Zen in Brazil: The Quest for Cosmopolitan Modernity

Widely perceived as an overwhelmingly Catholic nation, Brazil has experienced in recent years a growth in the popularity of Buddhism among the urban, cosmopolitan upper classes. In the 1990s Buddhism in general and Zen in particular were adopted by national elites, the media, and popular culture as a set of humanistic values to counter the rampant violence and crime in Brazilian society. Rocha shows, moreover, that in practicing Zen, the Brazilian intellectual elites from the 1950s onward have been driven by a desire to acquire and accumulate cultural capital both locally and overseas. Their consumption of Zen has been an expression of their desire to distinguish themselves from popular taste at home while at the same time associating themselves with overseas cultural elites. This book draws on three years of fieldwork in Japan and Brazil, and demonstrates the rhizomatic nature of the globalization process, where Brazil is one of the nodes (albeit less influential) in the web of global flows of Zen. This book is a Portugese translation of the 2006 publication, titled Zen in Brazil : the quest for cosmopolitan modernity, by the same author.