Samba and seriousness
Carnival in Brazil invites all to participate in the celebration of sound and dance. Offspring of Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, German, Lebanese and Japanese immigrants mix with the descendants of slaves forced from Western Africa — and a not insignificant number of tourists — to celebrate the pre-Lenten festival.
Of course, Brazilians don't need the spirit of carnival to display their warmth and generosity, as it is a relational society. Identity is defined by a web of extended family and friends. The country clubs of major cities are populated by people with shared backgrounds in high school and university; it is less common than in the USA to permanently move across state lines. Although an air bridge now served by discount airlines connects Rio and Sao Paulo, the traditional Carioca and Paulista rivalries remain.Brazilians invest their time in others. Weekends will find families and friends gathered, often at cafes lining coastal landscapes or in chic malls, shooting the breeze over a well-chilled chope or beer. That Brazil has become one of the most networked societies as measured by participation in Facebook or its domestic Orkut is not surprising; Brazilians connect to those they call friends. A foreigner is welcome — and a token of a reciprocal willingness to reach out to become a little bit Brazilian is most appreciated.
Do not, however, allow the late social dinners and the lazy Sundays offutbal, or soccer, fool you into thinking that Brazilians don't have a hardworking streak. Both the poor in the informal sector and the professional class put in long hours at work. If a Brazilian is late for a meeting it is more likely attributable to a broken-down bus or long traffic jam than it is to inattention to time. The warm mixing of social classes on a Copacabana beach also belies the rigid stratification in society. Yale trained Edmar Bacha (b.
1942) first coined the phrase Belindia in 1974 to capture the notion of a country divided by the elite standards of Belgium entangled with poverty as experienced in India. Although contemporary lines are blurring with the emergence of a new middle class and recent attention has been paid to race as a criterion for access to university, what is often portrayed as a racial democracy is highly segmented along lines of color. A quick visual survey of skin tone on a bus anecdotally confirms that Brazil is the largest African nation outside of Nigeria. Although the sociologist Gilberto Freyre (1900—87) tried to recast modern Brazil as a racial mixing bowl, skin-tone has long been a major determinant of economic class (Skidmore, 2010, 105).The Brazilian State has historically acted as a broker of the complexities of Brazilao. Geographic, economic, and social fragmentations are managed by a state that attempts to drive consensus among widely disparate Brazilians. Finding a way — or as it is called, jeitinho — of bridging divides falls to both state and federal agencies. States are powerful in this federal system; through a byzantine system of taxes called the ICMS (Impostosobre Circulaςao de Mercadorias e. Servιcos), states retain resources to proffer regional solutions and garner power. The federal government layers over local solutions with a federal glue, making Brazil one of the highest tax environments in the world. Brokering the different needs of industrial clusters, mega-cities, agricultural breadbaskets, energy wells, and deep rural poverty, the state is often over-reaching its capacity to effectively manage economic transformation. One can also observe a high degree of “leakage,” as the state churns European-level taxes, yet glaring gaps appear in the delivery of education, health, or transportation services. Corrupςdo is on the lips of most Brazilians as they explain abysmal outcomes in the social sector or national infrastructure, when improved social well-being fails to materialize.