How Valuable Race Can Beat Personal, Community, State, and International Level

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Question Two: Racial Identity in the Pelourinho
Racial identity politics are among the central concerns of anthropology. This paper details a historical perspective to examine the Pelourinho, Salvador, Brazil, to gain a nuanced understanding of the roots of contemporary problems that revolve around racial identity in the region. Pelourinho designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the mid-1980s, offers a perfect case for examining the role of documents in racial identification and commercialization of human treasure.
Written documents served multiple roles in Pelourinho. First, the paperwork told the story of Pelourinho including its residents, with emphasis on the Afro-Bahians. Also, the files served as the source of primary data in the form of surveys that IPAC officials collected. The information gleaned from the surveys predicated many critical compensation decisions. For example, IPAC’s Dona Karla synthesized the primary data from the survey, in which the Pelourinho residents had participated, and used the syntheses to determine “the size of indemnification” (Collins, 2015, p. 200). The files were also essential in identifying who qualified for a given state program; in the Pelourinho’s case, victims received indemnification only when the IPAC social scientists, social workers, and other officials were convinced that the beneficiary was qualified. The information further helped in locating where people had moved to upon receiving indemnification. Taken together, the written documents provided an accessible means for preserving field data, profiles of the individuals to be compensated, and identifying who had benefited from the compensation program and those who had not.
It is practically impossible to conceptualize the roles of the written documents without appreciating the impact they have had on racial identities and politics. Documentation, to a considerable degree, intensified racial consciousness, its meaning, and the potential benefits it harbored. As Collins, (2015) explains, IPAC’s use of the documents underpinned the residents’ conceptualization of selves as black or otherwise. The residents also realized that identity is a treasure that can be commercialized to attract individual material gains. In the same vein, the author used the identity to argue that it earned an individual the right to inherit indemnification the same way patrimony was passable down the family line (Collins, 2015). It was because of the records that racial politics took a new, rejuvenated turn in Brazil.
From the preceding...