![]() The concept of hybridity can thus describe Afro-Brazilians’ use of culture in the negotiation of power imbalances and alternative values. The article stresses the methodological importance of addressing multiple practices and voices emerging in the context of samba performances. This article traces the roots of samba and carnaval in Rio de Janeiro and examines their current import for a politics of identity by drawing from interviews and fieldwork at escola de samba Unidos da Cereja. ![]() At the same time, as expressions of Afro-Brazilian culture, samba and carnaval are contested performances many celebrate the “racially democratic” character of samba spaces as a core domain of Afro-Brazilian sociability. Such political use of culture was initiated by President Vargas’s appropriation of subaltern performance genres in his populist project of modernity. The discourse on mestiçagem is the basis for dominant narratives of national identity and celebrates samba and other Afro-Brazilian cultural forms as symbols of Brazilianness and racial democracy. ![]() If differentiated from mestiçagem, the concept of hybridity can productively be put to use. Through ethnographic and historical inquiry, this article inspects the usefulness of the concept of hybridity for an analysis of Rio’s samba and carnaval. Moreover, we are trying to expose some of the obstacles in the process of conceptualizing dance as heritage, while at the same time we regard the safeguarding process and the UNESCO inscription as further standardization. Dance heritage, as seen in the following pages, is made, and not found, while it is also commodified for consumption in order to establish continuity with the history and the past of the nation-state in which it is located. Rather, we argue that dance as intangible cultural heritage, as discussed in the following pages, is directly influenced by local and national cultural politics that dictate its process of safeguarding and its public appreciation. Regardless of its alignment with different heritagization processes and its status as intangible cultural heritage, we do not consider Samba solely as “folk” or “traditional” dance as these terms objectify the dance practice as non-modern and limit the public perception of the dance as anything other than tradition. ![]() While folklore was mainly accessible through the means of documenting and writing, dance was transmitted as bodily knowledge and later reconstructed as a choreographic practice. The ambiguity of what a folk dance, traditional dance, and what heritage means to different people have become increasingly problematic as all of these terms are contested and changing. Before they were inscribed on UNESCO’s lists, many dance examples were labeled as folk, traditional, and popular. In this article, we argue that before they are recognized as intangible cultural heritage of humanity dances such as the Samba de Roda undergo various processes of popularization, heritagization, and spectacularization that conceptually transforms them from social dances into a category that we define as dance heritage.
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