My father supported our family (six children) through the importation of automobile parts. He run the company from our home because he did not want to be tied to a place he had to open every day. Sometimes he worked in pajamas listening to music. Several of the songs he used to listen spoke about the relation between money and love and about the lack of money. I grew up with the impression that the aim of working for my father was mainly to listen to music and to have money to travel around the world. My parents are now in their eighties and still travel once a year to some place abroad. So I grew up with the sensation that money had only an extrinsic value and that it should not command my life.
In Brazil when you enter university you have to choose what subject you want to study and this choice determines the profession you will follow since professions are defined by undergraduate courses. I decided to take social sciences because having discovered Marxism at sixteen, I wanted to change the world. My father got worried because at that time nobody knew in Brazil what a sociologist was (now that our President is a everybody knows what a sociologist is). So he convinced me to take two courses simultaneously: social sciences (which is what I liked) and economics (which is what he thought I would be able to make a living on).
I finished both courses. I must say I found economics rather dull and always based on assumptions about the market which did not fit into reality. Social sciences on the other hand meant mainly sociology. And sociology in the sixties and seventies was very influenced by a rather mechanical Marxism and ended up frequently as analysis of social reality that always viewed social life as being determined by the infra-structure, i.e. economic factors.
I soon found out that what I really liked was culture. But culture was considered secondary. In marxist terms, culture was super-structure. First you had to understand the infra-structure. Once you had done this you could almost deduct supra-structure automatically. And what is more, culture meant culturalism, i.e., interpretations of underdevelopment that were not based on unequal relations but on cultural traits of the populations. So sociologists and political scientists who wanted to do the right thing would not study culture. Culture was studied by Anthropology and anthropologists at that time only studied simple societies. The problem was that I was an urban type who had always lived in cities and I was interested in urban cultures.
When I graduated, social planning became very popular in Brazil. Everything demanded a plan and many planning companies were created. So my first jobs were in planning. And to the surprise of my father they hired me as a sociologist and not an economist.
Having worked for some time in pIanning, I decided to take a master's course in urban planning because I thought there I could combine a practical skill with my interest in studying urban groups. But what I really wanted to do was to teach and to carry out research. I was hired as a lecturer of Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul because they wanted precisely some one who could develop the anthropological study of urban and complex societies. I was 24 by then. Full of ideas but with little experience.
After finishing my master's dissertation on culture and values of a popular class residential area which had be planned, I decided to take my Ph.D abroad and went to the London School of Economics and Political Science. There I worked on a thesis in which I compared different urban groups. It is a study of urbanization and social change in Brazil and is based on a research comparing practices and representations of different urban social groups. It was published in Brazil with the title Urbanização e Mudança Social no Brasil and stresses the question of cultural differences in Brazilian cities at a time homogenization was supposed to be taking place.
When I came back to Brazil after having lived four years in England I decided to study Brazilian culture more systematically. This coincided with the political opening and the end of the military regime. Suddenly culture became very popular because new social actors were appearing: women movements, gay movements, religious groups, regionalism, etc. These new actors were constructing new social identities and claiming specificities based on differences. And these differences were based on Brazilian culture. That was also the moment in which Anthropology started to study urban groups and to offer interpretations of what was going on in Brazil. In a way it became the hegemonic social science in Brazil. During the political opening in the eighties I carried out research on representations of violence and on the concept of Brazilian culture and the way it is related to the construction of national identity. This resulted in my book Violência e Cultura no Brasil where I discuss the emergence of new actors and the construction of social identities and how culture becomes an arena for intellectual and political dispute.
So far I was never really interested in money or in representations of economic activities. One day I went to the attic of my parents house and discovered cases of old 78 records of Brazilian popular music of the thirties and forties. This was a revelation because I soon found out that these sambas were fascinating. The lyrics had recurrent themes: the refusal of work as a value, money as debasing, men/women relations, passion, pleasure as opposed to work... This made me start an ongoing project of understanding the building of modern Brazil society through popular music. I have published several articles on this subject and plan to write a book about it. One of the themes I have been studying is money in Brazilian popular music. I carried out a long research in the Museum of Image and Sound in Rio de Janeiro and analyzed an array of songs.
Between August 1993 and January 1995 I was a visiting professor at the Department of Anthropology of the University of California, Berkeley. When I decided to go to the United States, North American scholars who knew my previous work suggested I should study some minority group in the San Francisco Bay Area such as the Brazilians who live there in growing numbers. Since I had just published a book on cultural diversity in Brazil, focusing on the revival of Gaúcho traditionalism, that would be the "natural" continuation of what I had been doing at home. Somehow the idea did not appeal to me. I came to the conclusion that that was what one would expect from a Brazilian anthropologist in the United States, i.e., that he or she should study the periphery in the center. As I had already worked on money in the lyrics of Brazilian popular music it occurred to me that money would be a more fascinating subject. When I told North American anthropologists about my plan, they were usually enthusiastic about it but tended to say it was a very broad subject and asked how would I be able to study it in so short a period of time. I was of course also concerned about the feasibility of my project and worried about the time frame. I had no idea on how to start it and where to focus my attention.
But from the moment I arrived in the United States (this was the first time I was staying a longer period of time in that country) I soon realized that money was around me all the time and that I was literally submerged in my research topic and would have no difficulty finding material. I soon realized that money in the United States could be looked at as a total social institution, to use Mauss' expression. Believing that money is a key to North American society, I decided to look at any instance which could bring me clues: scholarly and non-scholarly articles, financial magazines, books on personal finance, proverbs, expressions, banks, investment companies, health insurance, service clubs, compulsive spenders, restaurants, shops, etc. Looking at the multifarious aspects of money in the United States I ended up making Americans my "tribe." I published an article in Critique of Anthropology in which I discuss that experience.
The study of money in the United States made me think about the relations we Brazilians have with money and why it is so different from the United States. But I don't want to get into the rest of the paper I am supposed to bring to Bellagio. So let me finish by saying that nowadays my father tells me I chose the ideal profession: I am paid to listen and to write about music and I travel around the world without having to pay my way.