University of California-Davis doctoral student, Timothy E. Murphy, supervised by Dr. Donald L. Donham, will undertake research on the growth of provincial urban culture outside of global cities and how this culture affects social divisions of race, class, and gender. The project will provide insight into significant changes taking place in provincial cities throughout the world, as previously isolated people are cognitively incorporated into larger worlds, even when those worlds remain outside their physical reach. The research is important for increasing our understanding of the diffusion and authority of new ideas.
The research will be carried out on a network of middle-class Brazilians who live in a city located at the heart of the impoverished Brazilian Northeast. The study will focus on non-elite residents who are considered cosmopolitan, knowledgeable about sophisticated cultures from outside, despite the reality that poverty makes it impossible for them to travel. Data collection will begin with participant observation by accompanying informants throughout occupational, leisure, and consumer activities to 1) learn where and how they acquire their cultural knowledge; 2) assess the extent to which their daily practices and perceptions are linked to the world outside the city; and 3) analyze how they understand and operationalize dominant norms of race, class, and gender. The researcher will also conduct focus groups and surveys to collect comparative data on the dominant (non-cosmopolitan) local culture.
The research is important because it will advance our understanding of how even disadvantaged people in remote locales may connect to and identify with distant places and ideas. This is significant beyond the local case of "stranded cosmopolitans" in provincial Brazil because it may be through similar personalized pathways that new concepts -- be they political, cultural, or religious -- diffuse from global centers into local lives. The project also contributes to the education and training of a social scientist.
The research completed has revealed that the network of local cosmopolitans central to the project constructs lives connected to the wider world in four distinct ways. First, as a local community, participants in the network share cultural knowledge with one another via Internet and face to face on a daily basis not only through words but also via images, music, dance, and other forms of consumption and creative expression. Together, they forge an alternative, "underground" space in their city where they can experiment with and learn about unconventional ways of being and belonging, which always involve a complex mix of local and foreign influences. Thus, the cosmopolitan network connects to the wider world not by uncritically or individually appropriating information from afar, but rather, through a local community that seeks out, receives, negotiates, and diffuses cultural knowledge. Second, careful negotiations of economic and emotional ties to family members make this particular mode of identifying with an imagined wider world possible. Most local cosmopolitans' nuclear and extended families supply housing and provide other forms of financial assistance, which affords them the extra time and money necessary to participate in network activities. While some families encourage the cosmopolitans' alternative lifestyles, other families disapprove of them. The network's cosmopolitan lifestyle, then, depends largely on familial support, which often requires that its participants take care to maintain amicable relationships with their families as they continue to participate in the network. This finding is peculiar because most of these cosmopolitans' families are active players in the dominant local culture--the very entity against which this network defines itself. Third, acquiring novel information from people outside the network of local cosmopolitans is an essential component of connecting to the wider world. Participants in the network gain cultural information about the "outside" from locals who have traveled to distant places and cultures, from other Brazilians and foreigners they encounter in tourist destinations within Brazil, and from media (print media, local and international television and film, music, and Internet) published within Brazil, in Europe (predominantly the UK, France, Spain and Portugal), the US and Canada, and occasionally other countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Fourth, participants in the network must learn to lead double/multiple lives across the city in order to conform to different social norms, shifting the way they present themselves in terms of their race, class, and gender. For example, in order to retain this alternative cosmopolitan lifestyle, most participants must also maintain a certain amount of respectability in the eyes of the upwardly-mobile mainstream (family, colleagues, employers, future clients, etc.). Negotiating double/multiple lives usually involves restricting their unconventional relationships and practices to particular settings. This can apply to cross-class relationships, same-sex relationships, friendships, religious/spiritual affiliations, as well as other types of consumption and employment. The broader impacts and intellectual merit of this research are extensive. First, the research has provided the co-PI, Timothy Murphy, the experience to become a skillful ethnographer. Having employed a number of ethnographic research methods, he has learned which methods work best for acquiring particular kinds of information under a diversity of circumstances. The project also has refined his fluency in Brazilian Portuguese. Outreach activities have entailed the co-PI presenting his research to his department at his home university, making faculty members and graduate students aware of his research methods and major findings. In the field, outreach activities included discussing the project at length with informants, a group of performance artists in one of the city's most marginalized neighborhoods, and with students and faculty at two different universities in the field site. Additionally, the co-PI plans to return to Brazil in the summer of 2012 after completing his dissertation to share his conclusions with a number of laypersons, and university students and professors in the hopes of publishing his findings in Portuguese. Given that the project's findings speak to questions of status and belonging, race, class, and gender, and the dynamism of urban life in a growing provincial city in Latin America in the contemporary globalizing world, the research offers significant contributions to Anthropology as well as Sociology, Gender and Ethnic Studies, Latin American Studies, and Urban Studies. Finally, this project contributes to the public welfare by challenging dominant narratives that perpetuate social marginalization and by offering alternate routes for upward mobility. While Brazilian Northeasterners tend to be portrayed in the mass media and ethnography as either the wealthy culprits or poor victims of social inequality, this project provides a fresh nuanced depiction and analysis of Northeasterners through an investigation of creative and skillful middle-class men and women. Once translated into Portuguese and disseminated, this study will offer insight into alternatives for acquiring upward mobility (e.g. engaging flexible performances to cope with shifting social norms and capitalizing on the appropriation of cultural knowledge acquired from afar) within the region and beyond.
