Intimate Ironies: Modernity and the Making of Middle-Class Lives in Brazil (review)

Intimate Ironies: Modernity and the Making of Middle-Class Lives in Brazil. By BRIAN PHILIP OWENSBY. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ix, 332 pp. Cloth, $45.00.

Intimate Ironies offers creative meditations on the culture and experiences of "white or light-skinned white-collar salarymen and their families" (p. 45) within the modern market economy that was emerging in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo between 1925 and 1950. The author explores the efforts of urban employees and professionals to "get ahead," or at least to stay afloat, in a world of threats to the distinctive markers of their status: treacherous competition for jobs, inadequate salaries (especially in government service), multiple part-time jobs (bicos), and a rising cost of living (carestia). These cross-cutting pressures were further intensified after the 1930s, Owensby argues, by political developments that marginalized them from a new populist political game, increasingly defined in terms of "class" and "class conflict" (that is, in terms of workers and industrialists).

The book's most striking contributions stem from Owensby's ability to combine penetrating intuition, subtle empathy, and critical distance, as he explores middle-class sensibilities in a period of economic transformation and political flux (the "modernity" that looms so large in the freighted symbolism attached to the middle class, whether in Brazil or the North Atlantic). Intimate Ironies is not, however, a tightly argued and highly structured monograph about the growth and transformation of white-collar labor markets, lifestyles, and politics. Indeed, the reader will find that statistics are used only in a strictly illustrative sense and there is no pretense of offering a sustained or systematic examination of any single subgroup in either city. Rather, the author displays an impressive mastery of its cultural politics: the Brazilian "middle class" as a lived dilemma, an existential "state of mind" (p. 8) that is to be explored through "close attention to the 'nature, texture and structure' of everyday life" (pp. 48, 11).

These "coat-and-tie men" (as he calls them) were loosely bound together by self-conscious distinctions between themselves and the world of manual working people below and around them and the "rich" and "well born" above them. Their "stubborn preoccupation with status led them to accept an unresolved tension between hierarchical imperatives and egalitarian impulses" (p. 243), he suggests, in a process through which hierarchy "became less a holdover from Brazil's past than an instrument for negotiating a competitive social order" (p. 50). The insistence on being culto, for example, served as both a psychic defense and "collective will to status" (p. 60) for a group that combined life strategies appropriate to a more "meritocractic and market-oriented" social order with the use of the pedido (request for favors) and pistolão (connections) (p. 86). Through such sensitive readings, Owensby produces brilliant insights such as his discussion of the "reciprocity of an inertial paternalism" that characterized the relationship of "intellectual workers" and their bosses without merely reproducing simple patron/client ties (p. 67).

The middle-class struggle for self-realization was most often conducted, Owensby suggests, on an individual and family basis, only halfheartedly as organized groups, and almost never as a "class" (p. 221). Yet he finds much that can be learned from the activity of white-collar sindicatos after 1931 through which "hierarchy [was] affirmed, renewed, and challenged through collective institutional means rather than through patronage and personal relations" (p. 69). Although taking their associational life seriously, Owensby remains faithful to his primary goal, which leads to a home-centered account that highlights, in detail, the impact of a new consumerism. The book also has some subtle and interesting observations to make about the dynamics of color and race within middle-class life (pp. 63-64, 96-97, 125-26, 127).

In his effort to illuminate "issues of status and social hierarchy, market relations...