"Brazil above everything, God above everyone": an ethnography of Bolsonarist metaphorical colonial sense in the 2018 Brazilian elections

This thesis seeks to explain the success of Brazil’s far-right-wing Bolsonarists in the 2018 election campaign. It analyses how the different communicative forms present in the campaign, were structured around foundational metaphors that generated the entire cognitive universe of Bolsonarismo, allowing it to link into the type of society Brazil actually was: a post-colonial society, historically racist, hierarchical and founded on a regime of the normalisation of violence, which at the same time built its management of these dilemmas on the cordiality and flexibility of its relationships through festive expressions, such as carnivals and football. Influenced by Caio Prado Jr’s (2011/1942) concept of colonial sense, I have called the relationship between Bolsonarist metaphorical thinking and Brazil’s colonial origin a metaphorical colonial sense. This concept of metaphorical colonial sense has been crucial to the testing of the hypotheses that were the starting points for this thesis. These were that the Bolsonarist phenomenon could be explained as a product of the existence of a global systemic crisis, as a product of the existence of specific elements in Brazilian culture closely linked to the colonial past that included an acceptance of hierarchies and a specific historical social order that was perceived to be at risk, and through the category of “far-right” rather than fascism, as, although Bolsonarismo shared certain features of fascism, it was a complex, particular and peculiarly Brazilian phenomenon better explained by the concept of “far-right.” 

The fieldwork for the thesis consisted of an ethnography comprising two central activities. In the first, three electoral campaigns in the State of Rio de Janeiro were followed, during which I studied the metaphorical thinking articulated in official Bolsonarismo. In the second, various people with profoundly different profiles were accompanied through their day-to-day lives during the months of the electoral period. Some of these people intended to vote for the Bolsonarist project. Others were members of a progressive politics, who attempted to counter the onslaught of Bolsonarismo with their own set of metaphors. The concept of a metaphorical colonial sense proved crucial to identifying that the Brazilian far-right was projecting a metaphorical universe that was only able to function because of the deep historical roots of post-colonial Brazil. Although sharing some obvious traits with international far-right phenomena, “fascism” fails to capture the particular elements of Brazilian post-colonialism that proved so decisive in the campaign, especially the myth of racial democracy and harmony so necessary to understanding the continuing acceptance of violence as a means of managing conflict in Brazil. 

Thus, through the lens of conceptual metaphor theory and the concept of metaphorical colonial sense it became evident that the consequences of Brazil’s colonial period were present throughout the structuring metaphors of Bolsonarismo. The tensions of a society that had passed without explicit conflict from colony to republic, from slavery to abolition, and from dictatorship to democracy, could thus be exploited by an anti-establishment political program that declared Brazil itself as their party.