"There She Was Just A Walkin' Down The Street" or Retracing Ruth Landes' Footsteps in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil

• In Event: Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnography in Bahia, Brazil: An Eighty Year Retrospective

Abstract

Fifty years separates my fieldwork in Bahia (1987-1989) from that of Ruth Landes' (1938-9). Her intention was to study race relations but she became intrigued with the Candomblé and changed her focus. My intention was to study spirit possession traditions, but not the Candomblé, for the same reasons Landes hesitated to--so much was already written about it I doubted whether original data would be forthcoming. I, like Landes, however, was drawn by the Candomblé 's centrality in Bahia and conducted fieldwork in a small terreiro close to the big one featured so prominently in her work. Landes' analysis in the City of Women emphasized gender and innovation; mine pointed to race, class and the inter-connectedness of various extant traditions. In this paper I examine how the differences in our analyses were mediated by the social and political exigencies of our respective times, as well as the disparity in our ages and professional backgrounds. But I will also explore commonalities in our experiences as women, as Americans, and as distinct individuals. My first impression of The City of Women before going to Brazil was dramatically different from when I re-read it on my return. Not only were her observations consonant with much of my experience five decades later, I found myself laughing out loud at some of the more outlandish predicaments in which she found herself, so resonant were they with my own. Pioneer and iconoclast, I will exemplify how her work remains a model for our times.

Author

• Dolores J Shapiro