The global subject of precarity

Peer reviewedPostprin

The Missing ‘Brazilianness’ of Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Art and Architecture

This chapter examines a few of the landmark narratives on the issue of national character published between 1880 and 1940. Following the views of Lucio Marcal Ferreira Ribeiro Lima Costa patron, Costa held that it was instead the simple architecture of anonymous master builders that embodied the functional, technical, and aesthetic homogeneity of Brazilianness. In the drive to rehabilitate nineteenth-century Brazilian art and architecture, the actual discourses by which it came to be ostracized have themselves been suppressed from scholarship. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the decline of colonial and imperial plantation elites from northeast Brazil and the rise to power of coffee-growing and cattle-ranching oligarchies from the southeast, followed by the rise of industrial capitalism. The unchallenged ethos of national genius that Costa helped construct for Niemeyer remains to the day a favourite topic of debate on the nature of professional practice in Brazilian architecture

Cultural change and tradition in the indigenous architecture of oceania

Within the study of cultural change, anthropologists have identified a range of change processes, although this field of study is by no means coherent or unified. The current paper makes a theoretical contribution to this task from the sub-field of 'architectural anthropology'. Case study material is drawn mainly from research on indigenous architecture in the South Pacific or Oceania region in order to analyse (a) the transformations of traditions through deterritorialisation, (b) several types of biculturalism that combine cross-cultural architectural attributes, and (c) the significance of the social engagement process in the reproduction of architectural tradition. By way of a contribution to theory building, a set of categories are generated for particular types of architectural processes of cultural change. The conclusion makes comparisons between the various identified change processes and summarizes the variable transformational properties involved