Zen in Brazil: The Quest for Cosmopolitan Modernity

4. The Brazilian Imaginary of Zen: Global Influences, Rhizomatic Forms

4 The Brazilian Imaginary of Zen: Global Influences, Rhizomatic Forms In 1997 the glossy, upmarket Brazilian magazine Casa Vogue, a local version of Vogue Living, featured a cover story on ‘‘Zen Style.’’ The magazine invited twelve prominent Brazilian architects and interior decorators to produce designs that evoked ambiences of ‘‘Zen.’’ Each professional was asked to define the qualities of this ‘‘Zen Style.’’ The story was reported under the heading ‘‘Zen Style: More than a Decorating Style, It is a Life Style.’’ The list of attributes provided by the twelve professionals continued along the same lines. Zen has to do with culture, refinement, and it is contemporary; it reflects a particular mood; it is poetic because it incorporates all elements of life; it is quality above all; it seeks the essence; it has to do with visual simplicity, it is functional—it is here to be used; it is monastic but not poor; it is not decorative; Zen accessories are powerful because they carry memories and stories within themselves; Zen ambiences are monochromatic.1 The cover of the magazine featured the interior design chosen as the quintessential expression of a ‘‘Zen ambience’’: it portrayed a white-grayish room displaying three-dimensional white artwork on the back wall, wooden sculptures resembling thin, dry tree trunks on the right-hand side, immaculate white pillows on a dark wooden Indian bed in the center of the room, some African black-andwhite rugs complete with a traditional African guitar leaning on the side of the bed, and finally, a long, shallow, dark wooden bowl placed on the floor containing two items: a small loaf of French bread broken into two and ruffled, recently read newspapers. Bland yellowish light fell on two particular spots: the white artwork on the back wall and the loaf of bread on the floor. ZEN STYLE—A LIFESTYLE? IMAGINED WORLDS What makes Casa Vogue and some of the most prominent Brazilian interior decorators think Zen is a lifestyle? Where do the ideas of refinement, high culture, and monasticism (but not, as one designer was quick to note, poverty), which are associated with Zen, come from? Where do the African accessories and the bread fit in? What about the newspapers? Why was Zen associated with anything more than religion in the first place? 128 • The Brazilian Imaginary of Zen FIGURE 18 Cover of Casa Vogue: Zen Style (1997). This story weaves together many of the different threads that have entangled Zen in Brazil. I will argue that it exemplifies the way Zen is associated there with urban cosmopolitanism, class distinction through taste, and the construction of the imagined worlds of the exotic other. I contend that the constructed Zen ambience on the cover of Casa Vogue, and indeed all other images and ideas of Zen produced, circulated, and consumed in Brazil, shed light on the sectors of society that produce, circulate, and consume such ideas and images. Appadurai has argued that because of the recent massive globalization of the media and migration, the The Brazilian Imaginary of Zen • 129 imagination does not belong solely to the fields of art, myth, and ritual anymore.2 He asserts that ‘‘imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new global order.’’3 He observes, moreover, that this collective, shared imagination creates transnational communities. If that is so, one has to look for answers to the question of the association of Zen with high culture and lifestyle in the genealogy of global flows of the imaginary of Zen and their creolization with the local Brazilian imaginary. GLOBAL FLOWS AND SITUATED IMAGINARIES Many authors have discussed the implications of the intensification of global flows of people, images, information, technology, commodities, and capital for the nation-state.4 Deploying the idea of rhizome developed by the French poststructuralist theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Appadurai asserts that the West is just one of the nodes from which global cultural flows emanate. Like a rhizome , the global cultural economy does not spread from one particular center, but moves around in a chaotic and unpredictable pattern.5 In order to examine such transnational cultural flows, he proposes a system of five overlapping dimensions of the global cultural economy: ethnoscapes, mediascapes , technoscapes, finanscapes, and ideoscapes. Current cultural traffic would take place in and through the disjunctures...