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Urban Brazil (urban + brazil)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	50%

Selected Abstracts

Dreaming Equality: Color, Race, and Racism in Urban Brazil

JOURNAL OF LATIN AMERICAN & CARIBBEAN ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 1 2004
Thomas E. Skidmore
No abstract is available for this article. [source]

Sexual Citizenship: Articulating Citizenship, Identity, and the Pursuit of the Good Life in Urban Brazil

POLAR: POLITICAL AND LEGAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW, Issue 1 2008
Tomi Castle
In this article, I examine a citizenship course held by a lesbian rights organization in Campinas, Brazil, and argue that claims for citizenship may go well beyond claims for civil rights and legal recognition and, instead, revolve around full, participatory inclusion in public life. I further argue that social actors who demand full citizenship may at the same time place demands on themselves to become what constitutes, in their view, "ideal citizens," thereby neutralizing, at least in theory, the possibility of exclusion. In probing the understandings of the ideal lesbian citizen that surfaced during the course, including those that connect full citizenship with notions of the "good life," I suggest both that these women are simultaneously capitulating to hegemonic cultural conceptions of propriety, and rewriting those conceptions by refusing the role of marginalized "other" in Brazilian society.[citizenship, identity, sexuality, activism, Brazil] [source]

The Militarization of Urban Marginality: Lessons from the Brazilian Metropolis

INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1 2008
Loïc Wacquant
This article examines the workings and effects of the penalization of poverty in urban Brazil at century's turn to uncover the deep logic of punitive containment as state strategy for the management of dispossessed and dishonored populations in the polarizing city in the age of triumphant neoliberalism. It shows how ramifying criminal violence (fed by extreme inequality and mass poverty), class and color discrimination in judicial processing, unchecked police brutality, and the catastrophic condition and chaotic operation of the carceral system combine to make the aggressive deployment of the penal apparatus in Brazil a surefire recipe for further disorder and disrespect for the law at the bottom of the urban hierarchy and steers the country into an institutional impasse. The policy of punitive containment pursued by political elites as a complement to the deregulation of the economy in the 1990s leads from the penalization to the militarization of urban marginality, under which residents of the declining favelas are treated as virtual enemies of the nation, tenuous trust in public institutions is undermined, and the spiral of violence accelerated. Brazil thus serves as a historical revelator of the full consequences of the penal disposal of the human detritus of a society swamped by social and physical insecurity. Drawing parallels between penal activity in the Brazilian and the U.S. metropolis further reveals that the neighborhoods of urban relegation wherein the marginal and stigmatized fractions of the postindustrial working class concentrate are the prime targets and proving ground upon which the neoliberal penal state is concretely being assembled, tried, and tested. Their study is therefore of urgent interest to analysts of international politics and state power at the dawn of the twenty-first century. [source]

Cultural consonance, a 5HT2A receptor polymorphism, and depressive symptoms: A longitudinal study of gene × culture interaction in urban Brazil

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF HUMAN BIOLOGY, Issue 1 2009
William W. Dressler
In this study in urban Brazil we examine, as a predictor of depressive symptoms, the interaction between a single nucleotide polymorphism in the 2A receptor in the serotonin system (,1438G/A) and cultural consonance in family life, a measure of the degree to which an individual perceives her family as corresponding to a widely shared cultural model of the prototypical family. A community sample of 144 adults was followed over a 2-year-period. Cultural consonance in family life was assessed by linking individuals' perceptions of their own families with a shared cultural model of the family derived from cultural consensus analysis. The ,1438G/A polymorphism in the 2A serotonin receptor was genotyped using a standard protocol for DNA extracted from leukocytes. Covariates included age, sex, socioeconomic status, and stressful life events. Cultural consonance in family life was prospectively associated with depressive symptoms. In addition, the interaction between genotype and cultural consonance in family life was significant. For individuals with the A/A variant of the ,1438G/A polymorphism of the 2A receptor gene, the effect of cultural consonance in family life on depressive symptoms over a 2-year-period was larger (, = ,0.533, P < 0.01) than those effects for individuals with either the G/A (, = ,0.280, P < 0.10) or G/G (, = ,0.272, P < 0.05) variants. These results are consistent with a process in which genotype moderates the effects of culturally meaningful social experience on depressive symptoms. Am. J. Hum. Biol., 2009. © 2008 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source]

Cultural consonance and adult body composition in urban Brazil

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF HUMAN BIOLOGY, Issue 1 2008
William W. Dressler
In previous research in Brazil, we found socioeconomic and gender differences in body mass and percent body fat, consistent with a model in which individuals in higher socioeconomic strata, especially women, could achieve a cultural ideal of body size and shape. In this article, using new data, we examine these processes more precisely using measures of cultural consonance. Cultural consonance refers to the degree to which individuals approximate, in their own beliefs and behaviors, the shared prototypes for belief and behavior encoded in cultural models. We have found higher cultural consonance in several domains to be associated with health outcomes. Furthermore, there tends to be a general consistency in cultural consonance across domains. Here we suggest that measures of body composition can be considered indicators of individuals' success in achieving cultural ideals of the body, and that cultural consonance in several domains will be associated with body composition. Using waist circumference as an outcome, smaller waist size was associated with higher cultural consonance in lifestyle (, = ,0.311, P < 0.01) and higher cultural consonance in the consumption of high prestige foods (, = ,0.260, P < 0.01) for women (n = 161), but not for men (n = 106), controlling for age, family income, tobacco use, and dietary intake of protein and carbohydrates. Similar results were obtained using the body mass index and weight as outcomes, while there were no associations with height. These results help to illuminate the cultural mediation of body composition. Am. J. Hum. Biol., 2008. © 2007 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source]