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História da Vida Privada no Brasil. Volume 2História da Vida Privada no Brasil. Volume 3História da Vida Privada no Brasil. Volume 4

2000; Duke University Press; Volume: 80; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-80-3-569

1527-1900

Thomas E. Skidmore,

Brazilian History and Foreign Policy

The inspiration for these volumes comes from France. The model is the highly successful Histoire de la Vie Privée, edited by Phillipe Aries and Georges Duby. The French scholars wanted to penetrate the crust of traditional politico-institutional history to illuminate the histories of individual lives. They hoped this approach would bring us closer to the nittygritty of everyday life in the past.Not surprisingly, these four volumes from Brazil reflect the same problem as their Gallic forebears: finding sources on the “private” realm. Obviously many secrets will remain forever hidden from even the most assiduous of researchers. The farther back the historian goes, the harder it becomes, because the closer to the present, the richer the documentation. The historian of Brazil is necessarily left speculating, for example, about the intimate existences of the runaway slaves who built colonial Brazil’s famed quilombos in the seventeenth century.Since the first volume in this series (covering the colonial era) will be reviewed in a future issue of this journal, I shall focus on the last three volumes, which cover the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and total over 2,000 pages. Each volume has its own editor, operating under the general editorship of Fernando Novais, the distinguished Paulista historian of the colonial era. References to the individual volumes will necessarily be selective.The challenge in writing this kind of history is bringing it down to the level of individual actors. For this we need to reconstruct the time lines of single lives. The ideal source would be the “record linkage” which matches individual lives as documented in census lists, tax rolls and court records. In practice that approach is impractical, given the effort needed to find and link the records. That task has proved nearly impossible even for researchers in U.S. history.The Brazilian contributors to these volumes do not follow a uniform approach; they make do with a pastiche of sources: traveler’s accounts, official records, scraps from the media, such as newspaper stories (or advertisements), popular ditties, and magazine features. It should be added that the copious and well-chosen illustrations furnish a parallel historical chronicle that will repay careful study.The other major problem facing historians of this topic is definitional. In his preface to the first volume, Novais unfortunately has given us virtually no help in defining what his authors mean by vida privada. He describes the “team” approach when the authors “intently” discussed their texts, but nothing is said of the issues addressed. Instead, the general editor offers a vague reference to the “new history,” whose character is left to be deduced from its analog in French historiography. Novais’s imprecision is duplicated by his contributors, who seldom clearly define their subject.Volume 2, covering the Empire, opens with a richly informative chapter on the urban context of social life by volume editor Luiz Felipe de Alencastro. He includes details on sanitation, popular medicine, immigration (especially Portuguese), varieties of slavery, English riding horses, women’s fashion, the rage for altering family names, and the distribution of bawdy houses. What the author gives are ample clues for where the private might be encountered.Slavery is a large part of this story, since Brazil accelerated its slave imports early in this era—the first half of the nineteenth century—at a time when the slave trade to the rest of the Americas (except Cuba) had ceased. After 1850, when the slave trade ended, manumission accelerated as the abolition movement gained influence. Robert Slenes’s chapter on the west of São Paulo shows clearly how this rapidly growing region was highly dependent on fresh slave imports, given the low birth rate among the existing slave population. This meant manumission was likely to free a large number of relatively unassimilated Afro-Brazilians. Slenes also demonstrates, through skillfully documented cases, the frequent sexual exploitation of their female slaves by their masters. The result is a gripping look at an all-important dimension of private life.As Hebe Mattos de Castro notes in her chapter on slavery and the family, imperial law simply defined slaves as property and “dispensed” with the “scientific” discourse about “racial differences.” The author then taps the court records, especially of law suits brought by slaves against their masters. At the same time, she chronicles the masters’ maneuvering to keep freed slaves in a de facto servile relationship. Through it all, especially after 1850, the debate continued over defining the dimensions of citizenship to be enjoyed by ex-slaves—a debate with crucial implications for twentieth-century Brazil. Meanwhile, the quest of every slave was to become recognized as free (livre) and not freed (liberto), the latter term retaining an invidious overtone.Evaldo Cabral de Mello opens his chapter on “the end of the casagrandes” with a cultural explanation for the sparse documentation of private life in Brazil. According to this argument (earlier advanced by Gilberto Freyre), Catholics can unburden their secrets in the confessional, while Protestants have only their diaries as refuge. Nonetheless, Cabral de Mello finds enough written records of Pernambucan planters to illuminate intimate details of some socially powerful Brazilians. The picture is of an authoritarian family structure, with the patriarch exercising arbitrary power over his women, children, and slaves. Although restricted to the elite, these portraits are the most satisfying to be found in the entire four volumes. This is doubtlessly aided by the elegance of Cabral de Mello’s writing.Luiz Felipe de Alencastro and Maria Luiza Renaux in their chapter focus on the immigrants, who only reached Brazil in great numbers in the Empire’s final years. Principal coverage is given to the Germans settling the south. There is also attention to the anti-Portuguese sentiments typical of the larger coastal cities. Finally, João José Reis offers an intriguing account of the rituals surrounding death during the nineteenth century. Because Brazilian society had not yet enthroned individualism, the entire community was drawn into the grieving process. The more prestigious the deceased and/or his family, the greater the funeral cortege. Once again one gets a sense of how closely intertwined were the private and the public in imperial Brazil.Volume 3 might be expected to depict the greatest change in private lives. It covers 1890 to the mid-twentieth century—the era when deepening technology and expanding urbanization were eroding the basis of Brazil’s traditional agrarian society. The volume editor is Nicolau Sevcenko, a well-known social and cultural historian. His introduction sets the scene well by describing the resistance to modernization evident in the revolt of Canudos (1893–97), the Revolta da Vacina (1904) and the Guerra do Contestado (1912–16), but curiously omits any mention of the racially charged Revolt of the Chibata (1910).Sevcenko’s concluding chapter on Rio relies heavily on Machado de Assis and João do Rio, two celebrated observers of Rio society. It was the succeeding generation that then developed a fascination with gadgetry and machines—from the telephone to the electric light to the automobile. Yet, that Brazil was also the era of Carmen Miranda, the “officialization” of Samba, and the craze over Hollywood’s latest films. The account is livened with popular lyrics and a series of excellent illustrations from contemporary advertisements, cartoons, and photographs. But missing from this lively scene are the rest (80 percent or more?) of the cariocas of the belle epoque. The favelas that began appearing at the turn of the century, for example, find no place here. And where are those empregadas who did all the work? Were they never private?One of the most intriguing contributions in volume 3 is Nelson Schapochnik’s chapter based on post cards and family photo albums. Using these sources the author creates “a cartography of memoirs and desires,” (p. 433). The postcards sent from abroad reflected Brazilians’ conception of the wider world. They had a special meaning for creative genius Mario de Andrade, who never went farther abroad than Peru. The 246 post cards discovered among his literary estate had come from friends who served as his eyes and ears when visiting the famous sites Mario would never encounter.Schapochnik’s venture into family photo albums is equally rewarding. Most often pictured were weddings, communions, and school graduations. But even this author has trouble averting his gaze from the elite. His tour of the interior decoration of belle epoque houses and apartments, for example, never reaches the kitchens or the servant’s quarters.Elias Thome Saliba provides a welcome change of pace in his investigation of the “comic dimension” of private life. Parody was the favorite form, appearing in songs, radio sketches, and irreverent nicknames for famous downtown streets. The comic relief was delivered by poets and sambistas, who mocked Brazil’s would-be national identity. In a country whose future was daily debated, their humor provided a haven “where laughter was the solution—perhaps Brazil’s secret for maintaining hope and banishing death” (p. 365).In volume 4 the authors again face the temptation to avoid the “private” side of the story and slip into a description of institutions in general. Such is the case with Angela de Castro Gomes, who summarizes her well-known description of the corporatist structure imposed by the Estado Novo. But for the individual worker the most important element in that system was not the union (sindicato) but the labor court system (where grievances were taken with the help of a labor lawyer, not the union). It merits no discussion here. The same criticism applies to the chapter by João Manuel Cardoso de Melo and Fernando Novais, whose analysis of socioeconomic history relies primarily on macro data to describe migration, industrialization and housing. The reader is left asking how the ordinary Brazilian got a job when forced to compete with omnipresent reserve army of the unemployed. Were the best paying industrial jobs (Volkswagen, Whirlpool, for example) only available through kinship ties or patronage networks? How often did pure merit—the mantra of capitalist ideology—carry the day? In other words, how did the labor market look from the worker’s standpoint?The chapter by Alba Zaluar on violence is a recital of crime as seen by the middle and upper classes. The author provides ample statistics on the “explosion” of urban crime since 1970, but fails to tell what crime has meant in personal terms. There is no mention, for example, of the frequent drama of families forced to negotiate with shadowy kidnappers, who frequently work hand in glove with the police. Alba also seems uncritical of the way in which the image of the “crime threat” is sold to the public, as in TV sensationalist pseudo documentaries such as the program Aqui Agora. Finally, the author omits any mention of the brutalizing violence often practiced by the penal system and the police.In her chapter on race relations, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz offers an informative synthesis of recent research. She relies on macro data to construct a useful racial profile of modern Brazilian society. Meanwhile her chapter offers little on the nature of race relations na intimidade, as the volume’s title promises. Surely by now there are enough first-person narratives and case studies to give us the personal flavor of, in the author’s words, Brazil’s “particular type of racism, a silent and faceless racism which hides behind a suppressed guarantee of universality and legal equality which leaves for the private realm the practice of discrimination.” (p. 182).Esther Hamburger’s look at the astoundingly rapid penetration of television into post-1960 Brazilian society gives includes an excellent analysis of how the telenovelas exercise their magic on a cross-class audience. The author argues convincingly that reception of the telenovelas has become a community phenomenon, including multiple forms of viewer (especially female) feedback, thereby “constantly creating the essentials of an imagined national community” (p. 441). The telenovela has even reached the status of a unique national art form, surprisingly successful in the export market. But questions remain. For example, how has TV viewing changed family life—traditionally the core of private existence in Brazil?Despite the foregoing criticisms, the reader must feel gratitude to these editors and their authors. Even if their exploration of private lives is necessarily incomplete, we now have a valuable vade mecum for all who wish to know more about the grand sweep of Brazilian social history.