O What show and what erase the advertising discourses of the Brazilian meat industry

Abstract

The article intends to analyze discourses of the Brazilian agribusiness materialized in audiovisual advertising campaigns of this economic sector and disseminated by the mainstream media, in order to better understand a paradox of contemporary society: the accentuated consumption of meat and other products of animal origin, the systematic killing of millions of animals simultaneously with an increase of human sensibility to the animal cause. Based on the discourse analysis derived from Michel Pêcheux and contributions from Michel Foucault, we will seek to identify what is said in the food industry ads and how these statements are formulated. More precisely, our purpose is to analyze the production of certain effects of meaning related to the commercialization of the brands’ products and the silencing of others considered dysphoric by the sector and erased from their discourse. The analysis material includes an advertising by Friboi (Frigoríficos Friboi, 2014)  with the singer Roberto Carlos, and a commercial by Sadia (Sadia, 2007) set in a supermarket and starring Seu Juvenal, the butcher of the establishment, and Dona Elvira, a client looking for the brand’s ham. We will analyze this material through a procedure well known in AD, namely: the formation of relations between the statements of the videos, between the videos of the material and between them and others already said of the interdiscourse. These relationships are made by identifying and assembling paraphrastic chains: the polysemy constitutive of language can be interpreted from the production of the paraphrases constructed by the discourse in its different conditions of production. In addition, we will analyze the linguistic and imagetic resources used in the constitution of the audiovisuals under analysis, like lexical choices, syntactic threads, enunciative modalities. The analyzes allow us to observe the production of gastronomic and economic meanings, and the silencing of others that mark the animal character of food products.