Conference by Psychologist Ivan Labra

Community Psychology and Large Group Capacitation presented in the auditorium of the Public Library in Heredia, Costa Rica, on 28 August 2012
The presenter is the Psychologist and Expert in Large Group Capacitation, Ivan Labra, from Chile who worked, among others, more than a decade in southern Africa on the development and adaptation of the Large Group Capacitation approach.

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 INTRODUCTION TO THE THEORY OF ORGANISATION OF CLODOMIR DE MORAIS*

Origins of the Organisation Workshops

        The Organization Workshops were first created in Brazil in the mid 1950s by Clodomir Santos de Morais.  Brazil was then (as it still is now, albeit to a lesser extent) a subcontinent of extreme inequality;  where the poor stood in lines several blocks long for government-subsidized meals at 5 Cruzieros while businessmen lunched in luxury hotels at 200 Cruzieros a throw ; where poverty was exacerbated by galloping inflation;[1]  where the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul had living standards comparable to central Europe, while in the vast North-east (where the Organization Workshops were born) poverty levels matched the worst of Africa and Asia.   In the mid 1950s Brazil was industrializing at a dizzying pace; its flamboyant president (from 1955 to 1960) Juscelino Kubitschek claimed to make “fifty-years-of-progress-in-five”;[2]  the exurbs of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro filled with factories; while the landless labourers of the North East, most of whom were descendants of slaves, and whose de facto status had changed little with emancipation (slaves were not freed in Brazil until 1888), essentially remained still in the middle of the twentieth century in the old world of the Casa Grande (big house) and the Senzla (slave quarters—now converted to tiny row houses). [3]   

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[1] Morton S. Baratz, “The Crisis in Brazil,” Social Research.  Vol. 22 (1955) pp.  347-361. p. 354.

[2] Ieda S. Wlarda, Howard J. Wiarda, “Revolution or Counter-Revolution in Brazil,” The Massachussets Review.  Vol. 8 (1967)  pp. 149-165. p. 161.

[3] Gilberto Freyre, The Mansions and the Shanties: the Making of Modern Brazil.  New York:  Alfred Knopf,  1963.   For photographs of a casa grande in the North East and its accompanying row houses for labourers see Wendy Wolford, “Of Land and Labour: Agrarian Reform on the Sugarcane Planations of North-east Brazil,” Latin American Perspectives  Vol. Vol. 31 (2004)  pp. 147-170.

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