MASS COMMUNICATION AND CULTURAL STASIS: A QUALITATIVE CASE STUDY OF NORTHEAST BRAZIL

The present study attempts to apply a qualitative methodology derived from the principles of grounded theory to an historical study of mass communication in Northeast Brazil. A ritual conception of communication is employed, derived from James Carey's understanding of communication as a symbolic process through which reality is created, maintained, repaired, and transformed. The principle theme of this study is the examination of the various symbolic modes used to maintain relationships of inequality and passivity in Northeast Brazil. The time frame for this study begins with the initial colonization effort undertaken by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century and extends through the present period of military rule.;A culturally-based definition of communication posits the existence of a strong symbiosis between cultural and communicative matrices, with communication structures involved with the maintenance of cultural structures over time. Chapters Two and Three of the present work, therefore, develop an historical overview of the symbolic structures that define the geo-cultural environment of the Northeast. Against this backdrop, Chapters Four and Five examine the two dominant mass communication matrices that exist in the region: the traditional electronic and print media and the folk communication forms employed by marginalized people.;The communication forms and processes in the Northeast embody relationships of alienation and fatalism and play a key role in the definition and maintenance of a dominative socio-cultural environment. Since the mass media in Brazil developed in conjunction with and in support of the dominative elements of the socio-cultural matrix, it is highly improbable that the media can play an initiating role in the process of change, without a prior or concurrent change occurring in the overall socio-cultural patterns. The most severe form of poverty in the Northeast is the denial of the individual's ability to critically reflect on his or her own geo-cultural environment and to symbolically re-name and alter that environment through collective action. The potential for change in the Northeast depends on altering this form of poverty.