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Zero Hunger: Political Culture and Antipoverty Policy in Northeast Brazil

2015; Duke University Press; Volume: 95; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2874854

1527-1900

Stanley E. Blake,

Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development

Northeastern Brazil has long been characterized as a region dominated by traditional social and political patronage. Scholarship on the postindependence period has found patronage to be at the root of social and economic underdevelopment, an obstacle to democracy, and, ultimately, a cause of regional backwardness. Anthropologist Aaron Ansell has written a thoroughgoing critique of recent academic and political approaches to patronage based on studying the implementation of Fome Zero (Zero Hunger) and Bolsa Família programs in the pseudonymous município of Passarinho in the Brazilian state of Piauí. Ansell challenges the notion that patronage is a locus of economic and political exploitation and instead proposes a new model for understanding patronage termed “intimate hierarchy,” in which patrons and clients are potentially, if not economically and politically, equal and thus agree to exchanges that are mutually beneficial. He resuscitates Sidney Mintz and Eric Wolf's notion that horizontal and vertical exchanges are complementary, and he presents poor rural Piauienses as rational actors who seek to improve their economic situation by engaging in exchanges with local politicians and state officials.In his study of rural villages, Ansell details the pervasiveness of hunger and its social manifestation as the “evil eye”—the desire for a meal or a neighbor's cow or crops. He draws a distinction between what he calls “ocular wealth,” or “visible and visually impressive forms of wealth” (p. 52), which is subject to envy and the evil eye, and “purse wealth,” or “cash, checks, [and] government welfare cards” (p. 62), which is immune from the evil eye. Ansell also outlines labor patterns, including the traditional but less common mutirão, or collective community labor, and the more common “ ‘day-trading’ compact,” or labor exchange, between two farmers (p. 59). In additional to horizontal exchanges, Passarinho's residents engaged in vertical exchanges with economically and politically connected village leaders. It is onto these relationships that Ansell maps the effects of Zero Hunger and Bolsa Família. Ansell focuses on the ways in which officials used these programs to combat hunger, circumvent traditional patronage, and break the dominance of conservative local mayors who did not support the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT). Ansell argues that officials had little understanding of the complexities of patronage in Passarinho, overestimating the degree of elite coercion, ignoring the ways in which residents distinguished between moral and immoral exchanges, and equating all exchanges with traditional coronelismo. He examines three ways in which officials attempted, but failed, to undermine patronage. First, officials encouraged residents to use grants to construct cooperative chicken coops; however, the project was deemed a failure after participants asked local patrons for assistance. Second, officials distributed funds to members of quilombolas, self-identified, federally recognized communities of slave descendants. The project benefited a group of women who started an herbal remedy cooperative project and who came to play a prominent role in village politics, but who failed to identify with the national negro community. Third, officials attempted to marginalize Passarinho's mayor by symbolically undermining his public authority and by instituting a municipal management committee that determined who received Bolsa Família cash grants. Residents responded by rallying to defend the mayor and withdrawing from the committee during election season. While officials' efforts to end patronage failed, Passarinho's residents had little trouble in evaluating whether exchanges were beneficial and morally and socially acceptable, or in splitting their vote between local conservative politicians and the PT in state and federal elections. Ansell concludes that residents' knowledge and use of “intimate hierarchy” serves as a bulwark against the broken promises of liberal democracy.Ansell's work raises several questions. While his analysis of patronage is convincing, the longer-term social and economic effects of Fome Zero and Bolsa Família in Passarinho are less clear. Ansell suggests that residents' economic situation improved; however, his evidence is primarily anecdotal. His privileging of intimate hierarchy downplays economic inequality and exploitation in the communities that he studies. Ansell's approach to patronage would have benefited from a deeper engagement with the work of Brazilian labor historians who have demonstrated the ways in which workers further their own economic, social, and political interests by challenging and negotiating with employers, labor unions, and the state. Nevertheless, Ansell's study of patronage, especially the idea that clients are rational actors who do not conform to politicians' and bureaucrats' expectations, will force historians to rethink their assumptions about patronage in rural areas and their characterizations of northeastern Brazil. This work will thus be of great interest to historians of labor, social movements, and politics in the postdictatorship era and is a welcome addition to the social science literature on rural northeastern Brazil.