THE Brazilian culture is diversified, which does not exclude the evident social inequality, which is a striking feature of our country and is attested by the evident hegemony of a social class in the processes social division of labor and income division, in addition to factors such as access to health, education, sanitation and safety.
Despite being vast and wide, Brazilian culture becomes a status symbol for elites, which arbitrarily select what should or should not be consumed, relegating what was not selected to the limbo of cultural production. Furthermore, our rich popular culture contrasts with our people, who are often deprived of basic supplies for survival.
It is common to hear that Brazil is a mixed country, with a vast culture and syncretic religious beliefs. In fact, the ethnic formation of the Brazilian people occurred, first, with the miscegenation between African peoples, Portuguese (who already had in their lineage traces of miscegenation between different peoples of the European continent) and indigenous peoples.
Over time, since the beginning of the republic, Brazil received Italian, Japanese, German and other South American immigrants. This only attests that, taking the meaning of culture by a general conception that involves the habits, customs, cuisine, beliefs and the general way of life of a people, Brazil is really vast.
However, this diverse conception of Brazilian culture can result in a mistaken view of the non-existence of social ills, such as social inequality, cultural elitism and the racism.
Gilberto Freyre, in Casa Grande and Senzala, points his analysis of Brazilian colonial society to a path that is, to say the least, strange: he speaks of a harmonious relationship between blacks and whites in Colonial Brazil, which seems to be a euphemism that relativizes what really happened – the pure and simple domination of whites against black people.
The miscegenation that Freyre uses as data for attesting to his theory was nothing more than the result of sexual abuse and rape of white men against their slaves and against indigenous women. When white domination is relativized during the colonial period, it tends to support a structural racism that persists to this day.
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O cultural elitism (which, despite all the cultural vastness brasileira, exists here) is also a structuring factor for the maintenance of social inequalities that privilege ethnic groups, social classes and regions.
For a long time, Anthropology formulated theories that tried to justify the existence of cultures superiors and inferiors, according to the phenotypic development of the peoples who created these cultures. One of these theories is the social Darwinism, which came to be questioned by Franz Boas, at the end of the 19th century, and only fell for good after the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss.
See too: material culture and immaterial culture
Formation and cultural diversity of the Brazilian population
The Brazilian territory was inhabited, until 1500, by native peoples, called Indians by Europeans. However, there was not just one tribe or one strand indigenous culturalin the lands that the Tupi people called Pindorama: there were four different linguistic groups (Tupi-Guarani, Jê, Caribe and Arawak). These ethnic groups were divided into thousands of tribes, those divided into villages. Each tribe had its customs.
With the capture and enslavement of the African peoples, we could observe a cultural vastness similar to that of the indigenous peoples, as there was not a single tribe from which the Portuguese captured the Africans or a single African culture. African peoples were vast, divided into several tribes and from several different ethnic origins, which gave the Afro-Brazilian cultural formation a vastness and breadth as diverse as the indigenous one.
THE coming of white peoples, of European origin, for Brazil, both Portuguese (who already had a polyethnic origin) and the arrival of Italians and Germans, contributed to the miscegenation of our people. In Brazil, a unique culture emerged, fruit of strong miscegenation, which resulted in popular cultural products without equal in the world.
There is also in our land and in the formation of our people the religious syncretism due to the mixture of beliefs, which resulted, for example, in the emergence of a genuinely Brazilian religion: Umbanda, which mixes elements of Candomblé and Kardecism.
cultural prejudice in Brazil
Since the beginning of colonization, a cultural elitism reigns in Brazil, because the Portuguese saw themselves as superior and the native peoples as inferior. The excerpt transcribed below attests to this ethnocentric view:
"The language of this Gentile all along the coast is one, it lacks three letters, it does not contain f, nor l, nor r, thing worthy of astonishment, because thus they have no faith, no law, no king, and thus they live without justice and disorderly"i.
Later, when Africans began to be enslaved by European peoples, the slavery it also sat on a racist ethnocentrism and in a cultural elitism: Europeans, whites, considered themselves superior to Africans because of their phenotypes and their cultural characteristics which, in the judgment of the Europeans themselves, were superiors.
The Europeans had a governmental political system with state formation, they dominated gunpowder and writing, besides having money and starting mercantile capitalism. The peoples of the south developed in a way thatdifferent. With the exception of some Mesoamerican peoples, natives of Africa and America lived in contact with nature and did not establish commercial relations or centralization of power.
The way of life of Native Africans and Americans was self-sufficient, and their culture had taken on different contours from European culture. The justification of domination by culture is a strong element of cultural prejudice in Brazil.
Today, we can speak of the existence of an elitism that culminates in discrimination against those marginalized people (who are on the margins of society, due to social exclusion) and in structural racism. Structural racism, very strong in Brazil, is a type of veiled racism and indirect. It can be manifested through socioeconomic data, such asm those who point out that blacks earn, on average, 1.2 thousand reais less than whites, according to a survey by the IBGEii.
This kind of racism creeps in since the abolition of slavery, which gave freedom by right to enslaved blacks, but did not provide educational, economic and basic assistance support for that population to organize their lives. Theories that point to a racial democracy, like Gilberto Freyre's, only reinforced the idea that everything was fine, when it wasn't.
For not having a regimen of apartheid, as there was in the United States, the average Brazilian (especially the white population) grew up believing that there were opportunities equals for blacks, whites and indigenous people, when, in fact, there has never been one, and those who suffer from it daily are class blacks low. These aspects attest that there is a direct relationship between social inequality and cultural diversity.
Read too: Cultural appropriation - understand what it means and its consequences
Difference between cultural diversity and social inequality
In terms of strict interpretation, cultural diversity and social inequality are completely different. Social inequality refers to the differencein betweenatclassessocial and the income of each class. Cultural diversity refers to the vastthe amountincultures different existing in our territory.
In Brazil, the association between the terms "social inequality" and "cultural diversity" is possible, because despite our diverse cultural background, exclusion social is presented as an exclusion factor that manifests itself, mostly, through the difference between the different cultures that make up the population. Brazilian.
Grades
i GANDAVO, Pero de Magalhães. Treaty of the Province of Brazil. Rio de Janeiro: INL/MEC, 1965, p. 182.
ii VELASCO, Clara. Blacks earn R$1,200 less than whites on average in Brazil; workers report difficulties and “veiled racism”. In: G1 Economy. Available in: https://g1.globo.com/economia/noticia/negros-ganham-r-12-mil-a-menos-que-brancos-em-media-no-brasil-trabalhadores-relatam-dificuldades-e-racismo-velado.ghtml. Accessed on 04/25/2019.
by Francisco Porfirio
Sociology Professor
