The readings this week all have to do with the limitation of citizenship, and emancipation (focusing on race and gender). With the 19th century liberalism at force, societies start to discard ideas such as scientific racism, and inferiority and inequality of the sexes. However, with the world changing, there’s bound to be people with very strong opinions from both sides of the issue. This can be seen in all the documents in this chapter. To start off, the first excerpt, The Fetishist Animism of the Bahian Blacks by Nina Rodrigues, who is considered the first Brazilian anthropologist, and whose work is also famous for being slightly racist, and often having a “darkly negative view of blacks” as Dawson puts it, is a book, divided in four chapter, in which Rodrigues described the rich universe of the “candomblé baiano”. Personally, I found this excerpt remarkable and curious. In Brasil we tend to pride ourselves in being a non-racist nation, as Brasil has the world’s second biggest black population after Nigeria, the largest number of people of Japanese ancestry outside Japan, and more people of Lebanese or Syrian extraction than the combined populations of Lebanon and Syria, just to state a few. So reading about the research of Rodrigues, the whole text to me in the end sounded a bit hypocrite, the way he dismisses the candomblé religion, mulattos and black people as inferior, even though he says he has an unbiased view. On the other hand, the second text Partido Independiente de Color, shines a different light in the issues regarding emancipation of races, and the limitations regarding the citizenship of said individuals. I was rapt by the fact that even though the document was written in 1908, the points it makes are very “modern” and open-minded, I personally enjoyed reading it, I liked the phrase “… so that the republic can be represented in all its hues”. Furthermore, this chapter also discusses feminism, and the fight for social, political and economical equality of sexes. It does so by providing two texts, with opposing views, and in which the second one is directed to the prior. The first one, Brushstrokes by Maria Eugenia Echenique, deals with the issue that women lack political rights and access to education, the two things women need in order to be self-sufficient. While the second one, Women: Dedicated to Miss Maria Eugenia Echenique by Josefina Pelliza de Sagasta counterattacks by stating her beliefs about women’s natural subservience to men… while reading it, at the beginning I seriously thought she was being sarcastic. While there isn’t anything wrong with a women aspiring to be a mother and/or a housewife, what bothered me about this text was how she made it seem that the ONLY role a women could possibly play in society is the role of a mother and/or housewife. Women shouldn’t be deprived of choices, as I believe there is no right or wrong way “to be a woman”. She goes on to describe the emancipation of women, which by definition means ‘the process of being set free from legal, social, or political restrictions’ harmful. It was an interesting (and honestly a bit angering) read, especially coming from a woman.