by Fernanda Schneider Göttert

   There are so many ways to define what culture is and all of them carry the perspectives the speaker has. If I had to describe how I see culture in my own words, I would say that it is behaviors and perspectives that are shared, or at least recognized by people from the same society and that a way of understanding one’s cultural aspects is putting them side by side with ours. That does not mean a competition of The Best Culture, but simply an analysis based on comparison. 
   In my English II course, I had the assignment of interviewing a few Portuguese as additional language program students to talk about stereotypes, and later I presented the discoveries to the rest of the class. During the presentations of the interviews, one of the groups shared a comment made by one of the foreign students: when asked about what aspects of Brazilian culture they still found weird, this person Answered that none of them were “weird”, only different. For many people that may not seem like much, but language students know how the words you choose and the way you express yourself are deeply important in communication.
   The thing about culture traits is that when you have stronger, more easily-seen traits and behaviours, plus a group of outsiders who are not aware of the power of discourse, the result is cultural gossip - stereotypes. And like all gossip, they are either completely mistaken (no, there are not monkeys walking around common places in Brazil like the movie Blame It On Rio portraits) or they lack more information (Brazilians do not often wear less clothes compared to other countries because they are necessarily more promiscuous, but because they live in a tropical country). It is true that all people have stereotypes of all kinds no matter how hard you try not to - and that is okay. It is not a problem to have ideas and beliefs, but it all boils down to how you present and produce them (like that PAL student did so beautifully). 
   From now on, I have decided I will not allow my stereotypes and prejudice to speak louder than real experiences, and will not go the opposite way of meeting someone/some place with eyes filled with pre-concepted ideas, but letting go of ill-informed beliefs and observe if what that person/place shows me meets the gossip I heard. And I invite you all to do the same. 

by Natália Pureza


   When we talk about any country or culture, we talk about stereotypes. And the problem with stereotypes, as the Nigerian writer Chimamanda said in her speech about the single story “Is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete” and I believe that she is right. Countries and cultures do have characteristics, but people usually make the mistake of reading this sentence in the singular, not in the plural. Therefore, they tend to build only one story or to look at only one side of them.
   In my recent research project, “Brazil in the eyes of others: Brazilian music”, I had the opportunity to see my own culture, or at least a part of it, with the eyes of people from other countries. It was an amazing experience talking to them. And it was also intriguing how they, people that had never met me before, could tell me about the kind of music I supposedly listen to or the abilities I supposedly have. But what impressed me the most was to realize how insane we all are by believing that any culture could fit in one or two sentences, such as “Samba is the only kind of music in Brazil”.
   A culture is a vast and changing expression of a people; like a choir is made of many different voices, a culture is made of all the unique things people are together. Unfortunately, stereotypes reduce it. And just to name a few about my own country, Brazil, I personally am not happy all the time or go to the beach every day. There is no way for a country, with any extension, to have its people behaving all the same all the time, because people are not the same anywhere. And even though people do not mean to have those stereotypes, sometimes they are the only story they have about us, because they are the only story that was ever told about us. And the same thing happens when we look at other cultures.
   The stereotypes, more than all the other definitions, are a barrier – they keep us from realizing how beautifully diverse a culture is. By the end of my research, I was able to identify the stereotypes the outsiders had about Brazilian music before coming here, but I was also glad to realize that the interviewees of the research had broken this barrier. And now Brazil, and its people, is something else to them, something they can connect to. Furthermore, as we had this opportunity of talking to them, we are also breaking some stereotypes of our own. This changes, for us and for them, the way we see the world and ourselves – but it is not a given thing. It requires us to be open and to be kind enough to understand that what makes us different and unique is also what make us equals, and it means being human. It means being made of many stories.

by Marina Krebs


    “Culture” has been a very complicated word for me to define over the past years. What is totally unique for a nation? Do humans have a “universal culture”? What defines us and what makes us equal? After learning a lot about culture on this semester of English II, I have come to the conclusion that culture is everything that embraces the unique aspects of a group of people (in a big or small scale). Culture can be seen in the food, clothes, habits, music, language, celebrations, generally in the “way of living” of a certain group. Even though this semester we learned about culture relating to nations, culture is everywhere: favelas have their own culture, goths have their own culture, Jews have their own culture, nordestinos have their own culture… Surprisingly they all (and many more) come together to create the “Brazilian culture”, which, because of its enormous diversity, is susceptible to many stereotypes.
   As we have seen in one of our classes when we discussed about Chimamanda’s TED talk, "The danger of a single story", stereotypes are created from the single stories most people make or learn about others. If there is no interest in learning about a culture or in undoing certain stereotypes, they will perpetuate and become the only story about a country. Culture is complex and there are almost 200 countries with many cultures inside of them, so it’s impossible to be educated on all of them. But it is our duty to try every day to be as open as possible and don’t believe in the single stories, because not only can they be offensive, but also oppressive.
   For instance, I will be using Brazil as an example. It’s very easy for foreigners to see a movie or TV news about Brazil and choose to believe that what is shown in those is everything they need to know about our culture. They will probably think Brazil is nothing more than beaches, Amazon, carnival and violence. But what they don’t think about is that these stereotypes can shape the way they see Brazilians and our culture in general. After some interviews students from English II had with foreign students from PPE (Programa de Português para Estrangeiros), there were a lot of interesting responses about our culture in the eyes of the others. Most of them thought Brazilians were all extroverted, happy, party people, and even though they are not bad stereotypes, they can be very reductive. The worst stereotypes that we could see definitely came from bad representation in movies. After watching the documentary “Olhar estrangeiro” for our class, we had an idea from where those bad stereotypes came from, such as “Brazilians are promiscuous” or “Brazilians speak Spanish”. Although it’s impossible to completely escape from stereotypes, it is up to us to question and educate ourselves on bad stereotypes and to compromise on not perpetuating them.
   Unfortunately, we are all exposed to the single stories. Chimamanda said that these stories can be oppressive because the less we know about a country, the worse are stereotypes made for them. It’s very easy to see TV news about diseases in an African country and reduce Africans to only that story. On the other hand, we don’t do that to powerful nature nations such as the USA or European countries. What has changed for me is that the media controls stereotypes, so what we need to do is always question what is said to us. There is no shame in not knowing about a culture or country, it’s better to say “I’m not educated on this, I will research more about it” than guessing and basing what you will say on stereotypes. Sometimes being respectful is better than having an answer to everything.
   Lastly, I can say that I ended the semester prouder of my culture than when I started it. Brazil is so rich in diversity and it makes me sad that even Brazilians perpetuate stereotypes about our country. It is still a bit confusing to me what makes a person Brazilian, what type of feeling unites us – a mix of every color, religion, heritage – as this thing we call “Brazilian”. Whether it be our music, manners, language, way of living, food and even our memes, I think being Brazilian is feeling equal, united and connected, even with so many differences. I’m in no way similar to an indigenous person in the Amazon, but I know our different experiences are what makes this country what it is. And maybe that is why we are so unique: a big land made by many stories that all together defines us as one. 

by Wesley Henrique Acorinti


   This past semester I took part in my English II course project called “Brazil in the eyes of the other”. The objective of this project was to discuss how people from other cultures see Brazil and Brazilians so that we could understand how we see other cultures. Among other things, the project also aimed at finding out what stereotypes are, how they are formed and how we can deconstruct them1. After going through it, I would define the word ‘culture’ as the ideas, customs, social behavior and language of a particular society.
When a society is depicted, either in daily speech or in the media, it is usually followed by a stereotype. In countries like Brazil – that foreign people usually have one single version of its society – it is common for them to think that a made-up trait, such as the ones seen in overseas movie productions, is the single truth.
   Those stereotypes are mainly created and often reinforced by the mass culture industry, especially by the movies, as we have seen in the documentary called “Foreign eye” (in Portuguese, “Olhar estrangeiro2”). In this movie, we could verify that the image created about Brazil is regularly related to topless women, going to the beach every day, people who do not work, jungles, stereotyped “African” culture, sexuality, and idealized Latin love.
   After taking part in the project, I have learned not to define one group of people according to one single artwork. The Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi advocates that it is dangerous to have one single story about a place. We, Brazilians, are seen as sexy vagabonds because there are only a few published artworks that approach Brazilian diversity. Nonetheless, that is not the case of powerful countries, such as the United States. We do not stereotype Americans as Norman Bates, the main character of Psycho, because we have many stories that address other traits Americans may have; from love to hate and from poverty to wealth, we are provided with a lot of artworks which give us a plural insight about the U.S.
   After all, awareness was risen about thinking our portrayed image critically. It is quite sickening to see our country as a generalization of some traits as if we were somehow homogeneous. Even though it does not sell as much as the consolidated image, in Brazil, there is wealth and there are people like me who do not like the beach, who are hardworking and who do not live a high sexualized, idealized Latin love romance.

by Vinícius Festa Rigo

   After all the projects of the semester, the only possible definition of culture, for me is that everything is culture. The books that we read, the songs that we listen to, our discourse and all the aspects that constitute our personality can be defined as our own culture. There are too many ways to separate culture in sections (in religion, in a country, in a city, in a group of friends or even inside our own families), and in each section we can find different aspects that consolidate the definition of culture. Nevertheless, whereas it is what construct our personality and habits, we can consider that everything is culture.
   However, even considering culture as something so personal, there are some cultural stereotypes that we cannot run away from. During a project about some cultural aspects with the foreign students at our university, we have noticed that some incomplete information can collaborate with the creation of stereotypes. In language, which was our topic of the project, I have tried to figure out some stereotypes created about Brazilian Portuguese. Among all stereotypes, we can highlight this one: reading about the fact that most of the countries in South America speak Spanish makes a lot of people think that in Brazil we speak Spanish too. In this way, some stereotypes about our spoken language can be created.
   During the semester we have discussed a lot about other cultures, about the ways that we acquire different cultural aspects and how we express our own culture all the time. Learning that everything that we think or say is a response to something that we have learned before made me change the way I see myself and the people around me. This perspective made me a more open-minded person who tries to understand more how people react and respond to their own knowledge, and I started to comprehend and accept the differences between my perspective and others’.
   Culture is something that we must to try to understand to learn about us and about others. Learning the cultural aspects of some groups, countries and individuals help us respect others. Culture is, despite all, respect and knowledge. ​

by Roberta Thiesen de Freitas



   There are many factors that contribute to building someone’s or something’s stereotypes. Most of those are directly linked to the simplified stories media tells us, whereas others may result from rumors and the words on the street. But if there is something most people can agree on it is that the more we read about and consume culture and traditions of other countries and societies, the less we reinforce and spread stereotypes. We need to learn how to deny them, bringing facts that prove most of them wrong.
   The first concept we need to define so we can get rid of the stereotypes surrounding all countries and cultures is what culture really means. Don’t search for its definition on Google or in a dictionary, try to build a conception of your own, based on your experiences and knowledge. For me, after getting in contact with people from the most different cultures and traditions, it’s very hard to define such a complex concept, but I believe that culture can be every and any form of expression, a way of living and seeing the world, that is inherited from our ancestors and passed on to every generation. Once you realize every society has their own way of perceiving the world they live in, it also changes your own way of regarding the world and the people that make it what it is today.
   After forming our own concept and definition of the word culture, we are ready to move on to the second step: recognizing the stereotypes we believe in and the ones that are attributed to our own country.
   Albeit being Brazilian, I don’t love Carnaval, I don’t know how to samba or play soccer and, most importantly, I don’t own a monkey as a pet. These are some of the most known Brazil’s stereotypes, the ones most people around the globe would use to define Brazil and its society. There are a few others like all Brazilian women being hot and our dying love for Churrasco. Foreigners see Brazilians as people who love to party and live among the wild and nature, but it’s not really their fault if they see our society the way they do. As I previously stated, media contributes a lot to the creation of Brazil’s stereotypes. The cinematographic and tourism industries try to sell this image of Brazil being a sensual, exotic and heavenly country, where you can have lots of fun and feel very welcome - which is not entirely false, foreigners see Brazilians as nice and outgoing people. Although this may not be the case for tourists, it is not a reality for us Brazilians. Our country is nowhere near a paradise, we have many social and political issues, and, at this rate, we are probably going to work ‘till we die. That’s why people need to research more and educate themselves on other countries’ realities before believing in everything they read or in what media wants them to.
   After saying all of this, I’d be hypocritical if I said I, myself, don’t contribute to the spreading of stereotypes. I’ve consumed a lot of other countries’ music, TV shows, movies and books throughout the years. I used to believe that every Japanese lived for studying and was intelligent. I used to dream of the perfect American dream life, eating pancakes in the morning and drinking my Starbucks coffee during the day. It was very recently that I stopped believing that all Koreans were as perfect as the idols in K-Pop groups. I even believed, at some point, that Asian people ate dogs’ meat. I can’t say I have completely stopped believing and spreading stereotypes, but I’ve been trying to educate myself on the most diverse cultural aspects. I have read about the struggle Koreans face every day with the pressure of high beauty standards. I have watched documentaries about the consequences of the high-pressure Japanese students go through in their education system. I have made American friends who showed that the American Dream Life was far from what I had expected it to be. And that’s the third step. Finding resources that prove stereotypes wrong is the most important step. Educating ourselves about other cultures, making friends from other countries and getting to know more about their realities and the society they live in, watching critical movies and documentaries that don’t sugarcoat a country’s reality, reading articles, books and researches are just some of the many things we can do to extinguish most stereotypes we might believe in.
   Despite our efforts in educating ourselves, we cannot change other people’s mindsets. We can get rid of stereotypes dwelled on consciousness, but we can’t extinguish them in their totality. What we can do is raise awareness of how wrong most stereotypes are and spread the three steps, so other people can identify them and join us in this battle to stop stereotypes from getting stronger and stronger each day. Don’t forget the 3 R’s: redefine, recognize and reeducate. They helped me change the way I see my own country and the world we live in, it may help you too

Raphael Salvador Loureiro



I’ve had an amazing time this semester - though very busy - and much of that fun has come from the English II classes. The semester theme was “Brazil in the Eyes of the Other” and we started off discussing stereotypes and the concept of Culture.
While cultures are clearly different from one another, it is still hard to define Culture itself.
This question had remained in my head for a fair period of time until I finally figured things out.
The whole group was given a documentary* to watch. To put it shortly, it was about foreign stereotypes toward Brazil, specifically in movies. All the students were really mad because of what the entertainment industry made people think Brazil was like. What I was most intrigued by, however, was “if not that, then how is Brazil really like?” Well, I was soon after that given the opportunity to try to find that out.
We interviewed foreign students who had come to Brazil to study Portuguese. After
conducting the interview and analyzing their answers, I can say I was underwhelmed.
Having seen the extreme stereotypes displayed on the documentary, I was expecting the foreigners who were living here to have strong opinions as well. While their perspectives on the country did differ from the ones on the documentary (very, very fortunately), there was nothing too surprising about them, and I felt like they weren’t able to help me understand what Brazil was really like.
They told us Brazilians are more open, more informal, more cheery, etc. however, those are knowingly generalizations: not all Brazilians are like that. I still could not define what Culture was, let alone understand what Brazilian culture was like.
Hopeless, I decided to establish a closer contact with foreign students, most of whom were Chinese. Their culture was undoubtedly different from mine, so I thought it would be unpleasantly challenging to try to be friends: I was a cheery Brazilian, and they were shy Chinese people. Well, it turns out that I found a girl who hated mosquitoes, loved reading novels, and enjoyed my types of movies. We were just so similar in so many ways! I could almost forget where she came from.
   Maybe I was asking myself the wrong questions. It’s impossible to describe a whole place and culture as if it were one thing; it’s impossible to describe the concept of Culture without relying on generalizations.
   Maybe the right question is “Does culture matter?” and I would say “Not quite”.
Your culture can relate to you somehow, but the world is too diverse for us to fit in a tiny box. So, how do I see Brazil? I honestly don’t know, and I don’t think I’m supposed to. How do I see China? I don’t know that either, but I did make a really good friend who is from there, and I see her as the person she is, not where she came from.
   You can only understand the world around you once you stop seeing cultures and start seeing people. I made that switch and it was really worth it. I think that is the most important lesson I have learned this semester.

by Pâmela Gomes dos Santos


   It is difficult and complex to define what culture is, because it is not only about common experiences, but personal experiences as well. These common experiences are usually lived by people of the same religion, belief, behavior, etc. But it is not a rule. Thanks to technology, today we can connect and meet people with common tastes, for example, thousands of miles away, so that we can know a place, even superficially, through what is said by other people, such as on television and in newspapers. It turns out that the information we receive is the result of a point of view of who is speaking, not of what you are experiencing or often impartially imparting. The world is controlled by great powers, so most of the information we receive comes from these great powers and is popularized around the world, making a ‘’new truth’’ prevail.
   Brazil, for example, is seen by foreigners as a place where everyone can have fun, a tropical paradise. Thinking this way, it seems to be a good thing for the economy of the country, so the Brazilian media ends up contributing to any stereotype that pleases foreigners, selling this stereotypical image. It turns out that this is not always positive. Just a quick search on the internet to see that Brazil is seen from outside from all the best-known stereotypes such as football, samba, caipirinha, beautiful women, bikinis, beaches ...
   Something that is never missing is women. The Brazilian woman is seen as beautiful, hot and easy, having a tanned sculptural body and a big butt. This kind of thinking can be very harmful and have serious consequences, being dangerous, leaving us vulnerable.
Looking at it from the outside also made me wonder how hypocritical we can be that we get angry, and we often see our own country from a negative point of view only because of things I have barely seen, heard, and even I lived. We need to keep in mind that places are different, people are different, concepts, ideas, thoughts, experiences. We should not judge anything or anyone from the standpoint of others, or the little we know about. As we were reinforced this semester, the truth we know of someone or a place may be real, but that doesn't mean it's the only truth.
   I also used to have a lot of prejudice, which I try to get rid of. I have changed my mind about many things, I started to like things I didn't like, and I stopped liking things I loved. What matters is that we should always put ourselves in the other's shoes and not judge what we do not know. What we know, our opinion and experiences do not determine the opinions and experiences of others, and our truth is not the truth of all.

by Júlia Silveira


   When we locate ourselves in a strange country, we intend to get to know its culture, particularly because the culture is everywhere around us. Culture is the form we dress, we eat, we behave and also the form we speak. In Claire Kramsch's book - Language and Culture - she reveals some connections between the language we articulate and the culture we live in. In Brazilian Portuguese, for example, we use distinctive intonations for questions and irony sentences; and to foreigners, that is very odd.
   To know another culture helps to avoid stereotypes. Stereotypes are created because of a lack of knowledge in other cultures. With our English II class project, we had the opportunity to understand foreign students' opinions about a few cultural aspects from Brazil.
   The use of memes is quite intense in Brazilian culture, so we had the idea of questioning international students about their use of memes. Memes are known worldwide, mainly because of Twitter. Brazil is a country where there are mostly young people who use this social media. Memes are a new form of communication because they are easy to spread. The foreign students did not know Brazilian memes, however, 87% of them knew our culture of using humor as a way of protesting and having fun. The most highlighted result that we had in our research was the fact that most of the students use more memes in Whatsapp instead of Twitter, as Brazilians do.
   Our culture of '' making fun'' of significant matters was something important for the international students, a few of them were shocked that we have fun making memes of our presidents and our political problems. They also were stunned by the case that we make several memes about tv shows and music videos quickly. Brazil always had the fame of being a happy country and the use of memes reinforces that because humor is a cultural trade, especially our system of having fun in chaotic situations.
   Our main purpose of questioning the international students about memes was to know if they use this form of expressing ideas as Brazilians do. The results were the opposite we thought it was going to be, although we enjoyed the experience of knowing their visions about Brazilian humor.
   We were expecting a similar use of memes, but we understand that all cultures are different. For example, some students use only movie memes because political themes are a sensitive and respectful matter. Other students were more like Brazilians in this case and make memes of the presidents as a form of protesting- mostly Donald Trump memes.
   With this class project, we had a new perspective about our country, especially because before we did not agree with the stereotype of a '' happy country''. But now, we see why Brazil has this image and we agreed. Our use of memes helps to understand that because it is common to use humor to deal with things in Brazil. And for foreigners, it means that we are happy people because we use our playfulness to face daily situations.