Understanding Contemporary Brazil

Jeff Garmany, Anthony W. Pereira

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351708296
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Economics

Brazil has famously been called a country of contradictions. It is a place where narratives of "racial democracy" exist in the face of stark inequalities, and where the natural environment is celebrated as a point of national pride, but at the same time is exploited at alarming rates. To people on the outside looking in, these contradictions seem hard to explain. Understanding Contemporary Brazil tackles these problems head-on, providing the perfect critical introduction to Brazil's ongoing social, political, economic, and cultural complexities. Key topics include:

• National identity and political structure.

• Economic development, environmental contexts, and social policy.

• Urban issues and public security.

• Debates over culture, race, gender, and spirituality.

• Social inequality, protest, and social movements.

• Foreign diplomacy and international engagement.

By considering more broadly the historical, political economic, and socio-cultural roots of Brazil's internal dynamics, this interdisciplinary book equips readers with the contextual understanding and critical insight necessary to explore this fascinating country. Written by renowned authors at one of the world's most important centers for the study of Brazil, Understanding Contemporary Brazil is ideal for university students and researchers, yet also accessible to any reader looking to learn more about one of the world's largest and most significant countries.

1 Introduction

Aims of the book and frames of analysis

The title of this book is an ambitious one. Trying to understand contemporary Brazil, or, for that matter, any country, is a process that remains at best only partial. Even Brazil’s most famous social scientists, from Gilberto Freyre to Darcy Ribeiro, to Caio Prado Júnior to Celso Furtado, would find plenty to disagree over. Today, Brazil is one of the largest countries in the world, with a territory bigger than the continental United States, a population greater than Russia’s, and an economy ranked within the global top ten (see Figure 1.1). It has experienced enormous demographic, environmental, economic, political, social, and cultural change in recent decades. Important also to consider are historical processes and their connections to present day contexts. For example, Brazil’s legacies of colonization, slavery, political governance, inequality, economic development, and globalization are crucial for making sense of the present. So again, how can one possibly hope to understand contemporary Brazil?

Figure 1.1 Map of Brazil showing federal and state capital cities.

Source: UN Office of the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and optimized by Alice Hunter, Wikimedia commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BrazilLocation_MapUNOCHA_(optimized).svg

Our goal in this book is to provide context and analysis for making sense of contemporary Brazil from a multidisciplinary and international social science perspective. More directly, we want this book to serve as a critical toolkit for understanding social, cultural, political, and economic issues in present day Brazil. Rather than describing what Brazil is like, or providing a general overview of current events, we seek to offer critical insight on key subjects and debates. To do this, we draw on a host of academic contributions, merging insights from Brazilian scholars with those of brasilianistas (i.e., foreign scholars of Brazil¹) to shed light on contemporary issues. Again, our goal is to provide the reader critical tools useful for drawing her or his own conclusions. The book is meant to provoke and engage, and, as such, it tends towards analysis rather than description.

There is no single analytical framework we make use of, yet, as we note in the next section, there are several key themes addressed across the chapters. Our approach is also multidisciplinary, and we draw on a host of socio-theoretical perspectives. This reflects our own scholarly diversity and different disciplinary backgrounds. This is not to say, however, that this book lacks arguments or shies away from academic debates. To the contrary, each chapter seeks to provide critical insight by challenging surface-level observations and oft-held presumptions. In particular, we draw attention to five central points of analysis when trying to understand contemporary Brazil:

1. Brazil’s colonial history – and subsequent postcolonial present – is important for seeing the roots of ongoing inequalities, including broader processes of economic development, environmental management, and political governance.
2. Processes of national identity formation and nation building are key to understanding Brazilian culture and remain important for understanding social and political struggle as well as racial, ethnic, and gender discrimination.
3. Globalization and the ways Brazil shapes and is shaped by international processes and actors is critical for seeing how and why Brazil looks and operates as it does today.
4. The organization of Brazil’s federalist political structure must be accounted for when trying to explain contemporary democratic processes, including bureaucratic inefficiencies, the (un)rule of law, and problems of corruption.
5. The central role of informality cannot be overlooked when considering processes of social and economic development, urbanization, and even state governance.

We are reluctant to call these criteria our theoretical framework or a formal analytical structure, yet we highlight them here to note their importance to our overall approach. They are the central pillars of our analysis – like meta-themes that extend across each chapter – and are useful, we argue, as guiding principles for social scientists investigating Brazil.

Like many bits of scholarship, this work emerged from our own teaching and research experience. In 2011, we began offering courses at the King’s Brazil Institute at King’s College London, teaching undergraduate and graduate-level classes on Brazil in contemporary global perspective. We wanted to write a book that could anchor our reading lists, as well as contextualize existing debates, provide background and critical insight, and spark discussion between students and researchers alike. Crucially, our goal was to put multiple scholars in conversation, both Brazilian and brasilianista, to help link existing debates and foreground the contributions of Portuguese-language texts. We also wanted to introduce and situate the work of scholars such as Caio Prado Júnior, Raymundo Faoro, Boris Fausto, Florestan Fernandes, Milton Santos, Marilena Chaui, Ermínia Maricato, Candido Mendes, Celso Furtado, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, along with several others whose work exists mostly in Portuguese. While we hesitate to call this a “textbook,” there is no denying it was provoked in the first instance by our own teaching needs.

In addition to teachers and students, this book should also prove useful for social science researchers looking to expand their knowledge of Brazil. Again, the objective is not to provide an overview of Brazilian current events, but instead to help explain contemporary social contexts. By providing crucial background information, as well as situating key issues within academic debates, our goal was to produce a unique resource for a wide range of social science researchers. Whether one has little background knowledge of Brazil, or indeed if one is already an expert – that is, Brazilian, brasilianista, or Brazil-curious – this book should prove useful for educating and sparking new ideas.

These are the aims of the book; what we mean by understanding contemporary Brazil. In the remaining sections of this introductory chapter, we detail important themes and questions addressed throughout the book, including issues of source material, as well as the co-production of knowledge that constitutes a work like this. We then provide an overview of the chapters, noting key topics and debates covered across each one. By the end of this book, our hope is that readers feel stimulated and challenged by the work, and that, ultimately, it serves to provoke new arguments, ideas, and research agendas that push forward existing debates involving Brazil and the social sciences.

Key themes

With respect to the content of each chapter, our choices were influenced by two main factors: we wanted to focus attention on issues that, on the one hand, were highly relevant to contemporary Brazil, and, on the other, were regularly addressed in academic debate. This way, each chapter considers several topical issues and also connects to broader theoretical questions. This helps to explain the focus and substance of each chapter, as well as reasons for why this book should prove especially useful for students and social science researchers.

To understand contemporary Brazil, as promised in the title of this book, it is important to keep in mind key historical details and background context. For this reason, each chapter engages critically with a host of historical factors useful for making sense of the present. Like other postcolonial contexts, Brazil’s history of colonization, exploitation, independence, oligarchic governance, slavery, and violence – as well as integration into global processes of capitalist development – is hugely important for understanding why Brazil exists as it does today. Our purpose here is not to recount Brazilian history purely for the sake of background knowledge, but instead to be mindful of historical details in our examination of the present. Readers may be surprised how much history is included in a book about contemporary Brazil, but again, our goal here is to provide critical analysis useful for understanding present-day contexts.

Stemming from this engagement with key historical factors comes analysis of nation building efforts and Brazilian national identity. Brazil is well known for its geographic and population diversity, even celebrating these features as points of national pride. It is also famous for claims of “racial democracy,” where, supposedly, racial prejudice is reduced thanks to historical and sociological factors. How these narratives have been constructed, the ways they hold the nation together, and also how they exclude and suppress oppositional groups, is crucial for shedding light on contemporary debates and social conflict. These are questions addressed in several chapters throughout the book.

Connected here are issues of inequality, as well as a host of contradictions that have come to define Brazil’s legacy. Economist Edmar Bacha (1974, cited in Richmond, 2015, p. 24) famously described Brazil in the 1970s as “Belíndia”: A country that combines in small pockets the ‘first world,’ industrial society of Belgium within a sprawl of widespread poverty akin to ‘third world’ India. Making sense of this context, and in particular the roles of globalization, informality, and uneven development, is another important theme throughout the book. We consider from several angles how these processes have been produced and maintained over time – including, for example, ongoing legacies of racial inequality, urban segregation, and social resistance – as well as recent social policies introduced to assuage these inequalities. Troubling histories of violence are also significant here, and in several chapters we explore how violence and fear are present in the daily lives of many Brazilians.

Though poverty in Brazil is often associated with urban environments, rural areas are where poverty is, in fact, most severe. Exploring the roots of this, as well as its consequences, is another point of focus throughout the book. This helps to explain, for example, problems of environmental degradation, as well as the rise of one of Latin America’s largest social movements, the MST (O Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra – The Landless Rural Workers Movement). Related here are conflicts over natural resources and the rise of Brazil’s increasingly powerful agro-industrial lobby. Seeing the connection points between these processes and capitalist development, inequality, and the natural environment is crucial for understanding Brazil’s political ecologic future.

Part and parcel of this are questions of political governance, public policy, and federalism in Brazil. The role of the state, as well as the rule of law and democratic processes, is key to broader debates that span every chapter in this book. In recent years, Brazil has proven especially keen to engage in international diplomacy, participating with the United Nations and trying to establish a leadership role among developing countries by promoting Brazilian public and social policies. Through the early years of the twenty-first century, as the Brazilian economy grew and the middle ‘C’ class expanded, Brazil appeared well positioned to achieve these goals. But more recent economic and political turmoil has complicated these efforts, revealing Brazil’s still precarious position in a globalized economy. What Brazil is doing to address these concerns, including ongoing academic debates over development, political economy, and globalization, are also important points of focus throughout the book.

Brazil is also well known for its cultural attributes, combing a unique mixture of indigenous, African, European, and Asian influences, as well as showing distinct regional and state identities across the country. How this socio-cultural context was created and why it remains significant today are debated in several chapters, along with major cultural influences such as television and social media. For example, the Rede Globo entertainment network has for several decades been Brazil’s most significant cultural forum, and remains still today a central force in shaping attitudes, perspectives, and understandings of contemporary society. Considering the effects of such influences, including how new technologies, social media platforms, and patterns of mass consumption might alter Brazil’s cultural landscape in years to come, are key questions addressed in the book.

Related to this is religious and spiritual change in Brazil, and the growing presence of evangelical Christian groups. In some respects, Brazil is becoming more secular, yet many people remain intensely spiritual and fluid in their religious identities. In recent years, this has sparked increasing debate over issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage, and gender equality. Such conflict is by no means confined to religious discussions, and today spills over into political and social debate more generally. As in other countries, Brazilian civil discourse appears increasingly vitriolic, helping to shed light on recent and dramatic political change. Considering these issues, along with processes of social resistance, public protest, and the diverse ways social movements are responding, are also important points of consideration in several chapters.

Finally, yet another key objective of this book is to cultivate multidisciplinary and international debate. As mentioned already, many of the best scholarly works on Brazil exist only in Portuguese, alienating readers not fluent in the language and inducing parochial effects on academic debates within Brazil. Similar to researchers who become straightjacketed by their own disciplinary boundaries, so, too, do non-Portuguese-speaking academics become cut off from key debates among Brazilian scholars. One of our goals in this work is to help break down some of these boundaries, between both language and discipline. By engaging critically with Brazilian and brasilianista scholars from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, this book seeks to lower the walls, as it were, between different academic camps, as well as Portuguese and English-speaking audiences.

It should also be noted that a book like this represents decades of academic co-production and collaborative work. This is to say that far beyond us, the two authors, this book reflects countless ideas, arguments, insights, and observations from others we have worked with and learned from over the years. Key influences include some of our former teachers and supervisors, as well as current and former colleagues and students at universities where we have worked. Bibliographic citations never fully acknowledge the co-productive processes behind academic scholarship, and as we move on in the next section to outline the content of each chapter, we want to recognize the valuable and ongoing contributions of our critical interlocutors.

Outline of chapters

Before detailing the subject matter of each chapter, we feel it important to note some key issues not addressed as singular, individual chapters within the book. The first is inequality, which, beyond simply being the focus of a given chapter, could be the topic of an entire book series. This issue is addressed across every single chapter in the book, and therefore not something we chose to focus upon in just one chapter. Related to this is gender inequality and critical perspectives of gender in Brazil, which, more so than any other topic, is perhaps most deserving of its own, individual chapter. On the one hand, like socio-economic inequality, this is a topic we address in several chapters, with specific emphasis in Chapters 7 and 11. More generally, critical perspectives of gender are ones we feel should intersect, critique, and engage with all social science debates, and, thus, we are hesitant to corral such insights within one individual chapter. Much like research about Brazil should not be cordoned off within “Area” or “Latin American Studies,” feminist and queer critiques should not remain bound within “Gender” and/or “Women’s Studies.” Compartmentalizing such debates within individual paradigms and topics of study not only constrains them – placing them in academic ghettos, as it were – it also limits the scope and dynamism of other areas of research.

On the other hand, our decision not to dedicate a specific chapter to critical perspectives of gender and gender inequality in Brazil reflects our own limits of academic expertise, as well as decisions regarding the overall length of the book. This is not to make excuses, but instead to explain that key topics such as gender, geopolitics, biodiversity and ecology, business and international trade, literature and language, etc., receive lesser attention not because we believe they lack importance, but because the book ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. National identity and nation building
• 3. Political structure and government
• 4. Economic development and social policy
• 5. Race and ethnicity in Brazil
• 6. Urban Brazil today
• 7. Social movements and protest in Brazil
• 8. Environmental contexts and challenges
• 9. Culture and spirituality
• 10. Foreign policy and international diplomacy
• 11. Soccer in Brazil
• Afterword
• Index