Treasure Tales and National Bodies: Mystery and Metaphor in Bahian Life

Chapter 5 analyzes the stories of buried treasure and skeletons that the author argues residents put together to make sense of the rapid changes in their lives and in their neighborhood’s landscape. These treasure tales revolve around slavery and the value of history, suggesting the ways that state attention to the past is coming to take on material meaning and become an idiom through which residents express their rights and concerns about the commodification of Afro-Bahian bodies. It also examines the ways that a people who have learned the extent to which history has become a manipulated and a privileged idiom for state power begin to construct their own versions of the past