Papers - Conference 2009 - Institute of Latin American Studies

a. THE IMPORTANCE IN BEING PART OF THE ‘ELITE’There are several characteristics that make Brazil rather different than many of the countries overwhich the globalization process is mostly thought, but certainly none can match in importancethe economic gap between classes that comes about in the country. The Brazilian economicinequality is so determinant and well known that became one of the most significant traitspointed by sociologists and novel writers when trying to explain or portray Brazilian society.Brazilian almost folkloric class dissimilarity, embodied on local telenovelas (soap operas) and interms such “Belindia” -an expression coined during the 70‟s that describes Brazil as a fictionalcountry where a small wealthy part of the population live in wealth Belgium while the great masslive in poor India (Bacha, 1974) -, is also present in more scientific ways to determinate howbroad the gap is as the Gini Coefficient 2 . According to data from the 2004 United NationsHuman Development Report (HDR) Brazil has a coefficient Gini close to 0.6 - which places thecountry as the 8 th most uneven state on the world when comes to wealth distribution amongst127 nations that are in the report 3 .As being an inegualitarian society with its roots on a plantation model - which made use of bothslavery and peonage in different period of its history- Brazilian society has much of itsconceptions based on classism and social hierarchy (Freyre, 1933. DaMatta 1991. Almeida2007). The latter, somewhat based on the former, is a rather strong peculiarity in PortugueseAmerican culture that surpasses the State figure and its assumptions that everybody is equalbefore the law. As a matter of fact, is believed that some Brazilians- in situations in which anequalitarian treatment becomes intolerable- do the question: “você sabe com quem está falando?"(Do you know who you are talking to?), an expression immortalized by the sociologist RobertoDaMatta (DaMatta, 1991) that exposes the hierarchic characteristic of Brazilian society.According to the sociologist, Alberto Almeida, that tried out DaMatta‟s conception on a survey2 Gini coefficient is a way to measure social inequality developed by Corrado Gini. It is commonly used to calculatethe inequality in distribution of wealth. It consists in a number between 0 and 1, where 0 means a completeequality in wealth share (where everybody has the same income) and 1 means totally inequality (where one has allthe income of a given group while all other don’t have anything).3 2004 UN Human Development Report. http://hdr.undp.org/en/. Accessed on May 25 th , 20086