The Adventures of Little Playboy

So, one of the things that we anthropologists try to figure out is how certain categories are understood by the communities in which we work and how they enable and constrain social relations.  The traditional term for this is finding out the "native categories."  There are tons of critiques of working through native categories and the idea that understanding the meanings of certain concepts unlocks indigineous understandings, etc.  But let's leave that aside for now.  One of the largest challenges of engaging native categories is trying to utilize and explain them to people who have different worldviews and taxonomies without doing violence to the integrity of the original concept. 

So, I have been trying to figure out exactly what the category of playboy or playboyzinho (little playboy) meant to people.  I first heard it at a protest for a new metro stop in a rich neighborhood who didn't want more public transit that would bring the 'wrong type.'  At this protest, I heard people shout, "Ey, playboy, vai tomar no cu."  (Hey Playboy, go fuck yourself up the ass).   At this point, I understood playboys to be a kind of privileged guy whose parents buy him anything he wants, and who acts like he owns the world.  So, in my head, I immediately envision some kind of Monte plays tennis with Buffy type.  Talk about native categories, how about my own, right.

So, I was told that it was a much more broader critique of priveleged middle class youth. (ok, so less Monte aristocratic, more braugh-style middle class culture).  Flash forward, I am giving a talk on protests, aesthetics, and solidarity.  I use the example of how a group who I describe as "anarchist fratboys" are learning to demasculinize and de-heteteronormativize their protest chants.  Now, instead of saying "ey, [insert politician] vai tomar no cu,"  they say "ey, [politician] vai tomar no cum, é bom!."  [Hey, politician, take it up the ass, it's good!"].  It's a good ethnographic example, except that I don't know how to translate protesters that I understand as kind of fratty (with all the masculine culture that I associate with that) into portuguese.  So, I translate "anarchist fratboy" into "playboyzinho anarchista."

Needless to say, I get reamed in the comments, and, in retrospect, justly so.  These anarchists are middle class, I am told, but they are hardly playboys.  I think I had underestimated just how negative a connotation playboy has, especially by people who consider themselves leftists.  So, now I think I have to find a new name for many of these people, who are not quite my interlocutors but ar elinked to them. 

On the one hand, I have this problem of translating my own native categories (fratboy) into Portuguese and trying to understand what playboy signifies in any given situation.  I want to write more (in the near future) about a problem I am having with people describing the agressors in cases of homophobic violence in terms of ideology/culture without an eye towards socioeconomics.  For instance, people are very critical of skinhead attacks (rightly so) against LGBT people.  But they don't recognize the class aspect of these skinheads who often come from poor neighborhoods.  Likewise, I am hearing more reports of gay people in rich neighborhoods being attacked by playboys.  And people have an automatic rationalization that playboys são escrotos.  (Playboys are arrogant assholes).  But what does it mean that these rich kids feel like they can pick on vulnerable people for enjoyment.  I think there is a lot more disentangling here to do.