Precarious Democracy: Ethnographies of Hope, Despair, and Resistance in Brazil

Precarious Democracy

Precarious Democracy

Ethnographies of Hope, Despair, and Resistance in Brazil

Edited by

Benjamin Junge, Sean T. Mitchell, Alvaro Jarrín, and Lucia Cantero

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Junge, Benjamin, editor. | Mitchell, Sean T., editor. | Jarrín, Alvaro, 1980– editor. | Cantero, Lucia, editor.

Title: Precarious democracy : ethnographies of hope, despair, and resistance in Brazil / edited by Benjamin Junge, Sean T. Mitchell, Alvaro Jarrín, and Lucia Cantero.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020053254 | ISBN 9781978825666 (cloth) | ISBN 9781978825659 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978825673 (epub) | ISBN 9781978825697 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Social movements—Brazil—History—21st century. | Ethnology—Brazil. | Brazil—Social conditions—1985– | Brazil—Politics and government—2003–

Classification: LCC HN283.5 .P734 2021 | DDC 306.0981—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053254

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

This collection copyright © 2021 by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Individual chapters copyright © 2021 in the names of their authors

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

For John Burdick (1959–2020), who showed us what collaborative, antiracist, and feminist ethnography looks like, in Brazil and beyond

Contents

List of Acronyms

Introduction: Ethnographies of the Brazilian Unraveling

Benjamin Junge, Alvaro Jarrín, Lucia Cantero, and Sean T. Mitchell

Critical Overview: A Plan for a Country Still Looking for Democracy

Lilia Moritz Schwarcz

Part I: The Intimacy of Power

Chapter 1. Family Is Everything: Generational Tensions as a Working-Class Household from Recife, Brazil, Contemplates the 2018 Presidential Elections

Benjamin Junge

Chapter 2. Among Mothers and Daughters: Economic Mobility and Political Identity in a Northeastern Periferia

Jessica Jerome

Chapter 3. Dreaming with Guns: Performing Masculinity and Imagining Consumption in Bolsonaro’s Brazil

Isabela Kalil, Rosana Pinheiro-Machado, and Lucia Mury Scalco

Chapter 4. Whiteness Has Come Out of the Closet and Intensified Brazil’s Reactionary Wave

Patricia de Santana Pinho

Part II: Corruption and Crime

Chapter 5. Cruel Pessimism: The Affect of Anticorruption and the End of the New Brazilian Middle Class

Sean T. Mitchell

Chapter 6. The Effects of Some Religious Affects: Revolutions in Crime

Karina Biondi

Chapter 7. Look at That: Cures, Poisons, and Shifting Rationalities in the Backlands That Have Become a Sea (of Money)

John F. Collins

Chapter 8. The Oil Is Ours: Petro-Affect and the Scandalization of Politics

Lucia Cantero

Part III: Infrastructures of Hope

Chapter 9. Despairing Hopes (and Hopeful Despair) in Amazonia

David Rojas, Alexandre de Azevedo Olival, and Andrezza Alves Spexoto Olival

Chapter 10. Tempered Hopes: (Re)producing the Middle Class in Recife’s Alternative Music Scene

Falina Enriquez

Chapter 11. Withering Dreams: Material Hope and Apathy among Brazil’s Once-Rising Poor

Moisés Kopper

Chapter 12. Bolsonaro Wins Japan: Support for the Far Right among Japanese Brazilian Overseas Labor Migrants

Sarah LeBaron von Baeyer

Part IV: Old Challenges, New Activism

Chapter 13. Holding the Wave: Black LGBTI+ Feminist Resilience amid the Reactionary Turn in Rio de Janeiro

LaShandra Sullivan

Chapter 14. LGBTTI Elders in Brazil: Subjectivation and Narratives about Resilience, Resistance, and Vulnerability

Carlos Eduardo Henning

Chapter 15. Disgust and Defiance: The Visceral Politics of Trans and Travesti Activism amid a Heteronormative Backlash

Alvaro Jarrín

Chapter 16. Barbie e Ken Cidadãos de Bem: Memes and Political Participation among College Students in Brazil

Melanie A. Medeiros, Patrick McCormick, Erika Schmitt, and James Kale

Acknowledgments

Notes on Contributors

Index

Acronyms

BBB Bala, Boi e Bíblia. Bullets, Bulls, and Bibles (a conservative voting bloc in the Brazilian Congress)

BOVESPA Bolsa de Valores de São Paulo. São Paulo’s stock market

BRICS Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (five major emerging national economies)

DEM Partido Democratas. Democrats party

FIES Fundo de Financiamento ao Estudante do Ensino Superior. Fellowship Fund for Students within Higher Education

IBGE Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística. Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics

IBRAT Instituto Brasileiro de Transmasculinidades. Brazilian Institute of Transmasculinities

IMF International Monetary Fund

IOV Instituto Ouro Verde. Ouro Verde Institute, a sustainable development NGO

IPO Initial public offering

LARP Live-action role-playing game

LGBTTI Lésbica, gay, bissexual, travesti, trans e intersexual. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, travesti, trans, and intersex

LpT Luz para Todos. Light for Everyone (government electrification program)

MCMV Minha Casa Minha Vida. My House, My Life (government housing program)

MDB See PMDB

MEI Microempreendedor Individual. Individual Microentrepreneur

MPF Ministério Público Federal. Public Prosecutor’s Office

MST Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra. Landless Rural Workers’ Movement

MTST Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto. Homeless Workers’ Movement

NGO Nongovernmental organization

PAC Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento. Growth Acceleration Program

PCB Partido Comunista Brasileiro. Brazilian Communist Party

PCC Primeiro Comando da Capital. First Command of the Capital (a criminal cartel)

PMBA Polícia Militar da Bahia. Bahia’s military police

PMDB Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro. Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (1965–1979 and again, since 2017, the acronym MDB is used)

PRONAF Programa Nacional de Fortalecimento da Agricultura Familiar. National Program for Strengthening Family Agriculture

PROUNI Programa Universidade Para Todos. University for Everyone program

PSL Partido Social Liberal. Social Liberal Party

PSOL Partido Socialismo e Liberdade. Socialism and Liberty Party

PT Partido dos Trabalhadores. Workers’ Party

RENFA Rede Nacional de Feministas Anti-Prohibicionistas. National Feminist Network against the War on Drugs

SBT Sistema Brasileiro de Televisão. Brazilian System of Television (Brazilian TV network)

SIC Sistema de Incentivo à Cultura. System of Cultural Incentives

STF Supremo Tribunal Federal. Supreme Federal Court

SUS Sistema Único de Saúde. Unified Health System (Brazil’s publicly funded health care system)

UCSC University of California, Santa Cruz

UOL Universo Online. Online Universe (Brazilian internet content provider)

Introduction

Ethnographies of the Brazilian Unraveling

Benjamin Junge, Alvaro Jarrín, Lucia Cantero, and Sean T. Mitchell

Writing in mid-2021, with Brazil in the grips of the devastating COVID-19 pandemic,¹ it is difficult to find words to depict—let alone account for—the extraordinary transformations to the country’s political, economic, and affective landscapes that characterize the past decade. Even before the virus emerged and began ravaging Brazil, those transformations were devastatingly manifest. Circa 2010, Brazil seemed poised to become a global economic and political power, and the country was hailed worldwide as an example of successful progressive governance. During the two-term presidency of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (hereafter, Lula) of the leftist Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores; PT), from 2003 to 2010, some thirty million people had exited poverty (Neri 2014), as the poor and working classes saw an enormous expansion of opportunities for educational, economic, and geographic mobility. When Lula completed his second term in office in 2010, he had an 87 percent approval rating and was widely credited for having steered the country around the global economic crisis. On these laurels, many pundits assumed that the next decade would bring continued reduction of poverty and inequality and a deepening of progressive governance to this brutally unequal nation. And indeed, the overall economic trends characterizing the Lula years continued during the first term of Lula’s PT successor, Dilma Rousseff (2010–2014).

Brazil rose to become the world’s sixth-largest economy in 2012 (Inman 2012), and the nation’s rising international status seemed cemented when Brazil was confirmed to host two sporting mega events: the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics. In the summer of 2009, when Rio de Janeiro was awarded the bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics, Mayor Eduardo Paes erected a gargantuan diamond screen on Copacabana Beach so that Cariocas (Rio residents) could follow the results of the International Olympic Committee’s deliberations live. When the announcement came—with Brazil beating out Chicago, Madrid, and Tokyo—more than one hundred thousand attendees, clad in yellow-and-green Brasil T-shirts, erupted in ecstatic jubilation. The owner of a nearby beauty salon, Ana Paula, expressed her elation as follows, I can’t even tell you how happy I am! When I heard the news about the win, that the judges in Copenhagen are going to give us, the Third World, a chance to put on a good show, everyone at the salon began to celebrate! And if we finally show the world how great Brazil, and this ‘marvelous city’ is, then we will finally be a modern nation. I’m ready to enter the First World, and I hope all of Rio’s ugliness gets the chance for a makeover (Cantero 2015). Note the anticipatory elation and the strong optimism for the future embodied in Paula’s statement—almost unthinkable a decade later. What we were witnessing in 2009 was the affective engagement of individuals within a community of feeling mediated by forms of mass communication, which allowed them to share in an outpouring of optimism for the nation.

While Brazil’s successes at the time were real, a range of then-submerged social antagonisms have now become devastatingly apparent. The rising fortunes of the poor and working classes under PT governance threatened the established position and prestige for elites and middle classes in the established class hierarchy. Simultaneously, the rising profile of LGBTQ+, feminist, Black, and Indigenous movements increasingly provoked sometimes vicious forms of conservative backlash. Additionally, the waning of the commodities boom that was fueled by Chinese demand (Lyons and Kiernan 2015) revealed certain structural limits of the PT-era growth model, precipitating economic crisis and emboldening opponents of the PT. Meanwhile, even in the midst of poverty reduction, long-standing problems of crime, political corruption, deficient public services, and environmental destruction fueled popular discontent. All this created opportunities for conservative political and religious actors that had been organizing, growing, and cementing international alliances during the long period of left-wing governance.

Precarious Democracy examines how Brazilians from diverse walks of life have experienced and responded to economic precarity, political crisis, and diminishing hopes for the future from 2013 to 2019—a pivotal period in Brazilian history, bookended by the explosion of massive protests across the country in 2013 and the first year in office of hard-right president Jair Bolsonaro (2019). As our chapters show, these were years of not only deepening cynicism about institutional politics but also new forms of hope and resistance with transformative promise for the future.

More than a decade after the optimism of 2009, Brazil looks radically different. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, many of the social gains of the previous decade had been dismantled. Brazil’s economy had sunk to ninth place globally in terms of gross domestic product (GDP; IMF 2019), and 4.5 million people fell into extreme poverty (IBGE 2019). Moreover, in 2019, Brazil became the democratic country with the world’s highest concentration of income among the top 1 percent (Canzian and Mena 2019). Few now view Brazil as a formidable emerging international power, despite its planetary environmental significance. Between April 2018 and November 2019, Lula was imprisoned under politically motivated charges to remove him from running in the presidential election for which he was leading the polls, as leaked chats among the presiding judge and prosecutor reveal (Greenwald and Pougy 2019a). And crucially, riven by violent political polarization, Brazil has seen the rise of a vast far-right movement—capable of marshaling massive political and electoral support, somewhat paradoxically, even among those populations who most benefited under PT governments (Kalil 2018).

Let’s juxtapose Ana Paula’s 2009 expression of elation—typical of that bygone optimistic era—with the 2018 sentiments of an Uber driver from Recife, Clodoaldo. His words are exemplary of the sentiments that dominate the era in which we publish this book. Reflecting on the rapidly approaching presidential elections, which would pit PT candidate Fernando Haddad against Jair Bolsonaro, Clodoaldo exclaimed, Our country no longer needs democracy, it needs order. Then you’ll say ‘Who would you vote for?’ Man, I’d vote for the crazy Bolsonaro. I think that the military regime isn’t like we’re thinking it’s going to be. I think there’s going to be order. It’s a matter of respect, man. Respect the teachers, respect everything and everyone (Junge and Prado 2020). Here optimism is replaced with a strong desire for law, order, and traditional hierarchies, expressed as an aspirational nostalgia for Brazil’s 1964–1985 military regime. Of course, such conservative nostalgia was hardly new in the Brazil of 2009. But what had been a somewhat marginal, even stigmatized point of view in 2009 became a pervasive national mood less than a decade later.

There has been a remarkable shift not only in Brazilian politics but also in how Brazilians feel about their nation, with many fearing it is imperiled and pining for an imagined past that was more orderly. In 2009, during what seemed to be an increasingly successful democratization process that followed the dictatorship, few of us could have imagined that by 2018, the fantasy of returning to that period of authoritarianism and political torture would make such a potent comeback (Atencio 2014; Cowan 2016a). Without oversimplifying the diversity of sentiment that is always present in such a vast, diverse, and unequal country as Brazil, this volume seeks to trace ethnographically how overwhelming national optimism for so much of Brazil’s population was so dramatically supplanted by darker cultural moods.

Brazil’s Reversal of Fortune

This book provides ethnographic perspectives on a pivotal period in Brazilian history (2013–2019), yet one that does not easily fit into simple binary narratives about the period (e.g., Frazão 2018). From the massive nationwide protests that broke out in 2013—under PT president Dilma Rousseff—to the post-Rousseff-impeachment presidency of Michel Temer (2016–2018), this period is sometimes subsumed under a reductive narrative of an epochal pendulum swing from the left-wing governance of the PT to the far-right governance of Bolsonaro. But the forces that made Bolsonaro’s presidency possible were gathered in the much more ideologically ambiguous period that this book explores.

It may be useful to the reader to map out some key elements in this historical progression. The global economic crisis of 2007–2008 seemed not to touch Brazil, in part due to the Lula administration’s effective reliance on Keynesian countercyclical spending. The first indication to many national and international observers that something might be amiss was the explosion of protests across Brazil in June 2013. Those protests began with grassroots demands for free bus fares and for public services on par with those being produced for upcoming sporting mega events, but the mobilizations were pushed by elite media and political institutions to increasingly conservative ends (Mitchell 2014).

A severe economic crisis finally hit shortly before the 2014 elections, and as corruption scandals and right-wing political movements were featured prominently in the media, many of the country’s elites abandoned the PT and began to look for alternatives that would protect their interests (Souza 2017). Still, bolstered by the continuing support of Brazil’s poor and by voters in the northeast region, incumbent PT president Dilma Rousseff won a tight reelection in 2014. The losing center-right challenger, Aécio Neves, denied the validity of the election results. He and other conservative actors—particularly the dominant conservative media conglomerate Rede Globo—availed themselves of those protest movements to challenge the legitimacy of the reelected PT president. Massive counterprotests in favor of Rousseff also took off, and the country became increasingly polarized between PT supporters and detractors. The chapters in this volume explore the chaos, political uncertainty, and economic precarity that seemed to deepen each month during this tense period.

As the economy was faltering, a vast corruption scheme involving Brazil’s political parties and its major corporations came to light, and a sprawling anticorruption case, Lava Jato (Operation Car Wash), was used to take down the PT government. It has been made clear from leaks reported on by the Intercept Brasil and Agência pública that corruption investigations in Brazil at the time were principally aimed at the PT and that the U.S. government was covertly but deeply involved in this process—with further echoes of 1964 (Viana and Neves 2020). And it is far from certain that the PT was more culpable than other parties for corruption. In fact, those leaks have shown the case’s chief prosecutor, Deltan Dallagnol, and chief judge, Sergio Moro, to have illegally conspired to protect former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso because he was an important political ally (Martins et al. 2019). Still, this conjuncture led to the soft-coup impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, to the two-year presidency of the ideologically ambiguous and opportunistic career politician Michel Temer, and to the imprisonment of 2018 presidential front-runner Lula, facilitating the election of Bolsonaro. Moro was appointed minister of justice in the incoming Bolsonaro administration, a position he would leave after breaking with the Bolsonaro government a year and a half later.

Bolsonaro emerged as a figure of national political significance under Temer’s presidency. Yet the Temer period doesn’t easily fit prevailing narratives: He was Rousseff’s vice president, brought in because the PT needed the support of his (then) massive Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro; PMDB), in order to pass legislation. So for defenders of the PT, Temer’s presence signals the sordid nature of these politics. For defenders of Bolsonaro’s purifying right-wing politics, on the other hand, the Temer period muddies the easy moralistic narrative of victory over leftist depravity.

Temer was Dilma’s vice president, but he was ideologically closer to his presidential successor than to his predecessor. Indeed, Temer has said that he voted for Bolsonaro, and his policies of austerity, privatization, and realignment of Brazil with the United States and away from the so-called BRICS nations (Russia, India, South Africa, and China) were much more consonant with those of Bolsonaro than with anything that was part of the PT platform.

The chapters in this book chronicle a period of increasing democratic and economic precarity, and the defeat of progressive governance, and yet it was also a period of renewed activism, resistance, and hope—and of forms of violence that sought to silence those voices. This period saw the largest general strike in Brazilian history, mobilized against Temer’s government (Perrin 2017). And this period also witnessed the assassination of the Afro-Brazilian, bisexual, socialist, city councilwoman from Rio de Janeiro, Marielle Franco. But that very assassination was the result of her influential critique of police violence and of the police’s alliances with paramilitaries. At the same time, it was during this period that Franco became a potent symbol of resistance for Black, feminist, and LGBTQ+ activist groups seeking to reorganize themselves in the face of the conservative backlash and find new forms of activism (see chapters by Jarrín and Sullivan, this volume).

This is a brief outline of Brazil’s unraveling in the past decade, sketched here to give some wide-angle context for the rich ethnographic accounts in the pages that follow. At a still wider angle, we note the commonalities of Brazil’s recent political-economic trajectory with that of many other Latin American countries during this period. Brazil’s period of left-leaning governance and export-led growth was coincident with similar trends across the region, as are its more recent economic decline and turn to the right. After long Cold War and post–Cold War periods in which much national policy making in Latin America was dominated by the imperatives of Washington, the twenty-first century saw the rise of leftist governments across the region, from Argentina to Honduras, a process often referred to as the pink tide. Benefiting from commodity-fueled economic growth—and perhaps from Washington’s focus on its disastrous Middle East wars—these governments experimented with novel forms of redistribution and geopolitical independence. As we write this introduction, however, Latin American economic growth has stalled, leftist projects swell in some nations but ebb in others, and the right is resurgent across the region, signaling a possible new political realignment.

Beyond Trump of the Tropics

While this volume’s ethnographic panorama extends far beyond voting and elections, it will likely be looked to for insight into the rise of Jair Bolsonaro and the global spread in recent years of what is often referred to as right-wing populism. But while many of the individuals in these chapters voted for Bolsonaro, many did not—and many who did voted out of disillusionment and disdain with politics in general, with the PT, or with the hypocrisy of anticorruption politics itself (see Mitchell, this volume) rather than out of ideological affinity with the right-wing candidate. And while some people in these ethnographic accounts are politically active, many are not. If there is a political sentiment most often expressed in these pages, it is less frequently one of right-wing ideological affinity than one of ambivalence and disenchantment.

By giving privileged ethnographic attention to the deep disillusionment with politics and democracy during the years leading up to Bolsonaro’s election in 2018, the chapters comprising this volume inevitably lead us to the conceptual doorstep of populism—or, more precisely, the category of populism so often used by scholars and pundits to describe a certain style of politics. Within the social sciences, conceptualizations of populism have tended to focus on discourses, movements, and styles of leadership that pit some notion of the people against elites and cultural Others who threaten popular sovereignty, prosperity, or some other conception of popular well-being. In left-wing versions of populism, this frequently involves threats to some conception of justice, and for right-wing versions, to some conception of in-group purity or continuity. The backdrop for the rise of this style of politics tends to be the invocation of crisis, frequently regarding the economy, popular sovereignty, security, or morality. Certainly, many of our chapters show how amid a generalized sense of crisis, disillusionment with politics, and fears of crime, the violent narrative of an authoritarian cleansing of Bolsonaro’s campaign came to seem like an avenue of possible salvation to many. (See, for example, chapters by Junge; Mitchell; and Kalil, Pinheiro-Machado and Scalco, this volume.)

Explicit anthropological interest in populism—as both theoretical construct and empirical phenomenon—has intensified notably against the post-2016 backdrop of Donald Trump and Brexit.² While the experiences depicted in our case studies are certainly ripe for comparison with other global contexts undergoing rightward political and cultural shifts, we see significant limitations in the global spread of populist conservativism theoretical trope accounting for the ethnographic complexity and reality of what led Brazil to Bolsonaro. Without doubt, Bolsonaro’s rise would seem to index many often-identified traits associated with populist leadership and appeal, including his status as an outsider in Brazil’s mainstream sociopolitical order, his military background, his use of the ground of public resentment as [his] field of play (Webb 2018, 5), and his heavy reliance on cultural nostalgia for an era (chiefly, Brazil’s 1964–1985 military dictatorship) when life is imagined to have been more moral, more prosperous, and safer (see Schwarcz 2019; Gusterson 2017, 210). And yet imposing populism as a metaconcept to analyze Bolsonaro’s rise detracts from the specificity of Brazilian political, economic, and cultural conditions of recent years—and the concomitant, emergent political subjectivities we seek to bring into relief in this volume, in all their complexities, contradictions, and states of unfinishedness (Biehl and Locke 2017).

As we have noted, at the level of formal, institutional politics, Brazil’s trajectory from 2013 to 2019 bears some resemblance to that of other rightward-turning nations in post–pink tide Latin America, not to mention a similarity of Bolsonaro’s rhetorical style to that of far-right, heavily tweeting, media-disparaging leaders elected elsewhere in the world during the second decade of the twentieth century. Our volume, however, is not about Bolsonaro; it is about Brazilian citizens, communities, and movements living through the years leading up to Bolsonaro’s election. Hence the notion of Bolsonaro as the Trump of the Tropics—the latest in a wave of populist demagogues (Davis 2018)—holds little appeal for us, since it oversimplifies both the motivations of the electorate and the appeal of the man for whom enough of the electorate voted to secure victory. We also note the analytic weaknesses of a political concept that is capacious enough to be applied to both far-right authoritarian figures such as Bolsonaro and his democratic socialist foil and nemesis, Lula. Moreover, applied to the pre-Bolsonaro years, the populism trope also tends to strip ordinary citizens of agency, rendering them as merely duped subjects—duped by the media, duped by neoliberal capitalism, duped by fake news, duped by corrupt politicians, and so on—and seeing their emergent affective states as inherently bad for democracy.³ To be clear, these and other forms of deception were undeniable factors of the 2018 election outcome, and this volume’s editors and contributors share a deep concern that, roughly since PT president Dilma Rousseff was reelected for a second term in 2014, the roots of Brazil’s young democracy have weakened.

The Affective Politics of Precarious Democracy

Contemporary forms of mass disenchantment and disaffection have been described by social scientists using a range of conceptual vocabularies.⁴ The overall complex of attitudes and affects, however, tends to resonate with a deep sense that real-existing democracies are either dysfunctional, corrupt, or hollowed-out, leading to a significant demographic of people—liberal and illiberal—who feel betrayed by the very institutions that profess to serve them (Gagnon et al. 2018, vii).⁵ The chapters in this volume reveal a complex panorama of sentiments driven as much by cultural tensions around race, gender, kinship and family, sexuality, religion, and generation as by material conditions of everyday life and struggles for survival. Our intent is to show how these dimensions of identity and experience come together—in both clear and murky intersections—to shape political consciousness and behaviors (including, but by no means limited to, voting).

Affect is a useful analytic to consider the momentous political shift in Brazil because it helps account for how ambivalent feelings of disaffection, disillusionment, and anger can spread across a body politic rapidly, building like a snowball and turning into an avalanche that disrupts previous social and political structures. These forms of affect experienced by individuals are not merely a by-product of a nation’s economic, social, and political conditions. Rather, they co-constitute those conditions and shape them in very particular ways. We understand affect not to be an individual emotion but, rather, to be a description of collective capacities to feel and generate feelings in others, as affect is being constantly transmitted between bodies (Gregg and Seigworth 2010). Affect is characterized by preconscious, prelinguistic, and visceral responses to stimuli that can crystallize into certain dispositions or habits but are also volatile and have the potential to rapidly capture and transform the collective mood (Massumi 2002). Mass media is particularly adept at shaping and provoking these shifts in mood, particularly with the aim of selling a product or a political project.

Anthropologists, moreover, have begun to locate affect as instrumental to legal and technocratic procedures, as pre-social emotional practices figure prominently in arbitration and juridical decision-making (Clarke 2019). We saw this play out, ultimately, in the legal procedures against Dilma Rousseff, which often took on a morally self-righteous collective affect, where she became the iconic scapegoat for all that must be cleansed of governance—and thus PT leadership (Ansell 2018). For Mazzarella (2019, 46), whipping public affect into a state of normalized crisis is an elementary form of statecraft. When enough members of a society become disillusioned or disenchanted, for example, these feelings become embodied in ways that can lead to unpredictable transformations of political subjectivities and actions.

As ethnographers, the contributors to this volume bring into relief not only expressions of manifest anger, resentment, and disillusionment but also feelings of hope and profound ambivalence—the coexistence of conflicting feelings and opinions (Webb 2018)—that have spread through the hearts and minds of Brazilians during these tumultuous times. Indeed, ethnography is particularly suited for capturing nuance in contemporary affective moments, akin to how scholars have sought relevant structures of feelings in literature and other cultural work (Williams 1977). Theorists like Brian Massumi (2015, 55) argue that affect is always already political because it is a collective event that is distributed across . . . bodies and primes those bodies to act in unison. This insight helps us analyze the form through which (Brazilian) democracy operates and to consider how affective transformations have contributed to the precarity of democracy. Ethnography helps us catalog different types of affective politics and the mechanics that produce consent or apathy among a large proportion of the population in the face of contemporary reactionary politics.

As the lines between liberal democracy and fascism once again blur—in Brazil and elsewhere—it is urgent to show how, in people’s everyday lives, democracy has become precarious. We must examine the deployment of mass digital communicative technologies and infrastructures that open up novel forms of mass propaganda (e.g., through WhatsApp groups in the chapter by Medeiros et al.) and the increased circulation of internet memes and other modalities that prime the public for forms of mass politics—mass politics that are both democratic and nondemocratic. As Lucia Cantero (2015) has argued elsewhere, mass communication has the cunning ability to produce a public through affect, interpellating people at an intuitive, visceral level. The primacy of the image becomes exceedingly real in the face of fake news, such as the false articles spreading the idea that the PT enabled the gay indoctrination of children, which circulated uncontrollably during the 2018 election (see Jarrín, this volume). These shifts in the mass mediation of politics helped bring together the politics of affect with the politics of truth such that feeling became a recurrent default that people revert to when facts fail—truth as what feels right.

The PT endeavored to cultivate positive forms of affect among its base, winning four consecutive elections built on national optimism, redistributive economic policies, the initial enthusiasm around sporting mega events, and new citizenship claims based around race, gender, and LGBTQ+ identities. Yet these affective forms of hope, joy, and optimism that were so important to the PT’s successes were also instrumentalized in the party’s takedown. First, this messaging was easily co-opted by neoliberal discourses that interpellated Brazilians as consumers rather than citizens (see Jerome, this volume). Second, even many Brazilians who believed in the political project of the PT remained skeptical of the government’s promises (Junge 2018), having been betrayed by politicians in the past.

The mass protests in 2013 signaled an entrenched disenchantment with the way in which the design of development mapped onto everyday forms of precarity experienced by Brazilians. Many people felt duped—a sentiment that was deftly seized upon by actors seeking to dismantle the apparatus of social mobility built up under the PT. Precarity, Anne Allison (2014) argues, is characterized by contemporary economic conditions that weaken the safety net and render workers chronically vulnerable to flexible labor regimes, but it also registers, quite literally, onto the body politic as a diverse array of affects, such as feelings of hopelessness, anger, or estrangement from others. As the economy slowed down and the contradictions of global sporting events became obvious, these negative affects took hold of protesters, and some among the base that had elected the Workers’ Party and benefited from its policies began to turn their backs on it (see Kopper; Mitchell; and Rojas, Olival, and Spexoto Olival, this volume).

Affects like optimism and pessimism are the opposite sides of the same coin because affect has no predetermined, teleological outcome (Massumi 2002). Additionally, affect is always surprising us in its multiplicity and stickiness, attaching and deattaching itself to objects and bodies with ease (Ahmed 2013). Thus once the positive form of an affect collapses, it is fairly easy to give in to its negative underside, and these forms of affect are highly contagious, moving through crowds and communities mimetically⁶ and becoming amplified by forms of mass media (Mazzarella 2009). Traditional parties quickly lost control over how these crowds behaved, and powerful media outlets like Rede Globo increasingly portrayed not only the PT but all political parties as inherently corrupt—thus undermining the democratic system as a whole, according to authors like Jessé Souza (2016). The 2014 Petrobras scandal, for instance—buoyed by highly politicized corruption investigations aimed at the PT (Fishman et al. 2019)—tarnished a public institution that until then had been a symbol of Brazil’s promise (see Cantero, this volume), and transformed the nation’s optimism for the future into visceral anger at the traditional political class.

We note that, independently of each other and while covering different Brazilian regions, a number of the volume’s authors who addressed these tensions developed similar affective terms for the analysis of their ethnographic material: despairing hope (Rojas, Olival, and Spexoto Olival), negative hope (Kopper), and cruel pessimism (Mitchell). In each of these ethnographic cases, the authors identified local manifestations of the national political-affective shift that we describe here.

It was this volatile shift in sentiments that gave rise to the nation’s political polarization (Borba 2019) and to increasingly authoritarian social movements, made up of mostly middle- and upper-class Brazilians (Ansell 2018), who literally draped themselves in the national flag and began to wax nostalgic for the dictatorship and the order it supposedly provided to society. By then the memory of the dictatorship had been affectively reconfigured by the political right as a symbol of order, patriotism, and traditional family values, which meant forgetting all the atrocities it enabled or embracing them as necessary. In fact, in the eyes of the new right, one of Dilma Rousseff’s greatest sins had been her effort to establish a National Truth Commission in 2011 to review the dictatorship’s human rights violations, which had been subject to various forms of institutional forgetting since the 1979 Amnesty Law (Atencio 2014). Thanks to this 1979 law, the military regime retained significant political power during the democratization period, despite relinquishing formal control of the government (Zaverucha 2005). The National Truth Commission failed to change public perception about the dictatorship’s abuses, in part because Rousseff herself had been a victim of torture during the dictatorship as a member of an underground resistance group, which made it easier for the political right to mount a sharp counteroffensive that portrayed her as bent on revenge against the military forces (Dias 2013) and as a sexually suspect communist subversive in disguise (Sosa 2019). The sexual moralism that had characterized the dictatorship’s response to subversion (Cowan 2016a) returned in force during the impeachment trial as conservative members of Congress began to embrace authoritarianism as the only solution to the country’s perceived immorality and chaos (Cowan 2016b).

The significant parallels between the dictatorship and the new right demonstrate that both political formations tapped into similar anxieties to gain traction. First, the sentiments of today’s Brazilian right draw directly on the militarism, patriarchal traditionalism, anticommunism, and U.S. alignment of the dictatorship years (Snider 2018). Second, they also draw on the forms of transnational right-wing organization that were honed in those years (Cowan 2018), including the transnational moral panic surrounding feminism and LGBTQ+ rights that describes them as insidious forms of gender ideology (Corrêa 2018). The main advantage the new right had in relation to the dictatorship was that its political ideology took hold of average Brazilians as it spread like wildfire over social media such as WhatsApp, entering routine public discourse and even intimate family circles (see Junge, this volume). People began to enthusiastically adhere to this newfound conservative patriotism, as became evident in the joyous group dances (heavily featuring national symbols) that people choreographed in favor of Bolsonaro. Even old fascist slogans like God, Nation, and Family resurfaced as centerpieces of the Bolsonaro regime (Singer et al. 2020).

It seems that democracy itself has been rendered precarious in Brazil by the politics that emerge from hopelessness, disenchantment, and anger. Democratic institutions in Brazil have been delegitimized, and the party system is in disarray. And Bolsonaro himself clamors to dissolve the Congress and the Supreme Court in a Fujimori-style auto-coup (Barros 2020; Brum 2020)—something unthinkable just a few years prior. The fantasy-work of national identity (Berlant 1991, 2), which previously constructed the nation as united in its difference through myths like racial democracy, has been seriously fractured, perhaps irreparably, and some Brazilians are struggling to redefine their national community in ways that do not violently exclude certain members of society. Afro-Brazilians, LGBTQ+ Brazilians, and Indigenous Brazilians are making claims to the nation that are simply incompatible with the far-right principles embraced by Bolsonaro, and their resistance is organizing against Bolsonaro in innovative ways, responding with affective appeals of their own. Additional conflicts, political assassinations, and democratic instability seem more likely in the short term than a return to normal political elections; but a radically different future spurred by progressive activism may also be in the cards.

Overview of the Volume

Twenty-first-century Brazil clearly presents one of the most vertiginous and puzzling sociopolitical about-faces in the contemporary world. And yet we—the editors and chapter authors—do not always share the same explanations for the origins and implications of Brazil’s unraveling. Rather than downplaying these divergences, we embrace them as generative and indicative of the different methodological and theoretical affinities we each bring to this undertaking, exposed as we were to very different Brazilian populations during our ethnographic fieldwork.

We have organized chapters into four subsections, meant to help the reader think through different themes that defined the period between 2013 and 2019. First, we tackle The Intimacy of Power, with four chapters that describe the gendered, classed, and racialized shifts occurring within intimate spheres such as the family but that also had a wider political impact because they generated intergenerational tensions and disrupted how upward mobility, masculinity, guns, and whiteness were perceived by political actors. The second section, Corruption and Crime, delves into the ways in which criminality within and outside the government came to be associated with particular (im)moral projects, and destabilized national symbols, trust in government, and forms of reciprocity important to particular national communities. The third section, entitled Infrastructures of Hope, is centered on the forms of hopeful affect expressed by different populations that once directly benefited from government programs started by the PT but have become disillusioned with those programs or whose precarious situations have pushed them to put hope in Bolsonaro instead. The final section, Old Challenges, New Activism, chronicles forms of resistance emerging in response to the rise of far-right politics across Brazil, particularly among Afro-Brazilian, LGBTQ+, and student activists. For a more detailed discussion of each chapter, please read the critical overview, written by Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, after this chapter.

Beyond the Unraveling

It is hard to see what the future holds for Brazil, but this volume attempts to understand crucial transitional years for the nation and add ethnographic depth to our understanding of the major shifts that Brazil has undergone during this period. With democracy itself rendered precarious, grand narratives to describe these radical national shifts seem to fail. Any claim made about the present is like an attempt to hold steady a constantly changing object, making academic analysis feel impossible. But by paying close ethnographic attention to how different communities in Brazil lived through the country’s momentous transformations of the past decade, this book attempts to account for the multiplicity of experiences that have structured the current moment. One of the most powerful attributes of ethnography is its ability to show us how different people engage in meaning making during crises and social transformations and can experience the same event differently according to perspective—whether that perspective is shaped by race, gender, class, region, or any of the many other vertices along with the social experiences, harms, and benefits that may be distributed. This volume avoids the danger of a single story (Adichie 2009) by highlighting how diverse populations from various regions of the country experienced the Brazilian unraveling of the second half of this century’s second decade and how every sphere of life was impacted by this remarkable shift—from family dynamics and individual aspirations to political allegiances and collective forms of mobilization.

We complete final revisions on this introduction amid a COVID-19