Stereotypes and National Identity: Experiencing the “Emotional Brazilian”

Abstract

In this article, I examine how stereotypes are deployed in the process of experiencing national identities. Specifically, I analyse how a group of Brazilian academics who have studied in Europe and the United States have dealt with stereotypical notions of Brazilians as “warm people” who establish friendship “easily.” Ideas about a “greater emotionality,” which were often seen as negative from a European colonial perspective, are embraced and re-signified by them as a positive feature of Brazilian national identity, particularly when compared to the supposed “closed nature” of some Europeans. I argue therefore that the presence of such stereotypes contributes to reinforce a subjective sense of Brazilianess and also reveals the negotiations of power relations in the process of elaborating Brazilian national identity.

Key Words:

• national identity
• stereotypes
• Brazil
• friendship
• emotionality

This article is based on the research project “Are we Westerns? The construction of national identity among intellectuals” supported by the Programa Pro-Ciência of the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro. I thank Maria Claudia Coelho and Mark Harris for having read and commented on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Notes

1. In contrast, Uruguayans in Spain deal with a lack of stereotyped images that apply to them and see themselves, together with Argentinians, as “more Europeans” than the rest of Latin Americans (Paredes 2005).

2. I analyse elsewhere (Rezende 2003) how this notion of the “emotional Brazilian” is developed in some of the works of intellectuals in the 1930s.

3. All English translations from Portuguese are mine.

4. This particular form of distancing themselves from a Brazilian identity is also shown in Norvell's (2002) analysis of how these authors write about racial miscegenation. In an ambiguous way, they vary from treating Brazilians as a product of the mixture of three races/peoples to seeing Brazilians as continuations of the Portuguese, who as active subjects mixed only with Indians and Africans.

5. In this sense, this group's notion of friendship approached a wider Western conception which considers individual criteria and choice as the fundamental pillars of the relationship (Allan 1989; Silver 1989).

6. Chatterjee (1993) discusses a similar process in India that particularly valued its patterns of domestic life in comparison to its Western equivalents.