Some groups in rural Brazil merit special attention. Although there has been massive rural to urban migration in Brazil, nearly 40 million people still live in the countryside, and another 10 million live in towns with a population under 20,000. There are also signs of urban to rural migration as a result of exhaustion of employment and income opportunities in large cities.
Many of the inhabitants of the countryside are rural workers in agriculture, with permanent or, more typically, seasonal employment, particularly in harvesting, an activity in which women and children are also involved. Although a large number of small family farmers have land of their own, millions of rural workers are landless because land tenure is extremely concentrated in Brazil. In the face of slowness of official land reform, they began to invade unproductive properties in the 1990s. As a result of their organization and massacres of their activists in Rondônia and Pará, they entered the political limelight, and land reform was placed high on the political agenda.
In addition to farmers, Brazil has various kinds of traditional populations--including rubber tappers, Brazil nut collectors, caboclos and other traditional riverine dwellers, small fishermen, and others--who became a new social category in the late 1980s. Some of them received land from the government in the form of extractive reserves, meaning land containing valuable natural resources such as rubber-yielding trees, hardwoods, and so forth, ceded to their associations on the condition that they use their natural resources in a sustainable way. For some rural Brazilians, sustainable extraction presents an alternative to rural exodus and structural unemployment.
Brazilian culture was never monolithic. Since the sixteenth century, it has been an amalgamation of traditional Iberian, indigenous, and African values, as well as more recent Western values, developed in northern Europe and the United States, such as equality, democracy, efficiency, and individual rights. At times there are subtle or open conflicts, especially between norms of Mediterranean and Anglo-Saxon origin, or between practices of European versus Amerindian or African origin. However, Brazil is remarkable for the way in which there is unity in cultural diversity. Sometimes the values and practices of different origins have blended with each other, as in the case of Afro-Brazilian religious syncretism or liberation theology (see Glossary).
Another way of reconciling diversity has been the often considerable distance between actual practices, which conform with tradition, and official norms, which generally follow the positivist (positivism--see Glossary) logic of "order and progress" that underlay the establishment of the republic in 1889. The difference between norms and behavior, or between theory and practice, is a constant throughout Brazilian history. In colonial times and during the empire, imported cultural values and social norms had to be reconciled with the extenuating circumstances and realities of a frontier situation. Getting married officially, for example, was difficult in the absence of priests or because of the high cost of service by the justices of the peace.
In the 1990s, many people ignore laws that are not enforced, or allege that doing the right thing would be fine but that they lack the condições (conditions). The aphorism that sums up a common attitude about doing one's duty is, "Ninguém é de ferro " (No one is made of iron). The relaxed attitude is reinforced by the fact that laws or norms are often seen as having been imposed from the outside, rather than being the result of a social contract established for the common good. Thus, Brazilians, who are known for pragmatism, have become adept at living with idealistic rules, on the one hand, and actual practices that are often quite divergent, on the other. They switch easily between different cultural codes ranging from "traditional" values, such as machismo and paternalism, to "modern" values and social norms that favor women and equality.
Data as of April 1997