Tag: Brazil

The Brazilian Buttock Lift

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A review of Pretty Modern: Beauty, Sex, and Plastic Surgery in Brazil, Alexander Edmonds, Duke University Press, 2010.

Pretty ModernIn Brazil, women claim the right to be beautiful. When nature and the passing of time don’t help, beauty can be achieved at the end of a scalpel. Plastic surgery or plástica is not only a status good or the preserve of socialites and celebrities: according to Ivo Pitanguy, the most famous Brazilian plastic surgeon and a celebrity himself, “The poor have the right to be beautiful too.” And they are banking on that right. Rio and São Paulo have some of the densest concentrations of plastic surgeons in the world, and financing plans have made plástica accessible to the lower middle class and even to favela residents. While in the United States, people may hide that they have had plastic surgery like it’s something shameful, in Brazil they flaunt it. The attitude is that having work done shows you care about yourself—it’s a status symbol as well as a statement of self-esteem. Cosmetic surgery’s popularity in Brazil raises a number of interesting questions. How did plastic surgery, a practice often associated with body hatred and alienation, take root in a country known for its glorious embrace of sensuality and pleasure? Is beauty a right which, like education or health care, should be realized with the help of public institutions and fiscal subsidies? Does beauty reinforce social hierarchies, or is attractiveness a “great equalizer” that neutralizes or attenuates the effects of class and gender? Does plástica operate on the body or on the mind, and is it a legitimate medical act or a frivolous and narcissistic pursuit? Does beauty work alienate women or is it a way to bring them into the public sphere?

Class, race, gender, and plástica

Alexander Edmonds, an American anthropologist, answers these questions by mobilizing the three key dimensions of his discipline: class, race, and gender. Brazil is a class society with one of the most unequal wealth distributions in the world. It is also a society organized along racial lines, even though a long history of miscegenation has blurred color lines and made racial democracy part of the national identity. Brazil continues to have large gender gaps within the workforce and government representation. The country’s supposedly large number of exotic, attractive and sexually available women makes it a masculinist fantasy worldwide, while Brazilian feminists face enduring challenges. All these issues relate in one way or another to the availability of cosmetic surgery, the quest for beauty and attractiveness, and the development of medicine into new terrains of well-being and self-esteem. Pretty Modern mixes several strands of literature. It is a travelogue into contemporary Brazil, a deep dive into its history and culture, a journalistic description of the cosmetic surgery industry, a philosophical treatise on beauty and appearances, a personal memoir about the impasses of erudite culture and the wisdom of ordinary people. It even contains samba lyrics and color pictures of scantily clad models.

The Brazilian constitution recognizes the human right to health. It doesn’t recognize the right to beauty, but cosmetic surgery is provided for free or at subsidized rates in public clinics such as the Santa Casa da Misericórdia in Rio. Surgeons perform charity surgeries for the poor to get practice in large residency programs before opening their private clinics. Some medical doctors come from afar to learn how to operate barrigas (bellies) or bundas (buttocks), techniques that come predominantly from Brazil. Ivo Pitanguy himself, the pioneer of plastic surgery in Brazil, learned the trade from Europe before bringing it back to Rio and taking it to a new level. His democratic ethos has been maintained by his disciples who share his vision of cosmetic surgery as psychotherapeutic intervention that should be accessible to all. Pitanguy famously defined the plastic surgeon as “a psychologist with a scalpel in his hand,” echoing the saying that “the psychoanalyst knows everything but changes nothing. The plastic surgeon knows nothing but changes everything.” Women see their operations as a form of psychological healing; given the choice, they prefer the surgeon’s scalpel than the couch of the psychoanalyst. Plástica has psychological effects for the poor as well as for the rich: surgery improves a woman’s auto-estima, self-esteem, and is considered as a necessity, not a vanity. Appearance is essential to mental well-being, economic competitiveness, and social and sexual competence. If we follow the WHO’s definition of health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being,” then beauty work represents the new frontier in the pursuit of happiness.

The right to beauty

Of course, the growth of cosmetic surgery has not been without controversy. A “right to beauty” seems to value a rather frivolous concern in a country with more pressing problems—from tropical diseases, like dengue, to the diseases of modernity, like diabetes. Brazil has a health system divided into a public and a private sector with different standards of care, and the poor often see their universal right to healthcare obstructed by long queues, squalid conditions, and substandard practice. Cosmetic surgery stretches medical practice into an ambiguous grey zone where the Hippocratic oath doesn’t always fully apply. The growth of plástica has also been accompanied by a rise in malpractice cases, insurance fraud, and media stories of horrific complications. Some Brazilian critics see the new fashion of breast enlargement as a form of cultural imperialism brought by Euro-American influence in a country that has long valued small boobies and big booties (the ever-popular butt implant raises fewer cultural concerns.) Beauty ideals peddled by women’s magazines are blamed for eating disorders and body alienation. Cultural elites from the West see the pursuit of the artificially enhanced body as vain, vulgar, and superficial, betraying a narcissistic concern with the self. But who is one to judge? asks Alexander Edmonds, who confesses he shared some of the misapprehensions of the distanced scholar before he was confronted with a candid remark by a favela dweller: “Only intellectuals like misery. The poor prefer luxury.” Even though it is not common for a scholar to glance through local versions of Playboy or watch telenovelas titled “Without Tits, There is no Paradise,” the anthropologist knows the heuristic value of suspending one’s judgment and immersing oneself into the life-world of cultural others through participant observation.

Race raises another set of issues. Here too, North Americans have been accused of exporting their cultural imperialism, with its bipolar racial categories and immutable color line, in a country that has long prided itself for its racial democracy and color fluidity. In fact, Brazilians are very race-conscious. But rather than grouping people into races defined by ancestry, the local taxonomy describes subtle variations in appearance along a continuum. The national census racially classifies the Brazilian population in five color types: branco (white), pardo (brown), preto (black), amarelo (yellow), and indigenous. But in everyday usage, more than 130 color types have been identified. Brazil’s famous “rainbow of color terms” intersects with class and gender. In Brazil moving up the social scale can be seen as a form of whitening. For example, a light-skinned multiracial person who held an important, well-paying position in society may be considered branco while someone else with the same ethnogenetic make-up who had darker skin or was of a lower class may be considered pardo or even preto. But unlike in many parts of the world where lightness of skin tone is fetishized, in Brazil brown is beautiful. Many women pride themselves of being morena, a term that can mean both brunette and brown-skinned. On the other hand, blackness is stigmatized, and European facial features and hair confer social advantages. No wonder that “correction of the Negroid nose” is a standard surgery operation that raises few eyebrows, while Brazil remains one of the biggest consumer market for blonde hair dye.

The anthropology of mestiçagem

More than any other nation, Brazil’s self-image and national identity has been shaped by anthropologists. The Amazon Indian is known solely from the reports of ethnographers in the field, perpetuating the heritage of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Gilberto Freyre, a student of Franz Boas in the early twentieth century, provocatively reversed the scientific discourse on “miscegenation”  and its racist underpinnings by affirming the virtue of racial mixture and cultural syncretism. Freyre’s celebration of idealized and eroticized mestiçagem played a central role in defining Brazilian national identity. Sexuality—especially across racial lines—became a key symbol for the formation of a new, mixed population with positive traits, such as cordiality and physical beauty. But more recently sociologists have deconstructed the myth of racial democracy by documenting the persistent racial inequalities in wealth and income, access to education and social services, and representations in the media and in the political sphere. Governments introduced controversial quotas to promote racial diversity in higher education and in the public sector. There has been a shift in the representation of race in the past twenty years. More dark faces now appear in telenovelas, ad campaigns, and variety shows, and multinational companies have found a new niche market for black beauty products, fashion, and cosmetics. Afrodescendentes are adopting a black hairstyle and a negra identity as well as narratives of racial pride and militancy. It is too early to say whether affirmative action and identity politics will substitute to mestiçagem and the rainbow of colors, but the emergence of the black movement in Brazil also confirms the significance of the aesthetic dimension of modern subjectivities.

What does cosmetic surgery tell us about gender relations and women’s roles? Contrary to a popular perception, women do not engage in beauty work to comply to men’s expectations and submit themselves to the male gaze. They do it on their own terms, to follow their own desires or to respond to society’s “interpellation.” Motives may vary across social class, age category, and marital status. Some Brazilian women can be openly frank about it: “After having kids, I’ll have to do a recauchutagem [refurbishing, normally of a car]. After shutting down the factory, nê?” Plastic surgery is closely linked to a larger field that manages female reproduction and sexuality. It is not coincidental that Brazil has not only high rates of plastic surgery, but also Cesarean sections (70 percent of deliveries in some private hospitals), tubal ligations (sterilization accounts for half of all contraceptive use), and other surgeries for women. Some women see elective surgeries as part of a modern standard of care available to them throughout the female life cycle. Cosmetic surgery can mark key rites of passage: initiation into adulthood, marriage, motherhood, divorce, and menopause. The transformative events by far the most often mentioned in connection with plástica are pregnancy and breast-feeding. Tensions between motherhood and sexuality are analyzed in detail by Alexander Edmonds, who mentions that both are equally important for self-esteem. Drawing on a range of examples—from maids who aspire to acquire cosmetic surgeries, to favela residents who dream of entering the fashion world, to single mothers who embrace plastic surgery as a means of erotic body scuplting—he describes how sexual and class aspirations subtly mingle in beauty culture.

The right of the Brazilian morena

In his last book Modos de homem, modas de mulher, published shortly before his death in 1987, Gilberto Freyre warned against “yankee influence” and the impact of “north-Europeanization or albinization”: “one must recognize the right of the Brazilian brunette to rebuke northern-European fashions aimed at blonde, white women.” In Pretty Modern, Alexander Edmonds shows that the right of the Brazilian morena is not to be abolished. The tyranny of fashion applies more than elsewhere in a country where bodies are being refashioned to fit aesthetic and sexual mores. But Brazilian plástica does not follow an American or north-European blueprint. If anything, it leads the way that other emerging countries in Latin America or East Asia are also beginning to tread. There, the female body is invested with hopes of social mobility and self-accomplishment that demand long-term investment and management. In poor urban areas, beauty often has a similar importance for girls as soccer (or basketball) does for boys: it promises an almost magical attainment of recognition, wealth or power. For middle-class cariocas, the body is a source of distinction and success. For many consumers, a lean and fit body is essential to economic and sexual competition, social visibility, and mental well-being. Beauty culture interpellates women as autonomous sexual beings and as economic agents in markets where physical attractiveness can be exchanged with various kinds of cultural and economic resources. This anthropologic study shows that cosmetic surgery arises in unison with a central concern for Brazilian women: staying young, sexy, and beautiful.

Jogo do Bicho

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A review of Laws of Chance: Brazil’s Clandestine Lottery and the Making of Urban Public Life, Amy Chazkel, Duke University Press, 2011.

Amy Chazkel

The Jogo do Bicho, a number game based on animal figures, has often been described as Brazil’s national vice. It is part of the local urban landscape, just as pachinko defines Japan’s popular culture or PMU is a component of Parisian café life. The difference is that whereas pachinko parlors and PMU counters operate under the law, the Jogo do Bicho is a clandestine lottery that takes place in the shadow of the informal economy. Born on the outskirts of the zoo in Rio de Janeiro around 1890, it has thrived in a gray area between the legal and the illegal, and has been pushed into clandestinity by police repression. Understanding how this great partake between the lawful and the unlawful was made, and chronicling Brazilian citizen’s engagement with the state by way of an illegal activity, is the subject of Laws of Chance, a fine piece of scholarship published in the Radical History Review Book Series at Duke University Press.

A clandestine lottery in the shadow of the informal economy

The Jogo do Bicho has already attracted quite a deal of scholarly interest. Rudyard Kipling, visiting Rio in the 1920s, wrote of seeing bookies wandering the streets carrying placards with colorful pictures of animals. Roger Caillois, a French public intellectual, showed that the game was bound to a system of forecasting the future through dream interpretation, with its own code, classics, and expert interpreters. Gilberto Freyre, probably the most famous of all Brazilian sociologists, described the Jogo do Bicho as a holdover from Brazil’s indigenous and African totemic past. A common tendency of these authors has been to link the game to irrational forces: dream, superstition, fetishism, paganism. The Jogo do Bicho is seen either as a relic of the past or as a way by which tradition encrusts itself upon the modern.

By contrast, Amy Chazkel shows the Jogo do Bicho as a thoroughly modern and rational phenomenon. It became popular at just the moment urbanization and consumer capitalism took hold, and must be interpreted as the product of modernity rather than a refuge from it. It is based on numbers, with elaborate combinations that require the skills of a mathematician as much as the intuition of a dream interpreter. It is part of the money economy, and can be seen as an alternative to saving or insuring against future events. More generally, Amy Chazel distances herself from macro explanations such as invocations to culture, psychology, societal laws, or tradition. To invoke such determining factors is to lose the specificity of historicl causality. The Jogo do Bicho has to be studied at close range, without imposing anachronistic analytical categories, and by paying attention to the few traces the game left in the archives: police records of the arrests of buyers and sellers, judicial cases when these convicts were brought to justice, references to the game in popular culture and in legislation.

Brazil’s only reliable institution

Most commentators on Brazilian culture have marveled at the reliability of the clandestine lottery. “In the Jogo do Bicho, what’s written down counts,” says a local proverb, and the game has sometimes been described as Brazil’s only reliable institution. In his classic work on the sociology of games and play, Roger Caillois comments on the “scrupulous honesty” of the bicheiro, the lottery dealer. Writing in the late 1930s, Stefan Zweig also testified to the reliability of these underworld figures: “In order to avoid the police checking up on the jogo do bicho they played on agreement. The bookmaker didn’t supply his clients with tickets, but he has never been known not to pay up.” Amy Chazel exposes the scrupulous honesty of the bicheiro as part truth and part fiction. The lottery dealer lived by his word: no legal recourse was available if he refused to pay for the winning number. The internal logic of the game and its code of ethics surpassed, in the eyes of ordinary Brazilians, the legitimacy and reliability of the judicial system that censured it. But there were cases where the bicheiro and the banqueiro who backed him refused to pay, either due to turf wars and petty infighting, or because a fortuitous event (say, the death of the elephant in the zoo) had induced a large number of ticket buyers to play the winning animal.

Popular writings on the Jogo do Bicho have long underscored its longevity and popularity in the face of police repression. For sociologists of deviance, it is the law that creates crime. The Jogo do Bicho did not begin as a unitary, distinct practice operating outside the law. Its criminalization brought it into existence by both joining disparate, informal lotteries under a single criminal nomenclature and creating an illicit source of income for police through paybacks and corruption. Yet reversing the causal arrow between criminality and policing does not give full justice to the way the Jogo de Bicho operated. It posits the existence of a clear dividing line between the legal and the illegal, whereas this distinction is precisely the result of negotiated compromises and mutual encroachments. According to Amy Chazkel, “law is, in both form and function, an integral part of society, not something outside it.” She uses the informal lottery as an example of how law and society constitute and interact with each other. Likewise, state and state actors have to be included in the realm of the informal and unofficial which they contribute to create and sustain.

How the “animal game” escaped from the zoo

The Baron de Drummond is commonly credited with creating the game as a marketing tool for promoting the zoological garden that he had created in the new urban settlement of Vila Isabel at the periphery of Rio de Janeiro. Drummond requested a concession from the city government to operate a game that, it was hoped, would raise the zoo out of insolvency without depleting the city’s coffers. Every ticket to the zoo bore the image of an animal, and early each day the baron himself would randomly select one of the twenty-five animals printed on the tickets. Tickets were soon being sold by independent bookmakers or “bicheiros” to those who hadn’t even visited the zoo. By 1895 lottery “bankers,” or banqueiros, unaffiliated with Drummond were taking bets of their own on the outcome of the drawing at the zoo and paying winners out of their own earnings. It did not take authorities long to notice the Jogo do Bicho and remark on its patent illegality. Within months, the municipal government made its first attempt to shut down the game. The animal lottery simply shifted to a new habitat in the city centre, an environment in which it has thrived ever since. Once dissociated from the zoo, it took the outcome of the licit lottery to determine the winning number associated with one of the twenty-five animal series. Jogo do Bicho tickets began to appear among the merchandise offered for sale in kiosks that sold snacks and coffee on street corners. The “animal game” had escaped from the zoo, and would develop in conjunction with police repression and legal jurisdiction.

City authorities who banned the game stated that “games of chance depending upon luck… are prohibited in all times in Roman law and in our own Penal Code.” Yet entrepreneurs like Drummond who set up lotteries at first operated legally, and there was a National Lottery that brought revenue to the public coffers. Indeed the Jogo do Bicho challenged the legal lottery concessionaires with unwanted competition, and they actively petitioned the city government to suppress it. It was only in 1946 that all forms of gambling in Brazil were legally banned, after repression had taken an increasingly moralistic tone. It is no coincidence that the Jogo do Bicho emerged amid Rio’s social upheavals and alteration in its urban environment in the early First Republic, at just the moment it became urgent to demarcate the formal from the informal in myriad realms of urban society. The state attempted to modernize the city by signing concession contracts with large companies to provide the city with public work and infrastructure, including docks, public lighting and other utilities, roads, and civil construction, as well as entertainment and retail commerce. Corruption occurred regularly not only in determining who could win contracts and sinecures, but also in the complicity of public officials with monopoly-seeking concessionaires wishing to suppress competition by making spurious accusations of illegal practices.

The criminalization of everyday life

Amy Chazkel describes this privatization of urban space as a process of enclosure akin to the “enclosure of the commons” that marked the transition from medieval agrarian societies to modern capitalist economies. Alternatively, she uses the expression “criminalization of everyday life” to describe how some parts of the public domain formerly outside the state’s purview came to be associated with public disorder and criminal activity. Jogo de Bicho dealers, unlicensed street vendors, and other participants in Rio’s nascent informal economy were entangled in a struggle over de facto rights and access to resources and became part of the way both the state and the market operated. There was a subtext of moral panic behind urban modernizers’ battle cry of “Ordem e Progresso.” Practices common in the poor and working classes such as gambling, vagrancy, begging, prostitution, and drinking, as well as the martial art called capoeira, were criminalized as part of the authoritarian politics of “enlightened intolerance” that accompanied urban modernization. The issue of public order in Rio and other cities was made more pressing by the explosive growth of the urban population and the flood of immigrants from southern Europe, as well as by racial anxieties following the abolition of slavery.

The criminalization of the Jogo do Bicho was always ambivalent and contested. Compelling evidence shows a lack of consensus within Brazilian society as to whether the state should permit and regulate the game or outlaw it and punish its participants as criminals. During the period from the game’s origin to around 1917 it appears that virtually no one who was arrested for playing the Jogo do Bicho was evec convicted, fined, or handed a prison sentence. The unusually high rate of acquittal in cases of illicit gambling resulted from the wide discretionary power judges and police exercised, but also from the shared belief that “this was only a game”. Above all, men and women of all socioeconomic backgrounds showed their approval of the game simply by buying and selling chances to win. It doesn’t mean the law was ineffective: it protected the interests of the legal lottery concessionnaires, and it gave the police a blanket authorization to intrude into the lives of the working classes. For the poor urban population, most daily interactions with the state occurred at the level of the street police. The policeman was, in effect, the state, and his authority to control and arrest manifested the state’s coercive power over the everyday life of citizens.

A major work of imaginative historical scholarship

I read Laws of Chance as part of a survey of modern anthropological writings, many of which are published by Duke University Press. I would recommend it not only to historians of Brazil and Latin America, but also to anthropologists or sociologists working on contemporary terrains and to scholars engaged in critical studies. This book is proof that you can conduct anthropological work without resorting to participant observation. Familiarity with the archive—and especially with menial, obscure texts and artefacts that have so far escaped the purview of historians—gives a unique perspective into the life-world of ordinary people. Although the topic of a clandestine lottery in early twentieth-century Brazil may appear as mundane and recondite, it allows for a gripping narrative, full of twists and turns as well as theoretical developments. The informal, the illegal and the marginal appear not as residues of a bygone era that are bound to disappear with the advent of the modern economy, but as constitutive concepts that stand at the center of our modernity. The history of the Jogo do Bicho brings a fresh view on the relationship between the state and society in Brazil in the first decades of the twentieth century. It is a delight to read, as well as a major work of imaginative historical scholarship.