5 - The Face of the Land

Summary

Under the Vargas regime, and especially the Estado Novo of 1937-1945, a concerted effort was made to determine national types and wed them to a conception of brasilidade as a distinctive raciality. The representation of a generic ‘Brazilian man’ was part of the effort undertaken by minister Gustavo Capanema to redefine national culture along lines that drew heavily on the eugenics and race science of preceding decades. At the same time, the Estado Novo was committed to suppressing regional differences and eradicating threats to subvert its authority, two facets readily discernible in the manhunt for bandit leader Lampião, culminating 1938 with the brutal execution and decapitatiom of his band of outlaws. The chapter considers these facts in light of the search for a Brazilian archetype, examined through the works of artists Candido Portinari and Dimitri Ismailovitch, among others. The convoluted relationships between artistic representations and anthropological research – especially in the work of Arthur Ramos, leading authority on Afro-Brazilian culture – demonstrate how the drive to suppress the archaic was ever present alongside the wish to profess the modern. The affirmation of mestiçagem (miscegenation) mirrors, in an inverted way, the use of violence as a means of coercion.