2020FHAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 10 (1): 7–11

CURRENTS: THE RISE OF BRAZILIAN FASCISM

Ethnographic views of Brazil’s

(new) authoritarian turn
Federico N E I B U R G , Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal
do Rio de Janeiro
Omar Ribeiro T H O M A Z , Universidade Estadual de Campinas

Translated from the Portuguese by David Rodgers

In this introduction to Currents, we argue for the potential of ethnography to aid in understanding the present. Extended periods
of fieldwork allow anthropologists that are in the field well before the facts—that is, before significant political events occur—to
provide unique frameworks for understanding those events, frameworks that can incorporate conjuncture as it is lived by the
subjects in the sceneries being researched into analysis that take into account more long-term processes. Focusing on the current
political conjuncture in Brazil and placing it in a comparative perspective, we explore the peculiar position that anthropologists of
contemporary Brazil occupy, in which their role in the production of knowledge and their participation in public debates makes
them a target for the conservative and reactionary wave that is engulfing the country.
Keywords: Brazil, Bolsonaro, authoritarianism, anti-intellectualism

Every age has its own fascism, and we see the warning signs wherever the concentration of power denies citizens the possibility
and the means of expressing and acting on their own free will. We may come to this in many different ways, not necessarily
through the terror of police intimidation, but also by denying and distorting information, by undermining justice, by paralyzing
schools, and by spreading in many subtle ways nostalgia for a world where order reigned supreme, and where the security of a
privileged few depended on the forced labor and the forced silence of the many.
—Primo Levi, A past we thought would never return ([1974] 2002)

On January 1, 2018, the former army captain Jair Mes-
sias Bolsonaro assumed the presidency of Brazil. A year
and a half earlier, on August 31, 2016, his predecessor
Dilma Rousseff was ousted from office by an impeach-
ment process founded on accusations of budgetary mis-
management (the Federal Audit Court would declare
these to be baseless claims). Rousseff had been in her
second term. She had previously been a government min-
ister for her predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (the
leader of the Workers’ Party). When Lula completed
his second presidential term in December 2010, he en-
joyed huge popularity (around 80 percent approval, ac-
cording to all the polls). Taking advantage of a unique
conjuncture of economic expansion over the previous
eight years, he had promoted the most intense period
of growth and social mobility in Brazil’s history, based
on increasing the minimum wage, expanding credit, in-
troducing income distribution policies, and promoting
educational inclusion. But after the first two years of his
successor’s mandate, the international economic crisis
hit Brazil hard, and Rousseff’s clumsy economic and po-
litical management (especially in relation to the corrup-
tion scandals) ended up turning what had been a “little
wave” (in Lula’s words) into a full-blown tsunami. This
became the impetus, in part, for the social and institu-
tional crisis that led Bolsonaro not only to the presidency

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. Volume 10, number 1. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/708670

© 2020 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved. 2575-1433/2020/1001-0002$10.00

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 Federico NEIBURG and Omar Ribeiro THOMAZ
of the country but also to the head of a conservative and
authoritarian movement with extensive social and pop-
ular roots.
Bolsonaro was elected after a far-from-normal elec-
toral dispute. Lula, previously the favorite to win the
2018 elections, was imprisoned six months before vot-
ing took place. A short while later, while he was rising
in the polls, Bolsonaro was stabbed during a campaign
appearance, an event still veiled in mystery and an ob-
ject of speculation. Thereafter, he took no further part
in public appearances or debates and concentrated his
campaigning on social networks. This provoked suspi-
cions that are still being analyzed by the electoral justice
system concerning the financing and operation of his
campaign, which received support from Cambridge An-
alytica, Steve Bannon and his team, and was “turbo-
charged” by fake news (Cesarino 2019). The popularity
of Bolsonaro—transformed into a victim and an “anti-
system” symbol—was also boosted by the activities of
an extensive network of Pentecostal pastors, whose par-
ticipation in political life has been increasing over the
last three decades. The polarization ultimately recon-
ciled Bolsonaro with the generals who had him removed
from the army in 1988 after a military court found him
guilty of “serious transgression, indiscipline, and disloy-
alty” for his involvement in a military rebellion provoked
by wage demands. A key factor in this rapprochement
with the generals was the creation by Dilma Rousseff
(who had herself been imprisoned and tortured during
the military dictatorship) of the National Truth Com-
mission. Through the initiation of a review of the author-
itarian past, the military perceived the commission as
violating the pact established during the transition to de-
mocracy, thrusting them once again into national poli-
tics. This would culminate in their direct participation in
the electoral process and the Bolsonaro government.
Though undoubtedly marked by local constraints,
the election of Bolsonaro should be understood as part
of a process extending far beyond the Brazilian context.
We are faced with a reactionary and authoritarian wave
that has acquired specific contours in countries as dis-
tant as Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Narendra Modi’s India, and
Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines; it has been asserted through
Recep Tayyip Erdoǧ an’s attacks on Turkish institutions,
the perpetuation of Vladimir Putin in power in Russia,
and Viktor Orbán’s disdain for European institutions
and democracy in Hungary. It also lives comfortably
with threats to annex territories illegally and militarily
occupied in Palestine by Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-
right Israeli government. All of these leaders are sympa-
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8
thetic to Donald Trump’s assaults on the press and
mocking of the social achievements of recent decades
(tendencies repeated by Bolsonaro himself and many
others). At the same time, the Chinese government re-
sponded with violence to democratic movements in
Hong Kong and promoted the construction of reeduca-
tion camps for the Uyghur ethnic minority.
Numerous common processes have shaken these
distinct national contexts, such as the reaction to what
had been perceived as social “advances” and the “con-
quest of rights.” During his (chilling) race for the presi-
dency of the republic, Bolsonaro transformed indigenous
rights—inscribed in the Brazilian Constitution—into a
prime target, repeatedly announcing his intention to
eliminate the possibilities for the social, cultural, and
material reproduction of indigenous populations, identi-
fied in his speeches as an obstacle to agribusiness and
the country’s development. He similarly attacked Afro-
descendants, stating his plan to dismantle the legal net-
work created to protect quilombola populations and in-
stitutional support for the antiracist struggle, as well as
mocking LGBTQ populations and downplaying gender
violence. Under his government, the president explicitly
declared, “minorities would bend to the majority.” These
movements are analogous to those observed by Kristóf
Szombati (2018) in relation to populations classified as
gypsies in Hungary or studied by Kabir Tambar (2016)
in relation to the Kurds in Turkey: historically excluded
minorities who, taking as a reference point the construc-
tion of democratic institutions, demanded and eventually
won rights. They also directly echo the discourses of an
anticonstitutionalist party like Vox in Spain and its inces-
sant attacks on feminism and the institutional and legal
apparatus created to confront the structural violence of
gender. The coincidences are too many to be just coinci-
dences, all the more so if we think of the grotesque (and
gross) performances of Duterte or the Mussolini-like at-
titudes of Donald Trump. It becomes clear that the de-
struction of democracy (the term destruction was used
numerous times by Bolsonaro to describe his project) is
far from unique to Brazil.
As happened a century ago in Europe, one of the
central ingredients of the current authoritarian wave
is anti-intellectualism. In its Brazilian variation, this as-
sumes very precise forms, such as the systematic dis-
mantling of public institutions for education and scien-
tific production. Many of its advocates claim that they
are involved in a “culture war,” which translates into
a vicious attack on the arts, the sciences and, in partic-
ular, the humanities and secular values. In this context,
9 ETHNOGRAPHIC
anthropologists are targeted as enemies since they are
linked to the advance of “identity policies” (ethnic, ra-
cial, gender) and to ecological and cultural “conserva-
tionism,” with the primary focus on Amazonia. This is
a clearly identified enemy as anthropologists, along with
a huge range of professionals and activists from social
movements, played a significant role in the process of
democratization and the expansion of social rights be-
gun with the end of the military dictatorship (1964–
85). This included the elaboration of specific items of
the 1988 Constitution—the so-called “Citizen Constitu-
tion”—linked to recognition of rights (such as the right
of native and quilombola populations to have access to
their land). It is precisely this Citizen Constitution that
has become the main target of the destructive action pro-
moted by this mixture of reactionism and radical neolib-
eralism that underpins the Bolsonaro government.
In fact, over recent decades, the social sciences in
general and anthropology in particular have gained an
unparalleled public profile (in the double sense of am-
plifying and politicizing debates; Fassin 2017), concom-
itantly with the expansion of the universities, postgrad-
uate courses, and the number of researchers and PhD
holders. Anthropological research has joined forces with
civil society movements in spheres as distinct as health-
care, minority rights, or the fight against racism. In the
case of indigenous and quilombola populations, the
Citizen Constitution assigns a specific role to anthro-
pologists, who also made themselves heard in debates
that culminated in the 2010 Racial Equality Statute, or
in the recognition of equal marriage by the Federal Su-
preme Court in 2011.
Thus, the declarations of the current minister of ed-
ucation against the humanities are unsurprising: he not
only pressed ahead with the project of excluding sociol-
ogy and philosophy from secondary education, he also
resolutely declared that “Brazil does not need anthro-
pologists.” The current executive has allied with the in-
fluential ruralist faction in the National Congress and
the president himself has accused “anthropologists” of
“treasonous action” for their defense of the demarcation
of indigenous lands in Amazonia. Amid this toxic envi-
ronment, leaders of social movements are threatened
and murdered, colleagues are persecuted, and some of
them have been forced to leave the country for their
own safety.
In these conditions, writing about the “conjuncture,”
discovering what is “structural” about it, and fore-
grounding the strength of ethnography acquires an un-
paralleled political dimension. It was not by chance that
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VIEWS OF BRAZIL’S (NEW) AUTHORITARIAN TURN
the panel that gave rise to this section of Currents took
place outside of Brazil, more precisely in Lisbon, during
the Congress of the Portuguese Anthropology Associa-
tion (APA), held June 4–8, 2019. In this context, accom-
panied by an active and inspiring audience, we met to
think about how ethnography can help us to under-
stand the present. The four texts that make up this dos-
sier each seek to shed light on the dynamics involved in
the adherence to the authoritarian restoration project
underway in the country, showing how it is much more
than a one-off event or electoral accident, or a simple
outcome of the “errors” of the preceding social demo-
cratic governments (of the two main political parties of
the post–1988 era, the Partido da Social Democracia Bra-
sileira [PSDB] and the Partido dos Trabalhadores [Work-
ers’ Party; PT]).1 The articles—especially Feltran and
Pinheiro-Machado and Scalco—point to a deeper dy-
namics, the articulations between persistent modalities
of Brazilian authoritarianism with people’s hopes and
frustrations. In the space of a generation, the country
has lived through two successive and opposite cycles: first,
an intense cycle of social integration and improvement
via the labor market, the consumer market, and educa-
tion of previously economically, politically, and cultur-
ally marginalized populations; later, a new cycle of ex-
clusion following the 2008 global financial crisis and
its impact on the country, with the acute recession be-
ginning in 2014 and its trail of mass unemployment,
precarious work, and rising debt. The transformation
of Brazil’s religious universe, the loss of ground of Ca-
tholicism in general and progressive Catholicism in par-
ticular, once extremely active in the earlier process of
democratization, matched by the rise of Evangelical
churches and, above all, the politicization of Pentecos-
tal churches (their decisive penetration, first on the ra-
dio and television, later in the digital sphere), is another
of the central vectors explored in these articles (Al-
meida, this issue), as is the military, which is a central
element in the contemporary equation (Leirner, this is-
sue). Their actions over the period of the dictatorship,
particularly in the “Years of Lead” (1969–79), were never
openly discussed in the country due to the compromises
reached in the transition process to democracy and the
issue of the Amnesty Law in 1979. The institutionalization
1. It is worth recalling that the former party produced a
president who was a leading sociologist (Fernando Hen-
rique Cardoso) and the latter a president who was from
the working class and founded the strongest labor union
(Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva).
 Federico NEIBURG and Omar Ribeiro THOMAZ
of the National Truth Commission in 2012 had the
effect of unifying and politicizing the military against
democratic institutions, helping them encounter a chan-
nel of political expression in Bolsonaro. Tactics and strat-
egies articulated in the so-called “hybrid war,” which are
not confined to the military and which, in turn, overlap
with new forms of social suffering and the emergence
of new ways of belonging, changes in gender relations,
and personhood, are shaping the modulations of the
present highlighted in the following texts. The section
ends with a commentary by João Pina-Cabral that situ-
ates the material presented here in a comparative per-
spective, pointing to the ethical and moral dilemmas of
the work of anthropologists, characterizing the present
time (well beyond Brazil, of course) and the role of ethnog-
raphy in facing this new era as one of—in his words—
“pharysism.”
We do not pretend to present anything like an ex-
haustive panorama of contemporary Brazil. This would
undoubtedly be a disproportionate objective. Given the
constraints imposed by the short duration of a panel like
the APA event, we do not cover important areas in which
anthropologists have been producing equally incisive
and strategic visions to comprehend our present—such
as, for instance, questions relating to ethnicity or the en-
vironment (Carneiro da Cunha 2017), gender, sexuality,
and health issues (Carrara 2019), race relations (Bacelar
da Silva and Robb Larkins 2019), or access to land (Wag-
ner, Dourado, and Bertolini 2019), among many other
areas of inquiry.
It is important, though, to underline that the four
texts composing this section are the result of long-term
research (periods lasting longer than a decade), which
began long before the reactionary wave that inundates
us today appeared on the horizon of topics studied by
anthropologists and the preoccupations of their inter-
locutors in their fields of research—whether on the pe-
riphery of São Paulo or Porto Alegre, within the universe
of the military, or among the Pentecostals. Contrary to
the famous formula of Clifford Geertz (1996), the inter-
pretative force arises here from the fact that ethnogra-
phers were in the landscapes they analyze long before
the facts.
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10
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Bacelar da Silva, José Antonio, and Erika Robb Larkins. 2019.
“The Bolsonaro election, antiblackness and changing race
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.1111/jlca.12438.
Carneiro da Cunha, Manuela. 2017. “Traditional peoples, col-
lectors of diversity.” In The anthropology of sustainability:
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man and Jerome Lewis, 257–72. New York: Palgrave
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Carrara, Sergio. 2019. “Perspectivas sobre antropologia e
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11 ETHNOGRAPHIC VIEWS OF BRAZIL’S (NEW) AUTHORITARIAN TURN

Federico NEIBURG is Professor in Social Anthropology at the Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Ja-
neiro. He is also lead researcher for the Brazilian National Research Council and the coordinator of the Center
for Research in Culture and Economy (NuCEC, www.nucec.net).
Federico Neiburg
PPGAS
Museu Nacional
Quinta da Boa Vista s/n
São Cristóvão
20940-040
Rio de Janeiro
Brasil
federico.neiburg@gmail.com

Omar Riberio THOMAZ is a professor at the Graduate Program of Social Anthropology and the Graduate Program of
History at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP).
Omar Ribeiro Thomaz
Department of Anthropology
IFCH—UNICAMP
Rua Cora Coralina, 100
Campinas—SP 13083-986
Brasil
omarr.thomaz@gmail.com

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