Ruth Cardoso

Who was Ruth Cardoso?

Ruth Vilaça Correia Leite Cardoso was a Brazilian anthropologist and a former member of the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences at the University of Sao Paulo. She was the wife of 34th President of Brazil, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and First Lady of her country between January 1, 1995 to January 1, 2003. She held a Ph.D in anthropology from the University of Sao Paulo.

As professor and researcher Cardoso taught at the Latin American College of Social Sciences, University of Chile, Maison des Sciences de L'Homme, University of California, Berkeley, and Columbia University. She was an associate member of the Center for Latin American Studies of the University of Cambridge. With her husband, the sociologist and former president of Brazil, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, she founded and later directed the research institute Cebrap, which continues to be a leading site of social science research in Brazil.

Dr. Cardoso’s academic reputation rests primarily on a series of highly influential articles and book chapters on popular movements and political participation that she published in the 1980s and 1990s. Under Dr. Cardoso, Cebrap created Brazil’s first research group on social movements, helping to legitimate formal academic study of the “new” social movements that had emerged in the 1970s. At the same time, she was careful to stress the limits of identity-based and popular movements for political transformation, noting the divisions among them and their frequent dependency on clientelistic relations with the state and political parties.