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Before Brasília: Frontier Life in Central Brazil

2018; Duke University Press; Volume: 98; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-4379286

1527-1900

Izabel Missagia de Mattos,

Colonialism, slavery, and trade

The fruit of decades of research, Before Brasília will be an essential point of reference for discussions about the colonization of the Brazilian center-west, because of the scope of the research in various archives across Brazil, Portugal, the United States, and Austria as well as the project's theoretical and methodological rigor.The narrative, rich in details about the environment, material culture, and the daily lives of the different actors in the sertões (backlands), provides elements that guide the imagination of the reader in a fascinating dive into the past. The beautiful array of illustrations collected in the Library of Congress and the Oliveira Lima Library in Washington, DC, and the visual reproductions of the ethnographic material collected by the naturalist Johann Emanuel Pohl for the Museum für Völkerkunde of Vienna greatly help the reader interested in knowing the unexplored histories of the conquest and “civilization” of the region. This proves true as well for the maps that summarize information such as fluxes and demographic movements, along with quantitative tables cross-checked with the different sources.The author irreverently treats as “intruders” and “invaders” the bandeirantes (expedition participants), long considered heroes in the paulista historiographies (p. 31). This attitude strongly indicates the author's choice of writing a social history of the subaltern. Through this method, slaves, indigenous peoples, and women assume the roles of protagonists, undoubtedly an important contribution to Brazilian historiography.Carried by the book's narrative, we can penetrate deep into the sertões with the bandeiras (expeditions), observing aspects of their participants' daily life, survival practices, and relationships with indigenous populations—whom they tried to convince to follow them as allies—which included both toasts and the crossing of swords. The bandeirantes cruelly eliminated those who refused, taking by force the surviving women and children.Through a series of tables that account for the tribute paid to the Portuguese crown, we learn that the captaincy of Goiás was the second richest region in the country, losing out only to Minas Gerais. Goiás's wealth, however, came not from the gold mines discovered there in 1720 but rather from the extensive cultivation of livestock in its wooded regions. The difficulty of accounting for the gold obtained by elites in these sertões—where contraband seemed to escape surveillance, just as black slaves, deserters, and criminals fled and hid themselves in the wilderness inhabited by indigenous populations—was an administrative problem never solved by the captaincy (or province, as it would be called in the imperial period, from 1822 to 1889) of Goiás.The fear of indigenous attack was a constant in the townships due to the history of violence initiated by the first bandeiras in 1590. The developing problem of public order in the nascent urban centers was related to the evident abuse of enslaved populations, blacks, and indigenous, especially the women, who were forcefully led into degradation, into concubinage and prostitution. Despite this situation, the author recovers female agency, especially in the process of “pacification,” by taking up the still-understudied participation of women in the indigenous wars as well as their “alliances” with Luso-Brazilian men.The warrior nations fiercely resisted invasion, subjection, and captivity, and those who allied with the invaders started to carry out different types of trade. These trades included the capture, ransom, and later release of black slaves, with whom they maintained diverse and complex relationships (a phenomenon that appeared in other border regions), an area of research that weaves itself into the theoretical and methodological perspective of the book and thus opens up possibilities for comparison with other American conquest experiences. The author studied different indigenous nations present in these landscapes via ethnological contributions, including ethnographically informative travelers' narratives such as the one penned by the German Curt Nimuendajú, a pioneer in the systematic study of indigenous nations in Brazil. The violence and the disasters of the wars are treated by Karasch with the same depth and rigor that she applies to describing the sensibilities of the enslaved indigenous men and women, among the other historical actors that circulated around the sertões. This treatment imbues the narrative with a sense of constant and fluid movement through the rivers and mountains that make up the regional landscape.In line with her previous pioneering works on slaves in Rio de Janeiro—an approach now very much adopted in the historiography—Karasch uncovers the processes of cultural change that the Afro-Brazilian population underwent in the center-west. She does this by describing their daily resistance to slavery, principally through their religious gatherings, festivals, and rites, as well as the complexity of the different roles played by freed populations and gente de cor (freed people of color) (p. 273).The book, even as a comprehensive guide, will generate insights for all imaginable types of social and cultural historical research about those men and women immersed in a collapsing world that indeed resulted in the hecatomb of entire populations, like the Goiá and the Crixá. More than that, this work will undoubtedly aid the very descendants of that past in the reconstruction of their collective memory.