Racialized Cultural Capital and Inequality: A Comparative Study of Blackness in Brazil's Tourism Market

Abstract

In my dissertation, I argue that blackness is an accumulable cultural resource that perpetuates racial and class inequality. The overarching question I ask is what determines who benefits from blackness, black bodies or dominant resources? To answer this question, I first develop a framework that integrates cultural capital theory with two streams of research within the sociology of race - `racialization' and `race as a resource.' Next, I demonstrate my argument and address secondary theoretical goals - in globalization and race in Brazil, with an empirical study in the context of cultural tourism.I examine how individuals transform capoeira into a racialized cultural resource through connections to symbols of blackness and the meanings these symbols provoke, within the tourism market in Salvador, Brazil. Capoeira is a globally popular Brazilian martial art often linked to blackness, which brings American and European tourists together with Brazilian practitioners in an interactive setting. Cosmopolitan consumers now interpret cultural symbols of racial difference, including blackness, as valuable, and tourism exemplifies the growing value of racial otherness. Salvador, Brazil is a central site in the framing of blackness for cosmopolitan consumers. Tourist settings allow me to examine how individuals acquire embodied cultural capital through experience with cultural others. Scholars connect Brazil's extreme social inequality to race and class, and they reveal a profound ambiguity over racialized cultural heritage in Brazil. This creates a context where Brazilians of diverse racial and class backgrounds can benefit from racialized culture.How do racial meanings emerge as tourists and Brazilians interact, how does blackness becomes valuable as valuable a social, cultural, or economic resource for producers and consumers, and which actors benefit from this racialized cultural capital? I answer these questions through comparative participant observation and interviews at two capoeira studios. Long-term participant observation allows me to focus on the embodiment of experiences and the how of cultural valorization. Comparative ethnography best provides insight into how individuals, groups, and organizations put cultural capital to practical use to control and limit resources, allowing for two layers of analysis - one, of interactional meaning making and cultural enactment and the other, a cross-group comparison of these micro-level processes.