Consumption Markets & Culture

Brazil: a reorientation of the centre of the world – from the future

In 1941, Stefan Zweig published “Brazil: Land of the Future” with his impression of the country from 1936. In the book, Zweig celebrated the country’s potential by describing it as an idyllic melting pot of peoples and cultures. Such a portrait evoked a direct contrast to Europe, which had become a place of turmoil facing multiple conflicts (e.g., the Spanish Civil War) and the rise of fascism in World War II. For Zweig, Brazil evoked the experience of living in the future – a better future. Such an idealised notion has pervaded the country’s own imagination for decades, evoking a cruel optimism – that is, an attachment to the promise of a reachable better future that cannot be delivered or sustained through the liberal-capitalist systems (Berlant 2011) within and beyond the country.

In the last decades, for example, public policies have tried to frame and arrange the great majority of Brazilian citizens as a new social class – “the class C” – boosting its consumption habits and patterns. The interconnectedness of consumption and public policies, intertwined with the idea of “consumer citizenship” in a country in which basic social issues are not met (e.g., literacy levels, basic health and hunger indicators), formed the basis for very ambiguous social movements (Fontenelle and Pozzebon 2021) that, ultimately, led to a conservative and rightwing political strengthening. The rise of Jair Bolsonaro to the country’s presidency and Bolsonarismo as “a real convergence of different trends in Brazilian society (Nunes 2020, p. 3)” are examples of the violent, anti-democratic, and contradictory dynamics in place in current times, which can be seen as manifestations of cannibal capitalism (Fraser 2022). After all, as Fraser alerts us, “by virtue of its inherent structure, then, capitalism is fundamentally antidemocratic (p. 122).”

Brazil then seems to resonate in synchronicity with the global neoliberal restructuring and its imperative for exploration in the Global North and expropriation in the Global South. This way, in this SI, we invite researchers to reconsider Zweig’s proposition and look at Brazil as a place that has experienced the future. Not an idyllic one, though, but a future permeated by contradictions, failures, and even by the downfall of the world as we know it, something already experienced by the country’s indigenous populations (Brum 2021; Fontenelle 2024; Krenak 2020).

In other words, in this special issue, we would like to revisit this idea of what the future holds – as a mirror of capitalism’ promises – and what is the place of Brazil in this process. This special issue then aims to shift the centre of the marketing discipline to Brazil, as an illustration of the Global South – or even as a problematisation of the Western-Non-Western spectrum (as with other Latin American countries) (Mignolo 2000). We echo Eliane Brum’s (2021) call for a reorientation of the centre of the world – from Western cities such as London, Paris, and New York to the Amazon (in her case, more specifically to Altamira). For her (and for us), such reorientations are needed for exploring the multiple dynamics that often become concealed in marketing theory as well in marketing practice.

The kaleidoscopic scope of this SI

In this SI, which focuses on revisiting the idea of what future holds, we aim to cover multiple and even contrasting papers on Brazil – the good, the bad and the ugly. Previous studies on Brazil have already highlighted the good: Brazil’s flourishing and creative arts market (Brandellero 2022), football culture (McDonagh 2017), religious syncretism (Rodner and Preece 2019; Santana and Botelho 2019); Scaraboto and Figueiredo 2017), urban activism (Magalhães Lopes et al. 2021), and, certainly, the carnival (DaMatta 1991). Whereas other studies have also covered the bad and the ugly: the almost oppressive and colonial based cult of the physical body (Viotto, Zanette, and Britto 2021; Zanette and Scaraboto 2024), the marketplace exclusion and violence (Castilhos 2019, 2024; Magalhães Lopes 2023), the rise of conservatism (Barros et al. 2024; Fontenelle and Pozzebon 2021; Rosenthal and Airoldi 2024), and precarity of work, especially the work of non-white Brazilians (Lage and Rodrigues 2021; Teixeira 2021).

Although such studies have started to highlight the country’s multiple facets, we would like to further explore the multiplicity of contexts, populations, perspectives, and theories that can embrace both the diversity and the incoherences of Brazil. Such variety has the aim to start reading Brazil through its epistemological openings rather than its territorial boundaries. After all, it is hard to think about one Brazil as there are multiple “Brazils” inside Brazil.

With its continental proportions, the country can be seen as a complex tapestry filled with particularities and contradictions. Brazil is the world’s fifth-largest country by area (8.5 million km2, about the size of the continental United States) and the seventh most populous with 203 million people in 2023 (World Bank 2024). Its population is highly diverse, including indigenous Americans and the descendants of African slaves and European settlers (including but not limited to Portuguese settlers). With a real GDP per capita of US$9,032 in 2023 (World Bank 2024), it faces one of the highest rates of inequality in the world (Oxfam n.d.): “Brazil’s six richest men have the same wealth as poorest 50 percent of the population; around 100 million people.”

These multiple Brazils are often overshadowed by the country’s association with the Amazon rainforest, one of its six biomes (IBGE 2004). At the same time, the importance of the Amazon cannot be underestimated. The delimitation of the Amazon (called Legal Amazon, Amazônia Legal) covers a territory larger than the European Union. Whereas Amazon still encompasses pockets of humans and more-than-humans living in a symbiotic relationship (Descola 2013; Kopenawa and Albert 2015; Viveiros de Castro 2015, 2020), a great part of the region is marked with dehumanising processes (Brum 2021) and marketplace violence (Varman 2018; Varman and Al-Amoudi 2016; Varman and Vijay 2018). Indigenous populations and beiradeiros (traditional communities that are linked with the rubber cycle exploration in the area) have been fundamental to the reproduction of the Amazon ecosystem at the same time they face the violent breakdown of the world as they know it (Brum 2021; Fontenelle 2024; Krenak 2024). Their realities are one that collapses living and dying in the amalgam of deforestation and dehumanisation which can be traced to Western ideals of development and consumption (Brum 2021).

The role of the state in supporting such ideals is crucial. Public policies in Brazil have relied on consumption and increasing consumer purchasing power to create a ‘better life’ (Pinheiro-Machado and Scalco 2023). Multiple mainstream public policies (e.g., Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programmes since 2003, contemporary urban revitalisation processes in multiple cities, and Amazon’s development policies – from the 70s during dictatorship until more recent ones, such as the development of the hydroelectric dam complex Belo Monte) have an underlying assumption that progress and development policies must build infrastructures for one possibility of life – a life for consumption. In fact, such development policies have contributed to the production of conditions of vulnerability and poverty (Brum 2021) for the realisation of the consumer – a Western ideal engrained in neoliberal-colonial normativity (Magalhães Lopes 2023).

This SI aims to join the growing effort to decolonise the marketing field (Eckhardt et al., 2021), in addition to contribute to the discussion on the politics of consumption and markets (without disregarding the role of the state). Decolonizing the marketing field, with a focus on ‘consumption, markets and culture’, also implies pointing out how much the academic field in Brazil – and consumption studies, in particular – has been and continues to be deeply a ‘consumer’ of the epistemologies and theories from the Global North, in a process of assimilation and acculturation typical of a colonized country (Candido 2007). We then also question how we can produce knowledge in and about Brazil – from the perspective of consumption, markets, and culture – considering our own ontological and epistemological standpoints that prevent our ideas from being out of place (Schwarz 2000).

Building our own field of research on consumption in Brazil requires that we place ourselves on the international scene from a perspective that goes beyond a mere offer of empirical data packaged by imported theories; rather, it requires that we think about the space-time of consumption in the (de)construction of Brazil as well as its promise of a future that seems to be increasingly ancestral (Krenak, 2022). Brazilian social thinkers have previously reflected on Brazil in an original way, producing their own first-rate theory, however overlooking sociocultural aspects of consumption (Candido 2007; Oliveira 2018; Schwarz 2000). Based mostly on Marxist traditions, it dismisses the role of consumption in the context of capitalism as a social formation. And yet, as Harvey (2013) says, consumption is a foundational field, for comprehending cultural and political world themes. Producing original studies about consumption, from a Brazilian perspective, brings a new epistemological position, that is, above all, political (Viveiros de Castro, 2015).

With such political and epistemological interrogations, through this call for papers (CfP), we welcome studies that:

− Cover the multiple facets of Brazil as a continental country that is the home of 200 million inhabitants where many of them are fully integrated into a life of consumption (e.g., studies on status and luxury), whereas others remain excluded from consumption of basic needs (e.g., market exclusion and consumer vulnerability);

− Explore the complex dynamics that interconnect the multiple Global Souths and Global Norths as well as new lines of critique emerging from Brazil that follows other calls questioning the Westernized episteme of the marketing discipline (e.g., Kravets & Varman, 2022) by engaging with Brazilian authors (e.g., Aílton Krenak, Déborah Danowski, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Paulo Freire);

− Unpack the processes of co-creation of colonialism and violence (see Mbembe, 2020) – including but not limited to dehumanisation – through market fundamentalism interrelating local interests with hegemonic forces (e.g., studies linking modern slavery with market systems);

− Explore cultural and consumer manifestations of art, aesthetics, and resistance which emerge in complex scenarios where exclusion and resilience co-exist; and

− Examine the impact of Brazilian culture outside of Brazil, and how such impact reflects the contradictions, but also singularities, of the country.

Please, note that this list is not exhaustive. We are looking for works on multiple topics that traverse Brazil in its ontological and epistemological multiplicity (i.e., the call includes but is not limited to the topics mentioned above).

References

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Brandellero, A. 2022. How art market actors experience market emergence in an unequal field: placing Brazilian contemporary art in the global art market. Consumption Markets & Culture 25 (6): 525–545.

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