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Go-betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500-1600

2007; Duke University Press; Volume: 87; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2007-017

1527-1900

Hal Langfur,

Historical Studies in Latin America

Alida Metcalf offers an important revisionist interpretation in this highly readable study of Portugal’s struggle to found a New World colony. The book begins and ends with an anecdote about Margarida, an Indian woman who helped Bahian plantation owners subdue members of her own ethnic group, the aggressive Aimoré. A baptized resident of a prominent settler’s estate, Margarida persuaded her kinsmen to abandon their violent resistance and enter colonial society under the tutelage of Jesuit missionaries. “Because of her language, her mobility, and her understanding of two opposing cultures,” writes Metcalf, “this woman became the go-between who made possible peaceful encounters between two previously hostile groups” (pp. 1 – 2). In the tradition of more famous native intermediaries like Doña Malinche, who aided Cortés, the youth Felipe who served as interpreter for Pizarro, or Pocahontas and Sacagawea, who played critical roles in the colonization of North America, the conduct of this Aimoré woman testifies to the ubiquitous presence of cultural negotiators in the early Americas.The author argues convincingly that actors traditionally cast in bit parts as historical curiosities should occupy center stage if we are to understand how the Portuguese laid claim to Brazil over the course of the sixteenth century. Ordinary sailors, penal exiles, and Norman interpreters; indigenous concubines and their children; native orators, shamans, and wandering prophets: these individuals acted as go-betweens, cultural brokers who connected colonizers with the colonized in countless complex daily interactions. Third-party participants in virtually all colonial encounters, they moved with surprising agility between Portuguese and indigenous domains, belying conventional depictions of a dyadic collision between two irreconcilable worlds. Several Tupi women, for instance, helped their Portuguese husbands rise to the status of chiefs within native polities. Other natives fostered various forms of communication and exchange. This fluidity across racial and ethnic lines helps explain why “highly pronounced economic exploitation continued to coexist . . . with a degree of cultural tolerance in the colony of Brazil” (p. 274).The emphasis on what Metcalf terms “cultural arbitration,” as opposed to mediation — because the dynamic ultimately redounded to the advantage of the Portuguese — sheds light onto two additional groups, the first commonly emphasized by historians, the second less so. After Jesuits arrived in the colony in 1549, they quickly became, according to the author, “some of the most powerful go-betweens of the sixteenth century” (p. 90). Although they sought to break the bonds between native converts and their tribal practices, to achieve this they generally rejected the use of force in favor of persuasion — teaching, preaching, and discussion in native languages or through translators, conducted in mission villages geographically separated from settler enclaves. Met-calf recognizes the gap between missionary intentions and their outcome. In the most sustained analysis yet published of the spread of epidemic disease in sixteenth-century Brazil, she devotes a chapter to describing the biological destruction wrought by Jesuits and others who moved easily from one sphere to the other.An ever-expanding population of mamelucos — backwoodsmen of mixed Amerindian and European ancestry — were equally dexterous occupants of this cultural middle ground. Unpublished Inquisition records, which Metcalf employs along with Jesuit archival material and diverse published sources, reveal the importance of the mamelucos, particularly in Bahia’s developing sugar export economy. Rivals of the Jesuits, they rose to prominence after disease decimated the coastal native population. Operating in the interior of the colony, they coaxed Indians out of the forests, away from the missionaries, and onto the plantations to augment the enslaved labor force. “The mameluco go-between became a chameleon in the wilderness, adapting to, and insinuating himself in, each new situation,” Metcalf writes (p. 249). Their most controversial role linked them to indigenous santidades (sanctities), native messianic movements that combined Tupinambá, Roman Catholic, and possibly central African practices in resistance to Portuguese colonialism during the second half of the century. Participating in rituals associated with these movements, mamelucos ran afoul of the Inquisition, accused, among other transgressions, of heresy, idolatry, and “sins of the flesh,” including polygamy, conduct that was an outgrowth of their cultural hybridity.Metcalf’s argument goes a long way toward clarifying the importance of all of these actors to the colonial project. At times, however, her go-between concept loses value by becoming too encompassing, as when she applies it to Heitor Furtado de Mendonça, Brazil’s first inquisitor, whom she describes as a go-between acting as “the principal mediator between sinful individuals and God” (p. 236). The concept sometimes seems ill-suited even to the Jesuits, who supported a vicious military campaign against unconquered Indians conducted by Governor Mem de Sá in the 1550s. Likewise, if the outcome of mameluco activity was ultimately the supply of Indian slave labor, it is hard to accept that persuasion, the defining characteristic of cultural intermediaries in Metcalf’s formulation, can be understood as antithetical to violence. A solution lies in theorizing the two as a continuum: violence is negotiation by other means, to modify Carl von Clausewitz. If certain individuals and their actions strain against the model, it is a testament to Metcalf’s contribution that her study will surely prompt scholars to explore these tensions. She has provided a powerful narrative of Brazil’s first century — probably the best now available in English — that will speak both to specialists and students new to the study of Portuguese America.