14

Watching Telenovelas in Brazil

Mediating the Everyday

Antonio C. La Pastina

Augusto, a politician in his mid-thirties, liked television and telenovelas a lot. He never saw his desire to watch telenovelas as a threat to his manhood or his status in Macambira, a small rural community in northeast Brazil. Sometimes he watched television at his place, but mostly he would go to the house of a friend or a political supporter, since his wife worked the night shift as a nurse in a neighboring town. For Augusto, The Cattle King (1996–1997), a telenovela with a landowner as the hero and a landless peasant as the target of his love, provided good examples for Brazil. For instance Augusto saw pedagogic potential in Leia, the hero's adulterous wife.

Augusto was arguing that telenovelas can show behaviors that are “modern” and urban, yet not in conflict with the values of Brazilians. For him, women in telenovelas, and consequently in larger metropolitan centers, were already liberated, and hence they were engaging in practices that were still perceived to be disreputable in a small town such as Macambira. He believed that women, even in rural communities, had gained more freedom and that people were more accepting. He believed that telenovelas had helped in part to usher in this process of change. This one-decade-and-a-half-old quote underlines the discussion that will follow in this chapter. Augusto argued for the relevance of telenovelas in Brazilian society and, indirectly, he explained why these melodramatic texts have aroused so much attention not only among viewers, but also among academics, advertisers, and social activists. Even after more than 50 years of daily broadcasting, of changes in delivery technologies, and of increasing fragmentation of the audience through a larger number of open-air networks, cable, satellite, and internet providers, a Globo network telenovela still attracts over 30% of the total audience on most evenings in Brazil. Why and how have telenovelas managed to capture and hold the imagination of so many viewers in Brazil for so long?

This chapter discusses telenovelas' audiences in Brazil and offers a case study of rural viewers in order to document the ways in which audiences make connections (La Pastina, 1999, 2005) between popular culture narratives and the circumstances of everyday life. On the basis of a range of qualitative reception and ethnographic studies that began to be produced both in Brazil and abroad in the early 1980s (see McAnany & La Pastina, 1994 and Jacks, 2008 for reviews of the audience research in Brazil), it seems that Brazilians have relied on telenovelas to forge their national identities, grasp new urban middle class trends, and interrogate the concerns of everyday life. The first section of the chapter, which serves as a background for the case study that follows, provides an overview of the social and economic contours of telenovelas. I begin this section by outlining telenovelas' classification as a women's genre and then summarize audience research on televonelas; this is followed by a discussion of the role of product placement and social marketing in the creation of telenovelas. The next section of the chapter presents an overview of a case study in rural Brazil that takes up the themes presented in the first section. The final section concludes by identifying some promising areas for future research.

Every Night on Prime Time

Brazilians, millions of them, tune in Monday to Saturday to watch the drama and comedy of various telenovelas, following a narrative for several months – sometimes six, if the ratings are low, sometimes up to nine or ten, if the plot grabs the national imagination. To Live One's Life, the 2010 program broadcast in the prime-time spot of the leading network, Globo, attracted both criticism and praise. It is the story of a gorgeous and clever young model who, with several other models, has a bus accident on the way back from a fashion show. She becomes disabled. The drama of romance, love, and betrayal features many characters, including the model's handsome millionaire father, and acts as a foil for her recovery and decision to live her life fully. This strongly prosocial characteristic has led some viewers to complain of being tired of seeing a story about women in wheelchairs, yet many audience members are fascinated with the heroine's life and her strategies for survival. Her experiences have prompted news stories about similar events in the real lives of wheelchair-bound individuals from different parts of Brazil. The socially conscious nature of this drama, coupled in this case with the provision of a real-life story of a disabled person at the end of each episode, is one of the many trademarks of the Brazilian telenovela.

Unlike its counterparts in other Latin American nations, the Brazilian telenovela has been developing, since the late 1960s, into a unique local genre incorporating the voice, characteristics, and preoccupations of the Brazilian urban middle class. By the early 1970s the Globo network had invested heavily in production values; for instance it increased the use of external shoots, which had been previously avoided due to cost. The network also promoted a modernization of the telenovela's themes, including current issues and texts written by Brazilian writers. Through this process Globo created what it termed, in its own publicity material, the padrão globo de qualidade (Globo Standard of Quality) (Straubhaar, 1982; Lopez, 1991). These changes in style led Brazilian telenovelas to become more dynamic and more closely associated with current events in the life of the nation. According to Mattelart and Mattelart (1990), Brazilian telenovelas are an “open work” or an “open genre.” During production, the telenovela's creators receive direct and indirect input from viewers and fans, theatrical productions, commercials, elite and popular press, institutional networks, audience and marketing research organizations, and other social forces in society such as the Catholic church, the government, and activist groups (Hamburger, 1993).

For several writers (Straubhaar, 1982; Ortiz, Borelli, & Ramos, 1988; Lopez, 1995), the landmark telenovela that started the redefinition of the genre in Brazil was Beto Rockfeller, which was aired by Rede Tupy in 1968–1969. Beto Rockfeller escaped the traditional molds of the genre, presenting a telenovela in which artificial dramatic attitudes were abandoned and the use of colloquial dialogue broke with previous patterns of literary speech. But not only the language changed; the dramatic structure, narrative strategies, and production values were also modified.

Beto Rockfeller was the story of a middle-class young man who worked for a shoe store but used his charm and wit to pass himself as a millionaire – hence his last name. To keep his secret and maintain high social status, he had to engage in many less than honest activities. The telenovela reached very high audience ratings, leading the network to stretch it to almost 13 months (Fernandes, 1994). Globo – which up to that point had cultivated a very traditional style of telenovela, locating them in far away places with exotic settings and plots – saw the audience interest in Beto Rockfeller and championed this new strategy, placing the contemporary everyday life of urban Brazil front and center in their new telenovelas. In the decade that followed, Globo became the leading network of the nation, barely allowing competing stations to gain a fraction of the audience. In this process it reshaped the genre. Intentionally or not, Globo transformed the Brazilian telenovela into a forum for the discussion of Brazilian reality.

While Globo benefited directly from the dictatorship in Brazil – it had direct support from the government (Lima, 1988) – it also benefited indirectly from the 1968 imposition of censorship in Brazil. The institutional Act 5 (AI–5) heavily restricted the ability of many intellectuals, and particularly playwrights, to work in the theater and in the cinema. Writers such as Dias Gomes, Janet Clair, Benedito Ruy Barbosa, Silvio de Abreu, or Plino Marcos began to write telenovela screenplays. These writers were concerned with the urban reality and social preoccupations they observed, particularly in Rio de Janeiro, where the Globo network was located. They used metaphorical lenses to examine national and rural issues, tapping into the popular imaginary and into the patriarchal, patronage-based culture of northeast Brazil to subtly question the military dictatorship. The 1970s were years of military dictatorship, and Globo was clearly working in tandem with the regime to promote the nationalization of culture (Mattos, 1980). But the anomaly of having telenovela writers with anti-establishment credentials begs the question of why the regime was so lenient with this budding industry.

The writers were aware of the censorship laws and relied on romance to present the everyday; but, even so, they sometimes had their stories cut or censored. Additionally, the Globo network supported and was supported by the regime, becoming its unofficial voice with its 8 o'clock newscast that presented the government's “reality” every night (Lima, 1988; Porto, 2007). The newscast benefited from the popularity of the telenovelas, which sandwiched that half-hour news show. This, I'd like to argue, also helped ensure that telenovelas were tolerated by the regime. Finally, most relevant to the present argument was a widespread misconception that telenovelas were women's products, consumed only by women and consequently of little relevance (Hamburger, 1999).

Women's Genre

This last point is rooted in the origin of the genre in the early US radio soap operas, which positioned television serial fiction as a women's genre. Hamburger (1999), in her ethnographic study of lay theories of telenovela audiences, demonstrates how writers, advertisers, producers, and Globo management staff bought into this early view that the telenovela was a women's genre. Marketeers consequently focused all their efforts on a female target audience, overlooking the evidence that men, too, were consuming these texts voraciously, even if they were reluctant to be openly described as viewers. Since at least the mid-1980s, the audience has been almost 40% male (Ortiz et al., 1988). This perception of telenovelas as gendered, as a female text, also relates to the construction of femininity in Brazilian culture and to the distinct spaces that were traditionally defined as masculine (the street) and feminine (the home), as discussed by Roberto da Matta (1985).

Perceptions of the telenovela as a women's genre influenced most of the research produced in Brazil for the following decades. Studies by Leal (1988), Vink (1988), Prado (1987), Jacks (1993), Tufte (1995), and others worked steadily to build knowledge about women viewers, relying primarily on reception theories from the Birmingham School. Later works – such as Tufte (2000) and Lopes, Borelli, & Resende (2002) – used the notion of mediations, developed in Latin America by writers such as Guillermo Orozco in Mexico and Jesus Martín-Barbero in Colombia. Martín-Barbero (1993) proposes that, instead of studying the relation between viewers and texts from “the logic of production and reception [. . .] we [should] start with the mediations where the social materialization and the cultural expression of television are delimited and configured” (p. 215). These mediations are

With the mediations project, Martín-Barbero is attempting to decenter the media, arguing that they are losing their “specificity and becoming an integral part of the economic, cultural and political system” (Richeri's study, as cited in Martín-Barbero, 1993). This “abdication of mediacentrism” is a result of social movements that push the media to be integral to the economic system. Mediations are then the “structures encrusted in social practices and the everyday” (Lopes et al., 2002, p. 39; my translation). Therefore the mediations become a central sphere where media functions and interpretations can be understood in relation to everyday life, because “[they] produce and reproduce the social signification, thereby creating a sphere which makes the understanding of the interactions between production and reception possible” (Tufte, 2000, p. 21).

Leal's (1988) landmark study on upper-class women's and their maids' readings of the telenovela Summer Sun became key to understanding the way these viewers dealt with these texts in their everyday lives. Class became a marker for how the telenovela was interpreted, but also for how gender was talked about. The wealthier and more educated women attempted to distance themselves from the narrative and discussed the genre and the text decoupled from their own everyday lived experiences, while working-class women engaged with the narratives at a personal level, talking about their lives and the lives of the characters in relation to each other and in interaction with each other. Upon its publication in 1988, Leal's work became a model for the study of telenovelas in Brazil, creating a school based on reception theory and cultural studies.

The research of Lins da Silva (1985) and Tufte (1995) also suggests similar patterns of critical distance in the decoding of television messages. Unlike Leal's, however, their research shows that this critical stance may be due to political consciousness and the engagement in political or community-based activities rather than simply reflecting class. Lins da Silva (1985) looked at the way workers decode news messages from Jornal Nacional, the nightly newscast aired by Globo Television. He collected his data from two working-class neighborhoods in Brazil: Paiçara, on the coast of São Paulo state, and Lagoa Seca, in Rio Grande do Norte. Prior to starting the data collection, this researcher used an open-ended instrument to survey 250 people in both communities. Most of these people attended meetings later on and discussed the programming of the previous week, participating in some kind of community activity.

On the basis of his findings, Lins da Silva concludes that other sources, such as church, unions, political parties, radio, newspapers, and interpersonal contact offer the respondents information that often contradicts the one provided by television. His findings showed that (a) other sources were taken more seriously and may have been more influential than television; (b) previous knowledge of the issues discussed had an important role in aiding the decoding of messages; (c) news from abroad, which participants normally had no knowledge of, was taken at face value when aired on Jornal Nacional; and (d) local and national news, however, tended to be challenged. These findings, according to Lins da Silva, show that members of a community can make a critical reading of the information supplied by television, as long as they have access to other sources of information.

Telenovela Audience Research

In Brazilian telenovela research, one subject position has generally been privileged, be it that of class (Leal, 1988), political engagement (Sluyter-Beltrão, 1993), or gender (Prado, 1987; Tufte, 1995, 2000). Concentrating on one subject position alone reduces the possibilities for more textured analyses of audience reception. For each audience member, his or her identity might be multifaceted and several of his or her subjectivities may be engaged in the process of watching a single television program.

In contrast, Jacks (1993) focused on how regional culture mediates audience interpretations, consequently addressing issues of cultural similarities/proximities and becoming one of the first to rely on Martín-Barbero's early theorizing of mediations. Independently of class, viewers in Santa Maria, a mid-size town in Rio Grande do Sul, showed preference for characters presenting some of the characteristics they perceived to be inherent of the Gaúcho, natives of their home state. These viewers had already scored highly on Jack's scale of participation in traditional Gaúcho culture and were aware of local traditions and proud to engage in them. Jacks' work raises the issue of cultural proximity (Straubhaar, 1991; La Pastina & Straubhaar, 2005), another important element in the identificatory process. Cultural proximity might be recognized through visual (e.g., the landscape, dress style), verbal (e.g., regionalism, historical references), or other characteristics associated with a particular regional “culture.” Tradition, pride, and honor were seen as important elements in defining a telenovela character who potentially could be cast as Gaúcho.

In her work on the potential impact of telenovelas on the emancipation of working-class women, Vink (1988) argues that product placement, “the expansive form of advertising during telenovelas, is based on the belief that identification with heroes and heroines will increase the sales of all kinds of products” (p. 236). But one of the most compelling arguments for the process of identification and use of telenovela messages comes from Vink's retelling of Alves' research (cited in Vink, 1988). In Coração Alado (produced in 1981), Vivian, the main female character, is raped by her brother-in-law and has to decide between abortion and having the child.

The emotional involvement provoked by scenes to which a viewer relates personally probably has a strong impact upon such a viewer's identification with telenovelas. Viewers' identification with telenovelas takes place when they find similarities between their lives and the characters' situations in the texts. The perception of difference can also lead viewers to identify with characters and situations. The social context, genre structure, and narrative strategies, as well as the message content, can all have an impact on the identification process. There are clear examples, such as those mentioned by Leal (1988), of women using telenovela situations to approach certain issues with their partners. For several viewers, the process of identification may allow them to experience vicariously the lives of people in other realities, through which they might rethink their own realities and slowly articulate changes in their daily lives. Most of the studies conducted on telenovela viewers have focused on one particular telenovela – or two, in the case of Prado (1987); but they all make reference to other telenovelas mentioned by viewers (Jacks, 2008; McAnany & La Pastina, 1994). Tufte (1995) tried to expand the focus from one telenovela to many by analyzing the case of an actress, Regina Duarte, as a star. However, from the selection of the media texts used in these research endeavors it becomes clear that the issues perceived and debated by viewers are directly related to the narratives within the text. Sluyter-Beltrão's (1993) viewers talked about political issues not only because her interviewees were more politicized, but also because the text she was using represented a clear parody of the Brazilian political system. This political subtext in the telenovela was reinforced by the elite news media that covered the telenovela as a political event. Leal's (1988) women could discuss their relationships more easily when characters in the telenovela were also discussing their own emotional relationships. Tufte's (1995) respondents could discuss their struggle and the feelings of being ridiculed or rejected due to their social class or race because the leading character in the telenovela was going through similar situations. La Pastina's (2004a) viewers engaged in political readings because The Cattle King dealt directly with land reform and political corruption. Telenovela themes offer a vocabulary and a set of references for the discussion of specific issues. But they also work in a sedimentary manner, forming layers of meanings, themes, and vocabularies. Many times the actors' roles are quite similar to previous roles from earlier telenovelas, and characters in other telenovelas may go through similar situations. Tufte (1995) cites the example of a mulatta woman recollecting the character of a black architect, played by Zezé Motta in the telenovela Corpo a corpo (1984–1985), who endured racial discrimination. Tufte's respondent talked about this character from her repertoire of telenovela memories to explain her views on the problem of discrimination in the 1990 telenovela they were then watching, Rainha da Sucata.

Prado's (1987) fieldwork in Cunha, a small town in São Paulo state, demonstrates the importance of social, historical, and political contexts in explaining women's readings of female characters in two telenovelas. One important issue raised by Prado's study is that messages encoded in the text will raise certain topics for viewers; so for instance a rural telenovela might have as a background issue the matter of land ownership; while an urban telenovela might raise issues regarding race or sexuality. There are certain limitations inherent in the text; these are due to the genre's rules and narrative strategies, as well as to the thematic emphasis of a certain telenovela:

The text has an impact on the possible kinds of identificatory positions viewers can engage in. In research conducted in a small rural village in Ceará, La Pastina (1995) demonstrated that male respondents were clearly engaged with the 1994–1995 remake of Irmãos Coragem, a telenovela originally aired in 1970–1971, which promoted a clearly nationalistic project. Set in a rural northeastern town, the telenovela dealt with “rivalry among colonels, banditry, horses [...] it was more like a movie than a telenovela,” according to Assis, one respondent. Assis felt that it was easier to identify with characters in that telenovela because he felt more comfortable with a text that resembled a film rather than a telenovela – “which is more liked by women,” he said.

It is important to look not only at the direct context (the family and the house, as discussed by Leal, 1988 and by Morley, 1986, 1992), but also at the social, political, and historical environment in which the viewing site is located. The social environment considers structures such as gender, age, and race relations and elements such as health, education, and religion. The political sphere of the viewing site includes elements such as political patronage, corruption, and the perception of the role of politicians. The historical environment includes elements such as patterns of migration, traditional forms of economic survival, and racial and class hierarchies. Meaning can be apprehended only within a social–historical context; if the process is de-historicized, then meanings assigned to a text by viewers can potentially be misinterpreted.

Telenovelas for Profit

The commercial nature of telenovela texts requires a certain exposure to and awareness of capitalist culture to enable viewers to assess the meanings of some intertextual references such as product placements (La Pastina, 2001). These texts are surrounded by commercial breaks that target a particular segment of the viewing population, depending on the time and channel on which the telenovela is broadcast, as well as on the nature of the narrative. Together with merchandising, commercial insertions in the text help create a flow of meanings that must be assessed in terms of the local reality in which the viewers are inserted.

Brazilian telenovelas, especially Globo's, have long used product placement as a commercial strategy to increase revenues (La Pastina, 2001; Melo, 1988). Specific products are either shown or mentioned in a dialogue, within programs, in return for a negotiated fee. For example, from 1983 on, a number of telenovelas on TV Globo carried in-program propaganda for a major bank, Banco Itaú. In the telenovela Tieta (1989–1990), a modern, colorful branch of the bank was frequently shown in the middle of a small, traditional northeast Brazilian town. The bank branch opening was shown, and later on characters were shown doing business there, using its credit cards, and so on. Another TV Globo telenovela called Top Model (1990) contained a fashion show featuring the actual fashion line of a company partially owned by the daughter-in-law of Roberto Marinho, owner of the Globo network. Traditionally these product placements are tenuously related to the plot. Even though the telenovela's creative team does have some say in what will be inserted, most decisions regarding product placement are made by the marketing and advertising departments.

The goal is to make the product or concept advertised inherent to the narrative, forcing viewers to read that product or concept as a quality of the character using or manifesting it. With product placement, the networks can also circumvent legislation that limits commercials to fifteen minutes per hour, thus increasing the potential revenue per hour of production. The Cattle King (1996–1997) was very successful in attracting an audience that hovered around 50% of the television sets tuned in every evening. Several companies committed to advertising in this telenovela on the basis of the previous success registered by the writer, director, and leading actor in an earlier collaboration, but also on the strength of Globo's track record of delivering every evening a sizable audience with the desirable demographics.

Telenovelas for a Cause

The telenovela writer, on the basis of his or her personal agenda and in consultation with the network's office for social responsibility, develops social messages that are termed “social merchandising”; this is not the case in product placement (La Pastina, Patel, & Schiavo, 2003). These issues might include missing children (Gloria Perez's Explode coração, 1995), racial equality (Próxima vítima, 1994; America, 2005; Viver a vida, 2010), land reform and political integrity (Benedito Ruy Barbosa's The Cattle King, 1996–1997), and disability (Viver a vida, 2010) – to mention just a few. Some telenovelas, however, incorporate prosocial elements that are not inherently part of the narrative, such as messages about the importance of using condoms (Pátria minha, 1993) or specific health campaigns like promoting awareness of breast cancer (História de amor, 1996). This long-term use of telenovelas for social causes has trained viewers to read those insertions as parts of the narrative, and in some cases to evaluate the quality of the telenovela on the basis of these socially conscious messages..

Benedito Ruy Barbosa's first rural telenovela, aired in 1971–1972, was also the first Brazilian telenovela to use the genre for educational purposes. In Meu pedacinho de chão (My Little Piece of Land) he presented land conflict, but unhappy censors excised about 12 scenes. For all this censoring, most of the message was still communicated. The narrative was set in a small village, and Barbosa used that setting to discuss problems of rural life, promoting hygiene and agricultural information (Fernandes, 1994). Meu pedacinho de chão was co-produced by TV Cultura (the public television station in the state of São Paulo) and Globo. The adaptations of national authors and the educational content of some Globo products, such as Meu pedacinho de chão and the children's show Sítio do pica-pau amarelo (The Yellow Woodpecker's Ranch), were symbolic of this strategy of promoting a national culture and of educating viewers. Barbosa believes that telenovelas are privileged sites for discussing the problems and conflicts of the nation and for promoting awareness and ultimately change. In The Cattle King he pushed his political agenda to a new limit through a subplot devoted to land invasion and the politics of agrarian reform in Brazil. In the next section this telenovela will be the point of departure in a discussion of reception in a rural town in Brazil.

Watching TV in Macambira: A Case Study of Rural Viewers

The residents of Macambira, a small rural community in Brazil where I have conducted research since the mid-1990s, remain avid consumers of telenovelas. I will discuss the interpretation of one telenovela and in this process I will point to the challenges of audience work, to the process of engagement that occurs between viewers and texts, and to how the complexity of the narrative is central for the interpretative processes to unfold.

In 1996–1997 I followed The Cattle King in this rural community. During the 10 months of broadcasting I watched this and other telenovelas in the company of local residents and I conducted ethnographic interviews, participant observation, and in-depth interviews. But, above all, as a long-term ethnographer, I became immersed in the everyday of the community and my questioning about telenovela(s) was just another topic of conversation among many I broached in the groups of individuals I joined, socializing on sidewalks around town.

The Cattle King was a complex narrative by Benedito Ruy Barbosa that, in spite of being melodramatic and having love triangles frustrated by family histories, rivalries, and staunch enemies clearly marked as villains, discussed serious issues that confronted Brazilian society at the time. The landless movement was working steadily to bring the plight of those without land to the forefront of national debate, while political corruption, a recurring problem in Brazil, was rampant in the mid-1990s. In The Cattle King the heroine was a landless peasant destined to win the heart of the local landowner. We discover later that the heroine, although just a peasant at an early point in the narrative, was really a very wealthy heiress who had lost her memory in a car accident – an accident in which her whole immediate family died: this is the nature of telenovela melodrama. The hero was the cattle king, the owner of enormous ranches that he surveyed by plane. But he was a good landowner, who cared about the landless; he was also the friend and political ally of an honest senator, himself incorruptible and a supporter of the landless cause.

In the complex intermingling of melodrama and social justice, adultery and pre-marital sex, key subplots emerged that served to bond and to destabilize the lives of the characters. The Cattle King allowed viewers to engage with their own set of values and attitudes toward gender roles and sexual practices. In this process they questioned the validity of the images portrayed and their own reality. They shared their lived experiences while criticizing or praising the characters' actions and situations. The inherent genre repertoire available to viewers and the latter's familiarity with it allowed most of them, male and female alike, to participate emotionally in the narrative. In the following analysis I will demonstrate how viewers interact differently with these narrative elements, although on many occasions this happens simultaneously. This process, which I term media engagement, reflects the complexity of audience ethnography and its benefits.

The engagement between viewers/consumers and texts needs to be investigated as a process located in a broader context than the immediate site of the viewing interaction (La Pastina, 2005). I identified four stages of this engagement process: reading, interpretation, appropriation, and change. The first phase occurs when the actual reading happens, normally in the home, within a family context. The ‘reading’ phase is best understood in terms of a factual explanation of the narrative structure and content. The second phase occurs when the text is interpreted, which happens not only at an individual level but also through social interactions that might impose upon the text norms, values, and beliefs shared by the community. After interpretation, the third phase involves appropriation, where the issues brought up by the text and interpreted though mediating forces are used to explain one's own life or the social relations and cultural dynamics in which the reader is inserted. The processes of identification and catharsis are normally at work, and resistance also happens in this phase. The final stage in this engagement model is behavior change, which in many cases is the stage most challenging to document. This is the case even though ethnography, with its ability to develop longitudinal investigations, has the potential to observe community and social change that might be related to media presence. The four phases described here are an artificial attempt to impose an analytical framework upon an unruly process, but the framework does not assert that these stages are discrete or present in all textual engagements.

Telenovela appropriation in a small rural community such as Macambira is mediated by social talk (gossip), by knowledge of genre rules, by the viewers' cultural capital (particularly regarding urban lifestyles), by the local patriarchal culture, and by geographical isolation. Macambira's peculiarities also mediate the media consumption. Limited male employment and reliance on female labor, namely embroidery, have allowed women to gain greater independence.

Patriarchy

The questioning of local sexual mores and norms was experienced by many residents, who consumed telenovelas and other media products and saw a gap between their culture, values, and traditions and those represented on the screen (La Pastina, 2004b). It is in this sphere – between the local and the televised – that the mediations that structured viewers' interpretations of The Cattle King are located. Mediations are the sphere where production and reception interact, creating a space where interpretations can be understood in relation to their broad social, cultural, political, economic, and historical contexts. By raising issues of sexuality, trust, and moral norms, this telenovela fed viewers with material that, to some, resembled their own experiences. For others, it questioned the local patriarchal culture and exposed the gaps between representations of life in urban centers and their own lives in Macambira, thus reinforcing concerns over the telenovela's content.

The local patriarchal culture and its peripheral location in relation to the urban centers, as represented in the text, was a central mediating factor in the late 1990s. This telenovela's popularity was unquestioned in Macambira, even when elections were attracting most of the town's attention. Viewers followed the telenovela, asking friends and neighbors about what happened when they missed episodes and watching segments between meetings and rallies. Young and old talked about characters, used language from the telenovela, and knew about the main characters. Few residents had no information about the telenovela.

Established gender norms, attitudes, and the changing political economy of Macambira in many ways structured the levels of interaction between viewers and texts. Women's increasing economic power, due to their work as embroiderers, and the growing dependency of men on women's incomes have created a fracture in the traditional male–female domination patterns. This has allowed women to question their own and the men's roles in the household and community. The telenovela seemed to be one medium through which women observed alternatives; then they appropriated them in order to assess their own lives and the life of the community in relation to that of the characters in the geographic south. This finding supports earlier reception study findings by Leal (1988) and Vink (1988) and later ones by Lopes and colleagues (2002), which demonstrated how telenovelas were used by women to explain their lived experiences. Nevertheless, women wanted these contemporary contexts to be presented within the framework of traditional melodramatic narratives. Female characters in the telenovela could be independent and hard-working and male characters could be sensitive and understanding, but in the end the romantic couples had to finish the narrative by getting together and confirming the happy-ever-after ending. Several women perceived the process of contemporization of telenovelas with greater emphasis on social and political discourse a distraction from the central objective of these narratives: the romantic and familial relationships between characters.

Males, on the other hand, saw this process of contemporization as a bridge to what they perceived to be a realistic narrative, which justified their viewing and enjoyment of the telenovela. However, the established norms and attitudes regarding gender roles in the community still limited the males' possibilities of acknowledging the melodramatic as enjoyable. Telenovelas, for these men, were valued according to their perceived informational/realistic content. There was a perception that their masculinity, many times thrown into doubt by their inability to provide for their households, could be damaged even more by their association with a feminized text such as a telenovela. Males watching the telenovela preferred to talk about issues that interested them; in the case of The Cattle King, it was land reform and the rural lifestyle (La Pastina, 2004a). Even if these texts were perceived as feminine, men used the rural lifestyle and the political narrative to think about their lives in relation to the urban modern south (La Pastina, 2001). Their interest in these elements of the narrative seemed to indicate that perceived gender norms and patriarchal values did in fact hinder male viewers' engagement with the more traditional melodramatic elements of class ascension, love, and betrayal. This, however, does not mean that men did not pay attention to those elements or were oblivious to them. It means that they took a greater interest in elements associated locally with the masculine sphere, such as politics and farm techniques, rather than engaging with elements normally associated with the feminine sphere, such as child rearing and romance.

Intertextuality

In the context of masculine versus feminine characteristics of this telenovela, as they were perceived by viewers, it was through this contextual information (which I gathered beyond the in-depth interviews) that I was allowed to understand the implications of cultural capital for the interpretation of intertextual references in The Cattle King. The blurring between reality and fiction and the self-referentiality of the telenovela (Ott & Walter, 2000) were caused by the interactions between characters and real politicians in the news media and in the telenovela itself. Without access to the news media from the south or exposure to the national news media on television, it is likely that viewers would not have possessed the cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984) required in order to engage with these elements of the narrative (see La Pastina, 2004a for a detailed analysis of this case). Consequently, current affairs knowledge was an important factor in the reading of these intertextual instances and in understanding the self-referentiality of this material. But a viewer needed more than current affairs knowledge. He or she needed access to other sources of cultural capital such as news magazines or newspapers and exposure to a broad range of TV programs – as well as experience outside the local community. All of these are central for the building of embodied cultural capital that can be used to decode cultural texts like The Cattle King according to genre expectations. It is unfair to expect viewers in a remote location such as Macambira, with the limited financial resources available to them, to have been able to acquire, and to possess, the embodied cultural capital that would have allowed them to observe and interpret references to content in other media, not available to them. Such findings support the view that telenovelas are authorial texts produced according to a particular agenda and with a limited concern for broader audience interests beyond the immediate ones of the urban middle- and upper-middle-class viewing population.

Although the intertextual nature of The Cattle King, along with its political and social messages, was missed by most Macambira residents, the telenovela was followed and appropriated by many local viewers, male and female, in the discussion of local politics. In a small community like Macambira, local elections are major community events that can affect one's life in dramatic ways. During the broadcasting of this program, Macambira was experiencing a conflict-full mayoral campaign, which became a central factor in the analysis of the telenovela. The subtexts of political honesty and land reform that were missed, in their intertextual complexities, by local viewers were nevertheless appropriated by them according to their actual, experiential knowledge of politics and land rights in the community. Ethnographic data allowed a contextualization of the residents' readings and interpretations thanks to the depth of the researchers' knowledge of these residents' everyday lives and their views on local and national politics.

News and politics are typically considered to be part of the masculine sphere, and telenovelas are mostly situated in a feminine domain. There is a cultural construction that links femininity to melodrama and telenovelas, but that is not a universal association. In the case of The Cattle King, the presence of a political discourse, perceived as an interpenetration of the traditional feminine text by “masculine” news, was the excuse that most men gave for being involved with the narrative. The gender dynamics within the community – women's limited political power, or their increased economic power and greater familiarity with the telenovela genre – helped explain their greater skepticism toward representations of politicians in the telenovela. But these women's readings may also relate to their experiences of bartering votes for food, jobs, and other benefits. The lasting effect of this telenovela can be seen in the fact that community members would still talk about the The Cattle King 13 years later, to describe a telenovela that gave them relevant information applicable to their lived experience.

The Limits of Product Placement

With the exception of a few younger and better educated audience members, most viewers in Macambira perceived product placement to be an integral part of the narrative, or they did not perceive it as such at all. Clothing and fashion trends in the text, for example, were not perceived as product placement, but as an inherent element of the genre: the glamour of upper-class urbanites. While the narrative's agrarian element prompted the Globo network to promote product placements targeting the rural and agrarian market segments, these insertions were seen by viewers, especially males, as part of the discourse on modern farm life as practiced in more developed areas.

If viewers in Macambira were oblivious to these product placements, this was not due to an inherent inability to understand the nature of advertisement; it was rather a result of social, economic, and cultural constraints related to their isolation from urban consumer culture (La Pastina, 2001). The notion of engagement, introduced earlier in this chapter, helps to understand the relationship between viewers and product placement as a dynamic one, in which different viewers address the same text through different subjectivities, but also from within contextual structures that enable or constrain the text–reader relationship. The perspective introduced by engagement presents the relationship between text and reader as an active process, although not necessarily a conscious one, in which everyday life needs to be taken into consideration in the analysis of viewers' interpretations of media texts.

In the case of some products that viewers chose not to use, for instance a particular brand of beer, the visibility of the product in the telenovela served to outline the notion of local taste, possibly reinforcing these viewers' perception of their own identity as different from that of the people in the south, from where most telenovelas (and media in general) originate. It appeared that, in order to read these product placement insertions in the narrative, viewers were required to have a certain exposure to the products. But that did not guarantee that the product placement would be perceived for what it was. The difficulty of communicating specific product placement without sensitizing viewers may have limited the information gathered. The sporadic nature of some insertions – not all of them were presented regularly throughout the narrative – affected product placement perceptions, too – because not all viewers watched the program every evening. Unlike a plot that could be followed even if an episode were missed, commercial insertions required the viewer to be present and attentive at the moment of their occurrence.

Limited access to television commercials – which was due to the viewers' reliance on a satellite dish that received only the national feed – might also have had an impact on the relationship between viewers and consumer culture. Still, most residents were aware of commercials, and many of them craved greater access to these snippets of consumer culture and to the goods promoted in them. The isolation of the community hindered this process of integration within the consumer mainstream, creating the perception of a peripheral state in which viewers did not have access to goods and lifestyles they desired. In limited ways, some of these lifestyles and goods did reach the community, promoting the absorption of this “foreign,” normally urban, reality. Mostly they arrived through television and were adapted, as was the case with fashion. The limited access to commercials might also be connected with the uncritical opinions about product placements held by some viewers. A greater familiarity with commercial narratives and products could possibly lead viewers to relate these textual insertions to the goods advertised in commercial breaks.

The interpretation of product placement seemed to be tied to traditional gender stereotypes about men's and women's roles in society. Men were much more attuned to the narrative's rural elements, while women were more interested in elements connected with the fashion trends normally associated with the wealthy urban characters in the romance. This split seemed to be in harmony with the gender divide in terms of taste for telenovelas; and the latter's utility, as perceived by men and by women, was placed in the different realms of information-gathering and pleasure. For women, issues associated with beauty and leisure were more central, allowing them to chat about those images and trends with other community members. For men, the agricultural narrative, which related to a traditional source of income in the region, was seen as a venue for potentially useful information. Males looked for elements in the narrative that they deemed realistic; in the case of The Cattle King, this was the rural theme. That theme also allowed Globo to target rural consumers – mostly constructed as males by the network, through product placement. Male viewers knew about hats and other elements of men's fashion, but the telenovela served mostly to connect these men to something they understood: rural life. It also allowed them to talk about the telenovelas with other local viewers, without the potential feminization sometimes associated with telenovelas among rural populations (Almeida, 2003; La Pastina, 1999; Prado, 1987).

The emphases on certain levels of the telenovela narrative created a sense of peripheral status, of the telenovela being foreign to the urban, or even rural, reality portrayed on the screen. Foreign does not necessarily mean beyond national borders; it implies rather that a notion of center–periphery within the nation can create a cross-cultural distance within the national borders. Not unlike Abu-Lughod (1993, 1995), who, in working with rural groups in Egypt, noticed that these groups perceived themselves to be in the periphery of the nation, I found that people in Macambira saw themselves as being at the periphery of Brazil. This perceived gap between the industrialized south and the rural northeast may have led to a representation of the “other” as foreign. In this process local viewers felt isolated, estranged from the reality and culture of the Brazil represented on the screen. This gap did not seem to reduce the sense of belonging to the nation as a political entity, but rather it created a sense of injustice and inequality. It also created the impression of a cross-cultural conflict in which the values, morals, and attitudes of those from the south were distinct from those of the viewers in Macambira, even though they continuously invaded local reality through the media. In creating bridges between the local realities, rural and urban alike, mass media – and telenovelas in particular – promote access to information about events, ideas, lifestyles, and goods. In this process they define what is urban and, by default, what is rural, and they do it typically in terms of absence. This gap between what is available and what is seen on the screen may reinforce in the viewers a growing sense of being peripheral to the national and to global spheres.

The role of telenovelas in promoting a vicarious participation in the modern world (Leal, 1988) cannot be overlooked in Macambira. The desire to learn about fashion, lifestyle trends, and behavior was intrinsically associated with the process of watching television. Throughout the fieldwork, the growing access to multiple television channels with the help of an increasing number of home satellite dishes was fueling the viewers' knowledge of consumer goods and lifestyles. This growing participation in consumer culture may also have impacted viewers' awareness of media as a commercial enterprise. Nevertheless, the local isolation and the de facto limited access, as well as the meager financial means, remained a hindrance to a more complete participation in the global consumer culture. Technological change may bring greater access to and awareness of this culture, but, as this case study has demonstrated, the cultural capital that is available to viewers remains a central element in the process of media interpretation.

Conclusion

Continuing my long-term involvement with this community, which I came to call “Macambira,” I returned once again in the spring of 2010 to conduct fieldwork. Telenovelas remain a vital form of entertainment in a community that has grown somewhat – to 2,800 inhabitants from around 2,000 in March 1996, when I first moved to Macambira. The levels of cultural capital necessary to decode telenovelas remain an important factor for audience members, as much as the content of the telenovela, if full engagement is to happen. In the spring of 2010 the prime-time Globo telenovela Viver a vida (To Live One's Life) had much greater competition from other telenovelas and programs in several channels, which are now available in most homes, far more than had been the case with The Cattle King in the second half of the 1990s.

But the greatest challenger to, and enabler of, telenovela engagement was the Internet. It arrived in Macambira in 2007 and slowly became available to about one hundred homes, in addition to a three-computer Local Area Network (LAN) house. Through the Internet, viewers could search for information about the telenovela, follow the author's blog, search for gossip about the actors, and shop. The Internet turned out to be a radical experience for a community that had lived in great isolation a decade earlier.

As discussed earlier, Viver a vida dealt with the difficulties of a former model who had become disabled. One of her former colleagues was black, and racial discrimination was addressed early in the telenovela, as well as the plight of the favelados, slum dwellers in Rio de Janeiro. In this context sexuality, healthcare issues, race, and disability were the topics that emerged in conversation about the telenovela. Unlike the 1990s, when a lack of cultural capital had been a factor limiting many rural viewers' ability to engage with product placement and intertextuality, viewers in 2010 had a greater repertoire at their disposal for decoding these texts.

I have briefly mentioned these changes to indicate how audience ethnography and what I term media engagement allow for a greater understanding of the complexities of television audience membership and of the role it plays in the life of a community. The immediate and larger context where the viewing process takes place is relevant to the process of decoding and interpretation, as is the available mediascape in the community and the level of cultural capital necessary to understand the intertextuality present in the text. These characteristics change from community to community, from text to text, and they change over time.

Telenovelas, as I was told many times, have a central role in community life. The television set functions as an electronic storyteller, a bard (Fiske & Hartley, 1978), bringing into the community tales of “distant” lands and “foreign” practices. In this process, television exposes viewers to “practical inadequacies in the culture's sense of itself” (p. 88). People incorporate and challenge values, norms, and beliefs presented in the telenovelas, which on occasions destabilize the culture from within. As has been clearly discussed in the reception literature, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to demonstrate cause and effect through this type of audience research. I would like to propose, however, that through long-term ethnographic work it is possible to understand how media texts such as telenovelas become part of the repertoire of the community, possibly serving to create social changes over time, though the accumulation of knowledge from these texts.

Audience ethnographies allow for the possibility of assessing the different elements involved in the reception process and of evaluating how these elements interact within the context of the locality in which the observation takes place, as well as with the culture and identity of community members. Television audiences are fluid; they present different characteristics in different situations, in response to different programs. “Watching television should be seen as a complex and dynamic cultural process, fully integrated in the messiness of everyday life, and always specific in its meanings and impacts” (Ang, 1991, p. 161).

Since their inception in Brazil, telenovelas have evolved from a melodramatic mode to a more complex genre, with multiple formats and complex narratives, a star system, and a wide fan base. But the structural changes that Brazil is experiencing – a stronger economy and a greater sense of its global presence – as well as the radical transformation of information technology are putting more and more pressure on this genre. Telenovelas' audiences are increasingly fragmented, watching less live broadcasting and consuming more content online. An important area of research for telenovela audiences in Brazil will be to understand how the increasing presence of the Internet alters the role of telenovelas in the everyday.

The Internet also provides a unique opportunity to study fan communities and how these might be evolving, possibly creating a source of cultural capital for rural viewers who are unfamiliar with the urban landscape presented in most of these telenovelas. And the proliferation of cable and satellite services, together with the increasing consumption of imported programming through these service providers, might also be impacting viewers' sense of belonging to the local, the national, and the global.

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