Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 15:103122, 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 understand 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 certainly 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 professional, she considered her identity as too cosmopolitan to fit what she
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saw as an ethnic label.1 The growing number of Brazilian immigrants have to cope with this fracture in various ways. Margolis (1998) discusses 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 identity, based on the stories of a group of Brazilian academics who studied 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 specific 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 friendship abroad. In my previous studies (Rezende 1999, 2002), I showed that among middle class Brazilians, friendship is seen as both a sentiment 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 Janeirosix women and six men who were university 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

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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 projects issues but created 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 feelings 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 specialized 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 opportunity 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 unaccompanied 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 peoples different abilities in making friends, I treat friendship as a culturally constructed relationship, with meanings 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 consequence, 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 contextualize the analysis of this particular discourse on friendship abroad.

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National identities and stereotypes

In recent years the notion of identity has been treated as levels of identification that are continuously constructedrather than being determined a prioriand 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 movements 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 culture. As many authors (Anderson 1991; Hall 1998; Smith 1997; Verdery 2000) have recently shown, national identities are best seen as creations, or as narratives in Bhabhas (1990) terms. Such narratives are actually historically dated, and in each period distinct cultural elements are selected to form them, often contrasting with those of elected foreign societies. Despite its frequently essentialised character, 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 faades 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 contravene official ideology (1997: 9). Thus, criticizing the separation between the state and the peoplebest 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

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through gender and race (Kondo 1997; Piscitelli 1996; Stepan 1991), so that people develop various relations to such images and subjectivities, as well as distinguish themselves from other nationals based on such embodied traits. National identities become particularly salient in situations of contrast (Oliveira 2000; Woodward 2000). As I have said, because identities 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 themselves presented by other groups. Each group deals with such stereotypes differently, whether denying or embracing them (Oliveira 1976), but, in either way, people negotiate such images in the process of elaborating 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 experience of the people so represented (McDonald 1993: 221). These representations 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 stereotypical 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 available to understand difference and offers important categories with which to mark boundaries between us and them. McDonald emphasises 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 generally 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 Herzfeldthose aspects of a cultural identity that are both the focus of self criticism and yet an assurance of common sociality (1997: 3).

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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 attributed 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 attributed 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 conditions to which the powerful have accorded value (1997: 157). It is therefore significant to inquire how people relate to stereotyped images that are by definition generalising and reductive, leaving, in principle, no room for individual differences and singularities. In this article, I analyse how a specific group of Brazilians deals with a particular stereotypethat of the emotional Brazilianin 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 narrative that dialogues with wider Western conceptions of emotion and reason, an exchange that refers back to Brazils 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. According 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: 5758). Thus, nationalist movements in colonised countries inevitably had to deal with their colonial past, specifically with differences 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

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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 bothered 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 particular 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 themselves 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 discourses as pragmatic acts and communicative performances (1990: 11). With this approach, careful attention is given to the context in which emotional discourses are conveyedthe power relations that produce contested meanings and realities. As a consequence, emotion and discourse 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 studied, 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

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opposed to reason, as feeling to thought, and are consequently identified 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 negatively. 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 narrative about national identity, developed after the 1920s. Since Brazils independence from Portugal in 1822 and its subsequent proclamation 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 indigenous peoples, which gave Brazilians their hybrid quality. The anthropologist 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 overlooking 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 Srgio Buarque de Holanda, for instance, argued in his Razes 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 Holandas view, for them to behave based on wider

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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 Srgio 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 relation. 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 having been born in savage land. Thus, from early on there was a desire among the educated Brazilian natives to be recognised as equalsas Westernerswhich 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 viewclose to a European gazeof Brazilian society.4 But, despite its negative consequences, emotionality was also positively valued as a particular feature of Brazilian social relations. Most of all, unlike other civilised societies riveted by racial differences, it

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could bring closer different races and social classes, promoting a peculiar 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 dont 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 didnt 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 dont know . . . But Im such a spontaneous person, so easy to make friends that I tend to think this is a negative aspect of . . . I dont know if Europeans in general . . . I think that perhaps in order to preserve this democratic freedom, this is the price they pay many times, this sense of opposition between society and community . . . Its a perception of a very strong individualism which made it difficult for me to create 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 culture from an objective distance.

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In Silvias 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 situation 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 wasnt Brazilian so that I wouldnt enter the Brazilian network . . . because I had to do fieldwork there and I needed to speak French; I didnt 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 culture, 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 thirties 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 institutions they were enrolled in, having as well to master a foreign language 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 relationships established previously before leaving Brazil. If sociability and some sort of identificationgenerally in terms of values and worldviewswere 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.

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However, the creation of local friendship relations was both a goal as well as a constant difficultythe 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 characteristics 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 Silvias 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,

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it was friendship as a sentiment, rather than as a particular relationship, which bridged social distances. Nevertheless, such belief displayed 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 foreignershence 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 affinities 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 cosmopolitan, Western view of themselves. These were urban middle class intellectuals 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 Teresas, 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 critical stance toward Brazilian society, as in Marcelos self image as a qualified nationalist, it was common for them to value the emotionality and informality taken to be Brazilian traits. As in Renatos 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.

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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 Marcelos views.5 In a rather evolutionist fashion, differences in friendship practices became one of degree onlyin 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 language 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.
Its very weird because youre 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 neutral 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

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not as equalsas 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 wishedinstead 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 reinforced 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

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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 contributing to a greater perception of their national identity. This last issue takes me back to the initial question about how people 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 peoples subjective sense of a Brazilian national identity. Now, we may ask if this more or less straightforward acceptance or use of stereotypes was due to the contrastive situation people experienced, 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 narratives, they became positively valued by the Brazilians studied, transformed 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 studied society. As pointed out in the beginning, the process of typifying

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groups of peoplewhether organised according to class, ethnic, religious, or national divisionsis 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 dominance 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 situationsbecame 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, experiences 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 elaboration of national identity, whether by individuals or larger movements. Second, it presents how people relate subjectively to such stereotypical 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 onesand their effects on subjectivities and social relations. More importantly, it deals with the experience of representations produced in an unequal dialoguethat between Europe and the United States and migrants from the colonial world. Third, this article discusses how representations of emotions come to inform lived emotionality. In this sense, it contributes to a number

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of studies that treat emotions as cultural categories rather than universal traits stemming from a psychobiological basis. As such, this analysis may be of use to professionals that deal with emotional experiencespsychologists, therapists, and health practitionersand 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 differences, 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-Cincia 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 Norvells (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 groups notion of friendship approached a wider Western conception 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 patterns of domestic life in comparison to its Western equivalents.

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