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Racialized bodies, naturalized classes: Moving through the city of Salvador da Bahia
Author(s) -
McCallum Cecilia
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1525/ae.2005.32.1.100
Subject(s) - racialization , sociology , ethnography , embodied cognition , identity (music) , situated , product (mathematics) , constitution , field (mathematics) , race (biology) , gender studies , diversity (politics) , anthropology , geography , aesthetics , political science , epistemology , law , art , philosophy , geometry , mathematics , artificial intelligence , computer science , pure mathematics
In this article, I describe racialization processes in Brazil's third‐largest urban center, Salvador da Bahia, focusing on a broadly defined field of social practice. In a cross‐class ethnographic portrait of the city, I examine the situated, embodied production of meanings about the body, as subjects move through urban space and time. I trace the emergence of racialization from residents' microhistorical passages through the metropolis as these sediment into a shared, if partial, knowledge about difference and identity. I argue that it is such knowledge, borne by subjects as they ceaselessly reconstruct themselves, that grounds the mutual constitution of whiteness and of blackness in the city. Further, these processes generate knowledge of the naturalization of class. Thus, if a uniting factor underlies the diversity of discourses circulating in the city, it is the embodied by‐product of subjective experience.