| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Caribbean and Latin American

Lilia Moritz Schwarcz. The Spectacle of the Races: Scientists, Institutions and the Race Question in Brazil, 1870–1930. Translated by Leland Guyer. New York: Hill and Wang. 1999. Pp. ix, 358. $35.00.

In this elegant book, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz examines the development and operationalization of ideas on race within the context of Brazilian scientific institutions of the late nineteenth century. The subtext is the reception of Darwinism in Brazil, particularly Ernst Haeckel's version of it. 1

In Brazil between 1875 and 1900, there were three great centers of Darwinian irradiation: the law school in Recife; the medical school in Bahia; and the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro. All were self-consciously evolutionist, Darwinian in the emphasis on selection in human populations, Haeckelian in their insistence on a hierarchy of races, and Spencerian in their opposition to metaphysics. They shared the obsession for defining the nation that characterized all Brazilian positivists. Moreover, there were no universities in Brazil until 1920, so these institutions substituted. Indeed, the National Museum had the feel of a research university, with natural and social science departments and the nation's first and only experimental biological laboratory until the 1890s. The museum was, in the 1880s and 90s, highly identified as a center of evolutionary biology, where everyone was an evolutionist, and where the Linnaean concept of the species was pronounced dead. Its exhibits on human anthropology, Schwarcz observes, were based on a notion of classification that supposed "a rigid biological analogy that viewed living organisms as being interchangeable with social groups" (p. 103). . . .

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