Brazilian media frequently define middle-class Brazilians as victims who have lost their paradise along the bumpy road of a chronic political and economic crisis. After a period of rapid upward mobility during the 1960s and 1970s, when the military regime was engaged in modernizing Brazil, this middle class seemed to have become an ephemeral phenomenon, a "dream," or "an "illusion" (p. 21). In Consumption Intensified, O'Dougherty sets out to investigate middle-class people's daily struggles to "attain, maintain, and perform" (p. 3) their class identity in the face of permanent job instability and high inflation. In addition, she examines the relationship between the Brazilian middle class and an unabashed media that volunteered to define its economic and political raison d'être.

During her fieldwork (1993-1994), O'Dougherty perceived a general insistence on internal middle-class differences that she identified as part of a local management of boundaries. O'Dougherty claims that adopting this line of thought would overshadow the power mechanisms that produce the inequalities constitutive of processes of differentiation. Consequently, she employs a broad concept of middle class to observe a "situated," "non-representative" (p. 9) sample of 24 families--mostly liberal professional couples and their school-age children living in gentrified neighborhoods of São Paulo--who "shared certain significant structural and subjective experiences" (p. 8). Their lives and class identity had been affected not only by the economic crisis but also by its negative effect on the meaning of modernity to which the notion of middle class was so closely linked.

O'Dougherty builds her main theoretical argument around the subject of consumption. She shows how and why consumption intensified as the economic crisis threatened the maintenance of middle-class material and symbolic bases (home and car ownership, job security, private education, and cultural pursuits [ch 1]). In this context, consumption constituted a hierarchical set of practices explained under a specific discourse of "cultural and moral superiority" (p. 3), in conformity with which the middle class disassociated itself from both the frivolous materialism of the noncultivated nouveau riche and the misfortunes of the racialized poor Northeastern migrants. Education, "refined" culture (p. 14), and certain signifiers of modernity formed the symbolic values of this morality.

Following de Certeau, O’Dougherty observes Brazilians' "unique tactics and strategies" (p. 52) of market research and stockpiling of household goods as means of protecting their money against hyperinflation and adapting to frequent government stabilization plans (which she describes in chapter 2). Absorbed in their daily "shopping nightmare" (p. 51), O’Dougherty’s informants perceived themselves to be caught in a vicious cycle, the culture of inflation, in which their own protective responses to economic instability were intrinsically inflationary and would eventually be obstructed by yet another governmental plan. The temporary relief provided by the government would ultimately lead to a new period of recession when the middle class resorted to another inflationary strategy. A further "survival tactic" (p. 53) was the middle class’s uneasy move toward an informal economy of small businesses and services, often associated with the petite bourgeois. Supported by the media, Brazilians have found new ways to transform these ventures into honorable middle-class occupations (ch. 3).

Given these inevitable material adjustments, Brazilians turned to a special kind of consumption, "creating a dual vision--of the immediate reality of crisis and the desired reality of the First World" (p. 15). Drawing on Bourdieu's idea of class distinction and on recent theories of consumption advanced by Daniel Miller, Arjun Appadurai, and Colin Campbell, among others, the author demonstrates the ways in which Brazilians recontextualized transnational goods (ch. 4) and experiences of modernity (ch. 5) to "display their values" (p. 49) while reinforcing their place in the local social hierarchy. The acquisition of foreign goods (even through contraband) and the practice of international travel (mostly to Disney World) have become privileged means to create class distinction and support middle-class identity through a symbolic connection with modernity in a First World style. O'Dougherty asserts that, contrary to current assumptions about the flattening effect of globalization and transnationalism, Brazilian middle-class transnational consumption and defiance of protectionist policies not only adapt global structures of power to reinforce local inequalities, but also re-accredit the ubiquitous and troublesome presence of the nation-state.

Throughout the book O'Dougherty remarks on the influential place of media that have assumed the role of middle-class interpreter. Similarly, she continuously reflects on the middle class’s claims of superiority. The recurrence of these themes makes chapter 6 and parts of 7--on the media and on narratives of nation, race, and culture, respectively--somewhat redundant. An excess of information only adds extraneous detail to issues she has previously considered. For example, her meticulous description of one magazine's coverage of Fernando Collor de Mello's disastrous presidency, albeit engaging, ultimately distracts from her main argument. One explanation for this excess may be O'Dougherty's direct confrontation with a certain Brazilian intellectual protectionism (p. 179). Perhaps now, with such resourceful ethnography and keen analysis, some native intellectuals will have to admit that this U.S. anthropologist does indeed know something of Brazil's history and daily life.

My only other critique concerns O'Dougherty's inattention to social interaction within and between classes, which would have taken her cultural analysis on the power involved in daily politics of distinction and inequality a step further: when and how was the middle-class claim of superiority altered or disputed? In spite of this critique, Consumption Intensified is a much-needed and intelligent contribution to the ethnography of the middle class, particularly in Brazil.