The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília

University of Chicago Press, 1989
• 384 pages, 106 figure, maps, and tables

The utopian design and organization of Brasília – the modernist new capital of Brazil – were meant to transform Brazilian society. In this sophisticated, pioneering study of Brasília from its inception in 1957 to the present, James Holston analyzes this attempt to change society by building a new kind of city and the ways in which the paradoxes of constructing an imagined future subvert its utopian premises. Integrating anthropology with methods of analysis from architecture, urban studies, social history, and critical theory, Holston presents a critique of modernism based on a powerfully innovative ethnography of the city.

Holston focuses on the two sets of intentions that constituted planned Brasília: those embodied in the architect’s modernist design and those motivating the government’s plan for its implementation. He argues that both proposed a radical break with Brazilian history. Both attempted to transform the class structure of Brazilian society and the conventions of its urban life, linking the modernist aesthetic with the politics of development. Holston’s ethnography demonstrates, however, that in the making of Brasília these intentions generated social processes that paradoxically yet unequivocally subverted the city’s founding premises. As people inhabited Brasília, they reasserted social structures and cultural values that the planned utopia intended to destroy. The Modernist City breaks new ground in the study of cities and society and demonstrates the potential of anthropology to develop a critique of modernity through ethnographic analysis.

“Holston has produced what has thus far been lacking in the current debate over the ‘critique of ethnographic writing’: to wit, a critical ethnography, which focuses its critical self-consciousness in the conception and execution of the ethnographic account rather than in a programmatic reflection upon the act of ethnographic ‘writing’ as such. This is a salutary and timely contribution of strategic relevance to current theoretical discussions in anthropology, literary theory, and cultural criticism.”

—Terence Turner, University of Chicago 

“Holston’s brilliant study combines ethnography with aesthetics and literary theory, resulting in a powerful critical view of Brazilian society and politics. The scope and originality of this work recommend it well beyond readers interested in Latin America and urban issues.”

—Guillermo O’Donnell, the Kellogg Institute for International Studies and the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (Cebrap)