Bridging Art and Bureaucracy: Marginalization, State-Society Relations, and Cultural Policy in Brazil

• Published date: 01 March 2018
• Date: 01 March 2018
• Author: Anne Gillman
• DOI: 10.1177/0032329218754503
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329218754503

Politics & Society

2018, Vol. 46(1) 29 –51

© 2018 SAGE Publications

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DOI: 10.1177/0032329218754503

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Article

Bridging Art and Bureaucracy:

Marginalization, State-Society

Relations, and Cultural Policy

in Brazil

Anne Gillman

University of California, Davis

Abstract

Even under many formally democratic regimes, large swaths of the citizenry experience

alienation from states with uneven presence throughout the national territory.

Addressing a gap in scholarship that has examined why rather than how states establish

new modes of engagement with subaltern groups, this article documents concrete

mechanisms by which the Brazilian state built new state-society relations through a

particular cultural policy. By recognizing and funding artistic initiatives in underserved

communities, the program aimed to expand their access to the state and validate their

role in the polity. On the basis of in-depth fieldwork in three Brazilian states, the article

argues that new relations actually were forged through state-society encounters around

the program’s administrative procedures. The surprising twist—that paperwork, as

much as art, played a transformative role—sheds new light on bureaucracy as a point

of contact with the state and offers new insights into the ways that cultural politics can

shift.

Keywords

Brazil, culture, marginalization, state-society relations, cultural politics

Corresponding Author:

Anne Gillman, Department of Human Ecology, University of California, Davis, 1 Shields Ave., Davis, CA

95616, USA.

Email: agillmanjhu@gmail.com

754503PASXXX10.1177/0032329218754503Politics & SocietyGillman

research-article2018

30 Politics & Society 46(1)

The cultural policy of this ministry . . . should be seen as part of a general project to

construct a new hegemony in this country. . . . As part and essence of a project to construct

a Brazil that is for everyone.

—Inaugural address, Gilberto Gil, Brazilian Minister of Culture, January 2, 20031

This [Ponto de Cultura] program came from heaven, but the rules were made by the devil

himself.

—Comment from a participant in Brazil’s Ponto de Cultura program2

You can hear the drumming from the edge of Vila dos Pescadores, a fishing village

turned shantytown in the northeastern Brazilian city of Maceió, though it takes twenty

minutes to pick your way through streams of sewer water and piles of uncollected

trash to reach the waterfront site where the musical group Enseada das Canoas

rehearses. Under the shaded overhang of the neighborhood residents association, a

group of young people beat hand-made drums, transitioning from maracatu, a genre

cultivated in Afro-Brazilian religious communities, to the heavy off beats of the funk

music popular in Brazil’s urban ghettos. Driving three hours inland down roads lined

with sugar cane fields as far as the eye can see, you eventually hit a dirt road that leads

to the farmhouse where a local resident hosts a community radio program, featuring

live weekly performances of the band Meninos do Sítio (Farm Boys). The “boys,” an

ensemble of octogenarian accordionists, percussionists, and singers, perform a rousing

repertoire of familiar folk styles of the rural northeast—forro, guerreiro, reisado—and

neighbors arrive by motorcycle to dance a song or two.

Enseada das Canoas and Meninos do Sítio are among the nearly four thousand

cultural initiatives in marginalized areas that the Brazilian state has recognized as

Pontos de Cultura (cultural points), each receiving $90,0003 over three years in sup-

port of their continued development. Pontos are the cultural raw material of an initia-

tive established in 2004 by the Brazilian Ministry of Culture (MinC) to reconstruct the

relationship between the state and excluded sectors. Beyond expanding subaltern

groups’ access to state resources—already a relatively radical undertaking given

Brazil’s history of “government by and for the few”4— the Ponto de Cultura program

(PdC) directly tackles the cultural politics of state-society relations, or the meanings

assigned to Brazil’s poorer, darker-skinned citizens, which state actions both reflect

and (re)produce. By officially validating such populations as “culture makers,” the

PdC upends powerful social hierarchies that, even beyond material inequalities, keep

the marginalized “in their place.” How were these new state-society relations con-

structed in practice? How, in contexts of acute inequality and historical lack of access,

can states establish new modes of engagement with excluded populations? And how,

in particular, do the cultural politics of state-society relations shift?

Ultimately, the PdC’s high-minded vision was implemented by a bureaucratic state

and, as the political scientist James Scott observed, states have particular ways of “see-

ing” their populations that tend to miss or distort societal reality. The documentation