Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0049/00491.txt

Text File | 1991-06-24 | 22KB | 385 lines

$Unique_ID{COW00491}
$Pretitle{220}
$Title{Brazil
Chapter 2A.   The Society and Its Environment}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{P. A. Kluck}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{rio
amazon
highlands
meters
de
kilometers
central
sao
south
serra}
$Date{1982}
$Log{Samba dancer*0049101.scf
Figure 2.*0049102.scf
Figure 4.*0049104.scf
Table B.*0049101.tab
}
Country:     Brazil
Book:        Brazil, A Country Study
Author:      P. A. Kluck
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1982

Chapter 2A.   The Society and Its Environment

[See Samba dancer: Samba Dancer]

     Brazilian society of the early 1980s was marked by pronounced regional
and ethnic diversity. The country's principal regions include the
industrialized and relatively prosperous South and Southeast, the
impoverished, agricultural Northeast and its humid littoral and arid
backlands, the Center-West, and the Amazon Basin, the latter two only recently
opened to large-scale settlement and development. All the regions vary in
their economic and political histories; each has been integrated into national
life in a slightly different fashion.

     Ethnic diversity accompanies the marked regionalism. Descendants of
Portuguese settlers, Amerindians, and African slaves comprise the main
cultural groups. The Lusitanian heritage has been disproportionate to the
absolute numbers of Portuguese immigrants to Brazil; they were colonizers and
left their mark on the country's political system and social institutions.
Language, kinship, and religion all reflect Portuguese hegemony during
Brazil's formative centuries. Amerindian influence is most strongly felt in
the Amazon Basin, African in the Northeast. Numbers of European, Middle
Eastern, and Asian immigrants came in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Most settled in the Southeast, particularly in Rio de Janeiro and
Sao Paulo, bringing with them significant and diverse skills and training.
They remain a mainstay of industrial development.

     Rural Brazil is-as it always has been-dominated by large landholdings.
Social organization was traditionally based on plantations that were devoted
to export crop production and that relied on slave labor. Peasant landholders
were relegated to marginal lands. Although they might have played a major role
in the local or regional economy, they were, with few exceptions, under the
hegemony of plantation owners. Sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and casual
laborers replaced slaves after slavery's abolition in 1888, but social
relations had changed little by the mid-1980s: few held resources and power.

     Paternalism moderated the impact of the more glaring disparities. An
elaborate courtesy surrounded the relations between plantation owners and
their dependents. The powerless exchanged their labor for land and their
loyalty and deference for patronage and protection. The ideal landowner would
assist his minions in their need and shelter them from the predations of
outsiders. The decline of resident plantation workers in favor of casual,
temporary laborers marked the 1960s and 1970s. Economic trends limited the
land available to sharecroppers and tenants as well as to the owners of small
farms who needed to rent parcels to make ends meet. All these swelled the
ranks of casual laborers. The increase in casual labor and the growing number
of agribusinesses and commercial interests owning land served to undermine the
traditional norms of patronage and dependency.

     Since the 1930s Brazil has had an increasingly mobile, urban population.
A "moving frontier" has long characterized agricultural expansion. As soils
were exhausted, owners abandoned their holdings to move to virgin lands.
Peasants were the frontier's vanguard, clearing forests only to be shunted
onto more remote parcels as their holdings came under the purview of
plantation owners. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the agricultural
frontier moved southward from Rio de Janeiro, toward Sao Paulo, and thence
westward through the states of Sao Paulo and Parana. Fueled by demographic
growth, the migration continued in the 1960s and 1970s, moving into Goias.
Mato Grosso, and Amazonas. With each advance the latest frontier gradually
reestablished the social relations typical of more settled regions. Efforts to
use frontier lands to absorb the landless from elsewhere and to develop a
class of independent small family farms foundered.

     The most spectacular population growth has not been in the rural frontier
but in the large cities. Much of the economic-political transformation of the
past half-century relates to urban growth. The expansion in industry and
commerce and the concomitant rise in the influence of the bourgeoisie are
city based. The development of a substantial middle class of educated and
skilled employees to staff the burgeoning government bureaucracy and public
sector is likewise an urban phenomenon. Increased urbanization-far more than
migration to the frontier-has been Brazil's answer to skyrocketing population
growth and unrest in the countryside. Sons and daughters of the rural populace
have flocked to cities. For much of the 1960s and early 1970s cities provided
the rural-urban migrant with a measure of opportunity, if not affluence or
security. What the more uncertain 1980s would hold for the enormous and
growing numbers of urban, lower class Brazilians remained to be seen.

Geography

     The fifth largest country in the world, Brazil encompasses 8,511,965
square kilometers of territory, an area greater than that of the 48 contiguous
states of the United States (see fig. 1). It comprises about half of South
America's landmass and borders all but two of the continent's other countries
along a 15,700-kilometer land frontier. Brazil stretches 4,300 kilometers from
Cabo Orange in the north to Lagoa Mirim on its border with Uruguay in the
south and a similar distance from Cabo Branco on the Atlantic to the
westernmost point on its frontier with Peru. The country's coastline is more
than 7,500 kilometers long.

     The landscape of Brazil is dominated by two prominent features, the
Amazon River and the Central Highlands, a plateau that rises southward from
the great river. The Amazon, the world's mightiest river in terms of flow of
water and second longest after the Nile, cuts laterally across Brazil's
northern region, and countless tributary streams drain a vast basin that takes
in three-fifths of the national territory. The entire basin, including areas
in neighboring countries, supports a tropical rain forest that provides
natural replacement for 15 percent or more of the world's oxygen (see fig. 2).

[See Figure 2.: Natural Vegetation]

     Most of the Central Highlands consist of a tableland varying in altitude
from 300 to 500 meters above sea level, broken by a number of low mountain
systems and cut by deep valleys. The highlands ascend steeply in the east
forming an escarpment, where several peaks attain an altitude of 2,500 meters
or more, and then drop precipitously to a narrow Atlantic coastal plain.

     According to a system of regional designations introduced in 1970 by the
Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (Fundacao Instituto Brasileiro
de Geografia e Estatistica-IBGE), the country is divided into five
regions-North, Northeast Southeast, South, and Center-West (Norte, Nordeste,
Sudeste, Sul, and Centro-Oeste). To facilitate statistical reporting, the
IBGE shows the regions as composed of entire states and territories (see
table B). As a consequence, they overlap the topographical zones.

[See Table B.: Regions of Brazil, 1980]

Topographical Zones

     Brazil's natural features can be delineated into five topographical
zones. These are the Central Highlands, the Guiana Highlands to the north of
the Amazon, the Amazon lowlands, the Pantanal, and the coastal plain (see fig.
3). Brazil, which has the lowest mean altitude of any other South American
country except Uruguay and Paraguay, officially defines its highlands as areas