Duke University Press Log

Q&A with the editors of French Historical Studies

The incoming editors of French Historical Studies (FHS), Kay Edwards and Carol Harrison, discuss the future of the journal under their joint editorship, including information about forthcoming special issues and what topics they would like to see submitted to the journal. See the most recent issue here, and subscribe to the journal here.

How would you like to shape French Historical Studies in the future?

CAROL: In the future I think we’d like to continue some trends that we see in the field and that FHS is starting to reflect, publishing a lot about France and French history beyond the borders of metropolitan France. There will be more colonial material, which is where the field is going. We have exciting material on South East Asia and North Africa in the pipeline now that is being submitted.

KAY: We've also said that we've wanted to expand the chronological framework. FHS is open to anyone working in France or in these related fields over pretty much any chronology. But our submissions currently do tend to be much more modern. We want to get people who are doing medieval work or late antique work to think of us as well, since we definitely are a highly ranked scholarly publishing venue.

How do you see the journal developing over the next few years?

KAY: I would like to see us broadening the journal not just chronologically and in terms of international content, but also in terms of broadening it to more of an international academic audience. We currently are getting more and more submissions from German and Scandinavian lands, we've always gotten a few French, but we’d like to broaden our European, East Asian, African, Latin American base.

CAROL: I think we have a couple of ideas or projects on board now that are also about reminding the rest of the historical profession of how important French history is and how important French historians are to the rest of the profession. So I would say Michael Breen’s forum for instance. We have a group of articles by young French social historians that we’re arranging to translate into English to publish in the journal. I think this is important because social history is a much more lively tradition in France right now than it is in the Anglophone world. These are scholars who unless you work in French history and read French and keep up with things in France, you probably don’t know about. I think scholars outside of French history should read this forum to find out what’s going on in French history, and particularly in French social history. Similarly, we’ve got a special issue coming up in 2017 that we've just started planning on archives so we’re recruiting scholars who will be writing about archives not just as neutral repositories where the facts are, but as institutions that shape the way history is written, so as active participants in the writing of history. I think that’s the kind of special issue that will remind the rest of the profession that French historians are really crucial to shaping history.

Speaking of special issues, are there any other forthcoming special issues that you would like to talk about? How do you select special issues?

KAY: There is a French food special issue coming out that is primarily a project of the past editors. It is about food very broadly defined in French history. There is an article on coffee, another about WWII and food allocations and foraging, a wide variety of what defines food--not just a recipe book--particularly because France is so strongly associated with food culture.

CAROL: There will be articles on wonderful food, the introduction of coffee, there will be articles on lack of food, hunger, there’s an article on late 19th-century shop girls and their relationship to food, you know where they ate lunch and if they ate lunch. So that’s going to be a very exciting issue. And then further down the pipeline--this is more speculative--but 2018 is the 50th anniversary the events of May 1968. This is another one that I think will be important for FHS and I hope for non-French historians. Nineteen sixty-eight having obviously had a global reach, but the events in France were central. So that’s another one where we’d like to put together articles on France, on the Francophone world outside of France, and think about this anniversary. We would like FHS to lead the way a bit in talking about the German ‘68 and Mexico City ‘68 and Berkeley ‘68 and pull it together.

What would you like researchers to know about the submission process?

KAY: Don’t be afraid to send all different types of articles. Just because we’re FHS doesn't mean we only, as Carol said, do the metropol. There’s probably going to be a conception that we only do cultural stuff because that’s what France is. And the whole point is that we’re trying to get a wide variety of methodologies and subjects and approaches.

Who should be submitting to this journal that hasn't been?

KAY: A lot of early modernists and pre-modernists don’t think they should submit to FHS, in part because the name implies a very national framework that sometimes work and sometimes doesn't.

CAROL: They may be working on a territory that was not in fact called France. But if it’s Francophone, we’d like to see more early modern, medieval, and more French scholars! We do publish in French.

KAY: It does not have to be a translated work. In terms of material, I just want to see diversity. I really don’t want people to assume that because it’s French that it must be cultural or that it must have theoretical work. I have nothing against theoretical work, but I think there may potentially be stereotypes. I would like to see a reconstruction of environmental drainage, as long as this is something that hasn't been done.

CAROL: One thing our predecessors started that I think we want to continue is publishing more editorial pieces. Instead of very closely researched monographs, single author traditional research articles, FHS has been publishing these editorial pieces that are often reflections on the profession. We've published a recent one by David Bell that’s thinking about global history and reflections on the profession generally, on French history, and its role in the globalizing historical profession. I think there is room for developing that kind of editorial piece. We invite people to submit not just the research articles, but editorial articles that reflect the state of the field and the kind of the research that’s being done.

American Literature Article Wins Prize

Congratulations to Jayson Gonzales Sae-Saue for winning the Don D. Walker Prize sponsored by the Western Literature Association! The Don D. Walker Prize is given annually to the best essay published on western American literature during the previous calendar year.Sae-Saue's article, "Aztlán’s Asians: Forging and Forgetting Cross-Racial Relations in the Chicana/o Literary Imagination," appeared in the September 2013 issue of American Literature (85:3).  Curtis Marez's piece from American Literature (85:4) was given an honorable mention for the same award.

To read Sae-Saue's article, made freely available, click here.

Honorable Mention for American Literature Digital Open Access Piece

Congratulations to Curtis Marez, who received an honorable mention for the Don D. Walker Prize sponsored by the Western Literature Association! The prize is given annually to the best essay published on western American literature during the previous calendar year. The award committee found Marez's American Literature piece, "Cesar Chavez's Video Collection," "an exciting, innovative work of interdisciplinary scholarship that reflects the aspirations of the Walker Award in demonstrating the untapped possibilities of our still unfolding field."

The digital piece was a collaboration between the journal and Scalar, a multimedia authoring and publishing web platform developed by the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture. Read more about the piece in a previous guest blog post by American Literature managing editor Emily Dings entitled "Chavez Behind the Camera," here. “Cesar Chavez’s Video Collection” is an offshoot of Marez’s book Speculative Technologies: Migrant Workers and the Hidden History of New Media (forthcoming, Duke University Press), and is available on the Scalar platform here.

Check out the rest of the American Literature special issue, "New Media and American Literature," which includes three additional open-access digital projects, here.

The "Lost City" of Machu Picchu

On July 24th, 1911, American archaeologist Hiram Bingham and the Yale Peruvian Expedition team followed an eleven year old boy to the ruins of Machu Picchu. The expedition sensationalized the area and opened the floodgates of tourism in Peru. Today, tourists, adventurers, and academic enthusiasts from all over the world still flock to Machu Picchu. In honor of this wonder, sample several articles from two journals, Ethnohistory and Hispanic American History Review.

In “Collecting a ‘Lost City’ for Science: Huaquero Vision and the Yale Peruvian Expedition to Machu Picchu, 1911, 1912, and 1914–15,” Amy Cox Hall delves deeper into the rediscovery of Machu Picchu. She examines the practices and collecting technologies of the expedition to suggest that the objects accumulated as well as the practices used in accumulating helped fashion Machu Picchu into a “lost city” that was “scientifically discovered” by Bingham. Read an excerpt:

Although popular myth associates Hiram Bingham and his global unveiling of Machu Picchu in 1911 with archaeology, Bingham was trained as a historian and “had little interest in stratigraphy” or other methodologies associated with modern archaeological research. Instead, what was practiced on the three forays of the Yale Peruvian Expedition (YPE) to Machu Picchu is better characterized as a late antiquarianism-inspired collecting spree—or, less generously, strategic “grave robbing."

In this article I suggest that the expedition’s practices and technologies helped mythologize Machu Picchu into a “lost city.” ̈ It was initially imagined by Bingham as the lost Inca city of Vilcapampa, and the expedition team’s collecting practices and the frame of science, as well as the types of artifacts collected, helped materialize Machu Picchu as both a vestige of the Inca race and a “scientific discovery.” The collecting practices combined prospecting with the notion that science had a sovereign claim on those objects that might contribute to the accumulation of its knowledge. Rather than representing a nation’s or empire’s sovereign claim over a territory and its history, the expedition relied on the universal virtue and sovereignty of science to make its objects collectible.

Read more of “Collecting a ‘Lost City’ for Science” here.

In “Tourism, Environment, and Development on the Inca Trail,” Keely Maxwell explores how tourism has shaped Latin America by constructing touristic landscapes and impacting environmental problem solving. He utilizes written records and interviews to document the environmental history of the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. Read an excerpt:

Thousands of kilometers of former Inca roads span the Andes. One 40-kilometer section has become a new type of Andean pathway, a tourist trail hiked by 54,000 foreign visitors in 2008 alone. Tourism has emerged as a potent political economic force in twentieth-century Latin America, with concomitant environmental impacts. Yet despite the importance of tourism in the region, there are few scholarly investigations of its history, particularly its environmental history. Research has centered on how tourism developed as a leisure activity linked to modernity and capitalist industrialization, on the social construction of tourism destinations, and on social relations of hosts to guests. In Latin America, tourism histories have focused geographically on the Caribbean and Mexico and thematically on “sun and sand” or on cultural heritage tourism. The Inca Trail is part of the Machu Picchu Historic Sanctuary, created in 1981 and designated a World Heritage Site for natural and cultural heritage in 1983. It is a premiere tourist destination and the center of controversy over environmental impacts, and so it provides a critical case for examining the environmental history of Latin American tourism.

Read more of “Tourism, Environment, and Development on the Inca Trail” here.

The Little Veins of Central America by Deborah T. Levenson

Today's guest post is by Deborah T. Levenson, Professor of History at Boston College, author of Adiós Niño: The Gangs of Guatemala City and the Politics of Death and co-editor of The Guatemala Reader. She calls for us to listen to the stories of the undocumented Central American children appearing on the U.S. border.

That tens of thousands of children cross the border from Mexico to the United States without documents presents immediate challenges to all of us. They are coming primarily from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, countries in which not only is unemployment high, and employment very poorly paid, but mere survival—much less a life beyond mere survival—is at stake.  In the Mayan highlands of Guatemala, 70% of the population under age 5 is so malnourished as to stunt growth, and in all these countries violence from gangs and adult mafias is lethal, everyday.

Many of us might agree that nations should take care of "their own"—let’s not hold our breath—and that US bears much of the responsibility for crisis. Its policies have undermined local peasant agriculture and national industry, contributed to the sharp decrease in social programs, and supported military regimes that have modeled the behavior prevalent in gangs. These are vital questions.

However, given the sharp polemics over what to do with these children right now, I want instead to give some face to who “they” are.  I have spent years of researching and writing about youth in Guatemala, and with reference to Central American youth in general, and I want to suggest how the young fit into this schema of high levels of poverty and violence that generates flight, a noun that fails to capture children’s motives and identities.  

For generations, poor people of Central America—as in other places—have depended on the pooling of incomes of family members to guarantee one pot large enough for all.  Central American children have long been part of this familial wage. They have worked in peasant agriculture and as seasonal harvesters. The worse the economic crisis gets, and the less subsistence that is available in their regions, and the farther they go: from the countryside to the city; from country to country; from Central America to Mexico to the USA. For the most part, the Central American youth I have met in Massachusetts are here to remain vital to that traditional family wage economy and to retain a place that gives them esteem and meaning.  A 14 year old from Honduras lives in a crowded apartment in Chelsea and shovels snow in the winter and cleans yards in the spring to send money home for his mother’s expensive heart medicine.  A teenager delivers newspapers in Salem to provide for her siblings in Guatemala.  Many youth—of course not all—leave home to protect home. This is one of the oldest immigrant stories, in US history, a heroic and true one. Befriend a Central American youth and you might hear one.

 You might hear another true story, one about gangs such as Mara Salvatrucha  (MS-13). Most reports indicate that the current increase in immigration of unaccompanied minors is a reaction to the growth of gang violence. Yes, youth are running from gang violence, and, it need be underscored that by leaving, they are also resisting forced conversion into being violent themselves. MS-13 operates in a simple and seemingly airtight manner in which extreme violence plays a pivot role. You join the gangs and get shoved into a life that relies on hurting other people to earn money and prestige; one acquires points for murdering and thus moves up in the ranks. If you are rebuff the gang, you face punishment by death or, if that not, an impossible dilemma.  At 13 years of age, a Guatemalan named Edgar Chocoy refused to join MS-13, which “transmuted” his death sentence into the payment of  “tax” so exorbitant that he would have had to resort to serious crime to pay. He refused to do that as well, and he left the country, fast.  He made it to Los Angeles where he was picked up and deported back to Guatemala after a judge denied his plea that MS-13 would kill him on his return. Edgar’s stance against the gangs was essentially a moral one and he paid a high price for it. Two weeks after he was deported, MS-13 murdered him.

Policy toward unaccompanied children, many of whom have challenged the fatal dynamics of gang control, as Edgar did, or who have “resolved” (personally and successfully responded to) their home nation’s health care crisis in their small way by buying medicines that otherwise would not be supplied, need be based on respecting these youth, who stand for life and against despondency. 

Fernando, the Peruvian Neymar by Orin Starn

Our final World Cup guest post is by Orin Starn, author of The Passion of Tiger Woods and co-editor of The Peru Reader, as well as series editor for The Latin America Readers and The World Readers. He is Professor and Chair of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University.

I’ve  watched the World Cup from a shantytown in desert Peru.  

I’m here doing intensive ethnographic research—well, actually just hanging out—with my two-year old, Lucien. We’re living with a family I’ve known for almost thirty years. Back when I arrived in their village as a young anthropologist, the Córdovas lived in a mud farmhouse up in the Andes. They later followed the great Peruvian migrant trail, a million Joads, down to the big coastal cites. Their hot sandy slum is just a circle removed from hell, at least by regulation American standards. It’s a place of burning garbage piles and swirling dust storms where turkey buzzards, rats and scabrous dogs everywhere patrol for scraps. Life is still much better for the Córdovas. Now they live in a tin-rooved shanty with real matresses, a gas stove, running water, electricity, and internet pirated from a relative next door. There’s also a television that grabs the World Cup with only some good old-fashioned squiggly static.  I’ve found caring for a two-year old here to be sport in itself without the changing table, diaper wipes, and the Babies-R-Us rest, and an extreme one at that. But Lucien is a celebrity with his little blonde curls in a universe of black straight hair. And he gets passed around between houses and relatives in this world where people do not shut themselves off from each other as we so often do in the United States. 

Few here care all that much about the World Cup, contrary to the stereotype of a soccer-crazed subcontinent. Peru hasn’t made it to the World Cups for two decades. You see high shantytown skills in the fulbito, or mini-football,  played in the concrete schoolyard and sandy streets.  But poverty, league corruption, and bad facilities have kept the country from developing any real top-flight players since Teofilo Cubillas, the graceful Afro-Peruvian star who scored eight World Cup goals. Nor is Peru really much of a sports culture. Its genius lies in music, the arts, history, and, now food, with three Peruvian chefs ranked among the world’s top twenty. And then there’s also the gift and curse of Peru’s spectacular outsized geography of tropical jungles, Saharan deserts, and Himalayan peaks.

That doesn’t mean that soccer doesn’t matter. Consider the Neymar haircut of Fernando, a Córdova nephew:

 

                                                 

Fernando wanted to dye the floppy top blonde for the full Neymar effect.  “But my parents wouldn’t let me.”   He’s still only ten. He’d had the straight line cut of Daddy Yankee, the reggaeton superstar, the year before:

 

Now, Fernando says, four or five other boys in his fifth grade class have also gone Neymar. A  little Peruvian boy with the doo of a Nuyorican music idol and now the fallen Brazilian soccer superstar?  Hair has gone global like everything else.  

I ask Fernando why he likes Neymar. “I saw him in some games. He’s fatal, great – he always makes his team win.”   It’s television and the Internet, of course, that led Fernando to Neymar, the great enablers of global celebrity and sports circuits. “I found his pictures on Google. My Dad showed the barber on his phone.”

Hair, as the old school anthropologists liked to remind us, can stand for many things. Status: the Manchu queue and Sun King’s curly wigs. Rebellion: Cromwell’s roundheads, the Rasta’s dreadlocks, and the punk’s mohawk. Religion: the monk’s tonsure and Sikh’s uncut turbanned hair. And even, by its absence, the darkest human suffering,  as in the chemotherapy patient’s baldness or the concentration camp prisoner’s shaved head. Hair may be the most flexible and polysemous sign in the cabinet of body politics.

But for Fernando, hair is as much as anything about idol worship, the little boy’s eternal copycat desire to be like the mythical Olympians.  He was rooting for Brazil, but mostly for Neymar, though he didn’t seem too distraught about his hero’s injury. The day after, he came to show me this meme on his cousin’s laptop.  It had gone viral in Latin America:

 

The rhyme that makes the meme funny, at least to non-Brazilian fans, only works in Spanish—between ardilla, squirrel, and rodilla, knee. 

Zuñiga asks, “Neymar, did you see the squirrel?” 

“What squirrel?,” Neymar replies.

“The squirrel,” Zuñiga says, “that’s kicking you in the back.”

Fernando didn’t seem too stricken by Brazil’s black day against Germany. He got bored halfway, going out to ride his skateboard on a cracked chunk of sidewalk.

There’s little pan-Latin American solidarity in football fandom. National allegiances trump continental ones; the global south remains a term more for postcolonial academics than a felt sentiment here.  Brazilians have something the reputation of the old ugly Americans here, the arrogant tourists.  Argentina seems very far away, and it has treated its Peruvian immigrants poorly—maids and construction workers. There was a sprinkling of Brazil, Argentina, Germany, and even Dutch supporters among the Córdova clan, though no one was going to lose any sleep over the results:

 

One cousin, Cristina, did say she felt sorry for the Brazilians, a touch of human kindness.

Fernando’s sister, Made, 11, is a Messi fan, rooting for Argentina.  She was the secret weapon for her the sixth grade team at the Nuestra Señora de Lourdes school. Her coach would bring her in to play right wing when the team had to have a goal.  The other coaches complained that having a girl violated school rules, however, and Made didn’t like some of the boys shouting insults at her either. In Peru’s brand of soccer sexism, boys play soccer, and girls, if they play sports at all, play volleyball (and, it should be noted, the Peruvian women’s volleyball team took home the silver medal in the 1988 Olympics in a great underdog story of modern sports).  Made doesn’t play anymore, though with her gold-studded flatbill hat and cool funky look she’s not heading for Barbieland either.

 

I ask Fernando how long he’ll keep his Neymar cut. He’s not sure. Until, smiles his father Yonny, something new comes along from the  “fábrica de los suenos—the dream factory,” the shining online world of myth and fantasy by the gigabyte.

It seems to me enough worth recording the moment to snap one last picture of Fernando outside the house.

He holds his ball in his own little World Cup fold in time.

 

 

Super Marta and Our Own Crises by Marc Hertzman

Today's World Cup guest post is by Marc Hertzman, author of Making Samba. Hertzman is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Illinois.

When my high school soccer team played in the state finals our coach was Ann Cernicek.  Cernicek and her sister, Molly, had decorated college careers and helped push the wave that carried U.S. women’s soccer to global prominence.  Nonetheless, her presence on the sidelines of the boys’ championship was remarkable, all the more so because she was eight-months pregnant at the time. 

Coach Cernicek has been on my mind during the run-up to the World Cup, where Brazilian women will shape the competition—and be shaped by it—as never before.  People like to say that the political fortunes of Dilma Rousseff, the nation’s first female president, rest in the hands of the men’s team.  If they win the Cup, she’ll be re-elected.  If not, she stands no chance.
If the Seleção doesn’t win, some may also grumble that the roster didn’t include arguably the best soccer player ever. Marta Vieira da Silva (known simply as “Marta”) has won or finished second as FIFA’s women’s Player of the Year an amazing nine times. Like countless other extraordinary female athletes, Marta has drawn attention both for her otherworldly skills and things that have nothing to do with them, all while challenging widespread expectations about gender and sports.

During the Cup we can expect the kind of imagery and division of labor that seems to mark every big sport event.  Barely-clothed women will present awards (FIFA’s notoriously sexist president already drew criticism for the staging of the draw); at least one coach will ban “wives and girlfriends” from the team hotel; and the press will ogle female fans and print sensationalist accounts of prostitution and “sex in the tropics,” even while Brazil (like the U.S.) struggles to crack down on sex trafficking.

It’s still too early to tell what Dilma’s presidency will mean for women’s rights, writ large, but there’s little indication that even she can bring meaningful change to the world of big-money sports.  Marta and groups like GuerreirasProject have campaigned tirelessly for gender justice, funding, and respect for women’s soccer in Brazil, whose supremely talented female squad is perennially crippled by meager government support.  Whether or not sponsorship evolves in Brazil, Marta’s impact is undeniable, evident in her blog, which is full of inspiring messages not only from young women seeking guidance, sending good wishes, or recounting how Marta changed their lives, but also from boys and men who write for myriad reasons.  Marcio posted a message asking if he and his boyfriend, both homesick, could get together with her in Sweden, where she plays for a club team.  Kenedy, age 14, wanted advice about how to help his sisters launch successful careers.  José logged in just to state the obvious, leaving behind a short, straightforward message: “Best player in the world.”

As in Brazil, the future of women’s rights, gender justice, sports, and politics all hang in the balance here in the U.S.  Many in the press have already anointed Hillary as our first female president.  Meanwhile, the bloated, corrupt NCAA—a body that, like it or not, my fellow academics and I are impossibly entangled with—is simultaneously enmeshed in an overwhelming crisis of sexual violence on campus and challenged by the heady, complex prospects of “student-athlete” unionization, a project that holds tantalizing possibilities but also potentially disastrous results for women’s athletics.  As these stories play out, we will do well to think hard about our own relationship with spectacular sporting events abroad and close to home and to pay attention to Marta, Dilma, and less-known trailblazers like Cernicek, all of whom have more than a few lessons to teach us all.

Football in a Serious Country by John Gledhill

Today's World Cup guest post is by John Gledhill, co-editor (with Patience A. Schell) of New Approaches to Resistance in Brazil and Mexico. Gledhill is Max Gluckman Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. 

As the World Cup approached, British newspapers ran stories about facilities not being ready, the horrific possibility of being unable to tweet friends and family during matches because of deficiencies in Brazil’s communications infrastructure, strikes taking advantage of the moment in a Presidential election year, and most popular of all, shootouts between traffickers and police in Rio de Janeiro’s “pacified” favelas. Sporting pages warned England fans of the tropical miseries to be endured during their team’s first fixture in Manaus, and the challenges presented by Brazilian airports and public transport systems. But complementing this negative reporting was a more positive approach to protests about the Cup. That football embodies the pathologies of contemporary capitalism is hardly news to residents of Manchester, whose global sporting brand, Manchester United Plc, was taken over by the US-based Glazer family through a series of controversial loan-based share deals in 2005. Now a New York listed company incorporated in the Cayman Islands, United is currently eclipsed in the English Premier League by local rival Manchester City, 100% owned by the Sheikh of Abu Dhabi. Yet even the English could not fail to be impressed by the depth of the critiques of FIFA that emerged from Brazil’s longstanding experience of the sleazier side of the “beautiful game”.

 

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Opinion surveys now show that less than half the Brazilian population approve hosting the World Cup. We are not talking simply about an awakened generation of middle class kids but a country of continental scale denying its stereotyping and being “serious” about what kind of social future it wants and its role on the world stage. The legacies of authoritarianism and racism that haunt modern Brazil are daunting. Progress has been made on discrimination and poverty reduction. Increases in real wages and formal employment renewed social mobility. Yet in Brazil as elsewhere, wealth inequalities and the social self-segregation of the more fortunate present formidable challenges to constructing a more humane, less violent, society. The problems that have emerged in Rio’s favela pacification program show that not enough has changed since 2007, when state governor Sergio Cabral ordered the invasion and siege of the Alemão favela complex during the Pan American Games. Securitization unjustly defines favela residents as threats to the rest of society, and “proximity policing” proves difficult to implement because of deep rooted problems within the police corporations themselves. Budgets for the other side of “pacification”, investment in the social development of poor neighbourhoods that ironically preserve stronger patterns of collective sociability than the “asphalt” despite the violence, are inadequate because of spending on infrastructure for the Cup that has scant social utility and the social cost of forced relocations. Accumulation by dispossession remains the rule rather than the exception in neoliberal cities since reducing violence in poor neighbourhoods makes them apt for gentrification. Yet in triggering demands that the money be spent instead on improving public health, education and transport, this World Cup should not only convince foreigners that Brazilians understand that football, like carnival, is about profits for the few, but also put the country at the forefront of any doubts the world’s political classes may be beginning to have about the sustainability of that model. 

Seth Garfield Celebrates the 1994 World Cup with the Xavante Indians

Today's World Cup guest post is an excerpt from Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil by Seth Garfield. Garfield is Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas, Austin. Garfield's latest book is In Search of the Amazon.

On the night of July 17, 1994, I joined hands with Xavante Indians in their village of Parabubure in central Brazil as they celebrated a festive occasion with song and dance. Ringed in a circle, the Indians stomped the earth at the center of the village in graceful rhythm, chanting sonorously in their Gê tongue. As men pounded their feet in one step and women in another, the gendered spheres of Xavante society were ritually enacted. The remoteness of Parabubure from Brazilian settlements shrouded the ceremony in eerie seclusion, the starlit Mato Grosso sky offering the only illumination. Had their forebears been resurrected for an instant and accompanied the performance, they might have thought that little had changed, that the Xavante remained undisputed masters of their territory, faithful preservers of ancestral custom.

But they would have been deceived.Whereas the Xavante once danced on land that extended ‘‘to where the earth touches the sky,’’ they now trod on the confines of a reservation, demarcated by the Brazilian government a decade and a half earlier. Decrepit buildings, the administrative skeletons of a defunct cattle agribusiness, marred the natural tapestry of sprawling shrub, the familiar backdrop for communal ritual. Worn-out clothing draped muscular bodies once bared publicly with neither reproach nor shame. Moreover, the Xavante were not honoring an ancient tradition nor performing a long-standing rite. They were commemorating Brazil’s victory in the World Cup.

Earlier in the day, the Xavante were not celebrating much at all. They were struggling, like other historical actors, to make the most of their circumstances. As their village lacked electricity, the Indians had hoped to view the final soccer match on the public television in the central plaza of
Campinápolis, the nearest town, which was a two-hour drive away. On the dirt road to town, the Indianswould pass a succession of cattle ranches whose fenced-off pasture land once served as hunting ground for wild pig, anteater, deer, and peccary.With shattered pride but determination, the progeny of a onetime warrior nation could take their rightful place in the Campinápolis square, brooking the racism and condescension of ranchers and townspeople.

Cirilo, the Xavante driver, planned to chauffeur many of the eighty or so members of his community in the truck that the Fundação Nacional dol ĺndio (National Indian Foundation, funai) had provided some time ago. He regularly transported fellow villagers to town to buy foodstuffs, clothes, and basic household goods, as well as to receive medical treatment and social security payments. But with each attempt by Cirilo to rev the engine, frustration mounted as the Indians sensed that the trip would
be canceled. 

The Xavante might have radioed funai regional headquarters to send a mechanic. Based on long experience, though, they knew that state assistance would not be forthcoming for days or even weeks. Besides, the radio was broken as well, informed Carlos, a Xavante who headed the funai post in the village and earned his pay as an agency employee. For the final match of the World Cup, a portable radiowould have to suffice, and we all huddled around to await the momentous showdown between Brazil and Italy. The nation’s triumph on the soccer field electrified the indigenous community. During that nighttime revelry, their cynicism (and that of other Brazilians) regarding state capacity and national potential appeared to dissipate.

Less than half a century earlier, the Xavante were as much in the dark as the countryside around them that night regarding soccer, trucks, radios, researchers, reservations, the Indian bureau, and nationalism. In short, they knew little about Brazil, whose victory they now cheered. Nor did they have very much interest, for that matter. Had my grandfather ventured off in his youth to a Xavante village to learn about the interplay between state policy and indigenous political culture, he might have witnessed a more ‘‘traditional’’ lifestyle. He also likely would not have lived to tell the tale.

From the second half of the nineteenth century to the mid–twentieth century, the Xavante defended an enormous stretch of territory in northeastern Mato Grosso against Indian and non-Indian alike. Male warriors bludgeoned interlopers to death, strewing their naked corpses as testaments to Xavante supremacy, xenophobia, and masculine prowess. A history of resistance to Portuguese and Brazilian expansionism and of sociopolitical autonomy fueled Xavante belligerence.

Copyright Duke University Press, 2001.

Brazilian Multiculturalism and the World Cup by Jeffrey Lesser

Today's World Cup post is by Jeffrey Lesser. Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History at Emory University, is the author of Negotiating National Identity, and A Discontented Diaspora and editor of Searching for Home Abroad.

The Brazilian nature of multiculturalism is particularly apparent during World Cup years.  This international soccer championship has more viewers than any other single sporting event and in 2006, sixty million people watched Brazil defeat Croatia in the opening week of the championship. More than ten times that number watched the final game in 2010. In Brazil numerous channels broadcast the national team games simultaneously. Yet another phenomenon also takes place in Brazil, a country which has received immigrants from Asia, the Middle East, the Americas and Africa from the late nineteenth until today.

Some Brazilian fans root for the teams of their ancestors while others take a nationalist position.  Ethnic restaurants are often filled with cheering fans, many who root against the team of the country whose food they are ostensibly eating. In São Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul you might go to a cantina (a Brazilian version of a trattoria) to root against Italy. When the World Cup was held in Japan in 2002, some Japanese-Brazilians began wearing a t-shirt with an image of the rising sun and the phrase “I will never visit you.” A significant number of fans of the Rio de Janeiro futebol team Flamengo, however, took a different position.  Their allegiance was to the team’s greatest player, Zico, who in 2002 was coach of the Japanese national team.  As Japanese-Brazilians roared for Brazil, Flamengo’s die-hards screamed for Japan led by their beloved player.  

 

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