Part II: Politics
If, as I argue in Part I, collective discourse is not cognitive destiny, then what makes some representations more compelling than others? Why do some symbols tend to galvanize people, and others leave them cold? What inner trails does subjectivity follow in response to discursive incitement? What, in Melford Spiro’s memorable formulation (1987a), makes representations cognitively salient? These are the central theoretical issues addressed in Part II.
An inviting place to look for answers is in the domain of politics, where leaders constantly seek to define situations in their favor and to elicit commitment from their followers (Bailey 2001). Sometimes leaders succeed, and sometimes they fail. Why? For the revisionist marxist Antonio Gramsci, history gave no assurance that the workers would prevail. Capitalism had its contradictions, but those contradictions would not mechanically destroy the system that bred them. Ideas stood in the way, ideas that would not be swept aside in the impersonal rush of economic history. Common sense—invisible, customary understandings about the world and human beings—was the prime obstacle to political change. In Gramsci’s Italy, an unreflective hierarchical worldview, profoundly shaped by Catholic religious belief, sustained more explicit political doctrines and arrangements that guaranteed the power of signori and the bourgeois state. Making that transparent foundation visible, and therefore vulnerable to transformative criticism, was, for Gramsci, the first task of revolutionary intellectuals. In other words, a new political order could only be founded on a new common sense, which could only be built after the old was revealed and then demolished.23
Inspired by Gramsci’s provocative speculations, all three essays in Part II look at the political implications of common sense and reflective consciousness. The descriptions of local common sense that underpin the analyses draw on person-centered research I conducted in São Luís during 1984–86 and 1991.24 Through ethnographic case studies the chapters in Part II explore the articulation of political rhetoric and action with widely disseminated, largely nonconscious ideas and feelings.
“The Hegemony of Discontent” assesses the role of são-luisense common sense in a Brazilian political rivalry, a 1986 riot in São Luís precipitated by cynical machinations during and after a local election. I recount how the new mayor, Gardênia Gonçalves, found herself besieged in the city hall, finally escaping from a crowd who broke the building’s windows, invaded it, and set it on fire. The analytical challenge is to gain some understanding of a complex, extreme, confusing event, of which no single person had a clear view. Why, I ask, was the mayor attacked with such rage and glee just a week after her resounding election to the office? The partial answer is that her opponents manipulated local feelings about patrons to their political advantage. According to são-luisense common sense, patrons can be loyal benefactors or treacherous persecutors. Helped by her own miscalculations, Gardênia’s political rivals used adroit political rhetoric to turn popular love for the mayor into hatred, amity into enmity, and trust into a sense of betrayal.
“The Semantics of Dead Bodies,” in contrast, describes a rhetorical boomerang, exploring the political and emotional implications of a 1985 São Luís murder trial. Diógenes—nicknamed “Didi, Terror of Anil” (a neighborhood of the city)—is accused, together with the federal narcotics agent José, of killing Natinho, a young man, and severely wounding Natinho’s girlfriend Adélia. The prosecution paints Didi as a marginal, a vicious street thug; the priest who defends Didi claims that his client, neither angel nor killer, was framed by the police in a bid to exonerate José. Didi is convicted, an ostensible triumph for justice and public safety. But, I suggest, in highlighting the figures of marginal and policeman, the trial mobilizes ironic background understandings that undermine the state’s own objectives. Shadowing the legal arguments are widespread suspicions that murderous police and murderous hoodlums are all made in Brazil, products of a corrupt, oppressive regime that even as it convicts Didi unintentionally reconfirms its own implacable brutality. I speculate that, even granting Didi’s guilt, in the end the trial therefore intensifies, rather than reduces, the fears that the conviction, ideally, should assuage.
In “Wild Power in Post-Military Brazil” I look at the survival of a commonsense view of power as wild and dangerous, or without limits. I suggest that “wild power,” a trademark of the terrorizing practices of Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964–1985), persists in the nooks and crannies of post-military Brazil. Once again, the setting is São Luís. I examine two types of events: maratonas, or gang rapes, and seqüestros, terror-squad abductions. I argue that such forms of quotidian violence serve as residuals of, or (more ominously) reservoirs for, repugnant political practices. The perpetrators of maratonas draw on notions of wild power in enforcing oppressive sexual norms; those who abduct young men in seqüestros use wild power to enforce oppressive political conformity. Wild power thus outlived the dictatorship, which testifies to its durability, but I do not mean to suggest that it is a national character trait etched in stone. Indeed, the corrosively critical popular song discussed in the paper’s final pages is an incisive local challenge to wild power. Chico Buarque, the song’s Brazilian composer, is, like one of Gramsci’s organic intellectuals, excavating the common sense that underwrites a wide range of political abuses.
Ideas of double-edged patronage (“Hegemony of Discontent”) and dangerous power (“Dead Bodies,” “Wild Power”) are entrenched in Brazil, but not immune to critical formulation and censure. In these chapters, which deal with disheartening, often atrocious events, I hope to second those Brazilians who have before me identified such conceptual snares, impediments to the realization of Brazilians’ hopes for greater equality and guarantees of basic rights.
Part III: Identities
Identities, which are strongly associated with perceptions of self and propositions about relatedness, are premier candidates for examination through the double lens. Claims about identity, forwarded in symbols, stories, and performances, circulate in public worlds, often endorsed or created by powerful political actors. Official representations—historical narratives, folkloric displays, state pageantry, citizenship laws—are examples. Yet identity sentiments cannot be reduced to such representations. Once again questions of cognitive salience arise, for identities are differentially appropriated into the selves of those to whom identity representations are addressed. Personal factors intervene between representation and experience.
The theoretical essay “Whose Identity?” discusses the significance of identity studies for key debates over culture and presents an overview of current anthropological approaches. I argue that reducing identities to discursive constructions, as is often done in the recent literature, is to accede to a questionable “null model of the person,” which treats subjectivity as inscription on a blank slate. Other options—cognitive, psychodynamic, consciousness, or blended models of the person—are available to anthropologists, and all are superior to the null model, yielding more complex analyses that can grapple with experiential aspects of identities. I suggest, in sum, that all cultural accounts, especially accounts of identity, presuppose some model of the person, and that a convincing analysis of identity—one that effectively bridges public and personal worlds—therefore requires a carefully considered, robust model of the sort employed by psychological anthropologists.
“The Identity Path of Eduardo Mori” discusses theoretical issues raised by a close study of personal ethnic identity. Drawing on my mid-1990s research on Brazilian migrants in Toyota City, the chapter describes the twists and turns of a Japanese Brazilian factory worker’s identity sentiments. Eduardo moves from feeling Japanese in Brazil to feeling Brazilian in Japan, though at all points his identifications are idiosyncratic, ambiguous, and ambivalent. I argue that such changing specificities of meaning, and Eduardo’s own intervention in his identity path, are easily masked by analyses that invoke sociocultural determinism to deduce virtual subjectivities.
The closing chapter, “Do Japanese Brazilians Exist?” is the most radical. Reflecting on the identity sentiments of yet other Japanese Brazilians, I wonder if I am justified in invoking the ethnic category “Japanese Brazilian” at all, even when they themselves do so. More generally,