(6) For the purposes of this article—an analysis of the historical conditioning of a debate—we will remain agnostic concerning the strengths and weaknesses of the various sides to the argument. The disagreements extend to the terms themselves. There are significant differences of opinion concerning all three of the words in our title: intellectuals, popular culture, and the people. As to intellectuals, this article refers directly to a rather narrowgroup, the roughly two dozen Brazilian scholars in the social sciences and humanities who have written extensively on the subjects discussed here. In a somewhat looser and more indirect way, it also refers to the dissemination of their ideas to a considerably wider group: the university community at large, priests, nuns, pastoral agents, bishops, and militants in the Partido dot Trabalhadores. It is among the clergy and the militants that the idealization of popular culture reaches its apogee. The preferred newspaper of the liberal intelligentsia, the Folha de São Paulo, has also shown a strong receptivity to the intellectual currents discussed here. Having clarified the groups to which I am referring, there will be no need here to enter into theoretical disputes over definitions of ‘the intellectual’. With respect to ‘popular culture’, I employ this term to describe the religious and recreational practices of the poor, and the values embodied in such practices, insofar as these differfrom those of other social strata. This definition has the distinct advantage of leaving open for empirical investigation the question of whether there actually exists such an entity as ‘popular culture’. (The quotation marks will be excluded in the text only for stylistic reasons). This definition of popular culture also leaves open for inquiry the issue of what these values, allegedly unique to the poor, might consist of, and whether such values are equally present in all expressions of poor people's culture. A persuasive argument that there exists no such unitary scheme of values, distinctive to the poor, may be found in Fernandes, Ruben Cesar, Os Cavaleiros do Bom Jesus (Rio de Janeiro 1982), pp. 137–40Google Scholar. Lastly, ‘the people’. I have translated for this term the Portuguese word povo. Although this is the nearest English equivalent, the Portuguese refers more specifically to what would normally be considered the working classes and marginal poor, both urban and rural. In a less developed country, where the majority of the people are poor by any standard, the conflation of these terms is understandable. It nevertheless creates ambiguities over who is included and who excluded by invocation of the povo. There has been little interest in clarifying these ambiguities. They have been useful to populist politicians desirous of appealing to members of many social classes. They have also been useful to Marxists, aware of the infinitesimal size of the industrial proletariat as conceived by Marx.
