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

Animated by an explicit interest in shifting the conceptual terrain of middle-class study away from canonical, "First World" subjects, Maureen O'Dougherty's important work is framed by a set a questions intent on unsettling the material and symbolic dominance of the overdeveloped world, "whose hegemony," she maintains, "makes their middle classes the international standard" (O' Dougherty 4). As the author queries, "What happens with these theories [of middle-class life] when we study a location outside the First World or Global North where among other differences, the middle class is a minority rather than a sizable demographic group?" (4) O'Dougherty's analytic energies are thus directed at illuminating the complex, intramural contours of Brazilian middle-class consumption practices during a period of dramatic economic crisis. While her analysis is calibrated to capture the general posture of the national middle-class (with important internal variations), the author's ethnographic focus is on residents of the city of São Paulo. As the author clarifies:

This book, then, is an effort to further our understanding of middle classes by locating a particular middle class in place and time and by conceptualizing this social category through Athe everyday practices and discourses of middle-class people. It identifies consumption and discursive claims of "cultural" and "moral" superiority as foundational to the attainment, maintenance, and performance of middle-class identity and boundaries. (3-4)

As such, O'Dougherty charts the complex ways in which the historical preoccupation with cultural and moral superiority of middle-class Brazilians did not wane during the nation's economic downturn, but rather, intensified. Articulated through heightened modes of particular practices and protocols of consumption, such moves were understood and deployed as central to a recuperative project, one anxious to shore up and consolidate notions of this class as forever set apart in a historical moment when such consumption-bound distinctions were threatening to erode.

Much space in O'Dougherty's introduction is dedicated to justifying her selection of informants and defining as singular the Brazilian middle class, despite its deep heterogeneity. Bypassing the "traditional" middle class, which consists mostly of immigrant shop owners, the provincial middle classes, and the nouveaux riches, she focuses on what is known in Brazil as the "modern" or "new" middle class, which consists of "salaried workers in the liberal and technical professions." (18)

The author marks the renewed moral investment in home and car ownership, private school education for children, the elaborate staging of debutante balls, and the maneuvers involved in maintaining the middle-class household in a time of stunning scarcity, as examples of the activation of the principle of social distinction in the local sphere. Trips by the middle class to Disney World and the purchase of transnational goods are compelling examples of its operation in a global context. In the discursive realm, O'Dougherty posits the media as key to the restoration of a sense of middle class social distinction inexorably tied to particular consumption practices. With the material means of purchasing severely curtailed, the media emerged as central to the figuration of the middle class as the signal victim of the crisis. This discursive consolidation gave concrete public form to the steadily fomenting middle-class discontent with the state that would soon result in the toppling of the Collor administration.

While O'Doughtery's text works well to illuminate the interior logic, the complex anatomy of middle-class consumption practices, the lack of a sustained treatment of Brazilian inter-class dynamics is curious. Indeed, the author deploys a negative, unilateral definition of the middle class in which the contrast made is with the poor, while the complex distinctions from the rich are left largely unexamined. That the author does not explicitly make a clear analytic distinction between the middle class and the elite is surprising given that her...