Sound Praxis, Poverty, and Social Participation: Perspectives from a Collaborative Study in Rio De Janeiro

Abstract

A long-standing and pervading theme in fields of inquiry such as economics, sociology, health studies, human rights, or social policy, poverty has apparently not similarly impacted scholarship on music beyond the implicit recognition—more typically found in folklore, ethnomusicology, and popular music studies—that it may have conditioned to some degree music-making among given groups within a larger society or even among larger societal entities such as countries and continents. One problem likely hindering more theoretical approaches to music and poverty is the difficulty, so often expressed in the above-mentioned fields, of finding a universally acceptable definition of poverty (not forgetting that defining “music” is also far from unproblematic). A growing literature, mostly beyond music disciplines, accounts for the many possible determining factors behind such a definition—such as family or individual income, gross national product, formal employment rate, average cost of a minimal caloric diet, access to basic sewage, and adequate housing—which may be adopted either in combination or in isolation. At the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries, economists such as Amartya Sen, Mahbub Ul Haq, Deepa Narayan, Celso Furtado, and others went further in the pursuit of a multidimensional approach, considering factors such as education, availability of natural resources, and political participation in defining the boundaries indexing situations of poverty. Sen's (2010) definition of poverty as one's privation of developing individual capacities has since become an influential source of public debate (Crespo and Gurovitz 2002).

URBAN CELEBRATION IN A BRAZILIAN FAVELA: From an Art Festival to a Youth Movement

“…First, as has been noted throughout this article, Fazendinhando is youth-led (see Figure 3). In line with the cultural initiatives already discussed, as well as many others throughout Brazil (Araújo and Cambria, 2013;Angelini, 2015;Caldeira, 2015), Latin America (McGuirk, 2014) and other countries in the global South (Sitas, 2020), Jardim Colombo's prospects of a better future rely on its creative and politically active youth. What is remarkable is that this generation born and raised in Jardim Colombo feels part of a well-connected national and transnational network of change-makers.…”

“…Inspired by Paulo Freire's pedagogy, many of these cultural initiatives share an emphasis on self‐awareness and the need to name social injustices, as well as their social and systemic roots. In this vein, Samuel Araújo and Vincenzo Cambria's account of a participatory project in the Maré favela in Rio de Janeiro highlights how, through sound praxis and group discussions on ethnomusicology, its residents are ‘challenging the forms of symbolic violence’ (Araújo and Cambria, 2013: 38) that result from the common association of favelas with violence‐inducing music (and art more generally). Another significant example of counter‐cultural production is the Morrinho project, a miniature city that re‐creates Rio de Janeiro's peripheral urbanizations.…”

“…Nonetheless, such approaches are not without their own critiques:

This uncritical idea of absence that is central to most common‐sense views about favelas includes, however, many other lacks, such as lack of order and legality, lack of infrastructure, lack of education, lack of healthy conditions, lack of job opportunities, lack of knowledge, lack of security, lack of culture, lack of moral and civic values, etc. Such an all‐encompassing association of lack with favelas for a long time represented a central assumption behind most of the actions carried out in favelas by the state, non‐governmental organizations, and most university outreach projects, which have almost always aimed at bringing something to them (Araújo and Cambria, 2013: 33).

Motivated by this and other critiques of deficiency‐based analyses of informal settlements, this final part of the discussion uses a strength‐based approach to discern the politics embedded in Movimento Fazendinhando's planned urban celebration. Sustained by its four pillars and informed by its structure‐changing aspirations, Fazendinhando constitutes direct evidence of Miraftab's notion of insurgent planning , which refers to grassroots planning strategies born in the era of neoliberal global capitalism that aspire to challenge historical structures of oppression (Miraftab, 2009; 2017).…”

“…This uncritical idea of absence that is central to most common‐sense views about favelas includes, however, many other lacks, such as lack of order and legality, lack of infrastructure, lack of education, lack of healthy conditions, lack of job opportunities, lack of knowledge, lack of security, lack of culture, lack of moral and civic values, etc. Such an all‐encompassing association of lack with favelas for a long time represented a central assumption behind most of the actions carried out in favelas by the state, non‐governmental organizations, and most university outreach projects, which have almost always aimed at bringing something to them (Araújo and Cambria, 2013: 33).…”