1 Punitive Manifestations of Modernity: When Popular Culture meets Enlightened Culture * Helena Singer ** Prepared for delivered at the 2001 meeting of the Latin American Studies Association, Washington, DC, September 6-8, 2001. Section “Brazil in Comparative Perspective: Religious Manifestations and Popular Culture” An essay about punishment in a section on popular culture may suggest that we are going to differentiate the popular ones – like lynchings – from the punishments of the enlightened culture – like prison. However, this is not the perspective we are going to assume. The subject of this paper is the enlightened discourse on social conflicts, punishments and human rights. The objective is to highlight the continuities and discontinuities present in the discourse of technical law operators 1 (police chiefs, lawyers, prosecutors, attorneys, judges) and specialists (psychologists, political scientists, journalists, jurists, sociologists, anthropologists) regarding these phenomena called lynchings in the context of Brazilian democratization. Before developing this analysis, it is necessary to clarify the events we are talking about. The word “lynching” is used indiscriminately, what creates a number of difficulties for the selection of cases for a research that centers on this phenomenon. The same action which is defined by one press agency as lynching appears in another as a homicide committed by an “extermination group”, and in another is qualified as “massacre“, or even “making justice“; the same newspaper uses the term lynching to describe most distinct types of actions, almost randomly. Thus it becomes essential to establish a very accurate definition of the concept, to make the types of cases encompassed by this concept clear. The concept of lynching used in this paper is: collective action by a group formed exclusively to perform it, where all participants are direct agents and whose objective is revealed by observable evidence - slogan chanting, possession of lethal instruments (blunt instruments and, at times, white weapons), depredation - summarily executing one or more individuals allegedly responsible for a given action or identified with social stigmas. Lynching is particularly good for the analysis intended here. On one side, it brings the notion of popular justice - the population legitimizes such punitive practice as a form of justice. On the other side, lynching disconcerts the knowledge regarding crime, guilt, and punishment. When the enraged population “take justice in their own hands” against an alleged criminal, they incur acts considered criminal and deviate from the ideas of * This paper originates from the doctor dissertation “Disturbed Discourses: Lynchings, Punishments and Human Rights” presented to the Sociology Department of Sao Paulo University in 2000. The empirical object is composed by the inquiries and proceedings regarding eight cases of lynchings occurred in Sao Paulo between 1981-1989, all the signed articles and editorials on lynching obtained from the press survey from 1980 to 1996 and all the national academic literature produced on the subject of lynching. ** Doctor on Sociology by Sao Paulo University; senior member of Institute of Studies on Rights, Politics and Societies (IEDIS); education director of Semco Foundation. 1 According to Sérgio Adorno (1993:10), technical law operators include all those actors who possess specialist knowledge, acquired by proper professional education, taught at university level.