Joy in Brazil
Myth, community, and the pursuit of freedom
Flamboyant media presenter José Abelardo Barbosa turned TV productions in 1970s and 1980s Brazil into wild spectacles. Titled intermittently “Chacrinha’s Casino” or “Chacrinha’s Nightclub” - both after Barbosa’s life-long epithet[1] - the shows featured famous musicians, amateur singing competitions, beauty contests, jeering live audiences, witty (albeit at times sexist) wordplay rhymes, bare-legged cabaret dancers and endless acts of buffoonery. Once, for example, Chacrinha had several men compete for the title of “the ugliest man in Brazil” only to bestow the preposterous crown to Chacrinha’s stage assistant – a slapstick clown called Russo – whose sunken, toothless pallet would comically foreground Chacrinha’s frequent appeals for viewers to give each other “a kiss on the mouth”. Rather than taunting specific individuals, however, Chacrinha’s burlesque theatre sought to celebrate the pettiness of life itself. The show did not come across as offensive because the frenzy of dance, laughter, music, and nonsense transmitted a fluffy sense of weightlessness, which viewers and participants alike ultimately experienced as sheer “joy” (alegría, in Portuguese).
In the 1930s, tropes such as “joie-de-vivre” and “alegría” acquired a mythical character in Brazil. Journalists, public intellectuals, politicians, and media personalities celebrated the “joy of the people” (“a alegría do povo”) as a collective virtue capable of unifying all segments of Brazilian society. Such ceremonial traditions as Carnival, the June Celebrations (festas Juninas), and the commemorations of Catholic or Afro-Indigenous Saint Days were interpreted under this guise as literal generators of national vitality. By the 1960s, discourse on “joy” had broadened further to indicate a kind of carefree “Brasilianness” (brasilidade) ostensibly apparent, for example, in local manifestations of football fandom, musical creativity, ballroom dance parties, and the idealisation of aesthetic perfection (especially the cultivation of desired male and female bodies). In all these cases, popular appeal to “joy” elevates common expressions of gaiety and jubilation into near-spiritual acts of moral distinction.
In reality, of course, things are a little more complicated. A feeling of “joy” does often suspend the hardships and disappointments of everyday life, but it is experienced and interpreted in distinct ways. In fact, friends and research interlocutors from the Brazilian State of Maranhão, where I conducted intermittent Anthropological fieldwork in the last 17 years, associate “alegría” with a plurality of activities, idioms, and interactions. People, in other words, tend to co-constitute various kinds of relationships as they indulge themselves in ecstatic forms of play, which hinge on distinct types of emotive experiences. Depending on the situation and the somatic reactions involved, “alegría” is generally used in Maranhão to identify four such emotive (or: affective) experiences: (1) joy-as-happiness (felicidade, diverção, satisfação); (2) scornful joy (fazer graça, tirar onda, debochar); (3) playful joy (folía, jogo, brincadeira); and (4) joy-as-climax/pleasure (gozo, gosto, prazer, sacanagem).
The objective of my research is to explicate how these diverse affordances of joy produce (and at times destroy?) ethical principles that intermediate power relations in society. My basic assumption is that the myth of alegría in Brazil is used to navigate degrees of mutuality, intimacy, and inter-dependance in households and communities. Focusing ethnographically on a working-class neighbourhood of São Luis – the Capital City of Maranhão – my fieldwork will register how grassroots experiences of “joy” help people build and sustain relationships with peers, neighbours, friends, family, and a wide range of spiritual forces; whose involvement in generating either joy or misfortune is locally seen to impact individual destinies. Focusing on “joy” as a meaningful resource will ultimately enable me, I believe, to comment on people’s own agency, power, and search for freedom in the Brazilian socioeconomic periphery.
“Freedom” is pertinent here because joy, like play, enhances our capacity to transcend crisis. It is not inconsequential that in 1967 – when the Military Junta escalated the repression of civil liberties in Brazil – musician Caetano Veloso chose the title “Alegría, Alegría” for a song he explicitly wrote about freedom. Lacking direct references to “joy”, the song nonetheless quickly became an anthem of hope and an iconic symbol of tropicalismo - a DADA-inspired cultural movement that transformed Brazilian art, music, and fashion. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, “Alegría, Alegría!” was an idiom first popularised across Brazil already in the 1950s by none other than Chacrinha; who used it in his radio programs like a mantra. Like Chacrinha and Veloso, I too believe that both spiritual and Dionysian indulgence in “joy” can be conducive to achieving freedom, in Brazil and probably elsewhere. Thinking through joy in Maranhão is therefore likely to shed new light on the pursuit of freedom in urban realities that are still framed by financial glass ceilings, economic precarity, social marginalisation, physical insecurity, and entrenched political hierarchies.
There is a broader element to this view, which is rooted in the apparent universal capacity to feel and produce joy collectively, beyond individual triggers. Joy, it seems, allows everyday people like you and me to resist challenging situations and to repair broken things in our lives insofar as we can experience it with meaningful others. As such, joy may well be relevant to anybody’s yearning for solace in a time of looming destruction. It is for that potentially universal feature of joy that I invite you – readers and interlocutors across the globe – to accompany this ethnographic journey into expressive forms of Brazilian joy.
Some links:
(1) “Chacrinha’s Discotheque”, 1974, Tupi Television Network, featuring performer Raul Seixas.
(2) “Chacrinha’s Casino”, 1988, Globo TV, one of the last programs recorded, rebroadcasted in 2012 on Viva Channel.
(3) Caetano Veloso’s Original TV Recording of “Alegría, Alegría” in 1967 as part of the 3rd “Brazilian Popular Music (MPB) Festival” on Rede Record Television Network.
[1] Pronounced: sha-krin-ya.