The Politics of Developmental Disruption: Memory, Place, and the Pandemic in Southern Brazil
Dominique Béhague, 2023-24 RPW Center Faculty Fellow. This year’s group is exploring the theme of “The Place of Memory.”
Photo by: Eugenio Hansen
How and with what consequences do everyday people push against standardized views of “normal” and “healthy” development? Can reclaiming memory and place from the way developmental sciences conceive of these play a role in challenging developmental norms? And to what extent can people’s attempts to disrupt developmental models be understood as acts of politics?
I first became intrigued by these questions while conducting collaborative long-term ethnographic research with participants of the 1982 Pelotas birth cohort study, a prospective study of 5914 children directed by researchers at the Federal University of Pelotas in Southern Brazil. The ethnography I co-directed began in 1997 when participants were 15 years old and continues to this day as they enter their 40s.
In Brazil, as in other regions colonized by European settlers, the psychological and social sciences have been foundational in establishing universal parameters for “normal” and “abnormal” human development. This knowledge has been built into core institutions implicated in the rise of industrial capitalism and liberal democracies, from education, medicine, and psychology, to government, the economy, and law. The creation of a “healthy” autonomous self with a clear line of development depends on specific “technologies of the self” – storytelling, remembering, identity-making, and therapy, to name a few – that stipulate and produce the qualities required for full membership in society. As historians have amply shown, however, only the established elite have generally been deemed capable of this form of personhood.
The practices and ideas embedded in this history continue to reverberate. In my research, I found that clinicians and teachers working with white and wealthy youth tended to equate analyzing memories with the intellectual capacity to overcome developmental challenges. Here, “adolescence” was defined as a distinctively transformative period of “storm and stress.” For black and brown youth and those of lower income, clinicians viewed memories as windows into histories of psychopathology, bad parenting, or life in poverty best left behind. In these instances, young people, regarded as incapable of adolescent development, were encouraged to enter adulthood more quickly.
While memory-as-capacity became anchored to places that memorialize elite families’ genealogies, such as the multigenerational home or the elite psychiatrist’s clinic, memory-as-pathology often justified institutionalizing young people in psychiatric hospitals, religious organizations, or the juvenile justice system. The continuities with Brazil’s century-long two-tiered psychiatric system – psychotherapy for the elite and hospitalization for the disenfranchised – are plain to see.
For the young people I knew, teenhood empowered them to question what society considers to be typical or atypical behavior during adolescence. Many resisted teachers’ referrals to the school psychologist, claiming these were classist and infantilizing. Instead, they reframed their transitions to adulthood by emphasizing intergenerational change. Digging into a collective past, they interrogated histories of violence and militarization during the dictatorship in their fathers’ pasts or the damaging role of psychiatric institutionalization in their mothers’ pasts.
By embracing emotional struggle as political and insightful rather than “illness” rooted in development gone awry, they have fashioned adulthoods that challenge mainstream definitions of “achievement and progress.” They created new forms of kinship, returned to education though deemed “too old,” and became upwardly mobile while continuing to live and build community in their places of origin, either favelas or government housing projects. These practices exemplify what I term the politics of developmental disruption.
The pandemic has brought renewed relevance and urgency to practices of developmental disruption. In 2020, colleagues and I initiated a new round of ethnographic interviews with our long-time interlocutors, now in their 40s. We witnessed how the pandemic opened new opportunities to reflect on society’s unrelenting demands for “achievement” and “success.” Some joined mutual aid groups, where vibrant discussions of emotional upheaval helped them challenge prevailing narratives of crisis- and poverty-induced “pandemic trauma,” reframing their “low-income” neighborhoods not as sources of disease but as vital spaces of care.
For others, pandemic isolation, twinned with intensified digital immersion, has deepened pre-existing feelings of “immaturity” and low self-worth, fomenting a desire to erase memories of the past and seek a “new start in life” through therapy, medication, migration, or divorce. In taking this research forward, my colleagues and I hope to learn how our interlocutors practice non-conventional forms of kinship, friendship, and work, reframing adulthood as neither “development” nor indeed “aging,” and through this, engaging with innovative forms of social change.
Dominique Béhague is Associate Professor at the Department of Medicine, Health and Society at Vanderbilt University and holds a summer appointment at the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine at King’s College London. Béhague’s long-term research in Southern Brazil explores the intersection of psychiatry, politics, activism, and the emergence of adolescence and other life-cycle transitions as objects of developmental expertise. She co-designed the longitudinal ethnographic sub-study the 1982 Pelotas Birth cohort, one of a handful of interdisciplinary cohort studies taking place in a country in the Global South. Her research has received funding from the US National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the World Health Organization, the UK Economic and Social Research Council, and The Wellcome Trust.