Class In Brazil Research Articles

Filling the Voids with Popular Imaginaries

AbstractIn the last few years, the emergence of a burgeoning middle class in Brazil has transformed the country into one of the fastest growing consumer markets in the world. For MMBB Arquitetos, based in São Paulo, social mobility and the upgrading of urban infrastructure represent a unique opportunity to develop the city. Fernando de Mello Franco of MMBB describes the practice's strategy for ‘urbanising’ much needed new infrastructure. A canal with a public park can be inserted, for instance, alongside a new drainage system, providing necessary social adhesion in a fragile urban culture. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

From form to meaning: evidence from the design, implementation and analysis of a focuse d task

This study reports on the design, implementation and analysis of a task cycle(Ske han, 1998) comprising two grammar exercises, a focused task (Ellis,2003) and a communicative task administered to 47 EFL learners in 10intact classes in Brazil. Results suggest that focused tasks may help learnersautomatize specific linguistic forms, freeing up cognitive resources to focus onmeaning, thus fostering the acquisition of complex linguistic structures in L2.Results are discussed in terms of psycholinguistic accounts of skill buildingwhich view the acquisition of language as the automatization of processeswhich develop out of controlled processes (McLaughlin & Heredia, 1996).

DEVELOPMENT AND THE IMPACT OF CLIMATE CHANGE ON ENERGY DEMAND: EVIDENCE FROM BRAZIL

This paper investigates the effects of climate on residential electricity use for households from different income classes in Brazil. Using cross-sectional data, the study finds that the temperature elasticity of electricity consumption varies significantly across income classes. The temperature elasticity of low income households is not significantly different from zero but middle and high income families have a long run temperature elasticity of 0.8 and 1.6 respectively. As emerging low latitude countries develop and incomes rise, the welfare damages of warming in the energy sector will become substantial.

ORIGENS DO TRABALHISMO: a experiência de Pedro Ernesto Baptista na década de 1930

Pedro Ernesto, interventor e depois prefeito eleito do Rio de Janeiro, então Distrito Federal, foi aos poucos aprofundando suas relações com os trabalhadores, o que causou o descontentamento de grupos polá­ticos e sociais que sentiram seus interesses afetados. A popularidade obtida por Pedro Ernesto assustou não só os grupos de direita, como também os de esquerda, que viram o prefeito como um concorrente á obtenção da atenção da população pelo Partido Comunista Brasileiro e pela Aliança Nacional Libertadora. Mas o grande opositor do prefeito viria a ser o presidente da República e os homens do governo federal, que viram Pedro Ernesto como uma força polá­tica que crescia nacionalmente e que poderia se tornar um concorrente em potencial. Caso isso ocorresse, seriam prejudicados os planos que visavam á manutenção de Vargas no poder e o estabelecimento da ditadura.

Critical reading and critical thinking

The purpose of this paper is to provide, for L1 and L2 reading and writing teachers, a brief overview of the literature about critical reading and higher level thinking skills. The teaching of these skills is still neglected in some language classes in Brazil, be it in L1 or in L2 classes. Thus, this paper may also serve as a resource guide for L1 and/or L2 reading and writing teachers who want to incorporate critical reading and thinking into their classes. In modern society, even in everyday life people frequently need to deal with complicated public and political issues, make decisions, and solve problems. In order to do this efficiently and effectively, citizens must be able to evaluate critically what they see, hear, and read. Also, with the huge amount of printed material available in all areas in this age of “information explosion” it is easy to feel overwhelmed. But often the information piled up on people’s desks and in their minds is of no use due to the enormous amount of it.

Juggling Race and Class in Brazil's Past

There was never anything merely black or white about brazilian notions of race and the differences attributable to it. IT IS easy to see today that the poor tend to be darker than those in the middle and upper classes and that those of darker color are most often poor. Yet there are dark-skinned persons in positions of power and prestige, and many whites live cheek by jowl with nonwhites, especially but not only in poor neighborhoods. Despite regional variations, Brazil is characterized by the complex interweaving of racial and social categories, making it hard to separate color from class as the predominant marker of differentiation. Racial identity has always been a tangled business, and in the past the existence of a finely ranked but permeable social order meant that society could absorb individual mobility without becoming egalitarian.

Reflections on the GUN CONTROL simulation: Pedagogical implications for EAP writing classes

This article critically reflects on the GUN CONTROL simulation (Saliés, 1994a) by retaking ideas advanced by Saliés (2002) and applying them to the context of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing classes in Brazil. It examines how controlled practice relates to learners' performance on the first draft in a simulation-based content unit designed for EAP writing courses. Specifically, it describes how fluency and controlled practice were balanced during briefing and debriefing, and it critically discusses the outcomes. Among other issues, it addresses the role of explicit instruction on learners' logical organization of thought, documentation, and use of language.

Prevalence and Pattern of Epilepsy Treatment in Different Socioeconomic Classes in Brazil

The worldwide prevalence of epilepsy is variable, estimated at 10//1,000 people, and access to treatment is also variable. Many people go untreated, particularly in resource-poor countries. To estimate the prevalence of epilepsy and the proportion of people not receiving adequate treatment in different socioeconomic classes in Brazil, a resource-poor country. A door-to-door survey was conducted to assess the prevalence and treatment gap of epilepsy in three areas of two towns in Southeast Brazil with a total population of 96,300 people. A validated screening questionnaire for epilepsy (sensitivity 95.8%, specificity 97.8%) was used. A neurologist further ascertained positive cases. A validated instrument for socioeconomic classification was used. Lifetime prevalence was 9.2/1,000 people [95% CI 8.4-10.0] and the prevalence of active epilepsy was 5.4/1,000 people. This was higher in the more deprived social classes (7.5/1,000 compared with 1.6/1,000 in the less deprived). Prevalence was also higher in elderly people (8.5/1,000). Thirty-eight percent of patients with active epilepsy had inadequate treatment (19% on no medication); the figures were similar in the different socioeconomic groups. The prevalence of epilepsy in Brazil is similar to other resource-poor countries, and the treatment gap is high. Epilepsy is more prevalent among less wealthy people and in elderly people. There is an urgent need for education in Brazil to inform people that epilepsy is a treatable, as well as preventable, condition.

Classe, raça e mobilidade social no Brasil

This article analyzes the differences in inter-generational social mobility and schooling between white, brown, and black men in Brazil. The main objective is to analyze inequality of opportunities for mobility and educational transitions. The results indicate that for individuals from lower social origins, inequality of opportunities is significantly marked by racial differences, and that for persons originating in the upper classes, racial inequality influences the odds of social mobility. The results suggest that theories of stratification by race and class in Brazil should be rethought, taking into account the observed interactions between race and class.

Queering Literacy Teaching: Analyzing Gay-Themed Discourses in a Fifth-Grade Class in Brazil

Following queer theory and critical discourse analysis principles, my aims in this article are to analyze gay-themed discourses in literacy contexts and to suggest a way of queering literacy teaching. In the first part, I focus on ethnographically generated data from a class of fifth-graders in Brazil. The analysis shows that homoeroticism was openly discussed by the pupils in off-task classroom discourses and in focus-group interviews, but in on-task classroom discourses led by the teacher it was an issue that was not to be raised. As a consequence, I argue that there is a need for openly incorporating gay and lesbian themes into classroom discourses and for queering literacy teaching. This can be done by introducing a view of discourse as a social practice, which makes it possible to analyze the ways in which sexualities are discursively constructed, thereby implying that there are differently situated ways of constructing sexualities rather than a single essentialist manner. In the second part, I introduce principles for a pedagogic discourse analysis to which literacy teachers could make recourse in order to show the discursive nature of sexualities. This approach is exemplified by an analysis of the discursive construction, in a Brazilian magazine article, of a man as gay.

Nursing/Psychosocial/Health Services

Nursing/Psychosocial/Health Services

Derivatives Usage and Risk Management by Non Financial Firms: A Comparison between Brazilian and International Evidence

This paper presents evidence on derivatives usage by Brazilian non-financial firms, using a sample of 74 companies. The proportion of firms using derivatives in Brazil is comparable to that of other countries already researched. There are economies of scale for derivatives usage, and managers use derivatives for risk management purposes rather than speculation. Derivatives usage across risk classes in Brazil follows patterns observed internationally: companies use derivatives primarily to manage foreign exchange risk, followed by interest rates and commodities exposures. The main concerns of Brazilian managers are linked to taxation and accounting issues rather than to financial and economic aspects.

Diploma of Whiteness: Race and Social Policy in Brazil, 1917–1945

In Diploma of Whiteness, Jerry Dávila outlines how intellectual discourses combined with public policy on issues of eugenics, nationalism, and public education in the city of Rio de Janeiro from 1917 to 1945. He argues that Brazilian intellectuals and educators shaped Rio’s public education programs into national role models, with the goal of creating what they considered an improved, or whitened, Brazilian population. These public education programs had a number of unexpected results, however: for instance, they opened up professional work opportunities to women, since most of the teachers were female. At the same time, the programs created an educational system that rewarded lighter skin and wealth, granting better chances for success to students and teachers with such characteristics. Tapping a wide variety of sources (including photographs, teacher journals, letters, and music, as well as school records, archives, media sources, and interviews), Dávila approaches the question that continues to puzzle and fascinate scholars of Brazil: how have notions of racial democracy intertwined unevenly with racist ideologies and practices?The chapters of Diploma of Whiteness, which Dávila refers to as “snapshots,” look at how different directors of the Rio school system influenced the development of public education policies. Programs of physical education, hygiene, nationalist songs, and statistical tracking systems were developed and implemented with the purpose of improving the “Brazilian race.” He shows how such programs were easily adapted to fit the goals of the Estado Novo (1937– 45), which emphasized policies of homogenization. Furthermore, Dávila discusses how ideologies based in positivism, eugenics, and “whitening” shaped the training and hiring practices of teachers. As whiteness became equated with modernity in the 1920s, “teachers of color, or of lower-class backgrounds, were perceived to be inappropriate mediators of this process” (p. 122) and were increasingly shut out, facing numerous obstacles in obtaining admission to teacher training programs. These ideologies also influenced how students performed in the public school system. Examining the testing system implemented by Anísio Teixeira in the early 1930s, Dávila is able to show how these tests favored white, middle-class students and limited the success of poorer nonwhites. A timely work for current debates about affirmative action policies in Brazil, this study describes the long history of issues related to race, racism, and class in Brazil’s education system.This excellent study adds to research done on race and class, reformist movements, and public policy by authors such as Sueann Caulfield, Barbara Weinstein, and Nancy Stepan. Introducing us to debates over a statue of “the Brazilian man” to be placed in the Ministry of Education, for instance, Dávila describes how intellectuals and policy makers believed that “whiteness” could be achieved through education. This led to eugenicist policies and scientific programs designed to create the ideal Brazilian through the public school system. Dávila claims that even though “eugenics lost legitimacy in the aftermath of the Second World War, the institutions, practices, and assumptions it gave rise to endured” (p. 51). Thus, non-elite children received some benefits related to these new education programs, but these benefits came with a cost, since eugenicist beliefs associated with such programs legitimized inequalities in the school system and in Brazilian society.Dávila’s study raises a number of questions for future research related to this issue. For example, it touches only lightly on the topics of gender and sexuality. In addition, as Dávila himself suggests, more work is needed outside of Rio in order to understand public education policies, race relations, and nationalism more fully in other regions and in rural areas. Diploma of Whiteness is an interesting and clearly written book, appropriate for both graduate and undergraduate courses on Brazil and Latin America. Nonetheless, it is important to note that this book may be difficult for non-Brazilianists to comprehend because of the lack of attention spent on the idea of “whiteness” itself. Dávila shows how education in Brazil became a way to acknowledge a person as white and elite, in that it employed teachers and favored students who were considered “whiter” and not from the lower classes. But it is not clear what is meant by “white” nor how the idea of whiteness changed during this period. This problem stands out especially in his analysis of photographs, in which he uses phenotypes, or “afrodecendant” characteristics, to describe the whitening process. The duplicitous meanings of whiteness are lost in this simplification.

Domesticating the Immigrant Other: Japanese Media Images of Nikkeijin Return Migrants

The return migration of Latin American nikkeijin to Japan is unprecedented in the country's history. Never has Japan been faced with so many returning Japanese who are so culturally different. Their presence profoundly challenges the country's long-held beliefs about Japanese ethnicity, race, and culture. Although the media are reputed to be the principal agents of social change, their coverage of these nikkeijin immigrants does more to reinforce than challenge traditional Japanese ethnic and cultural assumptions. (Migration, ethnicity, media, Japan) In the early 1990s, a popular weekly Japanese television program called Naruhodo za Warudo (Let's Go! The World) introduced Japanese audiences to the different customs, foods, and peoples of foreign societies. However, in one particular show the exotic person introduced was not an African or Melanesian, but a Latin American nikkeijin (Japanese descendant born and raised outside Japan). A Japanese Peruvian who had been crowned the Miss Nikkei beauty pageant queen was paraded onstage in a traditional Japanese kimono. Although she looked completely Japanese, the audience was greatly amused when she stumbled over the simplest Japanese lines she had been fed and eventually resorted to Spanish. This is an example of how the Japanese media exoticize the nikkeijin as ethnic curiosities who do not fit the Japanese notion that those of Japanese descent should be culturally Japanese as well. The Latin American nikkeijin have become much more than ethnic anomalies in Japan. With a population of well over 300,000, they have become the second largest group of foreigners in Japan after the Korean Japanese, and their numbers continue to grow steadily despite the country's prolonged economic recession. The largest group of nikkeijin immigrants are the Japanese Brazilians, who began migrating to Japan in the late 1980s in response to a severe Brazilian economic crisis and a crippling shortage of unskilled labor in Japan (Tsuda 1999a). Although they are relatively well educated and middle class in Brazil, they earn five to ten times their Brazilian salaries as factory workers in Japan. Almost all of them initially went to Japan with intentions to work for a few years and then return to Brazil with their savings, so they have been called dekasegi (temporary migrant workers). However, many remained, brought their families to Japan, and became long-term settlers (Roth 1999:150-54; Tsuda 1999b; Yamanaka 2000). Most of the Japanese Brazilian return migrants are second and third generation (nisei and sansei and no longer culturally Japanese. Therefore, despite their Japanese descent, they are treated as foreigners in Japan because of the narrow definition of what constitutes being Japanese, and have become the country's newest ethnic minority. The Brazilian nikkeijin have attracted a disproportionate amount of Japanese media attention, which has thrust them prominently into public awareness (Tsuda 2003:xiii-xv). As a result, even though many Japanese have not personally encountered Japanese Brazilians, most know of them. In low-immigration countries like Japan, most information and impressions about immigrants are obtained from the media, since the public has little contact with them. In addition, the media in Japan are powerfully influential. The Japanese watch an average of three hours and 23 minutes of television a day (Pharr 1996a:5), (1) an hour more than the average for Americans. Just as notable as the attention Japanese television receives is the amount of respect it has in Japanese society. According to a Research Institute of Japan survey, 56 per cent of the public expressed strong confidence in the credibility of television programming, compared with less than 20 per cent in the United States, according to Gallup/Harris polls (Pharr 1996a:15). Another study found that executives in a variety of organizations (including business, labor, academics, politics, and government) rank the media as the most influential institution in Japan (cited in Pharr 1996b: 19 and Verba et al. …

Consumption Intensified: The Politics of Middle-Class Daily Life in Brazil

Twenty years ago Marshall Berman noted that the experience of the modern in “underdeveloped places was built on the fantasies and dreams of modernity.” Though Berman did not say so explicitly, this formulation implied that under certain circumstances modern lives in such places could become the nightmare of Tantalus from whom the object of his desire was ceaselessly fugitive. This is the experience at the core of anthropologist Maureen O’Dougherty’s Consumption Intensified. The author argues that in the 1990s middle-class Brazilians had to contend with an economic and social crisis, which, by undercutting their ability to consume, threatened their social status and challenged their sense of middle-class identity as emblematic of modernity. She explores the twists and turns of this crisis by weaving together multiple theoretical threads with the words and experiences of about 50 middle-class informants from the city and state of São Paulo.O’Dougherty knows she is up against a formidable problem in defining the “middle class.” Precisely because of its centrality to self-understanding in modern societies, it is the class whose boundaries are inherently flexible and porous and whose composition is often characterized as heterogeneous and unstable. Her task is made more difficult by the fact that the very idea of the middle class in Brazil cannot help but refer to the presumed normativity of middle classes in Europe and the United States. O’Dougherty acknowledges these problems, but wisely pushes beyond them, recognizing that the best approach is to think of the Brazilian middle class in terms of the everyday practices of those who would claim the label, or have it claimed for them.The book sparkles with insights. By focusing on consumption, O’Dougherty sheds light on a still-understudied topic in the Latin American literature. She does an excellent job of showing how middle-class Paulistas lived through the early 1990s—when inflation reached 2,700 percent—by changing their views on acceptable jobs and defending what came to be perceived as an almost inalienable right to consume. She offers an ethnology of inflation, showing how people became mesmerized by the fata morgana that money becomes in such circumstances. (I lived in Rio in 1990–92 and she has the frenzy of daily life dead on.) Her vivisection of the Disney experience among middle-class Brazilians and her burrowing into the media’s role in Collor’s impeachment reveal crucial aspects of the mentalities and world views of her subjects.While O’Dougherty argues persuasively that middle-class people changed their behavior because of the crisis, she does not, to my satisfaction, succeed in demonstrating that her informants “redefined their identities” as members of an “historically constituted” middle class (pp. 3, 6). She does show that middle-class men and women reluctantly took up certain kinds of work—petty entrepreneuralism, commercial retail, and moonlighting generally—that had in earlier years been beneath them and turned to consumption as a hedge against erosion of their social position. She ascertains as well that her informants relied on a rough-and-ready moralism—one expansive enough to condemn corruption for Brazil’s plight, blame dark-skinned Northeasterners for dragging the nation down, and fault other sectors of society for acting out of self-interest rather than for the greater good— in confronting the disorienting complexities of their situation. This moralism, she concludes, isolated (her subjects might say insulated) them from the swirling political currents of the crisis. Although this is the part of the book that leans most heavily on theoretical formulations, I think she is basically right.What’s missing is the deeper sense that most of this was hardly new in the 1990s. Middle-class Brazilians have wrestled with inflation and been enamored of consumerism ever since the 1920s. Their participation in commercial retail and moonlighting dates back to the same period. If during the so-called golden age of the 1970s a segment of the middle class—the “modern middle class”—was able to forget its past, O’Dougherty need not have. Similarly, middle-class moralism has a long history, reflecting a distinct squeamishness regarding politics. Without knowing this history, the reader can only wonder how to account for a middle-class political stance so disempowering and self-defeating. More broadly, O’Dougherty’s depiction of modernity in Brazil might have revealed more of its tantalizing quality had she engaged the deeper historical context more fully. Such an engagement, perhaps through an inquiry into historical memory among her informants, might have led her to see a middle class more equivocal on neoliberalism than she suggests.Still, the book is a welcome one. I know of no other study that offers as sharp an image of middle-class life under inflation. With luck others will be inspired by O’Dougherty’s brave decision to trespass on a terrain that has largely been left to the economists. More important, it treats a neglected and much-derided group with sensitivity and human empathy, a feat in itself.

The Coproduction of Race and Class in Brazil and the United States

The Coproduction of Race and Class in Brazil and the United States

Brésil, travail et travailleurs

Robert Cabanes — Brazil : Labour and labourers — Trade Unionism between corporatism and clientelism, paternalism and globalisation. Brazilian labour unionism happens to be at a crossroads characterised by the interaction between historical tendencies, current national choices (october 2002 elections) and the entry of industry into globalisation. This article attempts to assess the conditions open to its evolution by rapidly recalling its foundations and the recent history of the last 30 years. — Perspectives of the labouring classes in Brazil. Descriptions of the foundations of a labour-culture, as drawn from family accounts, stress the importance of the domestic bases and of the reference to cooperation labour, dominating hierarchical labour. The data involved is not affected by the precariousness of employment, which is an old feature of Brazilian labour trends. The said process has always had national expressions in form of minor unions and has new decentralised forms in relation to production, thus expressing a decentralised form of local democracy.

Is obesity replacing or adding to undernutrition? Evidence from different social classes in Brazil

Is obesity replacing or adding to undernutrition? Evidence from different social classes in Brazil

Designs of Deception: Concepts of Consciousness, Spirituality and Survival in Capoeira Angola in Salvador, Brazil

This paper addresses various questions concerning "consciousness" and related folk concepts through an examination of fundamental principles of capoeira angola. These include, for instance, ideas such as ginga, the sensing of the mind/body through specific movements; or energia, a type of psychic force believed to be engendered through engagement within a group or with an opponent; or mentalidade, the kind of "head" one develops in capoeira angola, referring in part to what we conceptualize as a "state of consciousness," and in this case a highly alert and perceptive state with other elements of psychic ties and influences. This mentalidade includes "street smarts" and a highly developed knowledge about the various ways deception can be used to "get what one needs" in life, in other words, these are tools for survival in a specific kind of environment. Such a discussion must include "race," and class in Brazil. Racial and class discrimination in Brazilian society is seldom expressed explicitly; indeed a rhetoric of "racial democracy" has been popularized in direct contradiction to the reality of a racial oppression that includes class. In this paper, I integrate related issues of "states of consciousness" that have developed in capoeira angola to the conditions of racial and class inequality, power and history that have been its nurturance. In the conclusions, I speculate that notions of consciousness are in the process of change as capoeira angola is being regimented, taken out of context and taught increasingly among middle‐class Brazilians and in such places as the United States.

Regional Income Inequalities by Income Class in Brazil: Is Inequality Higher Among Rich or Poor People?

The paper deals with regional inequality of per capita income by income class in Brazil. The paper calculates regional income inequality measures by income class, allowing for the identification of the income classes in which inequality is the highest. The indicators are calculated for the years 1960, 1970, 1980 and 1991. For each income classes the speed of convergence is estimated, allowing for the identification of the income classes for which convergence is taking place and at what speed.