The various cases of lynching in Brazil in the last 20 years suggest that the social changes are occuring in a direction opposed to the one of social scientists' cognitive orientations. The lynchings point out that popular culture in the circumstances of excluding development and modernization is not always and necessarily concerned with affirming traditions which dignify the man and assert his emancipation and liberty. There is no doubt the lynchings reveal a mentality compromised with the primacy of the social and of the rights of society regarding the individual. But they reveal it in its most opressing and punitive dimension, incorporating violent forms of exclusion and of ritual dehumanization of its victims.
lynchings; vigilantism; popular justice; antijudicial justice