brazilian history - a primer for fools

hello great folk of the internet. a friend asked me to do a little sum up of brazilian history for a cultural awareness class he will be teaching in china, and (out of a dangerous mix between angst and boredom) i went slightly overboard with it. i got carried away trying to systematize the country, and ended up with a long overview of brazilian history (as seen through the amateurish bias of a left-wing educated non-historian). it's not very precise, but i don't think it is too wrong in most respects. plus, 'a nation is an imagined community', but different narratives can provide this collective imagination. though it isn't much, i think this one would suit brazilians better than the spontaneous, contradictory and unreflected one you usually get out of brazilians (but only if you pressure them.)

brazil's political/economic cycles:

1500 (discovery) to 1822 (independence): under portuguese rule

1500s - early settling on northeastern brazil, stirrings of economic activity, very limited exploration of the geographically intractable northwest. all portuguese activity was centered around pau-brasil, the red wood used as a dye by europeans that gives the country its name. the rest of brazilian history can be seen as a slow march towards the south from Salvador, our first colonial capital on the northeast.

1600s-1700s - progressive expansion towards the middle-southern coastal ares, sprinkled with portuguese territorial disputes against the spanish and the dutch on the northeastern coast. interestingly, the dutch took control of a major northeastern city for about 20 years. culture flourished and brasil's first theaters, libraries and public schools were built. they were all subsequently razed by the portuguese when they won the city back. contrast this relative barbarism of portuguese settlers with the tendency towards interbreeding mentioned below.

economic horizons of sugarcane and mining are discovered, and brazil takes off as one of the great european colonies. until the 1800s we were the world's only producer of sugar (no wonder our cuisine is unsashamedly sweet. actually things are always either very sweet or very salty, with no middle ground and no other real seasonings other than black pepper - there's some sort of psychoanthropological prohibition on mixing the two; sweets are always for dessert - or breakfast; grandmothers incredulously dismiss tales of lands where the two flavour combine in ecstatic verbotten pleasure).

for the next 200 years brazilian economic cycles were to be intimately connected with the international price of sugar. equatorial (northeastern) brazil proved to have the perfect geography and climate for sugarcane plantations. as the portuguese slowly drifted southward in search of more lands for cultivation, they stumbled on the great middle-south-american gold and silver reserves.

outlandish amounts of slaves were brought in from Africa (mostly what is now angola, not coincidentally another big portuguese-speaking country) to work on sugar processing and gold/silver mining. the usual death and opression rates for slaves apply. i've read once that more slaves were brought to brazil than to the rest of all the european colonies combined, but that should be double-checked.

this happened parallel to systematic extermination of the indigenous population, who the portuguese considered very hard to christianize and enslave. brazilian folk stories still present indians as lazy and perfectly contented living hand-to-mouth. this might be related to the fact that most south-american indians were hunter-gatherers - there were no great empire like the ones faces by the spanish on central america, only very small tribes entrenched deep within the jungle. disease played a greater role than warfare in killing the indians.

it's also worth noting that the portuguese were reportedly much more willing to mix with natives and african slaves (if you catch my drift) than other european colonizers. this is when the defining feature of brazilian ethnicity, miscegenation, begins to take shape. together with it go near-total absorption of native or immigrant cultures into portuguese culture.

a comparison i saw recently (but should be double-checked) states that, while in the u.s. african-americans represent around 5% of total population, in brazil 48% declared themselves black or mestizo in the 2010 census. given such intense miscegenation, our ethnic black doesn't correspond perfectly to the north-american. this has some extraordinary effects on the dynamics of racism and prejudice in the country - it runs silently and slightly more along economic than ethnic lines. brazil is demographically somewhere in between the north-american case (with a black minority) and the south-african case (with a white minority), but oddly this hasn't proven the right ground for the overt, institutionalized discrimination that one sees on the extremes of this spectrum. our top sociologists say that underneath the appearance of cordiality and friendliness hide the two-sided fears characteristic of slave-master relationships: the slaves' fear of the masters' power, and the masters' fear of the slaves rebellion. to even approach the subject as such, to expose the relations of domination and oppression, would threaten the social order, so this is all neatly tucked into a cover-up of giddy friendliness and hospitality. something like that might perhaps also be said of our foreign fetish. in any case, we'll gladly settle for appearing non-racist, whatever is going on underneath.

this period is sprinkled with disputes against the spanish for territorial rule of an until then not fully explored south america. the pope ruled in 1650something that everything west of the arbitrarily drawn line of Tordesilhas will belong to the spanish, everything east of it to the portuguese. the catholic god was no on spain's side: further exploration west of tordesillas reveals that the pacific ocean was just around the corner, and that's how south america ends up with one huge tract of portuguese-speaking unified land on the west (brazil) and a thin strip of assorted spanish-speaking countries on the east (all the pacific-facing other south american countries, chile, argentina, bolivia, venezuela, colombia...)

1800s onwards - "independence" and coffe time!

1822 - the portuguese royal family escapes napoleonic occupation of portugal and flees to Rio. in line with the economic march towards the south, the capital is changed from northeastern Salvador to southeastern Rio. for a few years Rio is not only the capital of portugal's greatest colony, but the capital of the crumbling portuguese empire itself! oh would it that the portuguese had stayed - i could be an european citizen now! alas, no such luck: napoleon was defeated and the royal family went back. but wait, what is that? plot twist! dom pedro 1st, the portuguese prince, decides to stay back? and proclaims independence from either portugal or from his father, it is difficult to say? with an early oedipal thrust, independent brazil is born as the world's only colony whose independence retained the royal line - the only colony which didn't go from monarchic rule to autonomous republic. these notional power shifts with no real citizen involvement will be a recurring theme in the future history of the country, and eerily enough some of it can even be seen on the citizen protests going on in the streets today.

together with the tordesillas debacle, this might have something to do with the fact that, compared to other south-american countries, brazil is huge and oddly unified. the trend towards total incorporation of immigrant cultures into portuguese-brazilian culture continued, and though now a minority of the population is strictly portuguese-descendant, virtually everybody, no matter where their ancestors came from, lost their original languages and speaks plain silly brazilian portuguese.

there's a word in portuguese that's hard to translate into english: migue. migue is compromise solution, a sort of half-assed attempt to do something that turns out to have reasonably acceptable results. a versatile word, it is a favourite among university students who leave all the work for the last minute and finally succeed - they migue their way around exams. a related expression is 'pra ingles ver', which means something like 'for English eyes' or 'to show the English' - something done with just the minimal amount of effort, just enough effort to come up results that fool the viewer in a superficial first analysis. these could be considered a guiding principle of the way brazilian politics work, and of the way we deal with others and with each other: an appearance of democracy, an appearance of cordiality, an appearance of cheerful dedication to football and dancing on the streets, and more recently an appearance of emerging as a big player in the international economy. we'll settle for the appearance - isn't that what identity really is in last analysis? brazilian thought shies away from breaking these images down, from trying to look at the underlying processes. i'm not sure if even this can be said - it's tricky to discuss culture from inside it. on the other hand, it would be something by its very fictional nature hard to explore from some sort of cultural outside.

anyway. 1800s. coffee makes tentative dabs at the south, and slowly succeeds in establishing itself as what would be the centerpiece of the brazilian economy until the early twentieth century. the northeast is too hot for it, so farming migrates to the southeast and sao paulo state proves to be the most suitable for production. once it reaches sao paulo, towards the end of the century, it booms. brazil's first (and sadly last, now half-abandoned) true railroad is built to transport the coffee to the Santos port on the southern atlantic, near Sao Paulo city. immigration, mostly from italy and japan, starts to present itself as an alternative to slave labour. coffee and free labour were to become intimately connected, and the first features of a possible market society emerge on the south.

1890 - slavery and monarchy are abolished in a so-called revolution that lasted for a couple of days and shed no blood. the change to republic is considered just a rearrangement of power structures to follow the shift of economic activity from the northeast - which is now facing exhaustion of mines and competition in sugar production from the dutch - to the southeast, where coffee for export rules absolute, a stern but gracious, oversweetened dark lord. minas gerais, the state north of sao paulo where all the mines were, slowly shifts towards cattle farming. thus begins what is mockingly (but also a bit affectionately) called the coffee-with-milk republic: a joint rule under democratic guise between the two most economically meaningful states, coffee-farming Sao Paulo and beefy, milky Minas.

with slavery abolished, immigration from troubled europe booms. what now accounts for about 30% of the population comes to brazil to work in the coffee sector and around it. italians and japanese, then later syrian and lebanese, come to sao paulo, germans to the southernmost states. the north and northeast, the shining stars of colonial times, are left to its own devices, and have to deal with the thorny issues of slavery abolished without a plan for reintegration of former slaves into the economy - an inflexible agrarian economy that is slowly but steadily collapsing. leave it to the invisible hand of the market! 150 years later, today, the situation is more or less the same.

in this sense, brazilian history resembles (or better yet, mirrors; or better yet, fails to imitate successfully) north-american history - a slave-driving north versus a tentatively industrial south. no civil war though, and consequently no centralized, directed development plan.

1900s - republican times and the emergence of modern brazilian culture

30s - during the great depression, early signs of change from primary exports to autonomous industry by government-controlled market manipulation of coffee prices and reinvestment of profits in manufacture. an incipient consumer base of free labour provides market enough to begin trying out industrialization on import-substitution lines. this is helped out by the sad state of the international economy at the time and goes on until the 50s.

1932 - sao paulo attempts independence from the rest of brazil and is swiftly crushed. my grandfather is born on an italian-descendant peasant family in inner sao paulo state. horray!

getulio vargas, perhaps the most notorious brazilian statesma, the brazilian Churchill so to speak, rises to power and suckerpunches the coffee-with-milk republic into the past. he would rule as president twice, military-non-parliamentary head of state once, lead brazil through the second world war, align with the Alliance despite state-centralistic tendencies, coax massive investment in base industry and infrastructure out of the US in exchange for helping out with the european collective suicide, establish the brazilian welfare system and labour protection laws, finally making a dent in the heritage of slavery and opression, control international coffee prices through production monopoly and stocking/marketing strategies, reinvest the accumulated coffee profits in manufacture, giving brazil the first shot at becoming an autonomous industrial nation, and finally commit suicide days before a coup meant to finally depose him. his suicide letter reads "I exit life to enter history". fliegende kinderscheisse!

in the 50s, more concerted efforts at proper industrialization are attempted. some of it goes well, and construction of what is to become the new capital is begun in some remote, desertic, not-easily-accessible-by-the population corner of the Sertao. with a renewed wave of immigration and under the pen of architect and (very)arguable national hero Oscar Niyemeyer, Brasilia emerges from the unmanifested into the main city of central Brasil. the capital is moved one last time from Rio, and there it stays until today.

for some wildly unimaginable reason that must be related to lobbying from the construction sector, it is decided that the fifth largest country on earth can do without railroads. "brazil has an automotive vocation", say the government ideologues of the time. all the investment in infra-structure goes towards massive road projects, some of which proved unreasonable and now lie in crumbles being devoured by the bits of the amazonian forests that still haven't been targeted for deforestation.

*today, with an average per capita income less than a quarter of germany's, the average brazilian owns more cars than the average german. a large number of these cars are ironically assembled by volkswagen. no one knows how to push for a shift towards mass-scale public transportation. the economy is dangerously reliant on the automotive industry, the one industrial sector that consistently fails to de-industrialize. perhaps even more so than in north-america, owning a car becomes the central identity-building feature of young brazilians. one could carelessly argue that brazilians care more about their cars than about anything else in their lives - the car is the cornerstone of the brazilian subject. it all unfailingly gives me the creeps and makes me run away to china!*

the 50's were the golden age of independent brazilian culture (despite our having lost the world cup to Uruguay in Rio!!). this is when the quintessential, untranslatable brazilian novel is written - grande sertao, veredas. it deals with the Sertao, the vast temperate-desertic land expanses of middle and northeastern brazil where the portuguese, the indians and the africans mixed for 200 years to give rise to an unique culture of oppression, plantation and miscegenation. samba and its variations, all mixes between portuguese fado and african rhytms, consolidate as a musical styles in the northeast. the more urban bossa nova is born in rio and sao paulo, and the two faces of brazilian musical culture are settled: the cheerful, carnal, rural samba versus the gloomy, sadness-obsessed, urban bossa. one major offshot of bossa nova is chorinho, which means literally 'the little cry'. our best music is full of yearning, nostalgia, existentialist dread and a constant ambiguous interplay between love and the death drive. same goes for our best poetry. this might all tie back in to Fado (semi-literally Fate), a portuguese musical style with much the same feature of resigningation against the dark spectre of destiny.

look for 'aguas de marco' on youku for the unanimously voted best brazilian song ever, and i challenge you not to cry when listening to it. i can also send you a translation of a paradigmatic brazilian poem about love (and love's necessary failure etc etc) by carlos drummond de andrade.

the 60s-80s follow the traditional south-american lines of u.s.-backed dictatorship. it is often argued that the cold war worked to the advantage of developing nations by making america slightly less averse to economic development in the third world. it is also often half-jokingly said that the great brazilian tragedy consists in argentina never having turned communist - as we all know, losing a world war or having a communist neighbour are the two sure-fire recipes for economic development in the second half of the 20th century.

it's interesting that we never really made a serious attempt at communism throughout the century: following what was at the time an already well-established tradition of lack of political commitment or even consciousness, communism in brazil was attempted half-heartedly and consisted, before the war, mostly of a few people aimlessly riding horses around southern brazil. after the war all left-wing thought was suppressed by the dictatorship. so there.

under militarized central rule, brazil did manage to make another big leap into industrial development. thus brazil has two so-called `economic miracles`: one on the 50s (under a democratic regime) and another on the 70s (under the dictatorship, when we almost finished the leap towards industrialization but finally dropped the technologically-autonomous ball)

history from the 80's on is the usual third-world spiel: hyperinflation, clumsily opening up of protected markets to global competition, presidential impeachment, privatization, de-industrialization, reversion to agrarian primary exports, total submission to national and international financial interests. our strategy to combat this seems to consist mostly of migueing our way around the most immediately pressing issues.

brazil today

brazil is now the world's fifth largest country in both area and population (8 million square km and 200 million people, respectively 90% and 45% of u.s. figures, give or take). the population is disproportionately concentrated on the industrial south/southeast, and the north and northeast still struggle with rampant poverty, lack of industrial activity, and an obscure political system that resembles medieval europe. no wizards or elves though, just plain peasant oppression and the occasional chupacabra.

we are the 9th largest economy (6th in some measures, but gdp is fictional anyway), but about 80th in per capita income. we are also, in hobsbawm's words, the world champions in economic inequality. our gini index is only surpassed by our interest rates (if you will pardon the index-imprecise comparison). average economic growth barely keeps up with population growth, though some redistributive measures have successfully been undertaken by the labour government of Lula.

besides portuguese as a language, catholicism is the other big cultural heirloom from portugal. brazil has long been the largest catholic country. the pope being, as we all know, the last remaining leader of the roman empire, this means that brazil is the last true roman colony! we are all romans down there, though our current brazilian army would probably be no match for ancient roman legionnaires. catholicism, however, is now fast losing ground to spiritism, african-inspired umbanda and the fundamentalist evangelical christianity that seems to be a universal trait of low-income populations in most modern third-world countries.

***postscript

protests broke out all over brazil in 2013, following the now well-established practice of apprently spontaneous, viral, meme-like social network mobilization. these are the first nationwide protests in 500 years of recorded history.

I left Brazil soon after the countrywide manifestations started, and the little I witnessed gave me a clear feeling of a lack of focus, of protest for protest's sake. The signs held by the protesters in my home town of about 200 thousand people were as likely to say "Brazilians - join in Jesus" as "Mayor - Pikachu doesn't evolve, but you can" (sic). This is a town that for 400 years was untouched by overt politics, and it all felt like a pretty strange awakening. Brazil is the world's largest catholic country and also the holder of the world's (reportedly) largest gay parade, but it still feels to me that between these apparently inconsistent extremes there's no room left for actual politics - a politics of reflection, commitment and systemic thought. From what I hear of the protests, or more properly fail to hear, this dislocation seems to have stuck - they are also watered down, even though repression isn't, and politics remain the business of the elite.

Interestingly enough, discontinuities can also be felt between government measures and whatever the average Brazilian would regard, if pressed, as his political beliefs. When an evangelical pastor was appointed as minister of human rights, before the protests, there was some measure of directed insatisfaction: it briefly appeared that we were moving towards identity politics without the usual first stop at public awareness about the challenges of development. Wasn't identity politics supposed to be a prerogative of rich countries? It seems not - incontrovertible steps towards legal status for homoaffective unions were taken without resistance last year, even though most of the non-university educated people I know would be against it, if asked. There doesn't seem to be a lot of connection between public opinion and political measures, for better or worse - and it doesn't seem like the protests have managed to bridge that gap.

***postpostscript
as of late 2015, the fight is on, the country is politically fractured, the wheels are turning on the conservative machine 

dated special effects: a faux-cognitivist take on the oppacity of the Real

carl sagan, in his old, dusty, dated and amazing The Dragons of Eden, describes how early-day research into human cognition first came to the conclusion that visual and auditory stimulus received by the right eye/ear is processed mostly on the left hemisphere of the brain and vice-versa. the description, when first heard, can cause a bit of a shock - a little jolt of 'why me, i wouldn't have thought as much!`

now a good question to be asked here could be: why not?? why would you have not thought as much?

the same thing will happen if you try to watch a video turn off the images and keep just the sound. you will hear a dialogue and build up a picture in your mind of where the IT is taking place, what the people are wearing and whatnot. if you turn the images back on you will probably be a bit surprised - things don't look like you imagined. but what gave you the right to imagine them a certain way in the first place? were you even aware of the things you slipped into your mental picture?

i think there might be more metaphysical subtleties operating here than might be first assumed. it goes beyond the seinfeld brain x penis chess scenario.

if, jaded overinformed scientific post-modernist that you are, this doesn't at all come as a surprise to you, let's settle for this: isn't it easy to imagine a pre-scientific witch-doctor vehemently contesting this idea when first presented to it?

a first approach might try to settle the subject by stating that there are separated, non-integrated brain functions or areas (or some other poorly defined category) for the feeling of ''this is real!!'' and for the coming up with sentences such as '''this is real'''; in a broad sense different cognitive operational goings-on behind our sense of reality and our our image of reality. sagan himself talks about different processes being responsible for, broadly, intuition and abstract reasoning. well doesn't this in turn come as a bit of a shock?

but, crucially, and a bit circularly: why would i have assumed otherwise? or better yet: did i actually assume the opposite? i doesn't feel like it - it just feels like something not reflected upon. but if it wasn't reflected upon, if it wasn't construed as a concept, how come there can be any shock at all at this non-assumption being wrong? isn't there some strange discontinuity at work here, a discontinuity between assuming things for no reason and then being surprised when the assumptions turn out wrong?

an immediate amateur-lacanian flavour can be given to to all this: didn't an elective professor of psychoanalysis and literature once told me that what we think as reality belongs more to the lacanian imaginary than what lacan actually calls the Real?

what, to get a little less sidetracked, then, is an assumption? can it be defined from sagan's vaguely cognitivist point of view?

Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind posits that the comic effect is an evolutionary reward system responsible for the survival of those brains better able to find fault on their mental models - more mirth-pleasure means more auditing of mental models for inconsistencies.

interestingly, according to this cognitive take on the brain, there is only a comic effect when a joke undermines or undoes an UNNOTICED assumption made in the course of building the mental model. it's the little things that enter the picture without being seen that posed a danger to survival, and humour brings them out to the fore.

to go back to 90s sitcom, for example: in seinfeld's 'the parking space': george says that because elaine moved the car rearview mirror he got discombobulated, to which she replies - like you've ever been combobulated. assumption breaks, mild hilarity ensues.

this seems distantly related to the odd fact that special effects on movies, much as computer generated environments in games, tend to look absolutely gorgeous when you first see them but starkly dated as soon as an improved version comes out. through some sort of reverse uncanny valley (an uncanny peak!?), when first presented to good special effects the brain goes Whoa, This Is The It. This Looks So Real. I Doubt Reality Itself Even Looks This Real. a year later you feel like you were just fooled by it. it feels like we can only detect visual flaws after having built up some intimacy with a better simulation. all the flaws you couldn't notice before suddenly scream up their presence. is it the case that those unnoticed absences are allowed to remain quiet and harmless in the shady assumption-zone of the brain until challenged?

(funnily enough, reality itself doesn't do as well, as a basis of comparison, as more and better special effects.)

this could also be what makes an accent an accent, and so hard to pin down: not differences in the way people perceive the sounds, but the tiny divergences between the way they DON'T perceive them. an accent sounds out because it hurts the way sounds are supposed to be articulated. speech works best when it's fully transparent, automated, made invisible. is this invisibility the same as that of our mental models; the actual presence of a million things not considered?

on quite the other direction, it could also explain a bit about the opacity of language, about the fact that things are never really fully communicated. things are of course not just things, or words just words; they are the little visible bits of vast hidden relations that the speakers may not, likely won't, share. 

and while we're at it, let's just posit that this assumption-level is what's behind the weirdness of experiencing massive differences in cuisine.  if you are a wobbly western and go to a real chinese-food restaurant in china you will be shocked in more ways than there are ways to describe being shocked. arab food, as a counterpoint, tastes definitely different - but different in ways that don't challenge the assumptions on top of which we build the very notion of what food is. its tasting different actually bears testimony to the fact that arab food is similar enough to western that your taste buds/brain patterns are able to build comparisons and identify discrepancies. actual chinese food, on the other hand, will just leave you dumbfounded and vaguely concerned about your bowels, your identity and your sanity.

analogously, i think the assumptions might be the things that strike us the hardest when we look at, say, the crazy hairdo's on an 80's movie. cultural differences being large enough - and let's face it, the 80's are like another planet - it's not the superficial differences that make us giggle, it's something more fundamental, something that goes beyond what we can see and down to the level of actual shock.

in his post on confucius and theme parks, suman gupta raises a point that that might be put as: the functional purpose of a theme park is to flood you with so much saturated meaning that the things you see entrench themselves in your mind as if they were simply always there, present and true. a theme park 'confirms the presumed significance of its theme'. it does, in this sense, the opposite of a history major (or good comedy).

through this overflow of signs, the things being presented become assumed as true, become entrenched in the presumed world as if they were quite simply a given part of reality. they reach down to that level of silent, present-through-its-absence conceptual framework. there might be reason to believe that this powerful, all-informing vacant space beneath supporting the conceptual networks that we can actually see is the seat of ideology

if that's the case, it would be yet a bit more support for the often-held position that realism might not have as much to contribute to an understanding of the universe as poetry, or formal stylish adventures, or surrealism itself. what part of the brain works the mythopoetical?

and, finally, it feels as if concepts always have at least these two parts: the unseen assumption, and the visible part of what is actually thought. what is thought, the appearance of the concept, is just this last-minute shell that closes down the tension between a silent assumption and a certain environmental input. dualities abound

and that's how we humans go about or daily regular busineses, ridden with pesky ontologically questionable blind spots, presuming most of the real, all the while quite convinced of the materiality of 'things out there'. or, more generally... having no idea how the fuck the reality principle works. and that's all somehow functional, as well - to perceive something as a thing we rely on everything we don't immediately see about it. in that way blindness is a requirement of seeing.

for instance, why i am always so unwilling to edit, proofread or even read these posts? could it be that different operational complexes in my brain do the jobs of coming up with things to write about and looking at the finished product as such? is this what is behind the age-old feeling that things are always less interesting as written arguments than as insight? that insight loses something when noted down and actually communicated?

(don't answer that)

no wonder reality is so fucking murky