Tag Archives: Brazil

In this article, I examine changing meanings of participation for grassroots community leaders in Porto Alegre, Brazil, since the 2004 defeat of the Workers Party (PT) municipal government and a subsequent rise in the presence of both the private sector and NGOs in community politics. Through an ethnographic analysis of community politics in one municipal district, based on interviews I carried out in 2008, I argue that the changing relationship between state, private sector, and civil society has contributed to destabilization of the narrative of active citizenship hegemonic in earlier years, implanting a market-oriented, individualistic ethos in its place.

Community radio and hip-hop constitute sociopolitical agency in the (sub)urban, working-class neighborhoods of São Paulo. Practitioners and performers have defined themselves, in part, by their success in “conquering space” and, in turn, have created a productive public sphere. Members of both groups consistently describe what they do as public exchange, a viable and visible option on the part of the disenfranchised to engage in a Habermasian ideal sphere of civic agency. In this article, I argue that it is this epistemology of knowledge as exchange coupled with a sociogeographical presence that make hip-hop and community radio provocative to local residents and periodically irritating to state authorities.

In this article, I reveal the textual mechanisms that influential news editors employed to manipulate popular understandings of Mario Juruna, a Xavante leader who played an important role in advancing democracy during Brazil’s military dictatorship and became the first Indian elected to national office. I argue that editors used the implicit messages of represented language to initiate shifts in the public’s perception of the Xavante leader and thereby to change its opinion of him. Juruna’s case illustrates that linguistic resources are powerful tools that hegemonic institutions, such as the press, and other dominant parties may employ to advance their own interests and influence public opinion on matters of political and social import.

In this article, I examine the contradictory ideals and practices of North American gay sex tourists in Brazil. Even as gay travel can be an edifying search for broader community, gay tourists I met also argued that their travel and spending encourage local communities to become more tolerant of gay subjectivities. Gay tourists were attracted by “exotic” and “different” local models for same-sex desire, but they simultaneously promoted the universality of “gay identity” to sex workers as a matter of modernity and gay rights, thereby attempting to delegitimize the very sexual difference that initially attracted them. Moreover, tourists’ efforts to link consumer capability to sexual identification and civil rights reflect a larger and even more dangerous tendency to cede ethically grounded claims for equal rights to market-based ones.

Anthropologists have long puzzled over a supposed lack of explicitly racial identification among Brazilians who face racial discrimination. Yet a clear uptick in Afro-Brazilian identification and contestation of racism is observable in Brazil today. In this article, I examine the transformation of Salvador, Brazil’s Pelourinho neighborhood into a heritage center, a process that includes the commodification of residents’ lifeways, so as to link semiotic relationships encouraged by the patrimonializing of buildings, people, and their habits to alterations in racial politics. This case suggests that racial consciousness ties into popular concerns with secrets, depths, and hidden relations encouraged by heritage-based reifications of everyday habits as potentially alienable forms of property.