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Public Health, Patronage and National Culture

The Resuscitation and Commodification of Community Origins in Neoliberal Brazil

Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center, john.collins{at}qc.cuny.edu

This article examines state and citizens' reliance on patron—client relations during neoliberal restructuring. It contends that neoliberalism is not an objectively apparent set of processes but an ideology. Building on this insight that emphasizes contradictory power relations, I focus on residents of a historical center, the Pelourinho, and their interpretations of the packaging of their practices as patrimony. As a result of their experience with institutions and patronage networks, these people have cobbled together surprising approaches to their state and its production of value from their habits and themselves. Thus, even as the state structures its attempt to commodify habits around a mix of techniques and patronage, residents employ related idioms to make demands on that state. I develop this argument in relation to an earlier period that was influential in putting together the lineaments of the national culture that is commodified today to argue that a double-bound debunking takes place in the Pelourinho, due to the workings of patronage and an ostensibly objective social science. Such a relational engagement with state attempts to sanitize vernacular habits suggests ways of understanding state institutions and NGOs that are so much a part of ideologies and their contestations under neoliberalism.

Key Words: AIDS • Brazil • cultural heritage • hygiene • patron-clientelism

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