Department of Religion and Culture

Permanent URI for this community

https://hdl.handle.net/10919/24256

Browse

Browsing Department of Religion and Culture by Subject "Brazil"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Thumbnail Image
    Auctioning Patronage in Northeast Brazil: The Political Value of Money in a Ritual Market
    Ansell, Aaron (2010-06)
    Fundraising auctions help people in a small rural town in Northeast Brazil reckon with the effects that currency stabilization and democratization have had on municipal politics. These simultaneous processes have made politics confusing for the people of Passerinho by creating multiple modalities of electoral reciprocity. In this article, I argue that the ritual procedures of the auctions commensurate these modalities of reciprocity through a semiotic procedure in which money signifies both exchange value and more personal forms of value. I consider the auction's impact on municipal politics by looking at its effect on the narrative of democratic progress and on the prestige of grassroots politicians, traditional elites, and voluntary associations.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Impeaching Dilma Rousseff: the double life of corruption allegations on Brazil’s political right
    Ansell, Aaron (2018-08)
    This essay analyses the 2016 congressional impeachment of Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff, for alleged budgetary misconduct, as well as the related right-wing, ‘anti-corruption’ demonstrations calling for her ouster. I argue that Rousseff’s impeachment was facilitated by a conflation of two models of ‘corruption’ operating in Brazil, one legal-behavioural and the other religious-ontological. What happened in 2016 was a tacit conflation of these two models, along with their associated regimes for construing evidence of guilt. More specifically, congressional deliberations on Rousseff’s guilt allowed jurisprudential standards of evidence to be influenced by the evidential regime of the right-wing Fora Dilma (‘Out Dilma’) demonstrators. The demonstrators evinced Rousseff’s corruption through a semiotic process I term ‘cross-domain homology’, a process that I claim is intrinsically dangerous for democracy because it invites a state of exception to the norms girding representative institutions.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Models of Clientelism and Policy Change: The Case of Conditional Cash Transfer Programmes in Mexico and Brazil
    Ansell, Aaron; Mitchell, Ken (2011-07)
    Clientelist systems vary, and this variation influences the adoption and evolution of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes. We find that vertically integrated, corporatist clientelism in Mexico and more locally oriented, bossist clientelism in Brazil differentially shape the choices of governments to turn piecemeal, discretionary CCTs into more expansive and secure benefits.