Scandal-Making in Contemporary Brazil
Scandal-Making in Contemporary Brazil
Professor Roberto Grün, Joaquim Nabuco Chair in Brazilian Studies at Stanford’s Center for Latin American Studies
Professor Roberto Grün is the author of 4 books and 50 articles on immigration, economic and financial sociology. Professor Grün teaches Organizational Behavior and Sociology in the Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil, where he leads the Center for Economic and Financial Sociology (NESEFI). He is currently the Joaquim Nabuco Chair in Brazilian Studies at Stanford’s Center for Latin American Studies.
Professor Grün just finished his book about the sociology of finance and is working on another about the sociology of scandals. The “financialization” of Brazilian society triggered the resurgence of ideologies associated with political and economic figures, which were thought to have belonged and would stay in the past. In the center of this mythology is the “plutocrat,” and there is a hard divide in political Brazil over the meaning of this “new” persona. The present form of scandalizing was born together with this mythology, feeding those “totems” and producing new ones. This links Professor Grün’s past works on sociology of the economy with his present project about this configuration wherein the financial realm encounters the political and cultural unrest in contemporary Brazil.
Since Lula’s presidency (2003), Brazil has been in constant political turmoil triggered by a succession of scandals. In Brazilian political history, we may say that scandals were born together with the country. The big difference from most of the XX century is that scandalizing became a sort of machine that turns by itself. Scandalizing is a way to set the political and economic agenda and it is a kind of cultural power over society, which is by all means unequally distributed across the segments of the population. It is reasonable to describe those who arrived to the Federal Brazilian government with Lula as a “low clergy” group. Scandal-making is used as a tool to corral these new arrivals into conforming with the traditionally consecrated ways of setting the agenda and doing politics. But, if the assumption is correct that the “scandals’ machine” works by itself, it is unreasonable to expect that such a machine can be unplugged whatever the outcome of Brazil's present-day political conundrum.
