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This chapter introduces the important connections between media, democracy, and development in Brazil. Brazilian thought has relied heavily on conceptual oppositions in attempts to understand the country, as if there were something mysteriously contradictory in our culture and history, forever set on a rift between modernity and tradition. However convincingly described, the origin of such oppositions has never been fully explained. Introducing media history and theory into this discussion, we present a material dichotomy that illuminates the more abstract and cultural explanations of our particular history. We look at the region of Minas Geraes, where a sophisticated and diverse culture developed after the gold rush in the eighteenth century, in the Americas, and contrast such cultural achievements with the insurmountable difficulties in establishing a compatible written culture, primarily due to the prohibition of printing in the colony. We take note of the particular experience of the Conversos in Brazil, Jews who adopted Christianity in the shadow of the Portuguese Inquisition, as key to understand our ambivalent relationship to the written word and to knowledge. We describe commercial and cultural networks and contrast them with the paucity of media networks, including those of books and mail, domestic and international. This material disconnect, constitutive of colonial times in general, was particularly important during the formative years of a national market and identity and continues to resonate in the present.

Immigration to what is now the United States has been a contentious issue from the earliest days of the European settlement. Perhaps the earliest recorded incident of contention occurred over 350 years ago in 1654, when 23 Jewish refugees sought refuge into New Amsterdam, fleeing what they rightly believed would be the extension of the Portuguese Inquisition to Recife in Brazil. Peter Stuyvasant's objection to their settlement was rejected by the Dutch West Indies Company. The tension between those opposing further immigration on either social or economic grounds and those favoring it has continued over these three and a half centuries to this very day.

This chapter is an exploratory study of women’s football in Goa during two defining periods in its history: 1975–1991 and 2017–present. Anchoring the analysis within the intersection of sport, gender, and decolonisation, the chapter aims to address the peripheralisation of women’s sport in academic work on sport in India. Examining the evolution of women’s football in Goa and the multifarious factors that stilted its advancement, this research demonstrates how the systemic challenges that have historically plagued women’s sport continue to hamper its progress. The chapter argues that the professionalisation of women’s sport is indispensable to unlocking its potential and doing justice to the players and other stakeholders who continue to pursue it despite manifold challenges.

The word witch conjures up a black-cloaked figure with a pointed hat flying on a broomstick, often with green skin and a hooked nose: the epitome of feminine evil. Although this version of witches was popularised in The Wizard of Oz (1939) and commercialised in mid-twentieth-century North American Halloween costumes, conjecture is that it originated from the slightly greenish hue of applying botanical remedies, or the appearance of witches who had endured bruising and painful torture. During the height of the European witch hunts (about 1450–1750, with the greatest intensity 1550–1650), an estimated 40,000–60,000 witches were executed (Levack, 1987). Although some men factored into this death toll, estimates are that 75–80% of witches executed were women (Gibbons, 1998). Fear and persecution of witches exists globally, dating to Ancient Rome, but the more systematic purges were the result of complex forces, including rapid social and economic changes of the Early Modern era, the Reformation, the Little Ice Age and the Plague (Federici, 2014; Golden, 2006). Those perceived as witches, often impoverished, older, single women, were easy scapegoats for society's ills.

In recent decades, the depth and accuracy of archival research into witch hysteria have improved. Drawing on this research, this chapter examines the place of witch persecutions in the contemporary context. Although people often recognise the injustice of these persecutions, few countries have granted legal pardons or erected memorials to their victims. Why is the acknowledgement of these injustices so slow coming? What fears about witches do we still harbour?

Race scholars often refer to the colonization of Indigenous peoples in the Americas and the enslavement of Africans as a founding moment in the making of today's racial hierarchies. Yet their narrative of this initial moment often mischaracterizes early European states, erases Indigenous and African states, and naturalizes racial group belonging. Such practices are counterproductive to the antiracist project. Following the lead of decolonial scholarship, much recent work by historians has sought to recover and reconstruct the institutions, social structures, and agency of African and Indigenous peoples, as well as revisit assumptions about European power, institutions, and agency in their historical encounters with their continental “others.” I highlight the potential of this approach for sociologists of “race” by narrating two significant historical events in the making of the modern Atlantic world: the conquest of Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztec empire, and the transatlantic enslavement of subjects of the kingdoms of Kongo and Ndongo (in today's Angola) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I analyze how particular European, Indigenous, and African actors made decisions in the context of their own and others' historically situated and dynamic political and social structures. I read these historical events through the lens of decolonial scholarship, and sociological literatures on group-making, state formation, and the emergence of capitalism, to make sense of the violent social process that led to the breakup of African, Indigenous, and European political and social structures and the making of colonial and racially hierarchical social structures in the Atlantic world.

This chapter examines women’s participation at the Portuguese punk scene, suggesting the use of fanzines as an alternative medium able to spread feminist narratives. Through the words and pictures of the Portuguese punk fanzines – X.cute, Modern Girl, Global Riot, Sisterly, Mulibu and Cuecas Quentes – we highlight the strength of the symbolic resistance of the Portuguese punk women. This approach allows us to show the existence of an imaginary structure of equality within an actual scenario of inequality and reproduction of society’s gendered structure. The theoretical discussion involves themes related to feminism, the punk movement (Guerra, 2013, 2017; Guerra & Silva, 2015; Guerra & Straw, 2017), the riot grrrl scene (McRobbie & Garber; 1987; McRobbie, 2000, 2009), and the universe of alternative media and fanzines (Guerra & Quintela, 2014, 2016; Triggs, 2006; Worley, 2015).

The second decade of the twenty-first century finds Brazil racked by a series of scandals that are extreme even by world standards. This chapter presents an explanation for one of the behaviors that have produced these scandals. Specifically, it is the offering of bribes to public officials by individuals or companies that stand to benefit from contracts to perform public services and, furthermore, the paying of kickbacks to the officials if the contract is awarded. I liken this behavior to the making of vows to the saints in the “popular” or “folk” form of Catholicism – and other popular religions that accept its basic premises – and the fulfillment of the promise if and when the otherworldly being provides what the petitioner requested. Part 1 of the chapter examines an election for mayor of the city of Fortaleza in 2012 in which the office was “bought” for what seemed to be an exorbitant amount of money. I hypothesize that this is to be explained by the anticipation of the city receiving government contracts to build a soccer stadium, a rail system, and other projects related to the 2014 World Cup. In Part 2, I examine Brazil’s religions beginning with popular Catholicism, to show that the normative way of gaining something desired from a supernatural – be it the restoration of health or the recovery of a lost item – is to offer it something it values and then fulfilling the promise if and when the petitioner receives what was requested. I contend that this important religious pattern continues to provide the template for the secular behavior that is being judged to be corrupt by standards other than those found in the religiously based worldview of many Brazilians.