Consumption Intensified: The Politics of Middle-Class Daily Life in Brazil (review)

It would be easy to take potshots at Maureen O'Dougherty for having chosen to carry out her ethnographic fieldwork—the anthropologist's classic rite of passage—in the comfortable neighborhoods of south and west São Paulo (with no long treks to remote villages, no typhoid, no exotic languages to learn, a decent mattress, good restaurants, and informants recruited in local prep schools, who have more in common with the ethnographer than with their neighbors in the favelas a few miles away). But if we focussed only on the incongruity (more apparent than real) between the anthropological tradition in which O'Dougherty writes and the milieu she is writing about, we would miss a remarkably interesting study, that captures about as well as anything I have read the social-psychological-political impact of the inflationary crises of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

O'Dougherty's subject is the upper, not the lower middle class; most of her informants are university-trained professionals, many in middle or upper management, who work hard but are able to own a home and a car, employ a maid, and send their children to elite private schools. Her questions are interesting ones: how does this class define and distinguish itself? How have those strategies of distinction suffered or changed in the context of double- and triple-digit currency devaluations, catastrophically declining real salaries, unemployment, and intensified competition in the neoliberal world marketplace? And, what is the political impact of middle-class discontent?

O'Dougherty approaches these questions in several ways. Chapter two provides a memorable portrait of shopping strategies in hyperinflation, where prices varied wildly from place to place and moment to moment, and the object of the game was to hold onto fast-devaluing currency for as short a time as necessary. Because saving was impossible, middle-class people found themselves dragged into frenzied consumerism. Chapter three studies how, as professional and white-collar salaries lost buying power, people turned to self-employment in services and petty commerce. She finds ambivalent attitudes toward this new entrepreneurship. In chapters four and five O'Dougherty examines international consumer goods and travel experiences as indispensable markers of middle-class identity. With an anthropologist's eye she describes trips to Disney World as rites of passage and Miami-bought stereos as status goods, and makes the important point that these "first-world" consumption experiences fed an increasingly politicized disgust with Brazilian protectionism, inefficiency, high prices, shortages, and corruption. In the final chapters, she studies the political impact of this disgust, especially after Fernando Collor's anti-inflation plan embargoed savings. Fueled by the media, middle-class moral indignation was the driving force behind Collor's later impeachment for corruption. The parallels to Argentina's recent middle-class insurrection against Fernando de la Rua and the attempted coup against Venezuela's Hugo Chávez are evident.

O'Dougherty's dialogue is with anthropologists and sociologists, not historians. She draws widely and intelligently upon European and U.S. theorizing on consumption, identity, and globalization, but her command of Brazilian and Latin American historiography is somewhat weaker. It is admittedly unfair for a historian to find fault with an anthropologist for not reading more history, but a longer-term perspective might have saved O'Dougherty from some missteps, ranging from an occasionally keen grasp of the obvious (twelve pages to observe that many São Paulans use the regional term nordestino as racist code?), to the assumption that certain very old discourses (e.g., that the middle class suffers worse than the poor from the ravages of inflation) are new products of the crisis. Historians may also be bothered by O'Dougherty's citation style. The book retains the dissertation's almost excessive need to seek authority in theory, yet she...