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

Twenty years ago Marshall Berman noted that the experience of the modern in "underdeveloped places was built on the fantasies and dreams of modernity." Though Berman did not say so explicitly, this formulation implied that under certain circumstances modern lives in such places could become the nightmare of Tantalus from whom the object of his desire was ceaselessly fugitive. This is the experience at the core of anthropologist Maureen O'Dougherty's Consumption Intensified. The author argues that in the 1990s middle-class Brazilians had to contend with an economic and social crisis, which, by undercutting their ability to consume, threatened their social status and challenged their sense of middle-class identity as emblematic of modernity. She explores the twists and turns of this crisis by weaving together multiple theoretical threads with the words and experiences of about 50 middle-class informants from the city and state of São Paulo.

O'Dougherty knows she is up against a formidable problem in defining the "middle class." Precisely because of its centrality to self-understanding in modern societies, it is the class whose boundaries are inherently flexible and porous and whose composition is often characterized as heterogeneous and unstable. Her task is made more difficult by the fact that the very idea of the middle class in Brazil cannot help but refer to the presumed normativity of middle classes in Europe and the United States. O'Dougherty acknowledges these problems, but wisely pushes beyond them, recognizing that the best approach is to think of the Brazilian middle class in terms of the everyday practices of those who would claim the label, or have it claimed for them.

The book sparkles with insights. By focusing on consumption, O'Dougherty sheds light on a still-understudied topic in the Latin American literature. She does an excellent job of showing how middle-class Paulistas lived through the early 1990s—when inflation reached 2,700 percent—by changing their views on acceptable jobs and defending what came to be perceived as an almost inalienable right to consume. She offers an ethnology of inflation, showing how people became mesmerized by the fata morgana that money becomes in such circumstances. (I lived in Rio in 1990-92 and she has the frenzy of daily life dead on.) Her vivisection of the Disney experience among middle-class Brazilians and her burrowing into the media's role in Collor's impeachment reveal crucial aspects of the mentalities and world views of her subjects.

While O'Dougherty argues persuasively that middle-class people changed their behavior because of the crisis, she does not, to my satisfaction, succeed in demonstrating that her informants "redefined their identities" as members of an "historically constituted" middle class (pp. 3, 6). She does show that middle-class men and women reluctantly took up certain kinds of work—petty entrepreneuralism, commercial retail, and moonlighting generally—that had in earlier years been beneath them and turned to consumption as a hedge against erosion of their social position. She ascertains as well that her informants relied on a rough-and-ready moralism—one expansive enough to condemn corruption for Brazil's plight, blame dark-skinned Northeasterners for dragging the nation down, and fault other sectors of society for acting out of self-interest rather than for the greater good—in confronting the disorienting complexities of their situation. This moralism, she concludes, isolated (her subjects might say insulated) them from the swirling political currents of the crisis. Although this is the part of the book that leans most heavily on theoretical formulations, I think she is basically right.

What's missing is the deeper sense that most of this was hardly new in the 1990s. Middle-class Brazilians have wrestled with inflation and been...