POPULAR CULTURE IN LATIN AMERICA
Osiel, Mark J.
When Pope John Paul II visited the Brazilian city of Manaus in July 1980, there was a slight but significant change in protocol at the last minute. Members of an Amazonian tribe had been...
...They do not say that many of its practices (such as belief in 113 miracles or the animal sacrifices of Umbanda) are contrary to the ethos of modern society...
...In the joys of polo the corporate lawyer is seen resisting the alienating impersonality of his large firm, and in the comforts of yachting the surgeon proclaims his stubborn resilience in the face of his hectic schedule...
...Neto, an Althusserian Marxist, is not one to succumb to populist sentimentality...
...With all the concern over recovering historical memory, these cases might be remembered as well...
...When American intellectuals criticized the emerging television industry in the 1950s, Leo Lowenthal pointed out that their concerns and even their arguments were very old, and that fulminations against popular culture had changed little since Pascal...
...And it is irretrievably tainted with cultural imperialism, being the import of American missionaries...
...Hence the ease with which Ribeiro casually identified "rationality, neutrality, practicality...
...The Debate in Brazil and in the United States AESTHETIC ISSUES, so prominent in the North American and European discussion, are largely absent in the Brazilian debate...
...Any classical liberal would admit that the public and private realms operate according to different principles, and that the private realm can offer a "haven in a heartless world...
...In some other parts of Latin America the discussion of popular culture is significantly different...
...But once this has been done, it is no longer clear why the idea should not be extended beyond the working class...
...According to Bosi, "true interest in others, a spontaneous humanity, straightforwardness in speech, a sense of the concrete, a certain casualness about future plans—so different from bourgeois notions of planning for tomorrow, of submitting time to the logic of accounting...
...It is a protest from below against a strange, new reality imposed from above...
...The belief in the frequent occurrence of miracles also receives praise...
...Other authors add such qualities as communality, sharing, gregariousness...
...If the ruling ideas of every age are the ideas of its ruling class, as Marx believed, then it would be unlikely that popular culture could escape contamination by the dominant ideology, these critics contend...
...The black, when emancipated, ceased to accept our rite...
...By taking pleasure in a round of golf the IBM executive can be viewed as struggling against the oppressiveness he feels in having to order so many people about...
...The effort to purify a nation's culture of foreign aberrations, to recover its lost essence in the simplicity of its folk has still other precedents...
...Their conviviality permits people to overcome the servility they must show in the workplace...
...Even messianic movements, once viewed as the height of human irrationality, are coming in for more positive reassessment...
...All production is based on what people need, not on profit...
...But on the initiative of the bishops of the region, the performance was cut from the program...
...It discovers the origins and solutions to social problems not in collective action but in personal morality...
...The clearest exposition of this new "orthodoxy" among the left comes from Rubem Alves, a brilliant theologian: Popular religiosity is not merely archaic survival...
...It successfully resists destruction and oppression, preserving in its myths an alternative form of consciousness...
...If the poor already contain within their culture the seeds of radical consciousness, then the problem is solved...
...But the commonality is not in the notion that popular religiosity contains a camouflaged form of radical politics...
...Those common roots have been traced by many historians of ideas, such as Karl Lowith and Mircea Eliade...
...In a continent whose elites have always looked abroad for inspiration—to the point, at times, of slavish imitation—this reappraisal of the "culture of the uncultured" inevitably carries a polemical undercurrent...
...It lacks the transcendent ethical standards that are the basis of any social criticism, Camargo contends...
...They celebrate the equality of the participants, while allowing the dancers to be appreciated on their merits...
...The intellectual protagonists of our national identity will no longer be the academicians and litterateurs," announces anthropologist Renato Ortiz, "but the medicine men of Umbanda and the samba dancers of Carnaval...
...There are some striking differences, moreover, between the way Latin Americans argue about popular culture and the way their North American counterparts have addressed the issue— most recently in regard to the National Endowment for the Arts...
...in the latter, we respect them as ends...
...To find utopian kernels buried within popular culture is to say nothing at all about how an entire society might be constructed on their basis...
...To merely "accentuate" existing tendencies would not be to impose themselves or their own ideas...
...Its attack on the so-called culture industry rests not on any contrast to the high culture of elites but on a contrast to the enduring expressiveness of folkloric traditions...
...It does not even refer to the Indians, whose culture is in many ways a case apart...
...Through such self-governing associations, people learn the meaning of democracy...
...The left saw alienation and false consciousness...
...But the claim ducks the hard questions...
...By such encouragement they "were guilty of taking their own ethnic group, social class, or dominant culture as the criterion for medical judgment," according to Marcos de Souza Queiroz...
...But, in fact, it is only the latest language by which the bourgeoisie depicts its domination as natural and inevitable, charges philosopher Marilena Chaui...
...Thus cultural expression will always bear traces of class domination...
...And the critique of commercial culture is at once a critique of foreign dependence, since a large proportion of radio and TV content comes from the U.S...
...These may solidify the existing order, says Ortiz, localizing and confining heretical impulses, while acknowledging and defusing them...
...Beneath the modification in etiquette lies a change in the way the left in Latin America, which includes many church leaders, approaches the question of popular culture.' Until recently, the world view of the poor, as embodied in religious, recre' This article examines the debate taking place within Brazil, although some of the authors whose works I have consulted come from elsewhere...
...Moreover, in South America, "culture" is conceived in broader terms than in the North American argument, embracing not only arts and entertainment but any symbolic expression of a world view...
...Similarly, Umbanda has been co-opted by the white middle class, whose members now control most of its federations...
...Is that, perhaps, too much to ask of it...
...The president of Brazil had had the ear of the pope without first having to dance at his feet...
...These values include "a system of property based on collective rather than private ownership, as is consistent with biblical teaching...
...The question acquires special significance when issues of funding are at stake: should we endow the local symphony or the bluegrass festival...
...The believer's appeal for divine intervention "breaks the predetermined order of the world by force of imagination," Chaui continues...
...Brazilian literature has been heavily influenced by European modernism...
...it is, in fact, banal...
...Today Bishop Boaventura Kloppenburg recites mea culpas for past insensitivities...
...Today it is the publishing industry, no longer the local craftsmen, which produces most of these pamphlets...
...The rural poor may hate only the local landowner while seeing an authoritarian state as entirely legitimate...
...But they provide experience in mutual self-help through the voluntary association of working people, contends Novaes...
...All who write about these questions identify the object of resistance as "the dominant ideology of capitalist society...
...But this was no mere indulgence of Third World sensibilities...
...We are unable to see that popular culture teaches us lessons of resistance no less helpful than those of great moments in the history of class struggle...
...Even further removed from church orthodoxy than folk catholicism is Umbanda, a large and growing sect whose religious beliefs derive from the former African slaves...
...Even where popular culture retains its utopian elements, as in the uninhibitedness of the festival, these moments acquire their meaning precisely by virtue of their encapsulation...
...But even in that illusion there is truth, Chaui writes...
...Popular religion, therefore, is camouflaged politics...
...In the selfmanagement of individual tribes, and in the federative principle that governs relations between tribes, the Indians present to the white man the vision of a better world, writes church historian Eduardo Hoornaert...
...This morality includes such ideas as "efficacy, competition, punctuality, practicality, neutrality, rationality, achievement, performance, and asceticism...
...It is the only moment in his life when the believer is certain that his desires are heard...
...If the argument is valid, we should carry it to its logical conclusion...
...To accept the necessity of such values, however, is not to suggest that the traditional folklore of a rural society must succumb to their corrosive acids...
...WHAT IS IT, exactly, that popular culture seeks to resist...
...Regina Novaes argues that this is so because the left clings to too narrow a view of class consciousness, and that thereby it "ignores a whole gamut of attitudes and behavior that make up the daily battle against the boss...
...Another feature of folk catholicism is the village festival, an occasion upon which the clergy usually looked askance...
...While the finding may console the conscience of the organizer, it should trouble the conscience of the scholar...
...The two realms are ever in tension...
...What is most striking to an American about the Brazilian criticism of popular culture is what the critics do not say...
...The social ethic of Pentecostalism is even worse, writes Alves...
...Populists have long contrasted the alleged authenticity of popular culture with the supposed sterility of elite culture...
...ational, and aesthetic practices, won little respect from the educated...
...Today the church professes genuine, new respect for folk catholicism, seeking merely to "develop" the oppositional elements already present within it...
...Then the violins strike up: "From the depths of his soul, to which the faith of his forefathers had retreated, there burst forth the ancient traditions of his native Africa...
...They cement the bonds of friendship and community...
...Members of an Amazonian tribe had been scheduled to perform their dances for the pope, before their representatives would speak with him privately...
...The samba parades of Carnaval are examined in similar terms by Jose Leopoldi...
...The melding of Catholic and pre-Christian beliefs, observes theologian Leonardo Boff, is simply a way of translating the evangelical message into the categories of the local culture...
...It is in the fact that secular radicalism has its intellectual roots in Jewish messianism and Christian eschatology...
...Such performances are commonplace whenever a pontiff visits Asia or Africa...
...The intellectuals can nurture the soil without being accused of introducing alien weeds...
...The implication that a modern economy, even a socialist one, could be run on the same principles as Carnaval is amusing, at best, and almost certainly mistaken...
...It is also the version that has elicited the most vociferous counterattack...
...but while the Brazilians hunt for hints of revolutionary consciousness, the Americans have mostly bemoaned declining standards, the collapse of Western civilization...
...2 Could it be that in their very effort to escape dependence on the culture of the colonizer they only recapitulate the latest Western intellectual fashion—the revenge of reason upon itself...
...Thus Umbanda was born...
...The intellectuals saw illogic and unreason...
...The idea of resistance to oppression can be promiscuously extended to include virtually all forms of working-class leisure...
...110 A belief in frequent miracles is one element in "folk catholicism," a hybrid form of religiosity far removed from orthodox church doctrine...
...The counterargument is simply that defenders of popular culture exaggerate its elements of resistance and vision...
...The specifically messianic features of the movements tend to drop altogether from sight in the revisionist analysis...
...And what is the nature of this alternative vision that is to be recovered from its depths...
...If the term refers to the activity of cultural elites, it must surely include the novel and the drama, and the values contained in them...
...An attractive prospect, to be sure...
...Since its adherents are powerless, their protest cannot yet assume an overtly political form and must confine itself to the symbolic plane...
...They cannot so easily be accused of seeking to resurrect a long-dead past when that "past" is so clearly a living present to millions of people...
...Contrariwise, the assertion that popular culture carries a utopian project within its breast may mean something more substantial...
...The leader of an ultra-right Catholic organization recently published a book juxtaposing quotations from church leadership, extolling the superior dignity of indigenous cultures, with photographs of their more barbaric customs, such as head-shrinking and grotesque bodily disfiguration...
...In the confused beliefs of the common man, the church saw doctrinal deviation and paganism...
...In the former activities, we use people as means...
...To be sure, the content of the culture at issue is very different...
...Consequently, values that appear anticapitalist to the Brazilians are likely to strike us as simply antimodern—and hence much less commendable...
...Several bishops proclaim that they "feel the urgent necessity of recognizing and promoting certain indigenous values that are more humane and more Christian than our 'civilized' ones, and that constitute a genuine repudiation of our society...
...The most conspicuous feature of social structure is class domination...
...Syncretism is not only inevitable but a positive form by which God reaches out to men, in their concrete historical circumstances, and saves them...
...But it should not be confused with scientism, the presentation of moral and political questions as if they were technical ones...
...It may at first seem an amusing curiosity that Catholic bishops should seek to defend the rituals of nonbelievers from corruption by their own superior...
...Just as social scientists periodically "discover" poverty, humanistic thinkers have made a repeated practice of stumbling upon popular culture...
...If there is confusion, then, about what is to be learned from popular culture, there is also confusion as to what it resists within the dominant culture...
...In the U.S...
...At a deeper level, the culture of the subordinate classes is profoundly transformative...
...The very intensity of the Pentecostal ethos, regardless of its contents, creates certain tensions with the workday world, and so prevents complete accommodation to it...
...But even authoritarian regimes are showing considerable interest in capitalizing on the new developments...
...Folk catholicism consecrates the inequalities of rural society...
...The Pentecostal Protestants, a rapidly expanding group of sects, have usually been viewed by the left with particular distaste...
...Many societies have rituals of rebellion...
...into the understanding of popular culture...
...This was pure ethnocentrism and hubris...
...Science, as the pursuit of knowledge, is part of the dominant culture...
...And what values, by contrast, make up the morality of popular culture...
...The antipathy toward science extends even to its medical advances...
...Latin American criticism— and there is plenty of it—differs from that of the Frankfurt School in two ways...
...No less than the continent's literary efflorescence, cultural accomplishments of a "humbler" sort are providing new sources of national self-esteem...
...The sense in which such "moments of mad112 ness" offer a vision of an alternative society is, in any event, ambiguous...
...Convenient indeed...
...What passes for scientific knowledge among the elite professions presents itself in the impersonal language of objective truth...
...109 In Defense of Popular Culture RESISTANCE AND TRANSFORMATION are stressed by many authors...
...And their political views make for other conspicuous differences within this debate...
...In such rituals a society has an alternative vision of itself," writes anthropologist Roberto da Matta...
...The sense in which popular culture constitutes a haven of resistance to the oppressiveness of the working world is a trivial one...
...But there is nothing particularly radical in this conclusion...
...The Russian Populists, for instance, sought to uncover in the communal practices of village life the rudiments of the future society...
...Today the signs of the celebration of popular culture are everywhere—in political debate, in theological writing, in university symposiums...
...Even early Christianity drew many ingredients from surrounding societies, and thus involved more than divine revelation, pure and simple...
...Such dances, the bishops reasoned, form an integral part of a cultural system whose organizing principles are religious...
...The miracle "manifests a truly personal relation between the divine power and the believer...
...The clergymen felt that for the tribe to present its dances to the pope would be to trivialize the spiritual meaning the rituals have for their performers...
...Modern science comes in for severe attack...
...The left could stand to learn from such experiences of day-to-day resistance, psychologist Eclea Bosi exhorts...
...I 1 l But perhaps the most conspicuous revisionism is to be found in the recent policy of the Catholic church toward the cultures of indigenous peoples...
...As to the possibility of overcoming the tension between the two, there may well be similarities between the utopian hopes of popular religious movements and those of secular radicals, as the defenders of popular culture suggest...
...The dominant culture, then, may not necessarily comport with the values of the dominant class, as Daniel Bell has argued...
...While students of folk medicine now stress its hitherto unacknowledged virtues, earlier scholars are reproached for encouraging scientific medicine...
...Maria de Queiroz sees in the messianic experience the creation of leadership roles for women, and consequently she stresses their modernizing features...
...The intellectuals' preoccupation with popular culture has a long history...
...In modern capitalist society, she writes, it is science, not religion, that is the opiate of the people...
...Its membership is composed chiefly of the poor, black residents of the urban periphery, people who still view the Catholic church as an ally of the rich...
...Consequently there are 114 very few accusations leveled against defenders of popular culture for romanticist nostalgia...
...Evidence in support of that conclusion is not hard to find...
...we ask whether the standards of good taste are valid for all, and for all time, or simply, in the words of Michael Schudson, "the parochial consensus of elite opinion...
...It would seem self-evident to most Americans that such values are simply modern ones, having little to do with a society's property system as such...
...Its followers also have incorporated many elements of Catholicism, such as baptism and worship of the saints...
...Eduardo de Menezes writes: Encountering no explicit forms of political protest, finding only conformism and alienation, the intellectuals have projected their own anxieties...
...Only if one believes that the Industrial Revolution was a monumental historical mistake is the rejection of "achievement, performance, punctuality . . . " going to make much sense...
...Nor is it obvious that the other, nonscientific aspects of the dominant culture are politically regressive...
...Insofar as traditional belief obstructs the dissemination of scientific ideology, it is politically progressive...
...If the Latins understand culture more in anthropological than aesthetic terms, it is partly because preindustrial forms of expression in dance, artisanship, music, and religion endure with an intensity they no longer have in the advanced industrial countries...
...Especially poignant is the spectacle of the deracinated Third World intellectuals, seeking to restore the most inhumane practices in hopes of regaining the world they have lost...
...In short, the excavation of utopia within popular culture offers very little guidance toward a political practice that might be both radical and responsible...
...For centuries the Catholic church combined public criticism of folk catholicism with private tolerance, even indulgence...
...And the cultivation of a flair for popular taste has always offered the educated man, as Edward Shils uncharitably observes, the sensation of "going to the people" without becoming a Marxist...
...It may mean that we treat people differently in the marketplace, the workplace, and in politics than we do in friendship, family, and religious brotherhoods...
...Doubts About Popular Culture IN EPISCOPAL POLICY on the Indian population, we may have the most extreme version of the defense of popular culture...
...Historians have customarily characterized such movements, a recurrent feature of Brazilian history, as "retrograde, based on ignorance, merely the negative reaction of uneducated bumpkins of the hinterlands to progressive urban culture," charges Alba Zaluar...
...This belief suggests that the poor recognize the possibility of a public sphere beyond the control of the dominant class, a sphere to which they now appeal but may one day aspire...
...Novaes shows that in at least one rural area Pentecostals are no less likely than others to join unions and to demand political rights...
...Such voluntary association has been preciously rare in recent Brazilian history, for the government was suspicious of independent organizations...
...Between the lines of social-scientific and theological writing one easily discerns questions that are profoundly political...
...It may mean that such cultural expression provides small-scale models, such as the festival, whose essential principles may be applied to the organization of the wider society...
...Why can't this passing moment remain— not as a periodic day but as revolution...
...If it is more critical of the rural oligarchy than folk catholicism, it seeks to replace it with a laissez-faire individualism that is no better...
...It shares the antinomian, if not quite anticapitalist, orientation of its European models, according to literary critic Jose Merquior...
...Brazil's intellectuals have been too estranged from the authoritarian regime to aspire to influence over funding policies...
...Why not should the Indians...
...At the proper moment, what now seems archaic will become utopian, the apparent holdover from the past will become a clue to the future, and memory will become prophecy...
...The underlying question was an old one: If the working class is the emergent historical subject, and if it is therefore to make its own revolution, what role is there, legitimately, for the middle-class sympathizer within its social movement...
...But national variations in the debate say as much about the differing politics of intellectual communities as about contrasts in popular culture per se...
...What is resisted is a set of ideas that Jorge Ribeiro describes as "the morality specific to capitalist development...
...Until recently, the church showed little tolerance for Umbanda...
...Whether it can offer anything more to the South American left remains to be seen...
...In fact, the very concept of modern society has nearly disappeared from the vocabulary of the Brazilian left...
...Other truths, too, are uncovered in the subterranean wisdom of popular culture...
...In the Umbanda pantheon of divinities figure slaves, Indians, prostitutes, tricksters, and hustlers of the urban underworld...
...The ritualized exit from social obligations is intelligible only because it assumes an eventual return to normality, reminds Carlos Brandao...
...We wanted the African . . . to cease being an African, to adopt a Western mentality . . . to adopt the Roman rite...
...It is contaminated by association with the American "modernization" theorists of the '60s, and thus discarded as a mere euphemism for capitalism...
...A central dilemma of the democratic left in Brazil, since its involvement in the literacy campaigns of the early '60s, has been to discover a way of organizing and politicizing the workers without "manipulating" them...
...But the most common criticism of popular culture's defenders is very different...
...Popular religiosity is no more immune from such influences than popular literature, others argue...
...This surely is forgivable in the poor, who have been systematically denied access to modern education, but much less forgivable in the educated...
...But today the church encourages such festivals...
...The ambiguous relation between profession and practice remains...
...This would be to assume too static and immutable a view of what makes up a living folk tradition, scolds Ruth Cardoso —and to exaggerate the leveling tendencies toward uniformity within modern society, adds Lisias Negrdo...
...Does the world view of poor people display an awareness of their own exploitation and of an alternative to it...
...Both the Northerners and the Latins have seen in popular culture a threat to the interests and ideals of social elites...
...There also is a distressingly convenient quality about the discovery of resistance and transformative potential within popular culture...
...If the song and dance of Carnaval can plausibly be construed as resistance to hardship, why stop there...
...The prevailing view of that culture within the Brazilian debate so far is largely unexamined...
...Carnaval is now, above all, a highly profitable tourist attraction for foreigners, its moments of communality subject to exploitation...
...Although the current debate in South America is very different from its North American counterpart, it too has its historical precedents...
...All three saw superstition...
...I refer not so much to scholars in these movements as to their much more numerous sympathizers...
...Their argument amounts to a simple syllogism: cultural expression is never entirely independent of social structure...
...The left has customarily seen no more than alienation in the working people's cultural expression...
...To allow the pope to enjoy the dances as mere entertainment would be to profane their sacred content...
...Examining many such publications, he finds that the working-class heroes within them are always celebrated for their personal moral qualities rather than as workers...
...They have increasingly purged the religion of its African elements and have explicitly allied it with the progovernment party, in exchange for political favors...
...Antonio Neto subjects the songs and poetry of cordel literature, the principal reading material of the rural population, to some particularly harsh analysis...
...He returned . . . to the rhythms of his origin and the myths of his language...
...Now scholars no longer analyze these movements as symptoms of the crisis of rural society, confronted with the transition to modern life, but as intelligible responses to the crises of national politics and international capitalism...
...as "the morality specific to capitalist development...
...Another consequence is that criticism of the mass media is not so easily written off as the elitism of highbrows...
...Life in the slums, with its routine, drudgery, and violence, is transformed into a spectacle of fraternity and fellow-feeling...
...If it resists modern science, as in its attachment to ineffective medical practices, that is based on no more than ignorance...
...The bishops no longer seek to convert the Indians, or even to integrate them within modern Brazilian society...
...These movements have provided rare occasions in which the rural poor entered the stage of national politics, making their presence felt for the first time...
...Perhaps the international economy already too closely resembles the anarchical festivities of that occasion...
Vol. 31 • January 1984 • No. 1
