Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Terra de vaqueiros: Relacoes de trabalho e cultura politica no sertao da Bahia, 1880-1900

2014; Duke University Press; Volume: 94; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2802846

1527-1900

Stephen Bell,

Urban Development and Societal Issues

Joana Medrado's impressively researched study addresses the cultural history of labor relations in the cowboy (vaqueiro) culture of a region of northeastern Bahia. It forms part of a dynamic series, the Coleção Várias Histórias, linked to the Center for Research on the Social History of Culture at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). The book provides testimony to the current vibrancy of Brazilian historical writing. It offers a profound rethinking of some of the long-standing stereotypical social relations in literatures dedicated to social harmony, ideas especially prevalent in scholarly treatment of the sertão, the backlands of the Northeast. The historiography with which the author engages draws heavily from the evolving study of slavery since the mid-1980s, in which researchers have sought to understand more fully the themes of slave resistance and social negotiation. This book celebrates advances in the historiography of Brazilian slavery, but it also retains a high degree of skepticism about classical visions of social relations in the sertão, arguing convincingly that there has been insufficient attention to how different categories of rural labor navigated time and space. The work is tightly organized around the analysis of only two decades, a strategy helpful for intensive research of social relations. Moreover, the period examined seems most apposite when searching for signs of social stresses, since it encompasses both the abolition of slavery and Bahia's famous Canudos Rebellion.The first substantive chapter sets a portrait of the administrative district of Jeremoabo, an exercise that would have been strengthened by the inclusion within it of a map showing this Bahian region as it stood during the late nineteenth century. A major challenge is to establish the basic structure of landowning. Part of this involves the accumulation of wealth and power throughout the nineteenth century by the Dantas family, and most especially through the figure of Cícero Dantas Martins, the baron of Jeremoabo. Elites can be followed through the perusal of official sources, but other groups offer greater challenges. Some ranching regions of Brazil have nominal lists of landowners or gazetteers. No such sources were available for Jeremoabo; thus Medrado's systematic analysis of all the 324 postmortem inventories available for the period represents a major contribution. Ownership of animals was broadly diffused throughout the society, but only a few owned high numbers of animals in what was a most forbidding physical environment for ranching. Slavery was used most heavily by the middle sectors of rural property holders, people engaged in agriculture as well as ranching. This chapter also brings up the important lesson that categorical labor terms are riddled with ambiguities; they are not just about what people did but also about how they defined their social conditions.Analysis of law cases proves helpful for the task of gaining a stronger sense of social profiles. In particular, livestock robbery cases serve as a powerful window into the regional society. The rural society of Jeremoabo is shown to be more complex than traditionally presented, with various social actors on hand who were little disposed toward maintaining the social order. Medrado argues that the period examined saw some shifting of the balance of status between landowners and workers, in favor of the latter. She is especially interesting in her analysis of the cases of aggression against livestock that strayed onto the property of others, notably into the cultivated areas. The perpetrators of such crimes held to particular visions of autonomous spaces conquered at length and with difficulty by the slaves and the freed. Although this study achieves a great deal from legal cases, its author realizes that much adaptation taking place at face level escapes discernment in sources of this kind. Further leads on the values and political culture of the cowboys are drawn from correspondence and a close, new reading of folkloric literature, including the iconic literatura de cordel. Historians interested in linking extensive letter writing with the concept of “centers of calculation” might consider that the baron of Jeremoabo's massively thinned correspondence still comprises around 3,000 letters available for research. Working with archival keywords, and including those known to have been sent by cowboys, an impressive 137 letters become the subjects for close historical analysis. In these, we gain a clearer sense of how status was built over lengthy periods in this part of Brazil and of how at least some of the better-positioned ranch workers became adept at using rhetoric to promote their aims.This work makes a major contribution to rethinking social relations in a part of rural Brazil, helped by asking new questions about familiar sources and by the sustained probing of spaces of privilege. In terms of historical methods, it is a study worthy of broad attention. Through her careful exposition of how social values in this backland region shifted through time and space, Joana Medrado has written a compelling and praiseworthy book.