Friday, October 5, 2007

Ipanema dreaming

Here's one from the memory banks.

This was the view from the front of my apartment building in Rio in 1976. I lived on the back side of Ipanema facing the Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas. Nice view for a guy one year out of grad school.

I had joined the U.S. Information Service, the press and culture part of the diplomatic service. I took the foreign service test kind of out of curiosity, plus at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, there was sort of a mass migration to the test site. We were all kind of idealistic about improving relations or in my case, communication, between the U.S. and the rest of the world. I kept passing their tests and ultimately they offered me a job in Rio, which was much better than my other options for getting out in the world to do some research, since I had also made my way to All But Dissertation status in Fletcher's doctoral program. Wasn't quite sure whether I wanted to do something like government service or academia.

I was really interested in big developing countries with strong cultures and media, curious to see how they were dealing with what many people saw as U.S. cultural imperialism, a one way flow of TV and film from the USA out to the rest of the world. I was also really interested in India, China, Mexico and Peru, but Brazil seemed like a good place to start, from what I knew about it: music, carnival, interesting films, etc.

So off I went to learn Portuguese, how to be a diplomat and how to communicate across cultures. Some of that training was actually pretty useful. Years late a colleague at Michigan State, who was trying to start an argument that I did not want to have, said, "It's no fair, you've been trained as a diplomat." I particularly found some of the negotiation and cross-cultural training really interesting, as well as the history and background we got on Latin America. Best, though, was Portuguese itself. I had struggled with trying to learn German in high school and college. Not quite sure why it didn't take then, since I find it interesting now. But getting intensive training, focused on conversation as much as reading, was a lot more interesting that one hour a day in the classroom. Not to mention the imminent prospect of really being somewhere for three years.

Landing in Rio, I found a dinky apartment in Ipanema that my housing allowance would cover.
Kind of hard not to fall in love with Ipanema, the beach, the laid back feeling about the place, lots of interesting restaurants, etc.

Not to mention Brazilians themselves. I had been a bit shy in high school and college. Brazilians were so lively and engaging that they pulled me into their mode of behavior, which I was happy to throw myself into. I noticed that the people at the U.S. consulate who were happiest were those with the most Brazilian friends and the least dependence on the English-speaking community. So I tried to follow that practice, too. Both in Rio and later in Brasilia, when I got moved there. It seemed better than hanging with the people who saw themselves as displaced ex-patriates. There were plenty of those and I must admit I had a bit of hard time understanding them. How could you not want to throw yourself into a place like Brazil?

I just finished a fabulous ethnography on Afro-Brazilian religion, candomblé, in Salvador, done by Ruth Landes in the late 1930s. In the beginning, before she has made her way into the Brazilian communities she wanted to study, she spent time with the American expatriates there, who were largely miserable. It is interesting how some people, sent abroad, get trapped inside their own insular community. My personal experience: run, don't walk, for the door, get out into the local community as fast as possible.

The thing I did not do, which many of my like-minded friends, throwing themselves into Brazil did do, was end up marrying a Brazilian.

More on that and on Rio later.

1 comment:

Rolfo said...

I think this is one thing I definitely inherited from you--that is, if it was inheritable. Or maybe just picked it up from you along the way while I was growing up. That is, the whole desire for cultural immersion thing--I think that's a lot of what made anthropology sound interesting, was being able to make a livelihood (supposedly) out of throwing yourself into new and interesting cultures and trying to make yourself at home. A disposition, or desire really, to do that seems like a way that groups of Americans going international places tend to divide themselves. I definitely saw that on my mission--a divide between the American missionaries who really threw themselves into befriending and being around Brazilians and perfecting their Portuguese and falling in love with the culture, and those that preferred American companions and spoke English whenever they could. Seems like such a waste.

Kristy agrees, and says that a lot of the same is what brought her to psychology--that psychology seems a lot like ethnography, just on a personal level with an individual's life, rather than on a group/societal level.