Politics, and Identities. In each section, the emphasis is on theory and accompanying ethnography that span the gap between the public and the personal.
Part I: Meanings
Part I pries apart representation and subjectivity. All three essays criticize interpretive approaches that conflate the two. Interpretive analysts typically infer virtual subjectivity from representational evidence such as public symbols and performances, downplaying or ignoring personalizations of meaning. I advance an alternative view that meaning-making, a slippery and varied process, occurs at the interface between public and personal systems, and therefore accounts of meaning-making require attention to the ways specific people engage meaningful public forms.
“Has Culture Theory Lost Its Minds?” points to a cognitive skew among anthropologists themselves. The essay suggests that a commonsense model of linguistic representation misleads cultural theorists into thinking that words are like conduits or packages—that they carry meaning. This “conduit model,” which underwrites interpretive (and discursive) anthropology, has, I argue, strongly biased culture theory in the direction of culturalism. To defamiliarize the conduit model, I contrast it with an imaginary, defective, but nevertheless instructive “inkblot model,” which posits that, like subjects in a Rorschach test, people invent meanings for ambiguous stimuli. I emphasize that the actual production of meanings, captured in neither model, is best viewed as a double process: the circulation of meaningful public symbols coupled with discrete acts of personal meaning-making by those who encounter and respond to them.
The next two chapters elaborate the argument. They insist that virtual subjectivity, the product of symbolic interpretation, is no one’s subjectivity. The point is made first in “Missing Persons,” which advocates caution in applying interpretive methods to historical evidence. I draw on person-centered ethnographic research I conducted in Japan to show that the contemporary identities of specific Japanese Brazilians cannot be deduced from well-known public narratives of Brazilian nationhood and Japanese ethnicity. Such public narratives propose, but do not determine, identity sentiments. Because historians dealing with the distant past have access only to public records and other symbolic detritus, virtual subjectivity, a crude, unreliable proxy, has to stand in—but should not be mistaken—for the mentalities of the dead.
“The Metropolis, the Globe, and Mental Life” takes aim at virtual subjectivities adduced by Simmel (1950 [1903]) and Jameson (1984) for, respectively, urban dwellers and postmodern global villagers. These influential speculations, brilliant and provocative though they are, both falter in too readily inferring historically novel mentalities from generic aspects of the city and the globe. Life is not primarily lived “in the city” or “on the planet,” but rather in concrete daily interactions that demand close observation and may yield experiential outcomes that bear little resemblance to conjectures made at a distance, on the basis of gross public phenomena.
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
