Dar Um Jeito: Brazil’s Beautiful, Complicated Art of Finding a Way

There is a particular kind of person you want nearby when the plan falls apart. Not necessarily the person who wrote the plan. That person may currently be explaining, with increasing volume, that everyone received the spreadsheet.

You want the person who looks at the missing equipment, the closed door, the delayed delivery, the form that requires information available only after you submit the form, and says something like this: “Calma. A gente dá um jeito.” Take it easy. We’ll find a way.

I love that sentence. I love its quiet refusal to let the first obstacle become the final answer. Nobody has promised that the universe will cooperate. Nobody has pretended the problem is imaginary. Someone has simply decided there is still something worth trying.

English can translate the words. Understanding their cultural weight takes longer. In Brazil, the idea sits inside an enormous conversation about ingenuity, relationships, unequal power, survival, humor, and what people do when the official route does not lead where it claims to lead.

It also contains a warning. A clever solution can rescue a situation. A clever excuse can make a bad system permanent. The difference matters whether you are navigating a public office, running a company, raising a family, or trying to convince a printer that printing is, in fact, its principal occupation.

“Dar um jeito” means more than the dictionary can carry

The Portuguese word jeito has several related meanings, including manner, way, skill, and arrangement. That range matters. It can concern how something is done, someone’s knack for doing it, or the act of putting things into workable order. Priberam’s entry for jeito shows how much everyday territory this small word occupies.

Dar um jeito is an idiomatic expression. Translating it mechanically as “give a way” would produce English that sounds like a confused navigation app. Depending on context, “sort it out,” “figure something out,” “manage somehow,” or “find a way” carries the sense more naturally.

Jeitinho is the diminutive form. Priberam records both a gentle manner and an informal, astute way of resolving a difficulty. The suffix can soften the expression; it does not settle whether the action is fair. A request for a jeitinho still needs context. The dictionary definition is a useful starting point.

That is where the larger phrase, o jeitinho brasileiro, becomes interesting. “The Brazilian way” is a convenient English gloss, but an incomplete one. We are talking about a familiar cultural idea, not the operating manual issued to every Brazilian at birth.

The difference between the two expressions is useful. Saying “I’ll sort this out” does not automatically mean you intend to manipulate a rule. Likewise, dar um jeito can be entirely ordinary. The phrase about the Brazilian jeitinho invites a broader discussion about the methods used, the relationships involved, and who benefits.

That is the version that grabs me. It leaves room for effort without selling certainty. And frankly, after enough meetings with people promising frictionless transformation, I find a little honest uncertainty refreshing.

First, let Brazil be bigger than the postcard

It is tempting to explain Brazil using a small collection of internationally recognizable images: a beach, a football, Carnival, perhaps a drink sweating attractively beside an ocean. Those things can be wonderful. They cannot do the work of understanding a country.

Brazil contains different regional histories, environments, accents, religious traditions, communities, industries, and ways of life. The distance between somebody’s daily experience in São Paulo and somebody else’s in a river community in the Amazon cannot be closed by writing “vibrant culture” and congratulating ourselves on our research.

Even a single official measure should interrupt the urge to generalize. Brazil’s 2022 Census identified 391 Indigenous ethnicities, peoples, or groups, along with 295 Indigenous languages. These are living communities and languages. Brazil’s story did not begin when Europeans started keeping records about it. IBGE’s Brasil Indígena portal and its explanation of Indigenous languages offer a better starting point than the familiar blank-map version of history.

That complexity makes the expression more interesting. A national idea can be recognizable without being universal. People can use it affectionately, criticize it sharply, or feel both reactions in the same afternoon. None of those responses cancels the others.

I approach this as someone interested in how humans solve problems, and in the language they use to describe that effort. Brazil is not a motivational prop for somebody else’s business lesson. Its thinkers, institutions, and people have been examining this subject with far more depth than a slogan permits.

History: when the official route and the possible route diverged

There is no responsible way to point to a single historical afternoon and announce that the Brazilian jeitinho was invented. Nobody discovered improvisation at 3:15 p.m., filed the paperwork, and received a national trademark. Its interpretation belongs to a long discussion about Brazilian social life.

To understand that discussion, it helps to look at the relationship between institutions and the people expected to live within them. Who could issue an order? Who could appeal one? Whose needs were legible to the state? Who had access to someone who could make a decision?

A monarchy crosses the Atlantic

In 1808, the Portuguese court arrived in Brazil after leaving Europe under the threat of Napoleon’s forces. Rio de Janeiro became the seat of the Portuguese monarchy. Brazil’s political separation from Portugal followed in 1822, after years of change rather than one isolated dramatic moment. The Brazilian National Library’s history of independence explains this sequence and the institutional changes surrounding the court’s arrival.

That is a remarkable reversal to sit with: a European monarchy governing from across the Atlantic, in territory it had treated as a colony. It reminds us that institutions are historical constructions. The arrangements people are told are permanent can be revised very quickly when the people in charge need another arrangement.

The observation is broader than Brazil. What appears immovable from the waiting room may look surprisingly adjustable from the executive office. Whenever you hear “there is absolutely no other way,” it is reasonable to ask whether that is a fact, a preference, or a description of the speaker’s authority.

Freedom was fought for

Slavery continued after independence and was legally abolished in Brazil on May 13, 1888. That endpoint followed resistance, political pressure, organizing, and contested legislation. The Arquivo Nacional’s account of abolitionist legislation traces that long struggle. The National Library’s material on abolitionist movements also documents organized campaigns, associations, and the press.

This history requires moral seriousness. Resistance to enslavement should never be casually filed under “creative workarounds.” The stakes were freedom, personhood, family, and survival. Nor should a discussion of modern resourcefulness pretend that unequal power was a minor administrative inconvenience.

My reason for including this history is to keep the conversation honest about rules. A rule’s existence tells us that someone established it. It does not, by itself, establish that the rule is just. Equally, disliking a rule does not automatically make our preferred exception fair. Holding both thoughts takes more effort than printing “break the rules” on a motivational poster.

A cultural idea is not a historical diagnosis

It would be too neat to claim that a handful of historical events “caused” a national personality. Countries do not work that way. The useful historical questions concern institutions, opportunity, hierarchy, and the space people have to act. They help explain why the relationship between formal procedure and personal negotiation deserves attention.

They also keep us from mistaking coping mechanisms for freely chosen preferences. A person who has learned to navigate uncertainty may have extraordinary skill. That does not tell us how much uncertainty they would choose if dependable alternatives were available.

The human being behind the counter

One of the most compelling parts of this subject is the role of personal interaction. An institution may speak in categories, requirements, and reference numbers. A person arrives with a particular situation. Sometimes the conversation begins when somebody realizes those two descriptions do not line up.

Imagine a hypothetical customer whose document is valid but whose surname contains a character the software refuses to accept. The process says “invalid.” The person is standing there, stubbornly continuing to exist. At that point, someone needs to understand both the purpose of the requirement and the limits of the interface.

The helpful employee does not need to erase the requirement. They might identify an approved alternate submission, involve someone authorized to fix the record, or explain the actual correction needed. A little attention can turn a bewildering rejection into a solvable task.

Brazilian social thought gives us a deeper language for the relationship between personal ties and public institutions. In discussing Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s Raízes do Brasil, historian Lilia Moritz Schwarcz explains the complexity of his “cordial man.” The concept should not be flattened into a claim that Brazilians are simply pleasant. It concerns emotional and personal relations, including their difficult relationship with impersonal public life. Her essay on cordiality is an excellent deeper read.

That distinction is worth carrying into any workplace. Personal attention can restore dignity to a rigid interaction. Personal favoritism can remove dignity from everyone excluded from the relationship. Both involve people. Only one can reasonably claim to serve everyone.

My ideal is a system that allows people to explain their circumstances without requiring them to be charming, connected, fluent, confident, or related to the supervisor. Help should survive the absence of a good opening joke.

When ingenuity becomes somebody else’s problem

The strongest version of this essay has to make room for the uncomfortable part. If we treat every jeitinho as charming resourcefulness, we miss the debate inside the term. If we treat every use as dishonesty, we miss ordinary kindness and creative problem-solving.

A 2019 study in PLOS ONE examined individual differences in Brazilian jeitinho. Its analysis distinguished a dimension involving creativity and friendly, caring interaction from another involving deception and transgression. The authors described these as jeitinho simpático and jeitinho malandro. This is a research framework, not a test that assigns a personality to an entire population. Read the original study, “Between simpatia and malandragem.”

Here is how I would bring that distinction into everyday judgment. Ask what happened to the other people affected by the solution. Did we remove unnecessary friction, or merely arrange for someone less powerful to absorb it?

These are my practical examples, not scenarios taken from the study. Their common principle is simple: the ingenuity has to include responsibility for the result. A solution that works only because another person cannot object is a very expensive kind of clever.

I also like the disclosure test. Could you describe what you did, in ordinary language, to everyone affected? If the explanation requires a lowered voice and the phrase “technically, nobody asked,” your innovation may need a second draft.

Resilience deserves respect. Permanent hardship does not deserve applause.

There is a version of resilience talk that makes me uneasy. It happens when someone observes a community handling extraordinary difficulty and immediately turns that endurance into an inspirational lesson for people with substantially easier choices.

The admiration may be sincere. It can still leave the hardest question untouched: why are people being asked to endure so much in the first place? Praising the person who keeps carrying the weight should not excuse everyone who could help remove it.

Imagine telling an employee, “You’re incredible under pressure,” every Friday while refusing to address the same preventable emergency every Monday. Eventually the compliment begins to sound like a budget decision. The organization has discovered a renewable resource, and unfortunately that resource is somebody’s nervous system.

The version of resilience I respect includes the ability to seek support, change direction, set boundaries, and say that the current arrangement cannot continue. It includes perseverance, but it cannot require permanent self-erasure. “We’ll find a way” should leave room for “we need help” and “this needs to change.”

There is something especially powerful in the plural: a gente, we. It changes the emotional burden of the sentence. The person facing the problem is no longer being congratulated on their ability to face it alone.

That is why I find the phrase moving when it is offered with care. It can mean: I see the difficulty. I am staying in the conversation. We have not reached the end of our options. You do not need to solve everything before you deserve company.

For me, that is a more useful understanding of strength than endless toughness. A bridge needs supports. We do not accuse it of having a poor attitude because it declines to float.

A circle, a rhythm, and the work of keeping a culture alive

Some of the deepest forms of resilience are collective. They involve people maintaining knowledge, identity, and relationships across generations. The achievement is larger than getting through a difficult day. It includes making sure something meaningful remains available to the people who come next.

Consider capoeira. UNESCO describes it as an Afro-Brazilian cultural practice that combines fight and dance, with music and a circle of participants. Its account emphasizes mutual respect, social cohesion, and the transmission of knowledge. The UNESCO archive’s capoeira film and description offer an introduction that goes beyond spectacular movements in a short video.

I am not claiming that capoeira is simply an example of jeitinho, or that one concept explains its history. The connection I draw is about participation. What a viewer notices in the middle of the circle depends on a wider circle of people making that moment possible.

That is worth remembering in a culture of individual success stories. We like the photograph of the remarkable person. We are less consistent about noticing the teacher, the accompanist, the relative, the organizer, or the person who kept the gathering going when attendance was thin and money was thinner.

Samba de roda provides another place to listen carefully. UNESCO describes this tradition of the Recôncavo region of Bahia as involving music, dance, and poetry. Its heritage entry on samba de roda gives readers a specific cultural practice to explore, rather than treating all Brazilian music as one cheerful background track.

The point is not that hardship automatically produces beautiful art. People produce art. They learn, practice, disagree, remember, teach, organize, and create. Admiring the result should direct our attention toward their work and the conditions that allow it to continue.

This is part of why stories matter so much to me. A shallow story leaves us impressed. A deeper story changes what we know to notice. That difference runs through my approach to storytelling, authority, and visibility: the details should help us recognize the people and decisions behind the finished result.

When the price of tomorrow would not sit still

Resilience becomes easier to understand when we stop treating uncertainty as an abstract personality exercise. Money, for example, is supposed to help people plan. Severe inflation makes that planning painfully unstable.

According to Brazil’s central bank, twelve-month inflation reached 4,922 percent in June 1994, immediately before the real entered circulation on July 1. The Plano Real used a phased stabilization process, including the Unidade Real de Valor, or URV, as a unit of account before the new currency’s introduction. The bank’s history of the Plano Real explains the mechanism and the enormous logistical task of changing the money.

Those figures deserve a moment. Imagine trying to run an ordinary household when the relationship between a wage, a purchase, and a future obligation is changing at a pace you cannot ignore. Planning would demand attention that people in more stable conditions can spend elsewhere. That is the practical implication I take from the history, not a claim that every household responded identically.

For a small business, uncertainty can reach every decision: how long a quotation remains sensible, what inventory to hold, when to collect payment, and whether tomorrow’s replacement stock will bear any reasonable relationship to today’s selling price. The owner still has customers to serve while the arithmetic keeps moving.

I would be cautious about drawing a straight line from economic turmoil to a national talent for improvisation. What we can say is that a turbulent environment makes dependable planning harder. Competence under those conditions deserves to be understood in context.

The larger lesson of this history is also encouraging. People did not merely need greater personal stamina. Institutional design mattered. Serious technical work could change the conditions within which ordinary decisions were made.

That possibility should remain central whenever we discuss resilience. We can honor people’s ability to adapt and still want a world in which they do not have to keep relearning the price of stability.

Brazil also builds the better system

An essay about Brazilian resourcefulness would be incomplete if all its examples involved people working around something broken. That framing would leave the country permanently cast as the clever improviser while someone else gets to be the engineer.

Take Pix. Brazil’s central bank launched the instant payment system in November 2020. Its launch material described transfers and payments available around the clock, including weekends and holidays, with receipt in seconds. The central bank’s Pix overview and original launch announcement explain the intended service and framework.

I would not call Pix a jeitinho in the usual sense of an informal workaround. Its relevance here is that it demonstrates another response to friction: design infrastructure that makes a useful action easier to perform routinely.

That is a different scale of ambition. Instead of helping one person negotiate one obstacle, improve the route used by many people. A payment arriving promptly may look uneventful from the outside. Uneventful is often the highest compliment we can pay essential infrastructure.

There is a similar reason to look at aviation. Embraer’s account of the Bandeirante describes the company’s creation in 1969 as a means of developing industrial capacity for the aircraft’s production. The story concerns engineering, industrial organization, and sustained execution. Embraer’s history of the Bandeirante’s first 50 years in operation is a useful route into that story.

These examples widen the lens. Brazil can be discussed through everyday ingenuity, public infrastructure, technical expertise, and industrial capability. None requires pretending that everyone shares one method of solving a problem.

For business leaders, there is a valuable progression here. Solve the immediate difficulty. Understand why the difficulty existed. Build something that makes the solution dependable. That progression is close to what I care about in digital transformation consulting: changing how work succeeds, including the unglamorous parts that happen after the demonstration ends.

What “we’ll find a way” changes about a problem

I do not hear dar um jeito as a promise that every outcome is possible. Some constraints are real. Some doors should remain closed. Sometimes the responsible answer is to stop. What interests me is the interval before we decide we have exhausted the options.

A useful way to apply the phrase is to examine the definition of the problem. We often inherit a proposed solution and mistake it for the goal. Then, when that particular solution becomes unavailable, we assume the goal has become impossible.

Ask what must actually happen

Imagine a hypothetical community workshop whose projector stops working shortly before the audience arrives. If the goal is “display these slides,” the event has a serious equipment problem. If the goal is “help these people understand and practice three useful ideas,” the room may still contain everything needed for a good session.

The speaker could use a whiteboard, small groups, verbal examples, and a shared resource afterward. That approach is not automatically better. It is simply available once the outcome is separated from the preferred delivery method.

There are times when the equipment really is essential. The exercise is to find out. “What are we trying to accomplish?” is an excellent question precisely because it does not predetermine the answer.

Take inventory before declaring defeat

What do we have? Time, permissions, knowledge, relationships, existing materials, unused capacity, a smaller scope, or an alternate sequence? People often start by listing what is missing. A second list of what is available can change the conversation.

Constraints can also be different kinds of things. A limited budget, a safety requirement, a software setting, and somebody’s preference for how it was done last year should not be lumped into the same box marked “cannot change.” They deserve separate questions and different levels of caution.

Try something small enough to learn from

In a business setting, a modest test may tell us more than another elaborate discussion. A clearer service description, a simpler customer handoff, or a small pilot can produce evidence while keeping the consequences manageable. The test needs a purpose and a way to judge the result.

This is my practical reading of the phrase, rather than a scientific claim about how Brazilian brains work. There is no need to invent a national neuroscience of improvisation. The useful questions are available to everyone, and the quality of the answer depends on the situation.

“We’ll find a way” becomes valuable when it leads to observation, options, and responsible action. Without those, it can be another optimistic noise in a room already adequately supplied with optimistic noises.

Sometimes the first solution is a little room to breathe

Humor belongs in this conversation because absurdity is part of dealing with institutions, technology, and other humans. Somewhere, a person is being asked to print the confirmation that they selected paperless communications. Somewhere else, a team has scheduled a meeting to investigate why nobody has time to work.

Those examples do not belong to Brazil alone. Bureaucratic absurdity has achieved international distribution without requiring a particularly competent marketing department. The relevant question is what we do together when we recognize it.

A shared laugh can say, “Yes, I also see how ridiculous this is.” That acknowledgment matters. The person facing the obstacle does not have to spend their remaining energy proving that the obstacle exists.

I like humor that gives people a little room to think. A person can be overwhelmed by a problem and still notice something funny about it. The laugh does not cancel the difficulty. It can briefly stop the difficulty from occupying every inch of the conversation.

The direction of the joke matters. Laughing at a needlessly complicated process is different from laughing at the person struggling to navigate it. Making fun of our own attachment to a perfect plan can be generous. Making fun of someone’s language, poverty, accent, or lack of access would betray the very humanity this phrase can express.

My preferred joke is aimed at the machinery of unnecessary difficulty. The software that has fourteen required fields and no useful explanation. The committee that can approve a new committee but cannot authorize a replacement chair. The project plan in which every risk is green because the person updating the colors is afraid of the person reading them.

We can laugh at those things and then improve them. In fact, I would prefer that order to the one where we laugh for ten years and call it company culture.

What leaders should learn before putting “resilience” in the next presentation

The leadership lesson I take from this subject begins with respect for the people closest to the work. They often know where the stated process ends and the real process begins. Ask them what they must do to make the ordinary day succeed.

You may discover that your smooth operation includes a spreadsheet maintained by one person, a manual correction performed before every report, and a customer promise that depends on someone being available after dinner. The organization calls this efficiency because it has not counted all the work.

Listen to the workaround as information

When an employee says, “Here’s how we actually do it,” pay attention. That sentence may reveal a useful improvement, an unsupported burden, or a hidden risk. You will learn less if your first response is to punish them for admitting the published procedure does not match reality.

A hypothetical customer service team might keep a private list explaining which error messages mean what. That list could be evidence of initiative. It could also be evidence that customers and new employees are being forced to guess. The next step is to examine the problem and make accurate guidance accessible.

Give discretion a clear boundary

People need enough authority to solve appropriate problems. They also need clarity about what they cannot promise, change, disclose, or approve. “Use your judgment” works better when the organization has explained the goal and the boundaries.

Consider a service team authorized to correct a small billing error within a documented process. That can be faster and more humane than passing every case through four people. The important features are consistency, accountability, and a record of what happened. The customer should not need to locate the one employee willing to break the system.

Choose the smallest useful move

A business does not always need a large campaign to learn whether its message is clear. It may need five serious conversations with the right buyers and one well-written page explaining the offer. The appropriate scale depends on the question being answered.

That is part of the reason I connect marketing strategy to goals, decisions, and actual customer understanding. Resourcefulness is more valuable when it moves the business toward a defined result. Activity alone can be improvised indefinitely, especially when nobody has defined success.

Measure the rescue and the recurrence

If a customer issue was resolved quickly, that is worth knowing. It is also worth knowing whether the same issue appeared seventy times. A team can become excellent at recovery while the organization quietly becomes dependent on failure.

This is where useful KPIs and dashboard design matter. Track enough to distinguish a good response from an improving system: recurrence, rework, resolution time, and the conditions producing the problem. A beautiful chart announcing that everyone worked extremely hard may be accurate without being particularly helpful.

Let the hero take a vacation

The person who knows how to fix everything deserves recognition, support, and a plan that allows other people to learn. If a process stops when one employee goes away, the organization has concentrated too much responsibility in a human being who may reasonably wish to spend a week looking at water.

Documentation, training, sensible tools, and ownership are ordinary words. They do extraordinary work when used well. The test of a successful rescue is partly whether it can become a reliable practice that does not require the rescuer to be permanently available.

I want organizations to preserve initiative while reducing the need for constant improvisation. People should have the freedom to think and the support to stop reinventing yesterday’s solution.

A little Portuguese to carry into an imperfect day

The following expressions are useful companions to the main idea. Their English equivalents are contextual translations, not word-for-word equations. Tone and situation matter, as they do in any language. “I’ll handle it” can be reassurance, confidence, or the last thing someone says before creating a much larger problem.

Another word often nearby is gambiarra. In Brazilian informal usage, it can refer to an improvised repair or arrangement. Priberam’s entry records that sense. It overlaps with the world of making things work, but it is not interchangeable with the whole social idea of jeitinho brasileiro.

A gambiarra may be clever, temporary, awkward, or some combination. The word itself does not certify the result. I have enough respect for skilled work to know that “it hasn’t fallen over yet” is a remarkably limited performance standard.

The Portuguese passages in this essay are original reflections or ordinary expressions, with translations provided. They are not attributed quotations from Brazilian writers. That distinction matters because a sentence does not become inherited cultural wisdom simply because somebody puts it in italics.

“A gente dá um jeito” is most powerful when someone means “we”

What stays with me is the possibility inside that small sentence. The situation may be difficult. The first plan may be finished. The answer may require a different route, a different scale, more help, or an uncomfortable conversation. There can still be meaningful work to do.

I admire people who can remain curious at that moment. The ones who ask another question. The ones who notice an available resource. The ones who can make somebody laugh without making them feel small. The ones who understand that competence includes knowing when to bring another person into the room.

Brazil’s conversation about jeitinho gives us something richer than a slogan about grit. It asks us to consider creativity and fairness together. It gives us reasons to admire adaptability and reasons to improve the conditions that demand it. It reminds us that human relationships can help a system serve people, and that those same relationships need limits when they become exclusive advantages.

That complexity is part of the beauty. We do not need to sand it away to make the idea useful. An honest philosophy for real life should have room for complications. Real life has already demonstrated that it will be bringing them.

That last question is where I think the idea grows into something especially powerful. Finding a way can help one person through a hard moment. Leaving a clearer path can help people you will never meet.

For today, perhaps start with the smaller promise. Pull up a chair. Understand what is happening. Find out what you have to work with. Offer the help you can honestly give. And if someone has brought a spreadsheet, be kind. They meant well.

Questions about dar um jeito and o jeitinho brasileiro

What does dar um jeito mean in English?

Dar um jeito usually means “find a way,” “sort it out,” or “figure something out.” The most natural translation depends on the situation. It can describe an ordinary effort to solve a problem and does not inherently imply dishonesty.

What is o jeitinho brasileiro?

O jeitinho brasileiro is a culturally recognizable Brazilian idea involving ways of overcoming obstacles through ingenuity, personal interaction, or improvisation. Its interpretation varies with the action involved. It can suggest helpful resourcefulness or invite criticism of favoritism and unfair shortcuts.

Is jeitinho brasileiro always positive?

No. Context matters, including who benefits, who bears the consequences, and whether anyone is deceived or unfairly disadvantaged. A considerate solution to unnecessary friction differs from obtaining a private advantage at someone else’s expense.

Do all Brazilians embrace jeitinho?

No. A recognizable cultural concept does not describe every individual’s behavior or opinion. Brazil is diverse, and people may value the expression’s association with ingenuity while criticizing practices they consider unfair.

Is gambiarra the same as jeitinho?

They can overlap, but they are not identical. Gambiarra commonly refers to an improvised repair or arrangement in Brazilian informal usage. Jeitinho can involve a wider social situation, including interpersonal negotiation.

How does dar um jeito relate to resilience?

It can express a willingness to keep looking for a workable response when the first plan fails. In this essay, resilience also includes asking for help, respecting limits, and improving the conditions that repeatedly force people to improvise.

What can business leaders learn from the idea?

Define the actual goal, examine available resources, listen to people doing the work, and make responsible adjustments. Then address recurring obstacles so that a successful emergency response becomes a dependable process rather than a permanent demand for heroics.

Follow the story further

The best next step is to spend time with Brazilian voices, original research, and the institutions preserving the history. These resources support different parts of the discussion; no single one is offered as an explanation of an entire country.

• Priberam: jeito and jeitinho. Start with the words and their range of meanings. In Portuguese.
• Miura and colleagues: “Between simpatia and malandragem”. Original psychological research examining dimensions of jeitinho and individual differences. In English.
• Lilia Moritz Schwarcz on Sérgio Buarque de Holanda and cordiality. A richer discussion of personal and public relationships. In Portuguese.
• IBGE: Brasil Indígena. Official census material that makes the country’s Indigenous diversity visible. In Portuguese.
• Biblioteca Nacional: Brazil’s independence. Historical context for 1808, 1822, and the changes between them. In Portuguese.
• Arquivo Nacional: abolitionist legislation. The long and contested process leading to abolition. In Portuguese.
• UNESCO: capoeira circle and samba de roda of the Recôncavo of Bahia. Introductions to specific traditions, their practitioners, and cultural transmission. English pages.
• Banco Central do Brasil: Plano Real. Monetary history and the design of stabilization. In Portuguese.
• Banco Central do Brasil: Pix. Public payment infrastructure as another kind of problem-solving. In English.
• Embraer: 50 years of Bandeirante operation. An industrial history that widens the conversation beyond improvisation. In English.