The cordial maid: representations of servants in Brazilian adaptations of Eça de Queirós

ABSTRACT

This article considers the ways in which recent Brazilian film and television adaptations of the works of Eça de Queirós portray relationships between servants and their employers. I argue that the adaptations exaggerate certain connections and forge altogether new ones in order to create or emphasise a sense of kinship between people of different social strata.

This newfound familiarity between employer and employee, in relationships that recall Gilberto Freyre’s and Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s theorisation on Brazilian society, breaks some of the fixed hierarchies presented in Eça’s work. Such a change, paradoxically, grants working-class characters much more air time than their original creator would have envisioned, while at the same time emptying the social commentary that derived from the rigid power structures found in the novels. In this context, this article argues that the blurring of class lines in these films and series is quintessentially Brazilian in its use of emotional connection to mask oppression and create a false sense of equality.     

The ‘Regulatory State’ in Higher Education: Assuring Quality through New Modalities of Control in Brazil

The Brazilian Higher Education (HE) sector, following a global trend of rapid transformation, has undergone marked changes over the past two decades. These changes have involved the design of quality assurance tools as instruments for regulatory governance. In presenting an overview of the recent history and characteristics of quality assurance in the Brazilian HE sector, this paper contextualises the Brazilian experience according to broader conceptual frameworks and discusses how and why regulatory governance in this sector has so radically changed.     

Elite Preferences in a Consolidating Democracy: The Brazilian Legislative Surveys, 1990–2009

This article examines key ideological, economic, and institutional preferences of the Brazilian political elite in the first 25 years of the country's present democratic regime. Introducing the unified dataset of the Brazilian Legislative Surveys, it examines several crucial dimensions of politicians' attitudes, including elite placement on a traditional left‐right scale, preferences concerning the fundamental economic model, direct comparisons of the recent Cardoso and Lula governments, and orientations toward Brazil's global and regional projection. On many of the central issues, attitudes have remained stable, but on the dimensions that have seen notable change, nearly all the change has been in the direction of decreasing polarization. In contrast to the experience of some neighboring countries, the Brazilian case demonstrates that the sustained practice of democracy can lead to attitudinal convergence and macro‐political stability, even when the initial political and socioeconomic conditions appear daunting.     

Commissioning,Community, and Conscience

In all societies, collective memory practices are integral parts of local tradition and culture. While the recent “memory boom” has resulted in a massive international proliferation of commemorative monuments and memorials, not enough attention has been paid to cultural differences in the ways societies remember. By comparing processes of commemoration and memorialization in postapartheid South Africa with selected case studies in the USA, this article highlights the definitive role that material culture and tangible objects as containers of memory play in American society, while among black South Africans, oral and performative modes of remembering have traditionally been more important. In both societies, museums and commemorative monuments are promoted as officially sanctioned sites of collective memory, but their public reception differs significantly. It is argued that official forms of commemoration are most successful when they are connected to; flow naturally out of; or stand in a meaningful, symbiotic relationship with, vernacular forms of commemoration. While the tangible aspects of specific commemorative cultures can easily be imitated internationally or cross-culturally, its intangible aspects can never be assumed to transfer automatically.     

The Limits of Civil Society in Democratic Indonesia: Media Freedom and Religious Intolerance

Abstract

Indonesian democracy has been challenged by rising religious intolerance and discriminatory attitudes in civil society since the mid-2000s, despite expanded freedom in many areas including the media. Why has Indonesian civil society been put on the defensive by radical and conservative Islamic elements in the context of democratic consolidation? What role has expanded freedoms and a flourishing of new media and information technologies played? This article argues that two factors have contributed to the rising influence of religious hardliners/radicals and increasing religious intolerance. The first is hardliner access not only to new media but, more importantly, to traditional means and institutions for religious and political mobilisation, including state apparatus, to cultivate antagonistic sentiments and attitudes against what they consider the enemies of Islam within the Muslim communities while disseminating narrow and dogmatic interpretations of Islam. The other is the rise of conservative Muslim politicians within the state who are ready and eager to embrace new media and communication technologies while using the state office and prerogatives to advance conservative religious visions and agendas. In order to assess how those conservative politicians exploit their ministerial prerogatives and state patronage to curtail civil society, particularly the freedom of expression and religion, this article examines two prominent and controversial Muslim politicians: Tifatul Sembiring from the Islamist Prosperous Justice Party and Suryadharma Ali from the United Development Party.     

Views about modern museums in the palaces of the western Grassfields,Cameroon

This article presents the findings from a survey conducted in two museums in the western Grassfields of Cameroon. The purpose of the study was to identify how people feel about the newly constructed museums. Between 2005 and 2006, and also during intermittent visits in 2009, 2010 and 2012, a total of 20 interviews were conducted with museum officials, relevant government departments, as well as local and foreign visitors to the museums. The findings reveal that the population of the region is happy with the museums, regardless of the fact that they are worried about the impact these might have on the royal treasury or traditional palace museum, where the objects were previously stored.     

Corporate Movements in Democratic Brazil: Informal Business Networks,Civil Activism,and Political Influence

Relations between business, state, and civil society in Latin America are conventionally discussed in antagonistic or hierarchical terms. This article challenges this position, developing a qualitative case study tracing the activities of an informal network of Brazilian businesspersons that, over the last three decades, promoted an agenda of sustainability, transparency, and civil society participation. Drawing from concepts in social movement theory, it is argued that a dynamic movement‐like behaviour combining civil activism, organisational entrepreneurship, and fluid political alignment, allowed the group to establish lasting collaborative alliances with core actors in Brazilian democratic politics, and access relevant elite and policy‐making circles.     

The Politics of Police Violence in Democratic Brazil

More than a decade after Latin America's most recent turn to democracy, unchecked police violence and torture continue and in some cases have increased. This study examines police killings in 19 Brazilian states from 1994 to 2001 and finds that democracy has not substantially reduced these types of human rights violations, for two reasons. First, underlying social conflict has continued to exert a significant impact on the lethal use of force by police officers. Second, pro-order political coalitions, generally represented by right-wing politicians, have blocked effective measures to control police violence and have implemented public safety measures that stress the use of force. The analysis emphasizes the nonteleological nature of democratization processes and demonstrates the strength of political forces working to maintain "illiberal democracy."     

(Un?)Healthy Politics: The Political Determinants of Subnational Health Systems in Brazil

How does political competition shape institutions that govern the expansion of social policy subnationally? Brazilian states have shown a surprising variation in the design of their public health institutions, which regulate the distribution of health resources and citizen access to public health care. While many states have experienced fragmentation, some have remained highly centralized and discretionary, and only a select few have established a coordinated system based on power sharing and rules‐based distribution. Accounts that link public health care expansion to federal government imposition, the presence of the public health care movement, and leftist parties cannot fully explain this variation. Instead, in the three Brazilian states examined here, the nature of subnational political competition triggered different institution‐building strategies. The findings indicate that plural political competition yielded incentives for limiting state‐level discretion and for sharing power with municipal governments, while political concentration reinforced the attraction to centralized and discretionary policymaking.     

The EU against the New Normal: Avoiding the Banalization of the Israeli‒Palestinian Dispute

This article assesses the European Union (EU)’s engagement with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and highlights the unintended consequences of the policies pursued by Brussels on this matter. While stressing that Palestinians and Israelis interested in peace face the danger of the banalization of the conflict, the article argues that the current status quo is unacceptable and unstainable in the long run, and this demands new policies from the actors involved with the conflict or its resolution. The EU policies’ overall rationale must be to treat the Israeli?Palestinian dispute as a normal, non-exceptional conflict, in which economic and legal tools can be employed to create new legal facts on the ground. An alternative EU approach to the conflict must recognize the insufficiency of recent initiatives and should be built upon two pillars: the legalization of the main contending issues and the empowerment of the civil society actors and initiatives that foster dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis.     

Changing Narratives of Race and Environment in the Nineteenth‐Century and Early‐Twentieth‐Century Brazilian Amazon

The Amazon has been the object of numerous reflections upon the relationship between the natural environment and the categories of human society. This article analyses Brazilian writers who considered the relations between space and race over the course of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. It focuses on João Henrique de Mattos, José Veríssimo and Euclides da Cunha, placing them in relation to each other and within local, national and international discourses on race, nature and development. Its aim is to examine how a racialised geographical understanding of the Amazon changed over the course of the nineteenth century and was tied to Brazilian nation‐building.     

The Civil Society Discourse in Iran

A survey of recent Iranian books and journal articles reveals four important characteristics about how writers and academics in Iran generally perceive the concept of civil society. First and foremost, the notion of 'civil society' has gone through a substantial process of indigenization. Secondly, those who theorize about the concept see a crucial role in it for the 'rule of law'. This implies, both directly and indirectly, a primary role for the State, 'coexisting in harmony' and functioning as an integral part of civil society. Thirdly, even Iran's secular theorists have not been able to fully evade the gravitational pull of Islam and its overwhelming role in Iranian culture and society. At the very least, they maintain that civil society is possible only after a 'proper' interpretation of Islam gains popular acceptance. Finally, these authors frequently mention the 'image' that non-Iranians have of the Iranian nation. The importance of this self-perception lies in its implications for how the élite literati articulates 'culture' and portrays it to the public and, in turn, to non-Iranians. Essentially, this appears to be where the most lasting consequences of the discovery of 'civil society' in Iran seem to lie: whereas the articulations of Iranian scholars and politicians appear to be little more than a native version of a global academic trend, they seem to have ignited a subtle process of cultural re-orientation and re-articulation under the rubric of religion and an institutionalized Islamic Republican State.     

Participatory Democracy? Exploring Peru's Efforts to Engage Civil Society in Local Governance

As institutions are created to engage citizens and civil society organizations more directly, who participates, and what effect does participation have? This article explores two of Peru's participatory institutions, the Regional Coordination Councils and the participatory budgets, created in 2002. Specifically it asks, once these institutions are set up, do organizations participate in them? and what effect does this participation have on the organizations? The data show that the participatory processes in Peru are including new voices in decisionmaking, but this inclusion has limits. Limited inclusion has, in turn, led to limited changes specifically in nongovernmental organizations. As a result, the democratizing potential of the participatory institutions is evident yet not fully realized.     

Norbert Elias and Postnational Integration

What is the “Civilising Process” according to Norbert Elias? It is the history of the increase in interdependency links, and in their complexity, between individuals. From this perspective, the evolution of European society since the medieval period has seemed to follow a “determined direction” or a “constant orientation” defined by the passage to more and more globalising domination instances. Nowadays the debates arising from the building up of a political Union on a European scale lend new interest to the works of the German sociologist. Starting from the distinction between “objective” functional interdependence and integration, which suggests the development of a collective identity, Elias attempts to explain the gap between the arrival of a new “survival entity” and the growth of a new “definition of “we””. In the case of contemporary Europe, the persistence of national habitus which run counter political integration portrayed nonetheless as ineluctable have to be explained. In order to evaluate the originality of Elias' approach and its relevance to the present philosophical and political issues at stake, the author's “postnational intuitions” have to be confronted with the most recent theoretical orientations, including Dominique Schnapper's national‐democratic option and the “constitutional patriotism” of Jürgen Habermas.     

Looking for Sustainability: Environmental Coalitions across the State-Society Divide

This paper compares environmental policymaking in two Brazilian cities, Rio de Janeiro and Cubatão. It examines the formation of state-society synergistic interactions in the public policymaking process and their effect on long term sustainability of social mobilization. It concludes that whereas social capital can be constructed in the context of policymaking, it is critically dependent on a concerted effort from both state and society actors to build trust in their daily interactions. The Cubatão and Carioca River cases show that state-society synergy had little effect on the ability of the policy coalitions formed for pollution clean up to sustain themselves over time. Instead, there are indications that rather than a constraint, the flexible and informal nature of such coalitions may have been a critical factor in their ability to carry out policy successfully.     

Stones on the Road: The Politics of Participation and the Generation of Crisis in Bolivia

This paper demonstrates that recent protests in Bolivia must be linked to the failure of efforts to improve democratic participation in the country. It argues that such failures can be traced to a history of prejudices in national development and society and persistent biases and contradictions within international development policy and institutions. Despite these obstacles, the paper concludes that ideas for appropriate development and realistic alternatives for change to government and democracy are visible in recent critical development thinking and amongst the different social and cultural groupings involved in the demonstrations.     

Auf dem Weg in eine europäische Gesellschaft?

After half a century of European integration it is legitimate to ask if, how and in how far a ?European society“ has emerged. But how is this difficult notion to be conceptualized? What is European, what denotes society? Following the distinction of unity and difference, this article sets out to discuss the analytical options of the perspective of unity (the model of the nation state, the United States of Europe, a reality sui generis) and of difference (the ?other“ of Europe by comparing Europe to the regions of the world). According to the main thesis, European society denotes a reality sui generis, i.e., is an emergent phenomenon which can neither be conceptualized by the old model of the nation state nor the new notion of world society. European society should be characterized according to its leitmotif of structured diversity, its cultural and historical legacies, its logic of institutional separation and differentiation and its common basic institutional infrastructure. European society, therefore, rests upon a shared historical community of fate and exhibits a multiple unity of economy, work, education, solidarity, law, religion and culture. The engine of Europeanization is the European Union which together with nation states and regions fosters a veritable pressure of convergence upon the European space. Given its taken-for-granted character, the European society is half latent, half manifest, half empirically traceable and analytically conceivable, half normatively desirable or controversial.     

Home-grown strategies for greater agency: reassessing the outcome of civil society strengthening in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan

This paper seeks to reassess the outcome of mainstream civil society promotion policies in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan. While it agrees with critics that the distorting effects of funding relations have meant that the promised ‘grassroots citizen empowerment’ has not been achieved directly through NGOs, it does not agree that NGOs are therefore merely vehicles of the Western ideological agenda and international aid to the Kyrgyzstani population. It argues that the facilitation of international actors has opened up opportunities for individual NGO activists to pursue their own social and political development agendas. In recent years, some activists have begun to use these opportunities to develop strategies through which grassroots interests are represented to decision-makers, and citizens' abilities to represent their own interests are enhanced. The strategies adopted differ from the mainstream civil society model and have allowed some NGOs to function in a manner more relevant to the specific Kyrgyzstani context. This suggests that local Kyrgyzstani NGOs and activists should not all be written off as ‘artificial’ civil society, irrelevant to the dynamics of state–society relations.     

Individuals in the Japanese cultural context

In recent years Japanese ways of thinking and behavioral patterns have changed considerably. Perhaps most important, according to Hayao Kawai, Director‐General of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, has been a change in the relationship between individuals and society as a whole. This change will be worthwhile if it unleashes the initiative and capability of each individual for the good of society, Kawai says, but if it should give rise to an unfettered form of egoism, Japan is bound to end up with serious social problems. Japanese people are raised to be aware of the totality of relationships between people, so Japanese society presents a model of man in society that is quite different from the individualistic model of Western society. The task is to live with both world views, and constantly seek better ways to deal with the changing outside world.