Culture, Content, and the Enclosure of Human Being

Figure 1. Early morning in the Pelourinho Square: State- sponsored display of the Portuguese

“discovery” of Brazil alongside indigenous women, Carnival, 1999.

reflections

Culture, Content, and

the Enclosure of Human Being

Unesco’s “intangible” Heritage

in the new Millennium

John F. Collins

We might even say that emergent forms of property signify new possibilities for corporeality or bodily integration in lives that observers constantly tell themselves are dispersed. — Marilyn Strathern, Property, Substance, and Effect

In late April 2000, on one of those rainy yet sunny “winter” mornings common in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, I drove my friend Indio from the colonial- era city cen-ter known as the Pelourinho (Pillory) to the peripheral neighborhood of Fazenda Grande do Retiro so that he could visit his brother, Gaginho. Indio needed the ride because a knife wound had left this twenty- six- year- old former street child a quadriplegic. His limited mobility and Gaginho’s HIV- related ailments and paltry income meant that the brothers faced difficulties in seeing one another or in visiting the Pelourinho, a UNESCO World Heritage Center and former red- light district where both had contracted AIDS.1 Indio thus brightened notably when neighbors shouted greetings as we approached Gaginho’s home. He exclaimed in response, as beer began to circulate, “Here I am, patrimonialized in this passenger seat. Looking good, ain’t I? That’s why the gringo takes such good care of me.”

Radical History Review Issue 109 (Winter 2011) doi 10.1215/01636545-2010-019 © 2011 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.

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Indio’s commentary on his relatively immobile yet carefully transported per-sona took form around what might appear a surprising invocation of patrimonializa-tion, the term used in his city to describe UNESCO- overseen attempts to preserve colonial architecture and vernacular culture. Nonetheless, Indio’s words were part of an increasingly common way of speaking about personhood and property in the face of the urban reform and the commodification of Afro- Brazilian practices at the center of his government’s restoration of the Pelourinho Historical Center. Since 1992, this $100 million urban reform has given rise to the displacement of over four thousand residents and the state’s appropriation of six hundred colonial edifices. The project rests on a restoration of crumbling buildings and the reeducation of their overwhelmingly Afro- Bahian residents in what the state presents as “proper” forms of Bahian behavior.2 This burnishing of people and buildings, begun in the late 1970s, presents a particularly Bahian reworking of policies fomented by the World Bank and the Inter- American Development Bank (IDB) in the 1990s — a blending of biopolitical concerns with minority selves and the state- directed care of traditional practices — as central to the harnessing of popular culture as a tool for development.3

The Pelourinho restoration, initiated in 1967 with the founding of the Bahian Institute of Artistic and Cultural Patrimony (IPAC), stands as a special form of heri-tage management that first took form well ahead of the worldwide curve.4 While UNESCO landmarking has long supported boundaries between nature and cul-ture and monuments and folkloric creativity — for most of the second half of the twentieth century the organization divided its patrimonializing registers between “natural” and “cultural” heritage — during the past three decades Bahian planners have interpreted these categories through Brazilian intellectual paradigms that have encouraged engagement with everyday practices rather than an emphasis on monu-ments. At the same time, Bahian planners have often approached relations between race and history and culture and biology in manners distinct from their European and North American peers.5 The Pelourinho’s management thus seems an example avant la lettre of efforts to produce “intangible heritage,” UNESCO’s newest heri-tage registry and one usually described as arising in Asia. UNESCO locates this intangible heritage in “the human mind, the human body being the main instru-ment for its enactment, or — literally — embodiment. The knowledge and skills are often shared within a community, and manifestations of ICH [Immaterial Cultural Heritage] often are performed collectively.”6

Indio’s conceptualization of his wounded body and its importance to forms of expert care sutures concerns with health and morality to cultural practices that make his personhood valuable and attractive to the world’s most powerful. This highlights not simply some fetishization of identity or a misidentification of the real sources of value by Pelourinho residents whose everyday practices are becoming possessions of the nation, and of humankind, but the importance of analyzing enclosure’s leap

Collins | Unesco’s “intangible” Heritage in the new Millennium 123

from land and expressive culture to the historical terrain of human being. One could argue that Indio’s creative deformation of cultural heritage restoration, a transna-tional form of property making within which most everything may be construed as a community possession, suggests that certain of the Pelourinho’s current and former residents have come to blur the boundaries between land and people and colonial ruins and their residents, configuring themselves in the process as a species of liv-ing human heritage.7 This bundling of heritage, hygiene, and personhood — Indio is HIV- positive and thus capable of attracting the attention of the social scientists and public health authorities essential to his state’s attempt to sanitize and objectify his habits as culture — recalls John Locke’s claim that “man” is the owner of his self. Yet Indio does not argue that he has mixed his labor with land or objects beyond his body. Instead, he suggests that his status as something consecrated as cultural heritage places his body in some sort of sympathy with other objects.8 This entangle-ment of politics, subjectivity, and property motivates my attempt to understand how heritage, or what is usually called “patrimony” in Latin America, may function in remarkably iconoclastic ways in relation to forms of enclosure that are so much a part of development programs and conceptions of community belonging today.

Heritage does not usually involve the legal privatization of public or fallow lands used by the community, but rather a nationalization of once privately held properties, ostensibly for the benefit of all. In this way states employ UNESCO guidelines to transform private properties into publicly held and managed goods understood as representations of national origins and motors for economic advances available, at least in theory, to all citizens. 9 Yet attempts to make history and culture into resources must confront multiple existing property regimes. In the Pelourinho, these include a de facto urban commons formed at the end of the nineteenth century when elites departed for the suburbs after abandoning their mansions to impover-ished relatives and domestic servants. In the case of people like Indio, who exer-cised customary rights to such neglected spaces until their dispossession during the neighborhood’s still unfinished, post- 1992 restoration, such “public” appropriations of formerly private property in the name of capitalist development and democratic polity have generated not only political economic concerns with what Michel Fou-cault called the “care of the self,” but a social transformation in which particular forms of enclosure have left residents poorer. Such land grabs, promulgated in the name of increased access, are central to understanding enclosure’s relationship to everyday life, as well as the ways the marketing of culture and history may impact the horizons of political possibility today.

The use of “cultural heritage,” a designation of common property that in Salvador involves the effective privatization of collective properties, codifies once unmarked habits as cultural goods and allocates shared resources to specific, privi-leged classes. In other words, this heritage involves not simply the fomenting of community memories or, perhaps more cynically, the retaking of colonial buildings


by the descendents of their former owners. Rather, it functions as a hybrid form of public enclosure of everyday, popular habits as human “properties” overseen admin-istratively by UNESCO and IPAC and facilitated financially by institutions like the World Bank and IDB.

Understanding the expansion of patrimony through the logic of property’s extension from the land on which monuments lie into the inner states and private habits of an Afro- descendent population goes beyond claims about class- specific interests or statist interventions. Rather, in light of UNESCO’s recent elaboration of “intangible patrimony,” a powerful category within heritage management that props up recent World Bank and IDB- inspired attempts to treat “culture as devel-opment,” the transformations in property regimes currently taking place in heritage sites signal a change in which everyday life is enclosed as (and performed in the name of) a putatively common good.10 Statements like Indio’s claim to patrimoni-alization should not, then, be treated merely as instrumental reactions to displace-ment. Instead they index a spiraling commodification of essences that were once, and are often still, understood as inalienable human properties. Yet in a multicul-tural marketplace for human difference, practices typically coded in social theory as intimate or beyond the state’s purview may become quasi- natural resources open to alienation and exploitation. Nonetheless, as Indio demonstrates in mobilizing them so as to gain a ride to his brother’s house, such forms of property making may also generate room for maneuver for subaltern and civil society actors.

This essay resituates and expands recent anthropological examinations of cultural patrimony through attention to the habits and knowledge practices that in 2003 UNESCO grouped as “intangible heritage.” It seeks to relate them to the dis-possessions, territorial demarcations, possessive logics, and possibilities for popular struggle that have surrounded processes of enclosure by focusing on the ways these have been put into play when governments reclassify privately owned or incom-pletely registered lands and certain human practices as cultural possessions of a col-lectivity. The essay’s goal is to establish new perspectives for analyzing the effects of UNESCO’s patrimony programs by suggesting vectors for ethnographic and archi-val work that document the shifts in political consciousness emanating from and informing those reconfigurations of property and community taking place in the name of cultural preservation today. The concept of enclosure thus may prove a use-ful means of describing the powerful forces that have conspired to congeal “culture” into a composite, alienable good and a tool of late capitalist development.

Patrimonializing the Past: Property, Power, and Histories of HeritageCultural heritage may be understood as a new type of property created by cata-loguing in state archives that which supposedly lies within the social forms con-figured as essential to community identity. Heritage, in such a definition, is both a technology for instantiating state power and a category of property that permits a


myriad of practices, some of which supposedly index commensurable humankind, to be turned into possessions of that nation- state. Such transformations involve the surveillance and representation of everyday life, including material objects of folk culture, by legal, educational, hygienic, and archival institutions. In today’s climate of multiculturalism, in which so- called non- Western knowledge practices are often treated as exotic specimens, this heritage planning reflects specific Western episte-mologies regarding surfaces and depths, illusion and truth, origins and end points, and subjectivities formed in tension with individual and collective stewardship, or ownership, of resources.11 This is why battles over what gets defined as patrimony, a form of property typically coded as an inheritance belonging to a collectivity that gains legitimacy through the state- directed care of its traditions, are thus disputes over ethics, or what requires care and attention at a specific historical juncture. Such disputes give form to arguments about what is special or intrinsic to the pol-ity and the practices that symbolically define it. This is a basic part of nationalist imaginaries. But even more importantly, it suggests that patrimony works to produce a delineatory substance conjured up by means of epistemological and legal frame-works for specifying social relations as content- filled objects in themselves. This is one reason the modern heritage movement has taken shape, and why its histories are told, in dialogue with notions of individual and collective property that are now being stretched and altered in relation to capital’s novel colonization of everyday life through cultural heritage management.

The anthropologist Richard Handler has emphasized that in much heritage legislation, the term culture refers to something that communities possess, rather than being a contextual, process- based, and symbolic idiom that describes human interactions. From this perspective, culture is not something enacted or remade among specific interlocutors but is something open to public- sphere appropriation and for- profit alienation.12 Handler’s insights not only set the tone for many ensuing critiques of UNESCO’s apparent misappropriation of the culture concept but also confirm the role that cultural property plays in UNESCO’s late- twentieth- century policies and its current autobiographies.

According to UNESCO, a concern with heritage emerged after World War I but took shape only after 1959, when Egypt called for help in saving archaeologi-cal sites threatened by the building of the Aswan Dam.13 This is symbolic of many of heritage’s entanglements in the world today, as water and cultural treasures are now lightning rods for debates over scarcity and disputes over the merits of indi-vidual versus common property regimes. UNESCO’s mobilization around Egyptian treasures, which came on the heels of the 1954 Hague Convention’s argument that “damage to cultural property belonging to any people . . . means damage to the cul-tural heritage of all mankind,” pushed global property law beyond immediate con-cerns with who physically possessed an object and on to the issue of who had access to it. The attempt to preserve “man’s threatened heritage” might thus be understood


as a precursor, or a correlate, to discussions related to UN debates in the 1970s and 1980s over intellectual property, especially in the areas of pharmaceutical develop-ment and informatics. In the pharmaceutical example, arguments have turned on health as a human right and thus an ethical imperative to provide increased access to medicines whose high costs continue to mean that a majority must limit their right to health. Similarly, UNESCO sought in the second half of the twentieth cen-tury to define culture as a right and, like salient conceptions of health in Western social thought, as something imagined in terms of a subject with depth and internal coherence that construe that human vessel as possessing qualities as interiorized, palpable things. Nonetheless, and like contests over patents and rights to health, this involved UNESCO’s deflecting of questions of ownership away from the physi-cal possessor and toward access for an international public. The initiative relied on guidelines for defining the ostensibly special, or extraordinary, value of cultural goods, entities that are not necessarily portable and hence quite different from the artworks whose seizure or destruction had dominated earlier debates. Thus in the second half of the twentieth century heritage came to turn on arguments about human interiority, exceptionality, and access within a universe of shared rights and responsibilities secured in part through rethinkings of property.

From UNESCO’s perspective, physical spaces and cultural objects that war-rant the suspension of individual property rights in favor of a concern with a gen-eralized humanity must conform to particular technical criteria that can be evalu-ated and, when they conform to expert- sanctioned distinctions, can be protected.14 This preservation, which takes place through the extraction of objects and practices from commodity flows and individual ownership, depends on expertise that justi-fies their removal from the everyday. The 1972 Convention Concerning the Protec-tion of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage allowed nation- states to stipulate those natural or artificial “wonders” encountered in their territories in UNESCO’s World Heritage List and to spell out the criteria for recognizing what gave these “wonders” such exceptional qualities. The convention made clear that UNESCO simply recommended, but never required, that states seek recognition for practices and objects they claimed to own, while at the same time it promulgated standards to gird international property regimes that might protect such resources. In doing so, the 1972 convention defined “outstanding universal value” around the separation of “natural” and “cultural” patrimony, a move congruent with post- Enlightenment distinctions between nature and society that have done much to animate modern knowledge claims.15

A separation of nature and culture, and a reliance on labor as an explana-tion for humans’ ability to transform the former into the latter, is a staple of often otherwise contradictory government policies and traditions in social theory inspired by thinkers as diverse as Locke and Karl Marx. Yet UNESCO and national- level heritage professionals have since recognized the arbitrariness of nature- culture dis-


tinctions and the specificity, or the inapplicability, of European- derived concepts of property to cultural preservation. Among planners’ quandaries is the realization that nature is eminently social and that, even in the so- called cultural realm, a cathe-dral and a dance represent quite dissimilar cultural forms that may require distinct preservation mechanisms. Attempts to reconcile such contradictions have led to modifications and additions to the convention. Among the most significant was the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, which emerged from debates in the 1990s surrounding concerns with immaterial labor and practices that were difficult to codify on the basis of the convention’s previous iterations. UNESCO’s attempt to subdivide the category of culture, for instance, meant that it defined intangible heritage as “practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills — as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith — that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage . . . transmitted from generation to gen-eration, [it] is constantly recreated by communities . . . and provides them with a sense of identity and continuity.”16

Intangible heritage, as a slot for valuing humanity and its expressions, defines cultures around an “open character . . . [and their status as] dominant or non domi-nant . . . not necessarily linked to specific territories and [characterized by the knowl-edge] that one person can . . . belong to different communities and switch communi-ties.”17 This updates UNESCO’s culture concept to make it less about static qualities and more accepting of a holistic approach to “knowledge, skills [and] . . . cultural spaces associated therewith,” even as the emphasis on protecting intangibility has the contradictory effect of using people’s practices to entwine citizens and landscapes while turning those practices into properties of the collectivity.

Cultural Property, Ambivalence, and Ownership: U.S. Anthropology and Heritage StudiesStates have long faced critical contradictions related to their stewardship of collec-tive property. Since heritage must be produced, circulated, and interpreted, it is open to elaboration throughout its formation and reception, something central to Lisa Breglia’s study of people’s and institutions’ orientations toward heritage sites distilled from Mayan cities. In Monumental Ambivalence, Breglia focuses on con-tradictions inherent in “logically or discursively opposed projects of protection or preservation on the one hand and promotion or development [often in tandem with privatization] of national or global heritage on the other.”18 Concentrating not on material culture but on uses of heritage, Breglia explores popular resignifications of official representations. To do so, she separates heritage from material culture and argues that, at a neoliberal moment, the Mexican state finds itself torn between privatization and preservation. There is little doubt that a naive empiricism focused on a material culture conceived of as a collection of objects fails to recognize the


diversity of ways that people employ objects in social action. Additionally, states today face critical contradictions related to their stewardship of collective property. Thus Breglia’s separation of the discursive and the material, and of past and present, helps describe an early twenty- first- century moment. Nonetheless, it may also follow too closely those logics it seeks to reveal.

Property is a social relation that organizes seemingly disparate arenas of individual existence and collective belonging. Among those spheres of social and philosophical life it has tended to support over the second half of the twentieth century, and which my analysis treats as historically specific rather than given, are the world’s partition into the natural and the cultural, facts and interpretations, non-human objects and human subjects, and the material and the immaterial. Yet the assumption at the root of heritage and much social theory, namely, that labor medi-ates nature and culture by translating the former into the latter, relies in turn on the very distinction between nature and culture that such mediation purportedly over-comes. With the rise of culture as a product, this tautology based on human labor thought to produce social products as distinct from natural backdrops has become apparent in a way that generates an intense questioning. This does not mean that the rise of immaterial heritage presages a definitive refutation of the labor theory of value. Instead, it suggests that culture, whether approached as a particular, dialogi-cal relation between specific interlocutors or a product for the masses, has become an integral part of the production of value in ways that highlight the importance of following further the implications of its ambivalent separation from nature or biology. And the effects of a growing recognition by both subalterns and more privi-leged actors of the role of an objectified culture in producing the bases for commu-nity belonging is critical to how enclosure, territory, and humanity are implicated in today’s heritage projects.

Cultural heritage- based manipulations of what might be called “cultural essences” link citizens to territory as quasi- natural features of a landscape that is not just a place tied together around the elaboration of patriotic narratives but, like a nation’s collective possessions construed as its patrimony, is a material property of such accounts. Heritage and its objects are thus at the center of contemporary forms of enclosure promulgated in places like the Pelourinho that fuse peoples, in the form of symbolic yet living human ancestors, and restored landscapes as one tightly packaged resource. As my invocation of Locke should suggest, this essay is thus an account of human subjectivity, and being, as a property open to enclosure under capitalism. Yet this argument is not directly epochal, or one based on a neat dis-tinction between liberal and neoliberal economies. It is more of a claim about how a shifting, contemporary situation lends perspective to ongoing processes that can now be made out in new ways. A key task is not to identify some rupture whereby heritage is now a resolutely alienable commodity, but rather to understand a shifting


set of practices that makes “common” sense of popular culture — mainly through its commodification, it would seem today — at a particular historical juncture. And this is one reason this essay begins with Indio’s narrative of his arrival in Fazenda Grande do Retiro.

The circulation of foodstuffs, and especially libations, is a long- standing means of producing solidarity through the exchange and consumption of symbolic products that materialize human connections.19 Similarly, heritage is an idiom, and a good, whose celebration as a seemingly enduring resource produces feelings of community, a process that Breglia’s work questions by attending to discordances within such a shared medium. Yet even as heritage is not consumed in precisely the same sense as is beer in Salvador, or circulated like a yam or shell necklace in classical anthropological accounts from the Pacific, it is frequently approached as part of a network of gifts, or of reciprocal exchanges, that function quite differently from a marketplace based on the exchange of cash for commodities. In UNESCO’s June 2008 World Heritage Information Kit, one finds a chapter called, “Heritage: A Gift from the Past to the Future.” The title suggests that heritage is inalienable and enduring due to its role in reciprocal exchanges, an economic system long under-stood in anthropology as a means of maintaining collective control of resources on the basis of their passage between kin or individuals transformed into members of the same community through this intercourse.20 In this context, we can see how Indio’s invocation of patrimony took shape as result of the iconoclastic forms of self- objectification developed in the 1990s by Pelourinho residents subject to the state- directed disciplining and codification of their culture as a good that might attract outside funding and tourist dollars. Patrimony functions for Indio as part of a gift economy and of a commodity- based system. And both serve as practical resources for his knowledge of self.21

Conclusion: An Issue of SubstanceCultural heritage is an elastic medium that allows people to shift between property regimes at a moment at which privatization is supposedly the name of the game. Heritage plays this role in part because it may involve hybrid forms of communal property in which objects are preserved as well as alienated. But such ambivalence is not just an issue of straddling property regimes or providing alternative histories within established regimes of property. It is also about providing glimpses of these regimes’ limits, their distinct features, and human beings’ construction of alterna-tives to reigning notions of property. These enable us to observe that, as a social relation, property is a symbolic representation of persons and personhood as defined at a particular geohistorical moment.22

Modern archaeologists have demonstrated an abiding interest in cultural properties’ production, circulation, consumption, and thus their return and safe-


guarding. The resulting literature typically emphasizes redress and prevention as directed at civilizations’ treasures. This often involves losing sight of the extent to which properties are relations that reflect and condense existing political economic systems in ways that undercut attempts at the policing of the objects themselves.23 Such difficulties in delimiting circulation and use arise from factors ranging from the density of networks available under capitalism for the transfer of artworks to the difficulty of establishing the legal boundaries of a cultural manifestation. In Who Owns Native Culture?, Michael Brown wades into debates around cultural properties and calls for a more pragmatic and shifting treatment of culture by actors in the public sphere since existing “law strives for uniformity and precision” rather than the “ambiguity required to foster social peace.”24 Such support for pub-lic sphere mediation, in what seems a just and apparently rational manner, ties into a longer history of the coproduction of property and ideals of justice and progress in a variety of ways only touched on in this essay.25 And it highlights some of the reasons why one might want to avoid prescribing how culture can be construed as a more equitable property so as to foster justice. Culture, from the perspective developed in this essay and in relation to the contests going on over survival in Sal-vador’s Pelourinho today, is not a panacea that masquerades as a form of property; rather, it is a reflection and a constitutive element of capitalism. As such, the task at hand for a critical social science is not to correct how culture takes form but, rather, to understand how practices come to be called culture in ways that have power-ful effects on political subjectivities, oppositional movements, and the cosmologies within which they form.

In her approach to the ways that cultural property in Mexico supports the mutating forms and subjects of enclosure so constitutive of capitalism, Elizabeth Ferry avoids a focus on patrimonial objects as objects and instead looks at how sil-ver, “the quintessential patrimonial substance . . . is distributed, consumed, and valued in markedly different ways.”26 The most salient issue, for Ferry, is not the attenuation or improvement of dominant means of using silver per se. Instead, she investigates how silver is configured as a particular type of substance in relation to specific human practices. Silver gains value from contexts and uses, as do the prac-tices configured as culture that constitute those attempts to enclose human being as a commodity produced in precisely the sites, like a Mexican mine or the Brazil-ian center of the Atlantic slave trade, that gave rise to a capitalism too often seen as originating in Europe. This is where culture, or at least the argument about the reification of people’s practices as human “essence,” becomes good to think along-side precious metal.

Yet what seems most important for this essay is not culture’s or silver’s statuses as valued goods, or as even capitalism’s origins, but rather the political effects of the practices that confirm that either silver or what passes for culture is a substance in


itself.27 And as Indio’s commentary on heritage, his disability, and his relationship to social science and scientists indicates, the idioms through which human beings imagine the content of humanity have come to configure culture as a valuable sub-stance. Thus while there is little doubt that social roles such as serf, landlord, and peasant have taken shape around the management and enclosure of landed property in nations ranging from England to Mexico, Indio’s intervention, like UNESCO’s intangible heritage programs, raises the possibility that property and personhood may be co-constructed in new ways today.

As citizens’ everyday practices come into being as the core of a citizenship construed along market- influenced models, culture becomes a quasi- natural thing likely vulnerable to enclosure. Of course, to argue that culture is construed through objectification is not new. What does appear new — or, more precisely, what comes into clearer view in relation to shifting political economic processes — is the extent to which an unstable entity called culture becomes an object of state attention that resembles earlier concerns with the privatization of land as a productive resource. In places like the Pelourinho, attempts at accumulation focus not on abstracting labor situated on a shop floor, a field, or even a peasant’s household. Rather, everyday habits of the type long used to individuate modern nations and argue sovereignty around ethnic or cultural particularity now appear as a field of common, human property liable to alienation.28 In the hands of idealistic UNESCO planners, such content is proof of a shared humanity, general in its reach and particular in its mani-festations.29 Reworked by the government of Bahia, the IDB, and the World Bank, however, it appears to be a substance, akin to land, that must be enclosed to be mobi-lized for development. This is important not in terms of mourning an earlier era, but to understand more clearly shifting modalities of capital accumulation, related forms of political subjectivity, and the array of stratagems available to those who might seek to carve out alternative relationships not to culture, but to the broader field of objectifications that have turned practices often thought to index the deepest recesses of human being into touchstones for political economic exploitation.

Notes1. The city of Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia, is typically celebrated as the mythic site of

Brazil’s African soul. It thus appears in nationalist thought as the proper place for defining tradition and locating blackness in “racial democracy,” or the purportedly redemptive claim to Portuguese, African, and Native American hybridity essential to Brazilian modernity. The state government of Bahia has sought to reinforce this contested narrative through a reconstruction of the Pelourinho, Salvador’s colonial- era downtown, which served as the capital of its Brazilian territories and was the South Atlantic’s most important port until 1763.

2. See John Collins, “ ‘But What If I Should Need to Defecate in Your Neighborhood, Madame?’ Empire, Redemption and the ‘Tradition of the Oppressed’ in a Brazilian Historical Center,” Cultural Anthropology 23 (2008): 279 – 328.


3. The role of citizens’ everyday habits in capitalist development has given rise to insightful studies, including Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Ethnicity, Inc. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Julia Elyachar, Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); and Michael Herzfeld, Evicted from Eternity: The Restructuring of Modern Rome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). For development agencies’ policy suggestions regarding cultural practices in the 1990s, see Eduardo Rojas, Old Cities, New Assets: Preserving Latin America’s Urban Heritage (Washington, DC: Inter- American Development Bank, 1999); and Ismail Serageldin, Culture and Development at the World Bank (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1998). Nonetheless, the analysis put forth in this essay departs from such treatments of the roles of artisanal and culture- based labor due to its contention that cultural heritage functions as a biopolitical idiom, or a means of moralizing, state- directed care for the biological life of a population. On biopower, see especially Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, 3 vols. (New York: Pantheon, 1978 – 86); and Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).

4. In arguing that the Pelourinho cultural development scheme rests on an explicitly hygienicist approach to an Afro- Brazilian population I am not simply invoking Foucault but linking this biopolitical management of culture to slum clearance, the treatment of minority and working- class populations, and thus to aspirations to a European- style modernity in Latin American urban planning. Among the most helpful, albeit in quite different ways, discussions of this attempt to reconcile an ostensible barbarism associated with Latin American nature with urban civilization in Brazil are Teresa Meade, “Civilizing” Rio: Reform and Resistance in a Brazilian City, 1889 – 1930 (College Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997); and James Holston, The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). These works emphasize the extent to which the manipulation of an environment might alter the character of citizens during their own lifetimes, as opposed to future generations alone, and thus serve to counter a Latin American nature or racial condition often portrayed in Brazil as a source of national backwardness.

5. On Lamarckian evolutionary influences on Latin American concepts of cultural evolution and degeneracy, and their relationship to land and landscape, see Nancy Leys Stepan, “The Hour of Eugenics”: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); and John Collins, The Revolt of the Saints: Memory and Redemption in the Twilight of Brazilian ‘Racial Democracy’ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming). Put simply, the influence of Lamarckian concepts of evolution and degeneracy in Latin America, especially prior to World War II, mean that a variety of Brazilian thinkers have argued influentially that people’s contact with their environment and cultural contexts alter their own biological states, or essences. In other words, and contrary to Darwinian models of evolution that emphasize natural selection, the social or geographic milieu in which people take form is understood not simply as a force in their cultural construction but as a means of shaping their biological status in a particular present. In Revolt of the Saints I argue that the restoration of the Pelourinho at the end of the twentieth century partakes of enduringly similar logics, whereby Bahian heritage planners conceive of the restoration of buildings as a means of altering the ontological statuses of their residents.

6. UNESCO, “What Is Intangible Cultural Heritage?,” www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index .php?pg=00002 (accessed April 11, 2010).


7. See Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), on the overlaps between architecture, and especially domestic architecture, and conceptions of personhood and political subjectivity in post- Enlightenment thought.

8. For a discussion of the complex calculations that go into people with AIDS’ approaches to personhood and care, see João Biehl, Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

9. One especially troubling aspect of this tendency involves the delineation of parks or nature reserves in the name of a “common good,” and often with IDB or World Bank sponsorship, by means of the appropriation of untitled land that under international human rights law belongs instead to indigenous peoples or Maroons. Richard Price’s Rainforest Warriors: Human Rights on Trial (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), is a complex ethnographic account of these troubling contradictions. See also Jake Kosek’s Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), which argues against a dichotomous conception of nature and culture while following racially marked local residents’ contested uses of and claims to common lands now administered as a possession of a U.S. national state.

10. The World Bank’s Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Development Web page illustrates culture’s configuration as an economic resource. See World Bank, “Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Tourism,” web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTURBANDEVELOPMENT/EXTCHD/0,,contentMDK:20204614~menuPK:430438 ~pagePK:210058~piPK:210062~theSitePK:430430,00.html (accessed April 11, 2010).

11. In “Does Multiculturalism Menace? Governance, Cultural Rights, and the Politics of Identity in Guatemala,” Journal of Latin American Anthropology 2 (2002): 34 – 61, Charles Hale argues that a fetishization of cultural diversity helps veil more basic exclusions fomented, at least in part, through such celebrations. For a discussion of how the plays of interiority and exteriority I attach here to neoliberal multiculturalism function in terms of race, see John Collins, “Recent Approaches in English to Brazilian Racial Ideologies: Ambiguity, Research Methods, and Semiotic Ideologies,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 49 (2007): 997 – 1009.

12. Richard Handler, “Who Owns the Past? History, Cultural Property, and the Logic of Possessive Individualism,” in The Politics of Culture, ed. Brett Williams (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 63 – 74 ; and Richard Handler, “On Having a Culture: Nationalism and the Preservation of Quebec’s Patrimoine,” in Objects and Others: Essays in Museums and Material Culture, ed. George Stocking (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 192 – 217. Rosemary Coombe provides an influential theorization of legal struggles around cultural property in The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).

13. UNESCO, World Heritage Information Kit (Paris: UNESCO, 2008), 7.14. Ana Lucia Meira deploys Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of distinction in relation to cultural

heritage in O passado no futuro da cidade: Políticas públicas e participaçâo dos cidadâos na preservaçâo do patrimonio cultural de Porto Alegre (The Past in the Future of the City: Public Policies and Citizens’ Participation in the Preservation of the Cultural Patrimony of Porto Alegre) (Porto Alegre, Brazil: Editora da Universidade Federal de Rio Grande do Sul, 2004).

15. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).


16. UNESCO, Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (Paris: UNESCO, 2003), 2.

17. UNESCO, “What is Intangible Cultural Heritage?”18. Lisa Breglia, Monumental Ambivalence: The Politics of Heritage (Austin: University of

Texas Press, 2006), 6.19. See, for example, Thomas Abercrombie’s Pathways of Memory and Power: Ethnography

and History among an Andean People (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), which explores the alignment of past and present through ritual libation.

20. Classical analyses of gift economies and their roles in establishing social solidarity around forms of reciprocity in relation to inalienable goods include Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), originally published as “Essai sur le don: Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques,” (“The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies”) Année sociologique (1923 – 24); and Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (London: Routledge, 1922).

21. This insight into patrimony’s ability to straddle gift- and commodity- based economic systems, and thus its role in revealing their imbrication as opposed to some essential separation, is developed by Elizabeth Ferry in Not Ours Alone: Patrimony, Value, and Collectivity in Contemporary Mexico (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). In response to the ways in which workers render cooperative property both alienable and inalienable, thus making it a commodity and an enduring resource, Ferry argues that heritage permits people to boomerang between a marketplace and the preservation of collective property and associated identities. See also Annette Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping- While- Giving (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

22. Property’s and subjectivity’s mutual influence is emphasized in this essay’s epigraph from Marilyn Strathern, Property, Substance, and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things (New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone Press, 1999), 199.

23. Alexander Bauer, “New Ways of Thinking about Cultural Property: A Critical Appraisal of the Antiquities Trade Debates,” Fordham International Law Journal 31 (2008): 689 – 724.

24. Michael Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 242.

25. Rosa Congost’s “Property Rights and Historical Analysis: What Rights? What History?” Past and Present 183 (2004): 73 – 106, is an overview of approaches to property in European historical traditions that pushes beyond a view of ownership as possession and takes into account the multiplicity of possible relations contained within, and hence rights to, property.

26. Ferry, Not Ours Alone, 20.27. Such an illusion of content or intrinsic value is related to the market and its abstractions.

Therefore, like commodity fetishism in general, it plays a basic role in ideology.28. This is not to argue that attention to the ways that labor girds value in the packaging of

entities dubbed culture or nature is not critical to understanding the manners in which states oversee everyday life. On the contrary, my analysis rests on the suspicion that the bureaucratic management of the quotidian is itself a form of labor. However, in this short work, rather than exploring how the management of culture is a form of work or, conversely, working to unseat a labor theory of value, I seek to begin to conceptualize space for subsequent, more detailed analyses of the entanglements of nature, culture, labor, and


land. I do this by concentrating on the specific techniques employed by states that direct bureaucratic labor at the alienation of aspects of everyday life not typically construed as work but as “natural” backdrops to the social. For valuable insights into this process, see especially Genese Sodikoff, “The Low-Wage Conservationist: Biodiversity and the Perversities of Value in Madagascar,” American Anthropologist 111 (2009): 443 – 55; and Fernando Coronil, “Towards a Critique of Globalcentrism: Speculations on Capitalism’s Nature,” Public Culture 12 (2000): 351 – 74.

29. Jacques Derrida, Ethics, Institutions, and the Right to Philosophy, trans. Peter Trifonas (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).

Culture, Content, and the Enclosure of Human Being

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