A Metaphysics for Our Time: Pelourinho Properties, Bahian Social Bodies, and the Shifting Meanings of Rams and Fetuses

The particular technologies through which IPAC produces its version of history educate in turn the Pelourinho’s population as to the practical impossibility of such a history. This chapter examines disputes over property and patrimony as the state government seeks to turn the buildings occupied by approximately four thousand people into patrimony even as it incorporates those residents into its social services bureaucracy. It follows as IPAC seeks to sort out legal title to the buildings and establishes an indemnification program that residents rapidly overwhelm, creating fictitious families, registering relatives from thousands of miles away, and even attempting to compile their own dossiers and questionnaires—and thus altering the existing content of Bahia’s archival institutions in an inflection of still-unwritten histories—to blackmail state bureaucrats. This chapter argues that in the highly technical manipulations of the past through which IPAC produces its version of history, IPAC in turn educates the Pelourinho’s population about the practical impossibility of such a history.