Consumption Intensified

O'Dougherty Maureen O'Dougherty

Description

Consumption Intensified examines how self-identified middle class Brazilians in Sao Paulo redefined their class during Brazil's economic crisis of 1981-1994. With inflation soaring to an astounding 2700 percent, their consumption practices intensified, not only in relation to the national crisis but also to the expanding global consumer culture. Drawing on her observations of everyday practices and on representations of the middle class in popular culture, anthropologist Maureen O'Dougherty explores both the logic and incoherence of middle- to upper-middle-class Brazilian life.With the supports of middle-class living threatened-job security, quality education, home ownership, savings, ease of consumption-the means and meaning of "middle class" were thrown into question. The sector thus redefined itself through both class- and race-based claims of moral and cultural superiority and through privileged consumption, a definition the media underscored by continually addressing middle-class Brazilians as consumers-or rather, as consumers denied. In these times, adults became more flexible in employment, and put stakes in their children's expensive private education. They engaged in elaborate comparison shopping, stockpiling of goods, and financial strategizing. Ongoing desire for distinction and "first- world" modernity prompted these Brazilians to buy foreign goods through contraband, thereby defying state protectionist policy. Discontented with the constraints of the national economy, they welcomed neoliberalism.By uncovering connections between culture and politics, O'Dougherty complicates understandings of the middle class as a social group and category. Illuminating the intricate relation between identity and local and global consumption, her work will be welcomed by students and scholars in anthropology and Latin American studies, and those interested in consumption, popular culture, politics, and globalization.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Popular culture
• Consumerism
• Social class
• Brazil

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 18 février 2002
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822383628
• Langue: English

Extrait

Consumption Intensified

d u k e u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s

Maureen O’Dougherty

The Politics of Middle-Class Daily Life in Brazil

Durham & London

2002

CONSUMPTION INTENSIFIED

∫All rights reserved2002 Duke University Press Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper$ Designed by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset in Bembo with Gill Sans display by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Some of the material in chapter 1 originally appeared as ‘‘Auto-Retratos da Classe Média: Hierarquias de ‘Cultura’ e Consumo em São Paulo,’’ inDADOS—Revista de Ciências Sociais41(2), 1998. Some of the material in chapter 5 originally appeared as ‘‘Consumption and Middle Class Identity: Shopping during Brazil’s Economic Cri- sis,’’ inAnthropology for a Small Planet: Culture and Community in a Global Environment, ed. Anthony Marcus. Ithaca: Brandywine Press, 1996. Some of the material in chap- ters 7 and 8 appeared as ‘‘The Devalued State and Nation: Neoliberalism and the Moral Economy Discourse of the Brazilian Middle Class, 1986–1994’’ inLatin Ameri- can Perspectives26(1), 1999. All are cited here with permission.

to the memory of my father,

James Aquinas O’Dougherty

for my mother, Patricia Coyne,

and for Michel Ravaz

CONTENTS

∞

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List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

ix xi

Introduction 1 The Dream Class Is Over: Home Ownership, Consumption, and (Re)definitions of Middle-Class Identity 27

Shopping Nightmares, Banking Games, Government Packages: Local Shopping during Inflation 51

The Discrete Sales of the Middle Class: Gender and Generation in a Globalizing Economy 77

The International in Daily Life: Of Debutantes and Disney

International Bargain Shopping and the Making of Modernity 111

94

Delivering the Crisis: The Media and the Middle Class through the Collor Years 132

The Middle Class versus the Nation: Discourses of Region/Race and Morality 167

Deliverance: An End to Inflation and the Promise of Neoliberalism 195

Notes 207 Bibliography Index 251

227

ILLUSTRATIONS

Map: Zones and selected neighborhoods of greater São Paulo 18

Graph: Inflation Rates in São Paulo

63

Figures 1. View of the Avenida Paulista 31 2. View from the tenth story of an apartment building in Jardim Paulista 31

3. View of older and more recent apartment buildings in Pinheiros 34 4. View of Clarinha and José’s newly built home 34 5. Window display of a fourteen-inchtvwith remote control 60

6. Paulistana teen at JFK airport displaying her purchase of a stereo system 120

7. Window display a few months before the Plano Real was implemented 197

8. Window display a few months before the Plano Real was implemented 197