The cover photograph of the quebra-pote (pot-breaking) probably taken by the Brazilian folklorist Édison Carneiro in Itaparica Island, Bahia, in 1936, is more than a beautiful and allusive image of what is to come. No player knows entirely what the pot contains, but everyone is ready to catch everything it may have inside. The participants attempt to guide the blindfolded participant to hit the bowl. Each unsuccessful attempt results in booing and jokes. When, finally, the pot is broken, all participants run to catch as many prizes as they can. Aside from sweets and other small gifts, in the 1930s Brazilian Northeast, the popular brincadeira could reserve other surprises. For instance, when hit, a cat put inside the pot would provoke everyone to run and disperse. The opening of boxes and folders that contain visual and written paper artefacts, the former themselves nested inside collections and archives, are neither a collective celebration nor a scary adventure. However, the acts of opening and handling these things preserve something unexpected. Worse still, these surprises always change.

This book is about the creation of artefacts of knowledge, about their material existence inside the ethnographic archives and the effects of both – the artefacts and the archives – in the making of anthropological histories and practices. I presume this project may interest not only the anthropologists and the historians of this discipline, but all those who use their hands to manipulate paper objects amassed in archives and collections. Historians, social scientists, archivists and practitioners of STS may be also interested in knowing how some objects then called scientific were created and put to talk on behalf of many Others; us – anthropology’s practitioners – and Others with whom others like us have shared, in the early twentieth century, the founding of a field of study. I am talking about a specific kind of knowledge that was invented as a specialized area and recognized as a subfield of the anthropology. By the 1930s and 1940s it had accumulated diverse names. ‘Afro-American studies,’ ‘Afro-Cuban Studies,’ ‘Afro-Brazilian Studies’ (without mentioning other denominations not examined in this book) but also ‘Afroamerican Studies.’ These terms were never intended to be used as synonyms. Thus, we can observe how the creation of these labels to identify sets of scientific practices, knowledge, and the invention of theoretical and methodological tools also preserved their own local configurations and historicities. By using hyphenation and complements that territorialized their conformation as both ‘whole’ and ‘partial’ manifestations of social phenomena – the modes of existence of the ‘New World Negro’ – they were purified as a particular field of knowledge within anthropology. I assume that some readers may want to explore how, when and who else had been involved in these scientific and vernacular experimentations.

When we follow the things that were created as an outcome of these engagements, we cannot see a totality but rather a multiplicity of practices and their unequal effects. Their creators and users understood that the local and partial interests involved were also their differential aspect, their potency. We might say that the creators expressed in different ways their concerns relating to the politics of the creation of these artefacts of knowledge. Although the epistemic history of the field has much older ramifications, their points of ‘emergence’ will not be analysed in this book – what I have in mind is, rather, to follow the things created and amassed by some anthropologists and their interlocutors. I seek to pay attention to situations in which the former intended to transform what they sometimes saw as ‘vernacular,’ ‘folklorist,’ the result of ‘non-scholarly’ knowledge, as well as politically-oriented practices, into a scientific object (Wagner 2006). These tasks of ‘purification,’ as coined by Bruno Latour (1993), was a work of many hands, eyes, bodies and, mainly, things: the latter, along with the technologies invented to use them, performed an important part of the job.

This book deals with the things mainly, but not only, mobilized by anthropologists in order to produce knowledge about the African American, the Afro-Brazilian and the Afro-Cuban during the 1930s. However, its goal is not to dig up evidence of the creation of an epistemology of knowledge and its transnational connections. The research on which this book is based suggests that the artefacts created in fieldwork, offices, libraries, laboratories, museums, and other places and experiences – beyond the important fact that these places and situations involved actors other than the anthropologists themselves – have been different things during their troubled existence. Thus, I seek to make these differences apparent, highlighting rather than concealing the relationships between partial modes of making and being ‘Afro’ as a subject of science. If the artefacts created in a variety of situations have been different things, we should ask what sort of things they were and how the actors involved in their creation sought to make them meaningful. I intend to foreground these discontinuous and ever-changing contours.