This volume brings together 16 essays that explore how Brazilians have experienced and responded to economic precarity, political crisis, and diminishing hopes for the future from 2013 to 2019, the period between nationwide protests and the first year in office of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, and how optimism about democracy in the country turned into cynicism about institutional politics and progressive governance, while also being a period of activism, resistance, and hope. Anthropology, political science, and other scholars and activists from Brazil, the US, and the UK discuss the gendered, classed, and racialized shifts occurring in intimate spheres like the family and in terms of upward mobility, guns and masculinity, and whiteness; how corruption and criminality in and outside the government became associated with specific moral projects, destabilized national symbols, trust in government, and forms of reciprocity in specific national communities, such as the middle class; forms of hopeful affect expressed by different populations that once benefited from government programs but have become disillusioned with those programs or whose precarious situations have pushed them to put hope in Bolsonaro, such as the middle class, poor, and Japanese Brazilian overseas labor migrants; and forms of resistance emerging in response to far-right politics across Brazil among Afro-Brazilian, LGBTQ+, and student activists. Annotation ©2021 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
Precarious Democracy collects powerful and intimate political ethnographic writing on Brazils pivotal years, 2013-19, from the nations megacities to rural Amazonia. The volume demonstrates the necessity of ethnography for understanding social and political change, and provides crucial insights on one of the most epochal periods of change in Brazilian history.
Brazil changed drastically in the 21st centurys second decade. In 2010, the countrys outgoing president Lula left office with almost 90% approval. As the presidency passed to his Workers' Party successor, Dilma Rousseff, many across the world hailed Brazil as a model of progressive governance in the Global South. Yet, by 2019, those progressive gains were being dismantled as the far right-wing politician Jair Bolsonaro assumed the presidency of a bitterly divided country. Digging beneath this pendulum swing of policy and politics, and drawing on rich ethnographic portraits, Precarious Democracy shows how these transformations were made and experienced by Brazilians far from the halls of power. Bringing together powerful and intimate stories and portraits from Brazil's megacities to rural Amazonia, this volume demonstrates the necessity of ethnography for understanding social and political change, and provides crucial insights on one of the most epochal periods of change in Brazilian history.
