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Somebodies and Nobodies in the Body Politic: Mentalities and Social Structures in Colonial Brazil

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O TEATRO DOS VICIOS: TRANSGRESSÃO E TRANSIGENCIA NA SOCIEDADE URBANA COLONIAL. By AraújoEmanuel. (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1993. Pp. 362.)
HOMENS DE GROSSA AVENTURA: ACUMULAÇÃO E HIERARQUIA NA PRAÇA MERCANTIL DO RIO DE JANEIRO, 1790–1830. By FragosoJoão Luis Ribeiro. (Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional, 1992. Pp. 324.)
O ARCAISMO COMO PROJETO: MERCADO ATLANTICO, SOCIEDADE AGRARIA E ELITE MERCANTIL NO RIO DE JANEIRO, C. 1790–1840. By FragosoJoão Luis Ribeiro and FlorentinoManolo. (Rio de Janeiro: Diadorim, 1993. Pp. 118.)

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Stuart B. Schwartz
Stuart B. Schwartz*
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota
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Abstract

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Type
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Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , 1996 , pp. 113 - 134
Copyright
Copyright © 1996 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

∗

The author wishes to thank Richard Graham, Robert McCaa, Giana Pomata, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Thomas Cohen for their comments.

References

1. The classic formulation emerged in the 1930s. See Gilberto Freyre, Casa grande e senzala (Rio de Janeiro: Maia and Schmidt, 1933); Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Raízes do Brasil (São Paulo: J. Olympio, 1936); Caio Prado Júnior, Formação do Brasil contemporâneo (São Paulo: Martins, 1942); Roberto Simonsen, História econômica do Brasil, 4th ed. (São Paulo: Editora Nacional, 1962; 1st ed. 1937). On the impact of this generation, see Fernando Henrique Cardoso, “Livros que inventaram o Brasil,” Novos Estudos (CEBRAP) 37 (Nov. 1993):21–35. More recently, see the conflicting views but common framework of Fernando Novais, Portugal e Brasil na crise do antigo regime (1777–1808) (São Paulo: HUCITEC, 1979); Jacob Gorender, O escravismo colonial (São Paulo: Atica, 1978); Ciro F. S. Cardoso, Agricultura, escravidão e capitalismo (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1979).

2. A. J. R. Russell-Wood, Fidalgos and Philanthropists: The Santa Casa da Misericórdia da Bahia, 1550–1755 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968); Catherine Lugar, “The Merchant Community of Salvador, Bahia 1780–1830,” Ph.D. diss., State University of New York, Stony Brook, 1980; Pierre Verger, Flux et reflux de la traite des negres entre le golfe de Benin et Bahia de Todos os Santos (Paris: Mouton, 1968); Rae Flory and David Smith, “Bahian Merchants and Planters in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Hispanic American Historical Review 58, no. 4 (Nov. 1978):571–94.

3. On the internal market, see José Roberto Amaral Lapa, O antigo sistema colonial (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1982); Larissa Brown, “Internal Commerce in a Colonial Economy: Rio de Janeiro and Its Hinterland, 1790–1822,” Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1986; Stuart B. Schwartz, “Peasants and Slavery: Feeding Brazil in the Late Colonial Period,” Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 65–102; Bert Barikman, “The Slave Economy of Nineteenth-Century Bahia: Export Agriculture and Local Markets in the Recôncavo, 1780–1860,” Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1991; and Barikman, “A Bit of Land They Call Roça': Slave Provision Grounds on Sugar Plantations and Cane Farms in the Bahian Recôncavo, 1780–1860,” Hispanic American Historical Review 74, no. 4 (Nov. 1994):649–88.

4. See Kenneth Maxwell, “The Atlantic in the Eighteenth Century: A Southern Perspective on the Need to Return to the 'Big Picture/” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., no. 3 (1993):209–36.

5. Lawrence Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965); and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England, 1540–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); and Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London's Overseas Traders, 1550–1563 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).

6. P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688–1914 (London: Longman, 1993), 58.

7. See the summary of sources in Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 231.

8. Compare John E. Kicza, “The Great Families of Mexico: Elite Maintenance and Business Practices in Late Colonial Mexico City,” Hispanic American Historical Review 62, no. 3 (Aug. 1982):429–57; and Susan Socolow, The Merchants of Buenos Aires, 1778–1810 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). Kicza argues that Mexican merchants diversified investment in agriculture and other enterprises and used marriages to solidify status and provide generational security for their wealth. Socolow demonstrates how merchants who were at one time uninterested in agricultural investment changed their minds when it became profitable.

9. Manolo Florentino, “Em costas negras: Um estudo sobre o tráfico atlántico de escravos para o porto do Rio de Janeiro, c. 1790–1830,” M.A. thesis, Universidade Federal Fluminense, 1991.

10. Considerable research has developed on the transformation of Minas Gerais from mining to commercial agriculture and mixed farming based on slavery. See Roberto Borges Martins, A economia escravista de Minas Gerais no século XIX, Centro de Desenvolvimento e Planejamento Regional paper no. 10 (Belo Horizonte: Centro de Desenvolvimento e Planejamento Regional, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, 1980); see also Amilcar Martins Filho and Roberto Borges Martins, “Slavery in a Non-Export Economy: Nineteenth-Century Minas Gerais Revisited,” Hispanic American Historical Review 63, no. 3 (Aug. 1983):537–69, and the accompanying responses to it.

11. Michel Vovelle has directly addressed the possible relationship between materialist approaches and the history of mentalities. See Vovelle, “Ideologies and Mentalities: A Necessary Clarification,” Ideologies and Mentalities (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 1–13.

12. See the discussion of the “Repressive Hypothesis,” in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2d ed. (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 128–33.

13. Giovanni Levi, Inheriting Power: The Story of an Exorcist, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 175. A similar argument has been made for France by Robert Muchembled, Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France, 1400–1750, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 312–20.

14. A somewhat modified Spanish edition appeared as Vísperas del Leviatán: Instituciones y poder político (Portugal, siglo XVII) (Madrid: Taurus Humanidades, 1989).

15. Luis Weckmann, La herencia medieval de México, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 1984); 2d ed. in 1 vol. (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 1993).

16. George Foster, Culture and Conquest: America's Spanish Heritage (New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation, 1960).

17. The author follows Raimundo Faoro, Os donos do poder: Formação do patronato político brasileiro, 2d ed., 2 vols. (São Paulo: Globo, 1975; 1st ed. 1958). For a contrasting view of the relation between society and state, see Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, edited by Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994).

18. Much in this interpretation is reminiscent of Paulo Prado, Retrato do Brasil: Ensaio sôbre a tristeza brasileira, 6th ed. (Rio de Janeiro: J. Olympio, 1962; originally published 1928). The overwhelming concern with sexuality and its enervating effects is a recurring theme in much Brazilian thought about the national past.

19. Use of the extensive collection of Portuguese Inquisition materials will be considerably facilitated by a new guide. See Maria do Carmo Jasmins Dias Farinha, Os arquivos da Inquisição (Lisbon: Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, 1990).

20. Barroso, a folklorist and a Brazilian delegate to the Paris Peace Conference following World War I, wrote a number of anti-Semitic books including A sinagoga paulista (Rio de Janeiro: ABC, 1937) and Judaismo, maçonaria e comunismo (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1937). Barroso also served as editor (and defender) of the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion. See Protocolos dos sábios de Sião, 2d ed. (São Paulo: Minerva, 1936). On Jews in the slave trade in general, see David B. Davis, “The Slave Trade and the Jews,” New York Review of Books, 22 Dec. 1994, 14–16.

21. Laura de Mello e Souza, O diabo na terra da Santa Cruz (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1986).

22. Most of the recent studies of witchcraft as well as those seeking to reconstruct micro-histories based on Inquisition materials draw on the work of Carlo Ginzburg, who has been sensitive to the methodological problems inherent in using this kind of documentation. See especially Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath, translated by Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Pantheon, 1991); and Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, translated by John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). See also the exchange among Ginzburg, Edoardo Grendi, and Jacques Revel, “Sulla microhistoria,” Quaderni Storici, n.s. 86, no. 2 (Aug. 1994):511–75.

23. Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991); and Francisco Quevedo, The Devil in the New World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994).

24. See Timothy J. Coates, “Exiles and Orphans: Forced and State-Sponsored Colonization in the Portuguese Empire, 1550–1720,” Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1993, 340–45. See also Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

25. João Botero, Da razão de estado, edited by Luís Reis Torgal, translated from Italian into Portuguese by Raffaella Longobardi Ralha (Coimbra: Instituto Nacional de Investigação Científica, 1992).

26. The best modern study is Francisco Bethencourt, O imaginario da magia: Feiticeiras, saludadores e nigromantes no século XVI (Lisbon: Projeto Universidade Aberta, 1987).

27. Antonio Borges Coelho, Inquisição de Evora, 2 vols. (Lisbon: Caminho, 1987).

28. William Monter, Frontiers of Heresy: The Spanish Inquisition from the Basque Lands to Sicily (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 255–76.

29. Luiz Mott, “Justitia et misericordia: A Inquisição portuguesa e a repressão ao nefando pecado de sodomia,” in Inquisição: Ensaios sobre a mentalidade, heresias e arte, edited by Anita Novinsky and Maria Luiza Tucci Carneiro (São Paulo: EDUSP, 1992), 703–38.

30. The relatively few executions ordered by the Inquisition out of the large number of persons arrested has led to a somewhat benign interpretation of the Holy Office by some modern historians. The problem should be studied, however, in terms of the ratio of executions to arrests in comparison with the parallel ratio in the civil courts. Timothy Coates has suggested that capital punishment was extremely rare in the Portuguese civil courts, which favored degredo (exile), and that in comparison, the Holy Office was far more stringent, especially toward Judaizers. See Coates, “Exiles and Orphans,” 35–72. Antonio Manuel Hespanha argues that between 1600 and 1800, only about two people per year were executed but that the rate of capital punishment was much higher in the eighteenth century than in the seventeenth. See Hespanha, “De iustitia a disciplina,” La gracia del derecho: Economía de la cultura en la edad moderna (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Constitucionales, 1993), 213–16.

31. Jean Delumeau, Le peur en Occident (Paris: Fayard, 1978), 398–449.

32. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968). See also the discussion in Serge Gruzinski and Solange Alberro, Introducción a la historia de las mentalidades, INAH Cuadernos de Trabajo no. 24 (Mexico City: Departamento de Investigaciones Históricas, INAH, 1979), 25–40. Muchembled argues for the emergence of “mass culture,” an elite-dominated and -produced culture for the masses designed to replace popular culture and to reinforce the existing political and social order. See Muchembled, Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France, 279–311.

33. See, for example, Gianna Pomata, La promessa di Guarigione: Malati e curatori in antico regime, Bologna, xvi–xviii secolo (Rome: Laterza, 1994), 247–87; and Barbara Duden, The Woman beneath the Skin: A Doctor's Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). Compare Jacques Gélis, History of Childbirth: Fertility, Pregnancy, and Birth in Early Modern Europe (Boston, Mass.: Northeastern University Press, 1991).

34. Dorinda Outram presents a discussion of the differing positions taken by Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias on the rise of the state and the repression of the body. See Outram, The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class, and Political Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), 6–26. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977); and Norbert Elias, Power and Civility: The Civilizing Process, translated by Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1982).

35. Dorinda Outram, The Body and the French Revolution, 21.

36. For some recent examples, see MacCormack, Religion in the Andes; Carmen Bernand and Serge Gruzinski, De l'idolatrie: Une arqueologie des sciences religieuses (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1988); and La venida del reino: Religión, evangelización y cultura en América, edited by Gabriela Ramos (Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos “Bartolomé de las Casas,” 1994).

37. See Richard Kagan, Lucrecias Dreams: Politics and Prophecy in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990); Jean Franco, Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), especially “Writers in Spite of Themselves: The Mystical Nuns of Seventeenth-Century Mexico,” 3–22. On visionary women more generally and the Catholic Church's reaction, see Jesús de Imirizaldu, Monjas y beatas embaucadoras (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1977); and Luis Sánchez Lora, Mujeres, conventos y formas de la religiosidad barroca (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1988).

38. Compare Joan W. Scott, “On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History,” International Labor and Working-Class History 31 (Spring 1987):1–13. See also Kathleen Canning, “Feminist History after the Linguistic Turn: Historicizing Discourse and Experience,” Signs 19, no. 2 (Winter 1994):368–404.