Alexina de Magalhães and Lavinia Raymond

Mediations In Popular Culture and Black Folklore During Two Periods

Abstract

This study discusses how widely-disseminated interpretations of racism and black folklore can be transformed via ethnographic research, which we understand as cultural mediation. Alexina de Magalhães Pinto and Lavinia Costa Raymond were two white intellectuals, professors, and authors who, although forgotten nowadays, projected themselves in the intellectual and academic worlds of their time. They were active during two decisive moments in debates on racial issues in Brazil: from 1900 to 1920 and from 1935 to 1955. In their own (although initial and ambiguous) ways, they each confronted ideas about the disappearance of Afro-Brazilian cultural expressions, instead focusing on evidence of the ways in which the descendants of the enslaved maintained their cultural heritage.