewer described the comfort she found in National Geographic Fashion when it arrived by Federal Express, “approximately five minutes before tower one of the World Trade Center was hit” (Levy 2013). As she explained, “In the post WTC American experience,” the photobook provided “a powerful visual and contextual tool for understanding the value of clothes and adornment. Filled with timeless images of people from across the globe, it [offered] a compelling reminder to those both in and outside the realm of fashion to consider the rest of the world’s joys and sorrows as we reflect upon our own” (Levy 2013). Western viewers, distressed and anxious following the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, could seek comfort in the stability provided by non-Western subjects in National Geographic Fashion, who were perceived to exist within a timeless and romanticized ethnographic present, devoid of contact with a dangerous outside world. This view encapsulated many of the contradictions of National Geographic Fashion, which equated itself, on the one hand, with a new body of scholarship challenging the Eurocentric fashion model, but on the other, had an undeniable commercial remit, suggesting that academic debate had not quite filtered through into popular parlance, still captivated as it was by the exotic flair of a presumed Other. This was confounded by the fact that the official launch of the photobook on September 6, 2001, was held at the American department store Saks Fifth Avenue, New York, to coincide with events coordinated by the Council of Fashion Designers of America in celebration of New York Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2002. This marketing decision placed the luxurious photobook, albeit reasonably priced at $50 for mass-market appeal, firmly within a high fashion as opposed to an academic context; arguably, the latter would have

THE SPACE IN-BETWEEN

95

been more conspicuously achieved had the official launch been held at American book retailer, Barnes and Noble. Global subjects represented within National Geographic Fashion may have been aestheticized in accordance with Western beauty conventions, and promoted within a Western high-fashion context, but they were nonetheless rendered unequivocally peculiar and distanced through the gaze of fashion.

Fashioned and Self-Fashioning Nevertheless, the concept of the space in-between provides another, underexplored dimension to National Geographic Fashion. It enables images of self-fashioning and self-aware Brazilian subjects to be isolated and analyzed in greater detail. Brazil was the focus on only three occasions within National Geographic Fashion. In each instance, National Geographic focused on indigenous peoples, whether an anonymous Waura wrestler, indigenous to the Xingu National Park in the Western state of Mato Grosso, or Yanomami subjects, who live in the Amazon on the border between Venezuela and Brazil. This drew a parallel with snapshots one and three examined in the second chapter of this book. Rather than focus on Brazilian women and their creative appropriation of foreign dress forms, however, National Geographic Fashion solely documented male dress practices. The first snapshot this chapter examines was presented on the right-hand side of a double-page view (Figure 4.1). Published on a single-page spread, it reframed a photograph of a Yanomami man, poised with his young son beside him. Originally documented by Michael Nichols in 1990, this image was previously archived in a grid formation on the online photographic archive, National Geographic Creative (accessible at http://www.natgeocreative.com/ ngs/photography/search/comp-view/index.jsf). Recontextualized within National Geographic Fashion, the photograph was stretched and cropped along the bottom edge. While this may have been an intentional censoring of the young boy’s exposed private parts, it also brought the two subjects into sharper focus, framing them within the more intimate protocols of portraiture, as opposed to ethnography. The subjects have a presence and assertiveness, reinforced by their singular and central positioning within the frame, which highlights their ability to assert individual subjectivities from within the confines of National Geographic’s fashionable gaze. The portrait was intensified in color, mobilizing a dynamic dialectic between the two figures, who are dressed in red body paint and red loincloth, and the fertile, leafy green surroundings that frame them. This editorial decision drew attention to the red clothing and their painted, dark skin, which stands out clearly in the foreground, contrasting with the recessive green of the background.

96

FASHIONING BRAZIL

Figure 4.1 Author holding National Geographic Fashion (2001) open to view Michael Nichols’s photograph of a Yanomami father and son, Brazil. Courtesy of Jonathan Vickers.

Both subjects are captured straightforwardly in the frame; the man stares confidently and directly into the camera lens, while the young boy addresses the photographer with an arresting and inquisitive gaze. The man’s confident and composed gaze denotes complicity between the subject and the photographer, subverting the one-directional power relations frequently attributed to the relationship between observers and observed. It is useful here to draw on Merleau-Ponty’s observation that, in viewing a face that gazes directly at the viewer, we are not simply aware that it is a face, but we consider the position of the face; not only do we face that face, but this relationship is reciprocal, since we are also faced (2002: 294). The man has a dignity and stands as an active agent of his own appearance, rather than as a forlorn and passive object of a distanced voyeuristic gaze. His right arm envelops his young son, whose presence is also undeniably felt within the image as a knowing agent. The young boy is a site of potentiality, an in-between figure, who obscures the divisions between self and other, present and past, young and old, observer and observed. He appears to be as captivated by the curious sight of the clothed photographer, and his different mode of dress, as the photographer is by him. This self-reflexive dynamic can be extended to the viewer, who is equally aware of the young boy’s gaze, which stares out beyond the confines of the photobook onto his or her own dressed body, evoking a self-consciousness in the viewer

THE SPACE IN-BETWEEN

97

that is reciprocal and subverts the status of the young boy and his father as merely subjects-to-be-looked-at. As an indeterminate and ambivalent image, this snapshot mobilizes a complex interplay between the dominant exotic gaze that has been placed upon the Yanomami man and his son—centered upon the physical appearance of their dressed bodies—and a defiance of that gaze, which is counteracted by the inquisitiveness of the young boy’s returning stare. Although his clothing bears no obvious trace of cross-cultural contact and exchange, his self-possessed gaze suggests an instance of reflexivity; it characterizes Santiago’s notion of writing back, whereby the actions of the dominant culture, here looking and observing, are mimicked. Homi Bhabha has observed that mimicry is “the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which appropriates the Other as it visualizes power” (1990: 85). The little boy’s gaze hints at an alternative and critical rereading of National Geographic Fashion, which can now be understood not merely as an objectifying fashionable gaze, but as a productive space for new subjectivities to be created and contested. It is a potent reminder that just as the Yanomami man and his son provide an exotic spectacle to the National Geographic photographer, this dynamic works in playful irony, since the photographer is an equally curious specimen to the Yanomami subjects.

Western Fashion and Ethnic Dress However, critical recognition of the Yanomami subjects’ self-fashioning was entirely dependent upon the National Geographic Fashion viewer, to slow down the viewing process and contemplate the images in careful isolation. Within the context of the fragmentation and anxiety generated by the Twin Towers attack, it is perhaps less likely that feelings of identification and intimacy were mobilized between viewer and subject, and more probable that National Geographic Fashion fueled a desire for cultural superiority on the part of the Western viewer, to reinforce North American dominance by asserting the striking differences— presented on the body surface—of the rest of the world. National Geographic omitted particular images from the photobook. One example is a photograph published in the magazine in May 1939, which was captured by Robert W. Moore and documented a group of European-descended Brazilian men and women dressed in elegant European-style fashions as they queue for a taxi outside the luxury English department store, Mappin’, in São Paulo. Mappin’ opened in 1913 and disseminated fashionable forecasts to the Brazilian elite, enabling the aspiring middle classes of a newly industrialized and capitalist São Paulo to consume luxury goods such as clothing, accessories, furniture, fabrics and household appliances which denoted “Englishness.” The popularity of Mappin’ in the 1940s

98

FASHIONING BRAZIL

reflected a boom in São Paulo’s commercial and industrial infrastructure (Andrade 2006: 176–87). This omission demonstrated that National Geographic Fashion had an agenda—just as did National Geographic during the Second World War, when it chose to document white European-descended Brazilians wearing Western-style fashions as an extension of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy. The fashionable gaze that National Geographic Fashion placed upon the world in 2001 was palpably informed by an ethnographic desire to codify difference, rather than to present viewers with an easily recognizable image of fashion as a global economic force that permeates social life throughout the world. Instead of engaging with actual fashion systems—past or present, Western or non-Western, micro or macro—nor with high-end or everyday fashion, National Geographic Fashion focused narrowly on ethnic dress, reiterating the distinctions between a constantly innovating Western world and its presumed stable opposite. National Geographic’s reductive view of fashion was widespread across US print media. An article published in Women’s Wear Daily (WWD) on July 24, 2001, was entitled “Fashion’s Second Circuit: Plagued by fashion ennui and trying to find something unique to capture consumer’s attention, buyers are combing all corners of the earth for new, interesting resources. Here are reports from recent fashion weeks in Brazil and Australia” (Kemp 2001: 16–17). Not only did it acknowledge that Brazil and Australia constituted a second fashion circuit, and by implication, secondary to Paris, New York, London, and Milan, it also unashamedly pointed out the intent to plunder exotic looks from these countries to reinvigorate the Western fashion system. Rather than numerous fashion systems in existence throughout the world, WWD maintained there was still only one, Western-dominated system, which contained the power to incorporate a range of new and exciting ethnicities and exotic inspiration into its own frame of reference, as and when it pleased.4 This unashamedly asymmetrical balance of power resonated with fashion journalist Lamont Jones’s observation that National Geographic Fashion provided “a great holiday book for that fashionista on your list” (2001: 20). It was not until ten years later that National Geographic documented Brazil again through a fashionable gaze, only rather than focusing on ethnic dress worn by indigenous Brazilian men, it concentrated on Westernstyle high fashion adopted by Brazilian women living in Rio de Janeiro.

Snapshot 7: Bianca Marque’s Bikinis and Victor Denzk’s Dresses, September 2011 The second snapshot (comprised of Figures 4.2 and 4.3) that this chapter examines was published in National Geographic in September 2011, within an article entitled “Machisma: How A Mix Of Female Empowerment And Steamy Soap Operas Helped Bring Down Brazil’s Fertility Rate and Stoke Its Vibrant

THE SPACE IN-BETWEEN

99

Figure 4.2 Snapshot 7a. Photograph by John Stanmeyer, women in Bianca Marques’s fashion boutique, Rio de Janeiro, published in National Geographic in September 2011. Copyright: John Stanmeyer/National Geographic Creative.

Figure 4.3 Snapshot 7b. Photograph by John Stanmeyer, women in Victor Dzenk’s fashion boutique, Rio de Janeiro, published in National Geographic in September 2011. Copyright: John Stanmeyer/National Geographic Creative.

100

FASHIONING BRAZIL

Economy.” The title made use of the neologism “Machisma,” which National Geographic researcher Heidi Schultz explained was a fabrication by the author, American journalist Cynthia Gorney: It is a play on the word Machismo used in Brazil and many other Latin American countries. Machismo has been linked to domestic violence and other physical assaults on women. This was an inversion of that definition. We were showing empowered women who were fighting back, by taking their fertility into their own hands. (2013) The article, as Gorney explained, was written as “part of a year-long series called 7 Billion” that addressed the “world’s population reaching that number” (2013). As a result of its “vast landmass, with enormous regional differences in geography, race and culture,” Brazil was selected as an exemplary case study “to illustrate the drop in fertility that had been noted in many developing countries,” including Russia, India, China, and South Africa (2013). Within the article, Gorney compared Brazil’s fall in fertility with that of the United States: [The] new Brazilian fertility rate is below the level at which a population replaces itself. It is lower than the two-children-per-woman fertility rate in the United States. It is the largest nation in Latin America—a 191-million-person country where the Roman Catholic Church dominates, abortion is illegal (except in rare cases), and no official government policy has ever promoted birth control—family size has dropped so sharply and so insistently over the past five decades that the fertility rate graph looks like a playground slide. (2011: 101) She acknowledged that this trend did not apply only to “wealthy and professional women” but to all levels of society, including “schoolteachers, trash sorters, architects, newspaper reporters, shop clerks, cleaning ladies, professional athletes, high school girls, and women who had spent their adolescence homeless” (101). The article attributed this trend to rapid industrialization following the end of the military regime in 1985, which required women to work longer hours rather than stay at home with children; the ability to obtain means of birth control over the pharmacy counter without prescription; the introduction of a national pension, reducing dependency in old age on a larger family; the rise in caesareans as a result of financial incentives for doctors; the increase in women’s equality rights that stemmed from the Brazilian Women’s Movement of the 1970s and 1980s; and, finally, the widespread influence of Brazilian telenovelas, Portuguese-language evening soap operas, and their propagandistic dissemination of “a singular, vivid, aspirational image of the modern Brazilian family: affluent, light skinned, and small” (108). Gorney’s closing comment may

THE SPACE IN-BETWEEN

101

appear flippant, but she referred to the contemporary reality that despite vast cultural, racial and ethnic diversity within Brazilian borders, this has not, until very recently, been reflected in national media, where Afro-Brazilians have frequently been relegated to invisible or secondary roles (Nogueira Joyce 2012). Gorney described the consequences of this fall in fertility as “multi-class consumerism” and an explosion in consumer credit “reaching middle- and working-class families that two decades ago had no access to these kinds of discretionary purchases paid off over time” (2011: 116). While acknowledging that it was “a gross simplification” to deduce that Brazilian women are choosing to have fewer children to spend more money, she explained that “questions about material acquisition—how much everything now costs, and how much everyone now desires—both interested and troubled nearly every Brazilian woman I met” (118). Gorney cautioned that economic growth and a falling fertility rate did not straightforwardly ensure nationwide family well-being unless affluence was carefully managed and invested—the implication, perhaps, that Brazilian women might tend to be rather frivolous with their newfound wealth. So-called frivolity was not characteristic of all the women that Gorney met, however. Her article concluded with a description of having coffee with a group of professional women in São Paulo, where they studied “eight different glossy parenting magazines”: We studied the fashion photographs of beautiful toddlers in knits and aviator sunglasses and fake furs. “Look at these kids,” said Milene Chaves, a 33-yearold journalist, her voice hovering between admiration and despair. She turned the page. “And it seems you have to have a decorated room too. I don’t need a decorated room like this.” . . . The half dozen friends around her agreed, the magazines still open on the table before us: attractive objects, they said, but so excessive, so disturbingly too much. (119) While the Brazilian women seemed critical of their peers’ materialistic desire for (in this particular instance, children’s) fashion items, such as “knits, aviator sunglasses, and fake furs,” which were often paid for on credit, the back cover of the same edition of National Geographic featured Leonardo DiCaprio, dressed in an open-collared dark grey shirt and black jacket, in the latest Tag Heuer watch advertisement; this luxury fashion item tempted the National Geographic viewer, if not to purchase outright, then surely to buy on credit. DiCaprio modeled a man’s watch from the mid-range Carrera series. The implication deduced by the National Geographic viewer would surely have been that it was permissible for Western males to participate in fashion as active consumers, but not Brazilian women, even if it was in aid of their children rather than a lavish purchase for themselves, reinforcing a power imbalance between the two groups. Although fashion was not the focus of the article, it played a key role in constructing the new identity of the “empowered” Brazilian women represented

102

FASHIONING BRAZIL

by National Geographic. This is unsurprising given its focus on Brazilian telenovelas which, as Maria Claudia Bonadio and Maria Eduarda Araujo Guimarães have articulated, played a crucial role in launching national fashions and translating the international fashion scene for Brazilian consumers (2016: 209–28). Gorney’s opinion of fashion in Brazil, however, which she worked into her report so that it appeared actually to be the opinion of the Brazilian women she had interviewed, was retrogressive, and connected to the view of fashion propounded by the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) in the United States during the late 1960s and 1970s. The WLM understood fashion to be trivial, since the movement deemed it more liberating for women to break out of preconceived ideas of controlled femininity which constructed false ideals of women (Evans and Thornton 1989: 3). By putting forward her point of view via the Brazilian subjects that she interviewed, Gorney conveyed the overriding impression that it was glossy Brazilian magazines, rather than, in fact, National Geographic, which perpetuated an out-of-date and artificial ideology of Brazilian femininity through its representation of contemporary Brazilian fashion, which attempted to tell Brazilian women how they should, or rather could, live their lives. Rather than depicting Brazilian fashion as a highly profitable industry, which would have directly linked it to Brazil’s vibrant economy (to which by 2011 it was contributing 3.5 percent), National Geographic presented fashion as a mechanism used in a purportedly sexist, male-dominated Brazilian society to control women and keep them in their place (Anon. 2011). The overriding implication was that Brazil may have had a lower fertility rate in 2011 than the United States, but it was far behind in terms of attitudes to gender equality, despite National Geographic’s apparently commendable attempts to unearth evidence of its own invention, “Machisma.” Stanmeyer’s photographs of female Brazilian fashion consumers published within the article, however, were complex and intermedial. They communicated a different narrative, which held the potential to dissolve binary divisions and sculpt out a space in-between Brazil and the United States—through the simultaneous documentation and dramatization of Brazilian women—to form a direct connection to the National Geographic viewer.

Snapshot 7a: Bianca Marque’s Bikinis in the Magazine, September 2011 The first part of the second snapshot (Figure 4.4) that this chapter examines was published on a double-page spread at the very end of the magazine article. It captured fashionably dressed women talking, eating and laughing within the plush interior of Brazilian fashion designer Bianca Marques’s Ipanema boutique, in the affluent South Zone of Rio de Janeiro. The heightened surface spectacle

THE SPACE IN-BETWEEN

103

Figure 4.4 Author holding the September 2011 edition of National Geographic open to view John Stanmeyer’s photograph of Bianca Marques’s fashion boutique, Rio de Janeiro. Courtesy of Jonathan Vickers.

of the image immediately associated it with fashion: the glint of glass chandeliers, the shine of the silver bikini on display, the lustrous dark hair of the central female subject, the polished glass windows, and the smooth mirror to the right of the image, further to the silky sheen of the magazine page on which these features were reproduced. The photograph had the appearance of social reportage. It might have been a society page, or film still from a telenovela, since it did not document fashion explicitly, so much as an anthropology of social life among wealthy Brazilian consumers, whose tastes and aspirations might be interpreted as rather vulgar, and intended to provide entertainment for the National Geographic viewer. A cursory glance suggests the female subjects are passive and unaware of Stanmeyer’s voyeuristic gaze as they socialize with one another. A closer examination, however, complicates a straightforward reading of the image, establishing mechanisms of identification that rest in-between the observer and observed. The gaze of the woman to the left of center in the image, who is also reflected in the mirror on the right-hand side of the page, does not suggest passivity, but a specifically female gaze that matches Stanmeyer’s male gaze onto the women. Her active gaze is comparable to that of the small boy examined in the previous snapshot but, rather than curious, it is confident and self-assured. The female subject is no longer the object of a gaze, but the

104

FASHIONING BRAZIL

instigator. She inhabits a space in-between the photographer and his subjects where, meeting National Geographic’s dominant gaze, she places that gaze back onto the photographer and, by extension, the viewer. That there is a camera placed on the sofa beside her, directly pointing at the viewer, reinforces her position as an active and self-fashioning subject, while highlighting her own awareness of herself as a fashion image. The female protagonist encapsulates what Merleau-Ponty termed the “split gaze,” whereby “external perception and the perception of one’s own body vary in conjunction because they are the two facets of one and the same act” (2002: 237). Her gaze operates as a powerful inversion of National Geographic’s fashionable gaze onto the women, which makes transparent the private sphere of the shopping boutique within the public pages of the magazine. With a steely stare, the woman surveys the viewer, encouraging a heightened sense of the viewer’s own position as voyeur, and prompting critical reflection through the interconnected activities of looking, seeing, being, feeling, and wearing on the part of subject and viewer. This selfreflexive dynamic is reinforced by the editorial decision to split the image in two using a mirror, which reflects the photograph back onto itself. The crease of the double-page magazine spread emphasizes this mirroring but also obscures the subject’s reflection, drawing attention to the fact that mirrors do not simply reflect, but actively construct. The woman’s gaze reflects the confidence with which she has constructed her own appearance, through the adoption of Brazilian fashions that are in accordance with international trends. Her fashioned body does not render her a passive object, but becomes an active site for the articulation of her own identity. Fashion gives her the confidence to define herself against an objectifying National Geographic gaze, by mimicking that gaze in a process that resists and refashions it. A swimwear shoot documented in the T: The New York Times Style Magazine five months earlier in April 2011 provides an insightful point of comparison. Entitled “The Full Brazilian: frolicking on her native beaches in resort’s flirty new silhouette of rompers and shorts is that national treasure, the gorgeous Raquel Zimmermann,” it captured the globally successful fashion model on a trip to Fernando de Noronha, an ecological archipelago and UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Atlantic Ocean, 354 km offshore from the northeast coast of Brazil. As in National Geographic, the article celebrated a desirable white Brazilian femininity. Aside from the natural paradise of Fernando de Noronha, there is a relative lack of exoticism or playing up of a sensual Brazilian femininity, which foreign eyes might expect from a swimwear shoot on location in Brazil, not least one featuring a Brazilian model such as Zimmermann. A palpable awkwardness permeates Zimmerman’s poses. Dwarfed by her environment, in one photograph (Figure 4.5) she is placed just to the right of center in the frame, gazing directly at the camera. She models a Missoni bikini and Diane von Furstenberg sunglasses—an encapsulation of the continued reluctance

THE SPACE IN-BETWEEN

105

Figure 4.5 Author holding the 2011 Holiday edition of T: The New York Times Style Magazine open to view Angelo Pennetta’s photograph of Raquel Zimmermann on Fernando de Noronha, Brazil. Courtesy of Jonathan Vickers.

on the part of Western fashion media to acknowledge Brazilian designers as equal competitors on the global fashion stage (Andrade and Root 2010). Yet it is Zimmermann’s body language that stands out in this image: she sticks out her stomach and pulls back her shoulders, allowing her arms to hang stiffly by her sides. Her feet are turned inward, with one foot curling awkwardly into the sand. Rather than epitomizing the confident stance of a globally successful, active supermodel, Zimmermann has the appearance of an awkward, passive child. Her eyes are covered with sunglasses, so that even though the viewer watches her, she remains inaccessible. This might denote resistance to the photographer’s gaze but, due to her childlike stance that renders her body readily available to the viewer, suggests more a passive complicity to her documentation. Her gaze is far less dynamic than that of the central subject documented in National Geographic. Aside from Zimmermann’s unorthodox pose, the most revealing aspect of this New York Times fashion shoot is that, rather than present an overtly exoticized Brazilian beach scene, it is taken in a reasonably homogenous environment, which could be any number of isolated nature spots throughout the world. There is a relative lack of exoticism, and scarcity of surface, glitz, and glamour that might be expected from a tropical fashion shoot set in Brazil for an international audience. The article even states: “Zimmermann’s blond hair and blue eyes do not, for most people, immediately say Brazil” (Raub 2011: 166).

106

FASHIONING BRAZIL

National Geographic, in contrast, places a great deal of emphasis on surface sensation. The tactile and sensory responses that these seductive surfaces may have prompted in the viewer potentially undermined a critical rereading of the image through dress, pose and gaze, diminishing intellectual awareness by precipitating a shift towards desire. The tactile stimulation of the glistening chandeliers, glittering bikini, soft velvet sofa, shiny glass window and reflective mirror all threatened to seduce the viewer, encouraging a state of hyperesthesia in him or her and enhancing the likelihood, as in the previous snapshot, that a critical evaluation of the subject’s self-fashioning become overshadowed. Despite the subject’s active gaze complicating the photographer’s straightforward control over her, there was an overriding sense that the image had been directed by Stanmeyer’s discriminating eye, regardless of his insistence that it was an example of straightforward and objective reportage. If National Geographic had truly wanted to document Brazilian fashion through the quintessential Brazilian bikini, it might have pointed out the success of the national swimwear industry, which employs an original business model that is representative of the local lifestyle and tropical climate that has necessitated its production (Newberry 2007: 71–80). It could have mentioned that Brazilian swimwear is distinct from other segments of the Brazilian fashion industry because it has moved beyond, as Silviano Mendes and Nick ReesRoberts have articulated, “the traditional imitation of European and North American labels”—formerly widespread among Brazilian fashion design up until the late 1990s—“to a position of stylistic influence” that can be charted through the collections of Western fashion brands such as Gucci and Louis Vuitton (2013: 31). National Geographic failed to acknowledge these crucial cross-cultural aspects of Brazilian swimwear, which have positioned it on the cusp of Brazil and the West, in creative dialogue with the West but also culturally and stylistically distinct from it. By factoring these important issues into the article, National Geographic would have directly linked the documentation of Brazilian fashion to the Brazilian economy, highlighting the strategic nature of the Brazilian swimwear industry, which negotiates local and global sensibilities for commercial gain. Instead, the magazine presented a very narrow view of Brazilian fashion as the elite domain of wealthy, white, European-descended women, oscillating precariously between acknowledging the self-fashioning of Brazilian subjects, and overemphasizing the tactile stimulations that their representation provided to distanced viewers. These factors all contributed to an idea of fashion in Brazil as a superficial, feminine preoccupation. The second part of this snapshot extends these arguments to consider how an equally ambiguous image from the same article was recontextualized for the digital edition of National Geographic, and questions how viewers were encouraged to experience the lives of self-fashioning Brazilian subjects through the medium of fashion.

THE SPACE IN-BETWEEN

107

Snapshot 7b: Victor Dzenk’s Dresses on the Website, September 2011 The second part of this snapshot (Figure 4.6) was photographed in Brazilian fashion designer Victor Dzenk’s boutique in Rio de Janeiro. A pair of highheeled shoes can be seen on the feet of the central female subject, as she sashays down a corridor adorned with mirrors. Stanmeyer has framed her body centrally, encouraging the viewer’s gaze to move up and down, absorbing her nude-colored high heels; slim, tanned legs; turquoise minidress with a sheer cutout section; heavily made-up face; and coiffured hair. At the same time as this male gaze subjects the female subject to scrutiny from the viewer, several feminine gazes operating within the image counteract the visual mastery of the photographer. These female gazes direct the viewer’s gaze continually around the image in a triangular shape, encouraging the viewer to grasp the charged narrative being enacted, rather than to center on the fetishization of the central subject. The identities of these women are constructed through this in-between movement, which contributes to an idea of them as actors in a telenovela, albeit one in which there is an unmistakable imbalance of feminine power being dramatized. Through these dynamic gazes, the viewer gains the impression that feminine Brazilian identities are not a fixed being, but an interconnected process of fluid becoming. The first gaze belongs to the central light-skinned subject,

Figure 4.6 Author using a MacBook to view the September 2011 digital edition of National Geographic featuring John Stanmeyer’s photograph of Victor Dzenk’s fashion boutique, Rio de Janeiro. Courtesy of Jonathan Vickers.

108

FASHIONING BRAZIL

who glances at a woman with long dark hair, who is captured to her left but to the right of the photograph frame. The second gaze belongs to this light-skinned subject, who wears a white lace dress and glances to her right, leading the viewer’s eye to a darker-skinned shop assistant. Pushed into the left-hand corner of the photograph against a clothes rail laden with colorful dresses, and framed against a heavily patterned background, the third gaze belongs to this subject, who is dressed in a plain black uniform and appears to be of indigenous descent. She clutches a collection of wooden coat hangers that support brightly colored dresses, contrasting drastically with her austere ensemble. Her downcast gaze as she focuses on the task at hand mobilizes an unmistakable visual conflict, not only within this image, but also within the photographs published elsewhere in the article, between women who are employees of the Brazilian fashion industry and placed in correspondingly static roles, and the wealthier women that they serve, who consume fashion and are presented in active roles. The distinction between passivity and activity is emphasized here through the contrasting skin tones of the darker-skinned, uniformed employee and the lighter-skinned, dressed-up consumers. The caption guides the viewer’s attention to focus on this imbalance of power: “Consumer Culture: Despite the booming economy, not every Brazilian can indulge in expensive fashions like these” (2013). This is overtly conveyed to the viewer through the pose, dress, and gaze of the confident and fashionably dressed lighter-skinned women, who sartorially “write back” at a voyeuristic male gaze by taking representation into their own hands. The implication is that Brazilian fashion has enabled wealthy light-skinned women to construct their own subjectivities in-between Brazil and the West, as active fashion consumers in tune with international trends, but that less wealthy darker-skinned women have been excluded from this narrative, condemned instead to play the role of passive operators within the industry.

Print and Digital Media To fully understand this snapshot, it is necessary to comment upon the layout of images on the National Geographic website, which required the active viewer to adopt a more decisive role than previously encouraged by the magazine. Images reframed on the website were presented as a series of cropped, closeup thumbnails, which needed to be selected by the viewer in order to be viewed in full-scale enlarged isolation. The enlarged images were presented on a plain white background, divorced from the text apart from a brief caption, and from the remaining photographs of the article. This editorial decision constructed each image as a finished composition in and of itself, fixed in motion like a still from a telenovela. It also gave the viewer a choice of images to view, and in which order to view them. The perceptive viewer may have been encouraged to fill in

THE SPACE IN-BETWEEN

109

the narrative in-between images reframed on the digital screen, constructing a storyline that was less dictated by National Geographic, as the linear nature of reading the magazine encouraged, and more subject to their own, individual whims. This corresponded with National Geographic’s acknowledgment that through its expansion into digital media the magazine is continuing to expand “the scope of its visual storytelling, experimenting with digital experiences to find new ways of documenting the world and of allowing readers to interact with content” (2013: n.p.). Lucas D. Introna and Fernando M. Ilharco have acknowledged that digital screens present an already screened world to us which is already consistent with our ongoing involvement in that world. Hence, foremost and primarily what screens show is not the content that appears on the screen, but simultaneously, and perhaps more fundamentally, a way of being in that world. As screens we look at them but also simultaneously, immediately, and more fundamentally, we look through them to encounter our way of being in the world. (Introna and Ilharco 2006: 66)

Introna and Ilharco attribute a heightened sense of embodiment to the viewer’s experience of the screen, which mobilizes a dynamic interplay between viewer and subject, extendable to the level of self-projection that the smooth, reflective surface of the digital screen encourages on the part of the viewer. My own analysis of this image, reframed on the National Geographic website and recontextualized on the digital screen of my MacBook, gives a heightened importance to the complex gazes being enacted by the three female subjects in Victor Dzenk’s boutique. This is because the flat screen of my MacBook, which is thinly bordered in silver and placed perpendicular to the keyboard, has the appearance of a dressing table mirror, particularly when placed upon my desk, but not least when I catch sight of my own reflection projected onto the screen, which becomes a palimpsest placed over the top of the represented subjects. In her discussion of self-reflexivity and fashion blogs, Agnes Rocamora has made a similar point, acknowledging that digital screens are comparable to mirrors since they “allow[s] one to look at oneself,” as well as to look at what is presented on the screen (2013: 119). This simultaneous sensation of looking, while being looked back at, counteracts claims that all photographs viewed on screens— whether computers, mobile phones, or iPads—have disembodied the viewer and rendered him or her effectively immobile as the screen moves (Manovich 2004: 186–202). Once selected, a photograph on the National Geographic website could not be zoomed in and out of via the mouse or touchpad; for an image to be viewed in closer detail, the viewer had to physically move his or her body in toward the screen. The screen had the potential to prompt an intensely

110

FASHIONING BRAZIL

charged  encounter between the National Geographic viewer and Brazilian subjects, one capable of eroding the physical, but also emotional, distance between the observer and the observed.

Fiction and Reality This image—rather like the previous one examined in this snapshot—is not a fashion photograph, but rather a dramatized anthropology of Brazilian social life within a wealthy area of Rio de Janeiro. It uses fashionable details, such as the emphasis on tactile sensations, to draw the National Geographic viewer in—from the soft carpet, crisp cotton lace white dress, shiny glass mirror, and glittering jewelry, further to the smooth, surface of the digital screen (now often the first point of contact for experiencing high-end fashion, particularly in Western cultures). From this vantage point, National Geographic narrates the presumed reality of race relations within Brazil, by focusing on the ways in which fashion has been consumed by European-descended Brazilian women. There is always the danger, however, that the emphasis on surface may have resulted in a diminished critical awareness on the part of the viewer, whose intellectual interpretation of the photograph risked being undermined by its dependence upon the sensory optic/haptic experiences produced by fashion, which operated as a substitute for touch but also, potentially, for depth. The two ambiguous images examined within this snapshot oscillated precariously between fashioning Brazilian women as a passive spectacle, emphasized by the sensory overload of aestheticized surfaces available within the photograph to excite and tantalize the viewer, and critically acknowledging their individual practices of self-fashioning, highlighted through the various dynamic gazes that they perform within the frame. This ambiguity resonated with Bonadio and Guimarães observation that telenovelas “do not draw a distinct border between fiction and reality. On the contrary, they tend to blur this boundary by allowing viewers, to some extent, to experience the lives of their characters by means of consumerism” (2015: 213). This sense of real life injected with fiction was evident in Stanmeyer’s own, somewhat contradictory description of his photographic practice, which eroded the clear division between objective documentation and subjective dramatization. On the one hand, he asserted: “I do not direct the subjects in my photographs or collaborate in any way. This is reportage photography. It is naturally happening—no poses or styling done” (2013). Yet he equally acknowledged: “I simply see what has a feeling, purpose or emotion to the story. Not every photograph works. Other[s] do. It’s like working a pottery wheel, constantly molding the clay until the narrative takes shape and form” (2013). If these images are to be understood as an equal collaboration between subject and photographer, then narrative construction could be a tool

THE SPACE IN-BETWEEN

111

used to communicate individual processes of Brazilian self-fashioning to the viewer through a heightened sense of drama, emotion, and suspense. In this scenario, Stanmeyer’s role would be to simply document their performance, allowing the subjects to perform their own fashionable identities. There is an overriding sense, however, that even when the images were re-presented online and viewers were given a more active interpretative role, Stanmeyer still understood his position as an orchestrator, in which he is the creative artisan giving shape and form to the narrative, choreographing his actors like a film director. This chapter has identified two instances in the history of National Geographic’s representation of Brazil since 2001 when the magazine has engaged with fashion, whether overtly, as in the first snapshot, or covertly, as in the second. In the first snapshot, fashion was represented within a very broad ethnographic framework, informed by contemporary scholarship but with a commercial imperative, which presented Brazilian fashion as ethnic, indigenous, and masculine. Fashion provided a generic lens through which to gaze upon the world at large and render diverse subjects unequivocally peculiar. In the second snapshot, fashion was used to demonstrate how wealthy, white-skinned Brazilian women living in the affluent South Zone of Rio de Janeiro consume and construct their identities through fashion. Fashion was presented within an anthropological framework, but dismissed as superficial and distinctively feminine. Over the course of ten years, National Geographic departed from a masculine, ethnic understanding of Brazilian fashion—which suggested that difference was permissible so long as within that notion of difference there was a recognizable Western ideal of beauty—in favor of an overtly white, Western-influenced image of Brazilian fashion, fuelling a historical tendency within the West (and Brazil) to associate white skin with economic development and progress (Legg 2016). In both snapshots, National Geographic ignored the multidimensional nature of Brazilian fashion, presenting two very narrow ideas of what fashion in Brazil constituted, neither of which encapsulated the lived experience of fashion as a site of articulation and identity formation within the context of a global economy. In 2001 and 2011, the gazes of self-fashioning Brazilian subjects have characterized a liminal in-betweenness that has resisted National Geographic’s fashionable gaze to varying degrees. Santiago’s concept of “writing back” has not been communicated through dress, so much as in the active gazes that subjects have displayed in response to National Geographic’s gaze. The little boy’s curious gaze at the photographer in the first snapshot was an intrigued reaction to the presence of the camera, but also to the photographer’s peculiar mode of foreign dress. In the second snapshot, the Brazilian woman’s active and self-possessed gaze in the first example—in the form of a sustained look at the photographer—affirmed a shared recognition of herself as a fashionable image, drawing attention to the fact that the photograph was just that—a representation. In the second example, the women’s gazes at one another

112

FASHIONING BRAZIL

counteract the visual mastery of Stanmeyer’s gaze, highlighting the complexity of the image and the hierarchies in operation between different social, ethnic, and racial groups within Brazil. Although the return gazes of Brazilian subjects have complicated National Geographic’s straightforward dominance over the documented scenes, the sensual surface of the images has threatened to obscure the interactive nature of the exchange between viewer and viewed. The luxurious tactile qualities of National Geographic Fashion, not to mention its haphazard arrangement of image and text, risked eliciting a sense of hyperesthesia in the viewer. While the range of surface textures made available within the photographs of Bianca Marques’s and Victor Dzenk’s boutiques equally encouraged the viewer’s gaze to rest on the exterior of the photograph, rather than to explore its depth and meaning. The synesthetic overload of these snapshots has been evident in all three media examined—book, magazine, and screen—and suggests that National Geographic commodified these tactile sensations, which increasingly overshadowed viewers’ critical faculties and recognition of self-fashioning Brazilian subjects. This may have reflected National Geographic’s reluctance to engage in sustained intellectual debate with fashion, keen as it is to distinguish itself within the global mediascape as an educational and “scientific” journal, not a fashion magazine.

PART TWO

HOLDING UP A MIRROR TO NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC The first part of this book examined the representation of Brazilian dress and fashion in National Geographic since 1906, when the magazine first made contact with Brazil. It understood contact as an embodied, emotional, and multisensory experience, which extended beyond distanced, disembodied viewing and was intricately connected to the dressed bodies of both the Brazilian subject and the National Geographic viewer. In all seven snapshots examined, the photographic representation of dress and fashion drew variously on the conventions of ethnography, portraiture, documentary, fashion, and cinematography, which mobilized an ambivalent friction between viewer and subject that oscillated precariously between identification and difference. In the period prior to 1988, this dynamic tended toward encouraging the difference of Brazilian subjects, even while dress complicated a straightforward reading of the images published within the magazine. In the period following 1988, dress encouraged identification with Brazilian subjects, prompted by the haptic-visual qualities of the images, which took precedence over the textual narrative of

114

FASHIONING BRAZIL

articles in which they were published. The representation of Brazilian fashion provided the exception to this paradigm shift since 1988; it shifted one step too far and encouraged viewers to appreciate the haptic-visual qualities of the images to the extent that superficial surface risked eclipsing analytical depth, potentially distracting viewers’ critical faculties in a hyperesthetic overload (Howes 2005). Rather than encourage the critical recognition of self-fashioning Brazilians, the medium of fashion prompted viewers to treat both male and female subjects as exoticized or fetishized specimens. The second part of this book provides a crucial counterpoint to the first part and examines the representation of Brazilian dress in National Geographic Brasil, the tenth edition of the magazine reproduced in a local language.1 It covers a shorter period than the previous three chapters, but examines how the representation of Brazilian dress in National Geographic Brasil holds up a mirror to—and thereby casts light on—the representation of Brazil in National Geographic. In bringing National Geographic into direct dialogue and critique with National Geographic Brasil, this book is structured as a contact zone. That the first part is larger and comprised of three chapters, whereas the second part is smaller and encompasses only two chapters, is an intentional tool deployed to highlight the asymmetrical relations of power prevalent within the United States-Brazil contact zone. National Geographic Brasil must be conceptualized as an exemplary form of auto-ethnographic expression, a phenomenon that was examined in the previous three chapters through the concepts of anthropophagy, an aesthetics of garbage, and the space in-between. To recapitulate, whereas Pratt defined ethnographic texts as “those in which European metropolitan subjects represent to themselves their others,” auto-ethnographic expressions are “representations that so-defined others construct in response to or in dialogue with those texts” (1999: 589). She used the term to describe how subordinate subjects, a position embodied here by National Geographic Brasil, undertake to represent their own culture in ways that engage with their representation by a dominant culture, exemplified in this instance by National Geographic. National Geographic Brasil arrived in Brazil in May 2000, when Brazilian media conglomerate Editora Abril, the largest publishing and printing company in Latin America, distributed 20,000 copies of the Portuguese-language edition to newsstands nationwide. This was accompanied by the launch of the National Geographic Brasil website (www.ngbrasil.com.br), which advertised subscription services to the magazine. National Geographic Brasil, as part of the for-profit Editora Abril, had an explicit commercial imperative, unlike National Geographic, which since its establishment (and until September 2015) has formed part of the tax-exempt not-for-profit National Geographic Society.2 Permission was only granted to Editora Abril to reproduce National Geographic Brasil for profit after William L. Allen, the then editor-in-chief of National Geographic (1999–2005), had satisfied himself that the magazine’s high-quality printing and

HOLDING UP A MIRROR TO NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

115

publishing techniques could be maintained in Latin America, demonstrating the importance to Allen of the materiality of the global outreach of the magazine. The second part of this book takes this materiality into equal account as the first part, considering how the Brazilian viewer was encouraged to engage with four snapshots of Brazilian dress that were represented in the magazine. These snapshots are organized chronologically to highlight the development of National Geographic Brasil from May 2000 to 2015.

5 MISPLACED IDEAS: BRAZILIAN DRESS AS REFLECTED IN THE FIRST TEN YEARS OF NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC BRASIL

Austrian-born Brazilian literary and cultural critic Roberto Schwarz examined the existential circumstances of being the subordinate and peripheral subject of the asymmetrical relations of power in operation between the United States and Latin America: We Brazilians and other Latin Americans constantly experience the artificial, inauthentic and imitative nature of our cultural life. An essential element in our critical thought since independence, it has been variously interpreted from romantic, naturalist, modernist, right-wing, left-wing, cosmopolitan and nationalist points of view, so we may suppose that the problem is enduring and deeply rooted. Before attempting another explanation, let us assume that this malaise is a fact. Its everyday manifestations range from the inoffensive to the horrifying. Examples of inappropriateness include Father Christmas sporting an Eskimo outfit in a tropical climate and, for traditionalists, the electric guitar in the land of samba. (1992:1) Schwarz identified a perpetual problem faced by Brazilians, who have repeatedly appropriated intellectual paradigms, cultural forms, and fashionable trends from the United States and Europe, regardless of their relevance to local circumstances

118

FASHIONING BRAZIL

and national needs. This tendency to import foreign ideologies and institutions has ultimately defined Brazil in terms of fragmentation and lack of fulfillment, reflected in the development and current state of Brazilian culture. These are the key themes of Schwarz’s more pessimistic view, certainly in comparison with the positive stances of the three scholars examined in the first part of this book, of Latin American dependency upon derivative intellectual thought and cultural forms from European and North American capitalist systems. Schwarz criticized the fact that ideas from the so-called center have arrived in Brazil in quick succession, leaving little time for them to be refashioned and reinterpreted for a domestic audience, before the next innovation arrives. He understood this pacing to be a dynamic of power that has deprived Brazil of the chance to create forms of self-understanding related to its own reality and history; rather, ideas projected from the center have arrived on the so-called periphery and demanded an imposed receptivity from a Brazilian audience. Schwarz traced the historical and cultural complexities of these inadequacies to the period after it attained independence in 1822, when Brazil remained a slaveholding society but employed the dominant liberal ideologies of freedom and modern individuality that were projected from Europe (1992: 14). The adoption of modern democratic ideals of autonomy and personal agency, developed in response to an alien sociocultural set of circumstances, could neither be implemented authentically in Brazil, a country whose economic infrastructure was dependent upon slavery, nor be refused. The sartorial example of a furtrimmed Father Christmas suit worn in tropical Brazil, amid locals dressed in summer clothes and sandals, is only a more recent and trivial example of the same phenomenon. In 2001 Francine Masiello provided a productive metaphor—and one which was appropriate given the increased global exportation since the early 1990s, facilitated by economic liberalization, of surplus, secondhand clothing from the Northern hemisphere to Latin America, Africa, and Asia (Milgram 2006: 193)— to reassess the problematic development of ideas in Brazilian history that is manifested in Schwarz’s “misplaced ideas”: Despite the fact that Latin American intellectuals insist on the rule of the copy in relation to a European “original,” the fit is always inadequate; like a set of borrowed clothing, the original is often several sizes too large. (Masiello 2001: 60) Masiello pessimistically overruled the subversive and positive qualities of the “copy” that have been celebrated in much Latin American academic discourse to date. Instead, she conflated misplaced ideas with inappropriate and illfitting, cast-off clothing, ignoring its potential to be transformed or customized

MISPLACED IDEAS

119

on arrival in Latin America. In agreement with Schwarz, Masiello rejected the postmodern notion that the copy might constitute a positive means of creative representation, which held the potential to undermine and uproot the supposed dominance of the European or North American original. From the perspective offered by Schwarz and Masiello, the importation of foreign thought and cultural products as misplaced ideas, or a set of ill-fitting borrowed clothing, is central to understanding the cultural, social, political, economic, and sartorial history of Brazil. On first assessment, the arrival in Brazil in May 2000 of National Geographic Brasil might be misunderstood as a striking contemporary example of misplaced ideas, a demonstration of the process of cultural globalization by which a popular magazine established and developed within the United States has been made appealing and accessible to new audiences in so-called peripheral countries such as Brazil. Unlike Andrade, Stam, and Santiago, Schwarz outlined the painful existential conditions that a diffusionist conception of modernity, as a onedirectional flow that travels from the center to the periphery, or in the instance of National Geographic, from Washington, DC, to São Paulo, has created for Brazilians. This pessimistic stance ignored the fact that no culture is static, since ideas are always departing from one context, and being appropriated and applied differently, often in alternative and unpredictable directions, on their arrival in a new one. A closer look at National Geographic Brasil reveals that the magazine’s wide-ranging and sophisticated production of local material has often complemented, and sometimes even challenged, ideas about Brazil produced by National Geographic. A statement made by Matthew Shirts, the then editor-in-chief of National Geographic Brasil (May 2000–May 2013), a US-born journalist who has lived and worked in Brazil for over thirty-five years, enables the development of the magazine to be understood not merely as a process of growing into a borrowed set of clothes cast aside by National Geographic, but as a potential means of fashioning a new, distinctively Brazilian ensemble. Shirts articulated the negotiations and articulations that took place with National Geographic during the new magazine’s first thirteen years of publication: Our relationship changed dramatically between 1999, when I was first “trained” by NGM-USA [National Geographic] and 2013, when I left the position of Editor-in-chief of NGM-B [National Geographic Brasil]. In the beginning they tried to have as much control as possible of the editorial process. It was like night and day. By 2005 or so we were friends working together as a team. They changed dramatically, loosening up, but by then we had absorbed their methods and become good at doing what National Geographic does (and on a Brazilian budget). (2014; my italics)

120

FASHIONING BRAZIL

As Shirts outlined, prior to 2005 local material produced independently by National Geographic Brasil was rigorously checked before publication by Amy Kolczak, head of International Material at National Geographic, in Washington, DC. His description of this relationship as “like night and day” can be understood as a metaphor for the contact zone, in which the opposite poles of the United States and Brazil are posited against one another, and battle it out in a dynamic characterized by asymmetrical relations of power. However, after five years of publication, this relationship progressed to become more collaborative, “friends working together as a team.” Shirts described the process by which National Geographic Brasil established itself during its first decade of publication as one in which National Geographic’s methods were absorbed and realized, through a variety of creative appropriations, to the extent that the Brazilian edition became “good at doing what National Geographic does.” National Geographic Brasil’s lack of financial advantages, Shirts implied, had forced the editorial team to be creative and to improvise—animating local modes of representation, while complicating one-dimensional understandings of the magazine as heavily indebted to National Geographic. Shirts explained how National Geographic Brasil selectively adopted aspects of National Geographic that were of most interest to Brazilian viewers, transforming the magazine to meet local requirements: The next step was the production of editorial material of our own: journalism in the style of NGM. . . . It’s always necessary to adapt a magazine to local taste. But this was harder for us than it was for the Americans. Firstly, they had taken a very universal theme to interpret geography as “the world and all there is in it” [sic]. Secondly, because they are able to invest tens of thousands, even a hundred thousand dollars into the production of a single article. . . . We decided we needed to bring NGB closer to its Brazilian readers, essentially provide the national to the “national geographic.” Some of the reports from the American edition are of more interest to some readers, less interesting to other readers. We wanted to connect to the Brazilian reader. (2014; my italics) His statement contained an acceptance that there are different worldviews. It corresponded with Appadurai’s assertion that the world is not a singularly dominated and homogenous structure controlled by the United States, but an intertwined and interactive global system fabricated from “multiple worlds,” each of which is “constituted by historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe” (1996: 33). Whereas National Geographic was concerned with encapsulating “The World and All That Is In It”—to quote Alexander Graham Bell’s oft-repeated catchphrase—National Geographic Brasil

MISPLACED IDEAS

121

sought to document what lay within, rather than beyond, national borders (Pauly 1979: 523). This was openly acknowledged by National Geographic Brasil editor (May 2000–) Ronaldo Ribeiro, who articulated the magazine’s ethos as: “We are trying to keep the diversity of subjects that feature in NG American, by finding that diversity in Brazilian subjects that feature in NG Brasil” (2014). This chapter uses the analysis developed in the previous three chapters to build upon Schwarz’s useful metaphor, which can be used to encapsulate more adequately the shifting perceptions and increased significance of globalization in the post–Cold War era, as it has unfolded across world-time and world-space, establishing new hierarchies and inequalities.

Misplaced and Displaced My analysis refashions Schwarz’s argument in a more positive light, to demonstrate how foreign cultural ideas have been selectively refashioned by National Geographic Brasil in a transformative process that is sensitive to the particularities and peculiarities of Brazilian culture. This enables the intricacies and nuances of the processes of cultural exchange that have existed between the United States and Brazil, and Brazil and different cultures that rest within its borders, to be unpacked and analyzed in more depth. It is useful here to draw upon Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz’s understanding that foreign cultural ideas are not automatically and inevitably misplaced on arrival in Latin America, but must serve some purpose if they can circulate within a given environment, however different (1995: 102–3). Ortiz engaged with the issue of the peripheral nature of Brazilian culture by drawing attention to the particular and complex processes of cultural transference by which subordinated groups select and invent from materials imposed upon them by a dominant culture. Rather than revert to binary and essentialist views of “centers” and “peripheries,” Ortiz coined the neologism “transculturation” to refer to the highly varied cultural phenomena that he had witnessed in many aspects of Latin American life—economic, institutional, artistic, ethical, and religious—which had emerged as a result of intricate cross-cultural transmutations throughout the history of Latin America (102–3). He selected “transculturation” to replace such terms as “acculturation” and “deculturation,” which replicated the logic of colonialism by explaining cultural contact solely from the perspective of a North American and Western European center. He defined it as that which better expresses the different phases of the transition from one culture to another because this does not consist merely in acquiring another culture. . . . But the process also necessarily involves the loss or uprooting of a previous

122

FASHIONING BRAZIL

culture. . . . In addition it carries the idea of the consequent creation of new cultural phenomena. (102–3) Ortiz used the term to denominate the transformative processes undergone by a society in the acquisition of foreign cultural material. This entailed both the diminishing of a society’s native culture due to the imposition of foreign material, and the synthesis of the indigenous and the foreign to create a new, original cultural product. Reformulated through the lens of Ortiz, foreign cultural products have the potential to be defined not solely in terms of loss, as misplaced ideas, but also in terms of movement and relocation, as displaced ideas, ripe with the potential to supersede or override those ideas that existed previously. My use of the term displaced ideas revises Schwarz’s original concept and redefines foreign ideas in terms of their movement throughout time and space, in which they are not stable and fixed homogenous entities, but historically changeable and relative at any given moment. Before addressing the first snapshot this chapter examines, it is useful to outline who encountered National Geographic Brasil. Whereas National Geographic had a very broad readership, National Geographic Brasil had a far narrower circulation. While it is difficult to ascertain exact figures, since readers may have shared the magazine with family and friends, the average reader was presumed to be male, aged between twenty-four and thirty-four, and to live in the southeast, the economic heartland of the country that encompasses Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (Ribeiro 2014). They were classified as social class B, usually comprised of individuals who have completed higher education and are professionally qualified. The implicit norm of this audience is that they were European-descended and predominantly white-skinned. This was reinforced by the advertisements that featured within the magazine. The July 2000 edition, for example, overtly promoted the importation of Western European and North American lifestyles and goods to Brazil, through products such as European cars, Timberland boots, and Nescafé coffee. These advertisements tended to feature white-skinned male Brazilians, as opposed to those of predominantly indigenous or African descent. They provide a tangible reminder that, just as there was a considerable geographical distance between the National Geographic viewer and Brazilian subjects represented in the magazine, so there was also often a significant gulf between the National Geographic Brasil viewer and represented Brazilian subjects.

The Representation of Brazil in National Geographic Brasil Over a Decade From May 2000 to April 2010, National Geographic Brasil published 112 articles on Brazil, initiated and executed by a small team in São Paulo with

MISPLACED IDEAS

123

the assistance of a select number of contracted freelance journalists, editors, designers, photographers, and writers. Of the 112 articles, seven were shortened and paraphrased versions of material that had originally appeared in National Geographic during its first hundred years of publication, synthesized and represented in different configurations and sizes on the National Geographic Brasil page. Eight were direct translations of material that focused on Brazil and was published simultaneously in National Geographic. This chapter predominantly focuses on the ninety-seven articles produced independently by National Geographic Brasil, which commenced in December 2000 and continued (almost) every month until May 2010, when the magazine celebrated its tenth birthday. Viewed in their entirety, these articles emphasized the vast size of Brazil and its heterogeneous social, racial, and ethnic composition, spanning a broad range of spaces and places throughout the country. This chapter extends Schwarz’s concept of misplaced ideas to examine the intricacies of global cultural exchange, between both the United States and Brazil, and between Brazil and itself, which were visible in the representation of Brazilian dress in National Geographic Brasil from May 2000 to April 2010. It examines three snapshots organized over a period of seven years, using them to draw points of comparison and distinction with National Geographic. The first snapshot was written by Brazilian journalist Marina Moraes and published in National Geographic Brasil in July 2000. It re-presented an article examined in the first snapshot of this book, which was written and photographed by Albert W. Stevens and published in National Geographic in April 1926. My analysis considers the new interpretative potential provided by its discursive reframing seventysix years later. The second snapshot concerned Angolan immigrants living in Rio de Janeiro and was written and photographed by Brazilian photojournalist Ricardo Beliel and published in National Geographic Brasil in February 2003. The third snapshot examined Japanese immigrants living in São Paulo and was written and photographed by Brazilian portrait photographer Marcio Scavone and published in June 2008. This chapter uses displaced ideas as a critical lens through which to examine how cultural forms produced by National Geographic have been reframed and recontextualized in National Geographic Brasil since it was established in May 2000. I examine National Geographic Brasil’s use of dress to fashion an idea of Brazil, questioning to what extent the magazine has submissively repeated ideas about the country that were originally disseminated by National Geographic, and to what extent it has adapted these constructions to address local concerns. I am concerned, first and foremost, with how Brazilian subjects have been fashioned by National Geographic Brasil, in addition to how they have can be seen to have self-fashioned. In doing so, my analysis questions to what extent National Geographic Brasil has mobilized a dynamic reconfiguration of power relations between the United States and Brazil, and Brazil and itself.

124

FASHIONING BRAZIL

Snapshot 8: The Mayongong Man’s Rawhide Bag and Cotton Loincloth, July 2000 The first snapshot this chapter discusses was published in National Geographic Brasil in July 2000, within an eight-page article produced by Marina Moraes, entitled “Major Reports: the earth is green. Giant ants, lurking jaguars, piranhas, rapids, mosquitoes, malaria. The findings and scares of an expedition by hydroplane to the Amazon in 1924.” The article recontextualized eleven black-andwhite photographs, carefully selected from the eight-six originals that had been taken by Albert W. Stevens and published in the sixty-eight-page initial version of the article, which appeared in National Geographic in April 1926. I examined this article to contextualize the first snapshot analyzed in chapter two of this book. An image that was initially published in National Geographic (Figure 5.0), but subsequently reused seventy-four years later by National Geographic Brasil, enables Schwarz’s pessimistic view of the relation between the copy and the original to be reconceptualized as displaced rather than misplaced ideas.

Figure 5.0 Snapshot 8. Photograph by Albert W. Stevens, a man of the Mayongong indigenous group, Brazil, published in National Geographic in April 1926 and in National Geographic Brasil in July 2000.

MISPLACED IDEAS

125

Printed in National Geographic in April 1926, the image was originally published on the right-hand side of a single-page spread. It documented a male member of the Mayongong population, who are indigenous to the state of Roraima in Northern Brazil, close to the Venezuelan border (Olson 1991: 236). The background is a grey and white blur that focuses the viewers’ attention on the man’s clothed body, which is placed as an object of curiosity. The subject has bobbed dark hair and wears a cotton genital covering arranged under the crotch and around the hips in the shape of a T. He carries a leather bag across his shoulder, and the tops of his arms are tied tightly with scraps of colored material. Positioned just off-center in the frame, and gazing directly to his right, engrossed in something or someone beyond the photographic frame, his arms are crossed defensively against his bare chest. This self-possessed gesture might be read as one of subtle subversion to the ethnographic gaze that surveys him. This image had to be turned clockwise by the viewer to be perceived in its correct portrait dimension. This embodied action brought the photograph into uninterrupted dialogue with an image of a woman, printed in the same portrait dimensions on the left-hand side of the page, and a full-page landscape photograph of a woman and child sleeping in a hammock that was published on the opposite page. It rendered the image an active as opposed to passive object, which gained meaning specifically when navigated by a physical movement of the viewer’s hands, who had to simultaneously pull the textured, matte pages of the magazine apart at the seams to view the man in his entirety, and to read the accompanying caption. The caption to the image read: “YOUNG MEDICINE MAN OF THE MAYONGONG TRIBE: His rawhide bag contains pebbles, roots and a miscellaneous collection of rubbish with which he works his healing magic upon the credulous” (398; my italics). The contradictory caption was both a pervasive reinforcement of the subject’s titillating objectification for the benefit of the distanced National Geographic viewer, which refused to understand the practices and lived experiences of the Mayongong population within the boundaries of Western civilization, and a subversive illumination of the symbolic meaning of the Portuguese word gambiarra. This term carries a strong cultural and conceptual weight in Brazil, and was introduced in the analysis of Snapshot 1. To recapitulate, while gambiarra has no English translation, as Ricardo Rosas has succinctly articulated, it is “akin to the English term makeshift, referring to any improvisation of an expedient substitute when other means fail or are not available. In other words, ‘making do’” (2008: 343–44). Within the context of National Geographic, gambiarra was exemplified by the subject’s makeshift adaptation and improvised recycling of “a miscellaneous collection of rubbish” to assemble a set of tools from whatever is at hand, which ultimately served a different purpose through their modification, enabling him to work “his healing magic upon the credulous” (398). The caption both represented the subject as farcical and deconstructed

126

FASHIONING BRAZIL

his reductive objectification by highlighting the sustainability and inventiveness of his creative and practical endeavor. It is in this respect that gambiarra can be likened to Lévi-Strauss’s concept of “bricolage,” wherein the “bricoleur” performs his tasks with fragmentary, ready-made materials and tools that are close at hand and, despite the absence of a preconceived plan, through instrumental assemblage exceeds the boundaries imposed upon him, in this example, by National Geographic’s ethnographic gaze (Lévi-Strauss 2011).

Distance and Intimacy The redemptive quality inherent in the reframing of this image seventy-four years later by National Geographic Brasil in July 2000 must be understood in itself as an act of bricolage, which built upon, but also camouflaged, the characteristics of assemblage evident within the confines of the image.1 Brazil’s historical past, previously buried in National Geographic’s photographic archive and National Geographic viewers’ personal magazine collections, was reinscribed in the contemporary Brazilian present, where it was retrospectively invested with prospective new meanings. The image was enlarged, cropped along its left-hand side, and reframed to place the subject in the center of the image, surrounded by a thin black border and positioned in the center of the white magazine page. This representation focused the attention of the viewer on the subject, and encouraged him or her to experience the image meditatively within the conventions of portraiture, which in capturing a likeness probes the inner essence of an individual, as opposed to ethnography. The softly layered textures and varying tones of light and dark within the image further encouraged the viewer to take into consideration the subject’s point of view, his expressions, feelings, sensations, and gestures being given a heightened importance that worked to strike an emotional chord. The color tone of the image was adjusted to give it a sepia tint, which consciously invested romanticizing overtones and gave the subject an air of wisdom. This editorial decision enhanced the archival qualities of the image as a reflection of a time that had passed; it also reiterated, to the astute viewer, that this was a colonial document discursively reframed within the postcolonial present. There is an overriding sense that National Geographic Brasil sought to reclaim National Geographic’s distanced, ethnographic gaze and replace it with a more intimate Brazilian gaze, which catalyzed remembrance by reclaiming Brazilian history on its own terms and memorializing the subject as an idealized Noble Savage. However, as the photograph was placed on the page in portrait dimensions, the National Geographic Brasil viewer did not need to turn the magazine page clockwise, but could straightforwardly observe the image as it was. The image

MISPLACED IDEAS

127

as re-presented in the glossy pages of National Geographic Brasil therefore demanded a less bodily engaged mode of viewing than it had done in National Geographic and, potentially, encouraged a more distanced relation to the subject. Distance was reinforced by the caption that accompanied this image in National Geographic Brasil which, rather than emphasizing and building upon the subject’s creative demonstration of gambiarra, blindly questioned: “Why does he tie his arms so tight? Many questions remain unanswered. Researchers described the Indians as surprisingly clean, and carefree in differentiating men and women in dress or haircut” (Moraes 2000: 157). The caption scrutinized the subject with a comparable curiosity to that of National Geographic’s visual ethnographic gaze and highlighted the Brazilian viewer’s estrangement from the subject’s lived experience. Dress here became the focus of difference, which smoothed over the subtleties that distinguished male and female dress practices among the Mayongong. The caption camouflaged the complexities of Mayongong society and, rather than attempting to provide a richer understanding of their material culture using contemporary ethnographic research, emphasized instead what was still not known about them. In this respect, the textual accompaniment to the image corresponded with contemporary government policy, implemented in 1997 by Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso (January 1, 1995–January 1, 2003), which ignored indigenous concerns and enabled the private interests of land developers, miners and loggers to stake a claim to over 50 percent of all indigenous land in Brazil, frequently with destructive consequences for the ecology and livelihood of indigenous peoples (Kesselman 2004: 247). While National Geographic Brasil reframed this image in ostensibly more intimate visual terms than National Geographic, its caption ignored a crucial aspect of the interpretation of the man’s demonstration of gambiarra, which is likely to have been recognizable to the Brazilian viewer. In doing so, it was exemplary of displaced as opposed to misplaced ideas, since it intentionally, as opposed to inevitably, as Schwarz may have pessimistically concluded, relinquished the image’s ostensibly distanced visual ethnographic significations, but used text to replace them. This action established a new asymmetrical dynamic of power, no longer between the United States and Brazil, but between Brazil and itself, which worked to camouflage the subject’s performance of gambiarra, and accentuate instead the differences between the “civilized” Brazilian viewer, and the good-natured but purportedly “uncivilized” indigenous subject. The reframed photograph became a sentimentalized and prosaic image of the Noble Savage, which reclaimed the indigenous subject in more familiar and sentimental terms than National Geographic, but also refashioned him textually as a passive as opposed to active construct, whose sartorial practices remained an insignificant mystery to most urban male Brazilians.

128

FASHIONING BRAZIL

Snapshot 9: Lourenço Loy’s Red-andWhite Bandana and Gold Medallion, February 2003 The second snapshot (Figure 5.1) this chapter discusses was published in National Geographic Brasil in February 2003, within an article entitled “Little Africa: Living in a community in Rio de Janeiro, people from Angola recreate the environment where samba and carnival were born.” Unlike the first snapshot examined, rather than re-present material that had originally been published in National Geographic, it was produced independently by National Geographic Brasil, although the article was still checked prior to publication by National Geographic. The twenty-page article was produced by Ricardo Beliel and documented Angolan immigrants living in an area of Rio de Janeiro identified as “Little Africa.” This was due to the area’s high concentration of Afro-Brazilians,

Figure 5.1 Snapshot 9. Photograph by Ricardo Beliel, rapper Lourenço Loy in Rio de Janeiro, published in National Geographic Brasil in February 2003. Courtesy of Ricardo Beliel.

MISPLACED IDEAS

129

who in the late nineteenth century had begun to inhabit the zone in Downtown Rio de Janeiro between the Port and Praça Onze (Carvalho 2013).2 Beliel fabricated a palimpsestic connection between Little Africa’s pan-African past, and its diverse Angolan present, and sought to examine how new cultural practices witnessed in the area were enriching and reinscribing more established Afro-Brazilian cultural expressions. He explained his intentions for the article: In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century the area between the docks and the neighborhoods of Health, Santo Cristo, Gamboa, and New Town Plaza XI was inhabited by slaves and descendants of slaves and an African culture developed there with samba, capoeira, and candomblé. At that time the area was known as Little Africa. Many African immigrants living in this area today do not even know the historical coincidence that they are sharing the same geographic space that other Africans had inhabited a century past. I made the decision to give a direct approach, and make a cultural, historical, social and political comparison between nineteenth century Africa and the Angolans living there in the present. (2014) Beliel was clearly sensitive to the depth and complexities of lived experiences in Angola, which received independence from Portuguese colonial rule in 1975, over 150 years after Brazilian independence in 1822, but descended into a turbulent Civil War that continued, interspersed with fragmented periods of peace, until 2002 (Arena 2011). As he explained: In the case of Angola I have known the country a long time. I went there the first time covering the war in 1996 and then returned, often reporting on cultural and social issues. In Rio, at the time I wrote this material for National Geographic Brasil, I knew very well several Angolan immigrants or students living in Brazil. When I thought about doing this job it was because I had a lot of information and access to the environment of this community. (2014)

African Past and Angolan Present Despite Beliel’s awareness of the problems that had been encouraging Angolan refugees to emigrate to Brazil since 1975, a problematic interweaving of past and present permeated his article, through repeated allusions to a collective African past allegedly inscribed in the activities of present-day Angolans. He observed that Angolans “have in their blood the heritage of a continent which they know only to be on the other side of the ocean” (2003: 116). Such ambiguous comments contributed to an imaginary idea of a singular and culturally monolithic entity— Africa—to which Angolans are intimately connected by virtue of having been

130

FASHIONING BRAZIL

born in the same landmass. Beliel noted that “preserving their culture is a law among immigrants” who “recreate the environment where samba and carnival were born” (2003: 114). Similar observations woven into the fabric of the article placed Angolan subjects within a fixed and traditional past, concerned only with safeguarding stereotypical Afro-Brazilian cultural expressions, and disregarded their ability to exercise choice and discretion in incorporating new ideas from contemporary global culture. Nevertheless, interlaced within this dominant textual narrative, was a revealing subtext (manifest in the text and imagery), which focused on young male Angolans, who renegotiated global hip-hop culture through clothing, style, body language, and gesture. This subnarrative moved beyond the potentially objectifying and mystifying textual descriptions that conflated Angola with the African continent in its entirety and blurred distinctions between the colonial past and postcolonial present. Beliel used hip-hop to highlight the multidirectional flows of globalization that have enabled young Angolan rappers to self-fashion their diasporic identities in-between the United States, Brazil, and Angola. He outlined the sartorial subtleties of Angolan identification with hip-hop in Brazil, which has adapted ubiquitous global clothing (sneakers) to local tastes (in terms of color): It is not hard to realise the Angolan presence among the crowd in Lapa neighbourhood. Style makes the difference. Ignoring all economic issues, the immigrants wear a combination of foreign labels with an African touch. For them to be well “labeled,” as they call it, they will spend 500RS in shining sneakers in Angolan colours—red and black. (2003: 122) Beliel carefully explained not only the oppression that Angolans had encountered in Angola, but also the marginalization and subordination they have been subject to since their arrival in Brazil, where the history of colonial repression reverberated in contemporary Afro-Brazilian experiences. He quoted an Angolan rapper named Big Mani, who left Angola to escape enforced military conscription, reintroduced by the Angolan government in 1993: “Here there’s a lot of prejudice toward Africans. They still think we are slaves and I’ve been asked if I came to Brazil while riding a horse” (2003: 123). This context enabled Angolan immigrants’ engagements with hip-hop to be seen—not as derivative and trivial in relation to US hip-hop—but as a means of sartorial and political self-expression against a repressive Angolan government and racially intolerant Brazilian society. Rather than the appropriation of hip-hop in Brazil being exemplary of misplaced ideas, its redefinition by young Angolan men, who used it to address contemporary diasporic struggles, was a tangible demonstration of displaced ideas. One snapshot stood out for its multilayered meanings, and the male subject’s ability to demonstrate agency by fashioning his global hip-hop identity through

MISPLACED IDEAS

131

dress and gesture. It was a portrait of an athletic and muscular young black rapper named Lourenço Loy who is captured posing. He is placed on the right-hand side of a double-page view of the magazine, opposite a half-page block of text that rests above a candid half-page photograph of two older Angolan leaders, Muada Feliz and Maitre Boa, who lead a ceremony in a Kibanguista Church in Rio de Janeiro, native to the Bakongo community. There is an immediate visual distinction between the bright contrasts and colorful juxtapositions of red, yellow and green that frame Lourenço Loy outside in the photograph on the right, and the more somber pale yellows and white that frame the two figures inside on the left. This distinction is reinforced through the clothing choices of the represented subjects; unlike the photograph on the left, dress dominates the image of Lourenço Loy, who appears relaxed with the prospect of being seen.

Local and Global Hip-Hop Cultures The caption directed the viewer’s attention toward dress as the central point of reference for an interpretation of the image: “The clothing of Lourenço Loy, a rapper, shows the vanity of Angolan youth” (Beliel 2003: 117). While vanity is a derogatory choice of word, suggesting the subject has a narcissistic preoccupation with his own mirror image, it also pointed out that it is a conscious decision of the subject to dress like this, the subject having carefully chosen the terms on which he presents himself to the photographer’s gaze. In highlighting that this “vanity” is prevalent among Angolan youth, the caption also articulated an opposition to the older men on the left-hand side of the double-page view, who may have been associated with more conventional Angolan culture and are captured seemingly unaware of their own actions. Through his adoption of youth fashions and confident self-presentation, Lourenço Loy’s identity is foregrounded as a process of fluid becoming. He wears oversized baggy grey trousers, a red-and-white printed bandana that pushes back his braided hair, a white Nike sweatband on his right wrist, shiny, tinted sunglasses, silver rings, a diamante stud in his right ear, a large watch, and a heavy gold chain. The chain occupies the center of the frame and bears a pendant with the emblem of the American record company “Death Row Records.” “Death Row Records” was founded in 1991 and famous for signing numerous West Coast hip-hop artists including African-American rapper Tupac Shakur, who wore a solid gold, diamond-encrusted version (Ro 1998). Lourenço Loy’s clothing clearly shows that he is influenced by the male bravado of US hip-hop style, not least through the popular gestures that he emulates. Crouched down low, the creases and folds of his baggy denim jeans are emphasized. His body language is confident, and he glances askance, looking up and outside of the frame with a sense of self-possession. He wears no shirt, and the upper parts of his arms

132

FASHIONING BRAZIL

are highlighted to exaggerate his muscular physique. His carefully positioned hand gestures, with the wrists bent slightly forward, render the hands larger and more expressive to the camera, which is accentuated by the low camera angle. Richard J. Powell has questioned how black subjects “achieve parity with a commandeering photographer” (2008: 102). Conspicuous poses and hand gestures, he has argued, in addition to other authoritative actions, all indicate an awareness of “self-adornment, self-composure, and self-imagining [which] upsets the representational paradigm and creates something pictorially exceptional” (2008: xv). There is an overriding sense within this snapshot that the subject is an exhibitor of his own actions, using dress and body language to perform his black subjectivity within a Caucasian-dominated worldview. While Lourenço Loy’s dress and body language identify him with AfricanAmerican popular culture, visual and textual cues within the image reference local Brazilian and Angolan cultural markers, which suggest his style is not simply an inferior and misplaced imitation of African-American hip-hop. Rather than being placed in a homogenous and unidentifiable environment, Lourenço Loy is photographed sitting on stone steps that lead up to the bright exterior façade of a colonial Portuguese house painted in yellow, green, black, and red. The house is decorated in blocks of pan-African colors that also make up the colors of the Angolan national flag and its Brazilian counterpart. These contextual details firmly situate Lourenço Loy within a Brazilian and Angolan—as opposed to US-centric—context, mimicking the ways that hip-hop culture is adapted to address local concerns. As Carol M. Motley and Geraldine Rosa Henderson have pointed out, while many “global hip-hop sub segments take cues from African-American hip-hop, they also imbue it with an inventiveness and creativity so that it becomes uniquely theirs, and represents their pains, struggles and political issues” (2008: 246).3

Empathy and Otherness Nevertheless, the layout of this brightly colored image on the double-page magazine view complicated the political messages that were encoded within the subject’s performance of hip-hop through dress and gesture. It risked placing the subject as a hyperbolic expression of black Otherness, advertised for aesthetic appropriation by a distanced, white-skinned National Geographic Brasil viewer. Presented straightforwardly on the page, as though on a stage or screen, Loy is the male protagonist of a drama being narrated. Viewers watch him perform his starring role, where he is given space for self-presentation and self-expression. The extreme close-up and dominant position of Lourenço Loy on the magazine page place him too close for the viewer not to experience an intimate engagement with him, yet the terms of that involvement are contradictory and ambiguous.

MISPLACED IDEAS

133

In her discussion of film—which is useful when analyzing photography and its sequential layout in magazines—Jennifer M. Barker has written of how “this sense of fleshy, muscular, visceral contact seriously undermines the opposition between the viewer and the film, inviting us to think of them as intimately related but not identical, caught up in a relationship of intersubjectivity and coconstitution, rather than as subject and object posited on opposite sides of the screen” (2009: 12–13). In this photographic example, however, the subject looks beyond the photograph frame, refusing to engage with his audience, which frustrates a physical or emotional intersubjectivity between viewer and subject. There is an array of textures centered on dress and the body within the image, from rough denim jeans, smooth skin, gleaming plastic sunglasses, soft cotton bandana, to shiny gold medallion, which emphasize surface over depth. The image’s profoundly tactile nature ostensibly brings the viewer closer to the subject, encouraging, as Barker has articulated, “a caressing touch rather than a penetrating gaze” (2009: 12). Yet the bright blocks of saturated color and the subject’s black skin add a rhythmic and emotional dimension that encourages a loud, synesthetic response, and threatens to override the viewer’s deeper understanding of the sociopolitical purpose of hip-hop for Angolan immigrants living in Rio de Janeiro (2009: 24). It is in this vein that the photograph is comparable to images of non-Western subjects reframed in National Geographic Fashion, examined in the previous chapter, which demonstrated a tendency to focus on their exotic spectacle as opposed to acknowledging the individual processes of self-fashioning taking place. Kobena Mercer has employed the term “hyperblackness” to describe the paradoxical condition of black cultural expressions such as hip-hop which, despite being a highly visual form of global branding marked by rhetorical excess and exaggeration, often divorces black culture from its political aspirations, particularly when viewed by white-skinned viewers/consumers (2005: 160). Hyperblackness was apparent, not solely in this image, but in nearly all of those reproduced within the article, each of which had a lyrical quality and rhythmic dimension, fabricated by the bright colors and tactile textures that framed the black male (and female) subjects. While this dialectic between figure, form, and colorful environment could be read as a celebration of blackness, the referential capacities of the images were drastically undermined when viewed in comparison to the advertisements reproduced elsewhere within the magazine, which presented only white Brazilians in aspirational scenarios. Beliel has explained the photographic approach he adopted for this article: Many of the photos are spontaneous situations that naturally happened, I’ve never created an artificial situation to photograph, what I do is journalism, but I can ask the person being photographed to remain in a place or a direction, in order to look to the value of the final image . . . A picture of someone always has the cooperation of the person being photographed. It is impossible to

134

FASHIONING BRAZIL

remain indifferent and be photographed. Everyone is somehow expressed through being photographed. (2014) His initial description of the process by which he documented his subjects rested firmly within the confines of reportage; it connoted spontaneity, neutrality on the part of the photographer, truthfulness, and objectivity. In apparent opposition, however, Beliel then acknowledged that he might direct the subject “to remain in a place or direction.” He also pointed out that every photograph is collaborative to some extent, since the subject is always responsive to the photographer’s gaze, and thereby has a degree of agency in self-presentation before his camera. Beliel’s description of his working methods highlighted a similar contradiction to Stanmeyer, who was quoted in the previous chapter. Stanmeyer’s photographic practice oscillated between transparently objective, evident in his assertion that “this is reportage photography. It is naturally happening—no poses or styling done,” and openly fictitious, apparent in his acknowledgment that capturing a photograph was “like working a pottery wheel, constantly molding the clay until the narrative takes shape and form” (2014). Both Beliel and Stanmeyer defined their photojournalistic approaches in opposition to—or possibly even beyond— simplistic oppositions between fact and fiction. Their comments bear witness to the instability of reportage photography, and suggest a contemporary shift toward acknowledging its decidedly subjective status, even as its objectivity is simultaneously reasserted. T. J. Demos has pointed out that it has become “common, even fashionable, to announce subjective biases, or to argue for the impossibility of documentary representation tout court, due to its historically discredited status” (2013: 36). Demos articulated a desire to suspend disbelief, to assert that reportage is objective, even as this proclamation is forcibly rejected by the widespread and cross-cultural inclination to highlight the creative fabrication of an image not only by the artistic mastery of the photographer (particularly in the case of Stanmeyer, who adopts a more authoritarian approach), but also often in collaboration with his subjects (in the more cooperative example of Beliel). Rather like Beliel’s description of his working methods, the second snapshot this chapter examined was indeterminate. Angolan hip-hop fashions worn in Brazil were a displaced reinterpretation of United States mainstream hip-hop culture, adapted and localized to highlight the poverty and racial inequality experienced by Angolans living on the social margins of Rio de Janeiro. Yet their representation by National Geographic Brasil presented a carnivalesque spectacle of black Otherness, potentially advertised for aesthetic appropriation by a distanced white viewer. It hinted that the visual and tactile gaze of the National Geographic Brasil viewer in relation to the Angolan subject was imbued with uneven relations of power. Whereas this dynamic had previously been between National Geographic and Brazilian subjects, power had been mobilized and exchanged, and was now in operation between National Geographic Brasil

MISPLACED IDEAS

135

and Angolans living in Brazil. This snapshot encapsulated displaced ideas to the extent that it highlighted the additional hierarchies prevalent within the Portuguese colonies, and contributed to an overriding impression that a new contact zone had emerged, no longer between the United States and Brazil, but between Brazil and Angolan immigrants living within its borders.

Snapshot 10: The Japanese-Brazilian Women’s Cotton Yucata and Wooden Geta, June 2008 The third snapshot (Figure 5.2) this chapter examines was published in National Geographic Brasil in June 2008, within an article by Marcio Scavone that was entitled “Near East: In Liberdade in São Paulo, the spirit of 100 years of Japanese immigration to Brazil resides.” Like Beliel’s article, it examined an area of São Paulo named “Liberdade” (“Freedom”) in 1920, which has been home to the largest Japanese expatriate community in the world since 1912. Scavone explained that the article was published “to celebrate 100 years of Japanese presence in Brazil,” since the first Japanese immigrants arrived in Santos, state of São Paulo, on the Kasato

Figure 5.2 Snapshot 10. Photograph by Marcio Scavone, “Miss Tanabata,” women in a beauty contest during the Tanabata Matsuri festival, 2007, Liberdade, São Paulo, published in National Geographic Brasil in June 2008. Courtesy of Marcio Scavone.

136

FASHIONING BRAZIL

Maru ship in June 1908 (2015). The reductive title, “Near East,” drew upon North American and Western European ideas of an exotic Orient. It placed Liberdade as a synecdoche for Japan, which was extendable, through the deliberate and nebulous use of the geographically indistinct term “the East,” to the Orient in its entirety, substituting a part for a whole inasmuch as Beliel’s article narrated a culturally distinct area of Rio de Janeiro as a synecdoche for Africa at large.

Japanese Past and Brazilian Present Scavone’s text had a far more meditative quality than Beliel’s. It lyrically interlaced past and present through affective descriptions, which recalled his captivating and subjective memories of Liberdade on first visiting the area in the early 1970s, accompanied by his father, for whom “the magic of the Japanese district had long ago captured his imagination as a writer” (2008: 45). Scavone re-presented Liberdade less as a geographically distinct zone than as an idealized realm for imagination, desire, and nostalgia, where both the Japanese expatriate and the Brazilian observer might hope to retrieve and reignite a memory of a past Japanese presence unavailable in the present. He described how the architecture and urban environment of Liberdade have “an amber colour that is loaded with nostalgia,” which in autumnal light made it appear “even more original, more real, and closer to its Eastern descent” (2008: 45). Such romanticized descriptions evoked an image of a faded old sepia-tinted photograph, rather like the visual trope used in National Geographic Brasil in the first snapshot this chapter examined, wherein time and space were interwoven and overlapped through the physical disintegration of the material object, which was made to symbolize a bygone era. Scavone described how in contemporary Liberdade “everything seems to blur, waiting for a mysterious order to return to what it once was” (2008: 45). Such nostalgic longings for a more “authentic” but past Liberdade of the 1960s and 1970s permeated his writing, a period he deemed to be of “strength and cultural autonomy,” but was irretrievably lost in the present, since the area “grew up and was swallowed by the metropolis . . . dissolved in the ethnic melting pot of neighboring areas” (2008: 45). These sensual descriptions within the text were reinforced by the accompanying photographs, which employed a shallow depth of field, a technique often used in portraiture, to render many of the buildings and subjects documented slightly blurred. While this technical decision evoked a nostalgic mood that connected to the whimsical text, it also established a boundary between the subject and the audience, rather like a diaphanous veil. This complicated the viewer’s direct entry into the setting and characters of the documented scene, frustrating an immediate identification with the represented Japanese-Brazilian subjects. Presented on a double-page spread, the last snapshot this chapter examines captured thirteen

MISPLACED IDEAS

137

women of Japanese-Brazilian descent in a warm, interior setting. Lined up in a row, they face the gaze of Scavone’s camera and that of the National Geographic Brasil viewer. The women are photographed stationary, subject to a level of scrutiny as they stand up straight, dressed in the yukata, an informal and more comfortable unlined version of the kimono, which is constructed from a lightweight, printed cotton fabric. The creases and folds of their clothing are captured in crisp detail by Scavone’s camera. Decorated with a boldly printed graphic pattern that stretches from dark blue around the bottom to pale purple at the top, the texture of the women’s yukata contrasts with the blur of polished wooden floor in the foreground of the image. A bright red obi, silk sash, is worn high up and tied tight behind the subjects’ waists. It is crisply photographed to highlight the delicately patterned polka dots imprinted upon the cloth. The women wear geta, Japanese footwear with a long cultural heritage, which is constructed from wood and a soft thonged piece of cloth or leather. When wearing geta, the foot sits lightly on the wooden base of the shoe, not pushed entirely into the fork of the thong, which requires a slight forward tilt from the wearer, particularly when walking. Even though the women are captured stationary, Scavone’s camera angle emphasizes this forward tilt created by the geta in action, so that the women appear ready to topple forward toward the viewer. The women’s different facial features counteract the homogeneity of their dress, which assumes a superficial veneer of anonymity associated with any form of uniform. Not all the subjects’ faces can be seen, because of the harsh cropping and full-page bleed of the photograph. That we cannot see all these individual faces discourages identification with the subjects on the part of the viewer, who surveys the women but is unable to get close to them, and instead remains captivated by the range of tactile textures available on the hazy surface of the image, which are prompted by the shallow depth of field and contrast between smooth wooden floor and crisp cotton clothing. Those faces that are captured present a mixture of expressions, from forced smiles to apparent indifference. None of the subjects look at the camera, nor at one another, except for the subject on the far left who gazes warily in the direction of the photographer, possibly enacting a covert form of resistance to her documentation. That all the women except for one clutch their hands across their bodies, and in front of their crotches, draws attention to the wide sleeves of their yukata but also accentuates their femininity; as Scavone later acknowledged, “for me this photograph is all about the expressions of the girls being transferred to their hands and feet” (2015).

Ceremonial Dress and Everyday Clothing The photograph was taken during a beauty contest held during the Tanabata Matsuri festival that takes place in Japan and São Paulo in the first weekend of

138

FASHIONING BRAZIL

July. The caption that accompanied the photograph, written along the bottom of the image in black text on a thin strip of white, acknowledged this and read: “MISS TANABATA CONTEST happens at the Association headquarters Miyagui Kenjinkai. In 2008 the 30th edition will be held. The candidates, who come from all over the state of São Paulo, are wearing the yukata, a lighter costume kimono, which is compatible with the climate of Brazil. Clothing is a good symbol of the Japanese Brazilian neighborhoods” (2008: 46–47). The ambivalent caption not only highlighted how a traditional mode of Japanese female dress has been reinvented and acclimatized for local wear in Brazil, but also used clothing as a symbol of ethnic and cultural difference. On the one hand, the yukata is a form of dress that is exemplary of displaced ideas and has enabled JapaneseBrazilian subjects to self-fashion and self-present by affirming their cross-cultural identities in-between Japan and Brazil.4 The caption highlighted that this mode of ethnic dress was not static but had been fluidly refashioned for compatibility with its local context. It acknowledged that the photograph had been taken on a ceremonial occasion, a reminder that it is unlikely to have been worn by these women daily, but rather has been used to revive a more traditional and feminine Japanese identity for a specific purpose. On the other hand, the yukata provided a sartorial focus to mobilize the distance and difference of the female subjects in relation to the predominantly male National Geographic Brasil viewer. That the women are documented inside gives a sense of feminine domesticity, contrasting with the tough masculinity evoked by the representation of Lourenço Loy in the previous snapshot examined. The caption encourages a quasiethnographic surveillance of the women, underlining the distinctiveness of their dress by remarking that it was culturally specific to Japanese-Brazilians, rather than a reflection of a sartorial performance re-enacted to mark a specific event. Such a touristic gaze was reinforced by the fact that almost all the women shyly avert their gaze from the viewer, contributing to a feeling of their submission to the photographer’s gaze. Certainly, it was a conscious decision made by National Geographic Brasil to choose to publish this photograph of Japanese-Brazilian women—who wear a form of cross-cultural dress less easily recognizable to the viewer—than to include a far more dynamic and contemporary (both in dress and photographic technique) image that Scavone captured on the same trip to Liberdade (Figure 5.3). This photograph documented a Japanese-Brazilian woman outside in bright sunlight in the urban city environment of São Paulo. Although the background is blurred, the central subject is crisply documented, distinct from the hazy images reproduced in National Geographic Brasil, to capture the knit of her grey sleeveless roll-neck top, the glossy sheen of her dark hair, and the sparkle of her diamante earrings. Even though the subject does not look directly at us, she appears confident and self-possessed, and the up-close focus on her face, as she glances to her left, engenders a more intimate engagement between

MISPLACED IDEAS

139

Figure 5.3 Photograph by Marcio Scavone, “O Calendário,” a Japanese-Brazilian woman in 2007, Liberdade, São Paulo. Courtesy of Marcio Scavone.

viewer and subject. Her mode of dress is more reflective of what most JapaneseBrazilians might wear daily. The photograph could have been taken in Tokyo, São Paulo, New York, or London, since it realistically reflects the mix of cultures that interact and negotiate in Liberdade, which is not a romanticized location of quaint Japanese customs, as the image re-presented in National Geographic Brasil may have suggested, but one area of a thriving global city. Scavone’s summary of his photographic approach in this article provides an interesting point on which to conclude this chapter. As he explained: I am absolutely taken by portrait photography, so much so that I use my approach to portraiture to explain and navigate in all other genres of photography that interest me .  .  . I decided that an essay about a city, a street or a district, like Liberdade, is a portrait, I call it an expanded portrait. I let the people and the objects tell the story . . . My approach would never be objective, there was never an intention of journalism behind it. (2015; my italics) Scavone clearly drew on the aesthetic qualities and communicative possibilities of portraiture, a mode of depiction that is rooted in subjectivity, reinforced by his assertion that “My approach would never be objective” (2015). He outlined the aesthetic qualities and communicative potentials of his practice, which override its referential function, as an unbiased means of accurately conveying detailed information. Yet his assertion, “I let the people and the objects tell the story,” suggested a more unmediated relation to his subjects than the previous photographers examined in this book, each of whom was quick to assert the

140

FASHIONING BRAZIL

reportage status of their practice. Scavone suggested, instead, that the lived experiences and practices of his subjects drove the creative fabrication of the images, rather than his own desire to impose a particular style or singular documentary “truth.” His approach, even though the photographs selected for inclusion in the magazine tended to focus on more “ethnic” forms of dress, was therefore a shift beyond that of the previous photographers examined in this book. Scavone’s comments suggested a critical rethinking of documentary photography, which contained the potential for a more subjective reworking of the medium, a point that will be taken up in the work of the photographer examined in the final chapter. This chapter has examined the establishment and development of National Geographic Brasil over its first ten years in publication. In all three of the snapshots examined there has been a concern with Brazil’s history and cultural identity. The first snapshot reframed and recontextualized an image of an indigenous Brazilian subject that had originally been published in National Geographic in April 1926, and placed him in more romanticized and sentimental terms as a Noble Savage seventy-six years later. Yet National Geographic Brasil camouflaged an important aspect of the subject’s creative performance of gambiarra, and rendered him a passive signifier of Brazil’s indigenous history, divorced from contemporary Brazilian civilization. There was an overriding sense in this snapshot that National Geographic Brasil had refashioned the Mayongong subject as objectified and racially monolithic, rather than the subject’s own practices of self-fashioning constituting an act of individual defiance to his original ethnographic surveillance by National Geographic. While National Geographic Brasil clearly visually deconstructed some of the asymmetrical relations of power previously in place between the indigenous Brazilian subject and the National Geographic viewer, it mobilized a new dynamic of control through text that essentialized and idealized Brazil’s indigenous past, paying little attention to the subjectivities and subtleties in differentiation in dress between Mayongong men and women. Overall, this snapshot was exemplary of displaced rather than misplaced ideas, because it intentionally, as opposed to accidentally or inevitably, used the indigenous subject as a tool to mobilize collective memory of an indigenous past for the benefit of contemporary Brazilian viewers, yet in doing so, refused to understand Brazil’s numerous and culturally distinct indigenous societies as belonging to part of the present. The second and third snapshots both examined culturally distinct immigrant communities of Angolans and Japanese living in zoned areas of large urban cities, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Both articles that these snapshots were published within struck an emotional chord with the viewer through their complex interweaving of past and present, and constant references to a traditional past apparently inscribed in the subject’s present-day activities. Within Beliel’s article, an interesting subtext, in text and images, concerning young Angolan

MISPLACED IDEAS

141

males’ identification with global hip-hop through dress and gesture, worked to undermine the problematic and dominant textual narrative. Hip-hop enabled the National Geographic Brasil viewer to see how Angolan subjects negotiated and renegotiated global fashions and used them to express their socially, culturally, and politically marginalized experiences in Brazil, but also Angola, which had prompted their emigration. Yet their brightly colored visual representation in National Geographic Brasil risked masking their sociopolitical use of hip-hop to self-fashion. It risked instead fashioning Angolan subjects in a carnivalesque spectacle of black Otherness, and advertising them for aesthetic appropriation by a culturally distanced and predominantly white-skinned Brazilian viewer. Whereas Beliel established a masculine Other, Scavone’s article was more concerned with a feminine Other. Both the textual narrative that accompanied his article, and his accompanying photographs, fashioned a whimsical and mythical construction of Liberdade, while the snapshot examined was an interesting demonstration of how Japanese-Brazilian women use dress to construct and perform their fluid, cross-cultural identities on particular ceremonial occasions. Yet the caption’s focus on dress risked obscuring this exemplary expression of displaced ideas in favor of a romanticized depiction of dress as a symbol of passive, feminized Oriental difference. In National Geographic Brasil, comparable to National Geographic, there has been a palpable tension between encouraging identification with Brazilian subjects and highlighting their exotic difference. Schwarz’s argument has been refashioned and defined in terms of movement and relocation, as displaced ideas, as opposed to solely in terms of loss, as misplaced ideas. This reworked theory has enabled us to see how ideas between National Geographic and National Geographic Brasil have been in flux rather than static, but it has also demonstrated the new hierarchies and inequalities that have been established in the formation of a different contact zone, no longer between the United States and Brazilian subjects, but between Brazil and the various immigrant groups that have settled within its borders.

6 MUNDIALIZATION: BRAZILIAN DRESS IN NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC BRASIL, AUGUST 2013

The previous chapters of this book have used a snapshot methodology to analyze ten case studies from National Geographic and National Geographic Brasil, which spanned the period from 1926 to 2011. My analysis expanded upon the theoretical concepts of anthropophagy, recycled aesthetics, the space in-between, and misplaced ideas, conceptualized respectively by Andrade, Stam, Santiago, and Schwarz, to analyze the shifting dynamics of cross-cultural exchange that were entwined in Brazilian dress and fashion and its representation. These four scholars were selected for their interdisciplinary use of dress and fashion metaphors, which were employed to make a positive identification with the complexities of dress, body, and culture in Brazil. The methodological framework used in the final chapter of this book can be situated historically as the culmination of these four theoretical concepts. In the greatly accelerated phase of contemporary globalization, Brazilian cultural critic and sociologist Renato Ortiz pointed out the limitations of methodologies that assume Brazil’s dependency on the West, even if they are used positively to revalorize the improvisational dynamics of transnational encounter and exchange. He developed crucial aspects of the arguments put forward by Andrade, Stam, Santiago, and Schwarz, to consider Brazil, no longer as peripheral in relation to the West, but one cultural manifestation competing against numerous others in a global system, wherein it has become “somehow senseless . . . to talk about a diffusing centrality or of a clear opposition between external and internal, foreign and autochthonous” (2000: 144). Ortiz is relevant to an examination of National Geographic Brasil in the transitional period since May 2010, when the magazine celebrated its tenth

MUNDIALIZATION

143

anniversary and began to position itself more dynamically in relation to National Geographic. As Matthew Shirts summarized: In 2010, the cycle of globalization of National Geographic closed when one of the editors of the Brazilian edition, Ronaldo Ribeiro, wrote the text of the report on Lençóis Maranhenses for the mother magazine, published around the world and read by 40 million people. . . . Global issues are increasingly coming to NGBrasil. It’s true that many materials were very Americanized, but we had to take these in order to also produce the Brazilian content. Now, however, NGBrasil and NGUSA are increasingly discussing the same topics, albeit from different perspectives. (2014; my italics) Shirts cited the example of a July 2010 article written by Ronaldo Ribeiro— entitled “Sea of Dunes: wind and rain have sculpted the landscape of Lençóis Maranhenses. But this Brazilian National Park faces problems”—which was published simultaneously in National Geographic and National Geographic Brasil. National Geographic Brasil had previously been dependent upon the “mother magazine,” and required to publish articles on issues more immediately relevant to a US audience, in order to also produce local content for a Brazilian readership. Ribeiro’s article symbolized a paradigm shift toward a more consensual rapport between Washington, DC, and São Paulo. The two magazines no longer coexisted within a hierarchical relation of power, but entered in productive and dissonant tension, “discussing the same topics, albeit from different perspectives.” In acknowledging that there is more than one way of viewing the world, Shirts’s remark was consistent with Ortiz’s articulation of mundialization. Ortiz made a distinction between technological and economic globalization, and the cultural dimensions of globalization, which he conceptualized using an English neologism, mundialization, derived from the French word, mondialisation: There is no conceptual opposition between the common and the diverse; a mundialized culture promotes a cultural pattern without imposing the uniformity of all; it disseminates a pattern bound to the development of world modernity itself. Its width certainly involves other cultural manifestations, but it is important to emphasize that it is specific, founding a new way of “beingin-the-world” and establishing new ideas and legitimizations. And that is the reason why there is not and there will not be a single global culture, identical in all places. A globalized world implies a plurality of world-views. What we do have is the consolidation of a civilization matrix, world modernity, that is actualized and diversified in every country, region, place, as a function of its particular history. And this means that globalization/mundialization is one and diverse at the same time. (2006: 402)

144

FASHIONING BRAZIL

Ortiz argued that to refer to the technological and economic sphere is to designate processes that are reproduced throughout the world in the same fashion: whether a single and unified global economic structure (capitalism) or a singular technological system (comprised of the internet, computers, and satellites). It is impossible to speak of a singular global culture or identity in the same sense that one can refer to a singular technological or economic structure. He stressed that “there is no global culture; only a process of cultural mundialization” (2004: 5–22). While the predominance of the English language throughout the world unequivocally demonstrates an imbalance of power, this does not automatically indicate the disappearance of diverse languages, nor entail a singular mode of conversing in the face of its universal dominance. Mundialization must be understood as a site of resistance, change, and adaptation. It denotes a world vision that “co-exists with other world visions, establishing hierarchies, conflicts and accommodations with them” (2006: 402). Facilitated by the technological and economic processes of globalization, mundialization delineates a space for different experiences of the world, as diverse forms of understanding encounter one another while preserving their differences. Ortiz emphasized that mundialization is an overall social phenomenon; while there exists a “cultural pattern,” a common background that we all share as global citizens, this must not be misunderstood as a pervasive homogenization or standardization of ideas, behavior or goods, “imposing the uniformity of all” (2006: 402). His use of a dress metaphor provides a useful lens through which to consider the dynamics of global culture as it is localized and indigenized through dress and fashion practices. In the global fashion industry, a pattern is a twodimensional industrial template used to create any number of three-dimensional garments. Yet the type of pattern can differ drastically, not to mention the endless possibilities provided before and after cutting, focused predominantly on the surface of the garment and concerned with the use of different fabrics, materials, colors, and decoration, each of which is articulated and differentiated according to the choices and desires of an individual, group, culture, or country. Mylene Mizrahi cites a revealing example of mundialization—operating on a micro level—in her ethnographic study of the local appropriation of denim by Brazilian women at favela Funk Balls held in Rio de Janeiro (2011: 103–26). While the jeans worn by dancers may have appeared to be a generic and homogeneous form of a global style, they were produced from a stretchy fabric called moletom, which simulated the appearance of denim and clung to the moving body like a second skin. This distinctive fabric was thicker than denim, enabling rhinestones, embroideries, and lace to be attached to it, and rips, tears, and perforations to be made into it. The result was a distinctively Brazilian re-presentation of global denim that drew many parallels with the Lycra fashions documented in the fifth snapshot this book examined in Chapter 3, which captured an Afro-Brazilian girl dancing in Bahia; both had a seductive power as body, clothing, and dance

MUNDIALIZATION

145

worked together in motion, prompting viewers to consider not only how the Lycra top and denim jeans looked, but also how they felt. Just as Mizrahi observed the subjective and sensory experiences of Brazilian jeans for wearer and viewer, Ortiz referred to mundialization in phenomenological terms as a process that has provided individuals with “a new way of ‘beingin-the-world’ and establish[ed] new ideas and legitimations” (2006: 402). Not only is there no singular global culture, he asserted, but there is no universal experience of globalization. Rather, an individual’s specific engagement with the processes of cultural mundialization is anchored in his or her sensory perceptions and experiences of the surrounding environment, which takes discursive and subjective forms. Mundialization is not simply the hybrid mix of local and global objects and ideas, as they interact and are refashioned, but also the new sensory modes of perception and experience initiated during the process. Following Ortiz’s assertion that “a globalized world implies a plurality of world views,” this concluding chapter builds upon the preceding analysis to consider how not only the Brazilian subject but also the National Geographic Brasil viewer perceived and experienced their surrounding environment through dress.

Snapshot 11: Guarani-Kaiowá Dress, August 2013 The final case study analyzed in this book expands my snapshot methodology to examine three examples within one article, which was published in print and digital media in National Geographic Brasil in August 2013. Using Ortiz’s concept of mundialization, I analyze three different media—magazine, iPad, and film— questioning to what extent medium has impacted upon National Geographic Brasil’s attempts to fashion the Guarani-Kaiowá through their dress practices, and to what extent those subjects can be seen to have self-fashioned. Entitled “Guarani: red earth. They believe they have a spiritual connection to the place where their ancestors lived. In Mato Grosso do Sul, for decades this belief has bathed indigenous territory in blood,” this article was the transnational product of US photojournalist Nadia Shira Cohen, who wrote the text, and her partner, Brazilian photojournalist Paulo Siqueira, who took the photographs. The title referred not only to the fertile, red earth of the agriculture-rich state of Mato Grosso do Sul, the central-western state of Brazil, but also to the bloodshed that has taken place there in recent years, which stems from an increasingly tense stalemate between European-descended farmers and indigenous groups. The region is home to over 61,000 indigenous people, most of whom are GuaraniKaiowá.1 It also has a large proportion of high-value farmland, comprised of sugarcane and soy plantations, and cattle ranches, which are vital to Brazil’s economic prosperity and supported by the developmental agenda of then

146

FASHIONING BRAZIL

Figure 6.0 Photograph by Evaristo Sa, members of the Guarani-Kaiowá indigenous group, joined by students, protest in Brasilia, October 31, 2012. Copyright: EVARISTO SA/AFP/Getty Images.

president Dilma Rousseff. The conflict stems from a 1988 constitution that promised indigenous peoples the right to inhabit their ancestral lands, though not the legal right to own them, a process of putting the law into practice that has been considerably drawn out and judicially challenged by the farm lobby (Anon. 2015a). This constitution over the identification and demarcation of small areas of indigenous land was put in process in 2007 and is supported by FUNAI, federal prosecutors, and international NGOs, but it has been repeatedly blocked by legal challenges, and opposed by farmers, the state government, and Farmasul, the industry body for farmers. Indigenous groups have staged a series of occupations of farmland and protests (Figure 6.0), resulting in violent expulsion by farm security guards and federal police. The tensions between landowners and indigenous peoples that have arisen in Mato Grosso do Sul are rooted in the territorial importance that the Guarani-Kaiowá attach to the geographical area their ancestors inhabited, which they refer to as the tekoha, a term denoting the specific worldview that informs the geographical and sensory spaces that they occupy.

The Tekoha The Guarani-Kaiowá use the term tekoha to denote the physical places that they inhabit (whether land, field, forest, water, animals, or plants), and in which

MUNDIALIZATION

147

the Guarani teko (way of being) is realized. The tekoha has been defined as “a result and not as a determining factor, as a continuing process of situational adjustment . . . defined by virtue of the effective characteristics—material and immaterial—of access to geographical space by the Guarani” (Anon. 2015b). As a category that once connoted solely territorial space for the Guarani-Kaiowá, tekoha has since acquired great relevance and wide usage as a sociopolitical, cultural, and multisensory space that encompasses behavior, habitat, and cultural expression, and influences their way of being: of thinking, feeling, acting, dressing, and wearing. The tekoha is not fixed, but continuously reevaluated in relation to their changing environment. A parallel can be drawn here with Pierre Bourdieu’s delineation of the ever-shifting “habitus,” which he defined as “structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes” (1990: 53). The habitus encompasses the characteristic norms and tendencies that influence behavior and thought in a given society or group and structures the way that embodied individuals live; like the tekoha, it entails a situational adjustment and adaptation to shifting surroundings and unexpected situations. The tekoha resonated with Ortiz’s assertion that mundialization was “a total social phenomenon, which pervades all cultural manifestations. The whole goes to the core of its parts, redefining them in their specificities” (2006: 402). The tekoha must be understood then in phenomenological terms, as a pervasive manifestation of the Guarani-Kaiowá’s lived experience and embodied perception of “beingin-the-world.”

Snapshot 11a: The Guarani-Kaiowá Woman’s “Feliz Natal” T-shirt and Polyester Skirt in the Magazine The first example examined within this final snapshot (Figure 6.1) was printed on the left-hand side of a double-page view in National Geographic Brasil. One in a set of four full-length photographs of anonymous members of the GuaraniKaiowá published in a grid formation, it had a standardized, uniform quality, which stood out from the apparent artlessness that characterized most images published within the article, which lay closer to a sensationalist, photojournalistic aesthetic. All four photographs shared the compositional format of a single figure posed in the center of the frame: a style of representation that is situated within a long tradition of the essentialized and objectified ethnographic type, as discussed in the first snapshot this book examined. Siqueira has maintained a standardized distance, using a large aperture to give a shallower depth of field that lends a crispness and clarity to the isolated subject, who is carefully

148

FASHIONING BRAZIL

Figure 6.1 Snapshot 11a. Photograph by Paulo Siqueira, a woman of the GuaraniKaiowá indigenous group, published in National Geographic Brasil, August 2013. Copyright: Paulo Siqueira.

staged against a softly blurred, luscious green background. On first glance, this seductive full-color ethnographic gaze encourages the viewer to study the four isolated subjects (which consist of two women, a little girl, and a young boy) anthropometrically; placed as exotic objects, rather than interacting social agents, we are prompted to make a comparative study of their different modes of dress from within the uniformity of their depiction. The caption that accompanied this image, however, read: “The Guarani call these taken lands tekohas. In Pueblito in Iguatemi, another municipality, residents try to build a life in the area considered ancestral territory” (126). It underlined the importance of the term tekoha, drawing the viewer’s attention to the process of cultural mundialization by which the Guarani-Kaiowá situationally adjust to their immediate environment. While the caption omitted to mention dress, it nevertheless situated the Guarani-Kaiowá as interacting social agents rather than essentialized and racialized specimens, encouraging a closer examination of the four subjects. While ethnographic photographs were constructed to contrast different races, ethnicities, and nationalities, these images depicted

MUNDIALIZATION

149

subjects from within the same indigenous group. Rather than suggest their homogeneity as a group, this snapshot served to identify individual differences. The only typicality is the serial approach to photographing the subjects, since the diverse characteristics of each subject are shown through dress, pose, setting, and their placement within the photographic frame. Each subject displays calm and self-possessed expressions, gestures, and poses, demonstrating his or her agency in self-fashioning before the photographer’s gaze, which becomes an imaginative space to stage fanciful versions of themselves.

Objectivity and Subjectivity There is a palpable shift within this snapshot in the representation of GuaraniKaiowá identity—from something fixed, to something performative. The woman in this image stands with her fingers splayed over the top of two ceremonial sticks pointed into the ground, commanding the viewer’s attention with her stern expression. She faces the camera directly, compelling the viewer to meet her gaze and positioning herself as an active participant of perception and expression. Alison Griffiths has highlighted the paradoxical quality that is attached to what she terms the “return gaze,” whereby ethnographic subjects directly match the gaze of the photographer: “While it signals the filmmaker’s [or photographer’s] agency as the gatherer of images—we collect images of them and not vice versa—at the same time it carries with it a subversive or defiant element, a look that could be transcribed as ‘I see you looking at me and don’t like it’” (2002: 200). In this example, however, the subject appears calm, composed and comfortable with her exposure, and the image can be read less as a straightforward act of defiance to a controlling photographic gaze. Her return gaze is comparable to that of the Brazilian woman documented in the fashion boutique by Stanmeyer in 2011, examined in the seventh snapshot of this book, and suggests that the nature of the interaction between photographer and subject is complicit and consensual, rather than controlling. There is no awkwardness in the resulting image, but rather a sense that the subject has an increased awareness and consciousness of her body in phenomenological terms: as a subject to be looked at, and as an image before the camera. There is a stillness to the image, which encourages a more measured and contemplative response from the National Geographic Brasil viewer. It is not unexpected, given that the prototype was initially made using a large format camera, which slows down the image-making process and demands that the subjects remain still for a prolonged period. Siqueira commented on this snapshot: With these images I was not trying to pretend that they are objective—they are posed portraits and it is obvious. I allowed the subjects to show themselves

150

FASHIONING BRAZIL

as they wished. This is a more recent new direction that I have taken, away from more traditional, reportage photography. (2015) Rather like Scavone’s description of his working methods in the previous chapter, he described his role within the image-making process as relatively passive and unmediated, but advanced one step beyond Scavone since he “allowed the subjects to show themselves as they wished.” Siqueira asserted that this innovative approach demonstrated a shift away from “more traditional, reportage photography,” in which subjects do not pose, and the photographer, as a hidden “fly-on-the-wall” witness, decides on the composition and angle at which to capture them. He deemed this well-established photojournalistic practice to be a faithful transcription of reality. In contrast, within these “posed portraits,” rather than establish a distance from his subjects, Siqueira distanced himself from the image-making process, beyond setting up the camera equipment at a uniform distance from each subject and taking the photograph. The implication here is that Siqueira did not perceive these images to rest within the confines of an objective, documentary mode, but rather saw them as a contingent dramatization of identity, as subjects performed their own identities before the camera. While Siqueira posited a divide between objectivity—“traditional reportage”—and subjectivity—“posed portraits”—he also articulated a long-recognized paradox concerning documentary photography, centered on an understanding that it is surely more realist to allow subjects to present themselves as they wish, and to display openly the photographic equipment used, rather than to catch them off-guard, and to construct their identities from an overdetermined distance. Although not openly acknowledged by Siqueira, these images were a tangible demonstration of a “performative documentary,” to use a term coined by Demos, wherein “the dramatization and direct transmission of reality intertwine” (2013: 26). This snapshot hinted that a more objective truth might be reclaimed through narrative construction and imaginative storytelling, but operating on the part of the Guarani-Kaiowá subjects, who articulate and dramatize their own identities through dress. Dress performed a crucial role in fracturing the distance between the National Geographic Brasil viewer and Guarani-Kaiowá subjects. There is an emphasis on the texture and materiality of the subject’s colorful clothing, which refuses to blend seamlessly into the lush green environment that frames her. The setting emphasizes not only the richness and fertility of the environment, but also the importance the Guarani-Kaiowá attach to their tekoha as a source of food and raw materials for use as firewood, remedies, utensils, tools, building supplies, and dress. Her clothing demonstrates the Guarani-Kaiowá’s situational adjustment to their changing immediate environment, as they create outfits from the tools and materials that are available in a process that draws on gambiarra, which was discussed in the first and eighth snapshots of this book. The image

MUNDIALIZATION

151

invites a tactile gaze from the viewer, whose eyes move across the glossy flat surface of the magazine page and perceive the different textures presented, from the soft cotton of a Western-style T-shirt, to the smooth feel of a patterned polyester skirt. The tactility of the image invites the viewer to run his or her fingertips across the page, not to simply look, but also to feel the dress worn by the subject, who displays a combination of Western-style clothing (which in style, if not manufacture, originates in North America and Europe) and indigenous elements such as beaded necklaces and bracelets. The woman wears an elasticated heavily patterned skirt, a necklace made of fruit stones and feathers, a collection of plastic bracelets, and a red T-shirt that reads “Feliz Natal” (“Merry Christmas” in Portuguese). The viewer is encouraged to identify with the subject through her dress, to consider its sensory and expressive meanings, and to experience vicariously the tactile fascination that informs the Guarani-Kaiowá’s own relationship to their tekoha.

Individual and Communal Dress Although dress was not directly mentioned in the article, Siqueira and Cohen were clearly interested in the clothing choices made by the Guarani-Kaiowá. A distinction can be drawn from the Brazilian authors of the snapshots discussed in the previous chapters, one of whom even confessed: “I’m not an expert on clothing or feminine behavior” (Beliel 2015). Siqueira and Cohen described how dress “has shifted along with the Guarani-Kaiowá’s adaptation to their land. Today they have incorporated the materials that they have to hand into their dress” (2015). This comment acknowledged the Guarani-Kaiowá’s critical assimilation of foreign elements found within their tekoha, which are refashioned to suit their own needs and tastes. An example could be seen in one of the other four photographs printed on the same page, as a woman wears an outer skirt, which is a contemporary adaptation of Guarani-Kaiowá ceremonial dress, created from a pair of deconstructed and re-stitched denim jeans, a torn-up black T-shirt, and a knotted belt of white stones and orange feathers. Siqueira and Cohen explained that the Guarani-Kaiowá “used to use only feathers found on their land” as decoration for their dress, but now they also strategically appropriate items from mainstream culture and “incorporate different things such as plastic bags, T-shirts, plastic beads” (2015). An example of the creative utilization of used materials can be seen in a portrait of a little girl, also printed on the same page, whose distinctive skirt has been made by knotting together recycled plastic bags and wool to create hanging tassels. Siqueira and Cohen commented that among the Guarani-Kaiowá “dress is very different. . . . There are those who wear only traditional dress, those who utilize elements of traditional dress, and those who dress like normal Brazilian teenagers” (2015). This remark

152

FASHIONING BRAZIL

acknowledged the Guarani-Kaiowá’s ability to pick and choose what, when, and how they interact with items of global dress. Cohen and Siqueira described how “the Guarani-Kaiowá dress up for special occasions, for battle and for defense. They use dress to demonstrate their personal desires and individual choices” (2015). This comment emphasized the flexibility and freedom with which the Guarani-Kaiowá take elements of Western-style dress and use them to fashion their own indigenous identities. An example can be seen in the snapshot that is the focus of this section, since the woman wears a red T-shirt that reads “Feliz Natal.” The T-shirt is not being worn during the festive period and takes on a new meaning in its different context. The authors acknowledged: “The longer that we stayed in the community, we began to see changes. Some of the Indians didn’t wear traditional clothes all of the time, but others did, and others dropped traditional wear all together. The younger kids will not go to the village dressed as Indians because they are embarrassed, and they balk at their grandparents for dressing like this” (2015). There is the suggestion here that young members of the group are ashamed by their grandparents’ inability to adapt and negotiate change through dress. The authors’ comments acknowledged that the only potential aspect that is Western about Guarani-Kaiowá clothing is its origin, since it has been selectively modified and refashioned, demonstrating the process of mundialization as products transferred across the world as a result of economic globalization are used strategically for the creation of personal and cultural identities within Brazil. A revealing point of comparison can be drawn with a photograph of an anonymous Guarani-Kaiowá girl, which was published on October 9, 2013, on the online blog accompaniment to the Brazilian newspaper, O Estado de S. Paulo, within an article entitled “NGOs associate high rate of suicide among young Indians to land problems”. The article, written by Roldão Arruda, examined increased suicide rates among the Guarani-Kaiowá and Guarani-Nandeva communities, which were much higher than the national average and disproportionately affected adolescents and young people. This inconsistent trend was associated with their social dislocation at losing land owned by their ancestors. The article detailed the alcoholism and malnutrition widespread on Guarani-Kaiowá reservations throughout Mato Grosso do Sul, and was published to coincide with World Mental Health Day on October 10, 2013. It was accompanied by a photograph, captioned “Guarani Child: for international NGOs the solution to the problems would be the magnification of indigenous lands.” A young girl stares directly into the camera lens at close range, with her symmetrical body placed squarely in the foreground. She wears a dirty, oversized white patterned jumper, and her long dark hair, plaited at the front, hangs forward over her shoulders. She regards the camera with an innocent, wide-eyed gaze, her hands clasped awkwardly in front of her, nervously pulling at her jumper. Whereas in National Geographic Brasil there

MUNDIALIZATION

153

is a sense of the subjects as exhibitors of their own actions, here the subject enacts a dazed passivity, which is more likely to engender sympathy and pity in the viewer but refuses to acknowledge the subject as an interacting agent. The subject’s soiled clothing is a clear demonstration of the problems faced by the Guarani, who live in overcrowded reservations and often have little or no access to clean drinking water, medicinal plants, fuel, and food, while her yellowing hair is reflective of the severe malnutrition experienced by the community. A different type of identification between viewer and subject is evoked in this image. Whereas in National Geographic Brasil dress revealed the vitality of the community and contained an element of performativity, helping us to forge a more critical empathy with the subjects, here, the purpose of the image is to encourage sympathy, a problematic reaction that Sontag (1977) articulated when she wrote about the ability of such images to anesthetize the viewer, dulling our moral senses and ability to perceive the subjects on equal terms. In the second snapshot this chapter examines, however, National Geographic Brasil risked glossing over the serious problems faced by the Guarani-Kaiowá.

Magazine Page and Digital Screen The second snapshot will be analyzed as it appeared in the iPad edition of National Geographic Brasil, which was launched in December 2012 and available to digital subscribers. In the first digital edition, the then editor-in-chief of National Geographic Brasil (May 2000—May 2013) Matthew Shirts enthused: The iPad edition of National Geographic Brasil has just been launched! This is our first edition in this format. . . . It seems that the tablet computer was made especially for our magazine. The photos are more stunning, if that is possible, and the maps and graphics are interactive, facilitating the organization of information. There are also videos that can lead you to a new dimension of journalism in magazines. The new digital format stimulates the quality of editing more than that printed on paper. (2012) The digital edition of the magazine was locked so that it could only be viewed in landscape mode, an editorial decision that prompted the viewer to perceive and experience the images as a constructed narrative, comparable to the sequencing of a filmstrip, rather like Snapshot 7b examined in Chapter 4. Image and text were intentionally isolated; to view the images, which were presented on a black background, the viewer was required to make a horizontal swipe across the screen, yet to read the text, which was presented on a white background, the viewer had to make a vertical swipe down the screen. The high-resolution

154

FASHIONING BRAZIL

images were privileged over the monochrome pages of text, which reiterated Shirts’s assertion that “the photos are more stunning. . . . The new digital format stimulates the quality of the editing more than that on printed paper” (2012). Shirts’s emphasis on the proficiency in editing that was required to produce the digital edition of the magazine is particularly relevant to an analysis of dress, since National Geographic Brasil would necessarily have been required to consider how particular textures, materials, colors, and decoration appeared when reframed in high resolution on the digital screen.2 In the August 2013 iPad edition, the same set of portraits examined in the previous snapshot was reframed on a black background for the digital screen (Figure 6.2). A male subject seated in an armchair dominated the background of the screen and served as the point of departure from which the viewer could choose to select any of the other portraits to view, which were now printed in close-up thumbnails running down the left-hand side of the screen. Touch was now a crucial part of the viewing experience, since the active viewer was given a choice as to which images to view, and in which order to view them, which were then selected by pressing on individual thumbnails with a fingertip. This interactive

Figure 6.2 Author holding an iPad to view the August 2013 digital edition of National Geographic Brasil featuring Paulo Siqueira’s photograph of Ava Tape Rendy’i of the Guarani-Kaiowá indigenous group. Courtesy of Jonathan Vickers.

MUNDIALIZATION

155

element easily dispelled claims, as discussed in the fourth chapter, that digital images have rendered the viewer passive and immobile. The shiny flat surface of the iPad reflected the National Geographic Brasil viewer’s face onto the screen, so that he or she is likely to have experienced the sensation of looking and the sensation of being looked at simultaneously. This reflected gaze highlighted the viewer’s own process of identity construction—the viewer could not help but catch sight of his or her own reflection on the screen—and in doing so, drew a parallel with the Guarani-Kaiowá subjects’ subjective processes of presenting themselves before a gaze. This return gaze was particularly emotive when the photograph of the woman in the red “Feliz Natal” T-shirt was viewed on the iPad, since her returned gaze acted as a palimpsest over the viewer’s gaze reflected on the screen, prompting an intimate connection between National Geographic Brasil viewer and Guarani-Kaiowá subject. Yet the viewer’s reflected gaze on the digital screen was more problematic in the second case study this chapter examines, since the male subject refused to meet the gaze of the photographer and by extension, the viewer.

Snapshot 11b: Ava Tape Rendy’i’s Cargo Shorts and Western-style Shirt on the iPad In the second case study from this snapshot (Figure 6.3), the male subject is seated outside in a worn brown armchair, against a verdant backdrop of crops, green field, and expansive blue sky. With his head lowered, and body inclined toward the viewer, he gazes down at the ground pensively. His left palm leans on a wooden stick, while his right hand holds a gourd maraca. Although re-presented on the screen using portrait conventions, much as it had been in the magazine, there is a defamiliarization with the established codes of portraiture, since the subject’s face and body language refuse to communicate with the viewer. While denying a straightforward identification between viewer and subject, the viewer is nevertheless seduced by the three-dimensional tactile textures that the image encompasses, from the rough fabric of the dirty, disheveled sofa, the ribbed cotton of the subject’s mint-green shirt, the soft blue, red, and green feathers that adorn his headdress, to the string of shiny beads and smooth shells that he wears around his neck. These tactile fabrics had an increased clarity when reproduced on the higher resolution iPad screen, enabling the viewer to discern more of the range of different surface textures, and encouraging him or her to consider not only how they look, but also how they feel. These surfaces lead the viewer around the image and encourage a sensual gaze that delves beyond the two-dimensional shiny hard flat surface of the iPad screen, and encourages an intersubjective relationship with the dressed subject. The ensemble worn by the subject, whose name the caption informs us is Ava Tape Rendy’i, displays

156

FASHIONING BRAZIL

Figure 6.3 Snapshot 11b. Photograph by Paulo Siqueira, Ava Tape Rendy’i of the Guarani-Kaiowá indigenous group, published in National Geographic Brasil, August 2013. Copyright: Paulo Siqueira.

a discriminate appropriation and re-presentation of dress from two different cultural systems, both Western and indigenous. His combination of collared shirt and Cargo shorts, worn with decorative items from Guarani-Kaiowá material culture, is a tangible reminder that globalization does not engender the loss of local forms of dress, but is a mundialized process of simultaneous fragmentation and reinvention as local and global items of clothing interact. Yet a phenomenological engagement with the subject, and an understanding of the subject’s phenomenological engagement with his own environment, was undermined by the accompanying caption to the image, which glossed over sartorial subtleties and positioned the subject within a Western art-historical framework. It read: “The spiritual leader Ava Tape Rendy’i, of the Teykue indigenous land in Caarapó, poses in the cornfield of the Saint Helena farm.” Pose is an overloaded choice of word that points to the obviously staged nature of the highly aestheticized and theatrical composition. The subject’s pose situated the image visually within the Western art-historical canon, surely recognizable

MUNDIALIZATION

157

to an educated Brazilian readership, in which the principal subject is crowned, seated on a throne, framed centrally within the image, gazing down and holding symbolic objects in open palms.3 There is an overriding sense, particularly when comparing this image to the photograph examined in the previous case study, wherein the subject held her gaze confidently before the camera, that Ava Tape Rendy’i has been fashioned by the photographer. Ava Tape Rendy’i, who was directed by the photographer to remain in this dramatic pose for the duration of the shot, is less likely than Siqueira to have had an awareness of the continuum of similar Western art-historical images. There is an awareness of the subject’s passive submission to the photographic gaze, as his head hangs limply forward, and he is positioned within a fictive mise-en-scène of Siqueira’s choosing. There is a contrast between the National Geographic Brasil viewer, who views this image on the digital screen, and sees his or her own identity reflected, and the Guarani-Kaiowá subject’s inability to assert his identity; with his head hanging forward, he is placed as an object to be surveyed and controlled, rather than a subject to engage in dialogue with. This asymmetrical balance of power between the active viewer and passive subject was reversed in the final case study this chapter examines, which engaged with the medium of film presented on the digital screen, and provided a rare opportunity for the tactile and visceral qualities of Guarani-Kaiowá dress to be captured in three-dimensional motion, which previously could only be suggested in the photographs presented in the magazine, on the website, and on the iPad screen.

Snapshot 11c: Ava Tape Rendy’i’s Headdress on Film The final snapshot (Figure 6.4) this chapter examines is a short film produced specially for the iPad edition of the magazine. Entitled “Hopeless: the government neither indemnifies the farmers nor regulates the indigenous lands,” it was funded by Planeta Sustentável and served as a record of Cohen and Siqueira’s six-day trip documenting the Guarani-Kaiowá. The film opened with a post-Apocalyptic scene as billowing orange and grey smoke emerged from the silhouette of a tall forest, polluting a cloudless sky. A carefully selected soundtrack of crackling fire was interwoven into the scene, producing a potent symbol of the destructive effects of colonization on indigenous lands. As the sound of a gourd instrument being meditatively played gradually displaced the sound of crackling fire, an emotive palimpsest was enacted. The frame switched to the torso of Ava Tape Rendy’i—recognizable from the previous photograph—who wears beaded necklaces, body paint, and a feathered headdress and sings as he performs. It is the first time that we have seen indigenous dress in motion, and how it connects

158

FASHIONING BRAZIL

Figure 6.4 Snapshot 11c. Author holding an iPad to watch the film, “Sem Solução: o governo federal nem indeniza os ruralistas nem regularize às terras indigenas,” featuring Ava Tape Rendy’i and produced by Paulo Siqueira to accompany the August 2013 digital edition of National Geographic Brasil. Courtesy of Jonathan Vickers.

to performance, dance, and song. A feeling of copresence is engendered between viewer and subject, through the sense of tactile closeness prompted by the zoomed in shot, which provides a compelling feeling of being in the midst of the action, of “being there” with the subject. There is a mesmerizing quality to Ava Tape Rendy’i’s dress as it moves in three-dimensional forms. The muscles of his right arm flex as he shakes the maraca, causing his red-and-black body paint to pulsate; the tassels that decorate his gourd instrument move in time to the music; his beaded necklaces jingle and the feathers on his headdress flutter as he sways his head in time with the music. Despite the flat surface of the digital screen, the range of tactile sensations and textures presented in motion provide the viewer with a simulated sense of touch. While there is an element of theatricality to this performance, the camera does not linger on Ava Tape Rendy’i long enough for him to become an ethnographic spectacle. It switches instead to Siqueira and Cohen, who are surveyed with a comparable curiosity but captured in Western-style dress. Siqueira is dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and carries a food sack on his shoulder. Cohen follows, dressed in a strappy black vest top and rolled up denim jeans, carrying her pink and orange Nike trainers in one hand and her green Havaiana flip-flops in the other. A voiceover by Siqueira explains that there are

MUNDIALIZATION

159

around 50,000 Guarani living in Brazil now and that he and Nadia have come to document the disputes over their lands. Throughout the two-minute, fiftyeight second duration, viewers witness the Guarani-Kaiowá fulfill daily activities such as washing, cooking, and farming the land. A memorable scene inside captures a Guarani-Kaiowá man in a combination of Western-style dress and indigenous jewelry standing before a group of men, also dressed in a crosscultural mix of sartorial elements. The voiceover captures him providing the presumed perspective of the farmers: “The indigenous don’t work, so what is their interest in the land, it is all crazy.” Throughout we are constantly presented with photographs of Cohen (who is also a photographer, although most of the photographs printed in the magazine were shot by Siqueira) documenting the Guarani-Kaiowá. She bends down and crouches low to get the best shot. She is reflected with her camera in the car windscreen. These shots are very self-reflexive and do not try to hide the presence of the photographer; they emphasize instead the subjectivity of both Cohen and Siqueira, disrupting any notion of their role as an all-controlling, distanced ethnographic gaze. Representation is presented as a fluid process, open to various interpretations. It is reminiscent of a comment that Cohen makes in the text of the article, which encourages the viewer to think about how the Guarani-Kaiowá might also perceive the photographers: Our society romanticizes the Indians. We tend to think that the Guarani want to return to their ancestral land, plant new trees for the wildlife to return and then live in huts, hunt all day and pray at night dressed in feathers. Not quite. “You go around dressed as Pedro Alvares Cabral in 1500?” Tonico Benites asks the photographer Paulo Siqueira, who accompanies me. Benites is Guarani and teaches anthropology at the Federal University of Dourados. “Does having a mobile and computer make me less Indian? We are evolving along with modern society, like any other ethnic group,” he says, as we take a coffee at my hotel in the city. (130) The film is made up of aestheticized images from the article, with footage of the trip documenting Cohen and Siqueira’s interactions with their subjects. It closes with a scene featuring one of the farmers, named Dacio Queiroz Silva, who explains that if the government paid farmers considerable compensation then they would leave the area: “There is no solution. If you say: ‘No, but, there is an amendment to the budget for the indemnification agreement of the land!’ ‘So, give me, give me, then I will be leaving.’” Although none of the Guarani-Kaiowá are named, unlike Siqueira, Cohen, and Silva, they are given an opportunity to represent themselves sartorially throughout the film, which demonstrates how dress moves on their bodies and fits into their surrounding environment, the tekoha. The haptic-visual qualities of dress in motion engenders a sense of touch, drawing in the viewer, who is encouraged to consider its form in closer

160

FASHIONING BRAZIL

detail, prompting an intense awareness of an active and self-fashioning GuaraniKaiowá presence. National Geographic Brasil used film to prompt an intimate relationship between the viewer and Guarani-Kaiowá subjects presented on the screen, highlighting the lived experience of dress as an embodied cultural practice. A rather different representation of Guarani-Kaiowá dress is seen in the film Birdwatchers (2009), produced by Italian-Chilean director Marco Bechis. Birdwatchers, a fictional film that was shot predominantly without the use of a script and used many untrained Guarani-Kaiowá as actors, nevertheless reduced the indigenous group’s interactions with globalization to a form of standardization that led to the fragmentation of group identity. The opening scene captured a group of European bird-watchers sailing along a picturesque river in Mato Grosso do Sul, where they encounter a group of Guarani-Kaiowá hiding in the tree-lined riverbank. The indigenous people are armed with bows and arrows and wear loincloths, beaded jewelry, feathered headdresses, and body paint. A few release token arrows from their bows for the benefit of the tourists. The scene alludes to what Deborah Root has argued is the insatiable “appetite” of a European audience for the exotic “other,” as a source of “violence, passion and spirituality” (1996: n.p.). This notion is amplified by the second scene, which observes the Guarani-Kaiowá change back into their usual Western-style clothes of jeans and T-shirts, and collect scant payment for their exotic display from the wealthy European-descended landowner Roberto, who profits considerably from the European tourists that he hosts on his lavish estate, not to mention his rich supplies of sugar, soy, wood, beef, and biofuels. With aerial shots that juxtapose densely wooded forest and open fields of cattle and crops, the film confronts the devastating effects of European colonization upon the region and the displacement suffered by the Guarani-Kaiowá, who are dehumanized, impoverished, living on small reserves and in makeshift protest camps, and treated with patronizing paternalism by mainstream Brazilian society. This is most evident through the young figure of Ireneu, who uses his wages from harvesting sugarcane on the landowner’s plantation to buy a brand new pair of sneakers from the shopping mall. He is scolded by his alcoholic father Nadio, who remonstrates that he ought to have purchased additional supplies from the local shop to provide for the malnourished community. Ireneu is accused by Nadio of neglecting traditional Guarani-Kaiowá culture and, in a climactic scene toward the end of the film, commits suicide. The make of Ireneu’s sneakers is unknown since the camera intentionally never focuses long enough upon them, and so they serve as a homogenous expression of generic global culture, which literally wipes out an indigenous Guarani-Kaiowá life in the face of its dominance. Birdwatchers presents Guarani-Kaiowá subjects as fragile, with a lack of agency through dress. There is an increased awareness as the film progresses that Bechi sought to capture the indigenous group before their presumed demise, in a process that drew on salvage ethnography discussed in the third and fifth chapter of

MUNDIALIZATION

161

this book. In contrast, National Geographic Brasil presented the Guarani-Kaiowá as individuals performing their own subjectivities, rather than as objects of a controlling and dehumanizing ethnographic gaze. Whereas Bechis fashioned the Guarani-Kaiowá as doomed, on the receiving end of the asymmetrical global relations of power, National Geographic Brasil highlighted their vitality through mundialization, and integrated a critique of Western documentary photography and ethnographic image-making into a representation of Guarani-Kaiowá dress. This chapter has used Ortiz’s concept of mundialization to examine three snapshots that were published within an article in National Geographic Brasil in August 2013. Mundialization can be understood as the culmination of the four theoretical concepts employed in the previous four chapters. It has been used to consider how Brazilian cultural expressions are no longer fashioned in-between Brazil and the West, but are manifestations competing against many others in a global system. This methodological framework has been particularly useful for an examination of National Geographic Brasil in the post-2010 period, when the magazine began to position itself more pragmatically and dynamically in relation to National Geographic. I return to Ortiz’s assertion that “there is no global culture; only a process of cultural mundialization” (2006: 402). This fluid concept has highlighted the improvisational nature of Guarani-Kaiowá dress, which must be understood within the context of the tekoha, the framework that denotes the physical places that the Guarani-Kaiowá inhabit, but also their situational adjustment to a changing immediate environment. The first case study was examined as it was published within the magazine. It consisted of four posed portraits—of which I focused on one—that enabled the subjects to self-fashion and self-present before the photographer’s gaze. The tactile qualities of dress encouraged the National Geographic Brasil viewer to vicariously experience the fascination that the Guarani-Kaiowá have with their tekoha. There was a tangible sense that the magazine had taken a distance from its subjects, providing a space for them to stage fanciful versions of themselves, rather than imposing a style of representation upon them. This photographic approach enabled the Guarani-Kaiowá to demonstrate their individual sartorial interactions with the technological and economic processes of globalization, and revealed no overt standardization or homogenization to their representation, beyond the grid formation in which subjects were presented on the magazine page. Cohen and Siqueira clearly had an awareness of Guarani-Kaiowá dress practices as a form of mundialization, which was a development on each of the photographers and authors interviewed in the previous chapters of this book, none of whom professed to be particularly interested in dress. This worked to undermine the asymmetrical relations of power between National Geographic Brasil and Brazilian subjects. The second and third case studies were examined as presented on the iPad edition of National Geographic Brasil. The range of tactile textures in the

162

FASHIONING BRAZIL

photographic portrait of Ava Tape Rendy’i, which was re-presented for the screen in high resolution, ostensibly brought the viewer closer to the subject, and encouraged an awareness of his ability to self-fashion. Yet there was an overriding sense that the subject had been posed, or fashioned, by Siqueira, in a dramatic mise-en-scène that drew on the Western art-historical canon. There was a standardization inherent to this representational gesture, which drew a veil over the subject’s discriminate negotiation of dress from two different cultural systems, Western and indigenous. The final case study was a short film, produced exclusively for the digital edition of the magazine. The re-presentation of dress in motion, and the close-up and tactile qualities of film, provided a substitution for touch and encouraged the National Geographic Brasil viewer to perceive the subjects as self-fashioning individuals within a three-dimensional, multisensory framework. This mode of representation, not previously examined within this book, produced an intersubjective relationship between GuaraniKaiowá subjects and the viewer, drawing his or her attention to the individual, mundialized processes of the indigenous group’s sartorial interactions with global culture. Rather than an oversaturation and desensitization of imagery presented on the digital screen, it prompted a more intimate and nuanced response from the viewer, as the Guarani-Kaiowá were given an opportunity to represent their own subjectivities through dress, gesture, gaze, and performance. National Geographic Brasil’s representational strategies have illuminated potentials for National Geographic to venture into new modes of digital representation that can continue to resist the processes of objectification, stereotyping and appropriation that have been associated with the magazine in scholarship to date, and which could make use of the digital technologies available in a global context. Scholars are yet to examine editions of National Geographic that have been produced in different locations throughout the world; my analysis has demonstrated that this would provide an important avenue for future research, to examine the cross-cultural processes of negotiation that have taken place with the US edition, and to consider how the meanings of dress, but also its representation, never speak to a single audience, but are decoded and recoded as clothing travels through diverse sites and locations. Like National Geographic, as National Geographic Brasil has developed as a magazine, it has demonstrated more of a concern with issues of materiality that are central to the representation of dress as image and object, and its diversion into film in this final snapshot encapsulated its ability to promote identification with dressed Brazilian subjects.

AFTERWORD

The temporal and geographical scope of this book, as well as its primary focus on dress and fashion, emerged from dissatisfaction that academic discourse to date has not considered how the popular “scientific” and educational magazine National Geographic may have fashioned Brazilian subjects within the context of contemporary social life, which has unequivocally been transformed by global economic and cultural exchange. Equally, and to ensure that a Western perspective was not privileged, I sought to consider how Brazilian subjects have self-fashioned, and demonstrated a resilience, ingenuity, and inventiveness in negotiating and modifying objects and ideas that have materialized through cross-cultural encounter. I selected Brazil as a case study due to its long history of cultural and ethnic diversity, which is demonstrated in the multifaceted nature of Brazilian dress and fashion. Brazil embodies the slipperiness of the tensions between the “Western” and the “non-Western,” telling complex tales through dress and fashion—both emphatically transcultural forms of expression—that slip between the cracks of this deeply rooted cultural division. Such complexities raise interesting questions about how a recognizable image of Brazil has been narrated to an increasingly global readership by means of National Geographic and, since its establishment in May 2000, National Geographic Brasil. My multidisciplinary method of analysis throughout this book has used five Brazilian cultural theorists, each providing a crucial opportunity to understand contact between the United States and Brazil not solely from the perspective of National Geographic, but also by considering the practices and lived experience of dress for self-fashioning Brazilian subjects. Throughout the history of National Geographic’s documentation of Brazil, the magazine has used clothing and/ or bodily adornment to project impressions and preconceptions onto Brazilian culture. Dress has been used as a medium to portray and invent Brazil, which is at times presumed to be similar to, and at other times vastly different from, the everyday reality of the National Geographic viewer. Yet dress has also been used by National Geographic to articulate the complexities of Brazilian culture, in which local and global accommodations and resistances take place on a regular basis between different cultural systems. By documenting a more multifarious population through dress, National Geographic has recognized the dynamism

164

AFTERWORD

and flexibility of a truly transcultural Brazil that can not only sartorially but also, potentially, economically and politically bridge the artificial divide between the Western and the non-Western. The flexibility of dress styles testifies to the fluidity of identity, which is never fixed, but in a process of continually becoming. This has particular relevance within Brazil, a heterogeneous country that encompasses so many different identities, whether indigenous, European, African, or hybrid, as well as clothing cultures. Dress is, after all, a primary expression of cultural identity/identities. In all its variety, Brazilian dress tells stories—personal, local, and global—from both sides of the divide. It has been used by National Geographic to categorize difference, and it has been employed by Brazilian subjects as a vehicle to articulate a sense of who they are, in relation to when and where they are. Adopting Brazil as a geographical framework to analyze Brazilian dress and fashion practices is of course a problematic notion. Countries do not neatly fit into biological or cultural groupings, just as the world is not made up of discreet nations that never interact and exist in isolation. This book has highlighted the ambiguities and fluidities of Brazilian dress, which have enabled it to operate in unexpected and frequently strategic ways, crossing borders, passing through different hands, acquiring new values. At the same time as Brazilians have played with notions of national identity to construct personal and public subjectivities, it is impossible to reduce Brazilian dress to a single culture, nationality, or geographical region. It is the complexities of dress and fashion that have provided the analytical tools for a deeper understanding of Brazilian cultural identity; of global networks of exchange; and of National Geographic, which must now be reconsidered as a key visual site for uncovering transnational flows of objects and ideas. The complexities, nuances, and tensions that exist between different cultures, ethnicities, nationalities, and identities play a key role in constructing our sense of self and our awareness of others. National Geographic has enabled not only National Geographic viewers but also Brazilian subjects to engage selectively with the narrative potential of dress—as image, object, text, idea, and experience intertwined—and in doing so, to fashion their interconnected identities in a process that is continually becoming, and never static. I hope this book, in turning sustained attention to the global production, distribution, and consumption of dress and fashion within Brazil, can contribute to a more holistic approach to fashion history, by providing a space for Brazilian fashion histories and voices in a range of different contexts to be heard.

NOTES

Chapter 1 1 That these scholars happen to be male is coincidental. To actively search for Brazilian cultural theorists who are female would be to falsify the primary material examined. This book is keen to treat the primary content carefully, and to allow it to speak for itself as far as possible, rather than to search for a methodological framework that fulfils a narrow agenda of the author’s own. 2 Andrade, for instance, was born in Sao Paulo in 1890 and lived there for the duration of his life, but was of mixed European and indigenous ancestry. Stam, also of mixed parentage, was born in the United States in 1941 and completed his PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Berkeley in 1977. He has described his three-decade “intense, palimpsestic cohabitation with all things Brazilian” as “the fruit of a long personal connection to Latin America due to an important part of [his] family living there.” Santiago, on the other hand, was born in Brazil in 1936, received his PhD in comparative literature at the Sorbonne in 1961, and has taught in the United States and Brazil. His personal experience of living between different cultures has surely sparked his concern with Latin American hybridity. Roberto Schwarz was born in Vienna in 1938 but grew up in Sao Paulo, received his PhD at the Sorbonne in Latin American Studies in 1976, and currently lives and teaches in Brazil. His formulation of “misplaced ideas” can be understood as a reflection of his personal experiences of feeling “out of place” between these different cultures. Finally, Ortiz’s conception of the neologism “mundialization” reflects his hybrid identity, as a Brazilian (b. 1947) who was educated in France and received his PhD at l’Université de Paris VIII in 1975, but now lives and works in Brazil. 3 Although each issue of National Geographic produced to date is published and available to purchase inexpensively as a digital collection on DVD, the National Geographic Society is far less willing to allow scholars and journalists access to its rich archival material, which includes correspondence sent between editors, contributors, and readers, working drafts of articles, and unpublished photographs. I was extremely privileged to be given access to this material, which adds to the originality and depth of this book.

166

NOTES

Chapter 4 1 In 1994, National Geographic expanded to become part of the profit-seeking corporation National Geographic Ventures, which included television, website, books such as National Geographic Fashion, and collected issues of the magazine reproduced on a CDROM. These were separate from the nonprofit organization that included the magazine until September 2015 when National Geographic merged with 21st Century Fox. 2 To clarify my use of the term “ethnic” dress, Margaret Maynard defines it as “attire characteristic of a specific language, religious and ethnographic social group and may be worn by diasporic peoples who retain allegiance to their culture heritage. The term ‘ethnic’ is preferred to traditional, which implies a form of unchanging attire” (2004: 12). 3 Howes drew on Virginia Postrel’s understanding of how the tactile qualities of fashion items affect a consumer’s feeling and evaluation of them. In The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value is Remaking Commerce, Culture and Consciousness (2003), Postrel writes: “People pet Armani clothes because the fabrics feel so good. These clothes attract us as visual, tactile creature, not because they are ‘rich in meaning’ but because they are rich in pleasure” (Postrel quoted in Howes 2005: 287). 4 One example is the fashion shoot, “Viva Brazil!! Staring Gisele and New Girls (And Boys!) From Ipanema,” written by A. A. Gill, and accompanied with photographs by Mario Testino. It was published in Vanity Fair in September 2007 and capitalized on a stereotypical tropical Brazilian identity of samba, sun and carnival. It included Brazilian models, artists, actors and musicians, including Gisele Bundchen, Adriana Lima and Bebel Gilberto, but wearing Western fashion labels, as opposed to those of successful Brazilian designers. This reinforced an idea of Brazil as a source of exoticism to invigorate the Western fashion system, but failed to critically acknowledge Brazil as a potential competitor to it (Andrade and Root 2010).

Part 2 1 National Geographic Brasil followed the Japanese edition (April 1995), European Spanish edition (October 1997), Latin American Spanish edition (November 1997), Italian edition (February 1998), Hebrew edition (June 1998), Greek edition (October 1998), Polish edition (October 1999), German edition (October 1999), and French edition (October 1999). 2 The latter was complicated in 1994 with the establishment of the for-profit tax-paying National Geographic Ventures and, most recently, in September 2015, with the controversial announcement that all National Geographic outputs would be merged with 21st Century Fox.

Chapter 5 1 Regrettably, I was unable to include a photograph of this image as it was presented within the July 2000 edition of National Geographic Brasil. It is impossible to obtain issues of National Geographic Brasil outside of Brazil since no libraries in Europe

NOTES

167

hold copies. You need to be a Brazilian resident with an ID number to purchase copies on Mercado Libre, the South American version of eBay. Editora Abril do not sell or lend any archival copies of the magazine. 2 The name “Little Africa” is attributed to Brazilian composer and painter Heitor dos Prazeres (1898–1966), who lived near Praça Onze. Bruno Carvalho (2013) provides an interesting analysis of the area during the first decades of the twentieth century, when “Little Africa” constituted the uncivilized Other area of Rio de Janeiro, a point of contrast to the beautiful, modernizing South Zone. 3 Although not referring explicitly to Angolan immigrants’ identification with hip-hop, Derek Pardue has provided an informative ethnographic study of Brazilian hip-hop, predominantly as it has emerged and developed on the periphery of Sao Paulo in recent years. He has pointed out how Brazilian hip-hoppers “borrow and recast hiphop signs they associated with the U.S.” through a process of cultural appropriation and negotiation (2008: 6). 4 The following studies provide an informative introduction to how Japanese immigrants have simultaneously assimilated with Brazilian customs, but also expressed a sense of loyalty to Japanese cultural practices throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Searching for Home Abroad: Japanese Brazilians and Transnationalism (Lesser 2003); A Discontented Diaspora: Japanese Brazilians and the Meanings of Ethnic Militancy, 1960–1980 (Lesser 2007); Japanese Brazilian Return Migration in Transnational Perspective (Tsuda 2003).

Chapter 6 1 There are three subgroups of the Guarani living in Brazil: the Mbyá, Nandeva, and Kaiowá, each with subtle differences in religious orientation, social and political practices, and linguistic forms and customs. 2 Gary Needham has noted that “clothes are chosen for the screen because they film well rather than wear well and this also extends to the computer screen—where fashion images exist as electronic information, files and coding. The way clothes look, and how certain fabrics and colours will appear on the digital screen, are now taken into consideration at the level of design and production” (2013: 104). 3 This Western art-historical canon included paintings such as, to cite but one example, the early-fifteenth-century Ghent altarpiece, executed by Jan van Eyck in 1430–42.

REFERENCES

Andrade, O. (1924), “Manifesto of Pau-Brasil Poetry,” Correio da Manha, March 18. Andrade, O. (1928), “Manifesto Antropófago,” Revista de Antropofagia 1 (1): 6–7. Andrade, M. (1942), “O Movimento Modernista,” Rio de Janeiro, Casa de Estudante do Brasil. Andrade, O. (1986), “Manifesto of Pau-Brasil Poetry,” S. M. de Sá Rego (trans.), Latin American Literary Review 14 (27): 184–87. Andrade, O. (1991), “Cannibalist Manifesto,” L. Bary (trans.), Latin American Literary Review 19 (38): 38–47. Andrade, R. (2005), “Mappin Stores: Adding an English Touch to the São Paulo Fashion Scene,” in R. Root (ed.), The Latin American Fashion Reader, 176–87, New York: Berg. Andrade, R. and R. Root (2010), “Dress, Body and Culture in Brazil,” in M. B. Schevill (ed.), Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, vol. 2, Latin America and the Caribbean, 421–25, Oxford: Berg. Anon. (1940), “A Visita do Sr. Presidente getúlio vargas a são paulo,” O Estado de S. Paulo, 28 April: 7. Anon. (1941), “South American Visitors: Five Beautiful Neighbors from Brazil, Peru and the Argentine . . . recent visitors to the U.S.,” Vogue, July: 22. Anon. (1971a), Letter to NGS Secretary on September 3, Microfiche File No. 21.121397, National Geographic Society Archives, Washington D.C. Anon. (1971b), Letter to M. B. Grosvenor on October 5, Microfiche File No. 21.121397, National Geographic Society Archives, Washington D.C. Anon. (2011), “In Brazil, Booming Economy Boosts Apparel Business,” available online: http://apparel.edgl.com/news/in-brazil,-booming-economy-boosts-apparelbusiness75616 (accessed June 13, 2015). Anon. (2013), “National Geographic Magazine Devotes 125th Anniversary to Celebrating Power of Photography: Continues Evolution on Web and Beyond,” available online: http://press.nationalgeographic.com/2013/09/16/national-geographic-magazinecelebrates-power-of-photography/ (accessed July 18, 2017). Anon. (2015a), “Brazil: Clashes with Indigenous Movement Will Rise,” available online: https://www.oxan.com/ (accessed February 12, 2015). Anon. (2015b), “Guarani Kaiowa: Introduction,” available online: http://pib. socioambiental.org/en/povo/guarani-kaiowa (accessed June 3, 2015). Appadurai, A. (1986), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, New York: Cambridge University Press.

REFERENCES

169

Appadurai, A. (1996), Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Arena, F. (2011), Lusophone Africa: Beyond Independence, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Arnold, R. (2009), The American Look: Fashion, Sportswear and The Image of Women in 1930s and 1940s, New York, London: I. B. Tauris. Arruda, R. (2013), “ONG associa alta taxa de suícidio entre índios jovens a problemas fundiários,” available online: http://politica.estadao.com.br/blogs/roldao-arruda/ongassocia-alta-taxa-de-suicidio-entre-indios-jovens-a-problemas-fundiarios/ (accessed March 15, 2015). Avelar, I. (1999), The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning, Durham: Duke University Press. Azoulay, A. (2008), The Civil Contract of Photography, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Bakhtin, M. (1981), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Austin: University of Texas Press. Barber, B. (1996), Jihad Versus McWorld, New York: Ballantine Books. Barker, J. M. (2009), The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience, Berkeley: University of California Press. Barker, F., P. Hulme, and M. Iverson, eds. (1998), Cannibalism and the Colonial World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barthes, R. (1977), Image-Music-Text, London: Fontana. Barthes, R. (1981), Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, New York: Noonday Press. Bauman, Z. (2000), Liquid Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press. Beliel, R. (2003), “Mais Brasil: Angolanos no Rio. Fugitivos da Guerra em seu pais, imigrantes de Angola vivem hoje em counidade no centro velho do Rio de Janeiro— onde, há um sécolo, influências africanas germinaram o samba carioca,” National Geographic Brasil, February: 114–23. Beliel, R. (2014), Email Correspondence with Elizabeth Kutesko, April 4. Belting, H. (2011), An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Bhabha, H. (1990), “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in The Location of Culture, 85–92, London: Routledge. Birdwatchers (2009), [Film] Dir. Marco Bechis, Italy: Rai Cinema. Bloom, L. (1994), “Constructing Whiteness: Popular Science and National Geographic in the Age of Multiculturalism,” Configurations 2 (1): 15–32. Boca de Lixo (1993), Dir. Eduardo Coutinho, Brazil: Kinoscopio. Bonadio, M. C. (2014), “Brazilian Fashion and the ‘Exotic’,” International Journal of Fashion Studies 1 (1): 57–74. Bonadio, M. C. and M. E. A. Guimarães (2017), “Telenovelas: Consumption and Dissemination of a Brazilian Fashion,” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture 20 (2): 209–28. Bourdieu, P. (1990), The Logic of Practice, Cambridge: Polity Press. Braden, R. (2013), Conversation with Elizabeth Kutesko, March 22. Braga, J. and L. Andre do Prado (2011), História da Moda no Brasil—das influências as autorreferências, Sao Paulo: Pyxis Editorial. Brandini, V. (2009), “Fashion Brazil: South American Style, Culture and Industry,” in E. Paulicelli and H. Clark (eds.), The Fabric of Cultures: Fashion, Identity and Globalization, 164–76, New York: Routledge.

170

REFERENCES

Bruno, H. A. (1925), “Airplanes Aid Explorers in Brazil,” Popular Mechanics, November: 786–90. Bryan, C. D. (1987), The National Geographic Society: 100 years of Adventure and Discovery, New York: H. N. Abrams. Burke, P. (2009), Cultural Hybridity, Cambridge: Polity. Carvalho, M. L. M. (1996), Contemporary Brazilian Photography, New York: Verso. Carvalho, B. (2013), “‘Beyond the Belle Epoque: On the Border of a ‘Divided City’,” in Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro, 74–103, Liverpool: University Press. Castilho, K. and C. Garcia (2001), Moda Brasil, Fragmentos de un Vestir Tropical, Sao Paulo: Anhembi Morumbi. Cheang, S. (2013), “‘To The Ends of the Earth’: Fashion and Ethnicity in the Vogue Fashion Shoot,” in D. Bartlett, S. Cole, and A. Rocamora (eds.), Fashion Media: Past and Present, 35–45, London: Bloomsbury. Cheang, S. (2017), Transnational Fashion History: Some Problems in Twentieth-Century Chinesesness [Lecture], Courtauld Institute of Art, London, June 19. Clifford, J. (1987), “Of Other Peoples: Beyond the ‘Salvage’ Paradigm,” in H. Foster (ed.), Discussions in Contemporary Culture, 121–50, Seattle: Bay Press. Cobb, C. E. (2002), “Where Brazil was Born: Bahia,” National Geographic, August: 62–81. Cobb, C. E. (2015), “On Assignment: Bahia. Field Notes from author Charles E. Cobb, Jr,” available online: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0208/feature5/ assignment1.html (accessed February 11, 2015). Cohen, N. S. and P. Siqueira (2013), “Guaranis: terra vermelha. Eles acreditam ter uma ligação espiritual com o lugar em que seus antepassados viveram. No Mato Grosso do Sul, essa crença há décadas banha de sangue o território indigena,” National Geographic Brasil, August: 116–31 Coy, W. (1996), “In Photographic Memory,” in H. Amelunxen and S. Iglhaut (eds.), Photography After Photography: Memory and Representation in the Digital Age, Amsterdam: G & B Arts. Craik, J. (1993), The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion, London: Routledge. Demos, T. J. (2013), The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis, Durham: Duke University Press. di Bello, P. (2005), “Vision and Touch: Photography and Women’s Popular Culture in the Nineteenth Century,” in V. Tomalin and S. Popple (eds.), Visual Delights: Exhibition and Reception, 3–16, Eastleigh: John Libbey Publishing. di Bello, P., C. Wilson, and Z. Shamoon, eds. (2012), The Photobook: From Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond, London: I. B. Tauris. Dominis, J. (1971), “Taming the Green Hell,” Life, 12 November: 30–36. Douglas, M. (2004), Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London: Routledge. Dunn, C. (2001), Brutality Garden: Tropicalia and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Dutilleux, J. P. (1988), “Primal Sting,” Vogue, June: 244–307. Dyer, R. (1997), White, New York: Routledge. Edwards, E. (1997), “Ordering Others: Photography, Anthropologies and Taxonomies,” in C. Illes and R. Roberts (eds.), Invisible Light: Photography and Classification in Art, Science and the Everyday, 54–68, Oxford: Museum of Modern Art.

REFERENCES

171

Edwards, E. (2001), Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums, New York: Berg. Edwards, E. (2004), Photographs, Objects, Histories: On the Materiality of Images, New York: Routledge. Eicher, J. B. (1995), Dress and Ethnicity: Change Across Space and Time, Oxford: Berg. Eicher, J. B. (2001), “Introduction: The Fashion of Dress,” in Cathy Newman (ed.), National Geographic Fashion, 16–27, Washington DC: National Geographic Society. Eicher, J. B. (2014), Conversation with Elizabeth Kutesko, September 5. Eicher, J. B., E. Roach-Higgins, and K. K. P. Johnson, eds. (1995), Dress and Identity, New York: Fairchild Publications. Emerson, R. M. (1995), Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Entwistle, J. (2000), The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press. Evans, C. (2007), Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness, New Haven: Yale University Press. Evans, C. and M. Thornton (1989), Women and Fashion: A New Look, London: Quartet. Foucault, M. (1977), Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison, New York: Pantheon Books. Friedman, J. (1997), “Global Crises, the Struggle for Cultural Identity and Intellectual Pork-Barrelling: Cosmopolitans versus Locals, Ethnics and Nationals in an Era of DeHegemonisation,” in P. Werbner and T. Modood (eds.), Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism, 70–89, London: Zed Books. Friedman, T. (1998), The Lexus and the Olive Tree, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Garb, T. (2011), Figures and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography, London: V & A Publishing. Garcia Canclini, N. (1995), Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, Minnesota: University of Minneapolis Press. Garrett, W. (1988), “Within the Yellow Border,” National Geographic, December: 270–86. Gazzola, A. L. and W. M. Miranda (2001), “Introduction: Silviano Santiago, a Voice In-Between,” in The Space In-Between: Essays on Latin American Culture, 1–8, London: Duke University Press. Gill, A. A. (2007), “Viva Brazil!! Staring Gisele and New Girls (And Boys!) From Ipanema,” Vanity Fair, September: 316–34. Gilman, S. L. (1999), Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gorney, C. (2011), “Machisma: How A Mix Of Female Empowerment And Steamy Soap Operas Helped Bring Down Brazil’s Fertility Rate and Stoke Its Vibrant Economy,” National Geographic, September: 96–121. Gorney, C. (2013), Conversation with Elizabeth Kutesko, May 24. Grandin, G. (2010), Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, New York: Henry Holt & Company. Green, J. (2010), We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States, Durham: Duke University Press. Griffiths Belt, A. (2014), Conversation with Elizabeth Kutesko, September 24. Griffiths, A. (2002), Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology and Turn-Of-TheCentury Visual Culture, New York: Columbia University Press. Grundberg, A. (1988), “A Quintessentially American View of the World,” New York Times, September 18: 11–12.

172

REFERENCES

Guth, C. (2004), Longfellow’s Tattoos: Tourism, Collecting and Japan, Seattle: University of Washington Press. Hamilton Rice, A. (1921), Paper given at Royal Geographic Society on February 21, Hamilton Rice Expedition 1919-1920 Papers, Royal Geographic Society, London. Harding, R. (2000), A Refuge in Thunder: Candomblé and Alternative Spaces of Blackness, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Harvey, D. A. (2015), “On Assignment: Bahia. Field Notes from Photographer David Alan Harvey,” available online: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0208/feature5/ assignment2.html (accessed June 4, 2015). Hawkins, S. L. (2011), American Iconographic: National Geographic, Global Culture and the Visual Imagination, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Hays, C. L. (1997), “Seeing Green in a Yellow Border,” The New York Times, August 3: 12–13. Hemming, J. (2003), Die if You Must: Brazilian Indians in the Twentieth Century, London: Pan. Hendrickson, H., ed. (1996), Clothing and Difference: Embodied Identities in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Hess, D. J. and R. A. DaMatta (1995), Brazilian Puzzle: Culture on the Borderlands of the Western World, New York: Columbia University Press. Hestor, J. (1968), “Pioneer Methods in Salvage Anthropology,” Anthropological Quarterly 41 (3): 132–46. Hollander, A. (1993), Seeing Through Clothes, Berkeley: University of California Press. Howes, D. (2005), “HYPERESTHESIA, or, The Sensual Logic of Late Capitalism,” in D. Howes (ed.), Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, 281–303, New York: Berg. Hoy, S. (1995), Chasing Dirt: the American Pursuit of Cleanliness, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Huntington, S. (1996), The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York: Simon and Schuster. Ilha das Flores (1989), [Film] Dir. Jorge Furtado, Brazil: Casa de Cinema de Porto Alegre. Introna, L. D. and F. M. Ilharco (2006), “On the Meaning of Screens: Towards a Phenomenological Account of Screenness,” Human Studies 29: 57–76. Issit, M. L. (2009), Hippies: A Guide to an American Subculture, Santa Barbara: Greenwood Press. Jauregui, Carlos (2012), “Antropófagia,” in Dictionary of Latin American Cultural Studies, 25, Gainesville: The University Press of Florida. Jones, L. (2001), “Fashionable Influence: National Geographic Celebrates Book That Documents Fashion History,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 8: 20. Jorgenson, D. L. (1989), Participant Observation: A Methodology for Human Studies, New York: Sage Publications. Joyce, S. N. (2012), Brazilian Telenovelas and the Myth of Racial Democracy, New York: Lexington Books. Judge, J. R. (1987), Letter to J. McPhee on August 12, Microfiche File No. 510-1999.115517, National Geographic Society Archives, Washington D.C. Kaiser, S. (2012), Fashion and Cultural Studies, London: Berg. Kawamura, Y. (2011), Doing Research in Fashion and Dress: An Introduction to Qualitative Methods, New York: Berg. Kemp, M. (2001), “Global: Fashion’s Second Circuit, Brazil’s Big Draw,” Women’s Wear Daily, July 24: 16–17.

REFERENCES

173

Kesselman, M. (2004), Introduction to Politics of the Developing World, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Kraidy, M. M. (2005), Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Kutesko, E. (2015), “Brazilian Women’s Lycra Clothing,” in M. B. Schevill (ed.), Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion: Latin America and the Caribbean, London: Bloomsbury. Legg, B. (2016), “The Bicultural Sex Symbol: Sonia Braga in Brazilian and North American Popular Culture,” in S. J. Albuquerque and K. Bishop-Sanchez (eds.), Performing Brazil: Essays on Culture, Identity and the Performing Arts, 202–23, University of Wisconsin Press. Lesser, J. (2003), Searching for Home Abroad: Japanese Brazilians and Transnationalism, Durham: Duke University Press. Lesser, J. (2007), A Discontented Diaspora: Japanese Brazilians and the Meanings of Ethnic Militancy, 1960-1980, Durham: Duke University Press. Lesser, J. (2013), Immigration, Ethnicity and National Identity in Brazil, 1808 to the Present, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lévi-Strauss, C. (2011), Tristes Tropiques, London: Penguin. Levy, T. (2001), “Tobin Levy’s Fashion Book Reviews: National Geographic Fashion,” available online: http://www.lookonline.com/newbookreview-4.html (accessed May 21, 2013). Livingston, J. (1988), “The Best Photos from National Geographic,” in Odyssey: The Best Photos from National Geographic, 19–38, Washington DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art. Lutz, C. A. and J. L. Collins (1993), Reading National Geographic, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. MacKinney-Valentin, M. (2017), Fashioning Identity: Status Ambivalence in Contemporary Fashion, London: Bloomsbury. Manovich, L. (1995), “An Archaeology of a Computer Screen,” in NewMediaTopia, Moscow: Soros Center for Contemporary Art. Marks, L. (2000), The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses, Durham: Duke University Press. Marks, L. (2002), Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Martin, N. (2015), “On Beckton Alp: Iain Sinclair, Garbage and ‘Obscenery’,” in C. Lindner and M. Meissner (eds.), Global Garbage: Urban Imaginaries of Waste, Excess, and Abandonment, 207–18, London: Routledge. Martins, L. (2013), Photography and Documentary Film in the Making of Modern Brazil, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Masiello, F. (2001), The Art of Transition: Latin American Culture and Neoliberal Crisis, Durham: Duke University Press. Maynard, M. (2004), Dress and Globalisation, Manchester: Manchester University Press. McIntyre, L. (1988), “‘Last Days of Eden’: Rondonia’s Urueu-Wau-Wau Indians,” National Geographic, December: 800–87. McIntyre, L. (1990), Exploring South America, New York: C. N. Potter. Mendes, S. and N. Rees-Roberts (2013), “Branding Brazilian Fashion: Global Visibility and Intercultural Perspectives,” in S. Bruzzi and P. Church Gibson (eds.), Fashion Cultures Revisited: Theories, Explorations and Analysis, 31–42, London: Routledge. Mendonça, P. De (2014), Conversation with Elizabeth Kutesko, April 25.

174

REFERENCES

Mercer, K. (2005), “Diaspora Aesthetics and Visual Culture,” in H. J. Elam and K. Jackson (eds.), Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture, 141–61, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Merleau-Pointy, M. (2002), Phenomenology of Perception, London and New York: Routledge. Milgram, L. (2006), “Refashioning Commodities: Women and the Sourcing of Secondhand Clothing in the Philippines,” Anthropologica 46 (2): 189–202. Mizrahi, M. (2011), “‘Brazilian Jeans’: Materiality, Body and Seduction at Rio de Janeiro’s Funk Ball,” in D. Miller and S. Woodward (eds.), Global Denim, 103–26, Oxford: Berg. Mohs Gage, K. (2016), “Moda da Bahia: An Analysis of Contemporary Vendor Dress in Salvador,” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture 20 (2): 153–80. Moraes, M. (2000), “Grandes Reportagens: A terra é verde. Formigas gigantes, onças à espreita, piranhas, corredeiras, mosquitos, malaria. As descobertas e os sustos de uma exoedição de hidroavião à Amazônica em 1924,” National Geographic Brasil, July: 154–61. Mosqueira, G. (2003), “Global Islands,” in Creolite and Creolization: Documenta 11 Platform 3, Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz. Motley, C. M. and G. R. Henderson (2008), “The Global Hip-Hop Diaspora: Understanding the Culture,” Journal of Business Research 61: 243–53. Nead, L. (2005), Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-century London, London: Yale University Press. Nemerov, A. (2013), Wartime Kiss: Visions of the Moment in the 1940s, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Newbery, M. (2007), “The Brazilian Swimwear Industry,” in Global Market Review of Swimwear and Beachwear—Forecasts to 2013, 71–80, Bromsgrove, UK: Aroq. Newman, C. (2001), National Geographic Fashion, Washington DC: National Geographic Society. Newman, C. (2017), Conversation with Elizabeth Kutesko, August 12. Niessen, S., A. M. Leshkowich, and C. Jones (2003), Re-Orienting Fashion: The Globalization of Asian Dress, New York: Berg. Nordstrom, A. D. (1992), “Wood Nymphs and Patriots: Depictions of Samoans in The National Geographic Magazine,” Visual Sociology 7 (2): 49–59. Nugent, S. (2007) Scoping the Amazon: Image, Icon, Ethnography, Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. O’Connor, K. (2011), Lycra: How a Fiber Shaped America, New York: University College. O Bandido da Luz Vermelha (1968), [Film] Dir. Rogerio Sganzerla, Brazil: Urano Filmes. O Fio da Memória (1991), [Film] Dir. Eduardo Coutinho, Brazil: Cinefilmes. Olson, J. S. (1991), The Indians of Central and South America: An Ethnohistorical Dictionary, Westport: Greenwood. Ortiz, F. (1995), Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, London: Duke University Press. Ortiz, R. (2000), “Popular Culture, Modernity and Nation,” in V. Schelling (ed.), Through the Kaleidoscope: The Experience of Modernity in Latin America, 199–218, New York: Verso. Ortiz, R. (2004), “Social Sciences and the English Language,” Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais 19 (54): 5–22. Ortiz, R. (2006), “Problematizing Global Knowledge—Genealogies of the Global/ Globalizations,” Theory, Culture & Society 23: 401–03. Palmer, A. and H. Clark (2005), Old Clothes, New Looks: Secondhand Fashion, Oxford: Berg.

REFERENCES

175

Pardue, D. (2008), Ideologies of Marginality in Brazilian Hip-Hop: Retelling Marginality Through Music, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Pauly, P. J. (1979), “The World and All That is In It: The National Geographic Society, 1888-1918,” American Quarterly 31 (4): 517–32. Peixoto-Mehrtens, C. (2010), Urban Space and National Identity in Early Twentieth Century São Paulo, Brazil: Crafting Modernity, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Phillips, H. A. (1942a), “Air Cruising Through New Brazil: A National Geographic Reporter Spots Vast Resources which the Republic’s war Declaration Adds to Strength of United Nations,” National Geographic, October: 503–36. Phillips, H. A. (1942b), Letter to J. R. Hildebrand on June 18, Microfiche File No. 510-1999.116948, National Geographic Society Archives, Washington DC. Pieterse, J. N. (2009), Globalization and Culture: Global Melange, 2nd ed., New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Pinney, C. (1997), Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Port, M. V. de (2007), “Bahian White: The Dispersion of Candomblé Imagery in the Public Sphere of Bahia,” Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief 3 (2): 242–72. Powell, R. J. (2008), Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture, Cambridge: University of Chicago Press. Pratt, M. L. (2008), Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, New York: Routledge. Puttkamer, W. J. (1971), “Brazil protects her Cinta Largas,” National Geographic, September: 420–44. Queiroz, L. A. de (2002), Turismo na Bahia: Estrataégias para o Desenvolvimento, Salvador: Secretara da Cultura e Turismo. Rabine, L. (2002), The Global Circulation of African Fashion, New York: Berg. Raoni (1987), Dir. Jean-Pierre Dutilleux, Brazil: Pierre Louis Saguez Produções Cinematográficas. Raub, K. (2011), “The Full Brazilian,” New York Times T Style Holiday Magazine 4 (December): 160–69. Resende, B. (2000), “Brazilian Modernism: The Canonised Revolution,” in V. Schelling (ed.), Through The Kaleidoscope: The Experience of Modernity in Latin America, 199–218, London and New York: Verso. Ribeiro, R. (2010), “Mar de Dunas: vento e chuvas esculpiram a paisagem dos Lençois Maranheses. Mas esse parque nacional brasileiro enfrenta problemas,” National Geographic Brasil July: 50–65. Ribeiro, R. (2014), Conversation with Elizabeth Kutesko, March 23. Ritzer, G. (1992), The McDonaldization of Society, Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge. Rocamora, A. (2013), “Personal Fashion Blogs: Screens and Mirrors in Digital SelfPortraits,” in S. Bruzzi and P. Church Gibson (eds.), Fashion Cultures Revisited, 112–27, London: Routledge. Roett, R. (2011), The New Brazil, Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press. Rondon, C. M. da S. (1946), Indios do Brasil: Do centro, noroeste e sul de Mato-Grosso, Conselho Nacional de Proteção aos Índios: Ministério da Agricultura. Rondon, C. M. da S. (1953a), Indios do Brasil: Cabeceiras do Xingu/ Rio Araguaia e Oiapoque, Conselho Nacional de Proteção aos Índios: Ministério da Agricultura. Rondon, C. M. da S. (1953b), Indios do Brasil: Norte do Rio Amazonas, Conselho Nacional de Proteção aos Índios: Ministério da Agricultura.

176

REFERENCES

Ro, R. (1998), Have Gun Will Travel: The Spectacular Rise and Violent Fall of Death Row Records, New York: Doubleday. Romo, A. A. (2010), Brazil’s Living Museum: Race, Reform and Tradition in Bahia, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Roosevelt, T. (1914), Through the Brazilian Wilderness, New York: Scribner. Root, D. (1996), Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation and the Commodification of Difference, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Rosas, R. (2008), “The Gambiarra: Considerations on a Recombinatory Technology,” in M. Boler (ed.), Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times, 343–54, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Roth-Gordon, J. (2016), Race and the Brazilian Body: Blackness, Whiteness and Everyday Language in Rio de Janeiro, Berkeley: University of California Press. Rothenberg, T. J. (2007), Presenting America’s World: Strategies of Innocence in National Geographic Magazine, 1888-1945, Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Company. Santana Pinho, P. de (2008), “African American Roots Tourism in Brazil,” Latin American Perspectives 35 (3): 70–86. Santiago, S. (2001), The Space In-Between: Essays on Latin American Culture, London: Duke University Press. Scavone, M (2008), “Oriente Próximo: No Bairro da Liberdade em São Paulo reside o espirito des 100 anos da imigração japonesa no Brasil,” National Geographic Brasil June: 42–55. Scavone, M. (2015), Conversation with Elizabeth Kutesko, May 3. Scofield, J. (1971), Letter to Anon. on September 20, Microfiche File No. 21.121397, National Geographic Society Archives, Washington DC. Schneeberger, J. (1971), Letter to Anon. on November 2, Microfiche File No. 21.121397, National Geographic Society Archives, Washington DC. Schneeberger, J. (1989), Letter to Jeffrey Lawson on June 22, Microfiche File No. 510-1999.115517, National Geographic Society Archives, Washington DC. Schultz, H. (2013), Conversation with Elizabeth Kutesko, May 23. Schwarz, R. (1992), Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture, London: Verso. Sekula, A. (1981), “The Traffic of Photographs,” Art Journal 41 (1): 15–25. Sem Solução: o governo federal nem indeniza os ruralistas nem regularize as terras indigenas (2013), [Film] Dir. Paulo Siqueira, Brazil: Planeta Susteneval. Shinkle, E. (2008), “The Line Between the Wall and the Floor: Reality and Affect in Contemporary Fashion Photography,” in E. Shinkle (ed.), Fashion as Photograph: Viewing and Reviewing Images of Fashion, 214–26, London: I. B. Tauris. Shirts, M. (2012), “Do Editor,” National Geographic Brasil, December. Shirts, M. (2014), Conversation with Elizabeth Kutesko, March 31. Siqueira, P. and N. S. Cohen (2015), Conversation with Elizabeth Kutesko, February 9. Smith, J. (2010), Brazil and the United States: Convergences and Divergences, Athens: University of Georgia Press. Sontag, S. (1977), On Photography, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Stam, R. (1997), Tropical Multiculturalism: A Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture, Durham: Duke University Press. Stam, R. (1998), “Hybridity and the Aesthetics of Garbage,” Cultura Visual en Americá Latina 9:11, available online: http://www.tau.ac.il/eial/IX_1/stam.html (accessed February 11, 2015). Stanmeyer, J. (2014), Conversation with Elizabeth Kutesko, March 27.

REFERENCES

177

Steet, L. (2000), Veils and Daggers: A Century of National Geographic’s Representation of the Arab World, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Sterling, C. (2012), African Roots, Brazilian Rites: Cultural and National Identity in Brazil, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Stevens, A. W. (1926), “Exploring the Valley of the Amazon in a Hydroplane,” National Geographic April: 353–420. Stockler, M. (2001), Meninas do Brasil, Sao Paulo: Editora Cosac & Naify. Stockler, M (2014), Conversation with Elizabeth Kutesko, March 31. Tota, A. P. and D. J. Greenberg, eds. (2009), The Seduction of Brazil: The Americanization of Brazil during World War Two, Austin: University of Texas Press. Tranberg Hansen, K. (2000), Salaula: The World of Secondhand Clothing and Zambia, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tranberg Hansen, K. (2009), “Youth, Gender and Secondhand Clothing in Lusaka, Zambia: Local and Global Styles,” in E. Paulicelli and H. Clark (eds.), The Fabric of Cultures: Fashion, Identity and Globalization, 112–27, London: Routledge. Tsuda, T. (2003), Japanese Brazilian Return Migration in Transnational Perspective, New York: Columbia University Press. Valoma, D. (2015), “Cloth and African Identity in Bahia, Brazil,” in M. B. Schevill (ed.), Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion: Latin America and the Caribbean, London: Bloomsbury. Vasconcelos Cavalcanti, C. de (2000), The Environment, Sustainable Development and Public Policies: Building Sustainability in Brazil, Cheltenham and Northampton: Edward Elgar. Vecellio, Cesare (1598), Habiti Antichi, Moderni di tutto il mondo, Venice: Appresso i Sessa. Villaça, N. (2005), “As she walks into the Sea: A Semiology of Rio de Janeiro,” in R. Root (ed.), The Latin American Fashion Reader, 188–97, Oxford: Berg. Wade, R. H. (2011), “Boulevard of Broken Dreams: The Inside Story of The World Bank’s Polonoroeste Road Project in Brazil’s Amazon,” Working Paper No. 55 for Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, available online: http:// www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/WP55_world-bankroad-project-brazil.pdf (accessed June 3, 2015). Williams, E. (2013), “Sex Work and Exclusion in the Tourist Districts of Salvador, Bahia,” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 21: 453–70, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0966369X.2013.786685#. VNtKIcZNMy4 (accessed June 11, 2015).

APPENDIX 1

Timeline Tracing the Representation of Brazil in National Geographic onto Key Events in the History of Brazil and Brazilian Interactions with the United States (1888–1988) 1888

Slavery is abolished in Brazil. National Geographic is established and circulated among the National Geographic Society’s 200 members.

1889

A military coup overthrows the Portuguese monarchy in Brazil. The Brazilian Republic is established and controlled by wealthy coffee farmers. Brazil participates in the first Inter-American Conference held in Washington, DC.

1890

The invention of the pneumatic tire and development of US automobile industry creates an explosion in demand for Brazilian rubber. Coffee totals two-thirds of Brazilian exports and powers the economy.

1891

Brazil signs a trade agreement that enables the free entry of Brazilian coffee into the United States in exchange for a 25 percent Brazilian tariff reduction on US imports.

1890s

After Brazil opens its borders, there is a large influx of immigrants from Italy, Spain, and elsewhere.

1896

The Teatro Amazonas is opened in Manaus. It is funded by the boom in rubber wealth.

APPENDIX 1

1900

179

Modernization throughout urban Brazil with improvements in sanitation and public health and building of grand boulevards. Brazil remains the only natural exporter of rubber and booms economically, particularly in the Amazonian cities Manaus and Belém.

1903

Gilbert H. Grosvenor (1903–54) becomes the first full-time editor of National Geographic.

1905

Brazil inaugurates its first embassy abroad in Washington, DC. The United States establishes its first embassy in Latin America, in Rio de Janeiro.

1906

The third Pan-American Conference is held in Rio de Janeiro. The first three articles on Brazil are published in National Geographic: Anonymous, “Brazil and Peru” (April 1906) Anonymous, “What the Latin American Republics Think of the Pan American Conferences” (August 1906) Wright, Marie Robinson, “The Falls of Iguazu” (August 1906).

1909

The Teatro Municipal is opened in Rio de Janeiro, modeled upon Palais Garnier in Paris. One article on Brazil is published in National Geographic: Cobb, Dewey Austin, “Fishing and Hunting Tales from Brazil” (October 1909).

1910

Brazilian naturalist Cândido Rondon founds the Indian Protection Service.

1911

One article on Brazil is published in National Geographic: Ward, Robert, “A Visit to the Brazilian Coffee Country” (October 1911).

1914

Rondon and ex-US president Theodore Roosevelt explore remote area of Amazon basin. Roosevelt publishes his travel memoir Through The Brazilian Wilderness.

1917

Brazil declares war on Germany and joins the Allied powers.

1920

The Brazilian rubber monopoly crashes as a result of the English and Dutch planting trees in the East Indies. One article on Brazil is published in National Geographic: Adams, Harriet Chalmers, “Rio de Janeiro, in the Land of the Lure” (September 1920).

180

1922

APPENDIX 1

Centennial of Brazilian Independence from Portugal. Modern Art Week is held in São Paulo. It emphasizes national themes in music, literature, and the arts.

1923

The Copacabana Palace hotel opens in Rio de Janeiro. It becomes an icon of tropical glamour and glitz throughout the 1920s.

1925

British explorer Percy Fawcett disappears in the Amazon on his quest to find the Lost City of Z.

1926

Two articles on Brazil are published in National Geographic: Schurtz, W. L., “The Amazon, Father of Waters” (April 1926) Stephens, A. W., “Exploring the Valley of the Amazon in a Hydroplane” (April 1926).

1928

Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade publishes Manifesto Antropófago.

1929

The Wall Street Crash results in ruin for the Brazilian coffee market as prices plummet.

1930

Brazilian president Getúlio Vargas comes to power through a rebellion. He serves as constitutional president of the provisional revolutionary government. Two articles on Brazil are published in National Geographic: Simpich, Frederick, “Gigantic Brazil and Its Glittering Capital” (December 1930) Tate, G. H. H., “Through Brazil to the Summit of Mount Roraima” (November 1930).

1931

The statue of Cristo Redentor is completed in Rio de Janeiro. One article on Brazil is published in National Geographic: Holt, Ernest G., “In Humboldt’s Wake: Narrative of a National Geographic Society Expedition up the Orinoco and through the strange Casiquiare Canal to Amazonian Waters” (November 1931).

1932

Brazil holds its first Carnaval parade

1933

Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre publishes The Masters and the Slaves One article on Brazil is published in National Geographic: Holt, Ernest G., “A Journey by Jungle Rivers to the Home of the Cock-of-the-Rock” (November 1933).

APPENDIX 1

181

1936

Brazilian historian Sérgio Buarque de Holande publishes The Roots of Brazil.

1937

Vargas is the first president in Brazil to impose dictatorial rule in censoring the press, banning political parties, and imprisoning opponents. He closes congress and declares the Estado Novo.

1938

Vargas passes labor initiatives and minimum wage laws for the workers.

1939

Two articles on Brazil are published in National Geographic: Moore, Robert W., “As São Paulo Grows: Half the World’s Coffee Beans Flavor the Life and Speed the Growth of an Inland Brazil City,” National Geographic (May 1939) Moore, Robert W., “Rio Panorama: Breathtaking Is This Fantastic City Amid Peaks, Palms and Sea, and in Carnival Time It Moves to the Rhythm of Music” (September 1939).

1940

Brazil signs an agreement with the United States to finance a steel plant in Volta Redonda.

1941

Brazil signs an agreement with the United States enabling a US military mission in Brazil.

1942

Despite initial neutrality, Brazil joins the Allies in the Second World War. Brazil allows US troops to be stationed in Brazil. The United States lends Brazil $100 million to finance a steel plant and $200 million to reequip the Brazilian armed forces. One article on Brazil is published in National Geographic: Phillips, Henry Albert, “Air Cruising through New Brazil: A National Geographic Reporter Spots Vast Resources Which the Republic’s War Declaration Adds to Strength of United Nations” (October 1942).

1943

US president Franklin Roosevelt meets with Vargas at the Natal aerial base.

1944

The Brazilian Expeditionary Force is sent to fight in Italy. One article on Brazil is published in National Geographic: Moore, Robert W., “Brazil’s Potent Weapons: Brazil Supplies the Allies with Many Valuable Products, Including Iron, Manganese, Quartz, Rubber, Vegetable Oils, and Insecticides” (January 1944).

1947

One article on Brazil is published in National Geographic: Colton, F. Barrows, “Eclipse Hunting in Brazil’s Ranchland” (September 1947).

182

1948

APPENDIX 1

One article on Brazil is published in National Geographic Magazine: Moore, Robert W., “Brazil’s Land of Minerals” (October 1948).

1951

Vargas is reelected by popular vote. Brazil negotiates the supply of raw materials including uranium, manganese, and monazite sand to the United States. One article on Brazil is published in National Geographic: Goetz, Bernice M., “Jungle Jaunt on Amazon Headwaters: Foaming Rivers Led a Lone White Woman to Remote Clearings Where primitive Indians peered at her in wonder” (September 1952).

1953

Vargas creates the state-run oil company Petrobras. One article on Brazil is published in National Geographic: Siemel, Sasha, “The Jungle was My Home: To a Lone Adventurer Hunting Jaguars with a Spear, the Years Bring a North American Wife and a Jungle Reared Family” (November 1952).

1954

The military call for Vargas’s resignation. He commits suicide by shooting himself in the heart. John Oliver La Gorce (1954–57) becomes the full-time editor of National Geographic.

1956

Brazilian president Juscelino Kubitschek is elected and helps Brazil to achieve rapid economic growth in the subsequent five years.

1957

Melville Bell Grosvenor (1957–67) becomes the full-time editor of National Geographic Magazine.

1958

Brazil wins its first World Cup.

1958

Brazilian author Jorge Amado publishes Gabriella, Clove and Cinnamon.

1959

One article on Brazil is published in National Geographic: Schultz, Harold, “Children of the Sun and Moon” (March 1959).

1960

Kubitschek christens Brasilia the capital. It is symbolic of the integration of Brazil and of the push for urbanization.

1961

One article on Brazil is published in National Geographic: Schultz, Harold, “Blue Eyed Indian: A City Boy’s Sojourn with Primitive Tribesmen in Central Brazil” (July 1961).

APPENDIX 1

1962

183

One article on Brazil is published in National Geographic: White, Peter T. (with photographs by Winfield Parks), “Brazil, Oba!” (September 1962).

1960s

Brazilian artists created the movement Tropicália, which incorporates wide-ranging international influences into Brazilian music, visual arts, and theater.

1964

Brazilian president João Goulart is overthrown by a military coup, with support by the US government. The military dictatorship begins. One article on Brazil is published in National Geographic: Schultz, Harold, “Indians of the Amazon Darkness” (May 1964).

1965

Brazilian media empire Globo is founded by Roberto Marinho.

1966

One article on Brazil is published in National Geographic: Schultz, Harold, “The Waura: Brazilian Indians of the Hidden Xingu” (January 1966).

1967

The Brazilian government passes The National Security Law, which results in the imprisonment, torture, and murder of political dissidents. Frederick G. Vosburgh (1967–70) becomes the full-time editor of National Geographic Magazine.

1968

The movement Tropicália, led by Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, criticizes the military dictatorship.

1968

Institutional Act 5 bans most political parties and removes opposition from public office. Over 100,000 take to the streets in protest to repressive laws. Despite the military dictatorship, the Brazilian economy booms and averages at 10 percent annual growth over the next six years. One article on Brazil is published in National Geographic: Villas-Bôas, Orlando, and Claudio, “Saving Brazil’s Stone Age Tribes from Extinction” (September 1968).

1970

Gilbert M. Grosvenor (1970–80) becomes the full-time editor of National Geographic.

1971

One article on Brazil is published in National Geographic: Puttkamer, W. Jesco von, “Brazil Protects Her Cinta Largas” National Geographic (September 1971).

184

1972

APPENDIX 1

Brazil spends U$1 billion on the Trans-Amazonian highway (3,293mile). It is never completed. Brazil and the United States sign an agreement to build a nuclear power plant in Angra dos Reis. Two articles on Brazil are published in National Geographic: McIntyre, Loren, “The Amazon: Untamed Titan of the World’s Rivers, Flows Rich in Mystery and Legend across 4,000 miles of South America” (October 1972) McIntyre, Loren, “Amazon—The River Sea” (October 1972).

1973

Brazil invests heavily in biofuels such as sugarcane.

1975

Two articles on Brazil are published in National Geographic: Puttkamer, W. Jesco von, “Brazil’s Kreen-Akarores: Requiem for a Tribe?” (February 1975) Puttkamer, W. Jesco von, “Brazil’s Txukahameis: Goodbye to the Stone Age” (February 1975).

1976

Brazil and the United States sign a Memorandum of Understanding. One article on Brazil is published in National Geographic: Chagnon, Napoleon A. (with photographs by Chagnon and Robert W. Madden) “Yanomami: The True People” (August 1976).

1977

One article on Brazil is published in National Geographic: McIntyre, Loren, “Treasure Chest or Pandora’s Box? Brazil’s Wild Frontier” (November 1977).

1979-80

Strikes throughout Brazil due to continuing decline of worker’s wages. Easing of dictatorial power in Brazil and granting of political amnesty. Two articles on Brazil are published in National Geographic: Puttkamer, W. Jesco von, “Man in the Amazon: Stone Age Present Meets Stone Age Past” (January 1979) McIntyre, Loren, “JARI: A Billion Dollar Gamble” (May 1980).

1980

Wilbur E. Garrett (1980–90) becomes the full-time editor of National Geographic.

1982

Brazil halts payment of its foreign debt, which is among the largest in the world.

APPENDIX 1

1984

185

Itaipu becomes the largest hydropower plant in the world, providing 20 percent of Brazil’s electricity. A military-industrial cooperation agreement between Brazil and the United States is signed. One article on Brazil is published in National Geographic: Lea, Vanessa (with photographs by Miguel Rio Branco), “Brazil’s Kayapo Indians: Beset by a Golden Curse” (May 1984).

1985

An indirect presidential election is held in Brazil. The military relinquishes power to civilian politicians. Tancredo Neves wins, and millions of Brazilians celebrate the end of the military dictatorship.

1985

Neves dies due to complications arising from abdominal surgery, and his vice-presidential candidate, Jose Sarney, becomes president at a time of economic crisis in Brazil.

1986

Sarney introduces the Cruzado Plan, freezing prices and wages in an effort to control inflation. Inflation rockets when the freeze is lifted.

1987

One article on Brazil is published in National Geographic: Vesilind, Priit J. (with photographs by Stephanie Maze), “Brazil: Moment of Promise and Pain” (March 1987).

APPENDIX 2

Timeline Tracing the Representation of Brazil in National Geographic onto Key Events in the History of Brazil and Brazilian Interactions with the United States (1988–2014) 1988

Paul Coelho publishes The Alchemist, which goes on to sell over thirty million copies worldwide. A new constitution in Brazil reduces presidential powers. National Geographic celebrates its centennial. Three articles on Brazil are published in National Geographic: McIntyre, Loren (with photographs by W. Jesco von Puttkamer), “‘Last Days of Eden’: Rondonia’s Urueu-Wau-Wau Indians” (December 1988) Ellis, William S. (with photographs by William Albert Allard and Loren McIntyre), “Rondonia’s settlers invade Brazil’s imperiled rainforest” (December 1988) Ehrlich, Paul R., and Anne H. Ehrlich (with photographs by Mary Ellen Mark), “Brazil: Flight to the Cities” (December 1988).

1989

The end of the Cold War is symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall in November. Brazil holds its first direct presidential election since 1960. It is won by Fernando Collor de Mello.

1990

The Brazilian economy remains in trouble, and external debt is calculated at $115 billion.

APPENDIX 2

187

US president George H. W. Bush visits Brazil and seeks to develop more integrated economic relations with South America. William Graves (1990–94) becomes the full-time editor of National Geographic. 1994

Collor de Mello is accused of corruption, and Vice President Itamar Franco assumes the presidency. Franco introduces the Real, a new currency that stabilizes the Brazilian economy. Inflation plummets from a rate of 5,000 percent to below 10 percent.

1995

The newly elected Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso visits the United States. William L. Allen (1995–2005) becomes the full-time editor of National Geographic. Although the National Geographic Society, which produces National Geographic, retains its tax-exempt status as an educational publisher and distributor of grants, National Geographic Ventures is launched and operates for profit. Ventures begins to produce feature films (many of which are shown on cable television), build a website, and compile more than one hundred years of the magazine onto a CD-ROM for consumers to use at home. One article on Brazil is published in National Geographic: Van Dyck, Jere (with photographs by Alex Webb), “The Amazon: South America’s River Road” (February 1995).

1997

US president Bill Clinton visits Brazil.

1999

National Geographic Magazine negotiates an advertising campaign with Austrian fashion designer Helmut Lang. Annual trade between the United States and Brazil doubled to $26 million throughout the 1990s, while total US investment in Brazil tripled to $38 billion.

2000

Celebrations mark the 500th anniversary since the founding of Brazil. Indigenous peoples protest against racial genocide, disease, and forced labor, which have cut their population from an estimated 5 million (when the Portuguese first arrived) to 350,000. National Geographic Brasil is launched. Matthew Shirts (2000–13) is appointed the first full-time editor-in-chief.

188

2001

APPENDIX 2

Cardoso visits the United States to increase involvement in regional affairs and bilateral relations. Brazil participates in the Organization of American States in support of the United States following 9/11. The acronym BRIC is used by British economist Jim O’Neil to denote four rapidly developing countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), which have come to symbolize the shift in global economic power away from the developed G7 economies. The photobook National Geographic Fashion, edited by Cathy Newman (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society) is published.

2002

Former union leader Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva succeeds in winning the Brazilian presidency. Brazil wins its fifth World Cup, beating Germany 2-0 in the final. Two articles on Brazil are published in National Geographic: Cobb, Charles E. (with photographs by David Alan Harvey), “Where Brazil Was Born: Bahia” (August 2002) Zwingle, Erla (with photographs by Stuart Franklin), “Cities: São Paulo” (November 2002).

2003

Lula launches the Bolsa Família (Family Allowance) program, which helps over eleven million of Brazil’s poorest families. Brazilian musician Gilberto Gil is appointed minister of culture. One article on Brazil is published in National Geographic: Wallace, Scott (with photographs by Alex Webb), “Into the Amazon,” National Geographic, 204:2 (August, 2003), pp. 2–27.

2004

Brazil launches its first space rocket. One article on Brazil is published in National Geographic: Morell, Virginia (with photographs by Mark W Moffett), “The Rain Forest in Rio’s Backyard” (March 2004).

2005

Brazil repays entire debt of US$15.56 billion to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The murder of US-born missionary and campaigner for peasant farmers in the Amazon, Dorothy Stang, highlights the conflict over land and resources. The Brazilian government puts in place plans to protect areas of the Amazon from encroachment.

APPENDIX 2

189

US president George W. Bush visits Brazil and acknowledges that, as the largest democracy in South America, Brazil must demonstrate its leadership skills. Chris Johns (2005–14) becomes the full-time editor of National Geographic. One article on Brazil is published in National Geographic: McGrath, Susan (with photographs by Jorge Saenz), “The Wild Wet” (August 2005). 2006

Brazil becomes energy independent and achieves self-sufficiency in crude oil. One article on Brazil is published in National Geographic: Petterle, Izan, “Visions of the Earth: Rio de Janeiro” (April 2006).

2007

Rio hosts Pan-American Games, and Brazil wins the bid to host the 2014 Fifa World Cup. A Brazilian antislavery team frees more than 1,000 people from a sugarcane plantation in the Amazon. The Brazilian government officially recognizes human rights abuses carried out during the military dictatorship, during which time over 500 Brazilians “disappeared.” Two articles on Brazil are published in National Geographic: Saenz, Jorge, “Visions of the Earth: Brazil” (August 2007) Wallace, Scott (with photographs by Alex Webb), “Last of the Amazon” (January 2007).

2009

Brazil wins the bid to host 2016 Summer Olympics.

2010

Brazil’s annual growth rate is 7.5 percent, and bilateral trade soars to US$25 billion. Lula departs office and is replaced by Dilma Rousseff, the first female head of state in Brazil. National Geographic launches an iPad version. One article on Brazil is published in National Geographic: Ribeiro, Ronaldo (with photographs by George Steinmetz), “Dazzling Brazilian Dunes” (July 2010). National Geographic Brasil celebrates its tenth anniversary in May.

190

2011

APPENDIX 2

Brazil’s security forces occupy one of the biggest favelas in Rio as part of a major police crackdown ahead of the World Cup and Summer Olympics. One article on Brazil is published in National Geographic: Gorney, Cynthia (with photographs by John Stanmeyer), “Machisma” (September 2011).

2012

Carnaval in Rio continues to attract over one million visitors each year and revenues of US$700 million. National Geographic Magazine launches an iPhone version. Two articles on Brazil are published in National Geographic: Mann, Charles C. and Susanna Hecht, “Where Slaves Ruled” (April 2012) Regalado, Antonio (with photographs by David Alan Harvey), “A New Face for Rio” (October 2012).

2013

The IMF acknowledges that Brazil has the seventh largest economy in the world. National Geographic celebrates its 125th anniversary in October. It has over 37 local-language editions, a domestic circulation of 4,125,152 million, and a worldwide circulation of 8,143,687 million. Ronaldo Ribeiro (2013–) becomes the full-time editor of National Geographic Brasil.

2014

Brazil hosts the World Cup, spending US$13.7 billion in preparation. One article on Brazil is published in National Geographic e: Brown, Chip (with photographs by Martin Schoeller), “Kayapo Courage: The Rich and Powerful Brazilian Tribe Is Battling a Dam Project That Will Not Die” (January 2014). Susan Goldberg became the tenth full-time editor, and first female editor, of National Geographic in April 2014.

INDEX

Adidas 1, 67, 71, 73 aerial photography 31 “aesthetics of garbage” 59–62, 67, 73, 75–6, 83, 86, 90 African-American and Afro-Brazilians 78–9 African-American hip-hop 132 “African-American Roots Tourism” 79 Afro-Brazilians 29, 63, 101 African-Americans and 78–9 cultural expressions 129–30 girl’s Lycra top and denim jeans 76–8, 84 woman 81 “Airplanes Aid Explorers in Brazil” 36 Alaia, Azzedine 83 Alexander Hamilton Rice Scientific Expedition 29 Allen, William L. 77, 114 Amazon region 18, 28–30, 36, 39, 47, 62–3, 69, 74, 95 American Iconographic: National Geographic, Global Culture and the Visual Imagination (Hawkins) 14 American sportswear 43, 44, 45 American Vogue (magazine) 41, 42, 74–6, 83, 84–5 anchorage 34 Andrade, Mário de 28 Andrade, Oswald de 25, 26, 27, 28, 38, 57, 59, 88 Angolans 129–31, 134 anthropology 34–5 photographs 35 Western and Brazilian anthropology 49–50

anthropophagy 25–58, 88 black and white 40–2 Brazil in National Geographic 28–9, 33–5 identification and difference 42–5 Maku woman 29–33 Paulista women’s sportswear 38–40 portraiture and ethnography 35–8 Appadurai, Arjun 5, 73 Armani, Giorgio 7, 83 Arruda, Roldao 152 Associated Press 28, 40 Australia, Brazil and 98 auto-ethnography 11–12 Ava Tape Rendy’i 155–62 Azoulay, Ariella 9 Azzedine Alaia 7 Bahian communities 78 Bahian women 81, 85 Bahiatursa 77 baianas 79–81, 84–5 Bakhtin, Mikhail 60 Ballot, Henri 49 Barker, Jennifer M. 133 Barnes and Noble 95 Barthes, Roland 34, 53 Bauman, Zygmunt 70 Bechis, Marco 160–1 Beliel, Ricardo 123, 128, 129–30, 134 Bell, Alexander Graham 120 Bello, Patrizia di 16–17, 34 Belting, Hans 16 Bhabha, Homi 97 Big Mani 130 bikinis 98–106 Birdwatchers (2009) 160

192

Bishop, Elizabeth 8 Black Mouths. See Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau Boa, Maitre 131 Boca de Lixo (1993) 61 body and dress 14–15, 27, 50–5 body painting 50–2, 55, 95 Bonadio, Maria Claudia 102, 110 Bourdieu, Pierre 147 BR-364 69 Brazil at War (1943) 39 Brazil/Brazilian. See also National Geographic; National Geographic Brasil Angolans in 129, 135 anthropology 49 and Australia 98 culture 6, 25, 59, 88, 121 dress 1–2, 5–7, 10, 11, 16, 17, 28, 57, 60, 61, 163–4 fashion in 1–2, 10, 16, 17, 27, 102, 104, 106, 108, 111, 163–4 femininity 41–2, 102 fertility rate 100–1 hip-hop in 130, 134 history 178–90 Hollywood films in 27 indigenous people/population 5, 29–31, 36, 47, 60, 62, 63, 69, 95, 127, 145–6, 160 Japanese presence in 135–6 jeans 145 Lycra and Western fashion 83–6 military dictatorship 46 modernization 43 North American consumption of goods 44 North American lifestyle 122 Schwarz’s pessimistic view 117–18, 127 self-fashioning 13, 16, 110–11, 114 sexuality 83 and United States 29, 38–9, 45, 46, 90, 120, 121, 123, 178–90 urban 39–40 Western European lifestyle to 122 women 37–8, 53, 57, 84, 90, 95, 100–2 Brazilian Women’s Movement 100 bricolage 59, 126 Bruno, H. A. 36

INDEX

Cadillac 37 camera lighting and white skin 41–2 camizu 80 Canclini, Nestor Garcia 4 Candomble 79–80, 85 Caninde 71, 72 cannibalism 26, 27, 28 Canova, Antonio 52 Cardoso, Fernando Henrique 127 ceremonial dress 137–41, 151–3 Chaves, Milene 101 chronotope 60 Cinta Largas 45, 47 body painting 50–1, 55 civilizado and savage 47–8 males 56 photographs 49 women 50–1, 55 civilizado and savage 47–8 civilization 36 Clifford, James 69 clothing. See dress Cobb, Charles E., Jr. 62, 77–81, 84 Cohen, Nadia Shira 145, 151–2, 157, 159 Collins, Jane L. 12, 13, 14 contact zone 9–10 contas/ilekes 80 contemporary global fashion trends 81–2 Council of Fashion Designers of America 94 Coy, Wolfgang 66 cross-cultural aesthetics 60 “crumpled handkerchief” 60 culture, dress and 2, 6 DaMatta, Roberto 7 Death Row Records 131 Demos, T. J. 134 Denzk, Victor 98–102, 107–8, 112 Derrida 89 DiCaprio, Leonardo 101 Djaui 71, 72 Dominis, John 53 Douglas, Mary 42 dress 2, 12–14, 26, 34, 37, 61. See also global dress cultures

INDEX

Afro-Brazilian 81 Ava Tape Rendy’i’s 155–62 baianas’ 80 body and 14–15, 27, 50–5 Brazil 1, 5–7, 10, 11, 16, 17, 28, 57, 60, 61, 104, 106, 111–15, 163–4 ceremonial 137–41 cross-cultural 138 and culture 2, 26 definition 3 Denzk’s 98–102, 107–8 ethnic 93–4, 140, 165 n.2 everyday 138–9 female 34 Guarani-Kaiowá and 150–3, 160 hippie fashions 53–4 Japanese-Brazilian women 137–8 of Lourenço Loy 131–3 Mayongong practices 127 and nakedness 55–8 non-Western 2, 4, 163 Orientalist role of 13 and Ortiz 144 reuse items of 75 scholarship 2 second-hand 61, 74, 76 styles 60, 164 subject’s 34–5 Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau 75 Western and indigenous cultural systems 156 Western-style 5, 13, 36, 50–1 DuPont production facility 83 Dutilleux, Jean-Pierre 74, 75 Dyer, Richard 41 Dzenk, Victor 7 Editora Abril 114 Edwards, Elizabeth 11, 17 Eicher, Joanne B. 3, 92–3, 94 Elgort, Arthur 84 Elle (magazine) 83 Embratur 1 Emerson, Robert M. 78 “The End of Innocence” 71, 73 ethnic dress 93–4, 165 n.2 Scavone and 140 and Western fashion 97–8

193

ethnography, portraiture and 32–3, 35–8, 126. See also auto-ethnography Euro-American fashions 37 Eurocentric fashion model 94 Europe, war in 29 European-descended Brazilians 98, 110 European-style fashions 97 Eyck, Jan van 167 n.3 “fabrication” 89 Family of Man (exhibition) 13 fashion 27, 88, 89, 93–4 in Brazil 1–2, 10, 16, 17, 27, 102, 108, 163 definition 3–4 Euro-American 37 global industry 144 history of 2 non-Western 2 Western 1, 4 Feliz, Muada 131 female Brazilian subjects 36, 44, 57, 90 fiction and reality 110–12 Ford, Henry 30 foreign cultural ideas 121–2 Foucault, Michel 31, 89 Fundação Nacional do Índio (FUNAI) 47–8, 68, 74 Furstenberg, Diane von 104 gambiarra 35, 61, 125, 127 Garb, Tamar 35 Garrett, Wilbur E. 62, 63, 66 Gazzola, Ana Lucia 89 geta 137 Gill, A. A. 165 n.4 global dress cultures 4–5 globalization 4, 5, 10, 73–4, 121, 130, 143–4, 152, 160 Good Neighbor Policy 29, 39, 40, 41, 44, 98 Gorney, Cynthia 88, 100–1, 102 Goulart, João 46 Granada television documentary 74 Griffiths, Alison 149 Griffiths, Annie 92 Grosvenor, Gilbert H. 8 Grundberg, Andy 64, 65 Guadenzi, Paulo 77

194

INDEX

Guarani-Kaiowá 145–9, 150–3, 157, 159–61, 166 n.1 Guarani-Nandeva 152, 166 n.1 Gucci 106 Guimarães, Maria Eduarda Araujo 102, 110 Guth, Christine M. 52 Habiti Antichi, Moderni di tutto il mondo (Vecellio) 57 Hamlet (play) 26 Hansen, Karen Tranberg 62 Harvey, David Alan 62, 81–2 Hawkins, Stephanie L. 12, 14 Henderson, Geraldine Rosa 132 Herchcovitch, Alexandre 6 Hess, David 7 high fashion 2, 7, 19, 87, 93, 94–5, 98 Hildebrand, J. R. 40 hip-hop culture 130–3, 134 hippie fashions 53–4 Hollander, Anne 2 Hollywood films 27 Hons, Andre Seguin des 49 Horst, Horst P. 41 Howes, David 94, 165 n.3 hybridity 4, 60 hyperblackness 133 hyperesthesia 94, 112, 114 Ilê Aiyê 81 Ilha das Flores (1989) 61 Ilharco, Fernando M. 109 Indian Protection service (SPI) 49 indigenous people/population 5, 29–31, 36, 47, 60, 62, 63, 69, 95, 127, 145–6, 160 Índios do Brasil 49 Introna, Lucas D. 109 Ipanema boutique 102 Japanese-Brazilian women 135–6, 137–8 Jauregui, Carlos 26 Jean-Luc Godard 61 Jones, Lamont 98 Judge, Joseph R. 68–9 Karen, Donna 83 Kasato Maru (ship)

135–6

Kayapo 74–5 Kebede, Liya 84, 85 Kolczak, Amy 120 Lagerfeld, Karl 83 Latin America 7, 11, 43, 60, 89, 118, 121 Lawson, Jeffrey 69 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 51, 126 “Liberdade” 135–6 Life (magazine) 53, 55 “Little Africa” 128–9, 166 n.4 Livingston, Jane 67 Louis Vuitton 106 Loy, Lourenço 128–9, 131–3, 138 Lutz, Catherine 12, 13, 14 Lycra 7, 83–6 “Machisma” 100, 102 Maku man 36 Maku woman 29–33, 34–5 male dress practices 95 Manifesto Antropófago (MA) (Andrade) 25, 26, 28, 38, 55 Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil (Andrade) 25, 28 Mappin’ 97 Marks, Laura U. 15, 27, 65 Marque, Bianca 7, 98–106, 112 Masiello, Francine 118–19 Maynard, Margaret 90, 165 n.2 Mayongong 124–6 Mbaya 52 McDonaldization 73 McIntyre, Loren 62, 70 Medeiros, Jose 49 Mendes, Silviano 106 Mendonça, Paulo César Aguiar de 74 Meninas do Brasil 84 Mercer, Kobena 133 Merck 69 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 14–15, 65, 96, 104 Metuktire, Raoni 75 Miranda, Wander Melo 89 “misplaced ideas” 118–19, 123 Missoni bikini 104 Mizrahi, Mylene 144 Modernismo 25 moletom 144–5

INDEX

MOMA 13 “monarch-of-all-I-survey” trope 31 Moore, Robert W. 97 Moraes, Marina 123, 124 Mosqueira, Gerardo 58 Motley, Carol M. 132 multisensory marketing 94 mundialization 143–4, 145, 152, 156, 161 Municipal Sports Stadium, São Paulo 43–4 nakedness, dress and 55–8 National Geographic 25–9, 59–63, 87–91, 165 n.1, 178–90 Afro-Brazilian girl 76–86 April 1926 edition of 29–38 in August 2002 76–86 Cinta Larga women 45–8, 50–6 criticizing for displaying nudity 55–6 in December 1988 67–9 Denzk’s dresses 98–102, 107–11 100th anniversary of 63–7 Maku woman in 29–33 Marque’s bikinis 98–106 in October 1942 38–45 photograph of Djaui and Caninde 67–74 print and digital media 108–10 São Paulo Sports Stadium inauguration 38–45 in September 1971 45–58 in September 2001 91–8 in September 2011 98–111 Vogue and 74–6 Yanomami boy’s gaze 91–8 National Geographic Brasil 3, 117–23, 142–6, 166 nn.1, 3 Ava Tape Rendy’i 155–62 digital edition of 153–62 in February 2003 128–35 Guarani-Kaiowá indigenous group 146–55 iPad edition 153–62 Japanese-Brazilian women 135–41 in July 2000 124–7 in June 2008 135–41 Loy, Lourenço 128–35 Mayongong man 124–7 National Geographic Creative 95

195

National Geographic Fashion 90, 92–5, 97–8, 165 n.1 National Geographic Society 8 National Geographic Ventures 165 n.1, 166 n.2 National Indian Foundation. See Fundação Nacional do Índio (FUNAI) Nead, Lynda 60 Needham, Gary 167 n.2 Nemerov, Alexander 16 Newman, Cathy 87, 91, 93 New York Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2002 94 New York Times 64, 105 New York Times Style Magazine 104 Nichols, Michael 95 Noble Savage 126, 127 Noite da Beleza Negra 81 non-Western cultures 3, 92 non-Western dress 2, 4, 13, 163 North America consumption of Brazilian goods 44 and South America 16 sportswear 43 nudity. See nakedness, dress and Nugent, Stephen 49 O Bandido da Luz Vermelha (1968) 61 objectivity and subjectivity 149–51 O Cruzeiro (magazine) 49 O Estado de São Paulo (newspaper) 43, 152 Office of Inter-American Affairs 39 O Fio da Memória (1991) 61 ojá 80 Omolu 80 O Movimento Modernista (Andrade) 28 orixás 80 Ortiz, Fernando 121–2 Ortiz, Renato 142–5, 147, 161 Oxalá 85 palimpsestic process 11 Pan-American Conference 28 Pan-Americanism 30 Paulista women’s sportswear 38–40 Peixoto-Mehrtens, Christina 44 Pham, Ben 92 Phillips, Henry Albert 28, 38–40 photographic mapping 31

196

photography 16–17 ethnographic 35 Stanmeyer’s 134 Pieterse, Jan Nederveen 5 Pinho, Patricia de Santana 79 Pinney, Christopher 36 Planeta Susteneval 157 Polident 42 Popular Mechanics (magazine) 36 portraiture aesthetic qualities and communicative possibilities 139 and ethnography 35–8, 126 Postrel, Virginia 165 n.3 Powell, Richard J. 132 Pratt, Mary Louise 9, 11, 31, 69, 114 Presenting America’s World: Strategies of Innocence in National Geographic Magazine, 1888–1945 (Rothenberg) 13 print and digital media 108–10 Puttkamer, W. Jesco von 28, 47, 51, 53, 55, 62, 69, 70, 71, 74 “Queen Coffee” 44 raincoat 27 Raoni: The Fight for the Amazon (1978) 75 Reading National Geographic (Lutz) 13 recycled aesthetics. See aesthetics of garbage Rees-Roberts, Nick 106 Resende, Beatriz 25 Ribeiro, Ronaldo 121, 143 Rice, Alexander Hamilton 29, 36 Rio de Janeiro 1, 6–7, 18, 20, 28–9, 63, 128–9 Ritzer, George 73–4 Roach-Higgins, Mary Ellen 3 Rocamora, Agnes 109 Romo, Anadelia A. 77 Rondon, Cândido Mariano da Silva 49 Roosevelt, Theodore 29, 30, 39, 41, 98 Root, Deborah 160 Rosas, Ricardo 125 Rothenberg, Tamar 12, 13, 14 Rousseff, Dilma 1, 145–6 Royal Geographic Society 36

INDEX

saia 80 Saks Fifth Avenue 94 Saludos Amigos (1942) 40 Salvador da Bahia 77, 81 salvage paradigm 69 Santiago, Silviano 11, 88–90, 94, 97, 111 São Gabriel 36 São Paulo 29, 40, 43–4, 57, 63, 83, 97–8, 101, 119, 122–3, 135, 137–40, 143 Scavone, Marcio 123, 135–7, 138–9, 150 Schiaparelli, Elsa 92 Schneeberger, Jon 69 scholarship 2, 11–14, 19, 21, 57, 86, 88, 94, 111, 162 School of Physical Education 44 Schultz, Heidi 100 Schwarz, Roberto 117–19, 121, 124, 127 second-hand clothing 61, 74, 76 Second World War 45 Sekula, Allan 31 self-fashioning 13, 16, 35, 38, 53–4, 82, 86, 90, 95–7, 104, 106, 110–11, 114, 133, 149, 160, 163 self-presentation 13, 16, 53, 90 Sganzerla, Rogério 61 Shakur, Tupac 131 Shinkle, Eugenie 72 Shirts, Matthew 119–20, 143, 153–4 Silva, Dacio Queiroz 159 Siqueira, Paulo 145, 147, 149–52, 157, 158–9 Sontag, Susan 9 Space In-Between: Essays on Latin American Culture, The (Santiago) 88, 89 “space in-between” 88 Spanish American Caduveo Indians. See Mbaya “split gaze” 104 Stam, Robert 59–60, 62, 67, 73, 75, 76, 83, 86, 90 Stanmeyer, John 88, 102, 103, 106, 107, 110–12, 134, 149 Steet, Linda 12, 13, 14 Steichen, Edward 13

INDEX

Stevens, Albert W. 28, 29, 32, 35, 123, 124 Sting (musician) 74–5, 76 Stockler, Mari 83–4 “strategies of innocence” 13 subjectivity, objectivity and 149–51 suicide rates 152 swimwear shoot 104–5 Tanabata Matsuri festival 137 tekoha 146–7, 148, 150, 151 telenovelas 102, 107, 108, 110 Testino, Mario 165 n.4 tike-uba 69 transculturation 121 Tristes Tropiques (Lévi-Strauss) 51 Tropicália 28, 61 T-shirts 1, 152 21st Century Fox Media 8 Udigrudi 61 UNESCO World Heritage Site 104 United States Brazil and 29, 38–9, 45, 46, 90, 120, 121, 123 and Latin America 117 Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau 7, 68–74, 86 US Cold War propaganda 13 US cultural imperialism 7 Vanity Fair 165 n.4 Vargas, Getúlio 40, 43, 44 Vargas do Amaral Peixoto, Alzira 41 Vecellio, Cesare 57 Veils and Daggers: A Century of National Geographic’s Representation of the Arab World (Steet) 13 Villas-Bôas brothers 49 “The Waiting Room” 8 Welles, Orson 61 Western and Brazilian anthropology 49 Western and indigenous culture 69–71, 110 Western colonialism 26 Western fashion 4, 84, 90 Brazilian Lycra and 83–6 and ethnic dress 97–8

197

European descent in 29 industry 1 media 105 system 92, 93, 98 Western-style dress 5, 13, 50, 51, 73 adoption 55, 70 female Brazilian subject and 36 imposition 36 and indigenous elements 151, 156 Kayapo and 75 manipulation 52–3 second-hand 74 “White Heat” 84 whiteness 42 white skin 41–2, 44, 111 white sportswear 43 Williams, Maynard Owen 13 Wilson and Co. Inc. 44 women 53 body painting 50–2, 55 Brazil 37–8, 53, 57, 84, 90, 95, 100–2 Cinta Largas 50–1, 55 clothing and poses 53–4 consumption and re-presentation of American sportswear 44 facial features 137 as fashion consumers 54–5 gaze 103–4, 107, 111, 149 Japanese-Brazilian 135–6, 137–8 as objects of powerful gaze 44 white skin 41–2, 44, 111 white sportswear 44 Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) 102 Women’s Wear Daily (WWD) 98 “The World and All That Is In It” 66, 87, 120 World Cup 1 World Mental Health Day 152 “writing back” 11, 12, 89, 111 Yanomami 91–3, 95–7 Yemanjá 80 yukata 137, 138 Zimmermann, Raquel 104, 105