Abstract
Revolt of the Saints challenges, reveals, confuses, occludes and edifies. It could only have been written by John F Collins and will stand as a remarkable and loving testament by the author to his friends, informants, family, enemies and interlocutors as ‘fictional characters within Bahia’s political economy of development’ (p. 43). Emerging out more than a quarter century of personal engagement with the Salvador’s Pelourinho and Brazil, Revolt of the Saints uses seven roughly sequential chapters to build an analysis of the interdigitated processes that have shaped Salvador’s historic centre since its declaration as UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992. The result is an ‘unreasonable account’ of a liminal, contested place that ‘emanates from a propensity to take seriously residents’ arguments that they are themselves patrimonialized objects who gain a special, sacral status akin to that of buildings set off and reconstructed by heritage officials’ (p. 34). This ‘frustrating and painful story of social action and historical engagement’ works through issues of ‘race, historical destinies, and the uncertain boundaries between human beings and objects’ (p. 6), leaving this reader highly appreciative and slightly dazed.
My title, ‘Not for beginners’, will be well known to Brazilianists and I apologize for deploying Tom Jobim’s overused phrase here. The quip, ‘Brasil não é para principiantes [Brazil is not for beginners]’, indicates the difficulties that foreigners and visitors have in negotiating the country’s maddening quotidian reality. Similarly, Revolt of the Saints focuses on the details of how these complexities and contradictions emerge, morph and impact a particular population, in a particular place, over a generation. Through exquisitely crafted language, a keen eye for story and sharp argumentation, Collins demands our constant attention to the details, challenging us to see what he is (not) showing us.
Because Revolt of the Saints operates on so many levels, even those ‘experienced’ [experientes] in Brazil will be captivated by the rich histories, philosophical interventions and methodological nuances that Collins offers. Following Collins’ focus on the importance of materiality, this is a hefty book that has to be read with two hands, several writing implements, sticky notes and three bookmarks. The 44 pages of endnotes have to be read along with the chapters as this is where many of the key insights are revealed and doubts dispelled. The 30 pages of references constitute an essential and wide-ranging anthology on Brazilian race, heritage and anthropology. In the classroom, Revolt of the Saints will offer an opportunity to teach graduate students how to read twice, write clearly and research deeply and broadly. Undergraduates will haul it around with them for years, wishing they had understood what was going on. I will read it again before returning to Brazil and will use many of Collins’ insights in my own work for years to come.
While specifically situated at the intersection of anthropology and history, there is much in Revolt of the Saints that geographers will find intriguing, especially in regard to the different territorial strategies deployed by heritage officials, politicians and residents. Chapter 4, ‘A Metaphysics for Our Time’ will be of particular interest as it moves through territorial strategies, conceptions of property, the instrumentality of ethnography and the role of history in the production of space. Fortunately, there is one good map on page 73, but beyond that, geographers are on their own for ‘spacing’ the narrative.
I appreciate the necessity of engaging debates on positionality and ethnography, especially in relation to race and identity in Brazil, but there were moments when I felt as if Collins was wandering around with De Certeau, Mario Andrade and Gilberto Freyre when he should have been taking me to the corner bar to spend more time with Topa, Dona Katia and Bulindo. The latter trio, in the context of an academic text, may not be able to be ‘properly historicized’ (p. 358) without the former, and here lies one of the essential contradictions of Collins’ work.
The exploration of a biopolitics of heritage that emerges from Collins’ position as a foreign social scientist who has spent several decades exploring the ‘same’ place grabs the reader as unexpectedly and astutely as a Pelourinho pickpocket. Even as someone who has lived in and fought with Brazil, I found myself wondering how and where Collins’ observations were coming from and how he managed to remain so splendidly balanced between a North American ivory tower and the shit-stained steps of the Ladeira da Misericórdia. When these doubts about ‘veracity’ or ‘objectivity’ crept up on me, Collins had usually anticipated them, or disarmed them, as with a footnote where he writes, …despite his [Pateta’s] desire to be named in this text I have decided, in one more example of ethnographic authority, not to reveal his name or leave his face clear to my reader. Perhaps this is unfair, I am not sure. (p. 389)
In reading a book to review, one is always searching for holes in arguments, inconsistencies, connections and larger frameworks to hang one’s comments and criticisms on. It is exceptionally hard to do this with Revolt of the Saints from the perspective of an urban geographer, but there were a few instances in which I felt some slippage in the otherwise professionally curated Pelourinho that Collins brings us through.
Very early on, Collins describes his ethnographic techniques as a researcher and one particular moment when he learned about code switching from Pelourinho residents. As Collins prepared to visit with heritage officials in their offices, he would put on the khaki pants and leather shoes that signified a particular code without which he could not have entered the building. The residents encouraged him to play the fool, so that Collins could capture information that would later help them in their struggle for permanence, or indemnification, or survival or all of the above. Upon returning to the Pelourinho, Collins would change back into flip-flops, board shorts and a T-shirt to re-encounter his friends and to give them information pilfered from the state.
Collins tells us that ‘changing clothes was important not because it offered some context for interpreting what I saw and experienced, but because by shape shifting in this manner I began to participate in the transductions of evidence going on and around me’ (p. 22). A few pages later (pp. 34–35), Collins reveals that Foucault’s work on biopower is fundamental to the theoretical architecture of the book. Yet the role of the author as a biopolitical agent is under-explored. As Collins moves between his worlds in Bahia and the United States, and between the Pelourinho and the Instituto do Patrimônio Artístico e Culturalm da Bahia (IPAC) heritage offices, he drags his baggage stuffed with information and (according to his own argument) historically agential significations. Sometimes the baggage takes the form of specific documents, sometimes oral histories, sometimes it wears leather shoes, sometimes flip-flops. He can fake a gringo accent, he can speak (and translate) Bahian Portuguese and can likely samba pretty well. Collins can change his shape, his codes and his geography, but his Brazilian interlocutors cannot do so with the same facility.
As foreign researchers in Brazil, we may fool ourselves into thinking that we can look without gazing and describe without judging, but our very material presence alters a reality that is predicated upon contingent personal, racial, national, experiential and intellectual histories. To Collins’ credit, he makes this explicit throughout, but at the same time does not explore the massive differentials in biopolitical agency that he has in comparison to his friends and collaborators, especially in regard to the production of social space. For a book that is self-consciously developing a methodology predicated upon the importance of ‘the materiality of the sign as an important determinant of what history is’ (p. 361), further investigation of John Collins as sign will remain a point of essential blindness (p. 362) that readers will have to live with.
In spite of my desire to have a more profound analysis of biopower and the role that social scientists have played in the recent history in the Pelourinho, I was so convinced by the authenticity of the narrative and his deep understanding of social and neighbourhood dynamics, that by the end of the first chapter Collins had me convinced and captivated. Thus, even while looking for ways to critically engage the text, I found myself reflecting on the ways in which my own research could more closely articulate with what Collins has given us.
In addition to pursuing research and writing as part of an active political engagement predicated on love of place and a commitment to social justice, one of the major contributions that geographers can take from Revolt of the Saints is the destabilizing of the archive as a neutral site of historical research. Instead of moving into a closed, inert space of historical inquiry, archives might be approached as unstable borders between a society’s shifting truths and the techniques that produce and substantiate those facts…historical records are not simply arbitrary or habitual signs whose meaning can be decoded via some sort of detached interpretation or valorization of history as ‘what really happened’. (p. 19)
In choosing his material, Collins did a masterful job of building narratives that were neither melodramatic nor monochrome, but humanely present. The occasional foray into the anthropological weeds was always justified with an intriguing find, and though many geographers might lose patience, I enjoyed going back to read what I had not initially registered or digested. One of the benefits of waiting more than a decade between getting a PhD and publishing a monograph must be that one sees older research experiences much more clearly, and it is with a poignant sense of saudade that Collins relates an important meeting at the Coaty (an 18th-century building) in a chapter called ‘But Madame, What if I Should Need to Defecate in Your Neighbourhood?’ This chapter has an emotive clarity and intellectual precision that brings together all of the elements that constitute the methodological and practical interventions that Collins seeks: the physical presence of researchers at seemingly unimportant events; the need to be prepared with recording equipment; the ability to understand and interpret not only words, but situations and their implications; empathy with subjects across the social spectrum; political consciousness in thought in action; robust theoretical frameworks and an ability to explain clearly what is important and why.
Revolt of the Saints will join the ranks of indispensable English-language texts about Brazilian cities (Caldeira 2000; Fischer 2011; Holston 1989, 2008). Oddly, Revolt of the Saints does not quite communicate with histories of marginalization, poverty and struggle in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. It may be that Salvador’s social geography is so unique that only a narrow focus can articulate its reality. More likely, it is further evidence that neither the Pelourinho, nor Brazil, nor Revolt of the Saints is for beginners.