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

Abstract

Middle-class Brazilian homes are graceful and gracious.Welcomed in from the hot sun into the cool, soothingly uncluttered interior, the visitor is o√ered refreshment, and later enjoined to dine with the family.If the stay is an extended one, the guest returns after a morning out to smells rising from this and neighboring kitchens of beans cooking and of fresh fruit being squeezed for the midday meal.The solicitous hostess has arranged for the cook to prepare three main dishes: a beef in tomato sauce, a pasta dish, and garlic chicken, or on a special day, seafood in palm oil and coconut sauce.The hostess's arrival, after her morning's work as volunteer director of an orphanage school, and a quick stop downtown to deliver fabric to the tailor, coincides with that of her husband, a doctor, whose light honk summons the maid to open the back gate.The two daughters arrive from their law-and medical-school studies; the son, in business school, will have lunch as usual with his fiancée.After lunch, one finds upstairs that the bedroom has been straightened, and one's freshly hand-laundered, perfectly ironed clothes lay carefully folded or hanging from the wardrobe.The austere white walls and dark wood furniture, the cool parquet floors constantly swept, mopped, or waxed by a softly moving domestic worker, the long, laterally opening, wooden shuttered windows, the shaded tiled terrace, the distinctive, predictable sounds of each street vendor, the back garden with its scent of jasmine, the night breeze gently moving the mosquito netting.Tropical, postcolonial luxury, intimacy, and formality present themselves with mesmerizing calm to the fortunate visitor at an upper-middle-class Brazilian home.Backtracking, the visitor might note that privately contracted guards watch neighborhood streets or individual houses, whose high walls and barred windows further discourage intrusion.If the home is in an apartment building, tall gates and twenty-four-hour doormen control entrances from guard stations.Inside, two elevators separate residents and their guests from service workers, a (now notorious) system that segregates by color as well as by class or occupation.In this society, such