Ruben George Oliven
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 in Brazil knew what a sociologist was (now that our President is a sociologist everybody knows what a sociologist is). So my father 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 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 (Oliven 1980) 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 (Oliven 1982) 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.
Brazil has no tradition of valuing work, mainly manual labor. To toil in Portuguese is called "mourejar," something which according to the Portuguese should be left to the moors. A racist expression referring to hard work is "trabalho para negro" (work for a Negro), a direct reference to slavery. But even after the abolition of slavery in 1888 and introduction of wage labor in factories, work was has never been very valued, because the social order continued to be highly exclusive. Until the thirties Brazil was an essentially rural society. When industrialization and urbanization started to become more important in the thirties there was a strong reaction against working and the growing monetarization of life. The horror ao batente (hatred of manual work) developed into malandragem (idleness) which can be seen simultaneously as a survival strategy and a conception of the world through which some segments of the lower classes refused to accept the discipline and monotony associated with the wage-earning world.
The negative side of labor is reflected in Brazilian popular music (Oliven 1984). During the thirties and forties, when an urban-industrial society was in the making in Brazil, samba composers used to eulogize idleness. Malandragem developed into a way of life and a way of regarding life. Instead of developing a work ethic (in the weberian sense), Brazilians were developing a malandro ethic. This was so widespread that during the 1937-45 dictatorship the State decided to intervene through its censorship department prohibiting songs which praised malandragem and at the same time giving prizes to those which praised work.
Work in and of itself has never been something to be proud of in Brazil even if most of the population works more hours than does the North American population. If you ask a Brazilian what he is doing there is a strong likelihood he'll reply: "nothing." Actually "to do nothing" is a native category which perhaps makes little sense in English but which is full of meaning in Portuguese.
The same composers who praised malandragem also depicted money as something ignoble generally demanded by women who didn't understand that the men they were asking it for had something much more precious to offer them: their love. Of course one can see here a "sour grapes complex": knowing they'll would never make much money no matter how hard they tried, those men looked down at the vil metal (filthy lucre). But on the other hand, in several of the lyrics of these songs one can notice that money is a reality from which one can not escape in an monetarized society. But all of this is seen in a melancholic fashion. Nobody is happy to work. And money after all is very destructive: it ends love and friendship, and it invites falsehood and treason. As Noel Rosa, perhaps the greatest of all the composers of the thirties, put it in the song Fita Amarela (Yellow Ribbon) in 1933: "I haven't got any heirs/ and I don't own a single penny/ I lived owing to everybody/ But I didn't pay anybody back" ("Não tenho herdeiros/ Nem possuo um só vintém/ Eu vivi devendo a todos/ Mas não paguei a ninguém"). Or as another composer of the period, Wilson Batista, put it in a song composed in 1968 shortly before dying and called Meu Mundo é Hoje, Eu sou assim (My World is Today, I'm like that): "I feel sorry for those/ Who squat until the floor/ Cheating themselves/ For money or positions/ I have never taken part/ In this huge battalion/ Because I know that besides the flowers/ Nothing else goes with you in the coffin" ("Tenho pena daqueles/ Que se agacham até o chão/ Enganando a si mesmos/ Por dinheiro ou posição/ Nunca tomei parte/ Neste enorme batalhão/ Pois sei que além das flores/ Nada mais vai no caixão") .
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 (Oliven, 1996), 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 aspect of money in the United States I ended up making Americans my "tribe."
I am of course aware of the difficulties of the anthropologist dealing with complex societies and I don't want to sound ethnocentric in reverse by giving the impression that I believe that a complex society is nothing more than a simple society which has turned complex. I know there are important differences of scale. I know how difficult it is to generalize for so large a nation as the United States which can be seen as having not one but several cultures. I am aware that the relation to money varies according to class, race and gender and other categories. I know also that California, the place I was living in, can not be taken as representative of the whole US and I am well aware that a year and a half of observation might not be enough. But in spite of the difficulties of this sort of study I believe it is important to look at representations of money which are widespread in the United States and to compare them to Brazil.
Trying to show how pervasive money is in the United States and how it is considered polluting in Brazil I drew on different examples. There are several expressions in the United States directly related to money. "To add my two cents to the discussion" means you want to voice your opinion as regards a subject which is being debated. "They don't buy it" means they don't agree or accept the idea. "I would put my money on this" means that this is what is going to happen in future as regards a certain trend. "For one's money" means "according to one's preference or opinion" (Webster 1988: 1458). Thus, one could say: "For my money, the film is very good." A friend of mine reading a research proposal I wrote for the States, advised me that proposals are shorter than in Brazil and that every sentence of a proposal must "sell" an idea. You must be assertive (or aggressive) in the statements you write into your proposal. And "a penny for your thoughts" implies that theoretically everything is for sale including your most intimate feelings. In Brazil you buy a discussion (comprar uma discussão) and you buy a fight (comprar uma briga), both having a conflictive meaning
Whereas in America money is outspoken, in Brazil there is a diffident attitude towards it. In Brazil money is frequently shameful to be talked about. The polite way to ask for money there is "Can you lend some?..." ("Você pode me emprestar algum?..."). In the States money is more easily seen an integral part of the person. Thus the saying "Not a penny to my name." In America, when referring to the amount of wealth a person owns, newspapers frequently use the expression "Mr. X is worth so many million dollars." In Brazil one would not want to believe that a person could be defined by the money attached to him or her in spite of or because of the fact that social inequality is greater there.
In English you pay attention, you pay a visit, you pay a compliment, you pay your respect, you pay your way and you pay lip service. In Brazil you pay for your sins (pagar seus pecados) and you pay promises (pagar promessas). Whereas in the United States you will ask a person if you can buy him or her a drink, in Brazil you would ask if you can get or offer someone a drink. In Brazil asking if you can buy someone a drink would implicitly mean that you are trying to buy the person.
In Brazil money is regarded as more polluting than in the States. Actually in Brazil when a person is totally out of money he or she is "clean" (limpo), or when a gang robs a bank they "clean" it. But when a person is very wealthy, he or she is "rotten rich." (podre de rico), the equivalent of the American "stinking rich." In Brazilian slang the word poupança (savings) is used to refer to the buttocks. And when you are totally out of money you can say "I haven't got a whorish penny" ("Estou sem um puto tostão").
In America, however, it is poverty which is more filthy. In this respect one can be "dirt poor." There are other expressions relating poverty to dirt in English: something can be "dirt cheap" (again the dirt is in the lack, not in the abundance of money). On the other hand, a pay dirt according to the dictionary is "earth containing enough ore to be profitably worked by a miner" or "something which turns out to be a valuable source of information" (Webster 1988: 738). Notice how money (gold) breeds from dirt. Referring to American society, Knight argues that "Today poverty is recognized as an evil and money as the potential means of much good - of enjoying the arts, the education, travel, medical care, philanthropy, as well as the material necessities and comforts of life" (Knight 1968: 11).
Some American proverbs attest to the idea that money in America is seen as less dirty than, for example, in Brazil: "All money is clean, even if it's dirty," "Money doesn't get dirty" (Mieder 1991: 415), and "Money doesn't smell." Some proverbs compare money to feces but the classical Freudian equation between these terms (Freud 1953, Ferenczi 1956) is weak. Thus, the parody "Money talks, bullshit walks", makes money the strong element and feces the weak one. The payment day is "when the eagle shits." Although here there is an association between money and feces, the animal which provides people with money is not the filthy pig but the eagle, the symbol of the United States. And there is an instance of a direct equation of money to feces: "Money is like manure: it's only good when spread around" (Mieder 1991: 416). But the element which is stressed is the fertilizing aspect of feces. Since in earth feces are not "matter out of place" to quote Douglas' (1966) expression, in this particular circumstance money and manure can not be considered dirty.
Actually, there is a strong incidence of American proverbs which lend a positive connotation to money. To give some examples: "Money talks," "Money makes the mare to go," "Make money honestly if you can, but make money," "Money is power," "Money is the sinews of trade," "Money must be made, or we should soon have the wolf at the door," "Nothing but money is sweeter than honey," "Nothing makes money faster than money." There seems to be fewer negative proverbs about money. Among them are: "Money can't buy happiness," and "Money isn't everything." But even the biblical proverb "Money is the root of all evil," is frequently transformed into parody which negates its statement: "Money is the root of all wealth," "Money is the root of the Bank of America," "Money is the root of all evil and man needs roots," "Money is the root of all evil but it does seem to grow some mighty fine plants," "Money is the root of all evil but it's still number one as the root of all idylls," "Money is the root of all evil but has anyone ever discovered a better route?", "Money is the root of all evil and also of a good many family trees." In the same way "Money can't buy happiness" is transformed into "Happiness can't buy money." And "Money isn't everything" becomes "Money isn't everything, only half." "Virtue is its own reward" becomes "Money is its own reward" (Mieder 1989: passim).
I wrote an article about my findings on money in America in which I stated up front that I was presenting my ethnography in a specific style. In order to make the familiar strange, I had opted for the standpoint of a newcomer to another culture. I said I was looking at things which are normally taken for granted by Americans but which look quite different from my previous experience. My ethnography tried to be bold in its intention and cautious in its conclusions. This was done on purpose. The aim of the paper was to start a debate not to offer a definite set of answers. It was also intended as an attempt to ask if Brazil is following the American path as regards money, a question which to mind can not be replied thoroughly at the moment.
I had difficulty in publishing the paper in the United States. I sent it to several leading Anthropology journals. The referees either hated or loved it. Those who hated it thought I was biased and that I only saw negative things in American culture while looking at money. One of those referees even asked how I could analyze money in the US when I come from a country in which there is so much poverty. Those who loved it said the piece was sharp with a good ethnography and that is was a rare example of a foreign anthropologist looking at the United States. But unfortunately it was not written in the American style of academic journals. It did not start by defining clearly what its objectives were and it did not present a thorough conclusion. I finally published the piece in Critique of Anthropology (Oliven 1998). To my surprise now several North American anthropologists tell me they give this article as required reading to their students in order to show them that it is possible to make anthropological analysis of complex societies.
Catholicism is frequently seen as an important influence on Brazilian culture. Moog has even tried to discuss the Weberian thesis (Weber 1958) in a comparison between Brazil and the States. Whereas Brazilian culture would be characterized by the "dislike of useful work and all that is connected to it: initiative, organization, cooperation, and the technical and scientific spirit", in the North-American culture "the sanctity of debt and the dignity of labor are notions that neither the Puritan , nor the Yankee or the crypto-Yankee are disposed to let perish" (Moog 1964: 210 & 154).
As a matter of fact, Brazilian authors who wrote in the thirties frequently argued that Brazil was not a capitalist society. Thus Holanda who coined the term "cordiality" to explain Brazilian society, maintained that it was characterized by social relations which were personalized, affective, particularistic and clientelistic (Holanda, 1969). In a similar perspective, although from a different political standpoint, Vianna maintained that in Brazil there prevailed what he called a pre-capitalist mentality or spirit, in spite of the fact that materially the country was capitalist (Vianna, 1987, Gomes 1989 and 1990).
Dumont (1980) establishes a contrast between what he calls hierarchical societies and egalitarian societies. The first are based on the concept of person, whereas the second are based on the concept of a free individual. India would be the classical example of a hierarchical society whereas America would be the most developed example of an egalitarian one. Drawing on Dumont's model, DaMatta (1991) argues that today Brazil is somehow in-between hierarchical and egalitarian societies. Whereas the United States tends to be a society very much based on the egalitarian individualistic model, Brazil is closer to the hierarchical and personal model. There would exist a dilemma between the adherence to an impersonal individualistic model which exists formally in Brazilian laws, and the day to day tendency to constantly revert to personal relations. Hence the greater aversion to deal directly with money and the more face to face relations involved in transactions.
DaMatta also goes into the Catholicism versus Protestantism question. Commenting on the expression "dinheiro não trás felicidade (money does not bring happiness), he argues that it "adds to the underlying cultural equation that tells how work corresponds to punishment and how the accumulation of wealth equals something dirty or illicit" (DaMatta, 1991: 181). Analyzing the cultural matrix of the Brazilian inflation he argues that "of course we want to have money, but we can compensate its absence through the presence filled with value of friends, of health, of 'education' and, above all, of 'happiness.' This incapacity to regard money - and above all the possession of money - as a positive activity, as a hegemonic measure of competence and success, as the aim of all things, creates areas of tolerance and of social compensation that seem important in the Brazilian case" (DaMatta 1993: 172).
Brazil is a society of immense social and economic inequalities and according to data of the World Bank has the worst income distribution of the world, the minimum monthly wage being approximately one hundred dollars. It is a society which has experienced a "conservative modernization," in which the traditional has been combined with the modern and change articulated with continuity (Oliven 1989). Since Brazil is an urban society, its population has to deal constantly with money. Although the access to money (and goods and services) varies enormously according to social class, money is a reality which can not be avoided in spite of what the samba composers of the beginning of this century wished. But although the monetarization of life has increased, there is a lot of resistance to accept money as a central value. This can be seen either as the "sour grapes complex" I mentioned when referring to popular music or as a domination model based on a cultural tradition which tries to give a negative connotation to material things. This is part of an ongoing debate in Brazil about the question of our national identity. All sorts of intellectuals have at some point joined this debate which is constantly brought up and deals with the question of defining our main traits (Oliven 1986).
Some recent events point in the direction of a growing monetarization of life in Brazil. In 1995 in order to raise money the PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores), Brazil's socialist Workers' Party, launched a Visa credit card in association with Bradesco, Brazil's largest private bank known for the capitalist spirit of its Protestant founder who created the Cidade de Deus (City of God) to house its headquarters. It is interesting that Bradesco calls this card PT Bradesco Visa affinity card. At the ceremony in which the card was launched, Lula, the president of the Workers Party, said that "the adoption of the credit card shows that PT is the party of modernity" and that the party "would earn money as a capitalist and spend it as a socialist" (Krieger 1995, I-8).
Until the end of the eighties Brazilian credit cards could only be used inside the country. This was a way of controlling foreign currency expenditures. When finally the government allowed credit cards to be used abroad, several banks started operating with international companies like Visa, Master, American Express, etc. In 1995, federal government controlled Banco do Brasil, Brazil's largest bank, had an advertisement about their Visa card which is called Ourocard. It said "Visa Ourocard, your international identity." There is a double message here. The advertisement points to the fact that if you are rich and can afford to travel abroad and show your Visa Ourocard you will have established your identity as a respectable consumer. On the other hand, it hints that being national is no longer a question for Brazilians; the important in a globalized world is to be international and the credit card does it for you.
The United States is frequently depicted as a country where monetization - the increase in the proportion of all goods and services bought and sold by means of money - has taken place fully. In reality this process is much more complex as Zelizer (1994) has shown when she argues that there are different sort of monies in America: gift certificates, Christmas savings accounts, food stamps, etc. But America is probably the place were commoditization is a process which has extended to all spheres of life. In this sense it vindicates Marx's idea of Vergeldlichung (monetarization) of society. It has become a central value about which no bones are made. But, as I have tried to show, in countries with different cultural traditions like Brazil, although capitalism is holding sway, money is not (yet?) the driving force which shapes behavior and sentiment. One can only speculate if monetarization is a trend which sooner or later is going to take place in countries which are going through an economic growth like Brazil or if their cultural specificities will work as counter-balancing checks.
It is interesting that there is pratically no direct reference to money in Brazilian social sciences. There is of course a tendency to economic interpretations of social inequality in Brazil and there is what is called studies in Economic Anthropology, dealing mainly with how small scale societies organize their living. One of the few Brazilian writers to address the question of money directly was Olavo Bilac, who lived from 1865 to 1918. He wrote a well humored lecture entitled precisely O Dinheiro (Money). In the introduction to that lecture, Bilac says that "Money is a tremendous, omnipotent, amazing force. Everybody loves it, everybody seeks it and, however, everybody speaks badly about it; and those who pretend to despise it only show their desire to seduce it with its contempt, according to the old proverb that says that "he who despises wants to buy" (Bilac 1997: 14-15). The lecture is written as if it were a trial in which prosecution and defense have the opportunity to express their views. At the end the defense lawyer says the following words: "I declare the defendant acquitted! He can go away in peace ... if he is not yet imprisoned" (Bilac 1997: 59). In a sense, Bilac introduced in his lecture the difficulty Brazilians have to deal with money. He sort of plays the role of a presiding judge who does not pronounce a verdict but restricts himself to give the word to both sides.
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