Mixed Race Studies

The Brazilian system of racial classification

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Published Online: 2011-12-05
6 pages
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2011.632022

Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães, Professor of Sociology
Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil

Michael Banton’s text belongs to the long tradition of European social sciences which rejects the conceptual use of the lerm ‘race’ in sociological analyses. His work is also linked to the school—this time a minority—that uses individualist and logico-analytic methodologies, largey shunning historical, structuralist or holistic analyses. The real novelty of his approach, though, resides in bringing the natural concept of ‘colour’ to the centre of sociological analyses of the kinds of social differentiation and hierarchization that arise from the encounters between distinct peoples and cultures.

However my comments in this short text will not address any of these aspects head on. Instead I shall concentrate on clarifying what seems to me to be the weak point of the empirical example used by Banton in his argument, namely, the Brazilian system of racial classification, which, according to the author, is based not on race but on colour, by which he means skin colour or tone.

To allow the reader to follow my comments, it is worth briefly recalling what we know about the Brazilian system of racial classification, a topic systematically studied by sociologists and anthropologists between the 1940s and 1970s (Frazier 1944; Pierson 1945; Hutchinson 1952; Wagley 1952; Zimmerman 1952; Azevedo 1953: Fernandes 1955; Bastide and Berghe 1957; Harris and Kottak 1963; Harris 1970; Sanjek 1971; Nogueira 1985), with the aim of deciphering its classifieatory principles. From 1872 onwards the Brazilian census classified the ‘colours’ of Brazilians on the basis of the theory that mestiços ‘revert’ or ‘regress’ to one of the ‘pure races’ involved in the mixture an ideology that shaped both common-sense and academic knowledge at the end of the nineteenth century. The 1872 census, for example, created four ‘colour groups’: white, caboclo, black and brown (branco, caboclo (mixed…

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