Browsing by Author "Pylkkö, Marika"

This study looks at the ethnic categorization of darker skinned people and problems related to their participation in higher education through the theories of the French anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu. In the national censuses of Brazil the populace is categorized according to skin color. According to these publications, darker skin-colored Brazilians are underrepresented in higher education. Affirmative action politics has found it’s place within public discourse in Brazil beginning from the 1990’s, and as a consequence some institutes of higher eduction have adapted racial quotas for darker-skinned individuals. At the same time, affirmative action policies have been criticized on the basis that it suggests that inequality is by nature ethnic when such inequalities could just as well be socioeconomic. Historically Brazil has been considered a society free of racism, or in other words 'a racial democracy'. Ethnic categorization is analyzed using Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts habitus and symbolic power. The idea of habitus is used to refer to any attitudes and manners internalized by an individual, with which that individual evaluates, interprets and choses to act in the reality that they perceive. With symbolic power this work refers to to all the different forms of capital mentioned in Bourdieu’s work that relate to recognition and appreciation. Therefore, the aim of this work is to analyze the socially constructed, various colloquial and everyday phenomena related to classification by skin color. I look at how habitus and symbolic capital related differentiation happens and what significance it might have for the discourse between ethnic categorization and education. In order to answer the research question i collected material from fieldwork in North-Eastern Brazil for 2 months. In collecting the material I used ethnographic field work methodology, especially participant observation, semi-structured and unstructured interviews. Among the interviewed are a public school principal, a teacher, two dark-skinned university students and one private school university student. In addition, I utilized material on situations encountered by dark-skinned people in Brazil that have been published in previous studies. The interviewed had experienced situations in which symbolic evaluations related to their ethnic background and skin color can be considered significant. Additionally, many example of this arise from previous literature. In the situations that I observed social evaluations explained the habituslike actions of the people I observed. These examples can be assumed to have significance for construction of hierarchical society in Brazil in accordance with Bourdieaun theory.