From Underworld to Avant-Garde:
2012; Penn State University Press; Volume: 49; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/complitstudies.49.2.0227
ISSN1528-4212
Autores Tópico(s)Caribbean history, culture, and politics
ResumoIn his book, Música de feitiçaria no Brasil (Witchcraft Music in Brazil), which begun as a lecture in 1933 and was published posthumously, Brazilian musicologist Mário de Andrade describes the protohistorical connection between Brazil and the island of Cuba.1 In other words, he traces the cosmogonical practices that culminated in macumba, Santeria, voodoo, and another variants of Afro-Latin American religions. He follows the path of the word “cuba” in Brazilian folklore, which acquired meanings that evolved from just “Cuban” to “powerful individual” and “sorcerer.” Scouring the writings of Brazilian anthropologist Luís da Câmara Cascudo, Andrade tries to see the existence of “cuba” in the popular vocabulary of Brazil not only as proof that his theories about the influence of Cuban music on Brazilian rhythms were correct but also as evidence that Cuban “witchcraft” reached the Amazon, definitively showing that the north and northeast regions of Brazil were an extension of the Caribbean.It was not only religious manifestations that circulated between Cuba and Brazil, as Andrade points out. There was also an intense intellectual exchange between the first scholars dedicated to their local religions. In this article, I map this economy of thoughts, showing how in the beginning of the twentieth century, some Cuban and Brazilian intellectuals built their own view of the black Atlantic in a dialog with European positivism—a conversation that involved not only anthropology and political science but also law, literature, art, spiritism, psychiatry, theories of science, fingerprint identification, and many other fields, with each side influencing the other. In short, my aim is to demonstrate the passing of what was considered irrational (African religions and the world of spirits) into the very core of positivism and its materialist presuppositions. There they coexisted in a tension that developed both in the avant-garde and at the same time within what became the horror of racial hygiene.In The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Paul Gilroy only briefly addresses the role of science and positivism in the transatlantic black diaspora. He scarcely notes the participation of Latin American creole intellectuals (from anthropologists to artists and art critics) in the construction of that space, though he calls for study of how the idea of “race” influences the construction of “western aesthetic judgement, taste, and cultural value.”2 In Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line, Gilroy does analyze how “race-thinking” entered the black Atlantic, especially through ultranationalism and fascism, causing a tension in the way racial differences were seen, tending toward uniformization.3 Though his focus is on the twentieth century, he notes that “even prescientific versions of the logic of ‘race’ multiplied the opportunities for their adherents to do evil freely and justify it to themselves and to others. That problem was compounded once confused and unsystematic race-thinking aspired to become something more coherent, rational, and authoritative.”4 As Gilroy goes on to point out, the shift toward scientific understandings of race began “to create new possibilities and orchestrate new varieties of knowledge and power centered on the body.”5 In my view, the formulation of these scientific discourses on race, as well as their connection with religion, mysticism, criminology psychology, and art, has yet to be fully explored.Stephan Palmié explores the theme of witchcraft and science in Cuba, offering an interesting Foucauldian look at Fernando Ortiz and his early vision of Afro-Cuban religions, but some matters remain to be investigated.6 These include the role of spiritism as “a kind of religious thought based precisely on the terminology and the weapons of the enemy of religion: science,” as well as the quest for universal identification through biometry, which used the Latin American black body as one of its labs, the mystical studies of Cesare Lombroso, the “father” of positivist criminology, and an approach to the southern counterpoint of Nina Rodrigues within Brazilian modernism, Osório César.7In tracing the introduction of African religions and the world of spirits into positivist thought, I begin with the Cuban ethnologist Juan Luis Martín. Attempting to explain the paradoxical relationship between poison and remedy as understood by black Cubans, in 1930 Martín published a book titled Ecué, Changó y Yemayá. This text's subtitle is “Essays on the Sub-religion of Afro-Cubans,” yet it includes a chapter dedicated to Brazil titled “Cabildo y macumba.” In this chapter and in the following ones, Martín, one of the first Cuban ethnologists, describes the terrible scene of Afro-Brazilian religions characterized by possessions, rapes, poisonings, and all types of dishonesty and trickery undertaken by sorcerers of macumba.8 Though this account draws our attention primarily for its depiction of danger, death, and exoticism in Brazil, there is another aspect of the book that needs to be addressed. The most striking feature of this almost forgotten text is that Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier drew on it to write Écue-Yamba-Ó (1933). Carpentier was also deeply interested in Brazilian modernism, as one can see in his essays on Heitor Villa-Lobos in which he stresses the importance of the Brazilian composer to Western music.9 His engagement with Brazilian culture also becomes evident in the juxtaposition of his novel El reino de este mundo with Andrade's Macunaíma: they are simultaneously competing and complementary texts.In August 1931, in a letter sent to his mother, Toutouche, Carpentier asks for some photos of ritualistic images of ñáñigos (members of a secret, Afro-Cuban society) published by Martín in the magazine Orbe, which were supposed to be subsequently included in the first edition of Carpentier's “Afro-Cuban story.”10Ñáñigos received considerable attention from the repressive apparatus of the Cuban police. So not only did Martín come into play in Écue-Yamba-Ó, but Carpentier also consulted criminological studies of ñáñigos in order to construct the novel, the plot of which centers around them.In particular, Carpentier consulted Rafael Roche's La policía y sus misterios en Cuba from 1908 (a second edition was published in 1914). Roche was a member of Havana's police department, and his text is a manual on the criminality of black people that was connected to certain Afro-Cuban religious manifestations. The manual contains a chapter dedicated to the ñáñigos in which is found a series of twenty-eight drawings entitled “Signs, Signatures, Rubrics” depicting their ritual symbols. Some of them were reproduced by Carpentier in his 1929 article “La musique cubaine,” published in Documents, the French journal of “archeology, fine arts, ethnography and varieties” then edited by Georges Bataille in Paris. This essay appears to have served as a kind of theoretical exercise for Écue-Yamba-Ó, as Roche's thirteenth drawing also appears on the cover of a manuscript of Écue-Yamba-Ó, dated 1932 and held today in the Biblioteca nacional José Marti in Havana.11 These graphic signs were clearly important to Carpentier since they were also reproduced in the first edition of Écue-Yamba-Ó (exactly the same six drawings that had been published in Documents).Écue-Yamba-Ó is one of the founding texts of the Cuban avant-garde in its attempt to incorporate the black imaginary into literature and was constructed in close relationship with the future members of the French Collège de sociologie. In an unpublished French version of Écue-Yamba-Ó, a didactic, explicative outline of the book chapters that Carpentier would have written for a European audience (the manuscript of which is likewise preserved in the Biblioteca nacional), it is hard not to notice traces of anthropological criminology in his description of the novel: “Ce joli livre est le récit coloré et fidèle d'un nègre…. L'impression générale que l'on tire de cet ouvrage, est que le nègre cubain est un être superstitieux dont la vie est réglée par ses instincts, les dires des sorciers et la volonté de la société secrète dont il fait partie” (“This nice book is the colorful and faithful story of a Negro…. The general impression that one gets from this work is that the Cuban Negro is a superstitious being whose life is ruled by his instincts, the words of sorcerers and the will of the secret society that he belongs to”).12 And if we go back to the chapter dedicated to macumba, written by Juan Luis Martín, although he does not directly cite references to his sources, it seems to be fed by the research of Brazilian anthropologists and criminologists such as Nina Rodrigues. In his book O animismo fetichista dos negros bahianos (originally published between 1896 and 1897), Rodrigues claims that “Afro-Baiano” fetishism is a type of animism in its attribution to every being and thing of a phantasm or spirit that is independent of the body in which it makes its temporary presence.13 Rodrigues was one of the most prominent Brazilian intellectuals before the First World War. A Bahian psychiatrist, he studied Brazil's black population, drawing on Lombrosian theories of criminology to explain social behavior scientifically.The situation of Fernando Ortiz seems to be even more complex. He had a great admiration for Rodrigues, and Rodrigues's application of Lombrosian theories to the specificities of the tropics, especially to the part of the tropics dominated by plantations, fascinated Ortiz. Rodrigues makes repeated appearances in Ortiz's works. He quotes him many times in Los negros brujos (The Black Sorcerers [1906]), and in La fiesta afrocubana del día de Reyes which Ortiz started working on in the early 1920s, he cites Rodrigues's A raça negra na América portuguesa, which had been published in Revista do Brasil in 1922, a fact that demonstrates how well informed the Cuban ethnologist was about Brazilian studies.14 In fact, in an autobiographical article entitled “Brujos o Santeros,” Ortiz explains that when he was writing Los negros brujos, his studies, based on criminal anthropology, constituted in a certain way a symmetrical gesture to what Nina Rodrigues had accomplished some years earlier in Brazil.15It is true that very little was being published in Brazil about African religions that was not related to criminal anthropology during the time that Ortiz was working on Los negros brujos. Freyre's Casa-grande e senzala, an important Brazilian moment of epistemological change, emerges only in 1933, the same year as Ecué-Yamba-Ó. Ortiz himself appears to complete his theoretical paradigm only in the early 1940s with his great baroque eulogy to hybridism and mestizaje, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar. Though Ortiz had changed his approach, he was unable to surrender his passion for the primitive. This concept still recurs in his later work—even in El engaño de las razas (1946).Ortiz, well known as a scholar of Afro-Cuban religions, began his career as a criminologist, writing about the delinquency of blacks and particularly about religious practitioners he named “black sorcerers.” He too was enthralled by African animism and fetishism. In his Glosario de afronegrismos, he traces the origins of the word “fetish” to the Portuguese “feitiço” (“spell”) and back to its Latin root “facticius,” meaning something artificially made, nonnatural, which is still present today in the Romance languages and in English (“fascination,” “fascinating” and “fascinator”).16Ortiz published articles in Italy about the criminality of blacks in Cuba that stemmed from his research for Los negros brujos.17 The preface to Los negros brujos was written by Lombroso, then director of the journal Archivio di psichiatria (in which Ortiz's articles appeared) and the author of L'uomo delinquente, in which he develops the theory of criminal atavism. In the preface, Lombroso agrees with Ortiz's view of how atavism works on blacks and says he has nothing more to suggest to Ortiz but that he acquire data on cranial, physiognomic, and tactile abnormalities in a determined number of sorcerers and criminals and in the same number of “normal” blacks.18Ortiz was clearly captivated by Lombroso's ideas and applied his notion of atavism, the idea that an individual—in this case, criminals, the mentally ill, some “races,” and other social outsiders—can present physical characteristics that indicate backward movement on the “evolutionary scale” to the Cuban context. Ortiz updates Lombroso's theory to accommodate it to the reality of the tropics, and in his article “La criminalità dei negri,” he attempts to demonstrate that atavism works differently in the Americas than in Europe. For Ortiz, the Cuban sorcerer is in fact a “born criminal” in Lombrosian terms, and this fact can explain all his moral and antisocial impairment. But atavism does not account for his being born a criminal. Rather it is the changing of the environment that is to blame, specifically the fact that blacks were transported through slavery to a “more advanced” society. Therefore, the Cuban sorcerer is a “primitive criminal,” for he has a “primitive psyche” among more “evolved” beings. Ortiz thus employs Lombrosian atavism in a contradictory way. The Cuban sorcerer is a primitive because his environment suddenly became superior, while the criminal in civilized societies is also a primitive because he has taken an evolutionary step back, unable to keep up with the superior level of moral progress (599–600).Thinking about how to deal with the situation of “primitives” arriving in a “more advanced” society and becoming criminals owing to their inferior psychological constitution, Ortiz, in Los negros brujos, begins to delineate a hygienist project for Cuba. He believes that the campaign against black witchcraft in Cuba should be mounted on two fronts: first, the sources already infected ought to be eliminated and, second, the environment ought to be disinfected in order to impede the reproduction of this type of criminality. He concludes that progress requires erasing the remains of African “savagery” that infects the country and isolating the sorcerers as had been done with the yellow fever sufferers, because he believes witchcraft is highly contagious (410–11). In order to carry out the disinfection of Cuba, Ortiz proposes segregating the sorcerers in a sort of penal colony where the internees would be under constant surveillance and would be given many types of work. In the space of this penal colony that resembles a concentration camp, the black sorcerers would be included in the “nation” by means of their exclusion.19As Ortiz's writings demonstrate, the religions of Afro-Cubans were seen as an infection in the body of the nation. He could not have been aware of his own historical position, but Ortiz in 1906 (and even earlier) was participating in the birth of eugenics—through his own research and in his engagement with the research of the intellectual lineage with which he was affiliated. Ideas about the differentiation of human beings by way of reference to race, the inheritance of genius and of degeneration, and biologically dissimilar evolutionary stages of human development and about the hygiene and health of the body of the nation connected with new and rapidly developing scientific theories, constituted the melting pot in which eugenics, the idea that the man could be measured, classified and improved, came to life at the turn of the twentieth century.20In 1911, the fascination with dactyloscopy—influenced by Juan Vucetich's methodology—reached Fernando Ortiz in Cuba.21 That year, Ortiz was named “chief inspector of identification” by the Cuban government. His work culminated in the 1913 book La identificación dactiloscópica (Dactyloscopic Identification), which he signs as member of the “American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology” and of the “General Society of Prisons, France.” In a historical overview of human identification, Ortiz passes from one method to another, studying their qualities and deficiencies: craneography, ophthalmoscopy, radiography, mandatory tattoos, Bertillonian anthropometry, the work of Galton and, of course, Vucetich's dactyloscopy. Ortiz finds in dactyloscopy a way to push Cuba—still immersed in “administrative anarchy” owing to its inability to efficiently identify its criminals—into “modern civilization.”22 Without a national system of identification, he believes, society is subject to numerous disorders, including insoluble crimes, illegal immigration, bigamy, and many others (2).For Ortiz, fingerprint identification is also the pinnacle of Lombrosian anthropology. It is the very essence of anthropological identity: more a work of nature than a human invention, a domination of nature in its smaller details. Ortiz proposes a method to register not only criminals but every inhabitant of Cuba. Dactyloscopy, with its focus on details, is capable of differentiating a population that is difficult to distingue with the naked eye. Blacks are homogenized, and only science can provide a tool to proficiently expose distinctions among them and to establish a sanitary zone without barriers as a “positive means of prophylaxis and hygiene” (153) by identifying beggars and prostitutes. A remarkable passage of La identificación dactiloscópica further introduces the idea of adding to each individual's birth certificate their dactyloscopic combination. Thus, a person would become “the citizen A-2414 V-4342” (171). Ortiz ended up identifying himself by the combination of his own fingerprints “Y4444 Y4242,” saying that this was his “anthropological name,” found through dactyloscopy, and that it was “absolute” and “natural” (5). The significance of Ortiz's obsession with identification resides in the fact that through it, the black body would receive an identity. The text is accompanied by a series of photos, some of them showing how two different individuals (the Cuban criminals in these photos were black) could be indistinguishable by the naked eye (11–12). La identificación dactiloscópica forms a type of closure to two earlier enterprises, the attempt to identify ñáñigos' drawings by Rafael Roche and Ortiz's own exercise of mapping witchcraft in Los negros brujos. After achieving complete victory, that is, after finally being able to systematize the postslavery population—and after finding a method of including the black masses in the new nation, individualizing that which before was only equivalent to identical pieces of machinery—Ortiz could go to another stage: to study of the body he could add study of the spirit.Ortiz's fascination with the classification of man, from criminal minds to fingerprints, culminated in the desire to measure the soul. In 1915, almost a decade after writing Los negros brujos, Ortiz published La filosofia penal de los espiritistas (The Penal Philosophy of the Spiritists), which he dedicated to Lombroso. The text is a comparative study of the spiritist fundaments of Allan Kardec and criminological positivism. In Ortiz's view, spiritism is not just a religion; it is a science, at once experimental and rational. For him, the Lombrosian theory of atavism is consonant with Allan Kardec's findings on the retardation of the spirits of bad men. He points out that spiritism is contemporary with Darwin's and Wallace's writings and nourishes itself from them, while Lombrosianism is evolutionism applied to criminology and, therefore, also true and scientific. Comparing them, Ortiz adds that spiritism can reach, by means of its evolutionism, a more radical atavism not even dreamed of by the genius Lombroso: an interplanetary atavism.23According to Allan Kardec (as glossed by Ortiz), the criminal man has delinquency in his nature. He is a setback for his society. Within spiritism, he is also an atavistic individual, a representative of a prehuman atavism. And the madman is possessed; his body is under the influence of another spirit as—one cannot avoid making the connection—in religions of African origin. It is interesting to note that spiritism maintains a hierarchy of souls that is, not surprisingly, comparable and even correspondent to the positivist hierarchy of human races wherein the savage occupies the lowest rank (at least on this planet). Ortiz quotes Kardec as saying that some savages only need more body hair to complete their resemblance to apes (19). Spiritism sees the primitivism of the spirit as the infancy in which one is dispossessed of intelligence and acts by instinct. Cannibalism, for example, is the submission of the ignorant savage to his instincts (25). It is very interesting how, in some passages of La filosofia penal de los espiritistas, Kardec—as cited by Ortiz—defines the primitive who cannot understand civilization as the anthropophagite, the cannibal. More interesting still is how this image will be completely reversed by the Brazilian avant-garde. In the year 374 of the deglutition of Bishop Sardinha (or 1928), Oswald de Andrade published his Manifesto antropófago (Cannibal Manifesto) in which he states that “anthropophagy is the only law of the world, which unites us economically, philosophically and socially” (“só a Antropofagia nos une. Socialmente. Economicamente. Filosoficamente. Única lei do mundo”).24 Such a view of anthropophagy almost certainly conflicts with the views of the lawyer and criminologist Fernando Ortiz. Ironically, however, he would later advocate something similar himself: the law of transculturation. Anthropophagy is transculturation. Both view cultures as eating each other, clashing, and being constantly transformed by the absorption of the other's knowledge, history, wisdom, barbarism, and violence.Ortiz's La filosofía penal de los espiritistas is dedicated to Lombroso because at the end of his life, Lombroso devoted himself to studying spirits. In the year of his death, 1909, appeared the monumental Ricerche sui fenomeni ipnotici e spiritici (After Death—What? Spiritistic Phenomena and Their Interpretation), dealing with numerous occurrences of the spiritual world: hypnosis (considered a scientific method at the time), the power of mediums, ghosts and luminous apparitions of spirits, haunted houses, experiments with cards, mysterious imprints of fingers, fluidic limbs, levitation, materialization, radioactivity, speaking in foreign and unknown languages, writing mediums, transmission of thought, premonitions, trances, and, of course, the biology of the spirits. Writing on the size of the territory encompassed by spiritism, Lombroso argued hallucinated: “The spiritistic hypothesis seems to me like a continent incompletely submerged by the ocean, in which are visible in the distance broad islands raised above the general level, and which only in the vision of the scientist are seen to coalesce in one immense and compact body of land, while the shallow mob laughs at the seemingly audacious hypothesis of the geographer.”25By linking Lombrosian theory with spiritist doctrine, Ortiz thus is not accomplishing what it might seem he is: that is to say, an exotic and challenging cross-reading of fields like religion, science, and crime with the result of unexpectedly expanding on the thought of his Italian master. Ortiz is in fact being more Lombrosian than ever; his decision not only to categorize bodies (as in the interpretation of fingerprints in La identificación dactiloscópica [1913]) but also to classify their souls is the summit of his criminological career. Another important aspect of Lombroso's vast research interests is the connection that he had established years before between genius and degeneracy, art and the insane. In his 1888 book, L'uomo di genio (The Man of Genius), Lombroso defends the thesis that insanity and human geniality are closely linked. For Lombroso, the genius is a degenerate. The insane, according to him, had increased intellectual activity and produced literature, music, drawings, and paintings comparable to those of the great masters. He believed the study of the art of the insane could be useful in aesthetics and art criticism because it would reveal characteristics that belonged to the “pathology of art.”26 Ironically, we can see that the posterior shift in Ortiz's thought from regarding black cultural manifestations as forms of degeneration to appreciating their artistic character is not in contradiction with Lombrosian ideas; rather, it is those very ideas taken to their limit.In Brazil, there was also a famous psychiatrist interested in the relation between insanity and art: Osório César. He was not only willing to designate the works of mentally ill patients he treated in the Juquery Hospital in São Paulo as art. He also maintained that the sculptures, paintings, and drawings of those outsiders specifically resembled the art of the avant-garde. But what do the vanguardist and the madman have in common? The answer for Osório César: primitivism. Born in 1896, he lived in São Paulo (the center of Brazilian modernism) and was romantically connected with the vanguardist, anthropophagical painter Tarsila do Amaral. He wrote several books and articles on the art of the insane, including A arte primitiva dos alienados (The Primitive Art of the Alienated [1925]), A expressão artística dos alienados (The Artistic Expression of the Alienated [1929]) and A arte nos loucos e vanguardistas (The Art of Madmen and Vanguardists [1934]). Praising futurism, which had a great impact on Brazilian modernism (it is enough to recall the 1926 visit of Marinetti to Brazil), he claims that avant-garde art is brought into being when nobody believes in dogmas, when the art of the master does not cause ecstasy anymore.27 Now it is time to awake the primitive who lives inside us, to let ourselves to be guided by instinct: “Desejamos contentar os nossos instintos … e isto porque? Porque somos constantemente despertados pelas nossas influencias ancestrais. Dentro de cada um de nós dorme o seu somno milenar o primitivo[;] … o futurismo veio quebrar as cadeias do classicismo, estribando-se nas manifestações artísticas dos primitivos” (We wish to please our instincts … and why? Because we are constantly awakened by our ancestral influences. Inside each of us the primitive takes his millennial sleep[;] … futurism came to break the chains of classicism, leaning on the artistic manifestations of primitives).28For Osório César, the works of Marinetti, Braque, Duchamp, and Léger, among others, are perfectly similar to drawings by mentally ill people, such as those reproduced in medical literature. Both are in the realms of fantasy, being either the monstrosities and aberrations of madmen or the Freudian impulses of artists under a cover of the permissible. According to him, avant-garde art express, with its inner primitivism, the subconscious complexes of the authors, which appear under the symbolism of deformity. As to the clinically insane, he arrives at conclusions similar to Lombroso's: it is common for psychiatric patients to develop artistic aspirations of all kinds, especially a desire to paint and write (even the not very literate ones), and this is frequently observed among condemned criminals as well (36).Osório César became especially interested in an inmate of Juquery Hospital who was producing sculptures that all revolved around the same motive: “feiticismo” (both fetishism and witchcraft), expressing a sentiment of “atavism” and evoking the soul of the ancestors of his race (40). What strikes us most here is that the inmate used to substantiate Osório César's writings was also a black criminal who was removed from the public jail where he was serving a sentence for killing his wife with an axe. According to Osório César, the sculptor presents several symptoms; he has asymmetric cranial degeneration, small ears, and flat feet and suffers from persecutory delusions, symptoms that lead Osório César to diagnose him with early paranoid dementia. His sculptures are original, according to the psychiatrist, in their grotesque aspect and marked deformation. One of them is a bestial head reminiscent of the “gargoyle” of Santa Maria Formosa Church in Venice. Another is a cubist piece of art, presenting all the characteristics of the style with a primitive mind living inside it (40).Osório César defines cubism as the subjective art per excellence, for the artist can manifest full freedom of expression and relation of motives. The same is the case with the insane, giving rise to the possibility of a comparative study. According to him, the artworks of both the madmen in the Juquery Hospital and the vanguardists show a predominance of infantile complexes that detach from the subconscious and fixate themselves in the artwork. He goes on to analyze the creation of another insane man, also a criminal sharing a very similar history to the first patient, whose drawings likewise show a “reveling primitivism” (46). The psychiatrist recounts that the inmate started to suffer from hallucinations in a prison, where he had come to believe in the existence of an electrical machine that could read all his thoughts. The art of this man is marked by a shocking intellectual symbolism and references to the abdomens of pregnant women, resembling the pictures of Kandinsky, the “Russian revolutionary,” whom Osório César notes had earned fame in Europe with his “primitivist drawings” (47). He believes “symbolism” is what best describes the work of the insane, the criminal, the primitive, and the vanguardist. For him, symbolism emerges with human beings. It is their first form of manifestation and the reason why the insane regress to it: owing to disease, he believes, they regress to a primitive state. Within the avant-garde, primitivism is not a form to be discarded, feared, or s
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