Overview

Brazil changed drastically in the 21st century’s second decade. In 2010, the country’s outgoing president Lula left office with almost 90% approval. As the presidency passed to his Workers' Party successor, Dilma Rousseff, many across the world hailed Brazil as a model of progressive governance in the Global South. Yet, by 2019, those progressive gains were being dismantled as the far right-wing politician Jair Bolsonaro assumed the presidency of a bitterly divided country. Digging beneath this pendulum swing of policy and politics, and drawing on rich ethnographic portraits, Precarious Democracy shows how these transformations were made and experienced by Brazilians far from the halls of power. Bringing together powerful and intimate stories and portraits from Brazil's megacities to rural Amazonia, this volume demonstrates the necessity of ethnography for understanding social and political change, and provides crucial insights on one of the most epochal periods of change in Brazilian history.  

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9781978825666

Table of Contents

Reviews

"""Precarious Democracy presents a kaleidoscopic view of contemporary Brazil through a rich collection of ethnographies and a range of thoughtful analyses and insights about ordinary people throughout the country as they respond in multiple ways to the rise and political consolidation of the far-right in recent years. It is essential reading for understanding what is going on in Brazil today."" -- James N. Green * author of Exile within Exiles: Herbert Daniel, Gay Brazilian Revolutionary * ""This collection offers rich, theoretically evocative ethnographies on a range of sites seldom brought together in a single volume, from family frictions that expose the polarization of the past decade to guns and the performance of masculinity to Black queer resilience amid Brazil’s rightward shift. The assembled cases foreground feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial epistemologies and shed unique light on Brazil’s 'unraveling,' bringing into view the precarity often underlying formal democratic arrangements, even, or perhaps especially, those governed by the Left."" -- Sonia E. Alvarez * co-editor of Beyond Civil Society: Activism, Participation, and Protest in Latin America * ""Precarious Democracy presents a kaleidoscopic view of contemporary Brazil through a rich collection of ethnographies and a range of thoughtful analyses and insights about ordinary people throughout the country as they respond in multiple ways to the rise and political consolidation of the far-right in recent years. It is essential reading for understanding what is going on in Brazil today."" -- James N. Green * author of Exile within Exiles: Herbert Daniel, Gay Brazilian Revolutionary * ""This collection offers rich, theoretically evocative ethnographies on a range of sites seldom brought together in a single volume, from family frictions that expose the polarization of the past decade to guns and the performance of masculinity to Black queer resilience amid Brazil’s rightward shift. The assembled cases foreground feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial epistemologies and shed unique light on Brazil’s 'unraveling,' bringing into view the precarity often underlying formal democratic arrangements, even, or perhaps especially, those governed by the Left."" -- Sonia E. Alvarez * co-editor of Beyond Civil Society: Activism, Participation, and Protest in Latin America *"

This collection offers rich, theoretically evocative ethnographies on a range of sites seldom brought together in a single volume, from family frictions that expose the polarization of the past decade to guns and the performance of masculinity to Black queer resilience amid Brazil's rightward shift. The assembled cases foreground feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial epistemologies and shed unique light on Brazil's 'unraveling, ' bringing into view the precarity often underlying formal democratic arrangements, even, or perhaps especially, those governed by the Left. --Sonia E. Alvarez co-editor of Beyond Civil Society: Activism, Participation, and Protest in Latin America Precarious Democracy presents a kaleidoscopic view of contemporary Brazil through a rich collection of ethnographies and a range of thoughtful analyses and insights about ordinary people throughout the country as they respond in multiple ways to the rise and political consolidation of the far-right in recent years. It is essential reading for understanding what is going on in Brazil today. --James N. Green author of Exile within Exiles: Herbert Daniel, Gay Brazilian Revolutionary

"""This collection offers rich, theoretically evocative ethnographies on a range of sites seldom brought together in a single volume, from family frictions that expose the polarization of the past decade to guns and the performance of masculinity to Black queer resilience amid Brazil's rightward shift. The assembled cases foreground feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial epistemologies and shed unique light on Brazil's 'unraveling, ' bringing into view the precarity often underlying formal democratic arrangements, even, or perhaps especially, those governed by the Left.""--Sonia E. Alvarez ""co-editor of Beyond Civil Society: Activism, Participation, and Protest in Latin America"" ""Precarious Democracy presents a kaleidoscopic view of contemporary Brazil through a rich collection of ethnographies and a range of thoughtful analyses and insights about ordinary people throughout the country as they respond in multiple ways to the rise and political consolidation of the far-right in recent years. It is essential reading for understanding what is going on in Brazil today.""--James N. Green ""author of Exile within Exiles: Herbert Daniel, Gay Brazilian Revolutionary"""

""Precarious Democracy presents a kaleidoscopic view of contemporary Brazil through a rich collection of ethnographies and a range of thoughtful analyses and insights about ordinary people throughout the country as they respond in multiple ways to the rise and political consolidation of the far-right in recent years. It is essential reading for understanding what is going on in Brazil today."" - James N. Green (author of Exile within Exiles: Herbert Daniel, Gay Brazilian Revolutionary) ""This collection offers rich, theoretically evocative ethnographies on a range of sites seldom brought together in a single volume, from family frictions that expose the polarization of the past decade to guns and the performance of masculinity to Black queer resilience amid Brazil’s rightward shift. The assembled cases foreground feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial epistemologies and shed unique light on Brazil’s 'unraveling,' bringing into view the precarity often underlying formal democratic arrangements, even, or perhaps especially, those governed by the Left."" - Sonia E. Alvarez (co-editor of Beyond Civil Society: Activism, Participation, and Protest in Latin America) ""Precarious Democracy presents a kaleidoscopic view of contemporary Brazil through a rich collection of ethnographies and a range of thoughtful analyses and insights about ordinary people throughout the country as they respond in multiple ways to the rise and political consolidation of the far-right in recent years. It is essential reading for understanding what is going on in Brazil today."" - James N. Green (author of Exile within Exiles: Herbert Daniel, Gay Brazilian Revolutionary) ""This collection offers rich, theoretically evocative ethnographies on a range of sites seldom brought together in a single volume, from family frictions that expose the polarization of the past decade to guns and the performance of masculinity to Black queer resilience amid Brazil’s rightward shift. The assembled cases foreground feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial epistemologies and shed unique light on Brazil’s 'unraveling,' bringing into view the precarity often underlying formal democratic arrangements, even, or perhaps especially, those governed by the Left."" - Sonia E. Alvarez (co-editor of Beyond Civil Society: Activism, Participation, and Protest in Latin America)

Author Information

BENJAMIN JUNGE is a professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at New Paltz. He is the author of Cynical Citizenship: Gender, Regionalism and Political Subjectivity in Porto Alegre, Brazil and co-editor of Lived Religion and Lived Citizenship.  SEAN T. MITCHELL is an associate professor of anthropology at Rutgers University-Newark. He is the author of the award-winning, Constellations of Inequality: Space, Race, and Utopia in Brazil and co-editor of Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency. ALVARO JARRÍN is an associate professor of anthropology at The College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. He is the author of The Biopolitics of Beauty: Cosmetic Citizenship and Affective Capital in Brazil and co-editor of Remaking the Human: Cosmetic Technologies of Body Repair, Reshaping, and Replacement.   LUCIA CANTERO is an assistant professor of international studies at the University of San Francisco, California. She is the author of The Waste of Accumulation: The ‘Shock of Order’ Campaign and the Right to Rio 2016. 

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