Rethinking race and culture in Brazil's first Afro-Brazilian congress of 1934

Journal of Latin American Studies

Volumn 39, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 31-54

  Romo, Anadelia A ^a  

^a TEXAS STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Afro Brazilian; Brazil; Diaspora; Intellectual history; Race; Scientific racism; Social science

Indexed keywords

AFRICAN IMMIGRANT; BLACK POPULATION; CULTURE; DIASPORA; RACISM;

BRAZIL; SOUTH AMERICA;

EID: 33847059584     PISSN: 0022216X     EISSN: 1469767X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0022216X06002021     Document Type: Article

References (128)

1. There is an extensive bibliography on Freyre and I highlight here only the most relevant works. Maria Lúcia G. Pallares-Burke examines Freyre's intellectual debt to the British in Gilberto Freyre: Um vitoriano dos trópicos (São Paulo, 2005)
2. Jeffrey D. Needell traces the early biographical and psychological background of Freyre's work in 'Identity, Race, Gender, and Modernity in the Origins of Gilberto Freyre's Oeuvre', The American Historical Review, vol. 100, no. 1 (1995);
3. Thomas E. Skidmore sketches the historical context for Casa grande with 'Raízes de Gilberto Freyre', Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 34, no. 1 (2002);
4. Ricardo Benzaquen de Araújo studies the relation of Casa grande to the modernist movement in Guerra e paz: Casa Grande e Senzala e a obra de Gilberto Freyre nos anos 30 (Rio de Janeiro, 1994).
5. The recent critical edition of Casa grande provides a useful comparison between Freyre's first edition and his later revisions, as well as the role and reception of Casa grande in Brazilian intellectual history. Guillermo Giucci et al. (eds.), Casa grande e senzala: Edição crítica (Madrid, 2002).
6. Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves (Casa-grande & senzala): A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization (1933), trans. Samuel Putnam, 2nd English ed. (New York, 1966), P. 278. In quoting from Casa grande I have used the translations of the English edition but made certain to reconcile them with the original first edition in Portuguese. In cases of discrepancies I have sought to preserve die language of the first 1933 Portuguese edition. This particular citation in later editions had been changed to 'a sombra, ou pelo menos a pinta, do indígena ou do negro' but I retain here the version of die first edition, which specified only 'a sombra, ou pelo menos a pinta, do negro'. Unfortunately the recent critical edition of Casa grande does not note this significant shift.
7. It is important to note, however, that while some of Freyre's arguments repudiated whitening, the ideas of Portuguese survival were certainly paramount for Freyre. The use of racial terms in discussing Brazil is admittedly problematic. Here I attempt to use, whenever possible, the terms as used by contemporaries and rely principally on categories of negro and branco, or black and white, as used by authors of the era. I use Afro-Brazilian as a current term to refer to die culture and peoples of Brazil with African heritage.
8. Freyre, Casa grande (1933), p. xi-xiii.
9. 'Culture' at this time was broadly defined, encompassing notions of environment and social setting. I use the term throughout the paper in this wider sense. George E. Stocking argues that Boas was a transitional figure in the evolution of the concept of culture within anthropology, and helped imbue it with its modern meaning. See Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution (Chicago, 1982), p. 233.
10. For a broader assessment of Boas, see Stocking (ed.), The Shaping of American Anthropology 1883-1911 (New York, 1974).
11. Pallares-Burke stresses that Freyre's break from racially determinist ideas dated only from the mid-1920s. See Um vitoriano, pp. 269-327.
12. For the evolution of Brazilian racial thought in this era, see Dain Borges, 'The Recognition of Afro-Brazilian Symbols and Ideas, 1890-1940', Luso-Brazilian Review, vol. 32, no. 2 (1995);
13. Thomas E. Skidmore, Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought (Durham, 1993);
14. Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, The Spectacle of the Races: Scientists, Institutions, and the Race Question in Brazil, 1870-1930 (New York, 1999);
15. and the essays in Marcos Chor Maio and Ricardo Ventura Santos (eds.), Raça, ciência e sociedade (Rio de Janeiro, 1996).
16. Elazar Barkan, for example, highlights the egalitarian significance of this break in his study of American and British social scientists. Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars (Cambridge, 1992), p. 344.
17. Mariza Corrêa likewise argues for intellectual continuities during this period in Brazil but traces a more diffuse notion of determinism that served to restrict individual liberties. Corrêa, As ilusões da liberdade: A Escola Nina Rodrigues e a antropologia no Brasil (Bragança Paulista, 2001), pp. 257-8. Lourdes Martínez-Echazábal proposes that continuities were important to the transition in racial thought across Latin America as well as Brazil in 'O culturalismo dos anos 30 no Brasil e na América Latina: deslocamento retórico ou mudança conceitual?' in Raça, ciência e sociedade.
18. The papers for the congress were published in two successive volumes: Estudos Afro-Brasileiros (Rio de Janeiro, 1935)
19. and Novos estudos Afro-Brasileiros (Rio de Janeiro, 1937), both reprinted in Recife in 1988.
20. Roger Bastide, 'The Present Status of Afro-American Research in Latin America', Daedalus 103, no. 2 (1974), p. 112.
21. An overview of the state of the social sciences in Brazil in 1952 ranked the congress and its successor among the most formative events in the development of the field, although the ranking was admittedly carried out by one of the former participants, Édison Carneiro. L. A. Costa Pinto and Édison Carneiro, As ciências sociais no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1955), p. 21. As I note below, Carneiro would come to be highly critical of the congress, but still apparently continued to view it as significant.
22. Freyre, in hosting the Congress in Recife, attempted to establish the region as the geographical and intellectual centre of Afro-Brazilian studies. For the regional rivalries stimulated by the Congress and the development of Afro-Brazilian studies, see Anadelia A. Romo, 'Race and Reform in Bahia, Brazil: Primary Education 1888-1964', Ph.D., Harvard University, 2004, esp. pp. 82-105.
23. Corrêa also agrees on the importance of regional rivalry: See Antropólogas, p. 167.
24. For the modern development of the social sciences in Brazil, see Schwarcz, Spectacle of the Races,
25. and Sergio Miceli (ed.), História das ciências sociais no Brasil, vol. 1 (São Paulo, 1989).
26. Fernando de Azevedo gives a vibrant portrait of the Brazilian social sciences at mid-century in Brazilian Culture: An Introduction to the Study of Culture in Brazil (New York, 1950).
27. For a general overview see Robert Levine, 'The First Afro-Brazilian Congress: Opportunities for the Study of Race in the Brazilian Northeast', Race, Vol. 15, no. 2 (1973).
28. Beatriz Góis Dantas cites the congress in Recife, as well as the Afro-Brazilian Congress of 1937 in Bahia, as critical events in the process of idealising, and reifying 'pure' African traditions in Brazil in Vovó Nagó e papai branco: Usos e abusos de Africa no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1988), pp. 192-201.
29. Mariza Corrêa has a more recent, albeit brief, appraisal of the congress in Antropólogas e antropologia (Belo Horizonte, 2003), p. 167;
30. and Ilusões, pp. 223-9.
31. Livio Sansone marks the congress of 1934 and its successor in Bahia in 1937 as the initiation of a contentious field of race studies, but does not analyse the congresses themselves. Sansone, 'Um campo saturado de tensões: O estudo das relações raciais e das culturas negras no Brasil,' Estudos Afro-Asiáificos, vol. 25 (2002), p. 7.
32. Nancy Stepan, 'The Hour of Eugenics:' Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca, 1991), pp. 53-4.
33. Dain Borges, "Puffy, Ugly, Slothful, and Inert': Degeneration in Brazilian Social Thought', Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 25, no. 2 (1993).
34. Stepan traces the use of racial science in Latin America in 'The Hour of Eugenics'.
35. For the development of racial science more generally see Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution.
36. Cited in Skidmore, Black into Vhite, p. 66.
37. Immigration of white Europeans would speed this process of whitening and thus the race of potential immigrants was an important factor for policy makers. See Jeffrey Lesser, Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil (Durham, 1999).
38. For Brazilian theories of whitening, see Skidmore, Black into White, esp. pp. 64-77 and 200-5.
39. For the role of Lacerda, see Giralda Seyferth, 'A anthropologia e a teoria do branqueamento da raça no Brasil: A tese de João Batista de Lacerda', Revista do Museu Paulista, Vol. 30 (1985)
40. See Jeffrey D. Needell, 'History, Race and the State in the Thought of Oliveira Viana', Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 75, no. 1 (1995), p. 12.
41. See Skidmore, Black into White, pp. 113-23.
42. Gilberto Hochman, A era do saneamento: As bases da política de saúde pública no Brasil (Saão Paulo, 1998).
43. Stepan, 'The Hour of Eugenics', p. 160-2.
44. The role of Roquette-Pinto in challenging these racial ideas at the congress is also cited by Freyre in his preface to the first edition of Casa grande (Rio de Janeiro, 1933), p. xii.
45. Wilson Martins stresses the nationalist link between the regionalist and modernist movement in The Modernist Idea (Westport, 1979).
46. João Cruz Costa highlights the nationalist preoccupation of the interwar period in A History of Ideas in Brazil (Berkeley 1964), p. 261.
47. Daryle Williams traces the conflicts in defining brasilidade in Culture Wars in Brazil: The First Vargas Regime, 1930-1945 (Durham, 2001).
48. The invitation highlighted the participation of Arthur Ramos, Gilberto Freyre, Édison Carneiro, Mario Marroquim, Ulysses Pernambucano and Renato Mendonça. José Valladares to Melville J. Herskovits, 20 September 1934, Melville J. Herskovits Papers, Series 35/36, Northwestern University Archives, Evanston, Illinois. José Valladares was the secretary for the event and he, rather than Freyre, issued the invitation to Herskovits. The role of Herskovits in Brazilian anthropology is significant, although I do not address it here as it is more relevant to the second Afro-Brazilian Congress in Bahia. See Romo, 'Race and Reform', pp. 125-37.
49. Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, Os africanos no Brasil (1932) 8th ed. (Brasília, 2004).
50. Nina Rodrigues was a follower of the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso. Though he provided valuable ethnographic studies that later scholars would often return to, he approached African culture as a problem to be solved. Corrêa examines his career and his legacy for other scholars, particularly Arthur Ramos, in Ilusões. Another pioneer in the study of race in Brazil was the late nineteenth-century literary critic Silvio Romero. Romero famously argued that Brazil needed to study blacks as an object of science and was one of the earliest intellectuals in Brazil to embrace miscegenation as a potentially positive force. See Marshall C. Eakin, 'Race and Identity: Sílvio Romero, Science, and Social Thought in Late 19th Century Brazil', Luso-Brazilian Review, vol. 22 no. 2 (1985). The amateur ethnologist Manuel Querino in Bahia continued much of Nina Rodrigues' focus into the 1920s, but as a whole, there were few national studies of race in the early decades of the twentieth century.
51. Geraldo de Andrade, 'Nota anthropologica sobre os mulatos pernambucanos', in Estudos, p. 262.
52. Widow Juliano Moreira, 'Juliano Moreira e o problema do negro e do mestiço no Brasil', in Novos estudos.
53. Ibid., p. 150.
54. Ibid.
55. José Bastos de Avila, 'Contribuição ao estudo do Indice de Lapicque (nota previa)', in Estudos. Bastos de Avila was engaged in services for the prominent educational reformer, Anísio Teixeira. Teixeira occupied his post in Rio during this time and expressed considerable interest in studying Rio's students scientifically, also engaging the assistance of Arthur Ramos, who served as chief of Mental Hygiene for Rio's public schools. For these educational reformers in Rio
56. see Jerry Davila, Diploma of Whiteness: Race and Social Policy in Brazil, 1917-1945 (Durham, 2003), esp. pp. 35-42.
57. For a study of Teixeira's reforms in his native Bahia, and their deeply racist underpinnings, see Romo, 'Race and Reform', pp. 48-63 and pp. 199-235.
58. Gilberto Freyre, 'Deformações de corpo dos negros fugidos', in Novos estudos. His essay was expanded and published much later in O escravo nos anúncios de jornais brasileiros do século XIX (São Paulo, 1979 [1963]).
59. The medical arguments used by Freyre in his article also received attention in Casa grande and were important in supporting his views that the problems of Brazilian blacks might ultimately be cured, or changed. For the influence of the public health movement in Casa grande see Luiz Antonio Teixeira, 'Da raça à doença em Casa-grande e senzala', História, Ciências, Saúde, vol. 4, no. 2 (1997).
60. 'Deformações de corpo', pp. 247-8.
61. Ibid.; p. 248.
62. Freyre, Masters and the Slaves, p. xxvii.
63. Benzaquen, Guerra e paz, pp. 40-1.
64. Benzaquen notes, however, that the section on African origins is somewhat of a counterpoint to this trend. In fact Freyre used racial terms extensively to characterise peoples from different areas of Africa. His research on the region relied principally on the work of Melville J. Herskovits and his sketch of African cultural zones in 'A Preliminary Consideration of the Culture Areas of Africa', American Anthropologist, vol. 26, no. 1 (1924).
65. Freyre, Masters and the Slaves, p. 306.
66. Ibid., p. 298.
67. Ibid., p. 298.
68. Ibid., See especially pp. 314-21.
69. This discussion of African origins placed Freyre in the middle of a long-standing debate concerning Brazilian slaves, one that began at the turn of the century. At that time Sílvio Romero had asserted the predominance of Bantu Africans in Brazil, while Nina Rodrigues had countered with an emphasis on the Sudanese, at least in the context of Bahia. This debate betrayed concerns far beyond those of basic geography, and touched upon questions central to Brazilian national identity.
70. Ibid., p. 299.
71. Ibid., p. 308.
72. Ricardo Benzaquen also notes the contradictions in Freyre's continued stress on climate and environment. Guerra e paz, pp. 38-40. The idea of climate then, ironically, came to play a greater role in Freyre's work as it came to lose its explanatory power for social scientists as a whole.
73. For the importance of neo-Lamarckian thought in Latin America, see Stepan, 'The Hour of Eugenics'.
74. Freyre, 'Deformações de corpo', p. 250.
75. There is little work done on Ramos. Corrêa examines his early career in Ilusões, pp. 230-52.
76. For his later career, see Olívia Maria Gomes da Cunha, 'Sua alma em sua palma: Identificando a 'raça' e inventando a nação', in Dulce Pandolfi (ed.), Repensando o Estado Novo (Rio de Janeiro, 1999).
77. His ambiguous legacy in Brazilian anthropology is made clear by the critical assessment of his work in his obituary by scholars Florestan Fernandes, Octavio de Costa Eduardo, and Herbert Baldus: See 'Arthur Ramos, 1903-1949', Revista do Museu Paulista, N. S. vol. 4 (1950).
78. Ramos, O negro brasileiro: Ethnographia, religiosa e pyschanalyse (Rio de Janeiro, 1934),
79. and O folk-lore negro no Brasil: Demopsychologia e psychoanalyse (Rio de Janeiro, 1935).
80. Ramos wrote the introduction for the second volume of papers which was not published until 1937.
81. Ultimately Lévy-Bruhl's position was in fact relativist, as he did not insist on the superiority of a logical worldview, but this was not widely acknowledged at the time. Lévy-Bruhl ultimately came to recant his theory and, in notebooks published posthumously in 1939, argued that logical and illogical thought was common to both worldviews. Robert A. Segal, 'Review: Relativism and Rationality in the Social Sciences', Journal of Religion, vol. 67, no. 3 (1987).
82. By later years this emphasis on the primitive would come under attack. See the response by Ramos to his critics in O negro brasileiro: ethnographia religiosa, 2nd ed., rev. (São Paulo, 1940). His work would later move beyond his early emphasis on psychology to a focus on theories of acculturation.
83. Ramos, O negro brasileiro (1934), p. 23. The preface was probably composed before Ramos knew about the upcoming Congress.
84. Indeed, changing these mentalities was the chief aim of educators, and Ramos was himself in the midst of an extensive reform effort in Rio's public schools. His preface comes from this position of institutional authority, and is signed from the Institute of Educational Research: Section of Orthophrenia and Mental Hygiene.
85. Ibid., p. 28.
86. Arthur Ramos, 'Os mythos de Xangô e sua degradação no Brasil', in Estudos, p. 49.
87. Ibid., p. 50.
88. Ramos, 'Os mythos de Xangô', p. 54.
89. Thus, although he allowed for American alterations, his focus was in fact very similar to that adopted by Melville J. Herskovits who also looked for links to Africa. Ramos, however, at this point, apparently was not familiar with Herskovits' work: The authorities cited in his article beyond that of Nina Rodrigues and the Bahian Manuel Querino included only a few international African specialists, and the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz. Herskovits' approach receives critical attention in Walter Jackson, 'Melville Herskovits and the Search for Afro-American Culture', in George W. Stocking Jr. (ed.), Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and Otbers: Essays on Culture and Personality (Madison, 1986).
90. There is little biographical information on Carneiro and he has not been studied sufficiently. An exceedingly brief outline of his life may be found in the introduction to his collected correspondence with Arthur Ramos. Indeed, the relationship between the two was formative, despite significant intellectual divergences. Édison Carneiro, Cartas de Édison Carneiro a Artur Ramos: De 4 de janeiro de 1936 a 6 de dezembro de 1938 (São Paulo, 1987).
91. This activity by Édison's father later proved controversial when he published a volume of folklore that was harshly criticised by Arthur Ramos in 1937. Luitgarde Oliveira Cavalcanti Barros provides die original critique by Ramos, although without all exact date or source, in Arthur Ramos e as dinâmicas socias de seu tempo (Maceió, 2000), pp. 189-92.
92. Édison Carneiro, 'Xangô', in Novos estudos, p. 139.
93. Ibid., p. 144.
94. Édison Carneiro, 'Situação do negro no Brasil', in Estudos, p. 237.
95. Ibid, p. 238.
96. Carneiro became active in the communist party of Bahia in the 1930s, actions which later provoked persecution by the police, forcing his relocation to Rio. See the description by Ruth Landes in her ethnography of the era, City of Women, introduction by Sally Cole (Albuquerque, 1994 [1947]), p. 61.
97. Carneiro, 'Situação do negro', p. 239.
98. Ibid., p. 239-40.
99. Scholars such as Kim D. Butler have pointed to the cultural focus of the Afro-Brazilian movement in Bahia, but the radical political stance of this statement fall more in line with the approach taken in São Paulo. Butler, Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won: Afro-Brazilians in Post-Abolition São Paulo and Salvador (New Brunswick, N. J., 1998).
100. Lee D. Baker places E. Franklin Frazier within a wider circle of black intellectuals at Howard University, all of whom emphasised a rejection of African influences and a focus on the incomplete assimilation of 'legitimate culture'. This school of thought was often at odds with the New Negro Movement as well as many of the followers of Franz Boas, particularly Melville J. Herskovits. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race 1896-1954 (Berkeley 1998), pp. 176-9.
101. In fact the debate between Frazier and Herskovits would be carried abroad as both later conducted research in Bahia. Their findings, not surprisingly, were diametrically opposed. See their exchanges on the Brazilian family in Frazier, 'The Negro Family in Bahia, Brazil', American Sociological Review, vol. 7, no. 4 (1942);
102. Herskovits, 'The Negro in Bahia, Brazil: A Problem in Method', American Sociological Review, vol. 8, no. 4 (1943);
103. and Frazier, 'Rejoinder', American Sociological Review, vol. 8, no. 4 (1943).
104. See also David J. Hellwig, 'E. Franklin Frazier's Brazil', Western Journal of Black Studies, vol. 15 (Summer 1991). Herskovits' controversial role in American race studies is traced in Jackson, 'Melville Herskovits'.
105. Ari Lima notes the ambivalent position taken by Carneiro toward black scholars such as Manuel Querino. Lima, 'Blacks as Study Objects and Intellectuals in Brazilian Academia', Latin American Perspectives, vol. 33, no. 4 (July 2006), pp. 91-5.
106. It is intriguing that Carneiro's paper is punctuated by three ellipses in its published form, and it is not clear if these represent cuts from the original version. Although it is certainly possible that Carneiro himself edited out sections he was dissatisfied with, it is worth wondering whether it might have been Freyre himself, as editor for the volume, who may have made the changes.
107. Ramos, The Negro in Brazil (Philadelphia, 1939), p. 179. Ramos often reused portions of his writings and this statement is also repeated in his introduction to the republished work of Nina Rodrigues in the same year.
108. These charges were originally made in a newspaper interview with Freyre and the column is reprinted in Carneiro, Cartas, pp. 128-9. The Bahian congress papers were published in O negro no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1940).
109. For further analysis of the tensions of the second congress and Carneiro's role in organizing and overseeing the event, see Romo, 'Race and Reform', pp. 97-106.
110. Marcos Chor Maio provides the best study of the project as a whole; see 'O projecto UNESCO e a agenda das ciências socias no Brasil dos an0s 40 e 50', Revista Brasileira de Ciencias Sociais, vol. 14, no. 41 (1999).
111. For the divergence between the path imagined by Freyre and that taken by the UNESCO project see Maio, 'Tempo controverso: Gilberto Freyre e o Projecto UNESCO', Tempo Social, vol. 11, no. 1 (1999).
112. Carneiro elaborated this charge in an essay written in 1953 and originally presented to the first Brazilian Anthropology Association meeting. His charges may have had limited diffusion at first, however, as it appears that die essay was published only in 1964 in a collected work of his early writings. See Carneiro, 'Os estudos brasileiros do negro', in Carneiro Ladinos e crioulos (Rio de Janeiro, 1964).
113. Carneiro collaborated in 1950 with Nascimento to organise another type of congress in Rio, the First Black Brazilian Congress. Relations between the two later soured and Nascimento ultimately dismissed Carneiro's work as picturesque and irrelevant. His bitter critique charged that Carneiro had maintained an excessively scientific perspective that limited any social impact for his work. Nascimento (ed.), O Negro revoltado (Rio de Janeiro, 1982), p. 48.
114. Notably, Nascimento would claim a central role for Africa in his leadership of sectors of the black movement in Brazil. See, for instance, Abdias do Nascimento, Brazil: Mixture or Massacre? Essays in the Genocide of a Black People (Dover, 1989).
115. Carneiro, 'Os estudos', p. 115.
116. Carneiro did acknowledge that there were also some works of top quality presented at the Congress. Of his own role in presenting at the first congress and organising the second he remains somewhat vague, though he writes: 'Even I couldn't escape the current in these early times, but I believe I destroyed the esoteric nature of black studies with my Candomblés da Babia, written [in 1948] with the declared intention of serving the comprehension and fraternity between Brazilians'. Carneiro, 'Os estudos', p. 108.
117. Carneiro, 'Os estudos', p. 103. Emphasis in original.
118. Ibid., p. 104.
119. Ibid.
120. Ibid., p. 115.
121. Ibid., p. 116.
122. Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture (Boston, 1992), p. viii
123. Robin D. G. Kelley examines the tensions between nationalising and diasporic tendencies of scholarship in African-American studies in "But a Local Phase of a World Problem': Black History's Global Vision, 1883-1950', The Journal of American History, vol. 86, no. 3 (1999).
124. Kevin Yelvington asserts that this debate is still unresolved in studies of African-American culture in Latin America and that it continues to follow much of the same early divisions between Herskovits and Frazier. Yelvington, 'The Anthropology of Afro-Latin America and the Caribbean: Diasporic Dimensions', Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 30 (2001).
125. The UNESCO studies generally ignore the question of African culture. See, for example: Roger Bastide and Florestan Fernandes, Relações raciais entre negros e brancos em São Paulo (São Paulo, 1955);
126. Charles Wagley, ed., Race and Class in Rural Brazil (Paris, 1952);
127. and Thales de Azevedo, Les élites de couleur dans une ville brésilienne (Paris, 1953).
128. For the critique of Freyre's ideas of racial democracy, see Emilia Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories (Chapel Hill, 2000).