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

In his 1982 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez noted the difficult struggle of writers to capture the soul of a Latin American experience and critiqued the way the region has been understood by outsiders. Anthropologist Maureen O’Dougherty’s Consumption Intensified engages this challenge in its portrayal of middle-class daily life in São Paulo, and the study provides a variety of rich insights.

O’Dougherty examines how patterns of consumption shaped daily practices and notions of class and identity among Brazilians who self-identify as members of the middle-class. The resulting ethnographies of private life shed light on the 1981–1994 period of democratic transition and the middle class experience of intense economic instability. During her fieldwork (1993–1994), O’Dougherty interviewed 24 families who formed a unique sample of middle-class, two-spouse households in São Paulo, a city known as the financial, economic and cultural center of the nation. The families lived in the prosperous southern and western zones of the city and were all headed by couples aged 35–55 whose yearly income varied from US$14,000 to US$85,000 and whose children attended expensive private schools. Within this group, the focus is neither on purposes in common nor mutual traditions or hopes (such as professional groups or other “traditional” middle-class categories); instead, O’Dougherty circumvented the definition of middle class and focused on her informants’ own “verbal and active” understanding of their social identity.

In her endeavor, she succeeds in capturing the families’ anxieties. Her informants detail how various government economic packages and runaway inflation led families to undertake unorthodox measures to protect their wealth and consumerist strategies of comparison shopping and stockpiling. O’Dougherty vividly and effectively documents the complexities of maintaining one’s household under inflationary conditions and the different coping mechanisms developed in response to the crisis. Accordingly, consumption shaped and determined an ambivalent, occasionally “fantastic discourse,” which mirrored the rising inequality provoked by neoliberal politics and disenchantment with impotent government programs. O’Dougherty develops an original ethnography of inflation focusing on how the group’s idea of middle-class status found expression in varying “consumer” attitudes. These ideas revolved around attitudes about key investments (home, car, education), assumptions (prejudice and sense of superiority), occupations (informal jobs), anxieties (fears of downward mobility), and lifestyle (access to imported goods and trips abroad).

In relation to education, O’Dougherty details the sacrifices families made to pay for “good” private schools, although it could be added that they are not a sure ticket to the public universities. Yet, she notes that an educational experience is relegated to a second plane in relation to either a debutante ball or a trip to Disney World. She considers the place homeownership occupies in the middle-class imaginary, and how it was increasingly out of reach for Brazilians during the years of economic crisis in the 1980s and 1990s. O’Dougherty does a good job of explaining how violence reshaped new social boundaries through spatial segregation, which demarcated the way people lived (gated communities), consumed (shopping malls), and protected themselves (high-security systems). Those demarcations of class boundaries also found expression in the middle-class struggle for acquisition of high-status goods.

O’Dougherty effectively documents the plight of middle-class, economizing housewives, who were the first to engage in informal income-generating activities that redefined and redeemed commerce as a middle-class occupation. They were followed by the unfortunate white-collar workers who turned to small business. Both the informal worker as well as the informal contrabandist (muambeiro) provided highly desired goods blocked by state policies. The defense of “illegality” and the “outcast” tale of the middle-class professional are frank portrayals of contingent lives shaped by the culture of inflation reinforced by similar narratives in everyday media coverage. The media, referred to as the middle-class interpreter par excellence, rendered symbolically the social imaginary and the...