Books About Brazil

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In this groundbreaking study of the Workers` Party-the first legal mass party on the left in Brazil`s recent history-Margaret E. Keck sheds new light on significant changes in Brazilian political organization and society over the past two decades. Her book not only clarifies political movements in Brazil and Latin America but also gives insights into attempts in any country to create democratic parties that represent the popular classes.

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The Workers` Party and Democratization in Brazil

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Provides an introduction to Brazil using a question-and-answer format that discusses land features, government, housing, transportation, industries, education, sports, art forms, holidays, food, and family life. Includes a map, facts, and charts.

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Brazil: A Question and Answer Book

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Capoeira is a unique music-dance-sport-play activity created by African slaves in Brazil, and Candombl‚ is a hybrid religion combining Catholic and African beliefs and practices. The two are closely interconnected. Capoeira and Candombl‚ have for centuries made up a coherent form of Brazilian life, despite having been suppressed by the dominant cultures. Now they are not only widely recognized in Brazil, but have become popular in North America and Europe as a new blend of sports, dance, and holistic approach to many facets of life. For Western audiences, Capoeira performance and Candombl‚ services are fun to watch and participate in, but difficult to understand. Both have apparently familiar elements, but this seeming conformity with the dominant cultures was for 400 years a strategy of resistance by Brazilian slaves. The author offers his own reflections about Capoeira and Candombl‚, combining personal experiences with anecdotes, historical facts, and research as well as religious and philosophical interpretations, both Western and non-Western. The result is informative and entertaining, a description and analysis that allows readers to get a feeling, understanding, and even experience of the spirit of Capoeira and Candombl‚.

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Capoeira and Candomblé: Conformity And Resistance In Brazil

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Samba is Brazil’s “national rhythm,” the foremost symbol of its culture and nationhood. To the outsider, samba and the famous pre-Lenten carnival of which it is the centerpiece seem to showcase the country’s African heritage. Within Brazil, however, samba symbolizes the racial and cultural mixture that, since the 1930s, most Brazilians have come to believe defines their unique national identity.

But how did Brazil become “the Kingdom of Samba” only a few decades after abolishing slavery in 1888? Typically, samba is represented as having changed spontaneously, mysteriously, from a “repressed” music of the marginal and impoverished to a national symbol cherished by all Brazilians. Here, however, Hermano Vianna shows that the nationalization of samba actually rested on a long history of relations between different social groups—poor and rich, weak and powerful—often working at cross-purposes to one another.

A fascinating exploration of the “invention of tradition,” The Mystery of Samba is an excellent introduction to Brazil’s ongoing conversation on race, popular culture, and national identity.

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The Mystery of Samba : Popular Music and National Identity in Brazil

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A welcome addition to the history of the Modern Movement, this new book is a fully illustrated description of modern architecture in Brazil from 1929 to 1959. This unique presentation of the major Modern buildings of Brazil will be of interest to architects, historians and for a non-specialist audience worldwide.

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Brazil Built: The Architecture of the Modern Movement in Brazil

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In This Land Is Ours Now, Wendy Wolford presents an original framework for understanding social mobilization. She argues that social movements are not the politically coherent, bounded entities often portrayed by scholars, the press, and movement leaders. Instead, they are constantly changing mediations between localized moral economies and official movement ideologies. Wolford develops her argument by analyzing how a particular social movement works: Brazil’s Rural Landless Workers’ Movement, known as the Movimento Sem Terra (MST). Founded in the southernmost states of Brazil in the mid-1980s, this extraordinary grassroots agrarian movement grew dramatically in the ensuing years. By the late 1990s it was the most dynamic, well-organized social movement in Brazilian history.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Wolford compares the development of the movement in Brazil’s southern state of Santa Catarina and its northeastern state of Pernambuco. As she explains, in the south, most of the movement’s members were sons and daughters of small peasant farmers; in the northeast, they were almost all former plantation workers, who related awkwardly to the movement’s agenda of accessing “land for those who work it.” The MST became an effective presence in Pernambuco only after the local sugarcane economy had collapsed. Worldwide sugarcane prices dropped throughout the 1990s, and by 1999 the MST was a prominent political organizer in the northeastern plantation region. Yet fewer than four years later, most of the region’s workers had dropped out of the movement. By delving into the northeastern workers’ motivations for joining and then leaving the MST, Wolford adds nuance and depth to accounts of a celebrated grassroots social movement, and she highlights the contingent nature of social movements and political identities more broadly.

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This Land Is Ours Now: Social Mobilization and the Meanings of Land in Brazil

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This is an English-language translation of the culmination of the life work of Darcy Ribeiro, one of Brazil’s leading 20th-century intellectuals, known both for his work in Indian affairs and for his political activism. First published as “O Povo Brasiliero” in 1995, two years before Ribeiro’s death, it quickly became a controversial bestseller. Offering a sweeping overview of the ethnic, racial and social forces that shape Brazilian culture and society, the text presents an aesthetic of the Brazilian people as a whole. While the author dwells on the paradox of Brazil as a country of immense potential hindered by racial and class prejudice, he also describes it as “the most beautiful and luminous province on Earth”. Translated by Gregory Rabassa, this version does justice to the original Portuguese text, with all its idiosyncrasies, intrinsic poetry, epic hyperbole and departure from contemporary US norms of political correctness. It should be useful to all interested in Latin American culture, anthropology, sociology and history, as well as in the theory of culture.

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The Brazilian People: The Formation and Meaning of Brazil

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South American ufologist Irene Granchi has been involved with UFOs for over 50 years and has been studying them intensively for over 30 years. The author offers a plethora of case histories. Brazil has been a hotbed of UFO incidents since the ’50s, and this work serves as both a personal memoir and a scientifically-directed account of the happenings that have occurred there. Irene Granchi has researched the sightings, the report of crash landings and the abduction and cloning cases.

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Ufos and Abductions in Brazil

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This award-winning social history of death and funeral rites during the early decades of Brazil’s independence from Portugal focuses on the Cemiterada movement in Salvador, capital of the province of Bahia. The book opens with a lively account of the popular riot that ensued when, in 1836, the government condemned the traditional burial of bodies inside Catholic church buildings and granted a private company a monopoly over burials.

This episode is used by Reis to examine the customs of death and burial in Bahian society, explore the economic and religious conflicts behind the move for funerary reforms and the maintenance of traditional rituals of dying, and understand how people dealt with new concerns sparked by modernization and science. Viewing culture within its social context, he illuminates the commonalities and differences that shaped death and its rituals for rich and poor, men and women, slaves and masters, adults and children, foreigners and Brazilians.

This translation makes the book, originally published in Brazil in 1993, available in English for the first time.

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Death Is a Festival: Funeral Rites and Rebellion in Nineteenth-Century Brazil

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This is a general survey of Brazilian society, economy, and political system since 1980. It describes the basic changes occurring as Brazil was transformed from a predominantly rural and closed economy under military rule into a modern democratic, industrial and urbanized society, with an extraordinary world class commercial agriculture in the past 60 years. In this period, Brazil passed from a pre-modern high fertility and mortality society to a modern low fertility and mortality one, the economy approached hyper inflation many times, and it abandoned a policy of protected industrialization to an economy opened to world trade. The advances and the failures of these changes are examined for the impact on questions of growth and equality. The book is designed as a basic introduction to contemporary Brazil from a recent historical perspective and is one of the first such comprehensive surveys of recent Brazilian history and development in any language.

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Brazil since 1980

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