Overview

Who decides which stories about a city are remembered? How do interpretations of the past shape a city’s present and future? In this book, Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos discusses notions of power and national identity by examining how nation-states negotiate the preservation of urban spaces and how a city interprets, resists, and consents to the functions and meanings that it has inherited and that it reinvents for itself. Looking at the Brazilian city of Ouro Preto, de Souza Santos applies fine-grained ethnography and historical analysis to discuss the limits of Brazil’s imagery of social harmony and participatory democracy amid continuous inequality.

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9781538148136

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Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos' work provides a strong sense of Ouro Preto's evolution as an urban core, as well as inside access to the challenges posed by a student population, exclusive events targeting outsiders, and the political landscape of decision-making during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Ward, E. (2021); The Americas. * Urban History * In a pessimistic exploration of the clash between historic preservation and local community involvement, de Souza Santos (Univ. of Oxford, UK) presents the results of her ethnographic study of the UNESCO World Heritage site Ouro Preto in Brazil. As a Brazilian scholar from another heritage site (Brasilia), the author is uniquely qualified to elucidate the difficulties presented when a community in a historically significant (and preserved) area struggles with making that setting more efficient and comfortable for its residents. In the 1930s, the center of Ouro Preto was designated culturally significant, based on the reasoning that earlier political struggles in the mountainside town had been fundamental to the construction of Brazilian nationalism. Missing in that interpretation, however, was any consideration for the daily hardships of slaves (especially in the local mines), or for the town's domination by the colonial upper class. De Souza Santos concludes that by preventing change from occurring without a multilevel political process of approval in the historic core, preservation edicts in fact perpetuate inequality among the city's residents. This well-argued text, supplemented by numerous photographs, has important implications for historians, anthropologists, and preservationists alike. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals. * Choice * This book's sustained focus on tensions between governance/management structures and community rights/participation in the definition and use of urban space and heritage in Ouro Preto speaks to current concerns in heritage studies and urban development. The close-grained ethnographic and historically grounded studies are immensely useful in adding real-world critiques to the burgeoning heritage and urban development policy context of not only national, but also international agents, such as UNESCO. -- Dr Helle Jorgensen, Lecturer in Cultural Heritage Studies, Ironbridge International Institute for Cultural Heritage, University of Birmingham By placing questions of national identity, power, and politics at the center of an investigation into urban memory, cultural heritage, and legacies of social injustice in Brazil, this book provides an important contribution to contemporary social science debates. It is innovative in its methodological approach (owing to the author's ethnographic study of historical memory), as well as how it highlights connections between postcolonial development, the role of the state, and discourses of public participation. -- Jeff Garmany, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos' first monograph is a rich and sophisticated ethnography of the politics of memory in Ouro Preto written in an easy, flowing style. Drawing on diverse sources and bodies of literature - from heritage studies and political anthropology to in-depth interviews and ethnographic notes based on participant observation to literature and historical archives - this book is of great interest not only to anthropologists, heritage and urban studies specialists, but also to anyone interested in issues of participative democracy, grassroots politics and inequality in contemporary Brazil. -- Katerina Hatzikidi, University of Oxford and Graduate Institute Geneva * Urban History *

Author Information

Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos is the Director of the Brazilian Studies Programme and Departmental Lecturer at the Latin American Centre, University of Oxford. Her work focuses on urban ethnography, incorporating themes of cultural heritage, participatory city planning, and mining economies. Before arriving in Oxford, Andreza completed her PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews; a Masters in Social Sciences at the University of Freiburg, University of KwaZulu Natal and Jawaharlal Nehru University; and her Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science at the University of Brasilia.

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