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- Convenors:
-
Craig Schuetze
(University of Louisville)
Meg Stalcup (University of Ottawa)
- Stream:
- Relational movements: States, Politics and Knowledge/Mouvements relationnels: États, politiques et savoirs
- Location:
- LMX 221
- Start time:
- 6 May, 2017 at
Time zone: America/New_York
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
In this session we examine what counts as political and discursive evidence in transitions in Brazil. As charges of both progress and stagnation are leveled across a range of critical issues, we aim to render visible the parameters of these narrative battles and their ramifications.
Long Abstract:
Fueled by economic growth, Brazil undertook drastic infrastructural developments in the twenty-first century; the boom times of mega-events and massive oil discoveries reconfigured people and spaces, often violently. Over the same time period, there were staggering transitions in everyday life, including a proliferation and intensification of both state initiatives and social movements, from policies addressing abject poverty to organized demands for adequate public transportation, and efforts towards internet inclusion. The justifications for many of the changes centered on discourses of movement: expanding democracy, increasing rights, pacifying warzones.
Alongside and within these movements of change, however, media, politicians, and citizens highlighted spectacles of stagnation: examples of Brazil stuck in underdevelopment, political corruption, and class conflict. In the battle of narratives, the recent regime change was called a successful democratic procedure by supporters and a legislative coup by opponents.
This panel examines what counts as political and discursive evidence in addressing the question of transitions in Brazil. How does a picture of baby with microcephaly come to stand for the Zika virus and its future catastrophe, but not inequality, corruption, and state neglect? Do videos of police shooting protesters, or illegal wire taps of heads of state, support the narrative that Brazil is capable of changing its ways of structural violence, or that it is not? Rather than dromologically reducing violence to movement, or structurally reducing it to stagnation, we examine the modes of knowledge production that attempt to concretize discursive evidence.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Joseph Jay Sosa (Bowdoin College)
Paper short abstract:
As president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff confronted gender panics activated by conservative anxieties about her leadership and changing national culture of sexuality. This paper shows how rightwing cases for Rousseff's impeachment continually capitalized on gender panics in order to presume her guilt.
Paper long abstract:
Dilma Rousseff's tenure as president of Brazil witnessed remarkable shifts in the political public sphere around gender and sexuality. Cultural anxieties regarding this shift often swarmed around Rousseff herself, even as her government became increasingly risk-averse in promoting policies advocated by women's and LGBT social movements. Rousseff appeared to have a sustained if uneasy relationship with multiple symbols of female power ascribed to her. Her 2010 presidential campaign, for instance, embraced kinship imagery of her as "aunt" of Worker's Party development strategies. But it was only as Rousseff's sphere of influence became increasingly isolated within both her party and her government that Rousseff spoke more explicitly about the perils of being Brazil's first female president.
This presentation plots matrices of intelligibility that connected the constant buzz of gender and sexual unrest to changes in the partisan organization of political elites and ultimately to the isolation of Rousseff within the Brazilian political system. It thinks through both sides of the loss of power of the Worker's Party--not only conservative opposition fueled in part by anti-women and anti-LGBT reactionaries, but also the uncoupling of electoral strategists from feminist and queer (amongst other) social movements. Linking these sites of contestation during Rousseff's gradual loss of power, the paper examines how the evidence of Rousseff's improprieties were often confused with gender panics around her person.
Laurie Denyer Willis (University of Edinburgh)
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers the political (non)response of Pentecostals from Rio de Janeiro's Western Subúrbios during the Brazilian 2016 political crisis.
Paper long abstract:
While the 'slow coup' was engulfing daily political talk through much of 2016 in Brazil, many citizens took to social media to express opinions. Interestingly, the community of people who I conducted ethnographic fieldwork with for over three years - Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostals located in Rio's Western subúrbios - were silent on the issue, despite using social media daily for other reasons. These Pentecostals explain that they align themselves, first and foremost, with Jesus. Their Pentecostal faith, they say, allows them to imagine the possibility of life beside-the-state. For many, this is a way of sidestepping the state, as opposed to attempting to reform it to serve their communities better. For many Pentecostals in Rio's subúrbios the state is seen as a violent actor and any suggestion that we might work towards a fairer redistribution of power or services is often met with shrugs. I argue that these shrugs are not just about what they perceive as embedded corruption and impenetrable bureaucracies, but also a dismissal of the state-making project itself. In the midst of this silence on these issues, however, one social media post on the political crisis was widely shared: a photo of a banner hung over their community's pedestrian bridge reading: "Batan for Lula". Lula, of course, is the former President who was being hunted on corruption charges. This paper will consider the possibility of 'life beside-the-state', and consider why Lula is incorporated into this logic, while Pentecostal politicians - who supported the 'slow coup' - were ignored or treated ambiguously.
Joao Velloso (University of Ottawa)
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses the social control of protesters in four contexts: a) the 2010 G20 summit in Toronto, b) the 2012 Quebec student protests, c) the removal of Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zuccotti Park (2011), and d) the protests prior to the 2014 Fifa World Cup Final in Rio de Janeiro.
Paper long abstract:
Despite the reference in the anthropological, criminological and socio-legal imaginary to expressions such as the "criminalization of social movements", quite often quite often the social reaction processes mobilized to control protesters is unrelated to criminalization. The control of the new social movements changed drastically in the last decades, arguably since the 1999 Seattle WTO protests, and local authorities referred to (special) regulatory regimes as an alternative to criminal justice. This paper aims at exploring penal configurations mobilized in the control of protesters in four different contexts: a) the 2010 G20 summit in Toronto, b) the 2012 Quebec student protests, c) the removal of Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zuccotti Park (2011), and d) the protests prior to the 2014 Fifa World Cup Final in Rio de Janeiro. The social reaction to these events provides interesting insights not only on the uses of non criminal regimes in the securitization of great events, but also on how penal institutions may rearrange in given contexts, with more or less emphasis on different normative systems (military, copyright, by-laws, regulatory and even criminal law). I argue that there is an increasing use of administrative dispositifs that operate through low standards of evidence and a certain shrinking of criminal adjudication, even when criminal law is used. In that sense, I problematize the rationalities of such administrative regimes and the degradation of rights involved in such hybrid penal configurations as the legal guarantees present in one regime is not necessarily equivalent to the other.
Jeffrey Omari (UC Santa Cruz/American Bar Foundation)
Paper short abstract:
This paper uses 18 months of ethnographic research to examine how Internet governance and policies intended to expand Internet inclusion are vital contemporary efforts to redefine the relationship between the Brazilian state and Rio de Janeiro’s urban poor neighborhoods.
Paper long abstract:
This paper uses 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork to examine how Internet governance and policies intended to expand Internet inclusion are vital contemporary efforts to redefine the relationship between the Brazilian state and Rio de Janeiro's urban poor neighborhoods. In April 2014, Brazil enacted the Marco Civil da Internet, an "Internet Bill of Rights" that seeks to bring democratic principles to the control and use of the Internet in Brazil. This law, which establishes rules on net neutrality, online privacy, data retention, and intermediary liability, also regards Internet access as a requisite for civil rights. The Marco Civil thus positions Brazil as a pioneer in Internet governance among developing nations. At the same time, the city of Rio de Janeiro is forcibly "pacifying" certain favelas to remove violent drug gangs, introduce a more normative legal order, and increase the state's reach into these communities through the promotion digital inclusion schemes. While recent scholarship concerning favelas demonstrates that structural violence and digital inclusion go hand in hand (Scott 2016), the rapid emergence of Rio's smart city paradigm, which seeks to mitigate urban inequalities, may actually exacerbate long-standing gaps between the rich and poor (Gaffney and Robertson 2016). As a result, I argue that the Marco Civil's goal of promoting civil rights through Internet inclusion is merely aspirational, stunted by the very policies that attempt to further its democratic objectives.
Craig Schuetze (University of Louisville)
Paper short abstract:
The rise of bus torchings in brazil is best understood in relation to public violence, police violence, and political violence.
Paper long abstract:
Automobiles have recently emerged as both the instrument of, and a canvas for, political violence in Brazil. A recent picture showing a man lighting his cigarette on a torched bus shows that bus arson in Brazil has finally become an everyday phenomenon. Recent videos showing police corralling and running over protesters can neither be explained by Althusser's trope of interpolation, nor Ranciere's idea of circulation. Rather, this practice illustrates dialectic of confinement and pursuit in policing public spaces. This tactic, used in traffic control and in kettling protesters, helps explain the rise of bus torchings in Brazil. The battle of narrative that surrounds bus torchings is a key to understanding the larger political disputes as to what counts as evidence in recognizing democracy, violence, and public will.
Bus torchings in Brazil are considered a quebra-quebra—the destruction of icons and infrastructure of the state—which has taken on myriad meanings at various historical and political junctures. Social movements have long argued that burned buses are evidence of failing infrastructure and police violence since bus torchings are retaliations against two forms of preventable death: police assassinations and hit-and-runs. In the last couple decades the media has presented bus torchings as either unfortunate cases of the lower class biting the hand that feeds them or indexical signs of an upcoming war with the drug cartels. Police, the least ambiguous of all, see bus torchings as acts of terrorism that demand further police repression, notably, in forms of confinement and pursuit.
Meg Stalcup (University of Ottawa)
Paper short abstract:
This paper assembles narratives about the origins of the Zika virus and microcephaly from a range of new media and ethnographic sources in Brazil in order to ask what evidence is marshaled in circulating rumors, what threat they identify, and how they claim the authority of truth.
Paper long abstract:
What counts as evidence in rumors that circulate online? When the Zika virus was first identified and began receiving news coverage in Brazil in early 2015, the Brazilian Minster of Health responded with what was almost a snicker. The country had bigger concerns, said the government, than an infection so mild most people wouldn't even realize they had it. As babies with microcephaly started showing up in surprising numbers in hospitals in July, however, that very mildness appeared to have been a trick. A link between the virus and the babies was quickly suspected and gradually confirmed by biomedical researchers and doctors, but in stories shared online, forwarded by WhatsApp groups, and illustrated in YouTube videos, alternative explanations proliferated. These ranged from claims that the virus had been brought to Brazil by Cuban doctors or illegal African immigrants; to a secret mass sterilization campaign, spread by genetically modified mosquitos; to suggestions that the real cause of microcephaly was an insecticide. This paper assembles narratives about the origins of the Zika virus and microcephaly from a range of new media and ethnographic sources in order to ask what evidence is marshaled in these rumors, what threat they identify, and how they claim the authority of truth. Put differently, what are their modes of veridiction (Foucault 1998, 2008), and what does this tell us about how evidence works in online spaces in Brazil today?
Shannon Garland (Columbia University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers how claims about the relationship between aesthetic, financial, and media values serve as evidence in the debate over whether Brazilian activist group Fora do Eixo democratizes culture through alternative finance or uses state cultural funds to gain political power.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses controversy around the Brazilian musico-political start-up Fora do Eixo and its modes of circulating, representing, and valuing bands. While the organization has become an important political actor in Brazil, it arose and grew by strategically mobilizing social networks to produce independent rock/pop music throughout the country's hinterlands. Closely mirroring the rhetoric of the PT government surrounding the uses of technologies to enact social inclusion, Fora do Eixo argues that it uses the internet and its organizational logics to democratize Brazilian music culture. Music production has served as a main generator of financial and political capital for the group, especially owing to the organization's internal currency, card, which performing musicians receive in lieu of legal tender. In its arguments that card, as a tool for resource distribution, improves the aesthetic and financial state of Brazilian independent music, Fora do Eixo makes contradictory claims about the relation between cultural movement, media visibility, and aesthetic worth. Fora do Eixo critics, meanwhile, see the group's use of card despite significant state cultural funding as a tool for accumulating resources and political status. Critics judge the bands Fora do Eixo promotes to have low aesthetic value, which then serves as evidence that the organization does not mobilize and produce culture so much as exploit musicians. This paper explores the differing modes of defining and relating social, economic and aesthetic values in this debate. It considers the political implications of each mode for treating culture as material and economy in Brazil and beyond.