This article analyzes a series of photographs taken by the Brazilian artist Carlos Vergara between 1972 and 1975 that picture the Rio de Janiero-based carnival bloco Cacique de Ramos, whose characteristic black-and-white costumes fantastically approximate indigenous Amerindian attire. Taken at the height of the military dictatorship, when the pressure to conform to a singular nationalist identity was extreme, the photographs probe the potentialities and desire for group identification within a structure of horizontal rather than hierarchical affiliation. The essay argues that the photographs offer of speculative paradigm of intersubjective identification: a mapping of difference from deep within what the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro called a “passion of the same.” This paradigm is contiguous, yet distinct from the contemporary concept of “the multitude,” and suggests how an opposition of self and other might be transformed into a transversal operation of different-equal-same .

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's text, “The Equal and the Different,” was written circa 1975 at the request of the Brazilian artist Carlos Vergara, who had recently completed a series of photographs devoted the Rio de Janeiro-based carnival group, Cacique de Ramos. Viveiros de Castro, then an anthropology student at the Museu Nacional, locates in Cacique de Ramos a unique model of individual-group dynamics, one based neither on social hierarchy nor conformity, but mimesis and ecstatic deindividualization: a “passion of the same,” as he writes, that emerges from deep within Western society.