Strange Bedfellows: Brazilian Immigrants Negotiating Friendship in Lisbon

Abstract

In the late twentieth century, international migration became one of the strategies a number of Brazilians deployed to create and maintain a middle-class lifestyle. Many went to Portugal to seize the new opportunities offered by an expanding Portuguese economy and a skilled job market. As qualified Brazilians arrived with the required skills to fill these jobs and as they achieved a lifestyle that could be equated to a middle-class position in economic terms, they discovered more subjective barriers to their acceptance within general middle-class Portuguese society. In this article, I examine the role of friendship in people's efforts to integrate their middleclass migratory projects with their position in Brazil and Lisbon. I argue that making friends with the Portuguese was an important step for such a project while it required Brazilians to conform to Portuguese manners that contradicted the way they perceived themselves.

Postcolonial social drama: The case of Brazilian dentists in Portugal

“…I have shown elsewhere (Torresan, 2011(Torresan, , 2012 how, in the mid-1980s, people from different regions in Brazil and from all walks of life, tired of living in a persistent political and economic crisis, took up the idea that they could pursue their goals outside their country. The main destinations of this movement were the US, Japan (mostly for those of Japanese descent), Paraguay and Western European countries.…”

Sociability among European Migrants

“…Even with a shared language, however, differences in culture can lead to misunderstandings that impede social connections: Brazilian migrants in Portugal, for example, might act in ways intended to signal interest in friendship with Portuguese colleagues, but these actions sometimes clash with typical Portuguese understandings of appropriate behaviour and friendship patterns (Torresan, 2011). A personal disclosure in a workplace context might be intended by a Brazilian immigrant as an attempt to confide -but the Portuguese colleague might instead perceive that the immigrant lacks a sense of boundaries or is even attempting to leverage personal ties inappropriately for instrumental gain.…”

“…Morosanu, 2013). For most people, building new relationships takes time, and cultural differences can pose difficulties when trying to connect with natives in the destination (Torresan, 2011). And while the Internet enhances people's abilities to sustain relationships over distance (i.e.…”

Friendship, bitching, and the making of ethical selves: what it means to be a good friend among girls in a London school

“…While these are new developments in the literature, there is a longer‐standing interest in the relation between friendship and personhood. Angela Torresan () identifies two significant theoretical and methodological strands within the anthropological study of friendship. In one strand, authors view friendship as a particular kind of relationship dependent on a Western notion of the autonomous individual.…”