The Price of Honor: The Press versus Congress in the Rhetoric of Brazilian Politics

Rarely has honor been studied in the context of modern political relationships. From Marcel Mauss's pioneering study The Gift (1924) until John Peristiany and Julian Pitt-Rivers's landmark 1992 volume Honor and Grace in Anthropology, little has been done to consider this topic as an important object of political analysis (notwithstanding the fact that Mediterranean studies during the 1960s fostered a field later called the "anthropology of honor"). My purpose in this essay is to call attention to honor as a major aspect of contemporary political life, by focusing on the relationship between the press and the Brazilian legislature. I begin by briefly considering the relationship between honor and politics;I then examine legislative debatesover the new press bill, and I finish with an analysis of a critical event involving journalists and members of Congress that exemplifies the tensions between the media and politics in contemporary Brazil.

Honor, Power, and the New Brazilian Press Bill

The principles and mechanisms of honor and dishonor reveal how specific groups or social circles evaluate the behavior of their members in relation to established values and norms. More importantly, honor deals with a complex of categories and procedures that regulate access to moral and political resources, which are in principle open to all members of the group. Honor involves and develops power relationships; thus, it is always necessary for analysts to keep track of who is able to recognize and attribute honor, in what form, and for what conduct. Even when elements of precedence—such as family, age, gender, status group, or social class— are operative, the individual performancesthat confer honor remain important. Consequently, the value of honored persons is never absolute but consists in a type of good that needs to be renovated and recognized throughout their lives, since not all people hold the same position to define models of conduct and to judge the appropriateness of personal procedures to these models.

Events in the Brazilian congress allow us to see how personally identified notions of honor affect institutional politics, not only in the field of traditional politics but also in a wider field of political interaction.If the notion of honor delimits a conceptual field (Peristiany and Pitt-Rivers 1992) or a moral taxonomy (Herzfeld 1993) in which social esteem—a value that is very important in the political sphere—is expressed, then politics is itself an honored space in which the attribution of prestige works as a sign and as a source of power.

From this point of view, the control of the definition of honor can be one of the central questions in political life, even in a representative democracy where the values of equality and participation supposedly define everyone through a common citizenship. The notion of honor indexes persons to their social roles and thus allows for the attribution of differentiated rights and, above all, differentiated responsibilities for politicians. In Brazil, as opposed to other countries (Berger 1983), the constitutional, legal, and political framework recognizes the demands of honor, especially in politically sensitive moments. During so-called crises or, in anthropological terms, critical events or social dramas, claims and latent conflicts become explicit. What makes politicians honorable, and what are the legitimate mechanisms of confirmation and defense of their honor? How can the rights and duties of honor be reconciled with those of individualistic equality? Finally, does honor have a price, and can it be obtained or compensated for monetarily? This essay focuses on the development of these and other dimensions of political honor, using the Brazilian context to show how consensual solutions to these questions and even rules of disagreement are produced.

During the first half of 1996, those who followedcongressional activities in Brazil were surprised by the call for an expedited vote on the new press bill. At that time, there was an impasse between the executive branch and the National Congress regarding...