Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power

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Stereotypes and National Identity: Experiencing

the “Emotional Brazilian”

Claudia Barcellos Rezende

To cite this article: Claudia Barcellos Rezende (2008) Stereotypes and National Identity:
Experiencing the “Emotional Brazilian”, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 15:1,
103-122, DOI: 10.1080/10702890701801866

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Published online: 05 Feb 2008.

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Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 15:103–122, 2008
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1070-289X print / 1547-3384 online
DOI: 10.1080/10702890701801866

Stereotypes and National Identity: Experiencing

the “Emotional Brazilian”

Claudia Barcellos Rezende

Social Sciences Department, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil

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

The notion that identities are constructed through contrasts between

“we” and “them” has been present in the social sciences literature for
some decades, particularly due to studies about ethnic groups (Barth
1969; Eriksen 1993; Oliveira 1976). These contrasts are not fixed but
vary according to each situation, so that social identities, likewise, are
not crystallised but rather dynamic, in process. These distinctions are
often a pronounced issue for foreigners, who have to face how others
see them and to question their own ways of thinking in view of local
forms of thought (Schutz 1971). In this context, stereotypes usually
come into play, both as images deployed by the foreigner to under-
stand the local society and as representations with which locals make
sense of the foreign person.
This clash of images is experienced by most immigrants and cer-
tainly by many middle class Latin Americans who migrate. Oliveira
(2000) refers to the discomfort a Uruguayan teacher felt in the United
States when she was classified as “Hispanic.” As a middle class profes-
sional, she considered her identity as too cosmopolitan to fit what she

103
104 C. B. Rezende

saw as an ethnic label.1 The growing number of Brazilian immigrants

have to cope with this fracture in various ways. Margolis (1998) dis-
cusses the difficulty that many Brazilian women face when they land
jobs in the United States as domestic workers, an occupation they would
never have had at home where they often were the employers. Sales
(1999) also mentions how Brazilian workers in the United States strive
to build an image of “hard workers” to differentiate themselves from
“Hispanics,” a category Brazilian immigrants feel they do not fit into.
In this article, I analyse the disjunction between self-image and
experience and its effects on a subjective perception of national iden-
tity, based on the stories of a group of Brazilian academics who stud-
ied in Europe and the United States for their postgraduate degrees. In
particular, I seek to understand the role played by stereotypes in the
way national identities are subjectively experienced. I argue that,
more than just generalised views produced by others, stereotypes can
also be used by people themselves in the process of elaborating a sense
of belonging associated with national identity.
To do so, I examine how these Brazilian scholars related to a spe-
cific and internationally widespread stereotype that sees Brazilians as
“warm and very open” people. Specifically, my analysis of how such
emotionality was experienced focuses on how people developed friend-
ship abroad. In my previous studies (Rezende 1999, 2002), I showed
that among middle class Brazilians, friendship is seen as both a senti-
ment as well as a relationship. The affective dimension of friendship is
seen as crossing social barriers, and it is this aspect that relates
closely to the idea that Brazilians are “open” and “easily” make
friends. For the Brazilian academics I studied, this collective image
became a sensitive issue during their period abroad because most of
them had difficulties making local friends, hence turning into a source
of frustration and receiving great elaboration in their accounts.
Furthermore, this problem seemed to point to the fact that they were
seen as more different from Europeans and Americans, questioning
their self-image as cosmopolitan people.
My data come from interviews carried out with white middle class
academics from Rio de Janeiro—six women and six men who were uni-
versity teachers of the humanities, with ages between 40 and 55 years
old, who studied for their PhD degree in the United States, England,
France, Belgium, and Germany in the early 1990s. During the year of
2002 I conducted formal interviews with everyone, aside from having
various informal conversations with most of them as part of my own
network of university colleagues.
These interviews stemmed from a research project concerned with
the experience of living abroad and its possible effects on the perception
 Stereotypes and National Identity 105

of national identity, an interest derived from the fact that I, as a

Brazilian anthropologist, had studied for my PhD in England. My
years abroad not only prompted many of the project’s issues but cre-
ated as well a context of empathy and identification with the people
interviewed, so that throughout their accounts I was often asked
about the similarity or difference about my own conditions and feel-
ings as a foreign student.
Unlike Brazilians who migrate in search of better conditions of life,
these academics were away temporarily and were generally committed
to returning to Brazil, often with the idea of bringing back home spe-
cialized knowledge with which to improve Brazilian universities, in
which many already held teaching positions. This commitment was
strengthened by the fact that they were funded by government grants
to pay for the studies and life abroad, a practice that dates back to the
1960s. Besides the acquisition of specific skills perceived to be found
only abroad, these academics also saw in those four years the opportu-
nity to live in another society and learn about a different way of life.
Most of them went with their own families, and those who went unac-
companied either lived alone or with other foreign students. Thus, in
all cases, despite a wish to be integrated into the local society through
friendship, none of the people studied shared residence with locals.
Although friendship was not an interview topic, they all referred to
the friends they made or not, whether locals or other foreigners, thus
making it an issue connected to their perception of what it meant to be
Brazilian. It is important to stress that, despite native Brazilian
views, which compared people’s different abilities in making friends,
I treat friendship as a culturally constructed relationship, with mean-
ings and practices that vary across time and space (Silver 1989; Bell
and Coleman 1999; Rezende 2002). This anthropological perspective
deconstructs modern Western thought, which takes friendship to be a
private relationship, anchored only on individual choice and criteria
and on the expression of supposedly natural emotions. As a conse-
quence, friendship is often considered a more or less universal
relationship, brought about by emotions present in everyone, an idea
voiced by the people interviewed. Thus, in this analysis of a Brazilian
discourse on friendship, I point out those meanings that not only
emphasise its culturally specific character but also bear relation to a
particular elaboration of national identity.
In the next section I discuss how concepts of national identity and
stereotypes inform my study. Then, I briefly present some Brazilian
national narratives that articulate ideas about emotionality to con-
textualize the analysis of this particular discourse on friendship
abroad.
106 C. B. Rezende

National identities and stereotypes

In recent years the notion of identity has been treated as levels of
identification that are continuously constructed—rather than being
determined a priori—and performed according to the various contexts
of interaction (Butler 1991; Hall 1991; Kondo 1997). This approach
rejects earlier views that saw in the concept the crystallisation of an
ontogenetic process (Erikson 1987) that developed through a dialectic
relation with the social world (Kondo 1997; Berger and Luckmann
1985). Thus, the idea that identities have an essential basis tends to
be, nowadays, seen as a rhetoric to which people and social move-
ments resort to affirm and claim rights of recognition (Calhoun 1994).
This is particularly the case with national identities, which are
often built on notions of a shared, homogeneous, and essentialised cul-
ture. As many authors (Anderson 1991; Hall 1998; Smith 1997; Verdery
2000) have recently shown, national identities are best seen as cre-
ations, or as narratives in Bhabha’s (1990) terms. Such narratives are
actually historically dated, and in each period distinct cultural ele-
ments are selected to form them, often contrasting with those of
elected foreign societies. Despite its frequently essentialised charac-
ter, national identities are the product of a generally diverse society
and, therefore, become the object of negotiation and dispute between
different social groups.
Herzfeld calls for the need to “probe behind façades of national
unanimity” (1997: 1) and look into the ways in which people use and
re-elaborate official idioms according to personal interests. Just as the
government may resort to the language of intimacy and domesticity in
the pursuit of its goals, “citizens engage in a ceaseless business of
shaping the meaning of national identity, often in ways that contra-
vene official ideology” (1997: 9). Thus, criticizing the separation
between the state and the people—best seen as a symbolic construct,
Herzfeld sees a common ground that dissolves clearly defined levels of
power, based on his notion of cultural intimacy. It refers to the idea
that national identity contains a measure of embarrassment together
with idealized virtues, which gives insiders a familiarity with the
bases of power that enables, at one moment, creative irreverence and
at the next moment effective intimidation (1997: 3).
Together with the need to analyse how people manipulate national
ideologies, it is as important, as some authors argue (Radcliffe and
Westwood 1996; Smith 1997; Verdery 2000), to understand how they
develop a subjective sense of belonging to a nation. In other words,
how does a feeling of self become national? These sentiments of
belonging are often projected onto the body as well, particularly
 Stereotypes and National Identity 107

through gender and race (Kondo 1997; Piscitelli 1996; Stepan 1991),
so that people develop various relations to such images and subjectivi-
ties, as well as distinguish themselves from other nationals based on
such embodied traits.
National identities become particularly salient in situations of con-
trast (Oliveira 2000; Woodward 2000). As I have said, because identi-
ties are built on the distinction between “us” and “them,” they tend to
be more visible when different national and ethnic groups face each
other. In such contrastive contexts, people often turn to stereotypes of
the other, having to contend as well with typified images of them-
selves presented by other groups. Each group deals with such stereo-
types differently, whether denying or embracing them (Oliveira 1976),
but, in either way, people negotiate such images in the process of elab-
orating their identities.
As a form of generalising a reduced number of traits to entire social
categories, stereotyping is usually characterised negatively, reflecting
and reinforcing social inequalities. For many years, stereotypes were
so qualified because they “seemed to betray a lack of ‘direct experi-
ence’ of the people so represented” (McDonald 1993: 221). These repre-
sentations of the other, acquired through other means than by ‘direct’
experience of the reality represented, were thus deemed erroneous.
In a different line, McDonald argues that the recourse to stereotypi-
cal images may result from experience, one of categorical mismatch:
when different category systems come into contact, they do not match
up, hence producing a sense of unpredictability and uncertainty (1993:
222). This mismatch is usually expressed through the discourses avail-
able to understand difference and offers important categories with
which to mark boundaries between “us” and “them.” McDonald empha-
sises that the perception of difference, relative to the social and political
maps of the time, is more likely to occur at the boundaries available,
wherever they may be, and the lack of categorical fit will usually be
expressed in a dominant discourse. In the end, she argues, it is this
experience of mismatch that produces imagery in stereotypes that
appear very similar, irrespective of the group they attempt to represent.
Because stereotypes are based on the distinction between “us” and
“them,” they are also used to create self-images, particularly those
related to national identities. Because national ideologies are gener-
ally based on the assumption of a uniform, commonly shared culture,
stereotyped images help elaborate homogeneous national figures such
as “the Brazilian,” “the English,” “the American,” etc. They frequently
become part of the cultural intimacy discussed by Herzfeld—those
aspects of a cultural identity that are both the focus of self criticism
and yet “an assurance of common sociality” (1997: 3).
108 C. B. Rezende

In this sense, it is important to examine how people relate to these

self-stereotypes in various contexts: whether identifying themselves
with them or not, whether affirming or criticising them. McDonald
(1993) shows how the image of excitable, fun-loving, sexy people attrib-
uted by the English to the French has been assumed by France and
turned into virtue. When classification systems absorb typifications from
above, forcefully or not, irony may be used as a form of resistance. The
Cretan men Herzfeld (1997) studied resorted to a rhetoric of manliness
as a positive quality, one that was largely marginalized on the national
scene, to manipulate political allegiances. In Brazil, Piscitelli (1996)
shows how prostitutes in the Northeast tried to negotiate some social
ascension by exploiting the images of “natural,” tropical exoticism attrib-
uted to them as women of colour by white foreign tourists. Nevertheless,
as Herzfeld points out, these strategies of resistance or even subversion
often “offer[s] more moral satisfaction than change in the material condi-
tions to which the powerful have accorded value” (1997: 157).
It is therefore significant to inquire how people relate to stereo-
typed images that are by definition generalising and reductive, leav-
ing, in principle, no room for individual differences and singularities.
In this article, I analyse how a specific group of Brazilians deals with a
particular stereotype—that of the emotional Brazilian—in the context
of being a foreigner in the United States and European countries. As I
present in the following section, this image is part of a national narra-
tive that dialogues with wider Western conceptions of emotion and
reason, an exchange that refers back to Brazil´s colonial past.
In this sense, it is important to stress a point made in postcolonial
studies (Chatterjee 1993; Gandhi 1998): these self-stereotypes are
formed in an unequal dialogue between coloniser and colonised. Accord-
ing to Fanon, the resistance to colonialism involved overcoming the
alienated condition of the colonised, who would not see themselves as
subjects but as objects, through the eye of the coloniser: “in other words,
the colonised imports his conscience, he is a reflection of the reflection”
(Ortiz 1994: 57–58). Thus, nationalist movements in colonised countries
inevitably had to deal with their colonial past, specifically with differ-
ences between coloniser and colonised and their representations. In
Brazil the ambivalence surrounding the image of the emotional Brazilian
in some national narratives reflects power relations between the
European colonisers and Brazilian intellectuals, as I show next.

Creating the emotional Brazilian

Looking back at his PhD years in the United States, Renato said it
took him some time to adapt himself to what he called the “formalities
 Stereotypes and National Identity 109

of relationships”: the proper interpersonal distance, a different form of

physical contact. He was used to greeting women with kisses on the
cheeks and men with a hug and he realised that this behaviour both-
ered the Americans he knew. He also had to contend with the image of
Brazilian men as ‘Latin lovers,’ but he laughed about it. “We are hot!
Compared to them, we really are.”
Renato and the other men and women interviewed spoke of the
image Brazilians had as “warm,” “hot,” “physical” people. And, as
Renato remarked, they all felt that they were indeed emotional and
affectionate persons, a quality that became particularly appreciated
during their time abroad. These remarks point at two issues: a partic-
ular representation of emotionality and the way in which this image is
experienced.
Tackling the second point first, emotions have been seen as social
phenomena since Durkheim (1971) and Mauss (1980). As Mauss
states, through language “people manifest their sentiments to them-
selves as they express them to others and because of others” (1980: 62,
my translation). Indeed, much of the later anthropological work on
emotions (Abu-Lughod 1986; Lutz 1988; Rosaldo 1980) focuses on
analysing the meanings of various particular emotional categories in
different societies, questioning the psychobiological basis of feelings
and hence their universality.
More recently, interest has fallen on how these emotional categories
are used in discourse, with an emphasis on performance and its effects
on social life. As Abu-Lughod and Lutz propose, “rather than seeing
them as expressive vehicles, we must understand emotional dis-
courses as pragmatic acts and communicative performances” (1990: 11).
With this approach, careful attention is given to the context in which
emotional discourses are conveyed—the power relations that produce
contested meanings and realities. As a consequence, emotion and dis-
course are treated as related variables, thus rejecting views that place
emotion in an inner private realm of experience and discourse in a
public social world. In this sense, with regard to the Brazilians stud-
ied, their experience of emotionality was not only informed by cultural
categories that constructed how and when emotions should be felt and
expressed in the process of making friends but also gained relevance
in specific contexts when national identity was at stake.
Before discussing Brazilian national narratives, it is important to
note that the image of the emotional Brazilian has been elaborated
with reference to modern Western discourses on emotion. In this
Euro-American ethno-psychology, as Lutz (1988) discusses it, emotion
appears as an internal characteristic of persons, being thus subjective
in the sense of an individual perspective. As such, emotions are
110 C. B. Rezende

opposed to reason, as feeling to thought, and are consequently identi-

fied with the body, which is more natural in contrast to the mind.
Emotions are most of the times associated with irrationality, chaos,
vulnerability, lack of control, all of which tend to be qualified nega-
tively. However, emotion can also be valued when associated to life
force and commitment and opposed to alienation and estrangement.
In both ways, women are labelled as the emotional gender. As Lutz
puts it, “emotion is, at one time, a residual category of almost-defective
personal process; at others, it is the seat of the true and glorified self”
(1988: 56).
The notion of Brazilian emotionality was part of a well-known nar-
rative about national identity, developed after the 1920s. Since
Brazil’s independence from Portugal in 1822 and its subsequent proc-
lamation as a republic in 1889, there was much discussion about its
status as a modern nation, marked by a longing desire to be seen as a
civilisation according to European standards. The 1930s represented a
turning point in these debates about national identity, with a greater
focus on characteristics that were “genuinely” Brazilian, compared to
previous discussions that openly emulated European views about
nation and “civilisation.”
One of the pillars of “authentic” Brazilian culture became the newly
valued racial and cultural mixture of Portuguese, African, and indige-
nous peoples, which gave Brazilians their hybrid quality. The anthro-
pologist Gilberto Freyre (1981), who wrote about various aspects of
such hybridity, argued for the “harmonious” relations between the
“races” (although later he was much criticised by sociologists for over-
looking racism and discrimination). Re-signified positively then as a
founding myth, such mixture had for many years earlier anguished
intellectuals, who took racial intermarriage to produce inferior beings,
as shown by Seyferth (1989), thus making it virtually impossible for
Brazil to achieve its civilised (hence white) status.
Another important trait of “national character” was the emotional
“nature” of Brazilians, often perceived as responsible for the crossing
of social and racial distances.2 The historian Sérgio Buarque de
Holanda, for instance, argued in his Raízes do Brazil that “the Brazilian
contribution to civilisation will be that of cordiality” (1982: 106),
defined by him as a way of behaving moved by all that comes from the
heart.3 As a symbolic figure representative of our “national character,”
“cordial man” sought in social life the “escape” from his “fear” of living
alone; “it is rather a form of living through others” (1982: 108). But
such cordiality meant as well that people only acted on behalf of those
who were part of their personal circle of affectionate relations, making
it very difficult, in Holanda’s view, for them to behave based on wider
 Stereotypes and National Identity 111

collective reasons. This ambivalent perception of an emotionally based

cordiality would become an outstanding feature of one of the most
enduring narratives of the Brazilian nation.
The view of the “emotional Brazilian” had been present much before
the 1930s, in the early accounts of European travellers who came to
Brazil during its colonial period. These texts became the source of
many references for the works of Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Gilberto
Freyre, and Paulo Prado. Furthermore, the very idea of an outpouring
emotionality had been one of the recurring European representations
about the colonial world. This emotionality was seen to be a reflection
of a rather primitive stage in physical and psychological development,
one in which reason had still to be mastered in its control of emotions.
Thus, “savages” were more emotional and hence closer to nature, since
reason revealed the action of culture understood as civilisation (Lutz
1988), both of which had yet to be instilled through the colonial rela-
tion. If the colonised saw themselves through the eyes of the coloniser,
this was certainly the case with respect to the idea of Brazilians’
greater emotionality.
However, unlike other colonial settings, Brazil was a Portuguese
colony that ruled over a previously existing “savage” people for a very
short time only. With the rapid decimation of most of its indigenous
peoples, the country was effectively occupied through the descendants
of the Portuguese coloniser, African slaves, and their mixed offspring.
The colonial administrative functionaries born in the Americas
thought of themselves as Europeans because they shared with the
Portuguese ancestry, language, religion, and culture. As Anderson
(1991) points out, Europeans, however, saw them as inferiors for hav-
ing been born in savage land. Thus, from early on there was a desire
among the educated Brazilian natives to be recognised as equals—as
Westerners—which was denied by the European colonisers.
As a consequence, the emotionality imputed through European eyes
became ambiguously perceived as a Brazilian cultural element. From
a negative point of view, emotionality would not only reveal little or
even a complete lack of reason, and hence become a sign of inferiority
but was also seen as conducive to an anarchic sort of individualism
endangering life in society. Thus, we find in the Brazilian narratives
of the 1930s a certain way of disowning this emotionality in the
detached style of writing which seemed to remove the author from the
text, creating the impression that his was a foreign view—close to a
European gaze—of Brazilian society.4
But, despite its negative consequences, emotionality was also posi-
tively valued as a particular feature of Brazilian social relations. Most
of all, unlike other “civilised” societies riveted by racial differences, it
112 C. B. Rezende

could bring closer different races and social classes, promoting a pecu-
liar form of solidarity that coexisted with a hierarchical social order.
As we see next, many of these ideas are found in the present, albeit in
new and varied ways.

Friendship and frustration

Teresa made few friends while she lived in the United States with her
husband, a PhD student as well, and their children. She explained her
difficulty in making friends with Americans due to the fact that she
studied at home most of the time. She said she grew “stressed”
because she saw her husband and children as “more adapted”: “I saw
that they had friends and they began to find me a little weird, you
know? I was the person who still spoke the worst English, who stayed
at home, who could not make friends. The children had very nice
friends.” Teresa had other foreigners as friends. For her, the difficulty
with Americans was not due to the fact that she was Brazilian. “For
example, with these Dutch people, we identified ourselves, shared a
lot of things. So I don’t think it had to do with being Brazilian,
although it involves it as well.” Her perception of herself as a Brazilian
changed “a lot.”

I began being Brazilian there. I changed a lot, you see? I didn’t drink
coffee. I began drinking coffee there. You begin to perceive certain
things, a certain estrangement from Brazil . . . When I arrive in the US,
I realised that religion, Carnival, many things that we take for granted
here are not in fact, they are things that distinguish us from them.

Marcelo replied that his only difficulty during his four years in
Belgium was not having made as many Belgian friends as he had wished.

It would be easier to attribute this to the closed character of the

Belgians, I don’t know . . . But I’m such a spontaneous person, so easy to
make friends that I tend to think this is a negative aspect of . . . I don’t
know if Europeans in general . . . I think that perhaps in order to pre-
serve this democratic freedom, this is the price they pay many times,
this sense of opposition between society and community . . . It’s a percep-
tion of a very strong individualism which made it difficult for me to cre-
ate encounters, because I like to be with people very much.

Marcelo found that his PhD in Belgium gave him a certain “qualified
nationalism.” “Depending on the time and place, you could see me as a
exaggerated nationalist or else as that formal liberal who saw his cul-
ture from an objective distance.”
 Stereotypes and National Identity 113

In Silvia’s PhD course in France, there were no other Brazilians

than herself. From the start, she and her colleagues, French and other
foreigners, formed a “very close” group of friends. She thinks her situ-
ation was rather exceptional since in other French universities, most
courses are loosely structured around a fixed class group, as was her
course, so that the many Brazilian students end up sticking together.
Besides this, Silvia chose not to stay close to Brazilians, aside from
those whom she already knew from Brazil.

I pretended I wasn’t Brazilian so that I wouldn’t enter the Brazilian

network . . . because I had to do fieldwork there and I needed to speak
French; I didn’t speak any . . . The Brazilian group always hung together
in feijoadas, churrascos [typical food parties] . . . Some of those who
heard about it thought I was pretentious, disgusting, but I had to do it.

Silvia did not consider that living abroad affected how she perceived
herself as a Brazilian. It did change how she thought about “our cul-
ture, our way of being, questioning various situations, such as the
habit of touching people when talking to them . . . When I came back, I
had a more French perspective.”
For most of the university teachers studied, going abroad to get a
PhD was their first experience of living outside of Brazil. In their thir-
ties at the time, one of the motivations to study abroad was the wish to
learn about and live in another culture. From the start, they had to
experience different codes and values through the university institu-
tions they were enrolled in, having as well to master a foreign lan-
guage to attend classes. In this sense, they were different from most
Brazilians who migrated to the United States and Europe, relying
heavily on ties with other Brazilians to find jobs, housing, etc., and
often maintaining their social life within the Brazilian community
(Margolis 1998; Ribeiro 1999).
Although they did not live in these communities, these academics
did have Brazilian friends, as well as other foreign friends, mostly
students, on whom they counted for various kinds of support. The
former were often reduced in number and were frequently relation-
ships established previously before leaving Brazil. If sociability and
some sort of identification—generally in terms of values and world-
views—were significant, everyone emphasised how important these
friends had been in terms of emotional and practical support (e.g.,
helping at the time of arrival and departure and caring through
illnesses). They also stressed how they still keep in touch with these
friends, both foreign and Brazilians who do not live in Rio, despite the
physical distance that separates them.
114 C. B. Rezende

However, the creation of local friendship relations was both a goal

as well as a constant difficulty—the source of great frustration for
many. Despite their wish to experience another culture, few of the
academics interviewed felt they had achieved the local social insertion
they aspired, with their social lives restricted basically to university
circles. Most of the supervisors chosen were people who knew Brazilian
society fairly well, often having other Brazilians under their supervision.
And few people managed to make friends with the local Americans,
English, French, and Belgians.
Most people explained their problems in terms of perceived aspects
of the local society. For example, the strong competition felt among
native colleagues was a difficulty frequently mentioned, particularly
emphasised by those who studied in the United States. Although they
stressed that they would return to Brazil after the completion of their
degrees and thus were not competitors in the local job market, they
still considered such competition as hindering the development of
friendship ties. Among those who studied in Europe, the idea that
English, French, and Belgians were “reserved, closed” people, making
it hard to approach them as friends, appeared recurrently. Such char-
acteristics contrasted with an idea of friendship present among these
and other middle class Brazilians (Rezende 2002) that placed a strong
focus on spontaneity and display of affection as part of the process of
developing the intimacy and trust expected from the relationship.
Indeed, even when intimate relationships were not established, the
emotional component was still much valued so that friendship could
be seen as a sentiment widely displayed.
On the other hand, everyone had other foreign friends, generally
students as well, besides a group of Brazilian friends. As Silvia’s
account illustrates, nearly everyone interviewed mentioned that they
avoided relating only to Brazilians, since they did not want to seem
like a “ghetto.” With the former, their common condition as foreign
students going through a similar process of adjusting to a different
society became a strong affinity that brought them together. They
came from various places, such as Holland, Germany, Japan, and the
Middle East. Their common situation as foreign students apparently
neutralised cultural particularities.
The few or no local friends made were constantly singled out as one
of the most significant difficulties people had in their experience
abroad. Developing friendship was seen as an important requirement
for adaptation in the host society, as Teresa explained. Even more
generally, there was a widespread belief among Brazilian middle class
people that, on the whole, friendship could very easily cross cultural,
social, and racial barriers (Rezende 1999, 2002). More often than not,
 Stereotypes and National Identity 115

it was friendship as a sentiment, rather than as a particular relation-

ship, which bridged social distances. Nevertheless, such belief dis-
played the value placed on being connected to others, so that
friendship became an idiom with which to establish these ties, even if
discursively only. Thus, when abroad people did not make friends as
wished, it was as if they lacked social ties.
Consequently, their status as foreigners—hence in the margins—
seemed even more emphasised by this problem, since their friends
were mostly restricted to other equally foreign students. It was not
that these ties were devalued but rather that not having local friends
meant not belonging socially. Hence, their dislike to remain among
Brazilians only, since it made them feel excluded, as if in a ghetto. In
fact, these difficulties seemed to emphasize the perception that they
were so different from locals that there were not the necessary affini-
ties considered important for friendship. Actually, it was during their
years abroad that they came into contact with representations of
Brazil as a non-Western society. Before, they had a more cosmopoli-
tan, Western view of themselves. These were urban middle class intel-
lectuals who consumed a host of globalised goods and worked with a
Western body of knowledge. Like the middle class people Norvell
(2002) studied, before leaving Brazil, they seemed to relate little to the
national images and symbols of Brazilianess, which they would
embrace afterward.
It was therefore by contrast to the host society that their Brazilian
identity stood out. Most people perceived themselves to have become
“more Brazilian” during their stay abroad. They discussed how being
in another country reinforced their Brazilian identity. In some cases,
such as Teresa’s, people saw themselves as “becoming” Brazilians once
they were away. They described what it meant to be Brazilian through
internationally shared meanings and symbols such as football, coffee,
Carnival, or stereotypes such as the emotional Brazilian to define
what they saw as Brazilian identity. Despite the development of a crit-
ical stance toward Brazilian society, as in Marcelo’s self image as a
“qualified nationalist,” it was common for them to value the emotion-
ality and informality taken to be Brazilian traits. As in Renato’s words
quoted earlier, they liked being a “warm” people.
It seemed then that Brazilian “easiness” in making friends was
associated with such spontaneous emotionality, perhaps even its
consequence. It was therefore a feature discussed chiefly by those who
identified themselves strongly as Brazilians and who also had greater
difficulty in creating local friendships. In other words, reinforcing
their Brazilian identity meant placing a great value on what would be
Brazilian meanings of friendship.
116 C. B. Rezende

In fact, Brazilian codes for behaviour became taken for granted as a

standard against which different codes were compared and measured.
Thus, problems in friendship were attributed only to others’ cultural
specificity, whereas their own characteristics were seen basically as
personality traits, as in Marcelo’s views.5 In a rather evolutionist fashion,
differences in friendship practices became one of degree only—in some
societies, people had “a closed character” as opposed to the “open”
approach of others, with the latter being valued as the desired/
appropriate way of being. Because they saw themselves as holding the
standard values of friendship, problems lay in those others whose
behaviour differed from their own.
It was not a coincidence then that Silvia, one of the very few who
had local French friends, thought that she became somewhat “French”
in her attitudes after her return. Having been concerned from the
beginning with learning local codes, she became critical of some of her
previous codes of behaviour. When she returned to Rio de Janeiro, she
changed the way she made friends in the workplace, maintaining a
greater distance than expected. By doing so, she altered limits as to
how and when the emotionality expressed through friendship should
be present, therefore rejecting a fundamental symbol of Brazilian
identity.

Making friends and being Brazilian

During her years in England, Gisele counted on Brazilian and Dutch
friends but not on English ones. She felt her difficulty with the lan-
guage explained to some extent her feeling of having “witnessed from
outside” the English way of living, without actually taking part in it.
“I felt that I was watching everyone from a shop window, because no one
had invited me in. I was a spectator. But it was nice, it was interesting.”
Marcos said that he only perceived himself as a Brazilian when he
went to study in England, because he had never before been outside of
Brazil. It was a shock, he told me.

It’s very weird because you’re very different. And they see you as being even
more different that you actually are. So really there is a lot of prejudice . . .
and a difficulty in understanding what are your codes as well. So being
Brazilian . . . there were some positive things, particularly if you were a
white Brazilian. Brazil is also seen in certain respects as a relatively neu-
tral country. It is not really civilised but it is not barbarous either.

More than others, Gisele and Marcos conveyed in their accounts the
pain they felt about participating in English society as “others” and
 Stereotypes and National Identity 117

not as “equals”—as the Western intellectuals who held a significant

social status back home. In the process of dealing with this form of
participation, friendship with the locals became a sensitive problem,
which made Gisele feel as an outsider looking into a shop window.
There are four major issues that I emphasise in the analysis of
these stories of frustrated friendships. The first referred to the desire
to learn about a different culture as one of the reasons for studying
abroad. This desire reflected, on the one hand, the value placed on
knowledge of the other, almost a sort of cultural relativism, as an
aspect of this middle class ethos. It comes close to what Clifford (1998)
has called an “ethnographic subjectivity,” which is aware of cultural
conventions and has the perception of the subject as being in a culture
at the same time as observing it.
On the other hand, the wish to experience another culture was also
marked by the fact that most of the cities chosen for residence abroad
were seen as “First World” capitals. Thus, it was not just any different
culture that interested them, but it seemed a more or less common
(post)colonial desire to experience life in the metropolis and to learn
(more) about its way of seeing the rest of the world, including its
images of Brazilians.
The second issue present was the idea that, to feel adjusted to the
new society, it was important to develop friendship relations with
local people. It did not seem enough to study in a local institution,
with local teachers and colleagues; having local friends appeared to be
the most significant index of good adjustment. Friendship relations
were considered to be a fundamental form of mediation in any new
social situation and, moreover, became translated into a sign of social
inclusion, something that since the 1930s had been a crucial element
in many Brazilian national narratives.
Third, despite the significance of local friends, most people had
difficulty making them. Their problems in creating local friendships
seemed to mean the opposite of what was wished—instead of being
adapted and included, feelings of frustration and exclusion appeared
more common. With most of their friends being either foreign or
Brazilian students, their marginal position as foreigners was rein-
forced rather than attenuated and accentuated their difference from
the locals. As academics trained in Western traditions of thinking,
who had until then considered themselves to be cosmopolitan people,
they had to deal with images of Brazilians as non-Western locals, as
different and inferior others.
Lastly, the more people talked about problems in making local
friends, the greater was the reported sentiment of being Brazilian
abroad. Together with the perception of seeing themselves strongly as
118 C. B. Rezende

Brazilians came a greater value placed on emotionality and the way in

which Brazilians established friendship. Brazilian standards became
universal features and variations among different societies were
understood in terms of a greater or lesser distance in degree from the
so-perceived universal referents, rather than as culturally distinct
meanings and values. Thus, the difficulties with friendship that lead
to a perception of social difference and exclusion became reinterpreted
as problems locals had and privilege Brazilians held, thus contribut-
ing to a greater perception of their national identity.
This last issue takes me back to the initial question about how peo-
ple relate to national stereotypes. As we have seen, these university
teachers referred to various symbols to define Brazilian identity, most
of which they related to ambiguously before living abroad. The idea of
emotionality was also pointed out as a characteristic and stereotypical
feature of Brazilians, recognized as well in their own behaviour. But,
unlike other symbols, this emotionality was strongly embraced and
actualised in how friendship was established or not. Thus, we can say
that these typified images informed people’s subjective sense of a Bra-
zilian national identity.
Now, we may ask if this more or less straightforward acceptance or
use of stereotypes was due to the contrastive situation people experi-
enced, heightening their perception as Brazilians. In this context they
had to deal with images of Brazil present in their host society, images
that have long banked on the association between emotionality and
the tropics. Although these local stereotypes were often ambiguously
considered in foreign eyes as well as in some Brazilian national narra-
tives, they became positively valued by the Brazilians studied, trans-
formed into an advantage even when it came to the creation of
personal relations. The ambivalence present in the national narratives
of the 1930s gave way to a re-signification of difference as privilege; to
be spontaneous and emotional was no longer understood as a sign of
inferiority but rather of superiority.6 Thus, if the process of
(re)elaborating their national identity involved seeing themselves
through the eyes of these metropolitan societies, the local stereotypes
about Brazilians acquired new meanings and particularly new
strength, making them a positive element present in the subjective
sense of being Brazilian.
Stereotypes are therefore important in the analysis of how national
subjectivities are formed. As elements in the process through which
identities are constructed, they have to be considered in terms of the
contexts in which they are deployed and the various forms of power
relations that cut across them, both internal and external to the stud-
ied society. As pointed out in the beginning, the process of typifying
 Stereotypes and National Identity 119

groups of people—whether organised according to class, ethnic, reli-

gious, or national divisions—is itself permeated by power relations,
often stemming from and reinforcing social and political hierarchies.
A “discursive weapon of power,” as Herzfeld names it, stereotyping
actually “deprives the ‘other’ of a certain property” (1997: 157). These
power relations are, furthermore, rarely based on straightforward dom-
inance or submission, being more generally marked by ambivalence as
well as processes of negotiation and re-appropriation.
Thus, as in the case presented here, stereotypes were used to make
sense of what it meant to be Brazilian in the particular context of
being a foreigner in the United States and in Europe, during which a
host of images recalling colonial relations came to the fore. It was in
this specific condition that stereotypical ideas about emotionality—
often seen as negative in other situations—became re-signified as a
privilege Brazilians have over others, especially their former
colonisers.

Implications for practice

There are four aspects examined in this article that have important
practical implications: the dynamics of identity construction, experi-
ences of temporary migration, lived emotionality, and a particular set
of Brazilian values and meanings.
First, the article deals with identity politics on a micro level, as
experienced by a group of people. Although it does not focus on formal
groups or social movements, it discusses the dynamics of identity
construction, in particular of national identities, and its recourse to
stereotypes as revealing negotiations in power relations. As such, this
analysis can be helpful to the understanding of subjective processes
that are also part of more formalized claims for identity recognition.
Specifically, it shows how stereotypes can be manipulated in the elab-
oration of national identity, whether by individuals or larger
movements.
Second, it presents how people relate subjectively to such stereo-
typical images in the specific context of being a foreigner, away from
home. In this sense, this study examines experiences of migration—
in this particular case, temporary ones—and their effects on subjec-
tivities and social relations. More importantly, it deals with the
experience of representations produced in an unequal dialogue—that
between Europe and the United States and migrants from the colo-
nial world.
Third, this article discusses how representations of emotions come
to inform lived emotionality. In this sense, it contributes to a number
120 C. B. Rezende

of studies that treat emotions as cultural categories rather than uni-

versal traits stemming from a psychobiological basis. As such, this
analysis may be of use to professionals that deal with emotional
experiences—psychologists, therapists, and health practitioners—and
seek to understand them as part of specific cultural contexts.
Lastly, as a study of a particular group of Brazilians, it probes
values and meanings regarding emotions, friendship, social differ-
ences, and national identity, which are shared with other middle class
Brazilians. It thus offers material for those who work with Brazilian
society, as an object of study or intervention.

Notes
Received 6 December 2005; accepted 27 February 2007.

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.

Address correspondence to Claudia Barcellos Rezende, Department of Social Sciences,

Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Rua Ipu, 24, Botafogo, Rio de Janeiro, RJ
22281-040, Brazil. E-mail: cbrezende@bighost.com.br

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 concep-
tion 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 pat-
terns of domestic life in comparison to its Western equivalents.

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