Brazilian Culture

Brazil is a very vast country located in South America. A country with racial mixing, a wide range of religious practices, including indigenous communities, and a complicated environmental challenge. The citizens have discovered how to overcome hardship with ingenuity, creativity, and gratitude. It is a nation with an abundance of natural resources, including beaches, and food. Families in Brazil are frequently inviting and caring with themselves and foreigners. In general, they enjoy each other's company and would rather spend time together than alone. Brazil is known for its football team, Carnaval events, local festivals, street parades, food, and music. Bossa nova, samba, and funk are very famous, as well as other types of music like axé, pagode and sertanejo. The food such as barbecue has a specific aroma and flavor. “How Brazilians engage with food and how some national dishes have been immortalized in song. Some of the most renowned musicians in Brazil, such as Chico Buarque, Dorival Caymmi, Adoniran Barbosa, Djavan, Gilberto Gil, Paulinho da Viola, and Zeca Pagodinho, have composed and performed popular music about food.” (Dekaney)

Food

Brazilian food is really broad according to each state. The well-known caipirinha is one of the many typical dishes and drinks in Brazil. Coxinhas (shredded chicken covered in batter and shaped like a chicken leg), brigadeiros (chocolate truffles), pão de queijo (cheese bread), carne seca (dried meat), feijoada (pork stew), rice and beans, fruits like açai, guava, cashew, jackfruit, mangoes, sugarcane juice or cachaça, cold lager coffee, and cheese bread. Some of the main dishes are meatballs, pork chops with pineapple, flounder, dinner crêpes, chicken vatapa.

Facts and Myths

Brazil is a tropical nation of indigenous descent, which explains most of our hygiene practices. Brazilians take a shower every day, sometimes more than one, depending on the heat. Similar to when they brush their teeth after eating their main meals of the day, but in the work environment. You will notice that there will always be a wastepaper basket for collecting toilet paper in the restrooms. This is because the construction pipes and water treatment system aren't good for putting toilet paper in the toilets directly. People often say that Brazilians are very open to people from other countries. People in Brazil are accustomed to greeting one another with handshakes, hugs, and kisses on the cheek. The manner in which they do so varies depending on whether the situation is more formal or informal and also on the region of the country. Swiss punctuality is not exactly the same as Brazilian punctuality. In work circumstances, the timetables are generally regarded, but there is a resilience of a couple of moments for the start of gatherings. In social settings, extended delays are acceptable. Although Portuguese is Brazil's official language, it is common to use various expressions for the same word due to the country's size.

Holidays

These are the federal holidays presented in the year calendar, but every city or county have their own holidays as well. Such as the city's anniversary and saint that protects the city. Those are only an accordance between the specific region.

Federal Holidays in Brazil	Date
New Year's Day	January 1st
Shrove Tuesday	March 1st
Good Friday	April 15th
Easter	April 17th
Tiradentes Day	April 21st
Labour Day	May 1st
Feast of Corpus Christi	June 16th
Independence Day	September 7th
Lady of Aparecida's Day	October 12th
All Souls Day	November 2nd
Republic Day	November 15th

Religion

Brazil is a country of continental dimensions and, therefore, very diverse. But it's not that hard to guess the biggest religions in Brazil. Brazil is, by law, a country with a secular state and religious freedom guaranteed. Religious intolerance, although very present, is prohibited. How Brazilians interact with religion explains much of our past, from the beginning of the European invasion of the Americas, until now, with the growth of evangelical religions across the country. Most of Brazil is, by far, Christian.

Religion affiliation in Brazil as of 2020
Religion	Percentage
Catholic	54.2%
Evangelist (unspecified)	20.5%
Pentecostal Evangelist	3.7%
Afroamerican cults, Umbanda, etc.	2%
Protestant	0.8%
Jehova's witness	0.7%
Adventist	0.6%
Baptist Evangelist	0.3%
Believer without formal affiliation to any religion	0.3%
Mormon	0.1 %
Others	2.8 %

Source: Statista.com

LGBTQI+

In 2021, Statista reported a total of 300 deaths of LGBTQI+ hate crime in Brazil. The LGBT+ population has made significant progress, but it has also had to fight for equality, justice, and access to rights. The most recent ones in Brazil were the criminalization of LGBTphobia, the right of transvestites and transsexuals to use their social name, and the recognition of homoaffective civil unions. LGBT+ people, on the other hand, continue to face challenges in exercising their rights to employment, education, culture, and health, as well as other forms of violence. Although the majority of murders involve homosexuals (63% of the victims, including 10% lesbians and 53% gay men), “transsexuals and transvestites” occupy a high proportion of these murder statistics. 124 transgender people were murdered in 2019, which represents more than a third of the total number of recorded victims. Data presented by the National Association of Transvestites and Transsexuals (ANTRA) also show that Brazil is one of the countries that kills the most "transvestites and transsexuals" in the world. This situation of vulnerability appears to be getting worse. In the first ten months of 2020, Brazil surpassed the mark of 151 murders of trans and transvestites people. This represents a 47% increase in transgender murders from January to October 2020 compared to the same period in 2019.

Music and Art

Music

Brazil has a cultural multiplicity expressed by musical genres, which can be observed both by the diversity of rhythms and musical styles, and by the specific characteristics that each one of them has. Brazilian musical genres present elements that go back to the contributions and cultural influences of black people brought from Africa and indigenous communities, who participated in the construction of Brazilian cultural identity. They are strongly influenced by social, economic, political and historical aspects, associated with the contexts in which they develop. With this, we observe that in the different regions of the country we have a different musical style that is preponderant and gains national projection as a representative of the culture of the people of that territory. Thus adding a vast Brazilian musical repertoire. Some Brazilian musical genres such as Choro, Samba, Sertanejo, Forró, Rap, Hip-Hop, MPB, Axe and Funk are more popular in the country and have become known worldwide due to the projection that some representatives of the genre obtained in their career. artistic. The musical genre MPB (Brazilian Popular Music) has become a reference to national production, developed from a cultural movement that originated after the 1964 military coup, with composers and performers marking the music scene with questions about the cultural, artistic and social situation. even Brazilian politics in poetic form. Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Anitta, Gusttavo Lima, Pabllo Vittar, Gloria Groove and others are some of the artists that best represent the Brazilian diversity when the topic is music.

Art

The History of Art in Brazil is very vast and comprises several different periods of Brazilian society. Its origin, however, goes back to cave paintings, until it reaches the contemporary days. As a whole, Art and its own history are intertwined with the history of human beings. In this sense, artistic production since Prehistory has accompanied the emergence of other civilizations over time. However, the History of Art in Brazil experienced several different moments of production. From rock art, the development of indigenous, colonial, baroque, neoclassical, romantic, expressionist, modern and contemporary art can be observed. Created by D. João VI, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts was the first institution dedicated to the teaching of Art. Between 1850 and 1920, the place was the scene of the main European artistic manifestations, such as Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism and Symbolism. Tarsila do Amaral, Romero Britto, Candido Portinari, Lygia Clark and Anita Malfatti are some of the famous artists known from Brazil.