ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an anthropological perspective on the beauty of the human body. The term 'fleshly beauty' suggests the important relationships between beauty and strong affects, such as desire, fantasy, arousal and shaking knees, amongst others. Philosopher Elaine Scarry points out that in the classical world, a glimpse of a beautiful person imperilled the observer, rather than the observed, suggesting the risks of beauty were quite different to contemporary ones. Anthropological philosophy in the eighteenth century proposed that beauty must not prompt egoistic behaviour or be too closely linked to practical activity. Kant's emphasis on the importance of disinterest in aesthetic perception was, of course, enormously influential in philosophy, but was also taken up by later racial anthropology. Brazil's aesthetic norms and practices are entangled with its construction of race. In the early twentieth century, scholars, artists and eventually the state rejected racial anthropology and whitening ideologies and began to embrace racial mixture as a defining feature of the nation.
