Consumption Intensified: the Politics of Middle-Class Daily Life in Brazil.

By Maureen O'Dougherty. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. 224pp.).

In the 1980s and early 1990s Brazilians suffered a traumatic bout with hyperinflation. The urban middle classes that had expanded significantly in the early 1970s during the heady years of double-digit yearly GNP growth, known at the time as Brazil's "Economic Miracle," saw their consumption possibilities shrink as prices out-paced income and wages. The economic measures implemented by two-term president Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1994-2002) to cut inflation and stabilize the currency account in large part for his two electoral victories over his principal opponent, Workers' Party candidate and former metalworker Luis Ignacio "Lula" da Silva. Exhausted from endless shopping binges to find bargain prices, insecure over employment and an overall slip in their standard of living, these urban sectors wanted stability. For those families who aspired to a nice car, a comfortable house, and private schools for their children, the new government promised economic and political tranquility.

Consumption Intensified artfully examines the trials and tribulations of those caught in the middle between an economic elite with one of the world's greatest percentages of income concentration and the massive numbers of poor Brazilians with little hope for upward mobility. The author's anthropologically inflected close reading of the lives of a cluster of Paulistanos, residents of the Sao Paulo, the capital city of the state of Sao Paulo and South America's largest megalopolis, offers insightful analyses about how those in the middle class define their identity through everyday practices and discourses. The author argues that while education and the unwillingness to engage in manual labor have traditionally marked the identity of the Brazilian middle class vis a vis the working class, material consumption has now become the core notion of a shared collectivity. Moreover, even though some scholars have suggested that the process of globalization might blur class distinctions as different social classes have access to foreign consumer items, Maureen O'Dougherty insists that class identity remains reified in the midst of a greater international exchange of goods.

Rather than attempting to untie one of sociologists' Gordian knots by offering an abstract, quantitative definition of the middle class, Maureen O'Doughtery looked to her informants for an answer. With rare exceptions, owning a house and a car were the defining measurements for middle-classdom. Added to this was a notion of educational and cultural superiority, especially for those from the lower social strata who may have only recently acquired these two markers of the middle class. At a time when the economy pulled people downward, the author examined the strategies employed to maintain these status symbols, among them the obligatory trip to Disneyland with a shopping spree stopover in Miami and the resurgence of an interest in debutante balls. Although dais reviewer is not convinced that the latter is a fashion that will stay in style very long, the point is that these two rituals, the trip and the ball, help define and shape middle-class identity. A middle-class child simply cannot survive socially among pre-teen peers if she or he has not been to Orlando. Narratives about the journey become an important vehicle for establishing and reinforcing social position. Moreover, the cultural capital allegedly acquired through foreign travel melds with a desire to experience the "modern." Since package tours and monthly payments have made these sojourns reasonably affordable, the Brazilian middle class (and in this respect the author's analysis applies to most of the Latin American middle class), can engage in a pilgrimage that syntholizes economic success, it also allows middle sectors to claim a link to a cosmopolitan culture and economy that is different, even "superior" to their own.

The author also examines how the mass media has packaged an image of the middle class that is also subject to consumption. Thus, rather than becoming active participants in changing the social, political, and economic reality of the country, O'Dougherty argues that during the period of hyperinflation, the middle class became self-absorbed consumers. Their preoccupation with television news watching, she insists, was a repetitive attempt to find out what was happening to their class, in part to measure how they were standing up in relationship to the others of their own social group. Although hundreds of thousands of middle class youth poured into the streets to demand the impeachment of President Fernando Collor de Mello in 1992, the author suggests that their motivation was ethical rather than political. Impelled by a sense of betrayal that the presidential candidate who had defeated Lula, a "mere" metalworker, had frozen their bank accounts and then engaged in massive corruption, they took to the streets. It was, however, an ephemeral moment of political mobilization.

Examining a slice of modern Brazilian history to measure the impact that the economy has had over how the middle sectors have defined and redefined themselves in a period of economic and political instability runs certain risks. In a time of runaway inflation and eroding buying power, it would seem almost obvious that a consumer fixation on acquiring food or other goods at affordable prices would be at the forefront of everyone's concerns. Yet the author has chosen a historical moment and used the quotidian lives of middle sectors caught in eye of an economic tornado to reflect on more profound questions about how a social class understands itself in turbulent times. This has important implications well beyond the decade or so under investigation. One could argue that the reaction of important sectors of the Brazilian middle class to the economic, political, and social upheavals in the early 1960s helped pave the way for twenty-one years of military rule. Likewise, the response of those in the middle to Lula's election and possible future moments of instability may be a determining factor in the fate of the country for the next decade. Thus, this study in its gaze over the recent past, may also offer insights into things to come.

James N. Green

California State University