Gender, Catholicism, and Morality in Brazil: Virtuous Husbands, Powerful Wives (Contemporary Anthropology of Religion)

CONTEMPOR ARY A NTHROPOLOGY OF R ELIGION A series published with the Society for the Anthropology of Religion Robert He...

Author: Maya Mayblin

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CONTEMPOR ARY A NTHROPOLOGY OF R ELIGION A series published with the Society for the Anthropology of Religion Robert Hefner, Series Editor Boston University Published by Palgrave Macmillan Body / Meaning / Healing By Thomas J. Csordas The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar By Michael Lambek After the Rescue: Jewish Identity and Community in Contemporary Denmark By Andrew Buckser Empowering the Past, Confronting the Future By Andrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart Islam Obscured: The Rhetoric of Anthropological Representation By Daniel Martin Varisco Islam, Memory, and Morality in Yemen: Ruling Families in Transition By Gabrielle Vom Bruck A Peaceful Jihad: Negotiating Identity and Modernity in Muslim Java By Ronald Lukens-Bull The Road to Clarity: Seventh-Day Adventism in Madagascar By Eva Keller Yoruba in Diaspora: An African Church in London By Hermione Harris Islamic Narrative and Authority in Southeast Asia: From the 16th to the 21st Century By Thomas Gibson Evangelicalism and Conflict in Northern Ireland Gladys Ganiel

Christianity in the Local Context Brian M. Howell Missions and Conversions Thomas Pearson Gender, Catholicism, and Morality in Brazil: Virtuous Husbands, Powerful Wives Maya Mayblin

Gender, Catholicism, and Morality in Brazil Virtuous Husbands, Powerful Wives

Maya Mayblin

GENDER, CATHOLICISM, AND MORALITY IN BRAZIL

Copyright © Maya Mayblin, 2010. All rights reserved. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–62312–5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mayblin, Maya. Gender, Catholicism, and morality in Brazil : virtuous husbands, powerful wives / Maya Mayblin. p. cm.—(Contemporary anthropology of religion) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–230–62312–5 (alk. paper) 1. Christian sociology—Brazil—Pernambuco. 2. Catholic Church— Brazil—Pernambuco. 3. Marriage—Brazil—Pernambuco. 4. Sex role—Brazil—Pernambuco. 5. Christian sociology—Catholic Church. 6. Marriage—Religious aspects—Catholic Church. 7. Sex role—Religious aspects—Catholic Church. 8. Pernambuco (Brazil)—Religious life and customs. I. Title. BX1467.P4M39 2010 306.6'34165098134—dc22

2009035740

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: March 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For Magnus, my virtuous husband.

To marry without love is not a sin, but to die without having learnt to love is. —Seu Luis, fifty-four years old, Santa Lucia

Contents

List of Figures

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

1

1 The Land and the People

17

2 Marriage in Santa Lucia

41

3 The Bearing of Burdens: Suffering, Containment, and Healing

67

4 Working to Sweat: Labor, Narrative, and Redemption

95

5 Virtuous Husbands, Powerful Wives: Marriage and the Dangers of Power

121

6 From Innocence to Knowledge

147

Conclusion

177

Notes

183

Bibliography

193

Index

207

This page intentionally left blank

Figures

1.1 Map of region

18

1.2 Trabalhador lifting hay

26

1.3 Santa Lucian woman

40

3.1

Rezadeira measuring patient’s chest

81

3.2

Rezadeira weeping

82

6.1

Casamento de matuto

167


Acknowledgments

Many people have helped this book along its way, and I am indebted

to every one of them. My greatest debt is to the people of “Santa Lucia,” who welcomed me into their lives with generosity and good spirit. I am especially grateful for the warmth and care provided to me by my host parents, Rita Cassia Oliveira Cadete and José Amauri Cadete, and to Maria de Lourdes Alves, Manuel Cadete da Silva, Maria de Lourdes Cadete, Fabiana Oliveira Cadete Almeida, Andre Alves Almeida, and Maria Lucia Silva Oliveira, and Lucia de Luca who taught me so much. I am grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council for providing me with a full postgraduate research award. A Malinowski Grant and a Grant from the British Federation of Women Graduates provided much needed financial assistance during the writing up phase. The work on this project began in 2000 at the Department of anthropology, London School of Economics. In Brazil, my research was facilitated through my affiliation with the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, and I am thankful for the support I received from both these institutions. There are many in Brazil to whom I owe thanks for the invaluable friendship and the practical and intellectual guidance they provided along the way, including Father Edward Figaroa, Maria Luisa and Carlos Peres da Costa, Dôra Cardoso da Silva, Rigoberta and all the crèche workers: Rosa, Ivanulda, Martha, Mery, and Katia. Also, Margarida and Almir de Oliveira, Adriano Bizerra and his family, Dona Severina Precilia Teixeira, Gileno Vilaça, Eliete Maria da Silva, Marcia de Isaac, Filipe Buckmeyer Wolff, Dimas Fereira de Oliveira, Antônio Cabral, Scott Parry, Salete Cavalcanti, Marcio Goldman, and Tania Stôlze-Lima. While the shortcomings of this work remain exclusively my own, earlier versions of this project benefited immensely from the challenges and suggestions of teachers, colleagues, friends, and

xii

ACK NOW LEDGMENT S

anonymous reviewers, including Peter Gow, the late Olivia Harris, João Pina-Cabral, Matthew Engelke, Laurel Kendall, Jonathan Parry, Chris Fuller, Fenella Cannell, Leo Wyndham, Will Norman, Robin Pharoah, Evan Killick, Eve Zucker, Florent Giehmann, Mandira Kalra, Rachel Wrangham, Alice Forbess, Jason Sumich, Amit Desai, and Michelle Obeid. A special debt of gratitude I owe to Michael Scott and Rita Astuti, for the crucial and incalculable contributions they made to this work. Throughout this project, I have drawn heavily from the bank of support provided by Carmen Miranda, Margaret Course, Bill Mayblin, Andrea Levy, Hannah Mayblin, and Simon Moore. I am especially grateful to Margaret Course and Carmen Miranda for help with copyediting, to Bill Mayblin for his production of a map, and to Hannah, Simon, Carmen, Bill, and Andrea, for providing the childcare I so desperately needed to complete this book. Finally I must thank Ezra and Willa for enduring my absences and my husband Magnus Course, whose contribution and sacrifice marks every page. My debt to him shall be hard to repay.

Introduction

Several months into my stay in the village of Santa Lucia in Northeast

Brazil, I was sitting on a doorstep in the late afternoon with my friend Amauri. In the distance, a dust cloud moved slowly toward us. As it got nearer, the figure of a thin darkskinned man became visible, scythe held over one shoulder and pickaxe dangling from his other hand. The figure trudged closer and closer, finally stopping some yards from the house. “O Pa,” called out the man, sliding his scythe down and wiping the sweat from his face. “O Pa,” called back Amauri. “Enter! Enter!” he said, gesturing toward the house. “I won’t, no,” replied the man, “but I’ll have some water if I may.” “Of course,” replied Amauri, and he called into the darkness of the doorway: “Oh Katiana, anyone, fetch some water for Seu José.” Katiana emerged shortly with a glass of water for the man. He thanked her and gulped it down while we all watched, strangely transfixed. The man handed the empty glass back to Katiana and hoisted his scythe back onto his shoulder. He smiled vaguely, revealing toothless gaps in his stillyoung face. “Thank you, God bless,” he said and went on his way. Amauri and I sat there and watched the man as he walked off into the distance, his hole ridden T-shirt billowing gently with each stride. “Now there’s a man who loves his family,” said Amauri without a hint of irony. I chose not to comment, but sat silently perplexed. For what we both knew well was that only two weeks before, Seu José had, in a fit of drunken anger, set his own house on fire with his wife and six children still inside it. Although everyone in Seu José’s burning hut had escaped unharmed, I was still perturbed by what had unfolded that night as I had lain sleeping in my host family’s house. It was only very gradually, in the months to come, that I began to see how this event was assimilated and dealt with via particular moral and theological discourses prominent among the Catholic villagers with whom I had come to stay.

2

G E N D E R , C AT H O L I C I S M , A N D M O R A L I T Y I N B R A Z I L

This book is an attempt to understand such discourses. It is about how spontaneous acts of violence and moral transgression are balanced out by everyday sacrifices, and how narratives of sacrifice are enacted and reenacted until they come to constitute part of the fabric of the moral person. It seeks to explore ethnographically how people in the community strive to relate to one another as undifferentiated Christian equals, while negotiating the fact of difference in terms of gender, power, and kinship. In particular, it focuses on how men and women craft conjugal units and deal, or fail to deal, with the tensions that arise. It is about how they suffer one another and suffer for one another. About the labor, the physical and metaphysical labor, they perform to feed, care for, and educate their young. About the work, both practical and theological, they carry out to get along in the sinful world, while remaining perto de Deus (close to God). In short, this book is about the way in which a group of peasant farmers in the impoverished Northeast of Brazil confront a particular moral paradox, in a particular place and point in time. Christianity and the “Doleful Abyss” The topic of moral paradox is a well-worn theme in Western academic scholarship. It may be linked, Marshall Sahlins notes, to the “pleasure-pain principle” of human action; to the idea of an “irresistible and egoistical human nature underlying social behavior, the sense of society as an order of power or coercion, and a confidence in the greater providential suffering figure among these anthropological themes” (1996: 395). However, and as Sahlins observes, it takes some “singular ideas of humanity, society, and nature to come up with the triste trope that what life is all about is . . . the melioration of our pains,” a triste trope that mainstream Judeo-Christian ideas about the human condition have much to answer for (1996: 395). According to Sahlins, it was in the biblical story of the Fall, that Adam’s sin opened the “doleful abyss between the absolute perfection of God and the radical wickedness of man” (1996: 396). It is in this theological notion, he argues, that so much of Western cosmology, and as a result Western anthropological theory, is rooted. The “doleful abyss” lurks everywhere, informing everything from the model of the relationship between self and nature to the social theories that suppose the inevitability of power struggle and miscommunication in human interaction. Indeed, native Western anthropology is so thoroughly saturated with Judeo-Christian ideas that to attempt to avoid them is, as one scholar suggests, “tantamount to abolishing anthropology itself”

INTRODUCTION

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(Bargatzky 1996: 416). True, Sahlins’ argument is perhaps directed mainly against scholars of a classical Enlightenment bent, whose project whether witting or unwitting, is to exorcise theology from the human sciences. If so, an interesting path lays ahead for an increasing number of anthropologists whose embedded Judeo-Christian models resonates unmistakably with the embedded models of their fervently Christian, theologically minded informants. Although I myself am not a Christian, the trope, the narrative vernacular of this book, if you will, is resolutely and unabashedly Christian in origin. It explores the “doleful abyss” or the antagonistic dualism between the absolute perfection of God and the painful, inadequacies of Man. Although I cannot claim to know precisely where my own philosophical traditions start and end, I would wager that they are not, in this particular instance, so far removed from many of my close friends and informants in the village of Santa Lucia. I have come to believe that together, we share a view of the human similar in type to Durkheim’s understanding of man as “a presocial and sensuous animal, egocentrically given to his own welfare, and, on the other hand, a social creature able to submit his self interest to the morality of society” (Sahlins 1996: 402). Rather than trying, as many scholars do, to step back from these assumptions, my aim in this book is to step forward into them and to leave them as the scaffold around and within which the subsequent argument develops. This scaffold, I suggest, bears some likeness to the “logical” part of what Michael Scott terms a “logical trajectory,” whereby Christians (and some social theorists) “aspire to systematicity by following through the implications of Christian language, truth claims, and values” (2005: 102).1 If the scaffolding I make here explicit within my own approach derives from an encompassing language of Christianity, then it is hardly surprising that a major theme within much of the anthropological literature on Christianity is the logical difficulty facing Christians between the world of daily life and the world of ultimate religious meaning. The tension is generally attributed to the otherworldly focus of Christianity that promises access to transcendent divine power, “but only at the cost of a privileging of the ‘life after death’ over the life of this world, and the future life of the spirit over the present life of the flesh” (Cannell 1999: 197).2 This has been productively examined in ethnographies of Protestantism via the challenges and offices of differing semiotic ideologies. In the Protestant iconoclastic tradition, where the Holy is a singularly immaterial thing, anthropological studies throw light on the anxious interplay between moral agency and the ways people conceive of the relationship between words and

4


things (Keane 2007; Engelke and Tomlinson 2006). For Christians such as the Friday Masowe Apostolics of Zimbabwe, the problem is one of representation and authorization. This they attempt to resolve through a radical and often painstaking differentiation between words and things, a process that leads even to a rejection of the Bible as too historically specific, too thing-like for a truly “live and direct” faith (Engelke 2007).3 The issues dealt with in this strand of scholarship might usefully be brought together under what Matthew Engelke (2007) refers to as the “problem of presence,” a problem that gained prominence in the philosophy of Hegel and whose roots lie in the distinctly Christian trajectory of the Creation, the Fall, and the Crucifixion. It is in this peculiar sequence of events that an irreconcilable distance between God and Man was established; a distance that gave way to the simultaneous presence and absence of God and thus to the problem of how best to access and worship Him. Notwithstanding the local and historical complexity of Christianity as it appears in various parts of the world, “the problem of presence” is, Engelke argues, one of those fundamental paradoxes that make it possible to speak of an “anthropology of Christianity” in more general terms. Engelke’s point could be applied even more broadly, for paradox provides social scientists with a useful epistemological peg on which studies of religion and morality can be hung. Indeed, it is not always easy to tell where the paradoxical elements of human “culture” end and paradox as a strategy of scholarly production (wherein a problem is first constructed to be resolved) begins. Nevertheless, if in speaking about an “anthropology of Christianity,” we are to some extent speaking about paradox, it is perhaps important to distinguish between the lived experience of paradox that arises out of Christian ideology itself—as revealed in many European and North American accounts of Christianity—and that produced by the coexistence of two quite different systems of values and traditions.4 Indeed “paradox” may not always be the most helpful way of approaching the disjuncture between Christian world views and those that predated Christian missionization. In some accounts that emphasize indigenous conversion to Christianity as a form of continuity with older traditions, the potential for contradiction and disjuncture appears to have remained merely a potential. As Peter Gow (2006) has argued, Piro people of the Peruvian Amazon “failed” to convert to Christianity, not because they did not understand Christianity, but because they did not think of their cosmology as a religion parallel to evangelical Christianity. Their experience of rupture and paradox was minimal because they

INTRODUCTION

5

did not see that the missionaries were trying to bring them an entirely new and exclusive system of values. For other people, such as the Arosi of the Solomon Islands, what paradox might have been has given way to a productive kind of dialogue, in which the value of the pre-Christian past is brought into alignment with Christian ideas through “ethno-theologies” (Scott 2005). Even within Christian ideology, the paradox contained within its transcendent logic—and in particular its resultant and infamous dichotomy between spirit and flesh—may not be as paradoxical as is generally perceived. As Fenella Cannell (2006) points out, Christianity has always contained an aspect in which the flesh is an essential part of redemption. From acts of self-mortification, to a positive focus on material places, objects and substances, examples proliferate that counter the paradoxical or “ascetic stereotype” of Christianity (Cannell 2006) that has become embedded in anthropology. For example, the importance of the material world comes across clearly in João Pina-Cabral’s study of Catholicism among Portuguese peasants where divine power can be tapped through various unorthodox forms of mediation, including a cult of “non-eaters” who live off the Communion wafer alone, as well as a cult of incorrupt bodies (Pina-Cabral 1986: 234–236). For the Spanish Catholics of William Christian’s study (1972), spiritual pollution from the everyday world is countered via a sacred geography, embedded in the physical terrain. The performance of purificatory rites at sacred shrines around the villages of the Nansa Valley is central for the “transformation of divine energy for human purposes” (1972: 101). Ethics and Morality: Choice and Reproduction A growing theme within the study of religion, and indeed within anthropology more widely is the topic of morality (Gregory 2009; Howell 1997; Laidlaw 2002; Robbins 2007; Sykes 2009; Zigon 2009). Within this emergent field, debate continues as to what conceptual work “the moral” actually does. It is generally agreed that the anthropological study of morality has traditionally been hampered by the “Durkheimian problematic” wherein all normative social action is, in some nebulous sense, equated with moral action (Robbins 2007; Zigon 2009). However, and as Joel Robbins states, “a developing consensus appears to hold that this conflation of morality with culture is not the way forward for an anthropology of morality” (2007: 294). What is needed, rather, is a general recognition of two different kinds of morality or moral experience: one termed the “morality

6


of reproduction,” in which morality is nonconsciously reproduced as people go about adhering to the norms of their society and another termed the “morality of freedom,” in which people are consciously aware of the freedom they have to choose what course of action to take and to thereby promote as morally correct (Robbins 2007: 278). Within the anthropology of Christianity, both Robbins (2004) and Omri Elisha (2008) discuss the troublesome tension between action and expectation or as Elisha sums up, “the gaps between one’s moral ambitions and the conditions of existence that reinforce and simultaneously threaten to undermine them at every turn” (2008:155). In these situations, moral paradox is experienced as “unreasonable moments” (Gregory 2009), moments of contradiction wherein persons are simultaneously pulled toward differing and incommensurable ideals. For conservative evangelicals in Tennessee, the difficulty of putting the theological concept of compassion into practice stems from its coexisting imperative of accountability. For the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea, there is a pull toward human agency or “wilfulness” that conflicts with the idea of obedience or “lawfulness” to God (Robbins 2004). The abiding question for the Urapmin is how does one live as a good person while existing in the midst of a social world that routinely draws one into sin? (2004: 254). The moral difficulties, the “doleful abyss,” in the Urapmin context are deepened by contradictions and conflicts between newer adopted Christian ideas and indigenous conceptions of social structure: “It is the contradictions and confusions that follow from this unsettled state of dual cultural play that lead Urapmin to fall constantly short of their moral goals,” argues Robbins (2004: 182). The moral paradox I explore within the Santa Lucian context might be better understood as a type of “stable conflict,” (Robbins 2007) one that forms an enduring part of Catholic Santa Lucian culture rather than arising out of any major change or sudden break with a pre-Christian system of values. The moral paradox discussed in the following chapters arises through the apparent disjuncture between an ideal of religious purity that values innocence and worldly detachment and the need for knowledge to live a productive life. For the people of Santa Lucia, a desirable life is a productive one, and consequently, a sinful one. It is one in which a child grows up to be knowledgeable, to find a spouse and have children, and most importantly to support a spouse and children. Such a path, as was constantly pointed out to me, was neither easy nor spiritually clear cut. First, it necessitated departure from a certain hallowed state of innocence. Second, it brought with it grave responsibilities to feed, nurture, and protect

INTRODUCTION

7

the young in a region historically given to extreme manifestations of social inequality, structural and interpersonal violence, poverty, and drought. The passage from innocence to knowledge is acknowledged as inevitable, the task facing Santa Lucians, however, is to mediate between the sterility of pure innocence and the sinfulness of complete knowledge in such a way as to demonstrate the virtue of choice; the choice to align oneself with God despite forces that pull one away. Left untended, knowledge and power may lead to death, both material and spiritual. Alternatively, it can lead a person to forge a reputation as someone exceptionally perto de Deus (close to God). In practice, as will be shown, this moral paradox does not constitute an irrevocable problem so much as a challenge to be lived and overcome. Reclassifying this paradox—this “doleful abyss”—as a challenge rather than a problem is an important task, because it reformulates it as a positive means by which people can attain closeness to God, rather than as a negative feature that dooms believers to a certain degree of failure. In many ways, this difference between a positive and negative evaluation of the same paradox maps onto many of the differences between Catholic and Protestant Christianities. Many ethnographers of the latter, however, have perhaps been overhasty in extending the negative interpretation of the paradox to Christianity as a whole. If as Engelke suggests, the paradox is one of the bases on which we can speak of a coherent “anthropology of Christianity” we must also be aware that it is within this shared paradox that some of the most salient differences between strains of Christianity are located. From a distance, Catholic Santa Lucians, like Pentecostal Friday Apostolics, or evangelical Protestant Urapmin, appear to devote themselves to an archetypal “impossible religion,” but look closer and one sees that rather than paradox featuring as a troublesome stumbling block to moral perfection, it constitutes a clear and legitimate means of engaging with the divine, a source of spiritual vitality in and of itself, if, and only if, one knows how to rework it. Conjugal Relations: A Widening of the Abyss If Christian doctrine presents a challenge for Santa Lucians, nowhere does it do so more for ordinary men and women than in the context of conjugal relations. Marriage is of course spiritually validated and idealized by church and state, most explicitly on the day of the wedding itself. However, and as the people I knew were frequently at pains to point out, the view from the ground following the actual

8


wedding ceremony is quite different. Marriage, I was told, is where morals ideals are tested out every single day. As a social institution, it constitutes one of the most challenging aspects of worldly disjuncture to negotiate, providing ample contexts for moral transgression in the form of neglect of duty, adultery, and violence. Given the focus of this work, on the tensions inherent within marriage, one might expect a certain amount of gender antagonism to predominate. In fact, something unexpectedly different in character comes to the fore. Gender distinctions notwithstanding, men and women in Santa Lucia share a singular sense of moral personhood. For Santa Lucians, morality is a fundamentally ungendered phenomenon. Therefore in situations of religious paradox and moral transgression, Santa Lucians strive to downplay the categorical differences between the sexes that apply in other areas of life and emphasize instead the essential singularity of human persons and their moral concerns. As such, the ethnographic account that follows presents something of a challenge to a long-standing tradition of feminist anthropological research in Latin America, which has made gender difference a central, persistent, and defining trope. Within this academic tradition narratives converge and diverge, variously revealing aspects of women’s subordination and/or resistance to male hegemony and the multifarious ways in which femininity and masculinity are defined, reconstructed, contested, and the like. What all such accounts have in common is an overarching concern with the commanding significance of difference (complementary or antagonistic) as an organizing principle of social life. This book offers an alternative to such a metanarrative, garnered from my informants’ own styles of arguing: instead of difference being an organizing principle of moral and religious life, it is the presumed unity, the fundamental identity of adults as moral persons (whatever their sex) that is held to play a defining role. Gender in Latin America In much of the literature on Catholic peasant societies in Latin America, authors have drawn special attention to the effects of rigid divisions and separations of gender. Men and women’s roles are presented as differing radically in terms of labor, power, moral standards, religious practice, and sexual propriety.5 In the “paradigm” of Catholic societies that results, a kind of functional division is assumed between the sexes: with “black-clad rosary-telling women” adopting the role of pious religious observers and honor-bound macho

INTRODUCTION

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men indulging in “flamboyant anti-clericalism” (Cannell 2006: 9). However, as Cannell observes, “What in effect appears to have happened, is that in advancing the well-known division between ‘male’ culture and ‘female’ domesticity, some of these early ethnographers also made a less-widely-noticed assignment of Christian practice to the female, and therefore implicitly non-cultural sphere” (Cannell 2006: 9). Perhaps in response to the implicit relegation of the female to the “non-cultural,” feminist anthropology from the 1970s onward has gone a long way toward counteracting the andocentric bias of much previous literature. In the literature on Latin America in particular, this feminist redressal has occurred by way of a focus on opposite “feminine” models of practice and ideology, and the overall picture to emerge continues to promote a sense of cultures grown out of rigid oppositions and gendered division. The body of work on gender in Latin America is large, spanning several decades, and it is not my intention to offer a detailed review of its content here.6 In general, however, it might be said that the study of gender in Latin America has developed from one concerned with “rescuing” women’s voices to counteract the andocentric bias of academic discourse into one that emphasizes intracategorical differences between men and women and the ambiguity and complex multiplicity of gendered forms. Toward such ends, theorists have stressed multiplicity, not only in constructions of femininity, but also in manifestations and images of masculinity (Archetti 1996; Harris 1994; Lyons 2002; Nencel 1996; Prieur 1996; Wade 1994). Where gender, morality, and Catholicism converge, theorists have tended similarly, toward a dominant paradigm of two gendered halves—one in which a feminine Virgin Mary complements and contrasts with a dominant male Jesus/God, and in which ordinary women are actively moral and religious, in contrast to men, who are not (Drogus, 1997; Levine 1992; Nagle 1997; Stevens 1973). In the following passage, Carol Ann Drogus sets the tone, outlining what for many theorists has long been one of the most curious and noteworthy aspects of Catholicism in practice: Throughout Latin America, women bear the burden of advancing Catholic movements—whether conservative or radical—and carrying on the religious life of communities on a day-to-day basis. . . . Women’s quantitatively greater activity suggests one important sense in which religiosity is “gendered”: in Latin America, and indeed it seems throughout the Mediterranean Catholic world, religion falls into

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women’s sphere of interests and competence despite their lack of formal authority in the church. Women are expected to be more religious and to maintain religious teachings, morals, and traditions in the home and community (Stevens 1973). The sexual division of religious labor may have implications for the way women perceive the church, religious symbolism, tradition, innovation, and so on, as well as for higher levels of participation. (1997: 9)

Building on this academic tradition, gender theorists Marit Melhuus and Kristi Anne Stølen (1996) extend the division of labor in religious work to the more general sphere of morality itself. Their argument is grounded in the principal observation of male domination of women in Latin American patriarchal mestizo societies. Such domination, they show, is based not only upon the notion of an inherent difference in the nature of men and women but also in male control of female sexuality embodied in the common cultural emphasis on female chastity and virginity. Within this complex, women’s sexual propriety is held to be at the core of the differential power relations that exist between the sexes, and emphasis is laid on the power that men hold over women to control it. This cultural emphasis on female chastity, they argue, is not merely a question of sexual propriety but one of morality itself, generating different schemes of moral evaluation for men and women. Thus, whereas men are classified according to degrees of masculinity, women are discretely classified according to their moral character. This, Melhuus asserts, is a “gendered morality,” one in which the rules of conduct apply unequally to men and women (1996). Generalizing outward from this contextually defined “gendered morality,” Melhuus and Stølen go on to suggest that gender, as a defining set of values, “is central to an understanding of Latin American reality, past or present, whether we are concerned with economic, political or cultural processes” (1996: viii). Theirs is a view shared by other feminist anthropologists of Latin America, who argue fervently that gender constitutes “a central organisizing principle animating and cutting across all aspects of cultural life and social inequalities” (Frazier, Hurtig, and Montoya 2002: 7) and thus an essential concept through which to understand the workings of institutions and ideologies that have shaped political dynamics in the region (2002: 11). Although Melhuus and Stølen successfully illuminate certain aspects of gender as a symbolic construct in Latin America, they omit from their theoretical approach any distinction between gender as a symbolic construct from the gendered or gender neutral ways in

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which people live their everyday lives. Marilyn Strathern’s recognition that the person is “both symbolically linked to and differentiated from gender” (1981: 179) provides a useful inroad to understanding what such an omission might mean. For as she points out, “That a contrast or difference between male and female is used to symbolise a disjunction of values does not ipso facto imply an antagonism between men and women” (1981: 178). In Santa Lucia, where it is common for husbands to beat, and sometimes even to kill their wives, both men and women do something different to feminist theorists: they categorically downplay gendered antagonisms as an explanatory framework for such patterns and events. Understanding this from an analytical point of view without crying false-consciousness is a challenging task. As I hope to show, we can at least begin this process of understanding by maintaining a clear distinction between the contexts in which gender comes symbolically to the fore, and those in which it is irrelevant, or relevant, but strategically downplayed. In this work I strive to show how gender, while an important concept for analysis, does not constitute an encompassing metavalue in every single context. That is, the culturally constructed differences between Santa Lucian men and women, in the things they do, the ways they behave, and how they choose to express themselves, are highly context dependent, sometimes assuming a more abstract and symbolic form and sometimes not. This is particularly true in the context of moral reasoning, where rather than appealing to symbolic notions of difference, Santa Lucian people emphasize unity, sameness, and equivalence in moral-ontological concerns. In other words, men and women are viewed as fundamentally strong and weak, powerful and powerless, moral and immoral in strongly equivalent terms: a woman is held to be as capable as a man of wielding power and of acting nobly with love (amor) or selfishly with pride (orgulho). The manner in which she demonstrates such capacities does indeed differ from a man’s, but this does not change the basic nature of what is demonstrated. This principle of basic equivalence and underlying similarity among persons resonates in striking ways with the theology that has been historically influential in the Catholic Church of the region. In making this observation, it is not my intention to attribute Santa Lucian ways of thinking about gender exclusively to theological developments within the modern Catholic Church. Catholic theology, however, being an emergent phenomenon, as well as one with particular regional specificities, has undoubtedly had some influence in this area. In the Northeast of Brazil, as in other parts of Latin America,

12


Catholic theology has been strongly influenced by Liberation theology. This led in the second half of the twentieth century, to the general advancement among the clergy, of a class-based understanding of the person; one in which gender was, if not entirely absent, certainly less central (Burdick 1993; Drogus 1997; Nagle 1997). In this context, the Christian idea that God created all of humankind in his basic image, coupled with the advance of a modern language of equality and “human rights” has supported and encouraged a different configuration of gender: one that downplays difference and division and foregrounds an essential unity of kind. Power No treatment of gender, conjugality, and moral discourse would be complete without some consideration of the matrices of power, authority, and hierarchy that shape and constrain them in practice. More often than not, analytical descriptions of “power relations” in Latin America attempt to describe power in social scientific terms, and much less effort has been made to understand what “power” is held to constitute in local thinking or, what “power” or authority might mean for those purported by scholars to wield it.7 In the Santa Lucian context, however, it is precisely this alternative angle that is required. Without it, one cannot begin to understand how violence, suffering, transgression, and gender difference map onto a moral discourse that emphasizes human unity and equivalence of kinds. In the following chapter, I situate Santa Lucians within the region known as “the Northeast,” detailing their somewhat peripheral and subordinate position within the wider political economy of Brazil. In the ethnographic descriptions that fill the rest of the book, the material situation of Santa Lucians—the economic strain and structural subordination they experience as poor, semisubsistence farmers within the wider panorama—constitutes a subtle but important subtext to their everyday predicaments and to their reasoning about Christian morality in the world. In chapter 5, I address “power” from a gendered perspective, as it occurs in intimate social life, between husbands and wives. In doing so, I take it as “given” that Santa Lucia is essentially a patriarchal society, one in which men head and control family units and predominate in public and political affairs. The implications of this kind of social structure (particularly in its effects on the lives of women) are well-reported and analyzed in the social science literature, and I am not interested in reproducing this type of argument here. However, I

INTRODUCTION

13

have come to believe that in foregrounding the analytical term “patriarchy,” we misleadingly assume that we already know what power means. This can lead us to ignore how informants themselves variously think about their behavior in relation to one another, whether they themselves elaborate a concept of “power,” “authority,” or “control” in relational terms, and whether such things are locally subject to moral assessment. In other words, while we might take patriarchal social organization to constitute a particular kind of “fact,” in a social scientific sense, we must not neglect to explore what power actually means in terms of the roles that people occupy within that context. The ethnographic approach that I take here both problematizes and pluralizes any monolithic understanding of power in patriarchal societies, and particularly with regards to men. Santa Lucian men are, in many ways, ideal candidates for the swaggering, macho stereotypes that often get passed off as typical among Latin American men. However, for all the displays of power and machismo that could and often did surface, Santa Lucian men, I discovered, were not exempt from strict moral judgments or harsh social sanctions if their behavior got out of hand. The married men I came to know well had subtle ways of letting the world know that for all their visible authority in social life, they too were vulnerable, and they too were constrained by a limited set of choices. Over time I came to realize that although men were ostensibly chefes da familia (heads of family), this did not always translate, straightforwardly, into a position of advantage. Many men I knew struggled to establish and sustain the affective bonds of loyalty with their children that their wives enjoyed as given and lived with the fear that in the event of breakup, it would be they who would lose all rights to the homestead they had helped to build. The “power” of Santa Lucian men over female kin, it appeared, was both symbolic and real, institutionalized and yet tricky to wield, seductive but potentially disastrous to even the most machista of men. The spoils of power were constantly tempered by expectations and obligations, and most of all, by the weight of social and moral judgment that attached itself to any position of power or leadership, either within or outside the home. When Seu José got drunk and set fire to his home, he transgressed a moral boundary. In the eyes of most Santa Lucians, what he did was inexplicable, constituting a sin of the gravest kind. Yet though inexplicable, it was not deemed unforgivable. Amauri, like others I spoke to, remained convinced of Seu José’s love for his family. By giving voice to this fact, a process began to unfold; one in which an act of transgression was overlooked in favor of the visible and public

14


sacrifices Seu José, via his labor and on behalf of his family, continued to perform. This book seeks to explore how through the crosscutting interstices of marriage, power, and moral discourse, Santa Lucians turn the “doleful abyss”—the tension between seamless religious ideals and the messy business of getting along in the world— into a source of spiritual vitality itself. Outline of the Book Chapter one sets the geographic and historical scene for the five main chapters that follow, each of which presents a theme that becomes salient at a different stage in a person’s life. I have chosen to subvert the somewhat predictable chronology of these stages in the order of writing by beginning, in chapter 2, with marriage itself—the moment of transition, as it were, from youth to adulthood. Following this, in chapters 3, 4, and 5, I discuss themes that apply exclusively to married adults. In chapter 6 I return to childhood, thus returning to a stage of life described at the very beginning of the book, before marriage. I have chosen to begin with the topic of marriage because it is the moral and spiritual conflict that marriage generates that constitutes the existential challenge underpinning the book as a whole. Thus, in chapter 2, I describe the different types of problem that marriage creates for people, ranging from the practical hardships of supporting one’s own household, to the moral dilemmas of split kinship loyalties and the spiritually polluting necessity of sin. If marriage is necessary but dangerous because it leads individuals away from spiritual salvation, the chapters that follow examine how people attempt to address this challenge. In chapters 3 and 4, I discuss some of the alternative religious discourses and practices by which married women and men, respectively, attempt to deal with the spiritual pollution generated by conjugal life, labor, and reproduction. Chapter three focuses on women’s narratives of suffering while chapter 4 explores (predominantly) men’s narratives of labor. In chapter 5, I discuss the sexual politics of power within the conjugal relationship. I continue to show that to be married is, in many ways, to be in danger of various sorts. My focus of analysis is what happens when it all goes wrong; when a marriage falls irreparably apart through acts of violence perpetrated by husbands and wives. I discuss local understandings of power within the conjugal relationship and show how these contrast with received gender-based analytical models that have been used by other writers to understand

INTRODUCTION

15

power relations between the sexes and the sexual politics of domestic violence. In this chapter, I elaborate a different perspective to the heavily gendered analyses that have shaped the literature on Catholic societies to date. Having discussed the ways in which married adult men and women deal with the existential problem that marriage poses for them as individuals, in chapter 6 I examine how they, as parents, deal with the challenge that marriage poses for their children. Parents desire that their own children grow up to marry, be knowledgeable, live well, and produce their own families. But they must also strive to prepare children for the spiritual and moral dangers that such a path entails. Children, I argue, embody something of a paradox: as innocents they are idealized, but their constantly changing relationship with the world is an endless source of anxiety to the adults who must guide the process of growing up. This paradox is pursued in the last chapter of the book by contrasting local concepts of knowledge (conhecimento/ sabedoria) and innocence (inocência) and situating these within two particular contexts: everyday speech-games and an annual secular ritual known as casamento de matuto. I argue that both types of interaction constitute a means of educating children about the inevitability of sin and moral conflict in a productive (i.e., a married) life.


Chapter 1

The Land and the People

Getting There

The village of Santa Lucia is a typical agreste settlement—one made

up of semi-itinerant traders, occasional migrant-workers, smallholding farmers, and their share-cropping kin and neighbors. To reach it involves a four-hour drive inland from the lower altitudes of the littoral up into the higher plateaus of the semiarid agreste (see figure 1.1). Leaving the favelas (shanty towns) on the outskirts of Recife, one drives for an hour or so past undulating seas of vivid green: miles and miles of sugarcane rolling up to and away from the horizon. Small sugar plantation towns appear and disappear periodically: brightly painted houses nestling on slopes thick with vegetation. Not far from these one often notices a pair of grandiose gates, leading to the residence of the local family landowners. Continuing along the highway, solitary restaurants and clusters of human establishments go by. Leaving these behind, one continues upward into thick tunnels sliced through the clay red hills. After a slow, uphill wind the road straightens out and the air dries out. Gradually the landscape flattens and the colors fade: brickred loam turns to beige dust, and green vegetation gives way to grey-brown scrub. Entering the agreste, the heat becomes drier, and isolated fazendas (farms) dedicated to cattle-breeding start to come and go. After another two hours or so you can make out in the distance, on the northwest horizon, the bluish outlines of the Serra de Ororobá hills. Some time after this, you may find yourself pulling into Santa Lucia’s nearest market town, into a maze of cobbled streets lined with pink- and peach-colored houses. Now passing snack bars and shop fronts, a low-walled state school, a municipal building, a colonial

18


1.1 Map of region

Catholic church, and a gleaming new palace of Pentecostal worship. You may pass through a market square heaving with bodies and bargains and become momentarily transfixed by the volume of produce, the rainbow of plastic wares, vials of tinctures, the heaving market atmosphere. However, the village of Santa Lucia is located in foothills approximately 1,300 meters above sea level. To reach it you must pass through this market and continue westward, toward the city of Garanhuns. Turning off the main highway takes you onto a dusty track that leads deep into the sítio (cultivated countryside). If you are proceeding

THE L AND AND THE PEOPLE

19

by motorbike taxi, then you will require an experienced rider, one who knows how to negotiate the potholes and just how fast to go to prevent bald motorbike wheels from skidding on the sandy road. Juddering up and down cracked-mud inclines, you may well approach strips of road devoured during the rains, and barely the width of the tires themselves. As far as the eye can see will be peasant roçados (fields), the staple crops of maize, beans, and manioc springing from their sandy soils. Occasionally, an irrigated pocket gives way instead to vegetable crops: cabbages, tomatoes, peppers, and coriander. Large cacti, lonesome palms, and odd homesteads dot the landscape, and you may see small birds flitting in the grassy hedge: the black and white lavandeira (washer woman), the dark red-chested sangue de boi (bull’s blood), and the deep blue azulão (big blue). As one descends into the valley, the village of Santa Lucia comes into view: lines of small brick houses crossing a stream and surrounded by hills of semideciduous thorn forest. The village is quietly alive; dogs snooze, smoke wafts, chickens run away, and carts rumble past. The occasional radio on someone’s front porch plays forró, the regional music. Women are often the first to notice your coming, as they lean in doorways or stop sweeping the dust in front of their houses to watch you pass. Men will spot you as they drive cattle to pastures up in the hills or walk through fields, tools in hand, calling out “O Pa!” to anyone they see on the way. Passing the casa de farinha (flour mill), you can hear the dim, continuous murmur of the machinery and catch the acrid smell of wood smoke and rotting manioc peel. Outside, young men—faces white with farinha (manioc flour)—load long baskets with manioc that they carry to the women in pairs. Inside, women sit on low stools in semidarkness, peeling roots. They may stop and look up if a motorbike goes by; you may just about make them out against the blackness of the peeling room, white teeth smiling as you pass. It is necessary to slow down near the school to navigate carefully through scattering children. If they recognize you they smile and call out your name. If not, they will stare and surround you as you dismount. You will have arrived in the heart of the village. The “Northeast” Santa Lucian people identify themselves in various ways, depending on the context. I have heard locals identify themselves variously as Brasileiros (Brazilians), Pernambucanos (Pernambucans), agricultores (agriculturalists), gente pobre (poor people), povo do sitio (country folk),

20


matutos (hillbillies), and most often as Nordestinos (Northeasterners). The state of Pernambuco where Santa Lucia is located was the first state to be colonized by the Portuguese and covers an area of 37,946 square miles. It is significant for being part of the conglomerate of Brazilian states that make up an area known as O Nordeste (the Northeast) and stands as the region’s second most populous state at approximately eight million.1 To speak of the Northeast is thus to speak about a geographical area with certain historical, political, juridical, economic, and climatic associations (Albuquerque 1999).2 But the “Northeast” is more than this, it is a concept that, from within and without, has been variously romanticized, stigmatized, and laden with a particular set of folk and scholarly connotations. It would be impossible to introduce the village of Santa Lucia without first locating it as a village at the heart of the Northeast, for this in itself has shaped the topic and nature of this study. When Santa Lucians refer to themselves as “Northeasterners” they do so to distinguish themselves from people from the south, central, and west of Brazil—particularly from anyone hailing from the comparatively richer cities of Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo. The distinction between the Northeast and the rest of the Brazil is not new but has been sharpened in recent decades by the advent of television. Even the poorest Northeastern houses are flooded, daily, with televised news programs and telenovellas set and made in the South, and it is through opposition to an image of the South as inordinately whiter, richer, and more glamorous that present-day Northeasterners derive their sense of identity. One of the defining features of the Northeast is its division into three geographic zones corresponding to the progressive dryness of the climate. Along the eastern littoral that extends from Rio Grande do Norte to Southern Bahia is the zona da mata: a flat, highly populated humid strip, originally covered in Atlantic forest and now dominated by sugar plantations. West of the coast is the vast interior region known as the sertão: a drought-prone wilderness of scrub growth ribbed with rocky mountains, and occupying approximately half of the Northeast as a whole (Andrade 1980: 21). In this region, where rainfall averages only twenty-five inches annually, agriculture is generally limited and cattle rearing is the dominant occupation. In the transitional area between the humid zona da mata along the coast and the vast, semiarid sertão to the west is a region known as the agreste, where rainfall is fairly reliable, averaging thirty to thirtyfive inches per year, but decreasing gradually in proportion to distance from the coast. One of the distinguishing features of the agreste is its geographic diversity, resembling the semiarid sertão in its driest


21

parts, and the more thickly vegetated zona da mata in its most humid zones. The agreste occupies the eastern portion of the Borborema Plateau and extends toward the mountains of Rio Grande do Norte and the southern part of Alagoas. In the Pernambucan agreste, where Santa Lucia is located, the degree of moisture is insufficient for sugar cultivation but permits the cultivation of beans, manioc, maize, and, in certain more humid parts, fruits and vegetables. These three major regions shade into one another and are integrated into a single “Northeast” region by the constant circulation of people and goods. Although three hundred years ago the Northeast was among the richest areas of the Americas, it has since become famous for being one of the poorest and most underdeveloped areas in Brazil. As Rebhun writes, the South boasts the major universities, museums, and cultural resources, the largest cities and busiest airports, the most modern banking system, and the biggest shopping malls . . . The Northeast seems almost a separate country from the South, forming a sense of abandonment reflected in persistent rumors of its sale to Japan in return for national debt relief. (1999: 38)

Present-day poverty in the Northeast is the result of a multitude of factors, one of the greatest being its famously unequal distribution of land (Pereira 1997). The land problem has its roots in the early colonial practice by which the Portuguese Crown handed out enormous land grants to prominent politicians (donatários). These politicians, in turn, bestowed extensive tracts known as capitanias hereditárias to individual colonizers. Large land-holdings (Latifúndios) were thus established from the beginning of the colonial period, and one of their effects was to produce a polarized, highly unequal class system that is still immediately recognizable in the present day.3 Even during the late 1960s and 1970s, when Brazil’s military dictatorship propelled the country toward rapid industrial growth, millions of Northeasterners continued to suffer high levels of unemployment, hunger, and disease (Pereira 1997). Poverty in the Northeastern sertão has also been intensified by periodic incidences of drought that have forced thousands of inhabitants to leave their homes. The famines suffered were exacerbated by the failure, on the part of the ruling elite, to invest in proper irrigation projects and to stem the environmental degradation caused by cash crop production and large-scale cattle farming. To this day seca (drought) continues to loom large in the collective memory of Northeastern people, and a fear of fome

22


(hunger) and sede (thirst) remains dominant themes in the collective psyche.4 It is perhaps unsurprising then that characterizations of the region by writers have tended to be stark and depressing. For example, in 1969 Josué de Castro described the Northeast as “600,000 square miles of suffering”; in 1975 Eduardo Galeano defined the area as “a concentration camp for more than thirty million people,” and in 1992, Nancy Scheper-Hughes wrote of the “pockmarked face of the Brazilian Northeast.”5 Even popular Brazilian media such as televised soap operas and literary novels have contributed to this emblematic depiction of the region, and tourist shops and markets are filled with ceramic figurines depicting images of retirantes—drought ravaged families fleeing their homes in the sertão. As such, the Northeast of Brazil has come to stand in the national imagination as a place of both tragedy and heroism, of unjust and yet noble suffering.6 The suffering of the Northeast arguably extends back to the early cultivation of sugar. Sugarcane cultivation was established in the zona da mata by the Portuguese in the early sixteenth century and has influenced Brazil’s economic, political, and social history ever since. From the earliest days of colonization, sugar attracted large numbers of settlers from Europe to the Northeast, settlers who prospered due to their brutal exploitation of African slaves. The power and politics of the plantation system and the stark social inequalities it spawned are widely suggested as having defined almost every aspect of life for slave and freeman, wage laborer, sharecropper, and migrant worker from the seventeenth century through to the present day (Bastide 1964; De Castro 1969; Fraginals 1976; Freyre 1986; Galloway 1968; Genovese 1971; Hall 1981; Scheper-Hughes 1992). As D. E. Goodman summarizes, In all the sub-regions [of the Northeast] the same man-made characteristic is present: an extreme inequality of land tenure which has, from its beginning, shaped a rural structure in which there is an equally extreme social inequality between classes untempered by any significant sense of noblesse oblige or humanism on the part of the landowner to those working on the land. (1981: 4)

In his epic work The Masters and the Slaves (1986[1933]), Gilberto Freyre dealt with the culture and social institutions of the plantation from both an anthropological and a literary perspective. Later writers such as de Castro (1969), Manuel Moreno Fraginals (1976), and Scheper-Hughes (1992) tackled plantation history from a resolutely Marxist perspective, describing the industry as a “whoring social and


23

economic social formation if ever there was one” (Scheper-Hughes 1992: 34), its victims “sad half humans crushed like cane between rollers that leave only juiceless husks behind” (de Castro 1969: 7). However, while the social, political, and economic history of the region as a whole grew out of and continued to be shaped by sugar cultivation near the coast, in the semiarid interior another story started to unfold, not of sugar and slavery, but of leather, cotton, and tenant farming. Bandits and Cattlemen: A Brief History of the Backlands Indigenous Tupinamba peoples had long been the principal inhabitants of the Northeast as European colonists from the coast began to drive more deeply into the interior. As coastal lands once reserved for pasture became absorbed into the plantation economy, colonial ranchers had no choice but to explore the hinterlands. The settlement of the interior by colonists was thus achieved little by little, as cattlemen, Jesuit missionaries, outlaws, and runaway African slaves traveled up the Ipanema River and proceeded inland along dry riverbeds. According to Kelsey, the cattlemen who eventually founded the great cattle and cotton estates of the semiarid interior were “free colonists”: descendents of Portuguese farming folk who were “ineligible through lack of capital and credit, name and rank to receive grants of the fat lands on the seacoast” (1940: 163). Unable to plant sugarcane in the zona da mata, they took advantage of climatic conditions in the sertão and agreste that were favorable for growing cotton and grazing cattle. In the process of establishing huge cattle ranches Tupinamba people were driven off their land, and with each animal requiring several hectares and very little tending, the area remained sparsely populated for three hundred years or more. Due to their direct ties with Rome, the Jesuit missionaries were eventually expelled by the Portuguese Crown from both Brazil and Portugal in 1759. The Brazilian clergy remained weak throughout the rest of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the colonial church serving more as an arm of the civil bureaucracy. Throughout the period between 1500 and 1822, only a handful of clerics served the interior, and most communities had little or no contact with the official Catholic Church. Popular religion was based around home altars and folk rituals, and many inhabitants followed messianic movements.7 A brief perusal of the historical literature on the Brazilian

24


Northeastern interior leaves one with a picture of a wild frontier land dominated by drought and violence, banditry, and mysticism. As Vera Kelsey wrote of this region in the 1930s, When the full scale of this turbulent and little-known region, the Brazilian equivalent of North America’s “wild and woolly” West, is told, the exploits of Buffalo Bill and Jesse James, of cowboys and desperados, of Indian raids, prairie fires and mountain blizzards and all the rest will become very pale indeed . . . Within these boundaries are the desiccated sertões, lands where short-lived rivers run and arid plains form a tragic background for periodic droughts and for one of the great Brazilian types, the sertanejo . . . a man of endurance and daring, rustic and undisciplined, an extremist whether he takes to religion or to crime. (1940: 162)

This stereotype, which has been romanticized through the ages via popular verses and ballads, continues to make a strong impression on writings about the region, informing, in my view, some of even the most recent scholarly works.8 A result of this is that anyone seeking to gain a rough impression of the social and historical makeup of the Northeastern interior would be forgiven for thinking it consisted almost entirely of powerful, warring cattle barons, bandits on horseback, and wandering religious fanatics. However, it is clear that the sertão and agreste’s inhabitants included, alongside such famous bandits as Lampeão and charismatic mystics such as Antonio Conselheiro and Padre Cicero, a class of rural tenant farmers (forreiros) who practiced subsistence agriculture on the land of the cattle barons. Peasant farmers were necessary to the latifundio system as their agricultural produce was essential to a regional economy otherwise dominated by large-scale cash-crop cultivation and commercial cattle farming. Moreover, in the agreste in particular, tenant sharecropping within the boundaries of large fazendas proved an ideal way to clear forest and create pasture for the forever expanding cattle stock of the fazendeiro. In fact by the late 1850s, most inhabitants of the region were subsistence farmers. The great majority of these remained tenants and sharecroppers on larger landholdings, but many more had come to privately possess their own small plots. This was especially the case within the food-producing agreste, so that by the 1970s, more than 85 percent of the agricultural establishments of the agreste were made up of properties occupying fewer than twenty hectares. Other people survived via a combination of itinerant trading and slash and burn agriculture together with hunting, gathering, and fishing. These


25

were poor people for whom tenant sharecropping was not the only means of survival, and for whom servitude to a single patron was not necessarily a permanent or inescapable condition. In fact, one of the ongoing problems faced by plantation and cattle-ranch owners in the second half of the nineteenth century, one that intensified after the abolition of slavery in 1888, was the lack of a loyal and regular labor force among the free rural population. Many peasants of the interior shunned patron dependency in favor of a seminomadic lifestyle. The mobility and inherent flexibility of this way of life enabled a certain amount of resistance to the low wages and exploitative conditions that accompanied a more sedentary life on the margins of the cattlefarming and plantation economy (Carvalho-Branco 1997). Anthony Pereira (1997) has described today’s Northeastern rural people as “peasantariats,” lacking a total commitment either to subsistence agriculture or to a wage economy. However, it would seem that it is precisely this “lack of commitment,” this shifting between tenant farming and legal, illegal, temporary, and seasonal wage labor in cities, or on plantations, that has allowed Northeastern peasants to retain a certain degree of social and economic freedom. About Santa Lucia Santa Lucia has one hundred and forty-four houses and has a population of roughly five hundred and sixty-five people.9 Its amenities include a primary school, a health post, a chapel, a casa de farinha, one small grocery shop, one butcher’s shop, two barracas (drinking shacks), and a well with a pump that serves the entire village. All major amenities are strung out along a central street, and they are interspersed with houses occupied by descendents of the village’s oldest families. On the fringes of this central street, reaching up into the hills, are smaller tracks where newer clusters of houses lie. Further away on remote hilltops lie various isolated houses, surrounded by agricultural land, but still pertaining to the village. In addition to the well, the center of the village is crossed by a stream that swells into a river during the winter months, and which residents use for bathing, fishing, and washing clothes. Making a Living Work in Santa Lucia is based around semisubsistence agriculture and livestock rearing. Approximately 65 percent of households (ninetythree houses) in the village own small-holdings of land on which they

26

1.2


Trabalhador lifting hay

will grow any combination of the staple crops of manioc (mandioca), beans (feijão), and corn (milho) for both sale and consumption. The other 35 percent of households (fifty-one houses) in the village are landless and survive by combining seasonal waged labor on other people’s land with various share-cropping and shared live-stock rearing arrangements (figure 1.2). The busiest time in the agricultural cycle is the rainy winter season that begins in May and ends in September. The time for planting beans and maize is May, for harvesting in August. Manioc, however, has a much longer cycle. It may be planted at any time of the year and harvested one to two years later.10 The summer months, which comprise the rest of the year, are characterized by the absence of rain. During this time, work in the fields is greatly reduced, and it is common for male members of the household, particularly young, unmarried men, to seek casual labor on local fazendas, on sugar plantations nearer the coast, or as itinerant traders at fairs throughout the region. A major source of employment to the poorer landless strata is the casa de farinha, which is in operation all year round. The casa de farinha is located at the heart of the village, along the same stretch of dirt road as the chapel, school, and health post. It is a large brick shack, comprising two windowless areas whose stable-like doors open onto the street. The first area is where the women work, sitting on low


27

stools scraping the dark, soily skin off the roots with knives and peeling implements (raspadores). The second room is where the men work the heavy machinery in shifts. Here, the peeled roots are processed into fresh pulp that is pressed to remove its toxic liquids, then further dehydrated through heating, and finally ground into the coarse whitish powder known as farinha. The machines in the processing room are large, rustic, and powered both by precarious electrical installations and by hand. Large wood-fired ovens built into the back of the mill belch out constant clouds of thick, sour smoke. Once it has left the ground, manioc is quickly perishable. For this reason, it has to be processed without interruption almost from the moment of its harvesting. Thus work in the mills does not follow a fixed pattern of hours, tending to begin at almost any hour of the day and normally ending at a very late hour of the night, if indeed it ends at all. The casa de farinha is, as Santa Lucian people themselves profess, the social and economic hub of the village. The mill itself resembles an extended household: a place where kin work alongside one another, drop by, and pass much time joking, conversing, and engaging in gossip. It also provides the major source of income for fifty-six individuals from a total of thirty-nine households. While those who work inside the mill benefit from the employment it generates, there are households who gain from the sale of manioc to the mill’s owner. The conditions of work for men and women in the casa de farinha vary substantially. Men are paid on an hourly basis and take home a fixed-rate salary of forty-five reals per week plus a monthly supply of the farinha for their families. Unlike men, women are not allowed to take home farinha and are paid per hundred kilos of manioc scraped. Thus a woman working for the same hours as a man is able to earn approximately eighteen reals a week, and she earns this only if she is an experienced peeler. People in Santa Lucia universally define themselves as agricultores (farmers), although few families survive solely through agriculture.11 Some of the men are builders, carpenters, or butchers, others are small traders owning shops and businesses in and outside the village, and many women earn extra cash giving manicures, taking in sewing, or by making cheese, or straw hats and brooms, for sale in the market. Finally, 16 percent of households (twenty-three houses) contain a member who works for the local council either as a teacher, a health-post assistant, a cleaner, or a truck driver. Although differing forms of wage labor evidently do exist, wage work is inherently small scale, informal, and flexible. For Santa Lucians, as for most poor rural Brazilians, survival involves a complex relationship with the social and natural

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environment. Agricultural work is contingent not only upon the season but also upon the climate that, in the semiarid Northeast, is notoriously unpredictable. As is the case throughout the interior, droughts and “dry years” (years where the rainfall is less than normal) pepper the stories and personal recollections that one hears on an almost daily basis (see also Arons 2004). Children in the village, with no direct experience of famine or drought, can reel off tales of hunger recounted to them by parents and grandparents, as though from personal experience. Many villagers also had, at some point in their lives, gone to live elsewhere as part of a family, in search of a vida melhor (better life). However, cyclical migration is also part of an overall way of life based around seasonal flux and itinerant agriculture. In fact, it is not just agricultural work, waged or otherwise, that is seasonal and cyclical but work for the state as well. People who are employed by the prefeitura (local council) are dependant upon political seasons. As is common throughout most of Brazil, state employment occurs along lines of kinship, histories of friendship, and favors owed through vote buying. Local elections are, therefore, fierce and passionate battles involving rupture and intrigue at every level within the community. In Santa Lucia, as in any locality within the region, employment in local government is extremely desirable as it means a regular, if minimum, monthly wage. However, persons holding such jobs are only too well aware that a state employee’s financial security is only as long as the political term of the administration that employed them. Should the opposing candidate win at the next election, all employees will be replaced. Land, Power, and Hierarchy The inhabitants of Santa Lucia are not rich, but their struggle for survival does not entail quite such extreme levels of dependency on richer patrons as is known to exist in other parts of the Northeast. None of those I talked to could recollect an instance of a particularly rich fazendeiro or powerful, landed coronel making his influence felt in the area. As one old man emphatically said, “There were never any big coronels around here. We never had anything like that. All we ever had were farmers like us, but some with a little more wealth than others.” In local terms, the peasant farmers “with a little more wealth” are and have always been direct descendants of the four families who originally founded the settlement. These include the owner of the casa de farinha, and all those who possess in the region of fifteen


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to thirty hectares of land as opposed to the norm of two to three hectares. Although these small producers work alongside everyone else practicing a mixture of subsistence and commercial agriculture, their businesses and larger land-holdings mean that they are significantly better off than the majority of village inhabitants. They may have slightly larger houses with flat cement roofs rather than tiled roofs prone to letting in rain, they may own a car or a pick-up truck, a mobile phone, a fridge, a gas cooker, or a simple washing machine, but apart from that it would be hard to pick them out, for they are likely to be wearing the same clothes, performing the same tasks, and socializing in the same way as everyone else. As benefactors and patrons, people from Santa Lucia’s wealthier strata are more directly influential in the lives of its poorer inhabitants than any powerful fazendeiro owning vast tracts of land and commanding his own militia. When in 1958 and 1965 new settlers arrived in the village, fleeing the drought of the sertão, some of these longer-established households donated the chão (floor) for them to build houses on in return for a defined period of labor in their fields. In several cases, the children of established houses and newer arrivals went on to marry. As such intermarriage indicates, the patron-client relation that existed back then (it exists within the village even today) is not the same kind as that which exists between the peasantry and the truly powerful rural elite. Now, as then, the better-off peasant small-holder may provide the small-plot owner or landless farmer with living quarters and with work in his fields or mill, but the terms and nature of this exchange is comparatively egalitarian. Religion Out of all the households in the village of Santa Lucia, only two adhere to Pentecostal Christianity, the rest are Catholic. Village life is thus predominantly Catholic and follows the rhythm of the Catholic calendar, observing all the relevant festivals and feast-days. Although the major sacraments of baptism, confirmation, and marriage all occur in the parish church in the local town, religious life centers on the village chapel. It is at the chapel that weekly catechism classes are held, twice-weekly Rosary recitation occurs, and novenas are offered during Easter, Christmas, and New Year. Once a month, the local parish priest arrives to celebrate a mass in the chapel and, on occasion, to offer confession. If the parish priest takes ill and is unable to celebrate mass, or during special religious occasions, villagers will gather in the chapel without an ordained priest for a type of service

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known as celebração da palavra (celebration of the word). Celebração da palavra is similar to an ordinary mass, but somewhat shorter due to the absence of Holy Communion. Normally the sermon will be prepared and delivered by the chapel overseer. Since the chapel’s construction in 1968, all the chapel overseers have been local women. In Santa Lucia, as elsewhere in the Catholic world, women lead the religious community. Although the official Catholic hierarchy is exclusively male, it is women who effectively put religious events and rituals into practice. In the village of Santa Lucia, women’s implicit domination of the religious sphere is manifest in various ways. It is a small minority of women who liaise with the parish priest; it is they who organize and oversee all the masses, processions, and special religious occasions within the community. These same women deliver sermons at celebração da palavra, catechize children, lead processions, look after the keys to the chapel, control access to the chapel coffers, and compose the songs and prayers that form part of the village’s traditional canon. Moreover, it is women who make up the majority of the congregation at Mass and Rosary. Male participation in chapel events is strongest at Christmas and Easter. At other times, their participation in the official religious calendar is limited, although this does not necessarily signify a lack of theological interest or personal inner devotion. Throughout the year, the church observes various saints’ days by organizing special masses and processions. Whether or not local people participate in such rituals, most will turn out for the festas (fairs) that follow such occasions, comprising of music, dancing, stalls selling food and drink, and fairground attractions. At such time, the hosting village or town is entirely taken over by the event. For those who participate in them, saints’ day processions are particularly important for the payment of promessas (votive promises). Promessas can be fulfilled in a variety of ways. A popular way of “thanking” a saint for their intercession in solving a problem is to partake in their procession barefoot or wearing a monk’s habit. The largest and most lively of these celebrations are those of St. Peter (São Pedro) and St. John (São João), held during the rains and intensive agricultural activity of June. The São João celebrations are marked by the performance of a secular ritual known as casamento de matuto (which I discuss in chapter 6), the consumption of special foods based on cornmeal, the building of commemorative bonfires, and all-night dances. However, the major festivals in the annual calendar remain Christmas and Easter. In the village of Santa Lucia, Christmas is a time marked mainly by increased prayer and attendance at special church services, but in local terms, it


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is less important than Easter. Whereas the famous Brazilian carnival is not particularly celebrated in the Northeastern interior, the fasting, abstinences, Passion plays, and early morning via sacra processions of Holy Week are always observed. At this time of year the village is awash with visiting relatives, and contrary to the somber mood that is supposed to prevail, an air of excitement and anticipation descends: men avail themselves of the opportunity to drink red wine instead of cane liquor, women swap recipes and converse animatedly about what they intend to cook that week, and children, pleased to be off school, play in the central street of the village and participate in the preparations. Holy Week is virtually the only week of the year when the daily diet of rice, beans, and beef is departed from, and mealtimes consist of special fish and coconut dishes, complemented with small salads and cooked greens. Although women have to cook these meals, many appear to greatly appreciate the break in routine. At home, many people maintain small shrines replete with votive images of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and various saints. The practice of pilgrimage to public shrines dotted about the Northeast tends to be linked to family tradition and is not as strong a custom among the families of Santa Lucia as it is in neighboring villages; however, each and every year at least one or two people from the village will make the famous pilgrimage to Juazeiro do Norte, home of the popular mystic and spiritual healer Padre Cicero.12 Although the majority of villagers will turn out on special religious occasions such as commemorative saints’ days, Christmas, and Easter, not all villagers attend weekly Mass, Rosary, or celebração da palavra. Even among those who do, levels of deference toward the church and its practices vary. Many people profess to not having time for official religious practices, while others claim that they live too far away from the village chapel, suffer from ill health, or lack the resources to be involved in the church and contributing toward its events. Anticlericalism is common, even among some of the most devout Catholics in Santa Lucia. It is not uncommon to hear jokes and disparaging remarks made about members of the local clergy, along the lines that they are basically selfish, greedy, rude, hypocritical, and authoritarian. Devout older women are particularly given to censuring priests behind their backs for beginning or terminating masses too late and for delivering substandard homilies.13 The ambivalent respect shown by Santa Lucian people toward the Catholic clergy is echoed by an ambivalent attitude toward official forms of religious practice. In matters of religion, many Santa Lucian people are strongly suspicious of anyone who strives too hard to “keep

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up appearances.” Villagers who go to church obsessively are often ridiculed as baratas de igreja (church cockroaches). Pentecostalists are also mocked for their conservative modes of dress and teetotal behavior. The argument offered is always that these kinds of practices are superficial rather than noble; they are concerned simply with outward appearance and do not represent a proper sacrifice in emulation of Jesus. For Santa Lucian Catholics, faith and worship revolve around an intimately human, almost fallen, image of Jesus. Theirs is a theology and practice rooted heavily in the idea of humility, sacrifice, and imperfection—in the idea of emulating Christ rather than in pleasing God through worldly abstinence and conformity to rules and regulations. The difference between these kinds of practice, which I will elaborate in the following chapters, hinges upon the perceived distance between the human and the divine. It lies behind the popular assumption that regular church-attendance, although good, is not necessarily a sign of faith or closeness to God. It also lies behind the notion that reading and owning a Bible is not necessary to proper worship. Among those who rarely attend church are illiterate men and women who are widely respected for the apparent depth of their faith (fê). Such people might be renowned spiritual healers, others known simply to pray daily at small home altars, to maintain a strong devotion to a particular saint, or to possess a wide knowledge of biblical stories and moral parables. Despite their ambivalence toward the institutional aspect of Catholicism, Catholics in Santa Lucia are wary of the rapid growth of Pentecostalism across the region. Consequently, they are passionately defensive about their own religion. Growing interaction with people converted to Pentecostalism has led to a heightened awareness among ordinary Catholics of the various differences between their own and more evangelical forms of belief and practice. During the time of my fieldwork, knowledge of the Bible was a favorite topic of discussion because it was felt to present something of a problem in the ongoing battle to defend the Catholic faith. Despite their disdain for the Pentecostal faith, many Catholics marvel at Pentecostalists’ intricate knowledge of the written word, and at their ability to wield a Bible like a weapon in theological debate, quoting scripture and singling out paragraphs and phrases to back up the arguments they wish to make. The Catholics I knew regretted their comparative lack of knowledge of the Bible, and they felt that there was a need to encourage Bible reading among the young. This was not for purposes of practice or worship, but in order that they might defend themselves adequately against Pentecostal onslaught. Thus although the Bible is


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not an integral aspect of daily worship and practice, it is nonetheless accepted as the word of God and, therefore, as the ultimate source of mystical and religious authority. Although in-depth knowledge of scripture is limited among Catholic Santa Lucians, knowledge of what could be called Christian “mythology” is not. Of these, Genesis and the Passion are the most important, frequently referred to both in local art and literature, and in everyday discourse. For Santa Lucian people, Genesis is an important ontological myth that explains both the origins and the nature of the world. When attempting to explain to me their past, and to answer questions such as “Who do the people of this region descend from?”, people would often look at me somewhat incredulously and ask, “Have you never heard of the story of Adam and Eve?” When trying to explain to me the basic charter given to them at their creation—the reason for death, social inequality, and physical suffering—people would invariably refer to the story of the Fall. This they generally explained as having come about less through the Devil’s trickery, and more through Adam and Eve’s collective disobedience to God in eating from the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil. As one young woman emphasized in her own telling: “It was the nature of Man from the start to be curious, to want to eat the fruit and disobey God. The snake helped to increase that evil curiosity.” This is very much in line with local thinking about the nature of evil in the world, an interesting corollary of which is a virtual absence of any belief in Satan. Santa Lucians make virtually no reference to the concept of the Devil (O Diabo) in their day-to-day speech and moral-ontological reasoning—something that appears to be in keeping with the increasingly rationalist direction of modern forms of Catholic theology prominent within the region. During my stay, I failed to record even a single instance in which the Devil was referred to in the course of a church sermon. Occasionally, the priest would utilize the term evil (mau) to describe a somewhat diffuse and generalized state of opposition to God, however, Satan (or Lucifer) as evil personified never once made an appearance. When I asked informants directly about O Diabo, they would look embarrassed and go on to explain that they were not superstitious like people of the past. These days, I was told, everyone knew that there was no such thing as a man with horns and a tail. Rather than viewing evil as something exterior to the person, Santa Lucians tend to conceptualize it as internal—as an inextricable and ambiguously useful aspect of the Christian person in the world. Thus in the modern Santa Lucian mind, the moral and religious problems people face by living and sinning are less the result

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of some actively diabolical principle than the result of a natural state that impedes the flow of graça (grace) from God to man. It is also noteworthy that local accounts of the Genesis myth never laid any emphasis on gender. Although the biblical claim that Eve was made from Adam, or that she was the first to consider eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, is acknowledged on one level, it is given only a very abstract and peripheral significance, if it is given any at all. As in other moral and religious contexts, categories of gender symbolizing a segmentation of two halves is subsumed beneath what is felt to be the more fundamental segmentation: that between God and mankind. In contexts of moral reasoning, therefore, what tends to be emphasized are the perceived merits and failures of individuals in relation to specific situations rather than the perceived merits and failures of “women” as opposed to “men” in generalized terms. If the Genesis myth explains how and why things are the way they are in the world, the story of the Passion is, in local thinking, the template par excellence of how things could be. Jesus’ life of benevolent self-abnegation is viewed as the ideal model of human being-in-the-world; one that is theoretically achievable by all ordinary people. Catholic Santa Lucians both make and are subject to constant allusions to the Passion via the media, through music and other forms of popular culture, and in their day-to-day discourse. In church, sermons, songs, and homilies carry the message that the best way to worship God is by emulating Christ. Rather than viewing such emulation as significant primarily in terms of salvation in the hereafter, Santa Lucian people are just as likely to view Jesus’ incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection in the world as proof that heaven may be achieved in the here and now. Over the course of my fieldwork, I came to realize that although Santa Lucian people clearly acknowledge a split between o mundo (this-world) and a world hereafter, such as o céu (heaven) or o paraíso (paradise), they remain relatively uninspired by heavenly or Eden-like concepts of time and place. What interests them much more are the possibilities of divine manifestation in this world. Thus the Pentecostal emphasis on the idea of a New Jerusalem made, literally, from gold and silver is ridiculous to many Catholics I spoke to. As my friend and assistant Lucinha explained, My sister-in-law who is a crente [Pentecostal] told me that Paradise is made of silver and gold; an absolute marvel to behold. Now, these Pentecostals read the Bible very literally. This gold, this silver, doesn’t mean to say it is real gold. When Jesus speaks of gold, he is talking of a treasure, a good thing: his reign. This is why he came into the world.


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Have you ever imagined the village of Santa Lucia where there was only good? Wouldn’t that be a place of gold? If here in Santa Lucia, all of us here, did like Jesus wouldn’t it be heaven? It would!

One of the most significant aspects of this kind of theology is its tendency to tip toward the depiction of Jesus as an ordinary man. Not a God-man with magician-like powers, but a real man, albeit an extremely perceptive man, whose depth of compassion for his fellow humans and intrinsic understanding of human psychology is in itself awe-inspiring. This was the image of Jesus that my friend and informant Marcia attempted to convey when on one occasion she sought to explain to me the parable of the loaves and fishes. In Marcia’s view, when Jesus was called upon to feed five thousand people in the desert, he humbly held up five loaves and two fishes and offered to share these with the gathered crowd. When the crowd saw this, they were so deeply moved by the humility of this gesture that they were compelled to reveal the food they had hidden about their persons. When five thousand people were suddenly willing to emulate Christ and share what little they had with those around them, something that seemed like a miracle occurred: out of nowhere there was enough food for everyone. Through this parable Marcia, like Lucinha, set out explicitly to contrast the rational superiority of her Catholic understanding of the Bible with what she considered as the unenlightened understandings of her Pentecostal compatriots. But I believe that she was also attempting to convey something in particular to me, a foreign anthropologist: that although she was from the stigmatized Northeast and a devout Catholic, she was neither superstitious nor someone who believed in magic. It is important to stress that although I have offered, here, certain generalizations, every person’s religion is also, in various ways, idiosyncratically his or her own. Moreover, just as the salience of religion in Santa Lucian peoples’ lives varies so does the basic cosmological notion. There is no singular take on many such points, including the particulars of birth, death, and the trajectory of souls (almas) in the afterlife. People are generally agreed about the existence of souls, which they believe are sent into the world by God and detach from bodies at physical death to enter either heaven or hell. However, they are vague and divergent on the details of such processes: At what point during conception and gestation does the soul enter the body? What happens to the soul immediately after physical death? What do heaven and hell as places actually look like? When asked about such matters directly, informants were often quick to profess that they “knew nothing” or were the “wrong person” to ask.

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Nonetheless, speculation over theological matters never fails to stir up a good deal of curiosity and interest. This sort of interest, I noted, was just as likely to arise during conversations that I had played no role in prompting. Whether in a Bible study meeting, in the casa de farinha, or whilst seated in the shade of one another’s doorways in late afternoon, discussions might veer onto the finer points of what does and does not constitute sin, the nature of love, whether it is truly possible to love one’s enemy, and whether God regrets having given Man freewill. In such contexts, contributions to theological debates vary. Some individuals partake with an air of curious detachment, simply listening to others holding forth. Other, more confident speakers will deliver improvised sermons or relate something that they once heard a priest say, occasionally with a good deal of performative hyperbole. In addition to this variation, the manner of moral-religious philosophizing alters subtly with the context. For example, during informal gatherings, a sense of joking and irony often pervades much of the moral-ontological discussion that occurs. Underpinning this kind of banter is a sense of pessimism about the human condition. A feeling that “in the end,” as one friend joked, “no matter how hard he tries, a man does more bad things than he does good.” It is perhaps for this reason, as I hope to show in what follows, that Santa Lucians devote so much energy to redressing the balance in other contexts, or at least to rephrasing the existential challenge that confronts them in more resolvable ways. The Santa Lucian People and Me In September 2002, I arrived in Recife to commence an eighteenmonth period of fieldwork. However, it was not until early 2003 that I found myself heading for Santa Lucia. I arrived there one January night, in the back of a pick-up truck, sitting atop my collection of clothes, books, and odd bits of kitchenware. The pick-up stopped outside a house, and as I clambered down from the truck, I remember wondering to myself why on earth the entire village had turned up to watch. Paralyzed with self-consciousness, I stood in one spot glancing around, until the mother of the house where I was to stay stepped up and greeted me with a warm smile. I greeted her back, and somewhere in the crowd someone laughed. I never learned who or why, I simply assumed they were laughing at this bizarre stranger who had descended out of nowhere, carting pots and pans and sporting a funny accent.


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My eventual acceptance as an antropologa here to study nossos customes, nosso jeito da vida (our customs, our way of life) followed a standard, if at times difficult, path. Despite this, I was lucky enough to find myself living with a warm, tolerant, and humorous family, who instantly incorporated me into their daily lives as though I were a “daughter” of sorts. The household was composed of Amauri, his wife Dida, and their two teenage daughters Fabiana, aged nineteen, and Katiana, aged fourteen. Along the stretch of pavement beside my house were the households of four of Dida’s siblings. It was not long before I came to know this extended family and became friends with Lucinha (Dida’s sister-in-law) and Lourdinha (Dida’s sister). Both of these women were instrumental to my research: allowing me to join them on daily outings, introducing me to new people, assisting me with interviews, and occasionally explaining jokes and asides that had gone over my head. I came to spend almost as much time in the houses of these women as I did in my own. Whatever drawbacks there were to my choice of field site, the communicativeness of its inhabitants seemed to more than make up for it. Most people were friendly, several were known locally as conversadores (conversationalists) and seemed only too happy to regale me with stories and anecdotes. As a resident anthropologist it was often frustrating that the best data would occur whenever I least expected it—during casual encounters, and at moments when it would have been impossible to make notes. At certain points I conceded to these trends, abandoning the illusion that my research would follow any predevised and coherent order I had set for it. In fact, I had little choice. Although I was an educated foreigner and, in material terms, more privileged than any of my informants, these facts paled in the rough and tumble of everyday life. The Santa Lucians I came to know well clearly had their own fixations and preoccupations. They were far more eloquent and dexterous with their language than I would ever be, and consequently far better equipped to mould our conversational encounters. This slight imbalance was perhaps in the end fortuitous, for over the long term, the themes that emerged from my research as most interesting and salient were clearly the things that seemed to matter most to them. For the obvious reason that I myself was a woman, the bulk of my participant observation was carried out among women, performing activities such as attending chapel, preparing food, sweeping floors, and scraping manioc. It was during such times when banter ticked back and forth, and I was more or less ignored, that I felt I learnt the most about Santa Lucian life. Opportunely for me, women were

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also in the habit of paying visits to one another in the late afternoon, visits to which I was often invited. Rather than being based around the performance of some communal work activity, visits constituted a form of social interaction between women that involved simply sitting and talking together. Such occasions were usefully appropriated by me for lengthier conversations with people about their lives. “Ask a question, ask!” certain women would demand whenever I came to visit. Ironically, I would find that the minute I was commanded to ask a question, all questions would mysteriously evaporate from my head. Quite often I found Santa Lucian people would end up interviewing me. My participant observation with men was inevitably more limited. Having gained acceptance within the community as “a daughter” in the house of a local family, I felt it would have been inappropriate for me to accompany men I did not know to work or to enter those male spaces such as the pool room and the drinking shack where men tended to spend most of their time when they were not in the fields or at home. I was, therefore, unable to collect data on a significant aspect of village life: the male world of the bar room, where men drink, build alliances, discuss negócio (business), and contest and affirm their social status. However, the fact that I was part of a family in the village allowed me to spend legitimate time in the company of its immediate male members. Over the course of my stay, my host father Amauri became a good friend and a key informant. On occasion I would accompany him on the back of his motorbike as he made his daily rounds, bartering and negotiating the sale of livestock and other objects with various male acquaintances. Amauri’s father, Seu Mané, was another man with whom I was able to spend a good amount of time, watching as he tilled the earth or fed the livestock, or simply sitting with him in the shade of his backyard, chatting about this and that. Unmarried men of my own age were more difficult to access as I was required to maintain a respectful distance from them, as they were from me. A notable exception to this was twenty-one-year-old André who, because he was Fabiana’s fiancé, would often interact with me quite freely. And once I had established regular contact with Seu Mané, it became easier to become acquainted with some of Amauri’s younger brothers who I sought out for their views on particular matters. As time went on and people in the village became accustomed to my going about with a particular project, my assistant and I were able to arrange formal visits and interviews with various older men, in their homes. In this way I strived as best as I could to balance out


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the female bias of my data collection although I cannot claim to have eradicated it entirely. An unanticipated result of my being unmarried at that time was that it led women to bring up the subject of marriage quite often. Indeed, the very assumption that I was innocent about married life seemed to generate in women a desire to describe their own experiences of conjugality. Time and again, those married women I knew well would go out of their way to talk frankly to me about topics that I, in theory, could know little about: sex, contraception, domestic violence, and so forth. I often had the feeling that this was partly because I was an outsider—someone to whom they could relate such things without risk of judgment—but it also seemed in keeping with the way older married women generally related to younger women of marriageable age. Many such descriptions were offered in the form of warnings about the difficulties and travails that marriage and motherhood entailed and were in line with older women’s role in preparing younger women for their own potential futures as mothers and wives. Much has been written by anthropologists about the difficulties of turning lived field experiences into written text. The politics of anthropological representation is a well-worn theme, a theme succinctly summarized by one anthropologist as “a positioned

1.3

Santa Lucian woman

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knowledge of peoples who are made part other by the observer’s eye, and part kin despite it” (McCallum 2001: 2). Not wishing to dwell on this issue at any length here, I am nevertheless obliged to point out to the reader that what this book represents is a partial and subjective account. Had I lived with a different family or been a different person, I would no doubt have produced a rather different piece of work. The process of constructing an academic argument invariably opens up certain lines of inquiry whilst shutting down others and curbing some of the open-ended complexity of the lived, real, world. If I have presented Santa Lucia as a bounded “culture” whose diverse aspects fit neatly into a hermetically sealed system of interpretation, this is more to do with the constraining problems of language and academic convention than any conscious desire to do so. My hope is that in the chapters to follow, the reader may steal some kind of a path into the moral dilemmas facing Santa Lucians in their everyday lives and gain a sense for the strategies they use to cope.14 My principle aim has been to write an ethnography about Santa Lucian people in which their own voices are clearly present— one in which they might recognize themselves even if they disagree with the analyses I put forward.

Chapter 2

Marriage in Santa Lucia

A few nights before her daughter Fabiana’s wedding, Dida and I

were trying to predict which young woman would be next to get married. “If it is you,” Dida said to me, “I’ll tell you to wait and put it off for as long as you can!” “Why?” I asked. Dida looked at me and lowered her voice: “Maya, married life is a risky business. If I could do it all over again, I would not get married. Fabiana, poor creature, doesn’t know what is in front of her. It is only afterwards that you see how life changes.” In Santa Lucia, most people subscribe to the view that it is only through the ambivalent pleasures and pitfalls of a marriage that a person comes to understand the true limits of his or her strengths and weaknesses. Indeed, to survive a marriage and be happy is to successfully negotiate life’s most difficult obstacle course. If a marriage goes well it is, as my friend once said to me, “a coisa melhor que Deus deixou” (the best thing that God left). However, there are plenty of people who will attest the opposite, trotting out the refrain “casamento não é brincadeira, não” (marriage is not child’s play), should the subject arise. As an unmarried person myself, I became a frequent target for thinly veiled warnings about the dangers of married life: the physical hardship, the weight of responsibility, and the beatings and fights. “Ah! The life of the married person is suffering,” an elderly woman once exclaimed in my ear in the midst of a wedding feast. At this I was startled, but also intrigued, for it had started to appear that marriage for Santa Lucian people was a vexing issue; enshrined and celebrated by state and church, yet pervaded by a sense of danger. As a process with political and economic implications, a process that provides the necessary conditions for procreation and therefore the continuation of life, taking up conjugal residence with someone of the opposite sex constitutes an important rite of passage among

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Santa Lucian people. However, as Catholics, Santa Lucians place particular value on the sacramental character of the church wedding, for it is this event that gives the political, economic, and reproductive outcomes of a union spiritual legitimacy and social weight. As João Pina-Cabral has argued for the Catholic peasants of the Portuguese Alto Minho, it is the sacred character of religious marriage that forms the basis of understandings of conjugal households and provides it with particular cosmological significance: Marriage and the household assume a sacred character precisely because they mediate between the evil of sex and the necessary reproduction of the group. Divinity and perfect sanctity are beyond the reach of ordinary human beings. Nevertheless, within the household, and via the sacrament of the marriage, the ideal of purity in reproduction is achieved. (1986: 50)

The legitimizing nature of marriage for women especially is in evidence in certain Catholic and Orthodox societies where Old Testament and Hellenic discourses shape ideas about gender and cosmos. Among the Greek peasants of Juliet du Boulay’s study, for example, the enduring perception that a woman’s nature “holds the seeds of the greatest corruption—a lack of intelligence and a predisposition to sensuality” (1974: 134) is mitigated by the process of marriage that turns women into valued mothers and housewives. As such, argues du Boulay, marriage represents the only relationship “which makes possible for woman the transcendence of her nature which is a part of her social and metaphysical heritage” (1974: 135). In using the term marriage, however, I do so in a sense that includes couples who have set up house together without an actual wedding taking place. In the region where Santa Lucia is based, this type of arrangement is common, particularly among poorer households. Established cohabiting couples with children are generally given “married” status and may refer to one another as meu marido (my husband) or minha espousa (my wife). It is often only in passing or by accident that one learns that an official wedding or ceremony never took place. In Santa Lucia itself, couples who marry with official state and church ceremonies outnumber those who do not. This is not to deny that other types of arrangement do exist, even within the village itself. At the time of my research three young, unmarried mothers lived in their parents’ houses, and various husbands had long since deserted their families, leaving their wives in Santa Lucia to live and raise their children alone. My focus in this chapter, however, is on

M A R R I AG E I N S A N TA L U C I A

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young people and the profound changes that take place in their lives as soon as they become sexually and publicly linked to someone of the opposite sex, whether by official wedding or simply by setting up house together. In doing so I wish to explore what exactly it is about married life in Santa Lucia that leads it to be associated with “suffering” and with “risk.” The risk marriage entails, and how people attempt to negotiate this risk is the central subject of this book. In this chapter, therefore, I not only explore a specific problem, but also set the ethnographic scene for all that follows. For the sake of argument, I begin by describing the most common path taken by young people in Santa Lucia: a path that begins in courtship, progresses into an engagement, and ends in marriage in a civil registry office followed by a ceremony in a church. I shall investigate the claim, made by so many Santa Lucians, that marriage is an occasion of sudden and overwhelming mudança (change) in a person’s life; one that ushers in a hitherto unknown potential for risco (risk) and sofrimento (suffering). I shall approach this claim by looking at the actual changes that marriage occasions in men’s and women’s lives and also by examining some of the lived concrete problems and social and spiritual dilemmas commonly faced by married couples. Finally, I shall explore attitudes toward those who have sought an alternative path to that of marriage; namely Catholic priests and religious ascetics. I shall argue that people’s attitudes toward such alternatives are at best ambiguous, and at worst, hostile. However, the ambiguity of people’s attitudes toward these alternatives suggests not only that marriage is a socially productive and therefore necessary path, but also that although its spiritual risks are great, so are its spiritual rewards. The Marriage Process Being Young, Being “Solteira” To be jovem (young) and solteira (single) in Santa Lucia is to be more or less any age provided one is unmarried and/or living with parents or guardians. Even those who clearly have a long-term namorado/namorada (boy/girlfriend) are still considered “single” and will be until the day they move together into their own house. For many couples, there is an interim stage in which their commitment becomes official. During this phase, couples are known as noivos (fiancés). Frequently, however, men and women may stay living under their parents’ roof well into their thirties, and if they never marry

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they are unlikely to leave at all. Most households are headed by the conjugal couple, and all others living with them are, regardless of age, under their authority. This situation is particularly marked for children who are expected to demonstrate utmost levels of respect toward their parents. Rules that must be adhered to include addressing one’s parents in the distant, respectful register; requesting each parent’s blessing upon waking each morning and obeying all parental orders without complaint. Older people recall that in the past, children were also expected to stand up when a parent walked into a room and to ask for forgiveness if they wished to cross a parent’s path. Today the rules for showing respect are fewer, but those that remain are strictly observed. In general, while young people remain under their parents’ authority, they are not expected to contribute financially toward the basic upkeep of the house. They are, however, expected to ajuda (help) their parents by carrying out tasks and chores at home, in the casa de farinha, and sometimes in the fields. It is important to note, however, that from puberty onward, young people labor not only to help out their parents, but also to earn their own money. Doing so, they will then be expected to buy their own school supplies, clothes, toiletries, and any other luxury items they might want or need. Only in the poorest of families, or under exceptional circumstances such as the death or illness of the household’s main earner, are children expected to contribute toward the cost of daily upkeep. In many of Santa Lucia’s households, therefore, unmarried men who work are likely to be better off than their own fathers in terms of disposable income. Unlike their fathers and married peers, they possess the money to buy consumer items, such as watches, motorbikes, and stereos and to cruise the highways eating and drinking in churrascarias (bar and grill restaurants). Once their basic household duties have been performed, whether or not and how much, young men and women work outside the home is up to them. In contrast to married adults, unmarried people have a good deal of time to pursue nonwork activities. When not at school, studying, or performing chores, girls tend to fill their hours doing one another’s hair and nails, going to festas (dances/ festivals), watching local football matches, listening to music on the radio, or watching Brazilian soap operas on television. In addition to attending festas and playing football, young men are likely to spend time buying and selling motorbikes and other forms of transport, playing pool, and drinking at the barraca. Pass even a day in the village, and one is likely to be struck by a qualitative


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difference in the lives of married and single adults: a young, unmarried woman may pass an entire day on the chapel steps gossiping with her friends while her mother bustles to and fro, transporting washing, balancing buckets of water on her head, shelling beans, herding livestock, cooking, and sweeping the front yard. A young unmarried man will rev loudly through the village streets, flashing his new motorbike while his father watches from the sidewalk, in ragged, working clothes. But this kind of difference is generally indulged by older village residents, the pervasive attitude being that the premarital phase is rightfully one of farar e divertimento (fun and games), because it is the only time in the life cycle one is truly free to do so. This was made clear to me one day when, in response to Dida complaining about her heavy workload, I asked why her two teenage daughters did not perform more chores around the house: “Ah, I let them be,” she replied “for once married, they too will know real work.” Festas and Courtship In Santa Lucia, the stated preference is for marriage within the village. Boys are encouraged to marry nonrelated girls from within the village because, it is said, that way they already know everyone and will not have trouble fitting in.1 Marrying within the village is also held to be ideal because a girl remains close to her parents. In practice, many men end up marrying women from neighboring villages; however, the endogamous ideal is sustained as much as possible through a preference for marrying women from villages within a seven to eight kilometer radius.2 Aside from the preference for marrying within the village, who one marries is a matter of personal choice. Most marriages occur after a period of namoro (dating) that has lasted for at least a year or more. Residence has a tendency to be virilocal in that a woman will move to a house built on her husband’s family’s land. Exceptions to this happen when landless men marry landed women; in this event the man is likely to move into a house on his wife’s family’s land. Sex before marriage is officially acknowledged as a pecado (sin), both for men and women. In practice, however, men in particular are encouraged, even expected, to be sexually active from their early teens. Girls, by contrast, are ideally expected to be virgins on their wedding day, but often become sexually active from just as early an age as boys. Many teenage girls discreetly avail themselves of the contraceptive pill, which can be bought over the counter in any pharmacy,

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and some even obtain it for free from the local health post. Of the young, unmarried girls who became pregnant during the time of my fieldwork, I knew of at least two who subsequently had marriages hurriedly arranged for them. With time, some of the older married women I came to know well admitted that they had not been virgins on their wedding day. Although premarital pregnancy is still regarded as something of a scandal, it does not provoke as severe a reaction as it did a few generations ago. Many young people begin dating someone of the opposite sex at a festa. Throughout the year and across the region, festas are held in different towns and villages to commemorate patron saints’ days, celebrate religious holidays and, in the run-up to an election, to rally support for the local administration. A typical festa runs for two or three days and involves fairground rides, food stalls, bars, and a constant stream of different bands that play forró (regional music). Although festas are attended by people from all social backgrounds, they are particularly popular with young people from rural areas who live in more isolated kin-based communities and have little opportunity to meet members of the opposite sex who are not their immediate cousins, nieces, or nephews. In their midteens, boys become increasingly obsessed with buying motorbikes that will transport them out of the village and across the region to meet girls at festas. A local festa is always an animated affair, one that takes over the entire village for the length of its duration. Weeks beforehand, rumors begin as to who will be wearing what, which bands will be playing, and how many people are expected to come from other parts of the region. As the sun goes down and stars begin to light the evening sky, a procession of motorbikes heads out of the village in the direction of the town or village where the festa is to be held. Well before the band is due to take to the stage young men begin pouring into the area on gleaming motorbikes, as do groups of girls wearing tight jeans and colorful lycra tops. While waiting for the band to start up, alcohol is consumed, jokes are exchanged, furtive glances are cast, and anticipation prevails. Dancing lasts for several hours, sometimes going on into the following day. Forró is ostensibly an innocent pursuit, but like many dances performed with an opposite sex partner, it is readily appropriated as a way of demonstrating sexual interest in someone. Single men are apt to use dancing as a way of becoming intimate with a woman. Similarly, women may signal whether they like a man via the level of physical distance and pressure they maintain in their posture during the dance. An implicit connection is made between being a good


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dancer, that is someone who possesses ritmo (rhythm) and having sexual prowess. Popular jokes and innuendos suggest that a person who lacks rhythm on the dance floor is bound to lack rhythm in bed. The public intimacy afforded by forró dancing is evident in the kinds of discussions that take place after a festa: open teasing between the generations goes on based upon who was sighted dancing with whom. Intimate discussion among peers builds upon this, involving explicit disclosures about sexual experiences that occurred during and after the festivities. Dancing, then, is often a first step on the path namoro, which may in time lead to marriage. Given the sexual connotations of dancing with someone of the opposite sex it may seem strange that despite the preoccupation with chastity and virginity before marriage, dancing is something that only unmarried people do. Married people rarely dance, and when they do it is only ever for very brief, curtailed periods. Instead, they adopt the role of spectators, watching the younger ones shuffle and gyrate. Such moments often provoke married people into reminiscing about their own premarital dancing days, and it is common to hear boastful recollections about how well a person used to dance back in the day when they were solteiro (single). Occasionally someone from an older generation will express disapproval of modern forms of forró, with its sexual lyrics and lewder styles of dancing, but in general the sexual undercurrent of the festa is viewed as legitimate. “See how they dance now,” a married woman once commented to me, regarding the couple gyrating before her; “once they are married, dancing like that will end!” Bikes versus Bricks: The Process of Building a House When a boy and girl become namorada e namorado (girlfriend and boyfriend), they still attend festas but mainly to dance with one another. Once their courtship is official, it becomes customary for the boy to pass the whole of Sunday at his girlfriend’s house. There on the front porch, under the watchful gaze of her entire family, the couple spend time together. Secret sexual liaisons are easily arranged, however, particularly if the girl has a pretext for leaving the house alone, such as attending school, and the boy has access to some private form of transport. When a couple have been in a serious relationship for some time, it is expected that they will eventually marry. For many young couples, the intention to marry arises gradually over the course of a steady relationship. Before actually discussing the prospect of marriage with his girlfriend, a boy may begin to demonstrate his

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intention to marry her by embarking upon the protracted process of purchasing materials needed to build a house. Early on in my fieldwork, I asked Fabiana whether she planned to marry. “By the end of the year I hope,” was her reply. Surprised, I asked whether she and Andre were officially engaged. “Not exactly,” she responded, “but he has started to buy the bricks, so I think it is only a matter of time before he asks.” Once a boy has secured a plot of land from his father, or perhaps bought a plot of land on which to build on for himself, he begins to invest his money in bricks that will pile up slowly, either in his parent’s front yard or on the plot of land where the house is to be built. The pile of bricks increases in size, month by month. Only when it has reached a reasonable height (i.e., sufficient to build the outer walls of the house), he will begin to purchase additional materials, such as sacks of cement, timber, terracotta tiles for the roof, a kitchen sink, and so forth. The construction of the house will then commence and continue sporadically from month to month depending upon the amount of money available to be spent on it. When the house is nearing completion, it is the boy’s responsibility to furnish it with all the essential items. For couples belonging to small-holding families, the basic furniture requirement for marriage is a double bed, a table with chairs, a sofa, an aluminum pan rack for the kitchen, and a television with a separate antenna. Fridges, gas cookers, and glassfronted cabinets in which to house televisions and display ornaments are considered luxury items and can be purchased or acquired in the years to come. The practice of purchasing building materials gradually rather than saving up money to buy everything in one go was explained to me in terms of inflation. For most people who exist on low and unreliable incomes, dramatic fluctuations in the Brazilian currency from one month to the next make saving money rather pointless. The pervasive attitude is to buy whatever one can as soon as possible, before its market value increases. This protracted and rather public process of purchasing materials, whatever its dominant motivation, has, however, a certain social benefit. It signals to the families of both the boy and the girl that the couple intend to marry, and it gives time to both sets of parents to grow accustomed to the idea and to let their views on the impending union be known. Thus by the time the boy has reached the stage of having to officially request his future fatherin-law’s permission to marry the girl, he has a fair idea of whether the request will go smoothly. Normally, if a boy has been diligent enough to work hard and plough his earnings into bricks for a house, he will be considered a suitable future husband for a girl, and there will be no


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objection on the part of her parents. In one case I knew of, however, the girl’s parents had openly disapproved of the marriage prompting the couple to elope. In another case, it became known that the young couple had eloped to São Paulo because the boy had neither the funds nor the land on which to build a house. Some months later the couple returned, expecting a baby. At this juncture the girl’s parents helped the couple to build their own house and a marriage took place. Couples intending to marry do not always need to build their own houses. On occasion one or another partner will inherit a house, or if one set of parents possess the financial means, they will buy the young couple their own house as a form of wedding gift. If the boy is particularly poor, or not given to the idea of committing his earnings to building materials, it is not unheard of for a girl to work and invest her own money in a pile of bricks and cement. One woman I knew well proudly advertised the fact that she had built her own house because she had been desperate to marry, and her fiancé had been too lazy to get on with it. In most cases, however, the boy takes on the major financial commitment in establishing the future household, and the girl watches closely as the pile of bricks slowly increases. The size of a pile of bricks and the speed with which it grows can signal a man’s level of commitment to his future wife. A pile of bricks can take anything from months to years to grow into a proper house, depending upon the success of that agricultural year, the reliability of the house-builder’s income, and, of course, his or her eagerness to get married. Brick piles slow down and stop growing for various reasons. Some people begin growing piles of bricks and then forget about them for months at a time. When courting couples fall out or break up, piles of bricks may stop growing. However, a common reason for a pile to stop growing is because the man’s income has been diverted into some other major expense such as buying or running a car or a motorbike. One girl in the village had been waiting for a pile of bricks to transform into a house for over three years. When I asked her why she thought it was taking so long, she cited her boyfriend’s passion for motorbikes: “that bike of his eats up all his money,” she explained. The contest between bricks and motorbikes is, in many ways, a deeply symbolic one. It underscores the gender-driven tension that men confront throughout their lives between mobility and fixity. Married women, for example, never ride motorbikes on their own, even though they might have done when they were single. From the moment that a woman gets married the ideal is that she gives up a large part of the former independent mobility she may have enjoyed and becomes ever more fixed—like the bricks of her house—to the

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domestic sphere. In time, the house and the land surrounding it become inextricably a part of her. It is a well-voiced fact in Santa Lucia that although men build them, in the end houses belong to women. If a couple separates, it is the woman who keeps the house, even if it is on his family’s land.3 By contrast, men, whether married or unmarried, place an extremely high value upon owning transport for it signals masculinity. Cars and motorbikes not only symbolize wealth and status, but also allow men to define themselves in opposition to women as mobile. The importance of private transport for defining masculinity is well summed up in the case of one young man called Dimas. Dimas’s brother-in-law had offered to sell him his part of their shared ownership of a truck, making Dimas the sole owner of the truck and considerably better off in the long term. Dimas had long desired to become the truck’s sole owner but the only way he could afford to buy the other half was by selling his car. The car was of no financial use to him—he used it simply to get about on personal errands, to festas and so forth—and yet it was his most prized possession. Dimas deliberated many days over whether to take up his brother-in-law’s offer, knowing that if he did not, his brother-in-law would sell his share to another local man. Finally, he decided not to buy the other half of the truck for the sole reason that he could not bear to be without a car. “I cannot be stuck in the village,” he explained to me when I queried him about it. “A man has to be free to leave any time he wants and for that he needs his own wheels,” he said. In Santa Lucia a free-roaming male is implicitly defined as a virile one for he remains unimprisoned by the domestic sphere symbolized by the house and its immediate grounds.4 Nevertheless, through their roles as husbands and fathers, men are intrinsically bound up with the domestic, the feminine, and with the sense of bricks-and-mortar fixity that it holds. Young men are therefore extremely reluctant to give up the transport they own and will try, as far as possible, to keep their motorbikes or cars running while striving to invest in the conjugal home. Weddings and Trousseaus Once the house is nearing completion, the boy pays a visit to the girl’s family and formally requests her father’s permission to marry her. Only when permission has been granted may he place a gold wedding band on the ring finger of the girl’s right hand and wear one on the same finger himself, as a symbol of their engagement. When the house is ready but still unpainted, the girl organizes a mutirão


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(voluntary work party) made up of unmarried female age-mates to help her lavar o chão (wash the floor) of the house. The group of girls enters the house with buckets and brooms to sweep out the dirt of the construction process and to wash the walls and floor down, leaving them clean for the paint and the furniture. At this stage a girl will become increasingly concerned to complete the trousseau that she is likely to have been collecting from the time that the first bricks were purchased. The trousseau is made up of all the lighter furnishings that the house will require, such as bed linen, table-cloths, towels, pillows, cutlery, plates, and kitchen utensils. To this end will be organized an afternoon chá de cozinha (kitchen tea-party) to which all young, unmarried, and recently married women in the village are obliged to attend, bringing with them a gift for the house. Men are banished from the house and the girl’s mother and older female relatives lay on a spread of food and drink for the visiting crowd of gift-bearing women. Gifts are stored in the back bedroom as the guests arrive and are only brought out midway through the party for a game that involves the bride-to-be being blindfolded and having to guess what each item is. If she fails to guess correctly, she is forced to drink a shot of cane liquor and to take an item of clothing off. The end result is normally a room full of laughing women and a very inebriated and nearly naked future bride. In Santa Lucia marriage consists of a civil ceremony in the local registry office and a church ceremony that occurs a week or so later. A couple are not considered truly married until the church marriage takes place, and it is only during the church ceremony that the engagement rings are swapped from the ring finger of the right hand to the ring finger of the left hand. However, what is arguably more important than even the church ceremony is the feast afterward that will last long into the night, involving copious amounts of food, drink, music, and dancing. It is a well-observed fact that wedding feasts are cripplingly expensive affairs, and those occurring in Santa Lucia are no exception. The wedding feast is financed by the bride’s parents and traditionally takes place in their home or at least in the bride’s natal village. When Fabiana, the eldest daughter of the house where I lived, was to be married to Andre, her father, Amauri, agonized for months beforehand about the expense and the problem of whom to invite and whom not to invite. On one occasion he became so exasperated with the mounting pressure and expectation on him that he threatened to cancel the feast altogether. After a moment’s tense silence Dida quietly reminded Amauri that Fabiana was not the “daughter of a dog” (filha de cachoro), and the feast was back on once again. A few weeks

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before the wedding was to take place, Amauri went from house to house issuing a formal verbal invitation to each household to attend. Then, two days before the wedding, the slaughter of animals for the feast and other food preparations began. Almost half of the village was involved, and large batches of manioc cake were baked to supply the volunteers with snacks as they helped to prepare. Marriage, Transition, and Spiritual Risk Before the religious wedding, engaged couples are officially required to attend a special session run by the Catholic Church, in which they learn about the nature of the spiritual commitment they are about to take. In this session they are taught that in order to marry they must truly love one another and that once they are married, living well together means living by the Christian commandments. At one particular session that I attended, men were encouraged to treat their wives fairly by abstaining from excessive drink and violence. “A Christian husband doesn’t beat a wife. He loves her and consults her when making a decision,” stressed the priest; “remember, she is an equal in the eyes of God and deserves your respect.” Back in the village, in the run up to the wedding, future brides and grooms are exposed to prenuptial advice of a different sort. Boys receive jocular tips from married peers about how to sexually satisfy a wife, and girls receive warnings from married female kin about the trabalho duro (hard work), the sofrimento (suffering), and the pain of childbirth that awaits. Although an impending wedding is, for the most part, viewed positively and looked forward to with much excitement, it is also an occasion for ambivalent reflection about the nature of married life. It is in the run-up to a wedding that older, married people are most likely to issue warnings about the responsibility that the young couple are about to assume and to intimate that marriage is a high risk venture, albeit with potentially high rewards. The transformation and danger that marriage occasions in men and women’s lives are widely acknowledged and frankly expressed— particularly by older, married people. During fieldwork I heard the subject discussed on numerous occasions by people of both sexes. However, it was only by closely observing and speaking to younger, newly wedded people that I began to build up a picture of how this transformation was actually experienced. Whereas some changes were physical and habitual, having to do with work and survival, others related to moral personhood and the individual’s spiritual state. In practice each transformation simultaneously implies and reinforces


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the others, amounting to a palpably real and holistic experience of discontinuity between one kind of life and the next. In the next section, I use ethnographic description to evoke the changes in social status that recently married people undergo and the practical hardships that often accompany them. In the subsequent section, I explore some of the moral and spiritual dilemmas that married people are exposed to; dilemmas that cause marriage to be categorized as a risco (risk) because it necessitates entering into sin, leading the person away from God. Practical Survival and Social Responsibility Giovani and Isabella were a quiet and congenial couple in their early twenties. They had been married for two years and had a one-yearold daughter. One day they agreed to do an interview with me on their experience of married life. After hearing about their wedding, and looking through their wedding album, I asked them how their lives had changed since being single. Isabella and Giovani thought about my question and glanced at one another shyly. “Life now is different in many ways,” Isabella ventured, “from one day to the next, everything changes.” Giovani nodded in agreement and joined in: “Married life is a lot harder. How can I explain it?” He paused, grasping for the right words and then went on: “When single, if you work you eat, if you don’t work you still eat. When married, if you work you eat, if you don’t work you don’t eat.” Somehow Giovani’s earnest expression coupled with his carefully chosen words communicated a great deal more to me on this occasion than the obvious fact that marriage entails the setting up of an independent productive unit. What was communicated was an experience of new and overwhelming responsibility. In truth, I had often picked up on such a feeling when in the company of young, recently married people, noting in them a peculiar mixture of burden and bewilderment. On my return to Santa Lucia, a year or so after my initial fieldwork, I went to visit my old friends Marcio and Edivania in their new house. The pair had been engaged during the time of my previous stay. In my absence they had married, and by the time I returned they had been married for two months. I had come to know both Marcio and Edivania as engaging and fun loving people. On the day I went to visit them they warmly welcomed me into their house. In accordance with his role as head of the household, Marcio took the lead in showing me around the two freshly cemented rooms of their recently built house. He offered me a seat on a brand new sofa

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and ordered Edivania to bring me a glass of beer. Before me on a shelf were displayed several fancy objects that they had received as wedding gifts: an ornamental clock; a small vase containing plastic roses with perspex dew drops on their petals, and a ceramic figurine of a blonde haired infant, hands pressed together in prayer. “Would you like to see the wedding album?” Edivania asked, handing me a photograph album wrapped for protection in a polythene bag. I could not help but notice a difference in Edivania. She seemed tired and preoccupied in a way she had never appeared before. I learnt that upon getting married she had found it necessary to take on a new job as a door to door seller of lottery cards and cosmetics, which was in addition to her regular work in the casa de farinha. I could see that my visit was causing her to worry about making a proper impression. “Virgin Maria! I have not had time to make doce (pudding) for guests,” she suddenly exclaimed. And before I could protest she had disappeared to a neighbor’s house to fetch some. As I looked through the photos I asked Marcio if he was enjoying married life. With a subtle grin he replied that he was. I then asked him how married life is compared with life as a single man. Marcio furrowed his brow and considered for a moment. “É outra vida!” (It’s a different life!) he replied, casting his eyes away from me and out toward the open door. I prompted him to elaborate. “It’s not all happiness, no,” he carried on, “one can’t compare it with what went before. That was one life, this is another completely.” The notion that marriage constitutes “another life” entailing a sense of rupture with the life that came before is well elaborated in local thought. Older married people are apt to spend time contrasting a vida antes (life before) or life quando eu era solteira (when I was single) with a vida do casal (married life). Women were often keen to share with me the feelings and experiences of change they underwent at marriage—changes that seemingly occurred, as one woman in her forties put it, “de um dia a outro” (from one day to the next). The same woman explained this sudden change to me by referring to her own wedding memories: Back in those days, people were still innocent before they married. There was no knowledge of the different life to come. It was very much like this: the day of my wedding I was still a moça (girl), the day afterwards I was uma senhora (a woman). On my wedding day I got up and asked for my father’s blessing. The day afterwards I got up and my father wasn’t there. No one made me my coffee. I had to make it myself.


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Dona Valdomira, a woman in her sixties, had married at the age of twelve. In an interview she described the change it had wrought for her in the following way: When I married I was still but a child, such a child that I even took a box of dolls with me to my husband’s house! One day I was so busy playing with my dolls that I forgot the beans on the stove and they burnt. Ave Maria! I was scared thinking my husband would come home and beat me, but he didn’t. He put fresh beans to cook and said: “don’t let this happen again.” . . . Even though God made me a respectable marriage, I preferred my life before. After I married my mother would visit and I would cry and say “Mama don’t leave me here,” and she would say “Daughter, I will. You are a married woman now.”

When a couple marries they undergo a literal overnight change in status. A young woman goes from being referred to as a moça (girl) to a mulher (woman) and switches from living in her parents’ house under their authority to living in her own where she is the dona da casa (female head of house/housewife). A similar change in status is experienced by the husband who turns from a rapaz (boy) into a homem (man) and becomes the dono da casa (head of house). There is no doubt that marriage offers young people a welcome escape from parental control and an increase in social status; however, the pleasures of conjugal autonomy come at a price. The responsibilities of married life descend immediately upon a couple the day after their wedding, and once they have descended, they are with the person for life. For men, marriage means working to support one’s household. Most young men will have started working full time long before getting married, therefore the amount of labor they perform may not actually increase. After marrying, however, work is no longer a matter of choice. A married man is obliged to work, whether that work is near or far from his home. The newfound obligation to labor and to spend all earnings on the conjugal unit is experienced by men as a radical change in their lives. Before marriage how much money a man spends on the construction of his own future house is his decision, and what is left over is likely to be spent on clothes, transport of various kinds, festas, and drinking sprees with other male friends. Once married, a man’s earnings must be spent first and foremost on the household he has set up with his wife. In almost all cases, the transition in spending priority makes masculine recreational activity difficult to finance and a conflict of interest emerges. It is often the case that in the first year of marriage, a wife

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will be less able to earn money outside the home due to the pressures of pregnancy, lactation, and child-rearing. This is the time that a man is most likely to relinquish whatever transport he might own. Men would often speak regretfully about the change in lifestyle that marriage had wrought on them. On my return to the village, Andre and Fabiana had been married almost a year. Once, as I sat reminiscing with Andre about the festas we had been to in the past, he reminded me that when he was a single man he had once owned a motorbike. “Man!” he exclaimed, “with that bike I used to go to every festa that was on. Now it is changed, now we have to eat. Well, we have to eat, so where is the money for festas to come from?” For women, marriage bestows a similarly heavy set of obligations. Depending upon the social and economic status of her husband, a woman may acquire the responsibility of working outside the home to support the household on top of all domestic chores. This is often the case due to the fact that women tend to achieve a higher level of education than men and are thus more likely to gain salaried work as teachers and health post workers in the local municipality. In addition to this, marriage confers upon women a hitherto unknown amount of domestic work. One of the key chores that separate married from unmarried women, for example, is the washing of clothes. An unmarried woman living at home may help out with smaller tasks such as the hanging out of washed items, but the bulk of the wash is always the responsibility of the dona da casa. Washing clothes by hand is a tiring job that requires strength and a certain level of acquired technique. The larger a woman’s household, the more hours she must spend scrubbing and wringing out denim jeans, cotton shirts, and woolen blankets. It is a job that can take up two days of every week, a job that many women say they only do a pús (reluctantly, by force). The same applies for the preparation of food: if a recently married girl is unable to cook, she and her husband are likely to go hungry. Once married, it is unacceptable for a couple to turn up at the house of either of their parents expecting to eat without having been invited. For girls, marriage is always more complicated in practice than it appears when single. The young wives I talked to were full of stories about how they thought they were prepared for the tasks of married life only to find, upon marrying, that there was still so much to learn. Fabiana, for example, was still unable to kill a chicken months after having been married. She would routinely beg Dida to perform this task, while Dida would forcefully urge her to learn to do it herself. Isabella recalled for me how she did not know how to bake the cornmeal cake that her husband Giovani liked to eat before work in the


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mornings. After various disastrous attempts she had borrowed more eggs from a neighbor to try once again, and once again the result was inedible. She related how upset she had been for wasting the week’s food supply, and how guilty she had felt when Giovani went off to work the next morning without eating at all. The sudden transition involved in marriage is generally acknowledged as producing problems for young women who may not have yet acquired all the skills necessary for running a house. It is therefore common, in the first two weeks following the wedding, for female kin to spend a lot of time visiting the new bride in her home, offering to help her with her work and providing advice on how to do things. In the week following the wedding, Fabiana’s house was filled most hours of the day with visiting female relatives, who helped her to sweep her floor, hang out her washing, and prepare Andre’s meals. On one occasion I was present as Dona Maria, Fabiana’s mother-in-law, suddenly appeared at the back door while Fabiana was cooking. “You have to add coriander to the meat while it is cooking or it won’t do,” she said, leaning against the doorframe with folded arms. Dishcloth in hand and looking mildly beleaguered, Fabiana peered into her pot. Dona Maria came into the kitchen, pushed up her sleeves, and began helping Fabiana to prepare her husband’s lunch. Moral Dilemmas and Spiritual Accountability Whereas Pina-Cabral (1986) and du Boulay (1974) have drawn out the positive and legitimating nature of divinely ordained Christian marriage, William Christian (1972) has proposed a more negative view of marriage, emphasizing its ultimately profane character. For Christian, writing of Spanish Catholic peasants, marriage is morally and cosmologically problematic despite its social productiveness and sacramental tenor: The final step of the descent from the mountain, the irremediable exit from the Garden of Eden, is marriage. In San Sebastian the mothers cry when their daughters are wed. I asked my widowed landlady why. Her response was, “Because they know in advance what kind of life the couple is in for. And it will not be good. Crosses, Crosses, and more Crosses.” Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden to live by the sweat of their brow. Eve had to suffer the pains of childbirth, and even Jesus had to carry his Cross before the Resurrection. (1972: 157)

For Christian, the polluting nature of marriage is based primarily upon the inherent impurity of sexual union, but it also overlaps with

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those active years of the life cycle that manifest a tension between the concepts of human nature as “dominated by self-interest” and human nature as “devoted to the service and glory of God” (1972: 157). Such observations appear to resonate with perceptions of marriage among Santa Lucians. In Santa Lucia, the overnight increase in responsibility that marriage enforces is matched by an overnight change in spiritual status. In local perception, marriage is a place from which there is no return; not merely in the sense that divorce is strongly frowned upon, but because it is a stage in the life course that is deemed to irrevocably change the inner person both in the eyes of society and in the eyes of God. Despite the fact that a marriage is a profoundly welcome and celebratory event, it brings a whole new set of moral conundrums to bear on the lives of the newly weds. As it bestows full adulthood on persons, it marks the moment from which they are held fully accountable for sinful thoughts and acts. It is this increase in moral accountability, I believe, that Santa Lucians have in mind when they speak about marriage as a high-risk venture. And it is this increase in moral accountability that Dida was alluding to when, shortly before Fabiana and Andre’s wedding, she remarked to her future son-in-law: “You have to go and confess and soon, because once you are married you really start to sin.” Dida’s comment to Andre alerted me to the widely held belief that married life poses spiritual challenges. As my friend Lucinha once explained during an interview, married people are felt to be more likely than unmarried people to be proud, covetous, greedy, and selfish: Lucinha: I will tell you how it is: when one marries, life becomes more complicated. When you are single, all you think about are foolish things, what will I wear to the next festa? That sort of thing. When a person marries, he starts to notice things that he never noticed before. Maya: What sort of things does he notice? Lucinha: When I married I noticed that we were poor. If one is a dona da casa, one notices what the house next door is like—if it is better or worse than yours. One becomes covetous, envious. Maya: But do you think that God minds if a person wants to have a nice house? Lucinha: No, I don’t think God minds. But it does say in the Bible that to want what other people have is a sin. And also, one cannot have too much pride in one’s things. The business of pride is a very big sin.


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For both men and women, then, marriage is a stage in which social competitiveness is thought to come most naturally to the fore. Married people, as largely self-reliant persons, are perceived as having a greater tendency to compare their success against that of others. They are commonly recognized as being more susceptible to feelings of envy and pride regarding the products of marriage such as houses, work, and children. And pride and envy, as either conscious or unconscious expressions of evil, are widely acknowledged to be serious pecados (sins). One of the most problematic aspects of marriage, however, is that it marks the moment from which people become socially recognized as sexually active. In Santa Lucia it is generally recognized that sex, even within marriage, is dangerous and potentially spiritually polluting. Jokes and stories about brides and grooms depict marriage as an ambiguous spiritual concession to the inevitability of desejo or tesão (lust, sexual desire).5 Although reproduction is acknowledged as a positive consequence of copulation, desejo is inherently problematic for several interconnected reasons. Many people I talked to regarded the fall of Adam and Eve, in true Augustinian fashion, as being down to the acquisition of a type of consciousness that led to sexual desire.6 Some of my informants saw this as part of the justification of the Catholic Church’s prohibition on the use of contraception and any sexual practice that does not allow for conception to occur. A much more public and worrisome dilemma is thus faced by most village women upon marriage when they have to decide whether to use contraception.7 In the same interview, Lucinha told me that the most difficult decision of her life had been her decision to operate against having more children after the birth of her third child. Afterward she had felt an urgent need to confess her pecado to her priest but was unable to pluck up the courage to do so. Eventually, she traveled to another town where she was able to confess with a priest who did not know her. In discussing this sensitive topic with me, however, Lucinha also made it clear that she regarded sexual pleasure for its own sake, within marriage, as a necessary means of “living well” together with her husband. The danger of sex, she told me, lay in the fact that it made people think só em si mesmo, em sua prazer (only in oneself, only in one’s own pleasure). In short, it is more often the egocentric emotions generated by sex such as guloso (greed), orgulho (pride), vaidade (vanity), and ciúme (jealousy), rather than the act in and of itself, that are the cause of spiritual pollution and potentially of spiritual, social, and even physical death. All sexual jealousy between couples

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that results in violence is put down as evidence of this fact. And it is precisely within marriage that the consequences of such emotions are most violently and poignantly played out, thus accounting for the batidas (beatings), desgosto (hurts), and traição (betrayal) perceived as common to married life. In chapter 5, I will explore this theme in more detail. What I want to point out here is simply that for my informants, it is not sexual intercourse per se that spiritually pollutes the person so much as the dangerous and destructive emotions it gives rise to, emotions such as pride and possessiveness that in turn may lead to sinful, violent acts. If the moral dilemma of contraception is one that is faced predominantly by women, the moral dilemma of negócio (commerce) is faced predominantly by men. An important part of any man’s role as family provider lies in his ability to negociar (deal in commerce/do business). Negócio is a skill that both men and women may develop, although it is predominantly associated with men. Traditionally, it is a husband’s role to negotiate an exchange for any livestock or agricultural produce that his household produces, once or twice a year, with the owner of the local amarzem (grain store). It is also a husband’s role to make the weekly food purchase at market. To be good at these essential tasks a man must have a cabeça fria (cold head) and be sabido (knowing, cunning, clever). The moral, religious problem that such personal qualities pose shall be discussed further in chapters 5 and 6. What needs to be stressed here is that for Santa Lucians, a talent for commerce involves an ability to pensar em vantagem (gain the upper hand). This is a quintessentially selfish act whereby one man profits at another’s expense. It was pointed out to me on various occasions that innocent people could not be sabido. Being sabido implies a certain knowledge of the world and especially of gente (people) based on worldly, lived experience. Children, for example, are categorically opposed to gente sabida (cunning, clever people), and hence adults in possession of childish innocence are said to be ruim de negócio (bad at business). For men, however, the doing of negócio is not restricted to weekly trips to market or an annual negotiation with the owner of a local amarzem or casa de farinha. It is a constant and ongoing obsession. The buying and selling of goods and livestock for profit are done as much to improve one’s social status and for divertimento (enjoyment) as it is to make money. Men, young and old, are constantly seeking to barter for or buy one another’s cattle, caged birds, motorbikes, bicycles, or any other item that might be sold on to somebody else for a profit. The apical expression of this obsession is the feira de


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troca (exchange fair), which occurs once a week in the local town on the day of the food market. On a jumbled side street, set apart from the main market, men can take along virtually anything for sale and exchange. Items on display at this fair tend to range rather eclectically from worn-out pairs of shoes, broken watches, and newborn puppies to brand new bicycles, helmets, and motorbikes. Men who are very sabido can make a lot of money through negócio, and although little of the income derived in this way is, in practice, expended on the household, it is generally believed that a man’s talent for negócio will benefit his family at least in terms of prestige. Thus the ability to pensar em vantagem is acknowledged as being one of the skills necessary to be classed as a good husband/provider. When a young man called Luciano became engaged to be married, other men joked that he was too burro (naïve, stupid) to be a good husband. This was based purely on the supposed fact that Luciano was bad at negócio. He was mercilessly teased that his new wife would have to take charge of his negócio if she did not want to spend the rest of her life eating her food puro (pure)—as in rice and beans without meat. Above all, however, it is the whole new set of affinal relations that marriage brings about that forces the married couple into making morally difficult choices about whose side of the family joint resources should be divided. The moral dilemma faced in such circumstances is particularly acute for men who, in most cases, have the final say in decisions about how to spend and divide up resources such as land and accommodation. In Santa Lucia, kinship is reckoned bilaterally and inheritance is equally distributed between males and females. Residence is predominantly virilocal, but once a woman is married she is thought to have an equal claim over her husband’s resources, as does he over hers. After a couple is married, kin on both sides continue to exert demands on the couple’s time, labor, and particularly on their resources. The injunction to share land and labor with close consanguineal kin is strong, and this, unsurprisingly, can lead to accusations of selfishness and wrongful conduct from either side of the family. Men, in particular, always face pressure to work in partnership with brothers rather than brothers-in-law. A classic tension thus arises when a married brother goes to work in São Paulo and is faced with the choice of leaving his parcel of land in the hands of a male consanguine or an affinal brother-in-law. In the majority of cases, the land is lent to a consanguineally related brother rather than divided on a more equal basis with an affine, and this occurs even in those cases where the land being left is the actual inheritance of the wife. This happened to Dida and Amauri when they moved to São Paulo

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for three years before my stay. The land that was Dida’s inheritance was the only land that the couple owned, and, rather than accept an offer of share-cropping from a brother-in-law, Amauri decided to allow his brother who owned no land at all to work it alone while they were away. Similar tensions arise when it comes to caring for aged relatives. If a couple have no sons and no unmarried daughters at home to help look after them, they may depend upon the material support of a sonin-law. A man in such a position is often divided between having to support both his own and his wife’s parents—a situation that often leads to marital disputes. The Alternative to Marriage Although marriage situates the individual within webs of conflicting relations and brings about a greater temptation—if not a certain necessity—to sin, those who do not marry are regarded as anomalies. Older bachelors are rare, but spinsters are common due to the custom parents have of encouraging at least one daughter to remain unmarried to look after them as they age. In return, a spinster eventually inherits her parent’s house where she will continue to live, often with an adopted niece or nephew to keep her company. A spinster (solteirona) is most often referred to as moça regardless of her age; a term that connotes her supposed state of continued virginity. In Santa Lucia such women may be actively involved in the community affairs, in particular those relating to the local church, but they are often ridiculed behind their backs. Most young women display no desire to remain unmarried, some even warn their parents in jest that they do not wish to be the one to remain behind to look after them in their old age. The path of priesthood or religious asceticism is another alternative to marriage, but this, too, is regarded somewhat ambivalently. Among the Northeastern laity there exists a strong inclination toward anticlericalism; an anticlericalism that is at once resonant with the kind commonly found throughout the Catholic world and at the same time subtly specific to the social and historical context of Northeast Brazil—a point I develop in subsequent chapters. During my stay in Santa Lucia, I lived opposite Edison, a twelve-year-old boy who everyone teased because of his apparent fondness for prayer and for regularly attending church. Edison once admitted that he wanted to become a priest when he grew up and everyone thought this was funny. His mother was the only person in the street who seemed


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to want to encourage this ambition. One day she quietly took me aside to show me the many drawings her son had made of the village chapel, replete with depictions of himself in priests’ robes standing beside it and chickens running about in the chapel yard. There is less of a tendency to be openly and overtly antagonistic toward cloistered monks and nuns because these types of people do not have any regular or sustained dealings with lay communities. Moreover, the ascetic calling is felt to have its place and is, on one level, a fundamentally respectable one. Were ascetics not felt to have some kind of special access to the divine, it is unlikely that there would exist such a widespread belief in the supernatural efficacy of the various Catholic saints (popular and official) that figure in local devotions.8 However, there exists an alternative discourse challenging the notion that the ascetic’s access to divinity is necessarily a privileged one. This discourse manifests itself most explicitly through the depiction of nuns, monks, and priests as hypocritically dominated by, rather than in command of, their sensual passions. Thus, when someone is thought to have a larger than usual appetite for food, people joke that they “eat like a Padre.” World renouncers such as monks and nuns, and even passing lay missionaries are targeted mainly through humor and ridicule. Northeastern clay figurines, woodcuts, and popular verses are littered with references to greedy clerics and sexually promiscuous ascetics. Humorous rendering of monks with erections and nuns with pregnant bellies may not be specific to Brazilian Catholic culture, but the particularities of the humor—the context and nature of the dialectic it sets up—are.9 The fact that this kind of humor is commonly relished among the Northeastern laity reflects on one level a popular mistrust of the corruptible nature of religious institutions, but it also refers, by oblique inversion, to the spiritual authenticity of the ordinary layman. The example of a young woman in the village called Maria do Carmo illustrates this point in a more direct manner. Maria do Carmo was preparing to become a novice nun but it was known to everyone that this had been, initially at least, against her parents’ wishes. Eventually, however, her parents had come to accept the idea, although Maria do Carmo’s father was clearly still ambivalent about his daughter’s vocation. When once I asked him about it he said the following: Well, I was against it. What father doesn’t want his daughter to marry and give him grandchildren? I said to her: “My child, if you are sure you want that life, you have my blessing. But know that if you want to live in the world, to work as we do, God will smile for you still.”

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The idea that “God smiles” even for those who do not enter the cloister is linked, in a direct sense, to the work and sacrifice that must be performed if one is to remain outside of it. The idea being evinced is that cloistered ascetics live an easier life, not a more difficult one, and this fact constitutes an obvious obstacle to the ascetic’s spiritual ambitions. The notion that nuns do not work was echoed on various other occasions, most notably one in which Dida lost her temper because her daughters had failed to clear away the breakfast things. From my room in the house I heard her chastisement: “What laziness is this? At this rate you girls might as well join a convent and become nuns!” Off-hand comments such as this one are suggestive of the way Santa Lucian people view the two alternative paths by which spiritual permanence might be achieved. Either a person chooses to bypass the polluting nature of sex, commerce, and divided kinship loyalties via priesthood or some other form of institutionalized asceticism, or they choose to marry and submit themselves to the spiritual challenges of conjugal life but through hard work and sacrifice transcend them. Marriage may represent a submission to the polluting possibilities of life do mundo (in the world), but the notable twist is that it is this very fact that marks out the spiritual achievements of the married individual as all the more remarkable. Herein it stands to reason that the manner in which one submits to such possibilities takes on crucial importance. For it is not simply whether one marries that will ultimately determine the destiny of one’s soul in the afterlife or the nature of one’s relationship with God in this life; it is how one performs and embodies the challenge of being a married person. Conclusion In this chapter I have shown how marriage tends to be experienced by persons as an overwhelming transition to a state of increased social responsibility, bringing hardship and a sense of radical rupture from the life that went before. The Janus-faced nature of the power, prestige, and fulfillment that conjugal life promises is made evident at various turns. Marriage requires couples to make morally difficult decisions, to carry out spiritually polluting activities and to negotiate multiple new temptations toward envy, greed, selfishness, and pride. Within this complex sphere, moral knowledge about the world and the ability to compete selfishly by using it are necessary for survival. Married people “know” the world, they are able to judge and be taken into account, but in turn they will be judged and be held to account. In many ways, the Santa Lucian case appears to support


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William Christian’s analysis that worldly marriage (for men as much as for women) represents a symbolic exit from Eden. However, in the Santa Lucian case, the exit is not just symbolic, it is phenomenologically real and experientially complex for those who must negotiate it. This will become clearer in chapter 5 where I examine the kinds of social and physical violence that marriage can lead to by exploring attitudes to violence between spouses. In this chapter I have sought to reveal the spiritual problem marriage gives rise to by showing how it brings the individual into conflict with close consanguineal relatives and affines, how it involves commerce that is explicitly predicated upon “gaining the upper hand,” and how it facilitates sexual union that in turn arouses sinful emotions such as lust, jealousy, and pride. It is for these reasons that marriage, despite its sacramental nature, is considered a dangerous path to tread, leading the person ever away from God. Yet it is also plain that despite such social and spiritual transgressions, marriage is necessary for the reproduction of the household, and religious celibacy is not considered a desirable alternative choice. This introduces the notion that transgression is itself a permissible social form; one that may be central to the ethnotheological discourse of my informants. What I hope to demonstrate in the chapters that follow is how Santa Lucian people attempt to embrace and reframe the transgression that marriage entails. And to show how in doing so, what appears at first to be a negative predicament comes to be seen as a positive strategy in the encompassing social and spiritual order.


Chapter 3

The Bearing of Burdens: Suffering, Containment, and Healing

One November afternoon, as I was at the chapel altar (which was

the coolest place I could find) writing up field notes under the watchful gazes of St. Judas and St. Rita, a young woman called Moça stuck her hands through the open upper half of the back door and clapped to get my attention. Leaving the coolness of the altar I stepped outside to see what she wanted. “Maya,” she whispered urgently when I appeared, “I would like you to meet my aunt Tia Ana. She has suffered greatly you know.” Before I could even respond, Moça started off down the track, arm extended in invitation for me to follow. Tia Ana lived alone in an old brick house on the river’s edge. Upon arrival I was ushered into a whitewashed living room. On the wall was a striking portrait of a young, earnest couple, evidently in their twenties, although the austerity of their pose made them seem somewhat older. Beneath this portrait, on a once-splendid red couch sat the widowed Tia Ana, hunched with age, but as composed as the stern, youthful image of herself behind the glass frame. The room was still but for the billowing of a thin curtain that separated the living room from the kitchen. Moça motioned for me to sit down while she went off to look for a chair for herself, so I perched myself next to the old lady who pretended not to notice me. A moment later Moça returned and said loudly into the old lady’s ear, “Tia, this is the girl from England. I’ve brought her to hear about your sufferings.” Tia Ana turned to regard me somewhat suspiciously and said nothing. Moça continued her urging: “Tell her Tia, go ahead and tell her about how hard you have worked, the life of suffering you’ve had. There was nothing you wouldn’t do for us, was there Tia?” Tia Ana said nothing. Moça and I waited politely but the old woman remained silent.

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Finally in a voice more to herself than to us she said, “I have suffered, yes, and now I wait for Him.” The old lady looked out of the open doorway with an air of thoughtfulness, but no more was said. An awkward time passed with the three of us in that room together, glancing back and forth, in silence. Moça kept gazing at her aunt, willing her to speak, but finally we stood up to leave. As we walked back to the village, Moça, who was obviously dissatisfied with the result of the visit, went on to tell me herself about Tia Ana’s life of suffering. She told me how Tia Ana had traveled about the country in search of work to feed her children, of the years that she had spent caring for her blind mother-in-law, of her late husband’s compulsion to gamble away their money, and of the terrible hunger that she had endured in the great drought. Although mildly embarrassed by the situation that had just unfolded, on some implicit level I understood Moça’s insistence that I know of her aunt’s suffering. For Moça, it was important that I perceive Tia Ana first and foremost for what she was popularly perceived to be: a sofredora (one who has suffered greatly). In Santa Lucia suffering is a powerful and pervasive idiom. It may be deployed via speech acts or physical behaviors in various contexts: from casual greetings to formal visits, from devotional and healing ritual to political gatherings. In many ways it could be read as belonging to a tradition of what I here term “elaborated suffering” within Orthodox and Catholic cultures, in which suffering is publicly elaborated, performed, and expressed. Within the literature on Catholic and Orthodox peasantries in Europe, women’s public and often dramatic performances of suffering are most noted in relation to rituals concerning death (Danforth 1982; Caraveli 1986; Seremetakis 1991) and pilgrimage (Christian 1972; Dahlberg 1987, 1991; Dubisch 1995). Elaborated suffering in such contexts has been analyzed as central to a range of important processes from expiation and divine mediation (Caraveli 1986; Seremetakis 1991), social bonding (Caraveli 1986; Dubisch 1995), and historical embodiment (Pandolfi 1991) to gender construction and political resistance (Caraveli 1986; Dubisch 1995; Magrini 1998; Seremetakis 1991). Anthropologists of Latin America writing about women’s elaborated suffering have tended to take a rather more politicized approach, seeking to locate it within wider discussions of Catholic misogynism and patriarchal oppression. In a much cited and heavily critiqued article by Evelyn Stevens (1973), the cultural emphasis on suffering in many Latin American cultures has been linked to an ideology of Marianismo—the “other face of Machismo.” Marianismo is said to concern an ideal of womanhood deriving from

T H E B E A R I N G O F B U R D EN S

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religion and myth as passive, self-sacrificing, and spiritually elevated in comparison to manhood. Subsequent scholars of the region have dismissed this theoretical model out of hand on the basis that it constitutes an inaccurate stereotype of women in Latin America—in the words of one commentator: “an ahistorical, essentialist, anachronistic, sexist, and orientalist fabrication” (Navarro 2002: 270). What most detractors of Marianismo seem opposed to is not so much the abstract assemblage of one group of characteristics (passive suffering and self-abnegation) set in contrast to another (penetrative power and aggression) but the assignment of femininity to the former and masculinity to the latter. For feminist scholars concerned first and foremost with women’s physical, material, and reproductive emancipation from oppressive social structures, the suffering figure of the Virgin Mary, while associated with power of a spiritual sort, nonetheless romanticizes the role of passivity in relation to male oppression. As a result, there has been a laudable effort among such writers to emphasize alternative schemas of emotional and political expression among Latin American women. One interesting example arises in the work of Ruth Behar (1993) who brings out the coraje “rage” of her central informant, a Mexican peasant woman called Esperanza. This “rage” is theoretically elevated by Behar as an example of “alchemized suffering,” one which “provided the clear and fiery light of consciousness for her [Esperanza] to plot the story of her life as her-story rather than his-story” (1993: 272). This feminist project, however, displays its own limits. As a cultural phenomenon, elaborated suffering in Catholic and Orthodox cultures has become so synonymous with the question of passive complicity in gender subjugation that other ways of apprehending the complex have been almost entirely overlooked. Moreover, women’s elaborated suffering has tended to receive attention only in so much as it appears in opposition to the behavior of men. By contrast, expressions of suffering and self-abnegation among men have received little attention, and the question of why suffering in particular should provide such a culturally productive idiom has remained underexplored.1 In chapter 4, I take up the question of suffering as a productive discourse among Santa Lucian men. In this chapter, however, I seek to uncover what suffering means in a specifically Santa Lucian context, and why suffering, of all emotions, provides such fertile ground for cultural engagement. In examining expressions of emotional pain and suffering, I draw from a theoretical tradition that has stressed the culturally constructed nature of emotions (Lutz 1988; Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990; Lutz and White 1986; Rosaldo 1984).2 Hence my concern is

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not with biologically universal emotions of suffering so much as with suffering as an embodied, conceptual, and moral construct. The chapter is split into two main sections. In the first I present some of my own ethnographic data on elaborated suffering in Santa Lucia. To convey something of the power and pervasiveness of this phenomenon in the Santa Lucian lived-world, I shall draw it out in relation to a mixture of everyday and ritualized contexts. These range from speech genres specific to social visits and greetings to actions within healing rituals. I then go on to examine the metaphor of containment by which suffering is locally conceptualized. This metaphor, I shall argue, arises in a variety of interlinked contexts, thus embedding different categories of person in an overarching semiology of suffering, sacrifice, and spiritual redemption. The examples I provide center mainly on women; however, it is crucial to bear in mind that this is more a product of the way I have chosen to divide up and present the data than a reflection of any fundamental difference between genders. It should be recognized that the argument I make here is both coterminous with, and complementary to, data presented in the following chapter that relates mainly to men. In the second part of the chapter, I return to my discussion of other ethnographic contexts, where women’s elaborated suffering is argued to serve an encompassing need to produce and express gender identity. In contrast to this type of analysis, I suggest that in Santa Lucia elaborated suffering serves an essentially ungendered existential challenge—one that is merely shaped by, but not derived from, a need to produce social difference between the sexes. Using the work of anthropologists such as James Laidlaw (2002) and Joel Robbins (2007) on morality and Andrea Dahlberg (1987, 1991), John Eade (1991), and Michael Sallnow (1991) on Christian pilgrimage, I shall offer a different perspective on what the expression of suffering produces, as well as addressing why suffering, more than any other emotion, should be socially productive at all. Narratives of Suffering in Santa Lucia Similar to Tia Ana, Dona Lourdes was a woman who was also renowned for her suffering. One day she agreed to provide me with her life story. Her narrative began with the following words: I was a person who suffered. Ever since the beginning I suffered. I don’t like to recount my life, no, because just speaking about it makes me cry! I was raised in the house of my grandmother. There my mother


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started to raise us with suffering. She suffered, suffered so much to raise us. Look, seems there were nearly twenty of us children there in the house, in my grandmother’s house. And didn’t I then go and have twenty-two of my own?

In the course of Dona Lourdes’s narrative, I learnt of her povertystricken childhood in a neighboring village and of the premature death of her mother from dengue fever. I learnt of her early courtship and marriage, aged just fourteen, which she claimed to have pursued to escape the overcrowded conditions of living under her grandmother’s roof. Marriage, however, had offered Dona Lourdes little reprieve, ushering in years of pregnancies and miscarriages, hunger, illness, and anxiety. “My suffering lead me to walking. I’d leave the house and walk for days,” she said, “they’d find me on the road somewhere and bring me back. Well, this happened again and again.” Dona Lourdes was small in stature but powerful in presence. Her black eyes shone and her cracked voice filled the room whenever she talked. She was a person who always had time for me, and as such, we passed many hot afternoons together in her cool, dark house. On this occasion, however, Dona Lourdes’s narrative went on at length. As she fell to describing how she and her husband had been so poor that they had to borrow shoes and clothes that were not ripped from a neighboring family to attend market, I felt tears welling up in my eyes. Perhaps noticing this Dona Lourdes finally changed the tone of her speech. Both she and her husband were now in receipt of a state pension, she assured me. Their children had grown up and left home: “Things are better now, thanks be to God, they are much better for us.” Women like Dona Lourdes and Tia Ana represented a generation of local women who had endured unusually high levels of economic hardship and social and political oppression. These were women who had lived through an era before land reform, before the introduction of state initiatives such as the provision of healthcare, education, and pensions for poor, rural people. Women like Dona Lourdes and Tia Ana remembered only too well what it was like to raise a family through periods of drought, hunger, and political dictatorship. Nevertheless, the emphasis they placed on their past experiences of suffering are remarkable because they seem to belong to a widely shared “speech genre” that seeks to cast ordinary life events in a metalanguage of suffering and endurance.3 I became particularly familiar with this “genre” when walking about the village with my friend Lourdinha. Oftentimes, when passing

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an acquaintance, Lourdinha would acknowledge them by calling out “O Comadre! É uma luta né?” (O Comadre! It’s a struggle isn’t it?). On occasion, I would accompany Lourdinha on visits to the houses of friends and relatives. Upon arrival, Lourdinha would weave a path through the cactus plants and pecking chickens to the back entrance. There in the dust and beating sun we would generally encounter the Dona da casa washing pans or preparing food. Upon catching sight of us, such women would stop what they were doing, smile a greeting, and usher us inside their houses, all the while requesting in the standard way that we forgive the humbleness of their homes. Having entered the kitchen and sat down to a glass of water or a small shot of cafezinho (black coffee), polite conversation between Lourdinha and the host would invariably come to focus upon the health and well-being of various people known to both women. Knowledge about other’s illnesses and ailments would be discussed and described—often in spectacular detail—before the women would move on to talk about their own various sacrifícios (sacrifices), doenças (ailments), and problemas (problems). Children and other related adults might appear and disappear throughout the course of such visits, and it was to this shifting and informal audience that women often produced what might be regarded as “narratives of suffering.” Such narratives typically grow out of a particular piece of news or story: somebody’s ill health or word of a long-departed relative. They might then move from this to center upon reminiscences of past events that brought on suffering. The content and detail of such narratives may vary, but the manner in which they are delivered follows certain conventions. Narrators digress from the norms of conversational exchange and become focused on their own story, repeatedly sighing and incorporating into their narration certain stock phrases such as “a vida é uma luta” (life is a struggle) and “a vida é assim” (life is like this). It is appropriate for those listening to interject with small exclamations “é!” (it is!) “é, mulher” (it is so, woman!) and to offer words of comfort such as Jesus também sofreu (Jesus also suffered). The formulaic dimension to this genre of expression is occasionally evident: a woman may suddenly interrupt a narrative to greet an infant with a large smile, or see to her cooking, or those listening might watch television or carry on a different conversation while the woman is still talking. When a woman produces a narrative of suffering, the power of her words to evoke past or present experiences sometimes leads to more extreme displays of emotion such as hand wringing or crying. People attribute this to the fact that the person is “re-living” (revivendo) her


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suffering. For listeners, however, the characteristic attitude toward such displays of emotion is one of benign detachment. Such detachment, far from signaling insensitivity to the feelings of others is actually very much in keeping with the situated nature of such speech. The narrative performance is as much a bringing-forth of suffering as it is a discursive reflection of it. Counteracting this process with utterances designed to dilute the sentiment would be to divest the speaker of the chance to relive and thus to make productive her suffering. The Politics of Labels During my time in the field, my informants would routinely point out to me those women—usually of middle age or older—who bore the title of sofredora. I would be introduced to such women with phrases such as “esta é a Dona X, ela é uma sofredora” (this here is Dona X, she is a suffered person) or “esta é a sofreda Dona X” (this is the suffering one, Dona X).4 The title of sofredora possesses particular significance because other persons bestow it. Thus, while any woman might present herself as a suffering person, being known and labeled as a sofredora constitutes an act of “consummation,” to borrow Mikhail Bakhtin’s phrase (1986). Defining someone in this way is a mark of respect, but it also constitutes an act of social participation in a general quest to negotiate the sin that accrues to those of married status. Only a select group of older women are regularly and publicly defined in this way. Such women often maintain, in public at least, an air of gravitas, and they are treated affectionately and reverently by other members of the community. Titled sofredoras were frequently singled out for my attention, and the manner in which I would be taken about the village and presented to them not only indicated the esteem in which these women were held but also revealed to me the power of sufferers to elicit ongoing relations of exchange and reciprocity. Indeed, the pressure to respond to the suffering performances of certain individuals was not restricted to me as a wealthy outsider; it clearly affected people within the village itself. Dona Lourdes, Amauri’s mother, was a case in point. Dona Lourdes, as a well-known sofredora, constantly elicited attention from her grown-up sons and daughters. On occasion Amauri would appear worn out by his mother’s elaborated suffering, and the obligation it put him under to give her his undivided attention. At such times he would order Dida to go and visit her on his behalf. Dida clearly resented this pattern, claiming that she had been tending to her mother-in-law on Amauri’s behalf for years. In a moment

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of frankness, when Amauri was not present, Dida commented wryly on the pragmatic dimensions of Dona Lourdes’s suffering: “Yes the woman is a sofredora, but you can give her ninety-nine percent of your time, and still she asks why it isn’t a hundred.” Suffering as Containment What does it take to be a good sufferer? According to my informants, the rightful way to suffer is, like Jesus or Nossa Senhora das Dores (Our Lady of Sorrows), com paciência (with patience). Ideal sufferers are consequently those who do not display exaggerated signs of suffering affliction; a point that may help to contextualize the examples of Dona Lourdes and Tia Ana, which appear to manifest at two different ends of the spectrum. While Dona Lourdes speaks of her suffering, unsolicited, and at every available opportunity, Tia Ana, on being invited to speak of her suffering, says nothing. Whatever other reasons Tia Ana had for behaving as she did that day, her silent performance in itself successfully conveyed something about the ideal form of suffering: a good sufferer bears their load patiently and without boasting. Being good or bad at suffering implicitly maps onto local concepts of bodily integrity. Thus good sufferers have “strong,” integral bodies capable of containing suffering. Here I use the term containment to mean “continuing to behave normally.” A good sufferer is therefore somebody who is able to render their suffering public in conventionally subtle ways, without appearing overly dramatic, boastful, or manipulative. The ideal narrative strikes a delicate balance: it presents the narrator not as a victim but as someone with a productive capacity and special talent for suffering. Ideally, suffering is not simply something that happens to a person, something that is experienced passively, it constitutes a skill, an ability—above all a capacity for endurance that pertains to some but not to others. Underlying this idea is the notion that certain kinds of bodies are better suited to suffering than others. Bodies that are good for suffering are forte (strong) and fechado (closed). Bodies that are not are fraco (weak) and aberto (open) (Brun 1989). Strong bodies are basically like strong containers: vessels that can be filled up without any danger of rupture. In general, adults are thought to have stronger bodies than children. This explains not only why children are supposedly more susceptible to illness, but also why they are more susceptible to mau olhado (evil eye).5 In the rest of this section, I will explore the idioms via which suffering is related to the body. In particular, I shall focus on treatments for the “weak” and “open” body.


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In Santa Lucia, suffering may be signified by a variety of phrases, many of which connote this idiom of carrying and containment. A common shorthand for signifying that having many children or much work leads to suffering is via the term carregado, deriving from the root verb carregar, meaning “to carry.” Hence one hears phrases such as “ela é carregada de filhos” (she is carried/weighed-down with children) or “ele está carregado de trabalho” (he is carried/weighed-down with work) implying a sense of encumbrance and endurance. Another word used in lieu of the verb sofrer is aguentar (to withstand, to bear up under). Thus, when producing narratives of suffering, women will commonly talk in the past tense about the hunger, loss, or pain that “eu aguentei” (I bore). The linguistic metaphors and social contexts that relate to the concept of suffering in Santa Lucia are evocative of the Latin root of the word sofrer that means “to bear/to contain/ to carry,” such that just as a pot carries and contains water, people “carry” and “contain” suffering. Verbal expressions of suffering as containment echo ways in which the body is often depicted. Suffering is presented as being linked not only to the subject’s personhood in an abstract, intentional, or volitional sense but also to its manifestation in the world as a human being in possession of a physical body. Herein the suffering person’s body is like a container; one that may just as well rupture from the weight of its content. Such was the case with one woman in the village who was said to have become doida (crazy), when her son drowned several years back. People were given to observing that this particular woman had suffered from an “open” constitution that, like a cracked vessel, had left her unable to properly bear her own suffering. It is interesting to note, however, that whereas pity is extended toward a woman who becomes doida, married women who commit suicide are publicly condemned. For married women with dependents to feed and look after, suicide is regarded as an apical expression of selfishness in that it constitutes a form of self-destruction that benefits only the self. Rather than being understood as a tragic side-effect of womanly suffering, suicide is perceived as preeminently sinful, not because it overrides God’s will to bestow life or death, but because it suggests a selfish unwillingness to bear suffering on behalf of others. An important distinction is therefore made between those who are afflicted with a weak body and are therefore unable to suffer correctly and those who opt selfishly to escape from suffering altogether. The folk sickness peito aberto, which literally translated means “open chest” is an interesting case for consideration because it appears to leave people with a weakened capacity for suffering. Peito

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aberto is a common ailment affecting both men and women, one that is curable only through prayer by a rezador (prayer-person). There is no precise or singular definition of its cause or symptoms but most people describe peito aberto as a peculiar feeling in the back or chest that occurs when the peito (chest) becomes aberto (open). This, it is said, happens from excessive lifting of weight or from trabalho pesado (heavy work) in general. When a person has peito aberto, their capacity for physical labor is impaired; they may feel weak, their chest might ache, and they are advised to abstain from all kinds of heavy labor (see also Rebhun 1994). The prayer for peito aberto is one that I saw performed on several occasions for both sexes. The rezador begins by measuring the circumference of the patient’s rib cage with a towel or length of cloth. The cloth is then placed back around the patient’s rib cage and the ends are twisted together where they meet in the middle of their chest (see figure 3.1). Using one hand to forcefully twist the material, an action that “closes” the chest, the rezador uses the thumb of her other hand to repeatedly press the sign of a cross into the center of the patient’s upper chest, whilst repeating chants under her breath. At the end of a lengthy period of chanting and tight twisting, the rezador uses the cloth to measure, once more, the circumference of the patient’s chest. She then shows the patient how much his or her chest has been closed by. This understanding of the chest as a typically closed structure that may become open is not only metaphoric but also literal, and patients are always very interested to see by exactly how much their chest has been closed. Once a person is cured, he is able to work again, in particular to aguentar (withstand) heavy loads once more. It is in cases of peito aberto that the container-like notion of the body becomes most evident. But the concept is implicit in two other contexts as well: childbearing and healing. The Mother as Container In Santa Lucia, pregnancy is the capacity to bear par excellence; the womb being the archetypal container. However, it is not only or specifically babies that women “carry” inside their bodies, but also suffering. Pregnancy is held to be an uncomfortable condition, and pregnant women are generally described as doente (ill). Illness, in this sense, does not convey pregnancy as a pathological problem so much as a drawn out process of bearing and encumbrance. This process, as it is locally conceived, reaches its apical expression in the rupture and suffering of labor.


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One morning as I was walking alongside Dida, we stopped to talk to a woman called Rosa who was sweeping the front step of her house. Dida knew that Rosa’s niece, Lucia, had gone into labor the day before and inquired after her. “Yes,” said Rosa, “the baby was born last night. Lucia suffered so much, so much that Niudo almost fainted.” As we continued on our way, Dida relayed this detail of Lucia’s suffering and her husband Niudo’s fainting to every person we crossed paths with. The healthy baby girl that had come out of it seemed, in this context, barely of importance. When a woman gives birth, people are generally keen to know two things: the sex of the child and how much the woman suffered in labor. During the groundswell of social interaction following the birth of a child, a large amount of attention is focused on the mother. Women are particularly apt to dwell on the topic of the labor itself, wanting to know how much pain was endured and whether medical interventions were needed. This fascination is fuelled at least in part by the common belief that the suffering of childbirth leaves a woman temporarily livre de pecado (free of sin). On one occasion Lucinha, my field assistant, shyly confessed to me that giving birth was the only time in her life she had felt herself to be completely cleansed of accumulated sins. A similar view was put forward by another woman who said that women were more likely to go to heaven if they died in childbirth. This particular woman had herself borne twelve children: In the old days childbirth was a risk. Virgin Maria, many women died back then because there was no medical assistance. Today there are hospitals, and everything. But those poor women that died, they used to say at the wake of such women, that it was one more angel in heaven.

In the initial three months following childbirth (or at least until sexual intercourse resumes once more), because of the suffering she has undergone, a woman is generally supposed to be, and often feels herself to be, spiritually fortified. Nonetheless, for the great majority of women childbirth offers a very temporary return to a sinless state. Before long, the woman is immersed once again in the spiritual risks and polluting practices of productive family life: sexual intercourse, commerce, covetousness, envy, and pride. At this juncture, a woman’s capacity to withstand, endure, and contain becomes important once again as the process of child rearing is widely acknowledged as a difficult and challenging task. Here we see that for Santa Lucian women, the suffering involved in child

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rearing is a blessing in disguise for it offers an effective—although more protracted—chance to redeem themselves in spiritual terms. Paradoxically, the rupture of childbirth may be seen to have threatened this capacity. This is because, as was explained, childbirth involves a lengthy process of physical opening up that leaves the body aberto demais (“too open”). Aside from the literal aperture of the vagina that radically transforms a woman from her once sealed and virginal state, childbirth results in a holistic rupture that leaves the woman’s body open, weak, susceptible to illnesses such as evil eye and thus—as with peito aberto—unable to work at full capacity. It is interesting to note that an older custom, now no longer practiced, saw women who had given birth receive a reza de parto (birthprayer) designed to “close” the body. Accounts of older women, some of whom had experience of the practice, described it as involving a rezadeira who is called to the house of the mother to pray for her in a manner similar to that used in cases of mau olhado (evil eye). However the prayer spoken in this context functions to protect both the mother and the child from any potential mau olhado that might afflict them during the vulnerable period immediately following the birth of the child and also to fechar o corpo (close the body), making the woman strong once again and able to work well to raise her children. Different reports were given of the methods used to perform the prayer. Whereas some women described it as a simple chant repeated whilst making the sign of the cross with a sprig of leaves over the body of the mother and her newborn, others claimed that the mother’s body also needed to be blessed with water or with ashes from her own hearth. In today’s context childbirth is a relatively medicalized affair, with the majority of women giving birth in the local municipal hospital. Improved levels of antenatal care and better access to medical intervention has lowered rates of infant and maternal mortality and marked a substantial change in younger women’s experiences and practices of childbirth. However, while the reza de parto has fallen out of practice among younger women, ideas about the nature of the postpartum body continue to overlap in places with those of older generations. It is commonly agreed, for example, that a successful labor temporarily leaves a woman more susceptible to the envy of her female neighbors and thus to illness from mau olhado. It is also agreed that ideally, a new mother returning home from the municipal hospital should observe a period of confinement that can last anything up to one month. During this time she should resist leaving the house and performing heavy domestic tasks lest her body fails to heal, or she succumbs to illness or infection. Whereas in the discourse of


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older women, closure was linked explicitly to the spiritual well-being of mother and newborn, in the discourse of younger women, idioms of bodily closure were notably intertwined with biomedical warnings about the danger of postpartum infections. Although it is thus important to recognize such discourses to be the shifting product of situated social practices, certain symbols appear to be recurrent. Mending the “unsound vessel” It might be observed that the postpartum prayer ritual bears some resemblance to an old Catholic ritual of churching women after childbirth; a practice technically defined by the church as an act of thanksgiving. According to William Christian, however, the symbolism of the churching ceremony speaks heavily of purification: The ritual has the woman being first purified with holy water, then escorted back into the most sacred part of the church by the priest . . . The fact that popular belief clings to the notion that women are impure until churched testifies to the clarity with which the symbolism is perceived. (1972: 154)

The notion that Catholic women are perceived as polluted after childbirth is echoed strongly by Dahlberg who observes that The central activities of pilgrims at Lourdes involve purifying the self, especially the physical self. Bathing and washing in the water are about cleansing oneself from sin . . . what are the specific sins these women hope to rid themselves of? They are the sins of the open body; sexual pollution and its product, birth. (1987: 244)

The argument that women in Christianity stand for the biological evidence of Original Sin is one that has been amply made elsewhere (Bloch and Guggenheim 1981; Bloch and Parry 1982; Pina-Cabral 1986; Warner 2000) and will not concern me at length here. All that I wish to draw out is the metaphorical preoccupation, evident in much theological discourse, with women’s bodies as “unsound vessels.” As the work of Marina Warner shows, through different historical periods, the church’s veneration of the Virgin Mary has invariably contrasted the female body “opened” through sexuality and birth with the ideal “whole” and “pristine” body of the Virgin Mary: The biblical images that the Fathers applied to the birth of Christ reveal that they conceived of a virgin’s body as seamless, unbroken,

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a literal epiphany of integrity. The Virgin Mary is a “closed gate,” a “spring shut up,” a “fountain sealed.” (2000: 73)

In historical terms, there has clearly been a precedent for the sense of “feminine unworthiness” postulated by Christian among Spanish Catholic women (1972: 154). This raises the question of whether Santa Lucian women, too, sense themselves to be biologically tarred. Could it not be that the postpartum prayer ritual is a folk manifestation of the churching ceremony aimed at purifying the polluted feminine body and reasserting its metaphorical virginity? For three main reasons, I would answer that it is not. First, while such an explanation is superficially plausible, it does not do justice to the complexity of the manner in which bodies are imagined as containers that are either strong or weak in their capacity for suffering. Second, it does not help to explain the peito aberto prayer, which is similar in principle to the postpartum prayer but applies equally to men. “Closure” in the treatment of peito-aberto is not simply the closing of a woman’s ruptured vagina but of the entire body-as-container, regardless of sex. Third, it cannot account for the apparent productiveness of suffering in itself whereby women emerge from the pain of childbirth feeling not polluted but spiritually fortified. Whatever their manifold motives, postpartum practices in Santa Lucia have as their basic aim a “closing” of the opened body. This aim is borne out by the fact that bodies (of either sex) repeatedly become open, whether through labor in the fields or in childbirth. Closing rituals, in this particular context, are not concerned with a cleansing of the spiritually polluted body, so much as with a mending of the world-weary body. For we have already seen that heavy manual labor and childbirth are both metaphorical substances that may fill the body; both processes require it to contain a certain amount of physical suffering. The ruptured body, on the other hand, becomes weak like a broken vessel. In the case of peito aberto, cure involves closing the open chest. Once this is done, the person is made able to continue “bearing” the burden of being-in-the-world. In the case of childbirth, a woman is allowed to heal and reclose to be able to “bear” once more: not simply more children, but the years of child rearing that lie ahead of her. For the ability to suffer, as will become clear, defines the moral person. It brings the person closer to God and imbues social obligation among kin with spiritual meaning.


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The Suffering Rezadeira Having discussed two healing processes connected with the suffering body, I turn now to consider the role of suffering in the lives of rezadores (prayer-persons) themselves. A rezador is defined as someone who has a fé (faith) strong enough to overpower evil and channel God’s healing through the power and technique of her prayer. Rezadores are called on to cure a number of ailments, including peito aberto, as we have seen earlier, but by far the most common affliction that a rezador treats is mau olhado (evil eye). Different rezadores use different chants and techniques, but the standard practice involves the use of a fresh sprig called mato, taken from any small leafed plant. The rezador uses the mato to make the sign of the cross over the afflicted person whilst chanting under her breath. As the evil is sucked out of the patient it gets absorbed primarily by the sprig of leaves, which wilts in the process, and secondarily by the rezador herself who yawns widely to tirar (take away) the mal (evil). In the process the rezador weeps tears (see figure 3.2). Her weeping, it is said, is a measure of the malevolence afflicting the person: the more evil she “takes,” the more copiously she weeps. People would always state, unequivocally, that anyone could heal through prayer. In theory, a rezador could be a man or a woman (i.e., a rezadeira), a boy or a girl, a rich person or a poor person. All that

3.1

Rezadeira measuring patient’s chest

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3.2


Rezadeira weeping

mattered was the strength of that person’s faith. It was sometimes stressed to me that a young, female, virgin was ideal for such a role, yet no one I knew had ever heard of a young or virginal rezadeira. Nor had anyone ever encountered a rezador who was rich, or at least known to be comfortably off in material terms. In practice, rezadores, whether male or female, generally come from the very poorest enclaves, are landless, and belong to the lowest socioeconomic stratum. They are always middle-aged or older and tend to be married with children. In theory they may be of either sex; however, the majority of them are women (Brun 1989).6 Much could be said about the social and political role of the rezador within Northeastern culture, and there is a substantial literature dealing with folk medicine in Northeast Brazil and the role of the rezador in diagnosis and healing of spiritual and physical affliction (Brun 1989; Rebhun 1994). What I wish to remark upon is the fact that in practice good rezadores—because of their age, life experience, and lack of material wealth—are generally perceived as supreme sofredors. Most rezadores are poor, and many live in visible, abject poverty. Yet despite their condition of necessity, the power and efficacy of the work they do rests upon the fact that they do not charge for their services. The rezadores I knew were consciously aware of their celebrity as sofredores, and some even seemed aware of the irony of their predicament.


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One rezador I knew was constantly thinking about giving up praying because, as he put it, “o rezador nunca vai pra frente” (a rezador never gets ahead), by which he meant advances economically. The most powerful and renowned rezadeira in Santa Lucia was Celestina, a woman known and titled as a super sofredora. Celestina was middle-aged and lived with her husband, some of her children, and various grandchildren on a steep, sandy incline some distance from the village. Their home was a brick shack that lacked running water and electricity, and it was in urgent need of repair. In many ways Celestina was no different from the other landless peasants living in poverty within the region, but her hardship was commonly noted as being more than the average person’s lot. Celestina maintained a peculiar position within the village, at once socially marginal and spiritually powerful. She kept a certain distance from other people— often to be spotted walking on her own along dirt roads in the surrounding countryside or sitting anonymously on a back pew of the chapel during mass. She also possessed about her an air of harrowed intensity, one which seemed to be only partly accounted for by the various stories that circulated about her behind her back. The stories that were told about Celestina concerned transgression and suffering. The men of her household were rumored to drink heavily and be involved in criminal activities, and this situation was compounded by the fact that two of Celestina’s daughters were single mothers who remained dependent on her to survive. In addition to this, it was said that Celestina’s sister had long ago stolen her identity to claim a state pension. Because of this deceit, Celestina herself was unable to draw a state pension and, burdened with feeding a large household, struggled to make ends meet. Despite this purported situation—or perhaps because of it— Celestina was the most renowned rezadeira in the region, and people would walk miles from neighboring villages to receive her healing prayer. Those whom I spoke to found it difficult to verbalize why, exactly, they considered Celestina better than any other rezadeira. All they could say was that her prayer was strong, and that it worked to cure them of their afflictions. However, it appeared in many ways that Celestina’s faith was indexed by her suffering. Her infamous life of struggle helped to cast her as someone with a heightened ability to treat and recognize the suffering of others. The following is an excerpt from a recorded conversation with Celestina: Maya: Why would you say people seek you out more than any other rezadeira?

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Celestina: Because my faith is very strong. People see how strong it is. That is why they come. Maya: Why is your faith so strong? Celestina: For someone like me, suffered the way I am, faith is everything. People know this, they think, “Surely, if she didn’t have faith, she wouldn’t be alive.”

In Celestina’s words, suffering is the encompassing value in terms of which everything else is expressed. This goes some way toward explaining the apparent disjuncture between verbally elaborated theories about ideal healers and ideal healers in practice. Theoretically, the efficacy of prayer rests upon faith coupled with youth, purity, and virginity. In practice, however, the efficacy of a rezadeira’s prayer rests not on her youth or virginal purity, but on the suffering she endures as a worldly, aged, and sexually experienced person. A parallel thus becomes observable between the archetypal suffering mother and the respected rezadeira: the rezadeira is the acme of suffering; she is the paradigmatic suffering mother and hence a powerful vessel for the channeling of God’s grace. The techniques of prayer enacted by the rezadeira recapitulate a semiology of suffering based on bodily containment. The act of containment is an act of sacrifice in that it involves the rezadeira sacrificing her body for the benefit of her patient. As she prays, the rezadeira yawns over and over, thereby absorbing and taking unto herself the suffering and affliction of the patient. In this way, like the mother who bears suffering on behalf of her children, the rezadeira bears malediction on behalf of the afflicted. Suffering and Womanhood in Catholic and Orthodox Cultures Having explored some expressions of suffering in the village of Santa Lucia, I want to expand and consider these against expressions of suffering in other Catholic and Orthodox cultures.7 Elaborate public displays of suffering have been noted by anthropologists not only in highly ritualized contexts such as death rituals (Seremetakis 1991; Caraveli 1986) and devotional practices performed at shrines and during religious processions (Dubisch 1995) but also in the context of everyday speech and praxis.8 Although the nature of expressions vary with the context, a set of common, symbolic behaviors often form an observable part of women’s elaborated suffering: crawling toward shrines on one’s knees, walking barefoot, dragging the tongue on the ground, breast-beating, shouting,


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wailing, weeping, and swooning. According to Tullia Magrini (1998), such behaviors constitute a “work of pain” specific to women. Magrini explains her choice of the term “work of pain” by drawing out its parallel to the term “kin work” adopted by Micaela Di Leonardo to describe American women’s task of sustaining family networks (1984). However, she does not speculate what the end product of such “work” might be. In the following sections, I put forward some suggestions on what the end product of such a work might be in the Brazilian context. Before doing so, however, let us explore, in more depth, what the dominant perspective on elaborated suffering within this literature has been. The Gender of the Sufferer Some of the most developed theoretical explanations for elaborated suffering are to be found in the work of Anna Caraveli (1980, 1986), Jill Dubisch (1995), and Nadia Seremetakis (1991). Within their work lies the claim that women’s expressions of suffering are indexical of their gendered performances. In other words, suffering and its public performance are an intrinsic part of what constitutes female identity; its work is to simultaneously define, elaborate, and elevate a sphere of feminine value distinct from that of masculine identity and politics. Within this literature, suffering appears as a cultural motif with both practical and ideological purchase. On an ideological level, argues Dubisch, the elaboration of pain and suffering in devotional practices and everyday life more generally constitutes a “poetics of womanhood” in which women construct distinctive and powerful images of what it is to be a woman.9 In the devotional context of pilgrimage, women’s ability to identify with the Panayia (Virgin Mary) as a suffering mother lends a particular moral force to their own elaborated suffering, for it draws on powerful religious imagery and aligns women with the major figure of Orthodox devotional practice (1995: 217). Magrini, too, observes that in Catholic and Orthodox cultures, the role of women as pain-bearers finds exceptional support in the cult of the Mater Dolorosa (Magrini 1998: 11). The fact that Catholic and Orthodox women often identify with the elevated sufferings of Mary, Mother of God, is indeed a point much noted (Cannell 1999, Drogus 1997, Hammington 1995, Warner 2000). However, as well as celebrating certain ideal values encapsulated by this important religious figure, Dubisch suggests that elaborated suffering may serve as a basis for women’s identification with other women on the grounds of shared experience (1995: 214)—a point also made by Caraveli (1980, 1986),

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in reference to the “community of pain” that she claimed united her female informants and to which her entry was facilitated by her own experiences of loss and motherly suffering. Caraveli notes the way that female mourning laments enact vital relationships among women across kinship and generational lines; “between the old and young,” and “between master performer and apprentice.” In these rites, she argues, the vocalization and physical display of pain are theorized as constructing an affective enclave of women in conflict with the male social structure (Caraveli 1986: 178). Pursuing the gendered analysis of elaborated suffering, Seremetakis (1991) juxtaposes the sociopolitical marginality of Greek women against the impressive force of their ritualized performances. In the following passage, the expression of suffering at death becomes a political cry; the forum par excellence for “private,” politically silent women to assert themselves within those male dominated realms defined as “public”: Maniat women move discreetly and swiftly in their towers and through the narrow streets between towers. They move close to walls and avoid public spaces defined as male . . . When the “whisper” of death comes, these bent women, creatures of the back alleys, stand up. They stretch their upper body and throw the head back, pulling out their loosened hair. They raise their fists against the sky, beating their chests in anger, scratching their faces, screaming. It is then one sees Maniat women in their full height. (1991: 75)

Seremetakis speaks of suffering in such contexts as both “an emotional force” and a “bodily symbolism” that evokes discontinuity and disorder. The scope for social commentary and critique within the lament discourse is, she suggests, extensive and may be directed at male institutions such as the church, the medical establishment, and the juridical system. Suffering thus functions as a performance event where “the silenced and semantic value” of female experience is recuperated and then transformed into a media of cultural empowerment (Seremetakis 1991: 208). It is important to note that the theorists I am writing about have developed their positions in relation to a particularly dominant theoretical concern with gender within Mediterranean anthropology, and it is within the terms of this dominant debate that women’s elaborated suffering has tended to be framed.10 Each of the theorists here cited have found the suffering motif useful in revealing the public and political dimensions of female identity in andocentric societies.


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However, the question of whether and to what extent elaborated suffering is an exclusively feminine practice has not been addressed. In Santa Lucia, the extent to which elaborated suffering constitutes a display of “womanhood” is secondary to its constitution of basic moral “personhood”—that is, of moral identity in a quintessentially abstract and genderless sense. First, not all women produce narratives of suffering, whether in ritual or in other contexts, and second, it is evident that men, too, have access to culturally recognized discourses on suffering and pain. This second point shall be discussed more fully in the following chapter on labor discourse. The first, however, comprises an important detail that is mostly absent in the literature on Catholic and Orthodox societies, and which I shall discuss below.11 Together these two factors suggest that in the context of Santa Lucia, elaborated suffering is not concerned with the construction of femininity in opposition to masculinity so much as with morality in opposition to immorality. Age and Suffering In Santa Lucia it is significant that only married women perform the suffering narratives I have described or are labeled as sofredoras. Never did I hear an unmarried woman young, old, or middle aged define herself as a sofredora. Even pressing various unmarried women on the topic of their own suffering, I found it impossible to get them to reproduce the same narratives with the same conviction. In certain cases, this was despite having experienced the same events (i.e., poverty, death, illness) that had made up the suffering narratives of their married, female counterparts. Although it is probable that younger generations of women are processing change in their cultural experience and expectations of suffering, it is also clearly the case that cultural performances of pain and suffering are believed to be the preserve of “older” (read: married) women. In short, narratives of suffering, much like storytelling among Piro people, are a practice one grows into (Gow 1991). Younger women with less-worldly experience are not expected to cast themselves as sufferers, for they are not expected to be as experienced in matters that bring about sin.12 Given that suffering is elaborated exclusively by married women, it would seem that it offers some way of dealing with the dilemma of having to live productively, yet sinfully, in the world, and hence of re-vivifying one’s failing relationship with God. Marriage is thus central to understanding the suffering complex: it simultaneously creates

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an existential conundrum and offers a way out of it. In the following section I shall explore the logic of exchange that underpins the suffering discourse and makes suffering such a socially productive idiom. The Suffering Narrative as a Performance of Sacrifice However one may look at them, the suffering narratives of Santa Lucian women are clearly complex and multidimensional. Similar to the Catholic women of San Salvador studied by Anna Peterson (1996), who produce narratives that situate their political struggles on the national stage within encompassing tropes of Christian martyrdom, the narratives of Santa Lucian women speak eloquently if obliquely to their structural position as poor and marginalized Northeastern citizens. Given the wider sociopolitical and economic context within which Santa Lucian people are situated, the narratives of such women may be read in any number of ways: as political statements, social critiques, emotional catharsis, or all of these simultaneously. What is generally agreed upon, however, is that narratives constructed by ordinary people to make sense of their experiences can act as powerful sources of meaning and value (Carr 1986; Peterson 1996; Steinmetz 1992). Such narratives, writes David Carr, are not simply told but are “told in being lived, and lived in being told” (1986: 126). Such complexity not withstanding, I would like to focus on a particular dimension of the suffering narrative: its role in the exercise of moral freedom. In Santa Lucia the ideal sufferer, as we have seen, is one who renders suffering as a “capacity” and “skill.” Suffering skillfully means suffering for others. Thus a mother “suffers” to feed and raise her children, and a healer “suffers” to cure her patients. In the narrative/healing event, the Cross such women carry is rendered socially tangible and experientially real to those who comprise their audience: patients, children, kin, and visitors. In the Catholic tradition, suffering is intrinsically linked to a sacrificial discourse, which centers upon the image and exegesis of Christ in the Passion.13 Within Santa Lucia the same sacrificial discourse that applies to the suffering of Christ in the Passion may be extended toward the suffering of ordinary individuals. In acts of elaborated suffering, the experience of pain and misfortune (something passive) comes to be equated with self-destruction (something active), and it further comes to be cast as having benefited some other. In this way, for example, Dona Lourdes’s narrative of motherhood as protracted suffering, implicitly casts her in the role of sacrificial lamb: her willing self-destruction generating the salvation of her children.


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This Christian morality of sacrifice bears resemblance to other ascetical, self-denying value systems, a notable example of which is the morality of the Jains described by Laidlaw (2002). Nevertheless, subtle differences are to be found between different types of self-denying morality. In the Jain case, for example, as with certain kinds of institutionalized Christian ascetic practice, self-destruction in the form of renunciation of the world and its pleasures is aimed at ridding oneself of personal distinction to become, in the end, “a pure soul . . . finally identical with every other purified soul” (2002: 326). In practice self-destruction in the form of world renunciation may be a highly individualistic morality, not necessarily motivated by the immediate needs of one’s close kin and community. In fact, in the Jain practice, as Laidlaw writes, “The self that is discovered and renounced includes all one’s kinship and other social relations” (2002: 326). In the lay Christian morality of Santa Lucians, however, renunciation (in the form of elaborated suffering) is an intrinsically social phenomenon. Rather than shedding one’s social and kin ties, elaborated suffering enacts a subtle shaving away of certain worldly layers—physical comforts and material possessions—layers that stand between individuals and their fellow Christians. In the Santa Lucian context, the logic of self-denial is thus sacrifice; unless some benefit accrues to others, suffering contains no value. For Laidlaw, formalized techniques of the self such as the confession and penance developed within Christian monastic traditions and the confessional rite of pratikraman practiced by Jains represent examples of what he calls “ethical projects,” whereby “people have purposefully made themselves into certain kinds of persons” (2002: 324). In his contribution to this field of debate, Laidlaw elaborates on the precise concept and meaning of “freedom” as it applies to people’s behavior when they choose to follow certain institutionalized codes and forms of moral practice. His argument being that although rites like that of pratikraman may include an element of socially imposed rules (or “moral reproduction,” to use Robbin’s phrase), they nonetheless represent an exercise of freedom, for “nothing in the rules would make sense without understanding the ethical project from which they derive” (2002: 326). We might view elaborated suffering in a similar way, as constituting something of an “ethical project” in Laidlaw’s terms. For while the norms and etiquettes of elaborated suffering may, in some sense, be socially given, they constitute a personal project that is freely entered into. The “freedom” exercised in elaborated suffering is, as always, of a kind specific to its context. Through vocalization that remolds and

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retells the past for the sake of the present, what was unconscious is made conscious. Narratives of suffering are, in this sense, as much the creation of a reality as they are its post hoc reflection. To underline this point we might turn productively to Bakhtin whose study of “speech acts” lead him to argue that “emotion, evaluation and expression [ . . . ] are born only in the process of its live usage in a concrete utterance” (1986: 87). In the concrete utterance of suffering, morality is “born” as it were. A parallel might here be drawn between the ontological and linguistic values of suffering narratives, and other forms of Christian oratory, such as hymn, confession, testimony, and prayer. However, it is the choice of the narrator to cast his or her sufferings as sacrifice that makes this a truly voluntaristic exercise, one comparable to the voluntarism of mortification practices in other forms of Catholicism (Eade and Sallnow 1991; Sallnow 1991). The exchange of suffering for grace is a well-established notion within the Catholic tradition and underlies the practice of penance in which bodily privations such as fasting, self-flagellation, going barefoot, crawling on the knees, and so forth, are thought to win the penitential devotee God’s forgiveness and grace. However, the willful subordination of the passions and the notion of self-discipline in the practice of bodily mortification hinges on its chosen and self-inflicted character (Dahlberg 1987; Foucault 1995; Laidlaw 2002). This voluntarism is what defines the suffering as an offering of sacrifice, thus differentiating the actual (or metaphorical) death of the sufferer from the death of a victim of murder or suicide. For the suffering that derives from ordinary everyday contexts to take on a voluntaristic and sacrificial flavor, it thus has to be actively reconstructed as such. Types of elaborated suffering that recreate an experience of suffering while objectifying it, submit to suffering while remolding it, achieve this. Sacrificial Suffering and Symbolic Exchange If everyday narratives skillfully cast suffering as an act of self-sacrifice, the notion of sacrifice in turn suggests the gift-like potential of suffering. But what kind of gift is suffering perceived to constitute? On one level, one could clearly argue that it is the Christian “free gift,” exemplified in the sacrifice of Christ, that is echoed and embedded in the elaborated suffering of Santa Lucian women. For Santa Lucians (as for Catholics more widely), to suffer on behalf of others is overtly recognized as a giving of oneself without expectation of return. In the Santa Lucian context, this idea attains its most elaborate expression in


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the injunction against paying the rezadeira and against even uttering the word obrigado (thank you) in return for a healing session. The free gift embodied in the ideal suffering mother (or rezadeira) makes her part of the pantheon of human saints able to act as mediators with the divine. As one local saying suggests, Deus criou mãe por que não conseguia estar em todos os lugares ao mesmo tempo cuidando dos seus filhos (God created mother because he could not be in all places at the same time looking after his children). And in the following popular verse, the mediative capacity of the eternally giving mother makes her into a saint like any other: Eu vi minha mãe rezando Aos pés da Virgem Maria Era uma santa escutando O que outra santa dizia14

I saw my mother praying At the feet of the Virgin Mary It was one saint listening To what the other saint said

However, as Hubert and Mauss long ago noted, the abnegation and submission that defines the practice of sacrifice are “not without their selfish aspect . . . Disinterest is mingled with self-interest. That is why it has been so frequently conceived of as a form of contract” (1964: 100). According to Jonathan Parry (1986), the ideology of altruistic giving is inextricably linked to the ideology of the reciprocated gift and self-interest. In the Christian world, he argues, a “universalistic conception of purely disinterested giving” has developed simultaneously alongside the notion of “pure utility” (1986: 468). And certainly, in the Santa Lucian context, one finds a certain amount of ambiguity and conflict between these two ideologies, for while the selfless suffering and abnegation of Santa Lucian women is clearly meant to eschew notions of earthly reward, it is implicitly understood that it will reap spiritual dividends. As Eade and Sallnow point out, for a strongly Salvationist religion such as Catholicism, “it is questionable whether the notion of purely disinterested giving can be anything other than a fiction” (1991: 25). Indeed, much has been written about the overtly transactional ethic of devotional exercises in Catholic cultures. One sees the manifold self-interested exchanges between humans and the divine most clearly in the literature on Christian pilgrimage cults where, using the shrine divinity as a mediator, physical suffering and penance are exchanged for material and spiritual favours, contracts are forged with the saints, sin is amortized by means of a tariff of devotional or ascetic practices, and many

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indulgences may be earned merely by dint of having attended the shrine festival and having expended earthly time in doing so. (Eade and Sallnow 1991: 240)

In his discussion of the Andean shrine of Señor de Wank’a in Southern Peru, Sallnow (1991) points out that bodily mortifications and devotional practices are primarily geared toward prompting thaumaturgic intervention in the affairs of the living here and now, rather than gaining grace and spiritual intervention in the hereafter. This would suggest that expressions of suffering cast as self-sacrifice may not necessarily be solely about securing reward in the next world, but also in this one. The latter point can certainly be made for Santa Lucia where, at times, suffering appears to be just as much about exchange with humans as it is about establishing credentials with the divine. Suffering could thus be said to be productive, not only because it elicits reward in the next world, but also because of the productive social relations it gives rise to in the present one. The role played by the sufferer’s audience is, in this sense, paramount, for sufferers cannot exist alone: they are defined and made valuable by their audiences. As the application or withholding of the title sofredora reveals, suffering narratives represent a genre of politics in which individuals may compete and attain a certain amount of prestige. Being seen to have suffered constitutes a powerful way of eliciting care and material reward from those one has suffered for. In returning to the theme of the gift, however, it should be noted that although sacrificial suffering in Santa Lucia clearly constitutes a form of currency with which to elicit exchange, its power to evince a return derives, paradoxically, from the idea of it being in the Christian sense, a disinterested form of gift. Suffering is only productive in the Santa Lucian context because it stands hierarchically opposed to an ideology of reciprocity and return. Conclusion In the last chapter, we looked at the spiritual challenges to which married people are exposed. In this chapter we have looked at one solution to the existential challenge that marriage generates through a focus on elaborated suffering. We have seen how suffering constitutes a sacrificial idiom through which married, adult women transfigure and deal with the problem of sin in their lives, as well as providing them with an effective means of fostering productive social relations.


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I have described how the ideological basis for the expression of suffering turns upon a notion of bodily containment that arises literally and metaphorically in various contexts. Suffering is therefore evinced predominantly in terms of a capacity to bear on behalf of others, and the value of such a capacity derives from its sacrificial, gift-like nature. Thus, by making themselves into sacrificial containers of suffering, women create and define the nature of their social relationships both with other human beings and with the divine. The examples I drew upon, both from my own data and from the relevant literature, have all concerned women rather than men and hence reveal a gendered aspect to this phenomenon. In Santa Lucia, women are more likely than men to employ specific types of speech genres that help them to “re-live” their suffering, thus casting it as a voluntaristic and sacrificial act. Women are also more likely than men to symbolically capitalize on their suffering by assuming the role of paradigmatic “gifting mother” through healership. It is perhaps because of this that women are generally more likely than men to be defined and labeled as sofredoras. Nevertheless, to argue that this constitutes, above all, a “poetics of womanhood” would be to put the proverbial cart before the horse: it does not explain why suffering, in particular, is such a productive vehicle for this purpose. I have argued that by examining the moral ontology of sacrifice underpinning the concept of suffering, an alternative understanding can be gained. The recognition that it is primarily older, married women—those who are most immersed in, and accountable for sin—who engage the suffering trope suggests that men in a similar position might also make a purchase upon it. And indeed they do, as evidenced by the fact that men can and do become healers or fall victim to peito aberto. In this chapter, then, we have explored the suffering dynamic as it applies predominantly to women. Let us now turn, in the following chapter, to explore how it relates to men.


Chapter 4

Working to Sweat: Labor, Narrative, and Redemption

Over the course of my stay in Santa Lucia, I became accustomed to

hearing people recite lengthy lists of the chores they had completed since waking. Typically this would happen as I chanced upon some acquaintance on a midmorning stroll. Upon exchanging “good mornings” I would enquire after the person and would often receive a long reply, which included a list of the various jobs and tasks the person had been busy with since the break of day. On one occasion I enquired after a passing female friend, which lead her to inform me that she had been up since the crack of dawn, and had already fetched water, swept the house, fed the livestock, washed a huge pile of clothes, and sorted the beans for lunch. Such verbal deluges puzzled me, and for a long time I took them personally, thinking they constituted a polite way of casting moral doubt over my own “chore-free” existence. This, however, would only have made sense if they had never exchanged such dialogue with one another. Time and again I overheard women greeting one another at that crucial hour of the day. “Oh comadre,” a neighbor would call out over the small fence of her backyard to Dida, who at that time was usually at her outside sink, shelling beans or straining cheese. “What is it comadre?” Dida would ask. “I’ve just finished sweeping the entire terrain,” would come the reply, “before that I carried the clothes to be washed, I fed the animals, and I’ve been scraping manioc since four a.m.” “It’s a struggle comadre,” Dida would respond and continue at her task. It was only with time I appreciated that these unsolicited lists of chores completed expressed something central about Santa Lucians in general: the importance to them of trabalho (labor) as a form of mimetic worship and the concomitant value ascribed the trabalhador (hard worker).

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In Brazil, as in other parts of the world, the concept of work has undergone complex historical transformations.1 From the time of Portuguese invasion in the sixteenth century, work was intrinsically bound up with the violent and extractive project of colonial-capitalist expansion. Up until the second half of the nineteenth century, the context and nature of labor in agriculture, livestock rearing, and mineral extraction led to its perception as a degrading physical activity connected to the uncivilized domain of nature and disassociated from the superior realm of culture and commerce. Work, as something performed predominantly by slaves, was a stigmatized concept and bore connotations of pain, of terror, and of “moral misery” (Pordeus 2000: 129). It was only with the abolition of slavery in 1888, the influx of German and Italian emigrants to the south of the country, and the growth of urban centers that the concept of work lost some of its more negative associations and became a marker of personal identity and moral value (Pordeus 2000). As Michel Foucault (1975) argues, the pedagogy of work—the process of creating docile and productive bodies through institutional and ideological policing—became prevalent in Europe during the capitalist expansion of the eighteenth century. According to da Silva Diniz (1991), a similar process only got underway in Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century, precipitated by the same motives. It was at this point that Brazilian landowners and entrepreneurs were faced with the question of how to replace slaves with free workers in a historical context where large portions of the population had not been educated for “regular and disciplined work” (da Silva Diniz 1991: 15). The conversion of large contingents of poor, freed men into disciplined workers demanded the creation of a juridical apparatus that obliged the freed man to integrate into the world of salaried labor, but to legitimize the new repressive measures, work needed to shed its negative connotations derived from three centuries of slavery. Positive changes in the conception of work among the bourgeois elite themselves led to the creation of schools of agriculture and centers of apprenticeship designed to educate and discipline the rural poor. At the same time, anti-vagabond legislation proliferated in an effort to discourage rural people from their subsistence based, seminomadic lifestyles. Prisons, orphanages, and corrective workhouses sprung up throughout the region as a means of punishing those who refused to assume a sedentary existence based on wage labor and comply with the new laws. According to da Silva Diniz, the sum of such measures amounted to the propagation of a new ideology by the elite classes—one which equated the moral qualities of individuals with

W O R K I N G T O S W E AT

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their dedication to wage labor (1991). The concept of work in Brazil, he argues, was thus invested with a new set of noble and moral associations, and the poor free population was invited to accept their entry into the cheap labor market. One of the problems with this argument is that it produces a rather top-down and reductive view of labor ideology. The picture painted is of a reified elite striving, in an almost calculated fashion, to impose their ideology upon an undifferentiated mass of poor workers. However, it is unlikely that work was conceptualized in any singular way by all social groups of the era. Issues surrounding people’s entry to the labor market in the past were complex, as they are today, and would have varied in relation to cross-cutting factors such as gender, class, occupation, and age. Considering such factors, one might be forced to acknowledge a certain amount of resistance to the work ideologies of elites in many parts of the country.2 Simply because work, before abolition, was considered a degrading activity among the wealthier classes who had the means to afford slaves and/or paid laborers, it does not mean that it would have been so for everyone. In fact, it is questionable to what extent the negative associations of work abounded in the preabolition era given that not all Brazilians were slaves or wealthy landowners. Santa Lucia, like other communities of the region, would have been originally populated in the early nineteenth century by the mixed race descendents of Dutch and Portuguese immigrants of farming backgrounds, native Indians, and African slaves. They would already have brought with them a concept of work endowed, if not with a Calvinist or a capitalist spirit, then with certain ideas (among them key Catholic or Hellenistic notions) that predated the era of Brazilian conquest. Although the present-day concepts and discourses on labor that I present in this chapter are not immediately contrastable with those of a hundred years ago, they remind us that labor ideology, at least in practice, is a complex phenomenon; produced and made meaningful by the nature of the labor itself, as much as by those who extract from it. In this chapter, I discuss present-day concepts of labor in the community of Santa Lucia, and their role in establishing moral personhood. I shall begin by elaborating the ways in which work-like activities are classified and conceptualized. I will then go on to examine the narratives and discourses produced about labor and to situate these within the broader socioreligious context. By drawing upon the historical work of Anna Leibovich (1995) and Carol Bynum (1987) in particular, I shall discuss some of the ways in which bodies and bodily metaphors have been utilized within Catholic and Orthodox

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traditions. Such historical examples, I argue, help us to understand the distinctly embodied type of morality that labor here produces, and the culturally specific type of Christian soul/body dualism that Santa Lucians work with. Work versus “true work” As described in the Introduction, work in Santa Lucia is based around semisubsistence agriculture and livestock rearing. Most households work small plots of land (roçados) on which they will grow any combination of the staple crops of manioc (mandioca), beans (feijão), and corn (milho) for both sale and consumption.3 In addition to this, a small proportion of the village work for wages in the casa de farinha (manioc flour mill) that lies at the heart of the village. Although people in Santa Lucia universally define themselves as agricultural workers (agricultores), agricultural labor is not the only means by which people make a living. Some of the men are builders and lorry drivers. Others are butchers or small traders owning shops and businesses in and outside the village. Outside the home, women commonly work as teachers, seamstresses, manicurists, and small traders; sometimes making cheese, straw hats, and brooms for sale in the markets. Ways of making a living, however, are not always defined as trabalho (work), just as all activities defined as work are not necessarily about earning money per se. All the same, if one were to ask a family who among them worked and what that trabalho was, the likely answer would be that the husband works and the wife does not. The husband’s work would be defined purely in terms of that which yielded cash. In short, one definition of the word trabalho is any activity that involves an exchange of resources outside the immediate family unit. In reality the household is a jointly productive enterprise, but only the male head of the household—usually the father/husband—will negotiate an exchange or sale for the agricultural produce in the market or with a wholesale produce buyer. Accordingly, when wives and unmarried sons and daughters labor in the family roçado or tend to the animals, they are often described as “helping” (ajudando) rather than “working” (trabalhando). In this context proprietorship is unimportant: the land may belong to anyone within or outside the household or family, but only the person who negotiates the sale or exchange of produce from that land is said to “work” it. This, however, is only one definition of the word trabalho. In a day-to-day context, it bears more of a resemblance to the English word “labor” in that it is used to denote any kind of purposeful and


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effort-requiring activity, whether or not it culminates in some form of material exchange. Thus women talk of having “worked” hard all day at their various unpaid domestic enterprises, and young unmarried people talk of going to “work” in the family roçado. In this day-today context, the word trabalho is used broadly to define everything from fazendo a faxina (doing the housework) and negociando na feira (doing business at the market) to a colheita (harvesting) and criando filhos (raising children). In the rest of the chapter, I shall be discussing trabalho predominantly in terms of its broader, less specified meaning and shall therefore be predominantly employing the English term “labor” as opposed to work. Nevertheless, it should be borne in mind that in daily usage, the different senses of the word trabalho are often entwined and cannot be neatly separated out from one another. Although the single word “trabalho” is used in various contexts, what is significant for Santa Lucian people is that while not all laborious activities can be viewed as trabalho in the exchange sense of the term, not all remunerated trabalho can be classed as laborious—that is, as trabalho de verdade (“true work”). During my time in the field, I was unable to convince my informants that doing ethnographic research was a type of trabalho. “What you do is not trabalho de verdade,” my host family would insist. At the time I was unable to ascertain exactly why this was, although in retrospect I believe it was because I did not produce an appropriate kind of narrative in relation to it. Occasions where I did perform “true work” would always provoke some comment, such as when Amauri caught me sweeping the house and dryly remarked “so you resolved to do some work after all, did you?” In the same way that people were given to doubting whether the work I performed was trabalho de verdade, they were given to doubting whether other types of people such as priests or politicians worked in the “true” sense or merely received a salary for performing a few, seemingly effortless tasks. An important aspect of the Santa Lucian concept of labor, or “true work,” is the idea that it is forced and requires a degree of struggle. As such “true work” is categorically distinct from other daily activities such as eating, conversing, watching television, and so on. That “true work” for Santa Lucians is something forced and effortful is revealed by some of the linguistic expressions used to denote worklike activities. The acts of harvesting beans and weeding are both described using the verb arrancar (wrench). Thus to arrancar feijão is to “wrench” beans and to arrancar mato is to “wrench” weeds. This is distinct from the verb puxar (pull), which implies the same physical action but using less force. Conversely, livestock rearing is

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one activity that is not traditionally described as work. People talk of land that is para trabalhar (for working) meaning agricultural work as opposed to land that may be more stony and less fertile that is para criar (for rearing), meaning to graze livestock on. Although rearing animals is not thought to require the same amount of effort as crop planting and is therefore not described as work as such, people in Santa Lucia frequently use the verb lutar (struggle) in reference to labor involving animals. Thus it may be said of someone whose main income comes from cattle rearing, that they “struggle with cattle” (luta com gado). Indeed, people often supplement the verb trabalhar for lutar for any work-like activity at all, therefore emphasizing the sense of force and effort that “true-work” involves. Work in Religious Discourse Concepts of labor in Santa Lucia resound with the tropes of Christian mythology. In catechism, children are taught the story of the Garden of Eden as the source of Original Sin and the cause of mankind’s exposure to the passions, to sorrow, and to death. Here they learn that Adam and Eve are cast out of the Garden of Eden for eating fruit from the Tree of Knowledge and are condemned by God to toil in the fields and to suffer pain in childbirth. In a sermon during the holy week of Easter, Padre Augusto referred the congregation to Chapter Three of Genesis: cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life . . . In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground.’ What does this mean, people? It means that we must toil to survive. And it is not easy, no. I hear you complain to yourselves: [puts on rural layman’s accent] “Ai, what have I done to deserve such punishment?” In their heart, who amongst us likes to toil? But let no one here be afraid to assume this cross, this heavy cross. For if God himself could suffer, why not us?

The meaning given to labor in this story is, from the outset, a highly ambivalent one. Labor is, on one level, the result of sin and a form of punishment, but on another level it is imbued with a strong, soteriological significance. As we shall see in the ethnography that follows, the mental and physical demands work makes on the person facilitates an oblique identification with Christ’s bodily martyrdom. As discussed in the previous chapter, the idiom of the suffering Christ is


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pervasive in daily forms of discourse, and it encompasses the practice of elaborated suffering. Labor, however, occupies a unique position in such discourse, as it has played a key role in the history of the Brazilian theological and liturgical tradition.

Legacies of Liberation Theology During the 1960s, Liberation theology, with its tradition of humanistic Marxism, had a large influence on Catholicism within Latin America (Burdick 1993, 1998, 2004; Cousineau Adriance 1995; Drogus 1997; Lancaster 1988; Lyons 2001, 2005; Nagle 1997; Orta 2004; Vásquez 1998). In the Northeast of Brazil, the new ministry of Liberation theology set out to liberate the Brazilian peasant from structural oppression and was particularly influential in the development of the land reform movement.4 According to the effervescent writings of the theologian Leonardo Boff in the late 1970s, the Liberationist charter would be delivered via ecclesiastical base communities characterized by reciprocity and egalitarianism, by “deep communion,” and by “mutual assistance,” (Boff and Boff 1986). Within the region of Santa Lucia, as within dioceses throughout the Northeast, Liberation style worship began to take the form of grassroots meetings, Workers’ Masses, popular missions, and politicized Stations of the Cross, in which events surrounding the Passion were creatively reworked so as to serve as the basis for a radical reflection on social oppression and human suffering. Traditional liturgy was also adapted: sermons were presented in the dialect and idiom of rural workers, and hymns were readdressed to “Our Lady of the Oppressed” and “Our Lord of the Workers.”5 On one occasion during this period, I was told, a liberationist missionary visiting Santa Lucia had invited the community to bring their hoes to a themed Celebration of the Word, which was held outdoors, and focused on the value of labor and the need for land reform. Worshippers were enjoined to hold their implements aloft for a mass blessing, which was rounded off with the popular Liberationist chant: “Viva o trabalhador! Viva o povo de Deus!” (Long live the worker! Long live the people of God!). Liberationist literature from this period offers some insight into the way the movement strove to radicalize peasants through the valorization of their labor. In the coffers of the local chapel was a rather dilapidated booklet of Liberation theology prayers and songs, which apparently had not been in use since the 1970s. Following

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are some excerpts of religious songs that imbue the act of labor with Christological significance: Aqui eu vim dizer, que muito trabalhei Cumpri o meu dever, e em Ti eu confiei. Lutei o dia inteiro para ganhar o pão Não pensei em dinheiro, pensei na salvação.

I came to say, that I worked hard Performed my duty, in You I trusted Struggled the entire day, to earn bread Thinking not of money, thinking of salvation.

Espero que encerre o mal do lavrador Que sofre sem a terra, que sofre sem valor. (Do altar de Deus)

I hope the farmer’s sorrow will end Who suffers without land, who suffers Without value (At the altar of God)

Somos povo, somos gente Somos o povo de Deus Queremos terra na terra Já temos terra no céu.

We are people, we are human We are the people of God We want land on earth We have land in heaven

Queremos plantar a roça Onde plantamos o amor Lavrador, a terra é nossa De um afã é um só Senhor

We want to plant the field Where we plant love Farmer, the land is ours Rally yourselves, there is only one Lord (We are people, We are human)

(Somos povo, Somos Gente)

Tu que me chamas amigo Vem provar-me que o és Vem para a roça comigo Na terra suja os pés

You who call me friend Prove to me that you are Come to the field with me Dirty your feet in the soil

Eu vou contigo pra roça Eu vou comer do teu pão Tu dás-me a força da vida Eu dou-te a minha canção (Canta amigo canta)

I’ll go with you to the field I will eat of your bread You give me the force of life I’ll give you my song (Sing friend sing)6

In the narrative of Liberation theology, the peasant is an unequivocally heroic figure whose localized struggle against the landowning elite is a


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manifestation of a wider, ongoing Christian battle against evil. Rural labor is cast as humble, arduous, unremunerated, and dignified. In the roçado the peasant farmer plants love (amor), his labor a supreme symbol of Christian nurture and self-abnegation. Through this is produced the “daily bread” (pão de cada dia), the force of life (a força da vida) itself. By the middle of the 1980s onward, however, a variety of social and political forces converged, that slowed down and in some ways reversed the progressive Liberationist ethic. Various scholars have since sought to illuminate why the popular church went into crisis, and the assumption within this literature has been that Liberation theology basically failed, and as such “broke its promise to the poor” (Nagle 1997; Vásquez 1998). However, and as Burdick suggests, an important and rarely asked question we might ask is whether and to what extent Liberation theology has continued to influence Brazilian social and political, and cultural values, despite its structural demise (Burdick 1999: 423). In Santa Lucia, as has been shown, aspects of Liberation ideology arguably still echo in the way that ordinary Santa Lucian people conceptualize agricultural labor, with one significant difference: rather than viewing themselves as a class of righteous heroes pitted against the wider forces of evil, Santa Lucians perceive themselves as ordinary persons pitted—oftentimes via that arduous labor—against their own sinfulness. Labor and Sin The first sense in which the sphere of labor is polluting is tied to its sexual connotations. This is particularly true of work in connection with the roçado that begins for an individual at a point in their life cycle where they are becoming sexually aware. As I describe elsewhere, initiating children into agricultural work is held to be both a way of controlling and a way of encouraging that awareness (Mayblin forthcoming). The process of digging holes (cavando buracos) to plant (plantar), or “bury” (enterrar) new crops is, unsurprisingly, envisaged as a sexual act. This is especially true in the case of the manioc plant that is grown from stiff pieces of stem called maniva, often referred to by the idiomatic term for penis, pau. The analogy is not lost on locals who joke that manioc is “born” after the pau has been “buried” in the hole. The growth of the crop is often linked in local discourse to the growth of persons. New crops “sprout” (brota), as do young people. When a person is described as broto, the connotation, depending upon the context, is that they are innocent and naïve or downright stupid. As the crop, like the person, grows tall and ripe, it becomes maduro (mature and fertile), like a married person. It is

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at this point in the life cycle of both crop and person, just before harvest, that the roçado becomes the ideal place for sexual intercourse. It is joked and hinted that lovers and married couples like to take advantage of the relative privacy afforded by roçado at this time of year, and I was told that in the past, women desperate for children would attempt to conceive in crop fields shortly before harvest.7 The second sense in which the sphere of labor is polluting, relates to its connection with commerce. As discussed in chapter 2, the exchange relations of market based negócio demands a certain degree of human awareness glossed in local parlance as consciência (awareness) or esperteza (cunning). Such qualities are perceived as antithetical to Christian moral values, and the pervasive opinion is that intense and aggressive forms of haggling over prices constitute a type of pecado (sin).8 William Christian (1972) makes a similar observation regarding perceptions of work among Spanish peasants. However, there the distinction applies only to migrant labor that occurs away from the village in the amoral space of the city: “Because the city is an amoral place, all rules of behaviour are off . . . The active life outside the village, at least as recounted afterward, rests on the principle that human nature, if left to itself, has self-interest as the mainspring of its actions” (1972: 163). In Santa Lucia, no such distinction is made. Vice is thought to be inherent to economic survival, wherever one works. Moreover, Santa Lucian people perceive themselves as intrinsically connected, if not to the city, at least to the local market towns, where the moral sphere of kinship is somewhat less pronounced and perceived amoral exchange relations predominate. Nevertheless, the forced and difficult nature of laborious activity can counteract the amoral character of exchange, for it provides a culturally recognized context for the enactment of self-sacrifice to occur. Narratives of Labor In Santa Lucia people are always eager to comment on whether a particular person is a trabalhador. As time went by, more and more people were explicitly singled out for me in this manner, and I started to observe that discussions of other people’s characters would inevitably circle around assertions over whether the person in question was a trabalhador (in the case of a man) or a trabalhadeira in the case of a woman. Thus in much the same way that certain women were known as sofredoras, some men and women were known as trabalhadores—a title that conferred respect and approval.


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The significance of this form of labeling was such that it was frequently the target of parody among Santa Lucian people themselves, such as when one young man, mimicking his own mother describing a prospective son-in-law, said, “He’s a good man, a real trabalhador!” Although both women and men are singled out in this way for their commitment to work, a gendered element is discernible. Although women are more likely than men to be labeled as sofredoras, they are nevertheless also observably trabalhadeiras, indeed it is in their work that they most clearly suffer. Men, however, are more likely to be singled out and labeled as trabalhadores, although the value of this label comes from the suffering it implies. The label of trabalhador is therefore used and applied predominantly in relation to men. However, the prestige of being a trabalhador is no more and no less than that of the female sofredora. It is simply that whereas women tend to frame their narratives through a generalized idiom of suffering, men tend to frame theirs through the more specific idiom of suffering through labor. The opposite of being a trabalhador is to be preguiçoso (lazy), a term that implies a certain lack of morality. To label a person preguiçoso is to say they lack consideration (consideração) and respect (respeito) for others. Another term opposed to that of trabalhador is that of marajá that, literally translated, means “maharaja,” and it denotes somebody who earns money without working very hard to attain it. In contrast to the virtuous trabalhador, the immoral marajá is someone who gets rich by exploiting the labor of others. In addition to such labeling, there exists the practice of exchanging stories about labor. This was revealed, not only through interviews in which I pursued the subject, but also through the spontaneous narratives people would tell among themselves when gathered socially. The stories and narratives I listened to and collected were striking for the attention they paid to the concept of physical suffering. In all narrations the body was in some way central, with the teller sometimes breaking off midsentence to show-off some bodily scar or physical complaint acquired in the process of that labor.9 The following four extracts are taken from labor narratives that were produced by people of different backgrounds, genders, and ages. The first of these is by a thirty-five-year-old married woman called Gloria who works as a primary school teacher. She has secondary education, a teaching diploma, and belongs to one of Santa Lucia’s wealthier families: I get up at five in the morning to sweep the house, make the breakfast and prepare the lunch. I leave everything ready so that my girls can heat

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it up for their father. By six I have left the house for work. It takes me one and half hours to get to the school where I teach. I go on foot to town and it takes me one hour to get there. From there I catch the bus to the school. And then I teach all morning until midday. Look, I have been teaching for eleven years. Eleven years of suffering. Only Nossa Senhora (Our Lady) knows what I have endured. It falls to me to discipline the children as well as to teach them. And we have no resources to do the job. Do you think the prefeitura gives us any resources to teach with? It gives nothing. I work hard. When I work very hard Maya, my blood pressure drops low, and I feel a terrible pain in my legs.

Antonio is a twenty-seven-year-old man who, although never having graduated, has several years of secondary schooling. He holds down various casual jobs in local commerce, in addition to the share-cropping work, which he does in partnership with his brothers. In the following passage, he gives an account of a past job he had as a traveling cigarette vendor. On the occasion being described, he had fallen asleep and been robbed of his cigarettes, his money, and various other possessions. What could I do? Well, I decided to walk. I had not eaten all day and the sun was burning hot. Twenty-four kilometres I walked to get home. I had lost everything, I was thirsty, and I was on foot. This is what the poor man suffers, well, what life is like for the humble Northeasterner.

Seu Luis is a small-holder and independent producer. He is married, in his early forties, and a father to four children. Following are some of his memories of working the land when young: I was brought up to do every kind of work there is. When I was eight, my father put me to work on the heavy stuff. This high I started going to the roçado. I did everything father did: planted fields, cleared forest, dug holes, slaughtered pigs, sold offal . . . That is how I learnt. When I got older I also did sharecropping to help my parents. Ave Maria, I didn’t have time to play like young people today, no, back in those days there was no tractor, no machine for threshing feijão. It was all on the hoe. Clearing forest, now that was heavy work: one’s arms would ache, ache, ache, from breaking soil. I would leave the house everyday with a hat bigger than a parasol on my head, to protect me from the sun. During harvest we slept in the fields, working all the day. Well, I learnt to work the hoe on an empty stomach. Back then one’s stomach obliged one to work, but often we were hungry.

The final account is by Seu Mané, a retired landless laborer married to Dona Lourdes, and father of twelve grown-up children. In the


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following passage, He describes what he remembers as the most arduous work of his life, working in the casa de farinha: Mixing manioc. Today they don’t do it anymore, no. Today people make manioc flour in a factory, everything with an electric motor, everything motorized. To mix flour in the old days, was with one’s arms. It was virtually the heaviest work there was in the world . . . Back in those days I worked the whole week for three cruzeiros. I started on a Tuesday, worked until Saturday, often Sunday. There were nights I worked at night, the day, the night, and the day after that until six in the morning. I didn’t stop mixing. Yes, my child, I suffered. Look, I mixed that flour in the mouth of the oven, the heat was so intense, see this leg here, all the hairs on this leg burnt off. This was the thing: there were times I passed two, three days there working without stop. Without being able to come home. The shift was thirteen hours, but sometimes the next guy to take my place wouldn’t turn up, so I couldn’t leave work. Well, my patron would say “You take on his shift and tomorrow early you go home to sleep so you can start back again at night.” So I would do thirty-six hours. All that was left was for me to drop dead, Maya. Ah, it was too much, too much. And do you think I had the strength to reach home and say: “Ah, now I’m home I’ll have a bath!” Who on earth would have had? Many times I would just wash my feet and fall asleep right there. Another thing Maya, I tired of leaving the casa de farinha with this leg of mine, hot, hot, from the heat of the ovens, and when I reached the river—back in this time there was lots of rain—I’d arrive and the river would be this high. Often I’d have to take off my trousers to pass. That cold river. I thought to myself : I’m going to enter but I won’t get out because surely before that I’ll die. I was afraid for my life, afraid that from the heat of the oven I would explode there in that cold water. The water was icy, and I would have to ascend the road flooded with that water. I walked in that icy water until I reached home. Now this wasn’t only one time, nor two, nor three, no. I did it because I had to. Not because I wanted to. Well, I suffered and thank God I never became disabled with this business. I suffered a lot, worked a lot, today I don’t work any more, but then I can’t. Today I live with a bad back. Yes, I suffered, Ave Maria, I suffered.

When I prompted Seu Mané for his reason for enduring such conditions, he indicated to his family: What else could I do, Maya, with Lourdes at home, every year with another baby. If I had been another kind of man I would have left, gone off into the world. Well, there are men who will do that, as we know. Imagine if I had! I would have suffered less that way. But a father has to feed his children. So I stayed.

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I shall return further on to look at reasons for the performance and representation of labor as suffering. Before this, however, it is important to observe that labor-as-suffering is not a discourse elaborated only by peasant villagers. It pervades Brazilian social structure and emerges in formal contexts and political discourse. In his analysis of the social organization and practice of Rural Workers Syndicates, for example, John Comerford (1999) observes the pervasive references in speeches made by Syndicate leaders, to notions of struggle (luta) and suffering (sofrimento). Such references emerge both in their general depictions of rural work and in their personal stories (Comerford 1999: 43–45). In Santa Lucia, the use of such discourse by the powerful was not at all uncommon. On one memorable occasion the village doctor called a meeting to raise awareness about the spread of dengue, which was at the time a matter of national crisis. The meeting was held outside the chapel, with the steps forming a sort of platform. When enough people had gathered, the doctor began a speech that went on for a full forty minutes about how hard he worked, the low pay he received from the local authority for his job, the long hours he spent commuting across states in order to do it, and the time he was obliged to spend apart from his beloved new wife. In so doing he cast himself in the role of heroic sufferer, sacrificing himself on behalf of the village. As I looked around I was surprised to notice that the audience were rapt in attention. No one present seemed in the slightest bit indignant that a wealthy, middle-class doctor, who lived in a luxurious condominium in the city, should lay claim to the experience of suffering. Flanked by his two auxiliary nurses, the doctor’s oration built up gradually to a finale. His “mission” (missão), he proclaimed, was arduous, and it was for this reason that the people of Santa Lucia should listen carefully and obey the following instructions on how to avoid the spread of dengue. In a similar fashion, whenever the prefeito (mayor) of the local town gave a public speech either in campaign for an election or to publicize a new construction or public work, he would dedicate the first portion of his speech to how much suffering he endured in his job; emphasizing the hours he sacrificed away from his family, the lack of financial reward, and so forth. In each of the above accounts, suffering, whether physical, mental, or emotional is in someway articulated. In several of the accounts, attention is drawn to the elements at play during the performance of the labor itself: floods, drought, hunger, and the ubiquitous Northeastern hot sun. However, it is not simply the labor itself that causes suffering but having to travel long distances on foot to the place of labor itself, missing out on sleep, and being parted from one’s


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family. The physical toll of work on the body is particularly prominent in the account produced by Seu Mané, whose position as a landless laborer left him no choice but to perform some of the most arduous and exploitative work there was.10 Labor as Atonement Although the type of person making a claim on the work-as-suffering discourse varies widely, those most likely to engage with it are married men. Married people, as I discussed in chapter 2, are necessarily mired in spiritually polluting activities. Be this as it may, some married people are tempted to worse misdeeds than others. Indeed, the significance to being a trabalhador only became fully clear to me when I began to hear it used specifically in connection with two local men, both of whom were widely known to have committed serious offences.11 The case of Seu José, the weary laborer I described in the very opening paragraph of this book, provides one example. Seu José was a landless laborer, and the father of six young children who ran about the village, often begging at other people’s back doors for food. Seu José worked much of the week and passed a good deal of his spare time drinking, like any other man. And like many other men, he was reportedly prone to the odd violent outburst. On this occasion, however, he had gone one step further than usual and, fuelled with alcohol, had set fire to his own house with his wife and six children still inside it. Fortunately no one was hurt, but Seu José had fled Santa Lucia for a few days in case the police were alerted. The other man, Seu Roberto was in his late sixties and had long ago murdered his wife with a scythe in a fit of drunken jealousy. Attitudes toward the offence committed by Seu Roberto are complex, and it will therefore be discussed more fully in the next chapter. The nature of both these acts, however, is such that one might expect irreparable damage to have occurred to each man’s relations within the community. In fact, this did not appear to be the case and both men were able to continue living in the community. When I queried friends in Santa Lucia on why these men had been accepted back into their respective families, explanations circled around the fact that they were muito trabalhadores (very hard workers). In talking about Seu Roberto, informants would often comment on the long hours he spent alone on his land, laboring without help—not, apparently, because he could not afford to hire some, but because he liked the hard work. Similar comments were made about

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Seu José who worked as a sharecropper and hired himself out whenever possible in casual labor, making, firing, and transporting bricks, digging wells and ditches, and loading sacks of farinha onto trucks for transportation to towns. On one occasion, Dida and Amauri were discussing Seu José’s predicament. Dida was concerned that his numerous children were becoming something of a nuisance, sleeping in the streets and constantly begging for food at other people’s houses. “The problem is with the parents,” she surmised. Amauri, however, came to Seu José’s defense. “The man may be poor,” he said “but no one can deny he is a true trabalhador. Do you think it is easy for a man to feed seven stomachs?” Amauri was trying to make the point that although the value in material terms was small, too small to sustain his large family, its sacrificial value was high, high enough to warrant a certain level of forgiveness for moral transgression. An interesting parallel may be noted between the redemptive work ethic of Santa Lucians and that which Max Weber (1967) linked to European Protestantism: both posit labor as a route to spiritual salvation, although in subtly differing ways. Whereas Santa Lucian people reject the idea that labor’s moral production is in any way connected to its level of material production, in Weber’s understanding of Calvinist theology, material and moral production may merge in that wealth can signal God’s blessing. Weber argued that following the Protestant Reformation, the acquisition of wealth became an approved and worthy goal: economic productivity was potentially a sign of God’s grace and being a hard and diligent worker presented a way for individuals to demonstrate their predestination.12 Thus, those who accumulated came to be considered the very pinnacle of morality itself, since they testified to the bourgeois virtues of thrift, diligence, hard work, dedication, and persistence (Marshall 1982: 107).13 In the Catholic Santa Lucian tradition, by contrast, the two spheres of morality and economic productivity are maintained as distinct. Although wealth and moral worth are in no way incommensurable, wealth is viewed rather unequivocally as a danger to the soul and a hindrance to spiritual achievement. Wealth, although always desirable, has the ability to transform individuals into marajás (exploitative, amoral persons), and in this sense can jeopardize a person’s chance of salvation. For Santa Lucians, industriousness is not, as the Calvinist position might imply, a sign that a person is already saved, it is simply a means of attaining salvation. The difference is one of chronology: in the Calvinist philosophy salvation comes earlier; in the Catholic tradition it comes later. This variation stems from the concept of grace that


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in the Augustinian philosophy is a gift but in the Catholic tradition may be earned in equal exchange for suffering.14 In Santa Lucia, the spiritual redemption of even the very best trabalhador is in no sense a foregone conclusion, and people I knew were quick to point out that men like Seu Roberto and Seu José were not paragons of virtue. Acts of extreme interpersonal violence are clearly and unambiguously deemed as types of moral transgression by Santa Lucian people, and as such, pose a direct challenge to collective standards of appropriate, Christian behavior. The moral discord that is felt in the aftermath of such transgressions is thus handled, to some degree, collectively. The inner thoughts and distinctive circumstances of individual transgressors are subsumed, in the collective imagination, beneath a generalized idea of what it means to be a transgressorin-the-community. In this context, the encompassing social interest lies simply in the potential for moral redemption via observable facts about a transgressor’s life style. Herein, whatever thoughts and feelings people may privately have entertained about men like Seu Roberto and Seu José, their public comments were restricted to the visible sacrifice that each man appeared to enact, via his daily labor, on behalf of his dependents. Similar observations were made in terms of other types of moral transgression. I was often struck by the constant observation that although certain men were notorious drunks, they were also trabalhadores. The example of drinking is pertinent given that Santa Lucian men tend to drink prolifically. Heavy drinking goes hand in hand with the discussing of negócio (business) and the building up of male networks of friendship and favor-owing (Cowan 1990; Lancaster 1992; Papataxiarchis 1991; Robben 1989). With the exception of Good Friday, there is no real restriction on the times or occasions suitable for drinking, and local barracas (drinking shacks) tend to do a steady trade throughout the year.15 The most common type of drinker is the weekend cachaceiro (cane liquor drinker). This is the man who works all week but spends his Sundays solidly inebriated. On Sundays local barracas open especially early and by seven a.m. are doing good business. I soon grew used to the strange phenomenon of customarily quiet, polite, and serious men habitually transformed on Sundays into staggering drunkards. Women, who tend not to drink alcohol, often disparage men for drinking too much. At the same time, however, they maintain a careful distinction between permanently inebriated alcoholics and weekend cachaceiros—tending to be much more forgiving of the latter. This was made clear to me as I walked through the village early one

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Sunday morning with Lourdinha, a woman who was herself accustomed to dealing with a husband regularly passed out from alcohol consumption. Lourdinha was an outspoken, energetic woman who seemed to know every single person in the region by name and had clear opinions about everything. I had often heard her complain that weekend cachaceiros made the village feio (ugly) and were a bad example to the young. I was therefore surprised when on this particular day she called out affectionately to a man slumped at the foot of the barraca in an advanced state of drunkenness “Oh José, all the world knows that you struggle all week just to escape with a little cachaça at the end!” The rationale Lourdinha was tapping into was one I had noted in my interviews with men before: that drinking, aside from its obvious social functions, offers a means of forgetting the hard work one has endured during the week. It is not, therefore, simply because he spends his week upholding his duties as a family provider that the weekend drunk is tolerated, but because in needing to forget, he is cast quite specifically as a suffering man. Paradoxically, heavy weekend drinking may be interpreted as testament to the existence of sacrifice and suffering in a man’s life and therefore as a public statement of his moral worth. Love and Fatherhood Moral people are often referred to as pessoas de amor (people of love). The concept of love, which I elaborate more fully in the next chapter, is deeply significant in Santa Lucia as it underpins ecclesiastical teachings about morality that extend to virtually all areas of life. A “good man” (o bom homen), it was generally stated, was to be found in two places: either in a field swinging a hoe or at home with his family. Once, as I sat passing the afternoon with Dida and family on the doorstep, conversation turned to the topic of adultery. Amauri lamented the fact that all the cuckolded men he had ever known were not bad men who had treated their wives unfairly, but good men who had loved their wives and children dearly. He knew this, he told us, because everyone in question was a trabalhador. When I asked him why being a trabalhador should signify love, he referred to a particular villager: Take Zé Preto. He is what I would call a good man, a man who shows his love for others. He’s not one of these who lives only to drink and have fun. Every single day he passes by the house, he doesn’t miss a day. Well, you must have seen him pass by, early, with his hoe. There


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is a guy that lives to sweat, goes from his house to the hoe, from the hoe to his house. As far as I’m concerned a man like that has to love his family.

Similar equations were expressed by women in relation to older male kin. What was striking in this respect was that despite the constant reference to the importance amor plays in everyday social interaction, no woman I asked had ever heard the words “I love you” pass from her father’s lips. Women would often describe their fathers as authoritarian figures, unable or unwilling to display verbal or physical affection toward them. But this, it seemed, mattered little if the man in question had been a trabalhador. Desilda’s father had passed away some years ago. The following dialogue, taken from a life-story interview I did with her, offers a perfect example of the form this topic typically assumed: Maya: People often say it is important to have love for others. Would you say your father was a loving man? Desilda: My father was a trabalhador. All his life he worked and took care of us. My father was the one around here who made the wooden wheels for people’s carts. We would watch him, early in the morning when he started, how he would lift those heavy pieces of wood and metal. Banging them into shape pah, pah, pah! Sometimes he would get orders and still be working at midnight, the night before a market. This was when he was not in the casa de farinha, making farinha for us. Ah, my father worked a lot. And I’ll tell you something else, every single week he would ride his cart to market, and return with our food, never missed a market in his life. We never went hungry. Maya: Did your father talk much to you when you were young? Desilda: No, father was never one for conversation. He never made even the smallest conversation with me. He was very closed. Maya: Would you say your father loved you? Desilda: With certainty I would. See, he was like the other people of that time: ignorant of how to talk, but a trabalhador nevertheless. Well, he loved us.

For Desilda, as for others, parental love is primarily a demonstrative phenomenon, not a verbal one. This notion, I would argue, is particularly applicable to married men whose gender precludes them from open forms of emotional expression. Herein, the supreme expression of a father or husband’s love tends to lie in his alter-centered deeds and in the labor he enacts on behalf of his household.

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Although both mothers and fathers labor to provide for households, fathers are the ones most likely to do wage work. Moreover, at least half of what a household as a unit produces from its land will be turned over for sale in the market to wholesale dealers in agricultural produce, and this dealing with outsiders is generally a husband’s job. The role of provider is more strongly associated with men than it is with women—for as Seu Mané put it earlier, “a man’s obligation is to feed his children.” Thus it is men who, in local imaginings, bear the larger load when it comes to providing for the entire family. Moreover, in a region historically afflicted by extremes of social inequality, drought, and land shortage, feeding a family is implicitly associated with hardship and struggle. In local imaginings, providers are persons burdened with an exceptionally heavy Cross. The peasant father-provider is simultaneously identified with Adam, cast out into the world, and the crucified Jesus. Sociohistorical factors here converge with latent symbolic configurations about labor derived from the Genesis myth, casting the provider as a distinctive type of worldly Christian hero ordained on a mission of spiritual import. It would be mistaken, however, to overplay the gendered aspect of the labor-as-suffering complex. For as we have seen, women are as apt to make claims on the discourse as men. This is hardly surprising given that both men and women exist in the same universe of symbols, and they are exposed to the same scriptural doctrines and preachings. Bynum makes a similar point regarding gender in Europe in the late Middle Ages when she points out that whereas male ascetics tended to renounce wealth and power, women ascetics tended to renounce food (1987: 295). However, women’s piety, she argues, was not inherently different from that of men’s, but rather a different appropriation of symbols toward the same ends. Indeed, in the Santa Lucian context, what stands out is not the issue of differentiation so much as correspondence between the various kinds of gendered narratives produced. Labor, the Body, and Redemption In seeking to analyze the labor narrative, it is important to recognize the sense in which it presents us, whether intentionally or not, with a form of critical reflection, and historical embodiment of what it means to be poor, rural, and from the Northeast of Brazil. Discernible within such accounts are layers of individuated awareness about the nature of suffering and its causation by social structure and political circumstance beyond the ordinary person’s control.


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However, it might also be said that such narratives embody all of this and more, arising from a complex mixture of sociohistorical factors and Christian cosmology. The logic of the labor narrative, regardless of what type of person produces it, is sacrifice on behalf of others (whether students, patients, family, community). The aesthetic of sacrificial suffering, as previously discussed, is captured by a notion of containment. The analogy between suffering and containment noted in the last chapter with regards to women resurfaces here in relation to men. Just as women suffer the burden of pregnancy, that is, of containing children inside the womb, men suffer the burden of containment outside the womb—of provision within the world. Mothers and fathers can thus be said to “contain” on behalf of their children in specific and particular contexts. However, the metaphor of containment can also be extended upward to encompass, in the final instance, an abstract, overarching cosmology of sacrifice and social regeneration. Take, for example, the common local saying Quem não respeita a mãe, não respeita a gente (He who has no respect for a mother, has no respect for people). In this saying, the mother-container is equated with, and thus mnemonically stands for the total, life-giving whole. The concept of labor-as-suffering, however, is not without historical or contemporary resonance either in Brazil, or in other parts of the world. The moral-philosophical maxims of ascetic suffering, moral perfection, and physical labor have been given extensive treatment by the cultural and literary theorist, Anna Leibovich.16 Through an analysis of Russian folktales and popular aphorisms, Leibovich contrasts a Western concept of work, associated with the glory of property, wealth, and personal ambition, with a Russian conception of work associated with resigned suffering and self-sacrifice (1995: 8). In Russia, the peasant experience amplified a sense of identification with the suffering Christ to include the most vital period of the agricultural cycle: the summer field work. Crop gathering, which was associated with back breaking work and with the death of the plant “bore the seeds of the promise of future life—the simulacrum of Christ’s suffering, his painful death on the cross, and the promise of resurrection” (1995: 28). Such a connection is evident, she argues, in the semantic meaning of the Russian word for peasant (krestianin). The root of the noun krest (the cross) invokes Christ carrying the cross on his way to Golgotha and a sense of partaking alongside Jesus in the same torment of suffering. She also cites the dictionary definition for the Russian word strada (summer field work) as “various kinds of suffering” and “the process of dying” (1995: 28).

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In Santa Lucia “the process of dying” associated with work can be understood as a powerful and effective technique-of-the-self, enabling a reconstruction of human/divine relations. The Spanish peasants of Christian’s study, it could be said, are involved in a similar project: to resolve the inherent tension based on living in the world. To these ends they employ two main strategies. One of these is “a sensible recognition on their part of the impossibility of the ethical demands made upon them” (1972: 158). The other is to cyclically cleanse themselves of pollution through informal “rites of purification” at shrines. Purificatory rites such as those documented by Christian revolve around an intensely asymmetrical human-divine relationship in which the person takes on the more passive role of requesting forgiveness and salvation through prayer but without knowing for sure whether it will be granted. The trabalhador, on the other hand, by tapping into the generative potency of sacrifice, constitutes himself more equally in relation to the divine. Through his conscious decision to suffer, he wields a certain creative agency in his own salvation that the humble petitioner does not. By emulating Christ’s physical death and bodily suffering, Santa Lucians lay emphasis on the “fallen” side of God. In doing so, they contract the ontological gap between God and man. Plumbing the Flesh As Jonathan Parry observes, in the Judeo-Christian tradition “the gates of heaven have in theory always been open to those who remained in the world” (1994: 271). Since salvation is to be obtained within it, the world is less-radically devalued in Christianity than it is in other major world religions, as for example in orthodox Theravada Buddhism, where only those who renounce the world can aspire to salvation, and the laity are left with the lesser religious goal of achieving a better rebirth (Parry 1994). Nevertheless, as Christian (1972) aptly points out, the symbolism and structure of the Roman Catholic Church manifest a clear ambivalence toward the social order. Such doctrinal ambivalence toward the world is arguably the product of a dualistic epistemology that values spirit more highly than matter. The Cathars of the thirteenth century were among the first of various extreme Christian and quasi-Christian positions to denounce flesh and matter. Starting from the premise of a cosmic dichotomy between spirit and matter, the Cathars rejected the doctrine of the Incarnation and argued that the holy or “perfect” must flee the flesh in this life (Bynum 1987: 252). Thus, historians have often seen the extravagant penitential practices of past eras as the manifestation of a world-denying and flesh-hating Cathar-religious philosophy.


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Fenella Cannell (1999; 2006) demonstrates how early Christian debates about the nature of flesh versus spirit have contributed to the scholastic notion of Christianity as the “impossible religion.” She writes, Discussions of the problems which Christianity poses for people in ordinary life have a long pedigree which (although few anthropologists seem inclined to make the connection) was probably first articulated by Hegel as the “unhappy consciousness” which is the fate of humanity when power is seen to withdraw from immanence in the material world to a transcendent world beyond, leaving mortals, as it were, orphaned . . . The same problem was rephrased in more familiar works by Durkheim . . . who claimed that “. . . it is only with Christianity that God goes beyond space: his kingdom is no longer of this world. The dissociation of nature and the divine becomes so complete that it even generates into hostility,’ and again with Leach . . . who emphasized the need for mediation in Christianity. (1999: 197)

Cannell’s (2004) recent study of American Mormon culture has shown, however, that the Christian celebration of the world “beyond” is not always a conceptually impossible one. Indeed, the extent to which the traditional split between spirit and matter actually expresses itself in local forms of religiosity has also been challenged by anthropologists of Catholic societies who note the prevalence of a sacrificial discourse centered on the body (Dahlberg 1987, 1991; Eade 1991; McKevitt 1991; Orsi 2005; Sallnow 1991; Eade and Sallnow 1991). As Michael Sallnow suggests, the doctrine of the physical resurrection of the unblemished body on the Day of Judgment, which early Christianity inherited from Judaism and which is maintained by both the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox churches, has “always had the effect of blurring the distinction between the spiritual and material domains, between the soul and the body” (Sallnow 1991: 22). Dahlberg advances a similar position, arguing that the unique Catholic emphasis on the body derives from teachings about the Real Presence in the consecrated host, and in particular from the Catholic institution’s opposition to contraception: Implicit in here in the teachings on human sexuality and reproduction, are ideas that the divine is embodied in, and that spiritual relationships are founded through, the human body. (1991: 47)

A concern with matter and corporeality has long been at the forefront of Christian, and particularly Catholic expression. As Bynum (1987)

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demonstrates, the humanity of Christ, understood as including his full participation in bodiliness, was a central and characteristic theme in the religiosity of the late medieval period. The sense of identification with Christ lay in the background of Eucharistic devotion but came out in various other ascetical practices. For female ascetics in particular, the often-excruciating pain of fasting, self-flagellation, and abstinence was not a flight from but into physicality. Religious women in the middle ages saw in their own bodies not only a symbol of the humanness of both genders but also a means of approach to God himself: The goal of religious women was thus to realize the opportunity of physicality. They strove not to eradicate body but to merge their own humiliating and painful flesh with that flesh whose agony, espoused by choice, was salvation. Luxuriating in Christ’s physicality, they found there the lifting up—the redemption—of their own. (Bynum 1987: 246, original italics)

Thus Bynum argues that late medieval asceticism cannot be interpreted as an expression of a dualistic theology because instead of degrading matter, it was an effort to “plumb and realise all the possibilities of the flesh” (Bynum 1987: 294). In Santa Lucia, local forms of devotional practice clearly betray a heightened concern with corporeality and with sensuality. But the body/soul dualism at work in this context is neither that of the Cathars nor exactly the same as Bynum’s female ascetics. The dualistic doctrine carne é fraca (flesh is weak) is propagated in the official theology of the Brazilian Catholic Church and is, on many levels, a widely accepted view. But whereas the weakness of flesh, from an official perspective, categorically devalues it in relation to spirit, for Santa Lucian people it does not. Through redemptive labor narratives that draw attention to bodily passions, weaknesses, and suffering, Santa Lucians invest flesh with a certain autonomy distinct from the volition of the spirit/self. It is this that allows them, when politic, to subscribe to the contrary view that flesh, although weak, has certain moral advantages over spirit. Let us return, at this point, to the notion of emulating Christ and to the example of Seu José and Seu Roberto: the continual affirmation of these men as trabalhadores draws attention to the remarkable ability of the flesh, via labor, to enact a mechanical form of sacrifice. The strength of the body is its ability to perform moral, alter-centered actions even when the spirit has lapsed into sin. Sacrifice, in this context,


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is a type of bodily theater that need not necessarily be accompanied by matching inward desire. Therefore one might say that because of its very weakness and resultant capacity to conduct suffering, flesh is an ideal mediator between two states of being-in-the-world: the fallen and the redeemed. In the labor context, it is because flesh is separate from and not merged with spirit that it can mediate in this way. In other words, Santa Lucian religiosity does not do away with the spirit/matter distinction, but neither is it rooted in an irreconcilable dichotomy—in a radical sense of spirit entrapped by body. Rather it appears to negotiate a subtler dialectic between these two poles. Conclusion In concluding this chapter I return once again to my description at the beginning of it, of the manner in which Santa Lucians would recite for me their tasks. Such sharing of everyday experiences has a certain purpose: to construct the person as a trabalhador whose embodied capacity for work says something significant about their spiritual, moral worth. Spontaneous listings of chores accomplished are, on this level, no different from the lengthier narratives produced by men on the toughness of agricultural labor, no different from the teacher who talks of the difficulty of working with children, or the cigarette seller who was robbed. In this chapter, we have seen how Santa Lucians construct their labor as an embodiment of Christian love and thus as the basis of all sociality. As the discourse on loving fathers in particular attests, sacrifice and hence love is recognized when labor can be said to involve physical pain or mental tribulation in some form, whether this be the sheer difficulty of covering one’s costs in an uncertain market, the travails of long-distance travel, or the physical effort of swinging a hoe. One striking feature of this particular labor discourse, however, is its capacity for assimilating and attenuating the moral discord that arises in cases of serious and violent transgression. Via this particular type of labor discourse, extreme sins may be retold and reworked until they appear to dissolve into the very fabric of the moral person-in-the-community. In the following chapter we shall continue exploring this theme, by looking more closely at the case of Seu Roberto.


Chapter 5

Virtuous Husbands, Powerful Wives: Marriage and the Dangers of Power

Lucia’s brick hut stood at the end of the dirt track. As I approached

it in the thick afternoon heat I felt strangely apprehensive. Perhaps, I sensed why Lucia had asked me to come to her. As I got closer I could see her leaning against her doorframe in an oversize T-shirt, emblazoned with the name of some past political candidate. She was smoking a cigarette and squinting into the distance, through the dust and heat. As soon as she spotted me, she stubbed out her cigarette, smiled warmly, and invited me into the house. Entering the front room, I noticed that Lucia had framed the photograph I had taken of the two of us and placed it on top of her television. Her front room, painted blue, was always neat. A calendar bearing a picture of the Virgin adorned one wall, and on the table in the middle of the room, was a crisply ironed tablecloth. “Maya,” she said to me as I sat down at the table, “I am going to tell you about my mother’s death and I want you to write it down. When you understand about this terrible thing that happened, you will understand my life.” Without much preliminary talk, Lucia then began to narrate to me her version of how her father, Seu Roberto, had murdered her mother, Dona Beta, with a scythe, fifteen years ago: I was young, only thirteen, my life was dedicated to playing. I never dreamed, never thought, you know, about marriage, nothing like that. But Maya, on that day at that hour I had become so anxious. I was at home with my mother washing dishes under a cashew tree. And there I was crying. So anxious was I that she sent me off with the neighbour’s daughter, Velta. I said “Mama I have this bad feeling in my heart.” She said “Go with Velta now, disappear, go and play.” So I left her and went. Then, at Lulu’s house where we went,

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they arrived. Me already with that terrible feeling. They arrived and said “Lucia, your mother has been killed. Your father killed your mother just now.” Ave Maria! At that moment I went crazy. I ran, crawled under the barbed wire, scratched myself all over to reach her. Madrinha Quiterinha caught up with me—they did not want me to go back to the house—but I pulled away from her. When I arrived at my house, there was already a mass of people, and there she was, fallen on Jecinda’s front terrain. She had fallen, Maya, I held her. I saw that a load of men were already with my father, restraining him, and the women were all crying . . . They said it happened like this: that when he went after her, Jecinda yelled “Run, Beta, run, the door is open for you to enter, he’s going to kill you, run!” She left the house running but could not run very fast because she was weak from an operation. Then, when she was nearly there, she tripped up almost at Jecinda’s door and that was the moment he got her. They say Jecinda screamed for her to run but it was too late. He got her with three swings of a scythe. If it had not been for Décio who arrived at that second, he would have finished her off instantly. Well, no one could stop me going to her. I held her in my arms, I rolled on the ground there sobbing. When I lifted her arm I could see her bone sticking out and her head soaked with blood. Her hair was already becoming hard with blood. The last thing she said to me was “Lucia, your father has killed me. Why has he done this?”

*

*

*

Lucia’s story was one I had heard before. That Seu Roberto had murdered his wife because of her supposed unfaithfulness was common knowledge. But strangely, to me at least, no one I knew seemed to hold it against the old man who was in his seventies and still lived in the house where the event had taken place. To understand why this was, it is important to first make a number of observations regarding conceptions of power and violence within the conjugal context. In this chapter, I seek to comprehend how intraconjugal violence is conceptualized and understood by Santa Lucian people themselves. In doing so, I aim to take a critical look at how concepts of morality and gender identity fit together and to forward an alternative perspective to that which has been proposed in some of the related literature. One of my aims is to question whether there can be any such thing as a “gendered morality” (Melhuus 1996) in Santa Lucia, a morality in which “powerful” husbands are exempt from moral encompassment, and “virtuous” wives, by contrast, are not.

VIRT UOUS HUSBANDS, POW ERFUL W IV ES

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Husbands, Wives, Violence, and Gender From marriage by capture and elopement to the playful punches and tiffs that, according to writers like Olivia Harris (1994) and Catherine Allen (1988), characterize amorous encounters in the Andes, the literature on indigenous South America and elsewhere is filled with references to the violent and competitive process by which intimate relationships are formed outside kinship and marriage occurs. But as many note, the violence often does not end after the wedding transaction is complete. Ongoing physical confrontation between spouses has been theorized as an expression of everything from the ritualized construction of masculinity (Harris 1994) to the positive production of kin out of affines, where, according to writers like Penny Harvey (1994) and Christina Torren (1994), physical force is simultaneously an idiom of integration and separation; a means of establishing order and hierarchy in a relationship predicated on difference, danger, disorder, and desire. More recently, Krista Van Vleet writing about violence and the ambiguities of affinity among Sulklk’ata argues that we need to guard against a view of domestic violence emerging solely from a relationship of power asymmetry between men and women, because this obscures the significance of those relationships that extend beyond the married couple, particularly the often-violent relationship between female affines (2008: 162). For those writing about Catholic mestizo societies, intraconjugal violence is frequently understood through gendered constructions of sexual propriety (Melhuus 1992, 1996; Melhuus and Stølen 1996; Stølen 1996a, 1996b). Drawing upon Mediterranean concepts of honor and shame, these writers have argued that male violence is both perpetrated and justified by masculine codes of honor that supersede local conceptions of virtue and morality. In such works, the notion that men’s status depends upon the ability to control women is given analytical prominence, and this feeds into the notion of the existence of an overarching antagonism between the sexes. Marit Melhuus and Kristi Anne Stølen’s (1996) discussion of sexuality and domestic violence is typical of a particular feminist approach wherein analytical concepts of power are variously deployed to reveal the differing interests of men and women, and this difference is foregrounded as the problem for analysis par excellence. In Latin America in particular, the power of Catholic gender imagery and the prevalence of patriarchal structures has long led gender theorists to focus on the tyranny of machista men and their oppression of women. As is argued in the introduction to one of the most recent edited

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collections on gender in Latin America by Janise Frazier, Jo Hurtig, and Rosario Montoya (2002), works that elaborate on the politics of gendered practices are “particularly urgent given this profoundly dystopian moment in Latin America and the world at large” (Frazier, Hurtig, and Montoya 2002: 4). Within this field approaches vary. While writers such as Melhuus (1996), Stølen (1996a, 1996b), and Annick Prieur (1996) have emphasized the complicity of women in their oppression by their acceptance and reproduction of dominant gender ideology, writers such as Ana María Alonso (2002), Montoya (2002), and Magdalena Villareal (1996) have pointed to the multiple strategies and beliefs used by women to subvert masculine power. Other theorists have been more critical of monolithic notions, arguing instead for the ongoing construction of multiple and sometimes contradictory gender identities (Wade 1994; McCallum 2001). According to Peter Wade (1994), it is the multifarious and contradictory nature of gender production, which brings radically differing values into collision within the home and accounts for violence of various sorts. It has been asserted before, however, that gender, being “good to think with,” is often used as a social metaphor to give voice to important binary stereotypes that are essentially abstract and dialectically present in all persons regardless of their sex (Ardener 1975; Harris 2000; Strathern 1988). In this chapter, I wish to extend a point made originally by Marilyn Strathern, who argues that “[w]e should not assume for cultures that make heavy symbolic use of the antithesis between male and female that it literally divides men and women into social classes—so that we then have to account for each class as having its own model” (1981:169). Reflecting upon such a problem in the Santa Lucian context has led me to pose a specific question of my own: might an overdrawn concern with contrast and difference lead us to overlook indigenous categories of correspondence between the sexes? The ethnography presented in this chapter will encourage us to rethink the centrality of gender-based models for understanding sexual politics and conjugal violence. For as we shall see, in the Santa Lucian case, what gets stressed is not difference—be it complementary or conflictual—between men and women, but the similarity of their moral concerns. And power, rather than being, as it so often is in feminist analysis, the preserve of men and the scourge of women, is locally conceptualized as a consequence of the knowledge (conhecimento) and self-awareness (consciência) that develops in persons through married life, and is thus wielded by both men and women.


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This chapter is divided into two sections. In the first section, I shall expand upon local understandings of power relations in a variety of different contexts. In doing so I focus on the moral discourse surrounding such relations; a moral discourse that turns about the dichotomy of love and pride. I shall go on to examine how Santa Lucian people apprehend the power relation between husbands and wives. This will lead me back to an analysis of the account of Dona Beta’s murder given earlier. In the second half of the chapter, I shall contrast my own theoretical position with the theoretical model of power and gender advanced by Melhuus (1992, 1996) and Melhuus and Stølen (1996). I argue that the concept of power elucidated by these theorists is too abstract and analytical for understanding intraconjugal violence in the Santa Lucian context, because it fails to capture the complexity of the moral discourse that surrounds the exercise and abuse of power in local terms. As Michael Lambek observes, to argue that people are political or desirous subjects does not preclude them from being moral subjects (2000:11). Recognizing this possibility, I suggest that to understand what makes powerful people subject to morality, we should at least start by examining what “power” means locally, and how it is conceptualized and problematized by people themselves. Concepts of Power in Santa Lucia In Santa Lucia, poder (power) is a rather nebulous concept that can be recognized as anything from a given structure of relationships, or a quality that can be possessed, to a situationally relative effect that one person can have on another. A frequent way of alluding to persons in a position of power is to speak about them as pessoas que têm, persons (that have). To “have” in this sense, can mean money, property, mobility, strength, position, education, social connections, charm, or sexual allure—virtually anything that a person could use to claim an advantage in their relations with others. This is taken as a fact that one cannot escape, and society is seen as being made up of a series of subtly asymmetrical relations to be successfully negotiated; as much from the perspective of “the haves” as from the “have-nots.” The point to be emphasized, however, is that asymmetrical relations between persons or groups are problematic for Santa Lucians, not because they believe, deep down, that they should not exist, but because they must follow a morally correct form. In what follows, I shall focus on the moral discourse about the exercise of power, rather than on local understandings of what power

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is. In doing so I am partly motivated by an observation put forward by Lambek who writes that “if the study of religion draws, from social theory, a serious concern with the ubiquitous workings of power, perhaps it can contribute the pervasive significance of morality. It can serve to remind us, as the saying goes, that while everything may be political, politics isn’t everything.” (2000: 312). Lambek proposes that morality is a significant third domain alongside power and desire, one that is neither reducible either to power or desire nor to refereeing the struggles between them. His suggestion that power is never exercised without a space for reflection is supported by my own research. As we shall see in what follows, the exercise and discussion of power in Santa Lucia is saturated by a moral-theological discourse, which turns upon the opposition between amor (love) and orgulho (pride). Where love for others and, more to the point, a lack of pride is what makes the power that an individual wields legitimate and acceptable, pride and lack of love is what makes it potentially dangerous. Power and Love “What is love?” This was the question that young people in Santa Lucia, having got to know me a bit better, were always curious to ask. My answers were never very satisfactory either to me or to them, perhaps because the question continually caught me off guard. In retrospect it should not have done, as amor is a central moral principle to Brazilians and a well-elaborated concept in Christian tradition and theology—one which reaches beyond the sphere of religion and extends into almost every area of life. When Catholic Santa Lucians speak about God’s love, they are referring to the Christian concept of love or agape, as distinct from eros (erotic love) or philia (brotherly love). Agape is the ideal being referred to and the general model of love expected to be practiced by ordinary people in relation to those they occupy some form of power over, whether their role is as landowner, politician, spouse, or parent. Thus, Santa Lucian people tend to have no problem with power, provided that it is wielded with—and thus constitutes an expression of—amor. After all, as friends were always reminding me, it was God who had originally loved man so much that he sacrificed his only son. In one particular sermon, Padre Augosto reflected on this point, dwelling upon the love that a father has for a son and extending the metaphor not only to the relation between God and man but also to that between the laity and the Catholic hierarchy. In this way, he attempted to justify the structure and power of the Catholic Church


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to a congregation increasingly attracted to more egalitarian evangelical groups. But his sermon also attempted to legitimize the concept of hierarchy to the laity, forcing the message that both social and spiritual hierarchy is acceptable, so long as the more powerful are loving, generous, and giving; having their subjects’ best interests at heart. Love, for Santa Lucian people, is not just a way of speaking about alter-centered behavior that could just as easily be glossed by the notions of decency or respect. It is conceptualized in opposition to knowledge and thought. As Reinaldo, a local teacher and someone who was active in the church’s youth group, explained to me: “Jesus was a man of love. He did not need to think before he helped someone, he never let his head stop him from helping others . . . Jesus was love. That means he felt from the heart for all those around him.” For Santa Lucians love, in its ideal form, is an ontological force with particular properties: it is visceral, profound, and unmediated by intellect. In Santa Lucia, the moral behavior expected of those in positions of power means that no type of relationship is perceived as inherently antagonistic. It only seen to become so if one or another person, usually the more powerful, is deemed to lack love. Priests, landowners, and politicians, for example, are often judged on the basis of personal merits and failures, and are rarely, if ever, abstracted as belonging to a particular kind of class. Personal relations being the dominant means of accessing the services and resources of others mean that Santa Lucians, like their poor rural neighbors, strive to classify all local persons of some power as either a conhecido (acquaintance) or an amigo (friend). Such terms worked to personalize the relationship and facilitated claims on the affective grounds of love. The moral standard intrinsic within this type of relation was made exceptionally clear to me on one occasion when I challenged my friend Dimas on why he kept describing the local prefect, a man with whom he had had personal dealings with all but once, as a “friend.” Struggling to explain myself, I tried to point out why I thought this was a false use of the term “friend.” “Ah,” said Dimas “so what you’re trying to tell me is that in England there are no such things as prefects.” “No,” I responded, and was thinking how to go on, when he interjected again, this time with a look of serious pity and concern on his face “Oh, so you mean to say that in England no one cares about anyone else, there are no such things as friends?” To give but another example, older people who were reaching their official age of retirement would often inform me that this year or the year coming they would pedir ajuda a prefeitura (ask the local council

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for help). Lengthy bureaucratic battles for pensions were common. Any progress made would not be conceptualized as gaining one’s well-earned civil right, but as being down to the fact that someone in the administration was uma pessoa decente, de amor (a decent person, a person with love), good enough to have “helped.” Conversely, people would often describe the failure of local politicians and administrators to help them as being down to the fact that they were persons who não tem amor para os outros (have no love for others).1 Power and Pride To be in a position of power is, nevertheless, perceived as somewhat dangerous. The reason that power and advantage are thought to be dangerous for humans is that they are said to induce a state of heightened self-awareness; a mixture of vanity and egotism, often glossed locally as orgulho. In Santa Lucia, people were quick to remind one that the other side of sacred amor was worldly orgulho, and it was generally stressed that only God could embody power in a totally pure, controlled, and benevolent way. One person with whom I was apt to discuss such things was my friend Seu Mané. Seu Mané was typical of most men in that he hardly ever went to church; however, this did not mean that he was theologically disinterested. In fact, Seu Mané was one of the most theologically reflective people I knew, and one of his favorite topics was pride. He once explained to me that during his incarnation, Jesus had been “King on earth,” but a king who had “slept and eaten in the houses of the poor because he had no pride.” Stressing the point he iterated that God was a being with feelings, a being who could feel many, many emotions, but the one emotion God would never feel was orgulho. The concept of pride was often alluded to when talking to or about wealthy people. The greatest compliment that could be paid to such a person was that they were “uma pessoa sem orgulho” (a person without pride). As a “wealthy” foreigner I would occasionally receive such praise myself. And the same treatment would often be given to visiting dignitaries or the local doctor, whenever he decided to make a home visit or take his lunch in a villager’s house. By contrast, unpopular people of wealth and standing were constantly derided for being orgulhoso demais (too proud). It was widely rumored that the last village doctor had only lasted two months in his post because he had been “too proud” to leave his nice health post to make home visits to the elderly and infirm who could not leave their homes. Various local politicians came under the same fire.


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Seu Julio, the last local prefect, was one who had left people feeling particularly embittered. It was said that once he realized he was not going to win the next election, he stopped paying salaries to the functionaries to extract the money for himself. The last four months of his office were, according to accounts, chaotic. Families went hungry, and angry mobs gathered to shout outside his house. According to Dida, Seu Julio had originally been a simple, honest man: owner of the local pharmacy and popular with everyone who knew him. When he became town prefect he changed. The change was attributed to the new found power that had made him proud. He became a man, in the words of Dida, sem amor (without love), he no longer ate food in the houses of the poor, no longer had time for people. In short, it was said, he became orgulhoso demais. It should be noted that theologically oriented discourses that embed power in an overarching semiology of “love” versus “pride” can be mapped onto broader Brazilian discourses that derive their logic from the vestiges of a feudal society of “masters and slaves.” In the paternalistic culture of the rural northeast, asymmetrical relations are negotiated via a language of “harmonious patronage” based on the ideal of the “good patron” (O bom patrão). For all the problems this assumes, however, what seems to concern Santa Lucians most is not the asymmetry itself but the creative potential within its fold. This is a potential most aptly summarized by Fenella Cannell (1999) in her description of a similar power dynamic between Catholic Bicolo peasants and their wealthy landlords: If power is to be distributed unequally, lowlanders seem to be saying, let us constrain the power-holders within a relationship with their dependents which they cannot entirely ignore. Similarly, if the poor are to be poor, let it at least not be forgotten that human value is not entirely measurable by wealth. (1999: 24)

As for Bicolo peasants, the construction of power as necessarily intersubjective is central to Santa Lucian discourses on the relationship between power and knowledge, as I seek to demonstrate in the following section. Power as a Reflection of Knowledge It took me a while to grasp the moral complexity of the power relation in local thought. For a long time I simply assumed that the disparaging narratives I had heard about bad patrons and corrupt politicians

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signified a generalized antagonism between richer and poorer classes. This motivated me to ask Amauri whether he believed the rich were less likely to go to heaven when they died. I had been expecting him to say yes and to perhaps make some reference to Jesus’s saying about the camel and the eye of a needle. But to my surprise he did not. It turned out that in his opinion the rich and the powerful were more likely to go to heaven when they died. In moral terms they had the advantage over the powerless poor because they had the means with which to effect good acts. “The rich man has the means to do good whereas the poor man is cursed from the start with a hot head,” he explained. Continuing, he said, “for a poor man like me it is actually much harder to be good. But I think God must understand this, and that is why he reserves a corner for us in heaven.” Amauri was not the only person to hold this opinion. It was widely believed that the rich, acting with love, were in a position to redistribute their wealth and influence among those who most needed it: donating land, saving the poor from miscarriages of justice with the state, and even saving lives by paying for much-needed medical assistance. However, and as Amauri implied, God does not “reserve a corner in heaven” for the rich. The suggestion being that although the rich and powerful may have a certain advantage over the majority in their potential to perform kind acts, they crucially have less of an excuse to fall short of the high moral standards expected of them. The following example makes the same point in a different way. In Brazil, the law entitles a person with a “superior level of qualification” (i.e., with a university degree or higher) to separate and superior cell conditions in a police station or prison while awaiting and during trial. If that person is eventually found guilty, they must carry out their sentence in the same conditions as everyone else. The first time I heard of this peculiar fact was during a conversation with a group of men and women after a chapel service. The focus of the debate was whether this was morally fair or not. It appeared that some of those gathered were of the mistaken impression that superior cell conditions also applied to those “superior” persons found guilty and convicted, leading one man to wax rather angrily about the injustice of it all. According to him, people with superior qualifications ought to be put into worse cells than the common poor as their crimes were inherently worse. A person like that, he said, with all that knowledge, deserved harsher, not milder punishment for wrongful conduct. By linking the severity of a crime to the level of a person’s knowledge, the man was making the same kind of point that people made on a daily basis in relation to sin and morality. Gossip about the


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immoral conduct of ardent church-goers (pessoas que vivem na igreja, “people who live in church”) was generally perceived as more shocking than that about people who never bothered with church at all, precisely because it represented a more serious break from the path of righteousness. In this sense, knowledge of the world, and of good and evil, is necessary but dangerous. Power is problematic because it is associated with being in a state of knowledge (conhecimento), much like that which Santa Lucian people maintain marked the beginning of the Fall—a point which I shall explore in more detail in the following chapter. In this sense, power is dangerous to those who actually wield it themselves. For a person to possess any real power or advantage over another, he or she has to be aware of his or her own power and/ or effect on others. He or she has to have what Santa Lucian people define as consciência (self-awareness). Consciência is part of what Santa Lucians see as necessary knowledge for living well in the world. Knowledge of good and evil and of right and wrong is what makes a proper moral person. If one knows what is right one can do what is right. It is for this reason that persons are constantly reminded of the needs of others around them in subtle and sometimes not so subtle ways. Just as rich anthropologists and powerful dignitaries are made aware of the moral stakes of their position through veiled compliments about their loving nature or lack of pride, men and women both young and old must forever be brought to awareness by family and friends. For awareness about one’s position in relation to others is what allows one to act morally and with consideration. However, as I have just described, if self-awareness embedded within a loving disposition makes the moral person, without love, it may break them. Therefore, a crucial concept underwriting all such discourse is that of limites (limits). There is a strong notion that awareness has limits. The more aware one is, the stronger the pull toward pride. When persons are said to have acted sem limites (without limits), the supposition is that they acted egotistically. That is, they were self-aware but dominated by pride. Knowledge and selfawareness, then, is the central problematic for Santa Lucian people and underpins the sexual, physical, and economic power that men and women are believed to wield over one another in different ways. This brings me on to the final point of this section, which is simply to draw attention to the sense in which asymmetrical power relations are not, for Santa Lucian people, inevitably antagonistic. On one level they offer the ideal solution to the problem of knowledge that confronts all people as they grow older and wiser in world. In their ideal

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form—and only in their ideal form—asymmetrical power relations are viewed as containing advantages for the less powerful because they allow them to remain in a somewhat safer position whilst deriving some of the benefits of another person’s knowledge, strength, ability, and influence. Persons with more power are in an inherently more dangerous position vis-à-vis moral personhood. The responsibility they shoulder is greater and, therefore, so are the potentially negative consequences of their consciência (self-awareness) and conhecimento (knowledge). As such, a less powerful person has the advantage of trying to derive benefits from the relationship without the dangers of the self-awareness and pride that such benefits entail. Having described the moral discourse that surrounds asymmetrical relationships, I will now turn to look at how Santa Lucian people articulate the power relation between husbands and wives. The moral dichotomy upon which power turns, that of love versus pride, is thought to apply as much to the conjugal relationship as to any other. There is a difference, however, because rather than playing upon the asymmetrical nature of the power that either sex has over the other, people tend to stress the symmetry and complementarity of the relation. This is because marriage is strongly viewed as a partnership in which each member has as strong a purchase on what the other has to offer—something that cannot always be said of the relationship between patrons and clients. Gender Roles and the Division of Labor in Santa Lucia In the day-to-day running of a household all members are expected to collaborate. The conjugal relationship is viewed, on a practical level, very much like a business partnership in which both husband and wife have equal stakes. Each sex may strive to argue that they work harder than the other: wives often disparage their husbands for the hours they spend stretched out in the shade, while they keep going throughout the day, sweeping the terrain, cooking, and washing up after meals. Husbands, however, will retaliate that their work requires more skill and practice than women’s work. They point out that while anyone can wash a plate, not everyone has the skill to negotiate a good price at market. Women will agree that negotiation requires skill, but they frequently chide their men for the bad financial deals they do outside the house or accuse them of being good at making money but even better at drinking it all before they reach home. The roles that men and women assume in the running of the household, however, are characterized by mutual need. And this,


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ultimately, is what my informants stressed to me when I asked them about it “É como uma parceria. Sem a outra pessoa, nunca se realiza a vida boa” (It [marriage] is a like a partnership. Without the other, you can never achieve a good life). With regards to work around the house, it is a man’s job to provide his household with gas and/or firewood for cooking; all other tasks related to the domestic sphere fall to women. It is a woman, for example, who fetches water, cleans, cooks, looks after children, and washes clothes. Purchases for the household tend to be made by both sexes, although there are certain things such as clothes and toiletries that a man would never buy. If necessary, a woman will buy everything that is needed, particularly if she has her own income. It is more common, however, for women to restrict themselves to the purchase of household basics from local shops such as cooking oil, margarine, salt, rice, soap, and coffee. In such instances, it is a husband’s role to attend market to buy staple produce such as meat, vegetables, beans, and farinha (if the families do not produce these items themselves). Bread, if it is eaten, can be bought fresh from the local grocer everyday by any member of the household. Tasks related to the sítio tend to be divided more evenly between the sexes, although men have greater responsibility over the raising of horses, cattle, and goats; and women over the raising of pigs. 2 Chickens, unless bred in large quantities, are also the responsibility of women, although this is not rigidly defined, and both sexes will look after the other’s livestock if needs must. The work tends to be complementary, however, as the milk that a man takes from his cows or goats will be made into cheese by his wife, and the pigs that a woman raises will be killed and butchered by her husband. It is a woman’s task to tend to the fruit and vegetables she might grow in her garden. It is also a woman’s task to cook for her family; however, in the preparation of food, certain tasks such as shelling or sorting beans, roasting and shelling cashew nuts, and putting the rice on to boil are all acceptable for men to do. Although work in the roçado is ideally defined as the task of men, women carry out as much work there as men do, and this is not regarded as problematic in any sense. Often, a husband and wife will till the land, sow crops, weed, and harvest in partnership, usually with the help of their children. In the absence of her husband, a woman will assume full responsibility for all work done in the field, the rearing of livestock, transport to market, and sale of the produce. If necessary, she will contract and pay for additional labor. Therefore labor outside the household is not strictly divided although there are

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certain areas where it is more so. In the casa de farinha, for example, it is women who skin manioc roots, and men who work the heavy machinery that processes the peeled roots into flour (farinha). Other activities also tend to be divided along gender lines, so that teachers are mostly women, and market traders are mostly men. There are always, however, exceptions to these rules. Men, Power, Virtue, and Pride Men in Santa Lucia are socially recognized as chefes de família (heads of family), as it is usually they who control the household’s resources, and they who, in a family dispute, have the last say. This is one sense in which wives admit that their husbands hold power over them. Their most frequent complaint is about investment. Upon selling off livestock that belongs to the household as a unit, a man will usually decide how and where to reinvest. Women commonly want repairs or extensions made to their houses whereas men want to invest in modes of transport that will enhance their prestige. However, if a family is doing well enough to feed itself, no one will disparage a man for spending his family’s money as he pleases. Men who abuse their economic power, however, are sometimes described behind their backs as proud (orgulhoso), egotistical (egoista), or ignorant (ignorante). During my fieldwork, certain men who appeared to spend more money on drinking and motorbikes than on food for their families were disparaged in this way. Such men would come under as much criticism from other men as they did from women. Particular men were praised for sustaining their households well, but they were said to be ignorantes nonetheless, because of the excessive jealousy or violence they showed toward their wives. It is generally held that a husband’s greater physical strength over his wife is something of which he must be aware. If loving, he uses it solely to carry out the harder physical tasks and to protect her from harm. If proud, he uses it to hurt her. In various imperceptible ways, the power of men over women is continually counterposed to the moral ideal of love. Before marrying, young men are apt to receive friendly warnings and pieces of advice from women and men of different ages. Some of it will be in direct reference to the position of power he is about to assume as household head. For example, when Andre and Fabiana got engaged, Andre’s male peers bantered with him to be fair in his treatment of his new wife. Fabiana was still at school and due to finish in two years time, but everyone suspected that once married, Andre would put


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pressure on her to give up and become a fulltime housewife. Andre’s friend warned him: “Rapaz! (boy), you have the rest of your lives together. For the love of God, let her finish her studies.” A similar warning was issued by Amauri, Andre’s future father-in-law, on the night Andre requested Amauri’s permission to marry his daughter. Amauri gave his permission for the couple to marry on the grounds that Andre promised to be a good husband and act always com limites (within limits). What he meant by this was that once married, Andre should not drink excessively, be selfish with his earnings, or beat his new wife. A man’s physical violence against his wife is commonly perceived as the biggest abuse of his power over her. The threat and carrying out of murder was well elaborated in local discourse. On one occasion, during a visit to Dona Lourdes and Seu Mané, the conversation had turned to the topic of male drinking. Dona Lourdes commented, as her husband sat next to her: “Ah, the bad treatment I used to get when he would return home, face filled with drink.” To this, Seu Mané replied, “Listen Maya, even she will tell you I was never the kind of man to raise my fist to hurt her. Never beat her once in my life.” “That is true,” agreed Dona Lourdes, “He never raised a fist to my face, no, but raised knives to kill me many times.” On another occasion, a woman I was visiting took me into the kitchen to show me the place where she hid the meat cleaver whenever her husband went out. The woman was accustomed to doing this, she told me, because of her husband’s habit of coming home drunk, jealous, and going straight for the kitchen drawer. When I asked Dida why women married men who were known to be ignorante (in this context “violent”), she responded that most such men were not like that before marrying, they only became so once married. The discourse about “ignorant husbands” was most prevalent among women of middle age or older. Such women invariably asserted that men who did not change for the worse after marriage were bom (good) whereas those who did were ruim (bad). Change here was perceived as an effect of the power that came with marriage. This was in keeping with a fear I had repeatedly noted among younger women regarding marrying their long-term boyfriends: the fear that afterward “he will change” (ele vai mudar). Women, Power, Virtue, and Pride A wife’s power over her husband is equally mixed an advantage because of the pressures and responsibilities it comes with. When Fabiana was

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about to get married to Andre, visiting female kin and neighbors were full of advice and warnings. Among other things Fabiana was warned that she should show muito respeito (much respect) toward her husband, no matter how difficult things were at the start of married life. The advice Fabiana received was mostly designed to make her aware of the new position of power she was about to acquire and to inform her of the rightful way to handle it. Thus Lourdinha, her maternal aunt, made it very clear to her that even though Fabiana’s parents would always welcome her back into their home at any point in the future, she was not to come running back to her parents’ house at every little upset, as this would be feio (ugly), by which she meant, an abuse of her power over Andre. “If you keep deserting him, how will he eat?” she queried, “Whatever might happen, a husband still needs his wife.”3 In Santa Lucia, there are various ways in which a wife is recognized as having power over a husband. Via her male consanguines, in particular, a wife has an acknowledged amount of control over her man. Residence is predominantly virilocal, but young wives constantly suggest their power by threatening to go back to their natal homes. Power is also connected to children. Due to the stronger affective ties between mothers and children, older wives whose parents may no longer be alive, have married sons and daughters as their closest allies. In Brazil, a woman and her child constitute uma família (a family) whereas two siblings or a man plus his children do not. A popular saying “pai pode ser qualquer um, mas mãe só tem uma” (your father can be anyone, but your mother is unique) expresses the common knowledge that whether there is shared substance between fathers and children, fathers are generally less significant in terms of consanguinity. A woman’s power, however, does not reside solely in her kin ties. It resides also in her sexual awareness and the power that this gives her over men. Male desire is felt to be strong, and young men are said to act with doidice (craziness) when in pursuit of girls they desire. There is a tension here, as young unmarried women are expected to respond as demure innocents, while remaining aware and cautious of the doidice they inspire in men. Once married there is no more pretence. A married woman is thought to be one who undoubtedly realizes the effect she has on the opposite sex and fully appreciates the potential power this gives her. The fact that a woman’s sexual appetite is thought to be naturally frio (cold) in comparison to a man’s means that, in theory, it can be satisfied by a husband alone. By contrast, a man’s sexual appetite is


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said to be naturally quente (hot), which justifies, in an unspoken way, his extramarital affairs. But this, rather than appearing to work in the interests of men, works just as easily in a woman’s favor, for a man’s infidelities have no effect whatsoever on a woman’s social standing and personal reputation. Repeated betrayal by a husband (whatever private sadness it may cause) can bring a woman a certain amount of social prestige as she comes ever more to resemble a virtuous, suffering, and morally superior wife. By contrast, a woman’s infidelity is perceived to be a conscious form of violence against a man precisely because it has the power to destroy his social reputation and potentially his life. Men openly proclaim that the worst thing they can imagine happening to them is to become a cuckold, for the shame and loss of reputation involved amounts to a social demise. “Your life is as good as over,” my friend Dimas told me. Pressing certain men on this issue, I found they were only too keen to explain. The cuckold becomes, in the words of one, como um porco (like a pig): an object of ridicule and disgust. Some claimed that the betrayed man looses his appetite for food and for sex and comes to exist alternately enraged and withdrawn. The masculine world of bars, markets, and snooker rooms becomes an unbearable place to be, and this affects a man’s ability to drink and negociar (do business) with other men. Both these activities are essential means by which men create solidarity, broaden social networks, and sustain themselves economically. A man’s loss of connection to his family was cited as another tragic effect of a woman’s adultery. As Amauri puts it, “A man who walks out of his house, leaves his children behind.” He was referring to the strong affectual link between mothers and children that means that in almost all eventualities, children stay by a mother’s side. He was also referring to the fact that although houses may be built by men, in the end they belong to women. It is widely recognized that should a couple separate, the man is the one who must leave the conjugal house, in which case any initial economic investment in its building will be his loss. Stories abounded about men whose lives were a testament to their love for their families and who had been destroyed by their wives’ infidelity. These were not, it was said, men who passed all their time drunk in bar rooms, but good men who suffered the hot sun every day out of love for their families. And it was continually emphasized that for such men, betrayal had been tantamount to death. Thus, because of the destruction it causes, adulterous behavior in a woman is considered to be as despicable a form of violence against her husband as a man’s physical violence is against his wife.

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Love and Consideration I turn now to briefly consider the ideal model of relations between husband and wife. In local terms, a good marriage is based on amor e respeito (love and respect). Consideration (consideração) is the continuous demonstration of that love and respect in deed, gesture, and intention. The ultimate expression of considerate love in a marriage, people would tell me, is being willing to suffer on behalf of one’s partner. The concept of consideração crops up in connection with concepts of love in much of the Brazilian literature. Both Antonius Robben (1989) and Linda-Anne Rebhun (1999) make mention of it in their respective discussions of Brazilian conjugality. Robben describes consideração as “the anticipation of another person’s needs without, however, experiencing their fulfilment as a duty or obligation” (1989: 183). Thus a woman would describe cooking for her husband as obrigação (obligation), but cooking his favorite meals as an act of consideration. Santa Lucian people are familiar with such concepts although there is often considerable disagreement between couples over which terms describe their relationship best. Both men and women describe a good marriage as one in which “both have love and consideration for the other.” However, men tend to see a wife’s cooking of a favorite meal as an act of obligation rather than consideration. Men describe providing food for the house as their obligation, and acts such as taking one’s wife on outings as consideration. On certain occasions it was plain that couples could use such concepts to make the other feel guilty. Women were to be frequently overheard complaining in the presence of husbands, that they lacked consideration, that they spent too much money on drink and not enough on meat for the table, that they never took them to festas, or back to their natal villages to visit relatives, and so forth. Indeed, the concepts of consideração and obrigação are usefully broad and interchangeable, reflecting the constantly shifting emphasis of marital power relations, so that in certain contexts, the husband has the advantage over his wife, and in other contexts, the wife wields power over her husband. Couples tend to deal with this constantly shifting balance of power over one another by eliciting the potential virtue in the way power is exercised. Thus men and women make constant reference to notions of love, respect, obligation, and consideration when talking to and about their spouse. A spouse’s power, when exerted with their partner’s benefit at heart, ideally through the visceral offices of love, becomes an act of virtue. Any potential


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pride in the social advantage they possess is thus rendered less damaging. However, it is also widely recognized that, like politicians, both husbands and wives can be corrupted by the power they have, as evidenced through the discourses on ignorant husbands and adulterous wives. Such pathologies, as Santa Lucians see them, may manifest themselves differently but are the same in kind. Both derive from a level of awareness that has surpassed some unspecified limit. A man’s consciousness of his physical strength over a woman, and a woman’s consciousness of her sexual power over a man, is legitimate knowledge so long as it is not infected with pride. If the major immanent danger for men in marrying is—in its most extreme form— social death, the major immanent danger for married women is physical death. However, at this point it is important to stress that both men’s and women’s violence, even as a form of retribution, is in no sense prescribed. It does not amount to an acceptable code of behavior in connection with notions of honor. In the Santa Lucian context, intraconjugal violence is highly transgressive and is always treated as a breakdown of moral order. Thus, although violence and death within marriage does occur, it is thought to be avoidable. In this context, ideas about morality clearly exist prior to ideas about gendered difference, and it is with this in mind that I shall, in due course, return to the case of Seu Roberto, who murdered his wife with a scythe. In the following sections, my concern is not with the truth or accuracy of the events that took place that fateful day, but with the manner in which it was recounted to me at this particular point and place in time. Whether Dona Beta did have an affair remains unknown along with various other key events that may have led up to the killing. However, what I wish to draw attention to here is one of the ways in which this tragic event was rendered, long after the event itself, as a parable about marital relations and the danger that awaits if the balance of power and awareness is disturbed on either side. A Question of Honor or a Problem of Pride? Until recently, wife-murderers in Brazil could be acquitted by the jury on the basis of the “honor defence” argument—a throwback to Portuguese colonial law that allowed a man to kill his adulterous wife and her lover (Caulfield 2000). In 1991 the Brazilian Superior Tribunal of Justice outlawed this argument (Caulfield 2000; Macaulay 2002; Santos 2005).4 Seu Roberto’s story is thus a familiar one. Indeed I learnt of three similar cases that had occurred in the

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locality over the past twenty years. I curiously noted that the concept of honra (honor) was never once alluded to. In anthropological literature, honor, defined as both a personal virtue and a high status, often preoccupies Mediterranean—and by extension—Latin American men (Melhuus 1992, 1996, 1997; Rebhun 1999; Stølen 1996). As described, the Mediterranean honor complex centers upon the relationship of each gender to sexual intercourse and its proprieties. Important attributes include the protection of legitimate wives and daughters from any contact with other men’s sexuality, and a readiness to use deadly force to avenge any implication about the honor of any member of the household (Miller 1993; Schneider 1971; Stewart 1994). In an article entitled “The troubles of virtue,” Melhuus (1997), who carried out research among rural Mexican mestizos, tackles gender through the relation of two killings spurred by the defense of male honor. Both cases constitute women as focal objects in a struggle between men. According to Melhuus, these types of stories reveal that some particular aspect of femininity is intrinsic to the construction of masculinity, and also indicate that men’s honor is something that has to be defended to be upheld. Embedded in this construction, Melhuus identifies a tension present in the discrete categorization of women as either “Madonnas” or “whores.” In using the wider literature on honor and shame to understand such killings, she homes in on an “inherent ambiguity” to configurations of Mexican gender, and hence elucidates on what she describes as the “enigma” of Latin American gender imagery in general: “a male dominant society which nevertheless places its highest value on the feminine, indicating a split between power and value” (1996: 230). According to Melhuus, the “enigma” of Latin American gender imagery resides in the different forms of evaluation used for thinking about men and women. Where men are evaluated according to their power over women as well as over other men, women are evaluated according to their virtue. Following authors such as Octavio Paz (1988), Melhuus defines feminine and masculine in terms of “openness” and “closedness” respectively—where being closed is the active, desirable state because “it serves as a protection against the world, a defence of one’s own intimacy as well as of others” (1996: 233). Conversely, openness is seen as a weakness and a “disgrace,” symbolizing “the inert, passive one who is open and opened” (1996: 233).5 Thus whereas men are evaluated as men according to the power and control they have, women are evaluated as good or bad according to their sexual state. Women, she asserts, must be the moral anchors


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of men, although men themselves seem to be given “more leeway” (morally speaking) in their doings—as indicated by the ambiguous connotations of the term macho (Melhuus 1992: 188). In summary, Melhuus’s model contrasts the “dichotomous” categorization of women with the more “continuous” categorization of men.6 In other words, whereas men are classified according to degrees of masculinity in that one is “more” or “less” a man, femininity is something of a “non-issue”—a woman is either good/ moral or bad/immoral. Thus women are judged according to sexual moral standards, men in terms of the power they wield, and never the other way round. This, Melhuus suggests, is what results in the “enigma” of gender in Latin America: virtuous women and powerful, macho men. Melhuus’s work bears witness to many of the same elements I came across carrying out my own research. However, her analytical model makes several problematic claims, only two of which I shall take up here: the first is her construction of “power” as a concept entirely unencompassed by the moral discourses of her informants, and the second is her suggestion that masculinity is singularly defined through this notion of power and, concomitantly, that women cannot (because they are virtuous) wield power over men. One is left wondering whether power, in the ethnographic context she speaks of, can really be perceived as so divorced from the moral and the sacred, particularly given the fact that her informants are Catholic, and that Catholic ideology generally promotes an idea of a hierarchically ordered realm of powerful and sacred authority. On the evidence provided, the amoral, penetrative power Melhuus talks of appears to resonate more closely with the Freudian, literary analysis of the Mexican author Paz than it does with local views. And yet, even if such a concept of power were grounded in local conceptions, it surely would not constitute the only understanding. In itself, there is nothing so wrong with using a strictly analytical or literary concept to elucidate ethnographic data, for the point of anthropological analysis is clearly to go beyond the simple reproduction of folk categories. However, a failure to properly engage with the same category (where it appears) in the local context confines us, in the end, to a limited view of what is being constructed by local people themselves. In the ethnographic context of the killing I have just described, divorcing the language of power from the concept of morality in this way would prevent us from understanding why Santa Lucian people choose to make sense of conjugal violence without recourse to ideal “feminine” or “masculine” types, or to notions of honor and shame.

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The honor/shame complex, whatever its historical pretext in Santa Lucia, did not appear salient in current understandings of this event. The word honra, I was told by several people, was the same as respeito (respect), in that only a person who acts with respect has honor. When I asked whether a husband who used violence against an adulterous wife did so to restore his honor, I was told that violence, being opposed to respeito (respect), could never restore honor.6 Herein it might be noted that while certain vestiges of an honor/shame complex may be read into the fact that Seu Roberto saw fit to answer his wife’s purported infidelity with violence, it was a distinctly different logic that was used to condemn that action as ultimately honorless, selfish, and proud. To class this event as an “honor killing,” then, would be to impart the killing with exactly the kind of rationale that people sought, in their retelling, to dismiss. Rather than embedding the story of Seu Roberto and Dona Beta in discourses about masculine honor or female virtue, thus reserving moral judgment to the female end, both men and women reflected upon it in a strikingly undivided way. The story was generally narrated in two parts: from the position of the woman and the position of the man. In all such narrations, the point was not to draw out the intrinsic differences between them, but to underscore the sense that despite their obvious differences, they were, in moral terms, made of the same stuff. Both were cast as essentially good people who had fallen victim to the complexities of power within the conjugal relationship. Lucia herself spoke highly of both parents. Her mother had been, in her own words, “A good, good person.” Her father, too, she cast as the archetypal hard worker who expressed his love for his family by sweating in the field and making weekly trips to market. Just as other people confirmed that Seu Roberto’s downfall had been an egotistical desire for extreme control, Dona Beta’s downfall, it was speculated, had been her pride. It was often remarked of Dona Beta, for example, that she had been beautiful and aware of the power this gave her in relation to men. If Dona Beta had indeed cheated on her husband, it was believed that she would have known, without doubt, the destruction this could bring to her husband’s life. Indeed, it was in relation to this that Seu Mané, himself of Seu Roberto’s generation, emphasized to me the suffering of the cuckolded man. Talking about Seu Roberto’s discovery of the situation he said, “Now after he knew about this business, time passed and his condition was such, Avé Maria! He lived as if he were asleep, lost all taste for life.” In all the accounts I recorded, an overwhelming emphasis was placed on the redemptive suffering of both involved. Dona Beta’s


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suffering was made explicit for me, countless times, not only through descriptions of her death, but also in reports about the violence she was subjected to by Seu Roberto in the years beforehand—violence for which he was roundly condemned. Seu Roberto’s suffering was attributed to his belief that he was a cuckold coupled with the consequences of his own action. This, I later realized, helped to explain the remarkable level of forgiveness I had noted in people toward Seu Roberto who still lives in the community in the house where the event took place. His daughter Lucia’s forgiveness was something I struggled particularly hard to understand. In the end it appeared to come down to the fact that Lucia believed her father to be someone who had, himself, suffered greatly and who was, in this way, a penitent man. The suffering of Seu Roberto was often cast as the effect of a virtual death; a feeling that he did not live but existed moribund, in a perpetual state of loss and regret. His home and marriage—the enduring symbols of a proper life—destroyed. As Seu Mané said, “Look, I know he acted without limits, but today he doesn’t live! He is someone for whom the world ended. In the same house that he lived in with her, he now lives alone. That house is finished! Isolated! Today nobody goes there. He won’t even look for another woman. Well, they don’t want him.” Since killing his wife, Seu Roberto had stopped frequenting the local bars and snooker room and had become withdrawn from the masculine world of networking and prestige. However, he had also become unable to serve as an example of virtue to his own children. Hence I was told about a time when a small crowd looked awkwardly on as Seu Roberto had tried to intervene in the drunken fight of Geraldo, his eldest son. Geraldo, it was said, did the unspeakable thing of pushing his father to the ground. “Who are you to tell me what to do!” he shouted out repeatedly until he was hoarse. Seu Roberto, who could martial no adequate response to this, got up wordlessly and retreated into the crowd. Upon recounting this episode to me, Seu Mané remarked that to be a father and yet unable to console or advise one’s own son was akin to being dead. The fact that Seu Roberto had remained inside the community was thus invariably contrasted with the new life he might have enjoyed had he left the village and gone to live somewhere else.7 His staying was conceptualized as a chosen form of penitence, for it actively perpetuated his state of death-within-life or life-within-death. By the time I arrived to carry out fieldwork, the case of Seu Roberto and Dona Beta had come to be remembered and talked about as a

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parable of marital relations. Seu Roberto’s act was never once hinted at as legitimate, but tended to be cast as a supremely terrible act of pride. By losing his sense of humility and allowing consciousness of his physical advantage over Dona Beta to overcome him, he took her life. Indeed, people used the story to highlight to me the dangers of pride and the misuse of power. The meaning that people bestowed on this painful event in their retelling of it was the mortally dangerous commitment that marriage involves, both for husbands and for wives. The ways in which the killing might illuminate actual imbalances of power are thus complicated by local understandings that downplay the difference between men and women and foreground the similarity of their moral plight. The politicization and criminalization of violence against women in Brazilian society gained momentum in the 1980s through the efforts of local and international organizations and expansion of a mass-based women’s movement (Santos 2005: 33).8 From an analytical viewpoint, Santa Lucian claims about the complementary powers of men and women need to be weighed against certain systematic political, economic, and legal advantages in Brazil that do indeed privilege men. A prime example is the fact that Brazilian law defines infidelity in men and women differently. For men, infidelity is an economic crime—an adulterous man is one who keeps what the law calls a concubina (concubine) in a house that he buys and maintains. For women, infidelity is a sexual crime—an adulterous wife has sex with a man not her husband. It is thus important to bear in mind the complexity surrounding local people’s claims that there is an equivalency between expectations for wives and husbands. Matters of legal definition aside, one might also point to the fact that the woman of this unfortunate couple ended up dead, whereas the man, whatever ostracism he may have suffered, did not. All this is true enough; however, one need not take what Santa Lucian people say about male-female equivalence at face value to find it significant. What I wish to draw attention to here are not the extensive and hidden structural relationships that constitute and complicate analytical understandings of power, but the way in which my informants sought to understand it for themselves. The point to be made is that there are different ways in which painful and inchoate events can be recalled and made sense of. The case of Seu Roberto and Dona Beta can be reworked analytically as a tangible example of men’s oppression of women or cast as evidence of the Brazilian state’s failure to protect women as a “class,” but it might just as easily be turned into a statement about the interpersonal dangers of marriage and moral


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personhood—something which Santa Lucian people, in the context of remembering, tended to do. For Santa Lucian people then, the conjugal relationship is, above all things, the delicate handling of consciência (awareness) through the constant struggle of love versus pride. To tip too far in either direction will not do: too much awareness leads to violence, even to death; to avoid marriage and remain innocent, however, is to avoid life. So when people say that married life is suffering, a sacrificial trope arises. What they are alluding to is the increased risk of social, spiritual, and physical death that married people confront to bring about new life. The case of Seu Roberto and his wife cannot be understood simply as a tale about the oppression of a virtuous woman by a powerful man. The ways in which the killing illuminates certain classic patriarchal structures are complicated by local understandings that downplay the difference between men and women, and foreground the similarity of their moral plight. Conclusion Similar killings to the one described in this chapter have been analyzed elsewhere as evidence of an overarching antagonism between the sexes in Catholic cultures. They epitomize that which has led feminist anthropologists to debate the universal dominance of men over women. Thus scholars attempting to characterize constructions of sexual propriety in Mediterranean, Latin American, and Caribbean societies have tended to present a portrait of cultures divided by gender into complementary but conflicting segments. Of Northeast Brazil in particular, it has been said, “women and men view one another through the filter of stereotypes fed by social separation, differences in point of view, and the misleading perceptions of desire itself” (Rebhun 1999: 109). The impression we are given by this literature is, ultimately, of cultures divided on multiple levels by gender and affinity into complementary but conflicting segments. That is, of cultures divided, at every turn, by categories of difference. There is a problem here, I suggest, and it lies not so much in the rendering of gender or affinity, as in the fetishization of these structures to the point that everything comes to stand for difference and all analogy is erased. In relation to the ethnography presented in this chapter, we see that reasoning about intraconjugal violence is premised on a concept of sameness and equivalence rather than contrast and division. Sameness here applies to human motives, to the wielding of power, and to the moral discourses that surround such things.

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It is of course true that in Santa Lucia, men and women occupy significantly different positions in the sexual division of labor, and difference between the sexes is continually constructed out of everyday forms of practice and expression. It is also true that in certain contexts, Santa Lucian men and women choose to evoke gender in terms of differing camps of competing values. However, the binary distinction between “male” and “female” that structures social life in certain contexts should not blind us to the presence of a logic that emphasizes the universality of moral concerns in others. In saying this, my intention is not to simply restate what has been stated many times before, that gender difference is not necessarily indicative of gender hierarchy. Rather, it is to draw attention to the similarity in the predicament of men and women vis-à-vis one another. In as much as marriage makes explicit the process of a person’s loss of innocence and acquisition of power, both husbands and wives must live with the fact that each represents the other’s “Fall from grace.” More relevant than the articulation of gendered identity, here, is the production of a gender-neutral discourse about social conduct and moral personhood. For though men and women’s sources of power may be different, what regulates it is said to be the same. Thus in local perception, intraconjugal violence and murder such as that which I described earlier are paradigmatic manifestations, not of difference surpassing identity, but of pride surpassing love. The problem, following Strathern (1988), lies in analyses that take the relationship between the sexes as axiomatic; as one where the tenor of the relationship is seen as arising from the need of each sex to carve out an antithetical definition to the other. Rather than carving out antithetical definitions, what Santa Lucian people strived to get across was that what legitimized or delegitimized power was the same for all categories of person concerned. In the presence of love, marriage is fulfillment. In the presence of pride, it delivers death. And when it strikes, love or pride—be it male or female—is commensurable. As Dona Lourdes opined in reference to Seu Roberto and his wife: ‘ela morreu, ele não morreu, mas foi mesmo que tivessem falecido os dois’ (She died, he didn’t die, but it is as if both passed away).

Chapter 6

From Innocence to Knowledge

It was not yet eight in the morning but already the market was hot

and crowded. Seven-year-old Ignacio was leading me through the clatter of trade to his father’s stall. It was difficult keeping sight of him as he zigzagged ahead, leaping nimbly over corners of outstretched tarpaulin piled high with brightly colored lycra garments and various plastic items. “And how do you help your father?” I asked, catching up. “I do everything father does,” he replied. “And at the end of the day, if there are lots of bananas left, he puts half in the wheelbarrow and I go and sell them on the other side of the market where the trade is better.” We had stopped before a wooden trestle piled high with fruit belonging to Josa, Ignacio’s father. Josa was a young man, but liked to dress rather unusually in the traditional checked shirt and smart trilby hat of the older generation. He nodded me a greeting. He was in the middle of shoveling produce into a blue polythene bag for a customer. When he finished he turned to me and said, “So Ignacio has been telling you everything about the trade? I tell you the boy is innocent no more, he is sabido [knowing/cunning], already, like his father.” * *

*

At different times and in differing cultural contexts, there has been a selective slant on the Brazilian trope relating to childhood. Whether viewed as naturally innocent, or naturally “knowing/cunning,” conceptions of the child have tended to reflect and reproduce moral anxieties that have been dominant in a variety of times and places. In an article dealing with the history of child policy in Brazil, Irene Rizzini (2002) examines the emergence of the idea that childhood was key to the future and to the overarching goal of “civilizing” the country. She

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focuses on how poor children came to be represented as a social problem for the larger project of nation building and were thus subjected to increasing control and institutionalization to defend the country from crime, disorder, and anarchy. In the first years after the republic was established in 1889, the state’s role on behalf of such children was defended as part of a larger “patriotic and civilizing mission of healing” (2002: 168). The child-saving movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was, writes Rizzini, based on the belief that “a harmful environment coupled with certain innate proclivities made monsters of children, a situation that could have devastating consequences for society as a whole” (2002: 108).1 In Brazil today, as in much of Latin America, awareness is growing of global movements and discourses that seek to protect the rights of children in relation to their participation in the sexual, laborious, and commercial worlds of adults. Within such movements, children are defined as natural innocents, and childhood as a phase of exclusion from all economic responsibility. Notable differences between this ideal and the lived-reality of thousands of children throughout the country have lead commentators to argue that in Brazil, “childhood is a privilege of the rich and practically nonexistent for the poor” (Goldstein 1998: 41; see also Campos 1993 and Hecht 1998). In the elaboration of such arguments, commentators seek both to critique current trends in the socioeconomic order and to reinscribe what may be acceptable in the definition and experience of childhood. Contextspecific as they might seem, such commentaries might be viewed as part and parcel of an overarching human concern with moral evaluation. One that cuts through time, and across class and culture, and in which adults are forced to recognize and reconcile certain fundamental differences in values between themselves and other adults, and also between themselves as adults, and children as children (see Law 2006). As Joel Robbins (2007) argues, it is during times of change (when new values are introduced, or the hierarchical relations that hold between traditional values are transformed) that people’s sense of the moral weight of their actions is likely to be at its strongest, and that anthropologists are most likely to see how morality shapes culture and experience. Robbins develops this argument in relation to the sociohistorical and cultural changes experienced by the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea as a result of their rapid conversion to charismatic Christianity. In doing so he is careful to make a typological distinction between “stable conflicts that are an enduring part of a culture and those conflicts that arise as a result of change” (2007: 300).

FROM INNOC ENC E TO K NOW LEDGE

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But what if change was, in Robbins’s own terms, “enduring”? What if change was a challenge to be negotiated with each new generation? Something that was present in the very process of growing-up-inthe-world? Child-care practices may vary widely across cultures, but certain interrelational dynamics between human adults and infants remain constant. Wherever it is performed, caring for children is an essentially open-ended and continuous kind of activity, one that, while it encompasses an unquestioned and nonconscious aspect, veers also toward moments of conscious questioning and to an awareness of a range of decision-making possibilities. Practices and discourses that relate to children and childhood are, in this sense, preeminently moral in character and offer opportunities for ethical reflection. In this way, children present an interesting case study for the anthropology of morality. By virtue of the fact that they must grow up in the world, children are fast learners and expert negotiators of changing contexts, cognitive perspectives, and spheres of moral value. As persons in a constant and heightened state of becoming, children demand the moral attention of adults. Adult caregivers, whose role is to guide the child’s growth process, are engaged in a social act that constantly reveals the conscious mechanics of prescribed dominant values. In praising and disciplining children, in allowing or restraining their actions, guiding or prescribing their behavior in the world, adults invariably lay bare their own value judgments. In Santa Lucia, the fact that children grow up physically and alter cognitively casts them firmly, in the local imagination, as paradigmatic embodiers of change. Children are about change, they change from one year to the next, and as they grow and alter they literally instigate change within households: demanding more space, necessitating shifts within work and sleeping arrangements, and introducing new kinds of knowledge and skill in relation to modern forms, and most importantly, modern technology. Parents are fond of commenting on how fast young children grow, and they will often ask for one another’s opinions on whether or not a child has grown taller. Older people are fond of pointing out differences between their own perceptions and those pertaining to the youth (jovems) of nowadays (hoje em dia). For example, grandparents often claim to be fearful (medroso) of the violence endemic in big cities and contrast themselves with their grandchildren, who appear to them as fearless, routinely traveling long distances to holiday and work in the cities of the south. However, it is also this very mundane, ongoing, and embodied change, which presents Santa Lucian parents and grandparents with a sense of the moral weight of their own actions. The aspect of change

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that is most morally fraught is, in this context, the passage from innocence (inocência) to knowledge (conhecimento). It is fraught because innocence—a spiritually elevated state—must be relinquished in favor of knowledge, a state that not only allows people to live productively, but also allows them to commit sin, thus taking them away from God. At key moments of their children’s lives, therefore, adult caregivers find themselves in a moral dilemma: whether to act to preserve childish innocence or whether to destroy it. In this chapter, I examine two types of cultural interaction that appear to be largely about this existential and moral dilemma. The first of these is a common speech game played with young children, and the second is a yearly ritual called casamento de matuto. My reason for considering these two forms of interaction together is that both position children as interlocutors in morally ambiguous scenarios and deal with the possibility of children’s transition from a state of innocence to a state of knowledge. In what follows I shall begin by elaborating upon the perceived problem of innocence versus knowledge, outlining through various ethnographic examples, the implications of this existential problem for Santa Lucians in their everyday lives. I shall then go on to explore the concept of the child (criança) and adolescent (jovem), and the relationship of each of these to various types of good and bad knowledge. Finally, I shall turn to describe the two forms of child-adult interaction, which form the focus of this chapter. Such types of interaction, I will argue, serve as an important context in which adults exercise certain moral choices in response to their experience of this specific dilemma. Knowledge and Innocence To Santa Lucian people, innocence—that state of being free from compromising knowledge—has a divine origin. It is, my informants told me, the human state that most mirrors that of Adam and Eve before the Fall. During a Bible study class that I attended, where the Genesis myth was debated, a young woman from a neighboring village offered the following interpretation: As I read it, before they [Adam and Eve] disobeyed God they lived well, because they didn’t have knowledge. They lived freely like birds, with the simplicity of animals, like that. The problem with Man today is he has to know about everything—Man wants to be like God, knowing everything there is, and this is wrong.


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The opposite of innocence (inocência) is a state of knowledge characterized by cleverness (esperteza) and cunning (sabidencia). Persons who possess knowledge are, by definition, not innocent. However, to possess knowledge does not automatically imply a lesser moral state, for it is how one uses knowledge that counts. Moreover knowledge comes in different forms. Knowledge of the Bible, of manners and custom, of how best to treat people is considered to be moral knowledge that all should have. The word most often used to denote this kind of knowledge is educação (education). Practical knowledge, denoted by terms such as habilidade or jeito (skill/manner/ability), of how best to plant a field, domesticate a horse, or play an instrument is also good knowledge in the sense of being necessary and beneficial to life. Another category of knowledge that is useful in life is erudição (learning), abstract and academic knowledge; that which is gained through schooling and books. In themselves, these types of knowledge are neither morally good nor bad; however, they can be dangerous if they are abused or if they lead a person to orgulho (pride). The type of knowledge that is perceived as most morally dangerous is knowledge about gente (people). People claim that it is when children begin to “know about people” (saber de gente) that little sins (pecadinhos) start to occur. Very much linked to morally dangerous knowledge about gente is carnal knowledge associated with desejo (desire). Knowledge arising from sexual relations is socially and spiritually problematic for the several interconnected reasons already discussed in chapter 2. There is no simple translation for what exactly is meant when people talk about o saber de gente (knowledge about people). It constitutes a type of knowledge that is predicated upon a highly developed sense of self-awareness (consciência) that makes it possible to read the minds of others, and hence, to manipulate them. It is thus precisely this kind of knowingness that is most likely to lead a person to sin. A person with a highly developed sense for such knowledge is generally described as sabido (shrewd/knowing/cunning/clever). There is no fixed way to learn being sabido as it is thought to be acquired naturally and inevitably through active engagement with the sensual world, wherein sight (a vista), sound (o ouvir), and speech (a fala) play a central role. A common way in which Santa Lucians reflect upon the fundamental problem of being in a state of knowledge is via the idiom of animals. The perceived dumbness and unselfconsciousness of animals are frequently contrasted in local speech against a distinctly human form of personhood, which is predicated upon language, selfawareness, and worldly knowledge. On one occasion, Seu Mané and

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I were talking about a young man from a neighboring hamlet who had recently gone to prison for the purported theft of a car. Many people were of the belief that the man was innocent, but Seu Mané did not agree. In explaining his position he said to me “nunca se vê uma vaca presa” (“one never sees a cow in prison”). The absurd image of the cow behind bars was used to allude to the widespread notion that evil (maldade) resides in self-awareness. However, for all that self-awareness is said to lead people to sin, Santa Lucians recognize a complex relationship of knowledge and innocence to freedom and domination, particularly in relation to humans and domestic animals. As Andre once commented to me of his two oxen that were pulling the cart we were riding on: “These oxen are strong! If they only knew how strong they were, there wouldn’t be a man in the world who could control them.” Thus, although self-awareness bestows on people a valuable capacity for freedom, people who take overt advantage of this capacity, people labeled sabido demais (too knowing), are frowned upon. When I refused to sell a bicycle to Amauri’s brother for ten reals instead of the forty it was worth, he loudly accused me of being sabida demais. When a somewhat unpopular woman called Dona Dada decided to take in the mentally ill widow of a neighbor who had died, people thought she was doing it to get her hands on the deceased man’s pension that had passed to his wife. Aquela Dona Dada é sabida! (that Dona Dada is cunning), they would declare, every time the subject arose. Another man in the village who made a living exclusively through business and trade had a reputation for being brutally sabido and was, I was warned, to be avoided at all costs. It would often be said of this man’s wife, by way of absolving her of blame for her husband’s nefarious activities: ela não sabe o homen com quem se casou (she does not know the man she married), thus contrasting her relative innocence against her husband’s level of knowledge. The Problem with Innocence In Santa Lucian discourse, humans differ fundamentally from animals not only in terms of their possession of self-awareness but also in their tendency to plan for the future, and thus by their possession of a concept of time. A recurrent theme in local theological discussions is the biblical injunction to give up selfish preoccupation and planning for the future to devote oneself entirely to God in the here and now. During such discussions people often refer, by way of example, to birds and other creatures that live without storing food in


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anticipation of future need. This ideal, however, is generally perceived as an exceptionally difficult one to emulate. As Dida and Amauri once expressed, such an idealized level of innocence is totally unrealistic: Dida: God requests of us that we do not worry about tomorrow. But look here Maya, life is a thorn; it’s hard! If I wasn’t to worry about tomorrow, if I wasn’t to work today to eat tomorrow, what would I eat? If I eat everything I have today, what will I eat tomorrow? How can I not worry about the future? I myself do not understand how a person can live that way. Amauri: That is right, woman. This business of not worrying about tomorrow, well, I worry about tomorrow, and a lot. This business of not planning ahead, it can’t be right. When I wake up in the morning, I wake up with a head hot with worry, hot, hot as a match. For the poor like us, seems there is no other way.

In other words, although innocence may allow certain closeness to God, it does not permit one to operate effectively in the world, as was made very evident in the case of Francisco. Francisco was a mentally disabled man in his mid-twenties who lived with his parents Seu Zé Mário and Dona Severina. The family had been trying for a long time to qualify Francisco for an early pension due to his incapacity to work. The official procedure regarding state pensions given out in cases of mental and physical disability was, however, in the process of becoming ever more stringent. New legislation had decreed that such people were only entitled to an early pension if they lived in a house where no more than one other person was also in receipt of a state pension. As both Seu Zé Mário and Dona Severina were retired and claiming state pensions, their son Francisco could not qualify. Thus the couple decided to tell the prefeitura (local council) that Francisco lived in the house of his older brother, half a mile away. This plan failed, however, because Francisco, who had to be interviewed alone, was simply unable to speak a lie. The day after Francisco’s interview, I visited the family to find out how it had gone. I arrived to find Seu Zé Mário sat on the steps of his front veranda, recounting the episode to a passing couple: Beforehand we tell the boy over and over, tell him: you live with your brother. We practice with him, we say to him: when the woman from the prefeitura asks where you live, you say I live with my brother. We make him repeat it. Each time we do this the creature cries, saying that he does not want to live with his brother. We tell him it’s not real, boy, it’s pretend. Yet every time we ask the question he answers: “I live with

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my father.” No, we say, you live with your brother! Again he responds “I live with my father.” So what do you think happened when the woman from the prefeitura came? He gave the answer: “I live with my father!” [Slaps hands together] And there went the money.

The passing couple laughed appreciatively at Seu Zé Mário’s humorous rendering of this event, and they turned to regard Francisco, who was sitting in the corner of the veranda. “You’ll never do as a husband, will you Francisco? You just cannot lie!” teased the man. Although people in Santa Lucia were constantly weighing up the relative merits of living effectively in the world against the weight of sin required to do so, the paradox that innocence presented only hit me when, at one point I attempted to buy a car. Everyone in the village knew about my desperate search for a vehicle, and Amauri and his brothers had advised me to wait for someone they knew and trusted to sell me a decent car at a good price. Being in something of a rush, however, I went ahead and bought one on my own from a man in the local market town. When the vehicle arrived in the village, everyone could see immediately that I had been ripped off. The rusty car sat outside the house in the late afternoon sun, attracting a crowd of inquisitors. Somehow, in the space between my handing over the money and having the car delivered to me, it had lost several small parts of its engine, its horn, and windscreen wipers. Gathering men would take one glance at it and tut loudly at my naivety. “You should have listened to me!” Amauri barked, “A person like you is unable to negotiate with someone like that!” He kicked the wheel of the car and made a swearing action with his arm, which shocked me. Never had I seen Amauri react in such a way. Upset and ashamed, I sloped back into the house, followed by Dida and a small party of interested women and children. “Listen Maya,” Dida said to me, “you are naive, yes, but it is also a good thing. In fact, it is so good we should be pleased you were robbed!” The contradiction of this statement was not lost on anyone present, and soon we were laughing. Glad to have lightened the mood Dida carried on: “It’s good, good, good you were robbed! What do you want to be sabida for?” The argument here concerns an explicitly recognized tension between the states of innocence and knowledge, and the question this poses for our understanding of Santa Lucian society overall. The example involving the car is simply one manifestation of a wider contradiction between the need to make a profit and the injunction not to lie. As I discussed in chapter 1, an ability to do negócio (business) is a valued worldly skill, although it is predicated quite specifically upon


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a lack of innocence. To have a reputation for being good at negócio is very much prized among men, and it is especially important in the context of marriage, where a household’s income depends on the kind of economic deals a husband is able to perform outside the house. A certain loss of innocence is thus a necessary prerequisite to sustaining one’s family. In this section then, we have looked at the paradox that innocence and knowledge is perceived to constitute, let us now look at how this paradox expresses itself in relation to the growing child.

The Concept of the Child and the Problem of Growing up in the World From Birth to First Communion In Santa Lucia, as in the rest of Brazil, a concept of the child (criança) as distinct from the adult (adulto) exists. Indeed, Santa Lucian ideas about the child are strongly resonant with Christian notions concerning the state of the soul. People believe that all children come from God and are born with a soul (alma). A baby’s soul, however, is different from an adult’s. Rather than being a fully developed entity imprinted with an individual history of good or bad deeds, it is nothing more than a capacity for thought and emotion. A baby’s soul does not automatically confer moral personhood, and the young, unsocialized infant is often regarded as more animal-like than human. This is suggested by frequent use of the term bicho (animal/creature) when referring to babies and infants up to the age of two to three years. Through baptism, which can occur anytime up to the age of three or four, parents proclaim their respeito (respect) for a child. Henceforth, the child is enabled to grow into a moral human being capable of returning the respeito it has been shown. In confluence with ideas about baptism providing the child with a point of entry to the Christian faith, people regard baptism as setting the child’s soul on the correct path—toward God as opposed to away from Him. It is then the job of the child’s parents and godparents to keep the child on this path, through raising and educating it properly, and ensuring that it attends catechism classes in preparation for first communion around the age of ten or eleven. In this precommunion stage of childhood, children are believed to possess a basic level of innocence and hence spiritual purity derived from their having arrived only recently in the world. Adults, correlatively, are less pure, and further away from God. The essential innocence of precommunion children has been noted before, particularly in reference to the widespread

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Catholic belief that young children and infants who die are without sin, and so destined to become “little angels” (Nations and Rebhun 1988, Scheper-Hughes 1992). The value ascribed to children’s innocence is in evidence in the village school room, where a handmade poster proclaiming the biblical saying, “Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew, 28.1) decorates the main wall. In a similar vein, Padre Augusto once began a sermon by exhorting the congregation to make themselves open and receptive como crianças (like children). He proceeded to explain this exhortation by elaborating upon the recognized innocence of children, and on the way in which innocence heightens the ability to trust. The quality of trust that a small child displays toward his mother, he argued, is the ideal model of the trust that an adult should display toward God. A child’s trust, he continued, is such that a child would not hesitate to jump off a ledge and into total darkness if he heard his mother’s voice calling. Adults too, he declared, should be able to make such a jump if they hear God’s call. Ideas that link children to innocence thus map onto a general conception of childhood as something divisible into two distinct periods: an earlier period that lasts until first communion (around the age of ten), and a later period that lasts up until marriage. First communion is the marker of the child as a full participant in the life of the church. Furthermore, first communion confers moral personhood because it marks the end of catechism classes and the commencement of the child’s ability to recognize good from bad and right from wrong. Precommunion children are therefore perceived as less accountable for misdeeds than those who have been fully catechized to partake in the Eucharist and as such tend to be treated more liberally by adults. Thus when precommunion children misbehave they are scolded, but not as severely as their catechized age-mates. Precommunion children are also allowed a good deal more freedom than older children to play (brincar) as they wish—a point we shall return to a bit further on. The essential differentiation between the earlier stage and the later one is the relationship of the individual toward knowledge. While children are perceived to be constantly learning about the world, life in the precommunion stage is accepted as constituting the period par excellence for the acquisition of knowledge, simply because it is the least restricted phase for doing so. Several factors point to this: for most children, childhood will be the only time of their life that they attend school. It is also the time during which they are expected to acquire their basic knowledge of the Bible and of Christian practice


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through catechism. Also, it is the only period of life when relative freedom of expression and explorative play is allowed. In all these senses, children are perceived as inhabiting a stage in which their prerogative is to learn. And to learn, not just about good (via school, home disciplining, and catechism) but about bad as well. From First Communion Onward In Santa Lucia, the level of knowledge and awareness that marks one out as an autonomous and fully accountable adult person is not achieved until marriage. Nonetheless, older children and adolescents are explicitly recognized as different from crianças (little children), and they are referred to as jovems (youth). Being in the classic turn of phrase, “betwixt and between” innocence and full knowledge, jovems are a frequent source of adult preoccupation and are subject to increasing discipline. The first sign that a child is becoming a jovem occurs around or slightly before the age of puberty. At this time, brothers and sisters who may have shared a room and even a bed together will finally be given separate rooms to sleep in. More often than not, due to sizes of families and restrictions of space, separate beds, rather than rooms, are arranged. Another change that occurs around this time relates to the expected comportment of jovems during church services. It is usual for children of all ages, including babies, to accompany their mothers to church. During any church service, one can be distracted by the playful kerfuffles, bored sighs, and unorthodox observations of children and infants. Little children are highly visible in church, not only because of their different comportment within it—running instead of walking, and climbing instead of sitting quietly—but also because of the way in which they use the church space. Whereas the place for adults is within the seating area of the congregation, facing the crucifix and altar, young children are permitted to sit upon the step of the inner chancel and, like the priest, face the congregation with their back to the altar. In this arrangement of bodies within the church, a manifest connection is made between the spiritual purity of the innocent child, the unmarried (childlike) priest and that of God embodied in the crucifix. The elevated purity of these categories is expressed through their occupation of the most sacred space within the church, separated from the nave where sit the spiritually impure congregation. As children turn gradually into jovems, they cease to run, climb, and sit on the raised platform of the chancel. Although children as old as ten and eleven will utilize church space differently from adults,

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the place for children who have had their first communion is firmly within the congregation. Most children appear to adapt their behavior without ever being told to do so. On occasion, however, a concerned looking mother will pull an older child away from the chancel step. If there is no space left on the pews, the child might sit on the floor in one of the aisles but must sit facing the altar and crucifix. The change in bodily comportment within the church should be mirrored by a new fervor toward attending it. Whereas little children who do not wish to go to mass are allowed to remain at home, older children are not let off so easily. This is particularly the case with girls who, once they start attending catechism classes, are expected to attend every mass and rosary.2 Thus parents who are not particularly churchgoing themselves continually reprimand older children for missing church services. An example of this occurred when fourteen-year-old Katiana announced, one evening, her intention to miss prayer. When asked why by her father, she replied that it was because she found it boring. “Boring!” roared back her father, who was stretched out in front of the television, with no intention of attending church himself, “things of God are not to be judged by you or anyone else as boring,” and he ordered her to leave for church immediately. For ordinary Santa Lucians, however, the value placed on children’s innocence is tempered by the fact that such a value is essentially a hollow one. Like the philosopher David Archard who writes that the child, in this conception “does not fear power because it does not see what power is” (1993:40), local conceptions of the child recognize that a child is a being that does no evil only because it knows none. Santa Lucian concepts of the child, then, do not extend to incorporate romanticist notions about child-like wisdom. Whereas, in the tradition of writers such as Rousseau, Blake, and Wordsworth a child’s innocence allows it to possess a preternatural wisdom uncorrupted and blinded by formal education, Santa Lucian people insist that children are not wise (sábio) because they do not know right from wrong. This is the primary reason for catechism classes, schooling, and disciplining children at home. The concept of the child is thus based as much upon an inner state of ignorance (ignorância) as it is upon one of innocence. Whereas innocence is positive because it suggests a lack of morally dangerous knowledge (such as knowledge about gente, and carnal knowledge), ignorance is the inverse, implying a lack of the kind of knowledge that makes one into a proper moral person (such as knowledge about God and the Bible, good manners, etc.). The dilemma for Santa Lucian caregivers lies in the fact that all desirable knowledge implies its undesirable inverse. Thus,


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while efforts must be made to rid children of ignorance, it is impossible to do this without also ridding them of their innocence. Knowledge through Play: Its Pleasures and Dangers In accordance with the spatial and comportmental changes wrought by puberty, children are expected to manifest a change in attitude toward childish occupations. As children become older, their play (brincadeira) comes under increasing scrutiny from adults. Parents are forever trying to prevent older children from joining in the games of younger siblings. On any typical afternoon, close kin and neighbors will gather in the shade of one another’s doorsteps to sort beans, plait straw for hats, and exchange news and gossip. At such times gaggles of children are always present, playing tag, rolling marbles in the dirt, and climbing the guava trees that line the center of the village street. Such play is generally tolerated by the congregated adults engaged in various activities, but every so often a mother will call out to an older child, requesting that he or she stops playing in “that manner” (d’aquele jeito). At such times conversation often turns to the perceived problem of older children’s play, with adults waxing anxious about the fact that their older children play “too much.” Adults worry a lot about this problem, claiming that too much play distracts older children from schoolwork and household chores, thus preventing them from eventual participation in the adult sphere of economic and moral productivity. Older women remind themselves of their intention to teach young adolescent girls how to crotchet to “parar las de brincar” (“stop them playing”). Men discuss their intentions of providing older boys with pigs or goats of their own to raise, with much the same desire. However, too much play in older children is worrying for another, more fundamental reason: older children are much too sabido for their play to be wholly innocent. In short, they are already in possession of too much knowledge about the world, knowledge that has the power to transform play into a morally ambiguous form of malandragem (mischievousness). Unlike Freudian theoretical frameworks that interpret play literally or analogously and regard play as a distinctive type of activity set off from others, Santa Lucians regard play as something of a mode, or an attitude that can be shown toward any kind of activity at all (Edmiston 2008; Schechner 1988). Adults frequently ask one another to stop “playing” with them in moments of jest or sarcasm. In haggling over the price of something in the market, a person might accuse a trader of “playing,” if the price they ask for is too high. Another example is

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carnival, which linguistically speaking individuals are said to “play,” rather than “attend.”3 Traditionally playful activities such as sports, gambling, dancing, storytelling, and carnival are all laden with an ethos of creative risk-taking and the lure of escape through inversion. The risk-taking involved in play is acknowledged as an important aspect of life in-the-world, not simply because it presents a legitimate opportunity for diversion amidst hardship and suffering, but also because it acts as a vehicle for learning. To play and be playful is, in this way, to switch into a temporary and pleasurable mode of beingin-the-world: it is to go along with things dynamically, to perceive social relationships as provisional and ever changing. Consequently play, in local imagination, is an attitude or activity with distinctively ambiguous potential. In differing contexts and various ways, both children and adults indulge in what may be classed as “play” (brincar), and when they do, they are held to be doing something that is intrinsically fun and creative but potentially sinful. The dangerous potential of play lies simultaneously in its association with knowledge acquisition, and its capacity for transformation into types of malandragem. The concern over the concept of play maps onto a wider preoccupation with the creative but dangerous potential inherent in all unstructured, imaginative, and open-ended forms of social interaction. The Santa Lucian discourse about play is, in this way, analogous to the “trickster eudemonic” that appears in Jamaican ritual and folklore. According to Austin-Broos (1997), in Jamaican folk tales, the trickster figure of Anansi uses the enigma of play to question the logic of moral discipline and to resurrect sensuousness and the “fallibility of a rational world” (49). In doing so he “inevitably creates an openness in life, a liminal beyond controlling norm” (1997: 47; see also Pelton 1980: 63–67). In Santa Lucia, the risk of existing within this liminal space, however, varies with the category of person. For young children, still in a phase of innocence, explorative play and childish games are regarded as morally innocuous, for adults in a full phase of knowledge, the moral risk associated with playful activity is deemed to be easily controllable. However, for older children, neither fully innocent, nor complete in their knowledge, playful activity can tip too easily into undesirable forms of malandragem. It is the “learning” aspect of play that is readily exploitable by adults during playful interactions with children, and that I here wish to focus upon. In the next section we will turn to regard two separate examples of how play, with all its mischievous possibilities, is utilized by adults in charge of children to negotiate this knowledge/innocence dilemma. Through play, adults make themselves protagonists in their


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children’s loss of innocence, and they control their inevitable acquisition of undesirable knowledge. Acquiring Knowledge through Speech Games and Ritual Speech Games We return at this point to the young child, who is not yet cunning or knowledgeable enough to survive well in the world without adult guidance and to examine their role in a very common type of speech game in which small children are used between adults, as messengers for insults. I use the word “game” here, in a loose sense to denote what is actually a form of playful interaction. Such interactions are not formally articulated games such as cards or football; they do not have “winning” or “losing” as their objective, and they are not initiated with the words “vamos brincar” (let’s play). Such interactions constitute more of a “covert category” (Whorf 1956), one that people act in terms of while unable to define it in words (see also Briggs 1998: 9). Such speech games are always played among kin and tend to occur spontaneously whenever people are grouped together. As with any type of game or performance, however, much depends upon the personalities of those involved. For example, the aptitude and willingness of individual children to be drawn into these kinds of exchange vary greatly, and not every one is a willing candidate. Similarly, while some Santa Lucian adults will never pass up the opportunity for a joke or jibe at another’s expense, others of a more serious disposition will routinely steer clear of such forms of interaction. However, most people, regardless of their level of willingness to instigate these little games, find the banter being channeled through the child greatly amusing. The more outrageous the insults that are channeled through the child, the greater the amusement value to the onlookers. Following are three such examples: One morning I returned with Amauri from the local town where we had been to buy medicine for his goats. On our way, we stopped by at his brother-in-law Gileno’s house. Gileno was at home with his three-year-old son Luciano, and two older daughters, Chrislane and Sofia. Amauri and I sat down with them to converse. The following interaction occurred between the two men and Luciano, the boy: Amauri: Hey, Luciano, aren’t you going to ask for your favorite uncle’s blessing? [Luciano looks shyly away and climbs onto Gilberto’s lap]

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Amauri: Hey, moleque (rascal), I’m talking to you. Aren’t you going to ask for my blessing? Gileno: [to Luciano] Say “You are not really my uncle,” say it. Luciano: You are not really my uncle. Amauri: What sort of disrespect is this?! Gileno: [to Luciano] Say “You are not really my uncle, you are too poor to be my uncle!” Say it. Luciano: You are not really my uncle, you are too poor to be my uncle! Gileno: [to Luciano] Say “If you were a rich man, I would call you uncle,” Say it. Luciano: If you were a rich man, I would call you uncle. Amauri: Is that so? Then you won’t find many uncles around here.

Later on that same day, after several hours had passed, the family and I were having supper together. Luciano ran into the house, as often he did after he had finished supper at his own house, and climbed onto Dida’s lap. Regarding the young boy with unabashed affection, Amauri repeated his question of earlier that day: “Aren’t you going to ask your uncle for his blessing?” to which Luciano replied, “You are not really my uncle, you are too poor to be my uncle.” At this Dida and her two daughters, who had not witnessed the afternoon exchange, gasped with amazement at how one so young could have come up with such a line. Amauri did not qualify where this phrase had come from. “You see how clever the boy is?” he said, beaming with pleasure, “Ave Maria, he is clever indeed!” Another example of this speech game occurred in the house of an elderly couple called Dona Maria and Seu Adalberto on an occasion when I had been invited for lunch. Their daughter Roseli, and fouryear-old granddaughter, Cassia were also present. After we had finished eating, Seu Adalberto got up from the table and announced that he was going down to the barraca. Cassia sprang to the old man’s side and asked to go with him, to which Seu Adalberto replied quietly that where he was going was no place for her. Dona Maria cast her husband a withering look and started to busy herself with dirty dishes. It was clear that she did not approve of her husband’s sudden leavetaking for the barraca. The following interaction occurred between the old couple and their granddaughter: Dona Maria: [To Cassia, while backward and forward, clearing table] Say “But where you are going is no place for an old man like you,” say it. Cassia: But where you are going is no place for an old man like you.


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Seu Adalberto: [To Dona Maria] Ah, I won’t be gone long woman. Dona Maria: [To Cassia] Say, “no, just long enough to come back smelling of liquor,” say it. Cassia: No, just long enough to come back smelling of liquor.

With an embarrassed smile, Seu Adalberto stuffed his hat under his arm and shook my hand goodbye. He stepped out of the back door and made down the path. Dona Maria, without a glance at her departing husband, addressed Cassia: “Run after him and tell him, ‘if you have too much you can spend the night in the cattle pen.’ ” Roseli, myself, and Dona Maria laughed as Cassia raced after her grandfather to deliver the last line. In yet another exchange Deia, a young woman who worked in the casa de farinha was passing by the house of her wealthier sister-inlaw who was standing outside it on her front porch. The sister-in-law called out a greeting to Deia and her young daughter as they passed. Deia called back and then said to her daughter, “Say ‘O tia, give us some money so we can also live in a beautiful house.’ ” Speech Games as Meaningful Actions Two important points need to be made about this kind of interaction overall. The first point concerns the age of the participants. The game is always initiated by adults and with children roughly between the ages of three and five years. Although slightly older children will sometimes be roped into acting as messengers, younger children tend to be favored over older ones because, while they are linguistically able, and basically old enough to grasp the “rules,” they are unambiguously still young enough to be innocents. The second point I wish to make concerns the relationships of those directly involved in such interactions. The child messenger will always be a close relation of one or both of the adults involved— usually a son/daughter, nephew/niece, or grandchild. To co-opt a child one does not know into such a game would be unthinkable. While the relationship of the child messenger to the adults involved appears relatively flexible (the child may be almost any categorical relation to those adults so long as there exists familiarity between them), adults who engage in an exchange of insults via a child messenger tend to be in affinal relationships, and the tensions inherent within each scenario appear, repeatedly, to focus upon the moral problematic that marriage and affinity generates. A couple of further restrictions are also in evidence. For example, it is significant that not one of the

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many instances I witnessed involved husbands or wives channeling insults to one another directly through their own offspring, a pattern that seems in keeping with the strong level of deference and respect that children are brought up to show toward their immediate parents. Utmost levels of respect must also be shown by adults toward any person of an older generation. Thus all insult exchanges of this form tend to be initiated between adults of the same generation. Children as Initiates and Purifiers of Knowledge Previously, we have seen that although children’s innocence is perceived as a spiritually elevated state, it limits them in worldly terms, and they are therefore obliged to escape from it. This leads to a situation in which adults struggle hard to negate the moral ambiguity and sin of worldly life (marriage, commerce, sex, etc.), whilst having to bring their children up to embrace it. Given these facts, we might understand the speech play of the sort described as one that enables adults to negotiate some of the moral anxiety that raising children produces. It is significant, for example, that affines would never address one another so disrespectfully under such ordinary circumstances. However, as we have seen, children may become safe channels for the expression of such immoral hostility. A child’s perceived innocence takes the immoral edge off an adult’s words without stripping those words of their message. In understanding how this might be possible, it helps to reflect, for a moment, upon local notions of spiritual healing that I discussed in detail in chapter 2. In Santa Lucia, religious healers known as rezadeiras are considered to be closer to God than the average adult person. The rezadeira’s spiritual power is talked about as a kind of capacity to bear and absorb the negative forces that afflict other people. Therefore, when a person is being healed of the evil eye, the rezadeira yawns widely to take in the evil, and weeps tears as she absorbs it. Powerful rezadeiras are said to have a great capacity to bear suffering, just as ordinary women, through marriage and childbirth, become metaphorical containers of suffering. The significant point here is that a rezadeira cures by absorbing the evil afflicting others and “bearing” it herself. Once inside her body, evil loses its force.4 In a similar way, then, children act as absorbers for the evil embedded in words. By acting as vessels for what is, essentially, morally dangerous knowledge, they make its existence less dangerous in the world. This is borne out by the fact that two adults passing such comments directly to one another, even jokingly, run a significantly higher risk of rupturing their relationship irrevocably.


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Speech games work, in this sense, to render the difficulty of certain relationships visible, and to transmit to children an acceptable manner for dealing with them. In seeking to understand such adult-child interactions, I find it useful to draw upon the work of the anthropologist Jean Briggs (1998), whose reflections upon Inuit adult-child “morality play” led her to a view of culture as “a mosaic of dilemmas which echo, cross-cut, confirm, and negate one another; dilemmas that are never totally resolved but have to be juggled and rearranged time after time.” (209). The “morality play” of Santa Lucians presents us with a similar view of culture, as something “never totally resolved,” particularly in relation to moral transmission across generations. Revealed within these speech games is the way in which adults must constantly juggle and rearrange spheres of value in their communication with children. In her account of Inuit morality play, Briggs chooses to emphasize a certain open-endedness of outcome to child-adult social interactions. In the Santa Lucian case, however, it would be pertinent to reflect upon the qualities of children as opposed to adults in local thinking, and to how this might foster a distinctly dualistic outcome, wherein speech games attenuate a dangerous state of knowledge in the adult and an impracticable state of innocence in the child. We see this most clearly with Cassia, who is being taught that going off to get drunk is morally wrong. However, in that particular interaction, Cassia is also being taught a confrontational and disrespectful way of addressing a husband. It seems that adults themselves, recognize the potential effects such games may have on children. As we saw in the case of Amauri and Luciano, the possibility—indeed the inevitability—that children will take up such dangerous knowledge themselves and be changed by it does not pass unnoticed. Here is where the similarity between rezadeiras and children breaks down. For whereas rezadeiras have the capacity to bear content without being changed by it, children do not. It might be argued that the possibility of change is an intrinsic part of, and perhaps a motivation for, such interactions. In this section, we have explored how informal speech games play out a tension between knowledge and innocence; let us now turn to look at a form of interaction between adults and children that happens only once a year, to examine how it deals with the same tension in a different form. Casamento de matuto: A Ritualized Loss of Innocence During the June festival of São João, children and young, unmarried people perform a theatrical dance called casamento de matuto

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(wedding of the country bumpkin). The dance itself, called a quadrilha, involves an equal number of male and female participants and takes the form of couples dancing to instructions spoken by a caller. A small play performed before the dance tells the story of a shotgun wedding, and it involves a bride (noiva), groom (noivo), bride’s father (pai de noiva), priest (padre), and local chief of police (delegado). The other quadrilha dancers comprise the wedding guests (convidados). Optional characters include the bride’s mother (mãe de noiva), godparent witnesses (padrinhos), and armed assistants to the chief of police (ajudantes). The story behind the wedding is not made explicit at any point in its staging, but derives implicitly from the characters that partake in it, and the dialogue they perform. The story behind the wedding is as follows: a girl becomes pregnant by her boyfriend, and her father demands that the boy marry her. The boy attempts to flee, so the father asks the local delegado and his armed guards to intervene. The boy is caught and brought to the altar where the pregnant bride awaits him. The wedding is performed by the padre, under the watchful eye of the delegado and his armed ajudantes. Once the marriage has been performed, the bride, groom, and other characters join the guests for the “celebration” and the quadrilha commences. The performance is meant to be comic, and characters dress humorously in parody of the matuto (bumpkin). Girls wear traditional floralprint frocks with petticoats, collars, and frills. Hair is worn plaited, adorned with a profusion of bows, and makeup is applied coarsely. A typical matuta has thick blue shadow on her eyelids and big pink circles of rouge on her cheeks. Freckles may also be drawn across her face, and one or two front teeth may be blacked-out to look as if they are missing. Boys wear patched trousers, white shirts, brightly patterned bow-ties, and straw hats. Some might add painted-on freckles and blacked-out teeth. Prepubescent boys, in particular, often paint on false beards and moustaches. The only characters to deviate from this look are the bride, who wears a white wedding dress (sometimes including cushioning around the waist to make her appear pregnant), and the padre who wears a black or purple gown (see figure 6.1). Curiously enough, there is no attempt among people to disassociate themselves from the parody of the matuto, who belongs on the one hand to a generic category of person (rural as opposed to urban), and on the other to a pejorative Brazilian stereotype of rural Northeasterners. The Santa Lucian willingness to simultaneously mock and embrace the matuto image is, one might say, part of an encompassing political and symbolic complex. It maps onto a wider


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6.1 Casamento de matuto

tradition rural Northeastern people have of telling self-deprecating stories about themselves in relation to modern technology, at the same time as offering a resource for reflection upon the structural relations that deny them access to it.5 In practice, the matuto is actually a highly adaptable category with complex symbolic associations. He may be rendered either as an ignorant buffoon, imprisoned by his simple life and rural environment, or as a type of anti-intellectual hero, spiritually cloistered from the complex sinful world by his rural existence. In everyday speech, Santa Lucian people are as apt as urbanites anywhere else in Brazil, to speak pejoratively of the matuto, and will tease and deride one another for being matutos at the slightest of provocations. When it comes to situating themselves as rural Northeasterners within the wider national panorama, however, Santa Lucians tend to recognize themselves as matutos. As one woman exclaimed when I asked her what a matuto was: “What is a matuto? It’s us! People who live simply, the way we do!” Every year, school children perform the casamento de matuto with their class. For the entire week of São João, afternoons are filled with staged performances by classes of school children, to which parents are invited to attend. It is important to note, however, that performances by younger children often involve only the minimum number of characters, such as a bride, groom, and priest. Dialogue before the dance commences is also pared down, and the performance really

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consists of nothing more than the quadrilha. Performances by older groups of children are likely to involve more characters and dialogue but revolve primarily around the dance itself. It is only performances by teenagers and young, unmarried adults that include the full dialogue and all characters. It is therefore this performance that makes the moral content of the story most explicit. In school performances, an accordionist and a drummer provide the live music for the dancing. Following the performance, drinks and traditional specialties such as cassava cakes, sweet tapioca pancakes, and cornmeal puddings are served. Among young girls, there is always some competition to be the bride. For boys, being chosen to be the groom is not as competitive an event, although it is still considered a special part. With the exception of some of the boys in their early teens, children revel in the opportunity to dress up like adults. Weeks before the casamento de matuto takes place, children start nagging their parents to help them put together an outfit. On the day of the performance, they strut proudly around the village showing these off. Many ordinarily shy children find their confidence bolstered by their adult disguises, and they use it to initiate conversations with children and adults they do not know or have never properly talked to before. Adults clearly enjoy helping children prepare for the day. Mothers take time out of their normal routines to dress their brides and grooms, sew patches on trousers, and hunt desperately around for the right kind of hat. When the children are ready, they wander through the village in groups, turning up at the houses of adult relatives, whose duty it is to closely inspect and laugh appreciatively at their costumes. Men try on the boys’ hats and, tongue-in-cheek, offer them cigarettes and alcoholic drinks. Sometimes a boy will be asked “Cadé a mulher sofrida?” (“Where is your suffered wife?”) producing much amusement. The “groom” is often singled out for special attention by adult women and men. When they see him walking past, women will say loudly, in mock disapproval “Lá vai o safado” (“There goes the rascal”). Men tease the groom for his safadeza (cunning naughtiness), they ruffle his hair and say things such as “Veja o condenado!” (“see the condemned one!”). Boys derive much enjoyment from this kind of interaction and some will brag to adults about invented escapades and amorous conquests. A favorite game that small boys play among themselves on this day is the game of “being drunk,” which involves pretending to be drunk and falling over in humorous fashion. Girls wander around the village seeking attention in much the same way as the boys. Rather than make fun of them, however,


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adults concentrate on admiring their clothes. The bride will be gently teased with comments such as “It’s your wedding day!” and “Where is your fiancé, has he run away?” If the bride is a little bit older, she might also be asked “When is the baby due?” Such types of question cause much laughter among adults and embarrassment to the girl. Whether a child is aware of the story behind the casamento de matuto will depend upon their individual level of awareness. Adults never spell out the full story or its moral implications to children. It is simply assumed that as children get older, they piece it together for themselves. As stated before, the biggest and most elaborate performance of casamento de matuto is carried out by unmarried men and women in their teens and twenties. This performance is arranged by the young people themselves and is a much more polished affair, often requiring financial contribution from the local prefeitura. Participants are likely to be linked through kinship and locality or will know one another through school or church. In Santa Lucia, the big performance by young people occurs at night, and it is watched by people from neighboring villages. A small stage is built in the center of the village for the musicians to play on, and special lights are rigged up to illuminate the dance floor. The night air is permeated by the rhythmic percussion of the band and the scent of smoldering bonfires. Before the performers arrive, people throng the area consuming food and drink brought along for the “wedding celebration.” Men drape the bar, drinking cachaça, and children shuttle excitedly between the stage where the band are warming up, and the man roasting cobs of corn on a large brazier. Eventually, the “guests” arrive and form two lines on the center of the dance floor, creating an aisle at the top of which stands the padre and the delegado. A horse-drawn cart decorated with palm fronds and paper chains pulls up carrying the bride and her father, who alight and begin to walk up the aisle. Upon reaching the top of the aisle, the bride takes her place, and a short piece of dialogue is performed in rhyming verse. The bride bemoans the fact that the groom has not shown up. The bride’s father consorts with the padre and delegado, and the delegado offers to go and look for him. The delegado disappears and then returns accompanied by his armed guards, marching the groom in front of him. The groom is shoved into place next to the bride, and the wedding ceremony commences. The padre asks the groom whether he “takes this girl to be his wife,” to which the groom, at gunpoint, answers: “no, but if I do not I’m going directly to my coffin.” He asks the bride the same, to which she replies, “all I know is

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that they brought me here today and told me to say yes.” With the brief ceremony complete, the padre declares “viva os noivos!” (“long live the couple”), and the guests shout “viva!” in return. The padre then enjoins everyone to celebrate with a dance. Here the dialogue part of the performance ends, and the quadrilha commences. Casamento de matuto as Cosmology and as Practice When asked about it, Santa Lucian people claim that the casamento de matuto is performed every year “pelas crianças” (for the children), because children enjoy dressing-up and dancing, and because all who partake have fun. As one woman replied when I asked her why casamento de matuto was performed: “é apenas uma brincadeira, é para divertimento—para a gente se divertir!” (“it is only childsplay, it is for enjoyment—for people to have fun!”). To understand the casamento de matuto, then, it is important to recognize that it is essentially a type of brincadeira and a source of “fun.” The fun and playfulness does not begin with the dance proper, it starts hours, even days, before the main event, with the organization of costumes, the process of dressing up, and the casual interactions that occur as dressed-up children wander around the village, practicing their lines. From the moment that children don their adult-matuto costumes, they begin to perform being adults. The playful sensuality of such improvised performance is, from the Santa Lucian view, the principle objective of this ritual, and it calls for a performative approach toward its understanding— one in which ultimate social transformation is neither prior to nor diminishing of the process itself (Austin 1975; Burke 1987; Goffman 1974; Turner 1969, 1974).6 Pursuing such an analysis, it helps to regard the casamento de matuto as a creative form of adult-child interaction, much like the speech games described earlier. Within the process as a whole—a process encompassing everything from the creation of costumes, the dressing-up and wandering about before the central performance, to the quadrilha itself—children are encouraged by adults to partake of the immoral world. The irony is that what makes it entertaining and humorous for adults is the innocence, and hence the ultimate inability of children to really do this. However, and as with the speech games analyzed earlier, the process is destined to render a transformation in the children, for through their performances they increase their self-awareness (consciência) and acquire dangerous knowledge about people (gente) and the world. In short, through play children are recognized as having the capacity to transform themselves; just as


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ordinary child’s play is filled with a certain dangerous and transformative potential, so is that involved in the casamento de matuto. While there are likely to be any number of reasons why parents might encourage children to partake in such events, it is pertinent to note that whereas adults have some level of control over their children’s acquisition of good knowledge (through disciplining them at home and sending them to school or to be catechized), they have little control over their acquisition of bad knowledge, such as carnal knowledge and knowledge about gente (people). A ritual such as casamento de matuto offers a structure through which adults may gently, through playful inversion, claim some control over the other side of the transformation that their children are destined to undergo. By bantering with them about their imagined noivos, noivas, and mulhers sofridas, adults ascribe children the sexual agency of adults. In doing so they elicit from them an individuated consciousness of the immoral side of sexual activity and the dangers it entails. In its dramatization of the shotgun wedding, the casamento de matuto constitutes a wry reflection on the unrestrained pleasure of youth, which comes abruptly to an end in marriage. As we have seen, in local perception, marriage is a place from which there is no return; a stage in the life course that irrevocably changes the inner person both in the eyes of society and in the eyes of God. However, in as much as marriage represents the final loss of innocence in a person’s life, it is an apt symbol through which to reflect upon and rephrase the problems inherent in the acquisition of knowledge. The casamento de matuto is, one might argue, about the problems of knowledge par excellence. It depicts the inevitability of sexual desire and its consequences through differing layers of subtext. On a certain level one can read the performance as a straightforward parable about the preservation of virginity. In this rather obvious sense it constitutes a warning tale to unmarried people about the potentially dangerous consequences of sexual intercourse. Young women and men perceive the shame that premarital pregnancy brings on parents and confront the idea of violent reprisals and/or of being coerced to spend the rest of their lives with someone they would rather not. There is another level on which the story can be read. Rather than a parable about the immorality of premarital sex; the sexual act and pregnancy of the noiva are metonyms for the aggregate loss of innocence involved in marriage overall. In the enactment of the casamento de matuto, positive and negative—both pleasure and pitfall—are compressed: the serious social implications of premarital sex with the humor of its rendering, pain of death with the fertility of the noiva

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and the proclamation of “viva!” at the end, and the unwillingness of the couple to marry with the gleeful, celebratory dancing of the guests. The performance dramatizes a deep-seated conflict between religious ideals and the pragmatic requirements of worldly social life. The religious ideal devalues marriage as the most prominent manifestation of human self-awareness and the condition for sin it creates. Social pragmatism, however, indicates that the loss of innocence is unavoidable and must be embraced. Marriage may be predicated upon a dangerous state of knowledge, but it is a socially constructive life-stage that leads as much toward life as toward death. Let us consider the fact that casamento de matuto is proclaimed to be “for children” in the sense that it is children and, more generally unmarried people who perform it. Certain symbolic dimensions here begin to unfold. If we accept that the ritual is a dramatization of the tension between being in a state of innocence versus one of knowledge we may notice, curiously, that all the main characters involved— the bride and groom, the delegado, the bride’s parents—fall into the latter category. The only possible exception being the padre who falls into neither as he is more knowledgeable than a child yet, through his lack of carnal knowledge, more innocent than a married person. In the ritual as a whole, however, child performers stand metonymically for innocence. The fact that the casamento is enacted by children closes the circle, so to speak, representing within the ritual all three states. Converging with the presence of children is their status as Northeastern matutos, which suggests a complex of symbolic associations, among which is that of innocence once more—but not the morally elevated innocence of childhood so much as that which comes parceled with ignorance. As described before, the matuto is defined largely by his lack of learning and stands in opposition to the wealthier and more sophisticated town dweller. Layered atop this traditional performance, then, is both a critique and a reflection of Santa Lucian senses of self within the wider national panorama. The matuto, in this rendering, is at once a figure of disdain and a playful, amoral echo of the suffering rezadeira: socially marginal, materially impoverished, and yet in possession of virtuous simplicity. However we look at it, the performance of casamento de matuto is, in the final analysis, a performative process, and its outcomes will always reflect its form. In his remarkable exploration of how “ethical identities” are formed through play in early childhood, Brian Edmiston (2008) argues that if adults and children play together then “co-authoring spaces” become available as collaborative everyday spaces intersect with play spaces. Within this process, the potential


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for creating ethical and other new understanding is expanded (2008: 193). In casamento de matuto, “co-authoring spaces” become available as children and adults dialogue playfully in relation to topics of sex, sin, marriage, and redemption. With each passing year, the “ethical identities” formed within the coauthored space provided by casamento de matuto are bound to shift and to become overlaid with alternative associations and values. As such, the meaning of casamento de matuto that I have put forward here remains at best a potential: a potential to achieve a loss of innocence as well as to address what such a loss would mean. Making Sinners, Making Saints In a historical study of the concept of childhood in the West, Hugh Cunningham (1995) cites a German sermon delivered in 1520, which claimed that “Just as a cat craves mice, a fox chickens, and a wolf cub sheep, so infant humans are inclined in their hearts to adultery, fornication, impure desires, lewdness, idol worship, belief in magic, hostility, quarrelling, passion, anger, strife, dissention, factiousness, hatred, murder, drunkenness, gluttony, and more” (1995: 49). Following the advice of Proverbs, 29.15, “The rod and the reproof gives wisdom; but a child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame,” the puritan parent thus sought to produce a civilized and educated Christian (Archard 1993: 37). In this understanding of children, little weight is given to the notion of innocence and far more is placed on the Augustinian and Calvinist tenets of Original Sin. Rather than pure and cherubic, children are cast as recalcitrant devils in need of rigid forms of discipline to instill a moral disposition. Alongside the notion of the child as inherently evil, however, one also encounters that of the adult who, in order to be saved, must rediscover the state of childhood. In this more secular view of childhood, which emerged in connection with humanist notions of childhood in Renaissance Europe, children possess a purity that derives from their having arrived only recently in the world. They are, as Archard writes, “nature which society corrupts. Growing up is an inevitable degeneration, a growing away from original perfection” (1993: 38). In this perspective, which has come to underwrite liberal protectionist concepts of the child, children are considered as vulnerable and innocent, and their innocence is to be protected for as long as possible by their separation from the corrupting productive, political, economic, and recreational world of adults.

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Cultural conceptions of the child have historically encompassed reflections upon the nature of society, reflections which, in turn inform the moral discourse that surrounds the question of how best to raise a child. In certain times and places, the idea of society has been cast as a force for corruption, destroying what is essentially good in the child; in others, society has been cast as a force for spiritual improvement and education, constraining and eliminating what is essentially bad. Although the Santa Lucian problematization of childhood is undoubtedly shaped both by Christian theology and by humanist discourse, the manner in which it frames this problem demands of parents a specific response. One way to characterize this general moral response would be in terms of the values assigned to the different elements involved. Whereas the proclivity to sin is, according to the Puritanical “Original Sin” perspective, a wholly negative aspect, in the Santa Lucian perspective it is what allows a child to live a normal and reproductive life. By the same token, innocence, which in the “natural innocence,” protectionist perspective is a wholly positive element, in the Santa Lucian perspective is dangerous and impractical and must be attenuated early on in life. The biggest concern for Santa Lucians is not that children are ontologically innocent or sinful, but that the capacities of children are both imperfect and unchecked. Although the ontological innocence of children is impractical, their capacity for sin is not yet mitigated by a mature potential for enactment of sacrifice. Santa Lucian strategies thus have a somewhat peculiar aim, to make of children both sinners and saints. Parental strategies to divest children of innocence are, in this sense, strategies to make them productive in various ways. The local problematization of childhood is not, therefore, a matter of needing to preserve what is good or suppress what is bad, rather it is a matter of needing to extract something good from something bad and vice versa. In this sense, rather than subscribing to liberal Western discourses that speak of a need to cherish innocence and prolong childhood for as long as possible, Santa Lucian people subscribe to a different idea. For them, innocence should not be preserved, but attenuated early on through playful initiations into the moral ambiguity of the adult life-world. Conclusion With this chapter we have come full circle, from marriage, childbirth, work, and death, back to childhood—to that youthful phase of the life cycle covered in chapter 2, in which marriage still awaits. However,


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rather than focusing on marriage, we have explored how knowledge and innocence prevail in the Santa Lucian imagination as a set of competing value spheres, and how the competition between these spheres is part and parcel of a broader local discourse about the place of children and adolescents in the world. In particular, we have seen how for adults, the innocence of young children is at once a cause of anxiety, a moral and practical challenge, and a resource to be mined. In the latter case, the fact that children lack knowledge about the world makes them ideal interlocutors in morally ambiguous situations between knowing adults. However, children’s innocence is constantly under subtle surveillance, as adults perceive the process of growing up in the world as one requiring careful management. This process of management receives heightened elaboration in the practice of certain speech games and ritual events wherein children are encouraged to perform the immoral behaviors and predicaments inherent in adult relationships. Such mutually creative and playful processes are important, for they mediate and diffuse, to some extent, the morally problematic nature of the rapidly changing child. Within such practices children are encouraged to acquire immoral knowledge, knowledge that paradoxically is necessary if one is to live successfully in the world, extracting via self-sacrifice, all that is good from it.


Conclusion

For the Catholic people of Santa Lucia, the need to live both mor-

ally and productively in the world constitutes something of a paradox. This paradox, as it is locally perceived, crystallizes around an understanding of knowledge (saber/conhecimento), which comes about most explicitly through the loss of innocence (inocência) at marriage. For Santa Lucian people, it is knowledge that simultaneously defines the nature of human beings in the world, makes socially productive relationships possible, causes persons to sin, and provides a unique challenge to the attainment of spiritual salvation. In this book, I have tried to address the ways in which people strive to meet this challenge. Thus I have investigated how, from childhood and through marriage, concepts of spiritual and moral accountability develop and change, and how people negotiate such changes through specific discourses on labor and suffering. The focus for this exploration has been the social and affective space of marriage; not only in a positive sense, but also as a mortally dangerous commitment for men and women alike. It is here in this negative manifestation that local understandings of power, morality, sin, and transgression intersect. It is here, in the emotionally charged and often violent relationship between husbands and wives, that the existential challenge of living morally and living productively comes most tangibly to the fore. What is remarkable, however, is how extreme transgressions are potentially assimilated and dealt with via specific discourses that center on labor and suffering. Such discourses eschew facts of power and difference among individuals and emphasize the universality of morality and its pitfalls. Thus, the same symbolic tropes that surround the practice and discourses of women also surround those of men. While male discourses predominantly utilize a language of “labor” and female discourses a language of “suffering,” both portray self-sacrifice as redemptive, and both generate the same rewards. Self-sacrifice has

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an expiatory value, working to emphasize the highest Christian value that can inhere in people: that of selflessness. Through the performance of being willing to suffer on behalf of others, a married man or woman’s sins are attenuated, and their social and spiritual position is in some way redeemed. A Model of Suffering as Sacrifice Speaking about suffering is an event, one which is consciously performed for a listening audience. During the production of such narratives, labor and other forms of personal suffering are constituted as gifts, as sacrifices, for the benefit of others. Paradoxically, events that cause suffering mostly derive from spiritually polluting processes: labor, commerce, childbirth, and marriage. Thus what is striking about the construction of suffering as sacrifice in the Santa Lucian context is that what persons sacrifice is not merely the body (through physical hardships of labor and childbirth), but the purity of the Christian soul, via the choice to marry and labor at all. The declaration of suffering described earlier effects a transformation of worldly pollution into something divinely oriented: sacrifice, an act that, “through the consecration of a victim, modifies the condition of the moral person who accomplishes it or that of certain objects with which he is concerned” (Hubert and Mauss 1964: 13 original italics). Let us look briefly at the model of sacrifice that has underpinned the discourses of labor and suffering described throughout, and remind ourselves of what this sacrifice achieves. Using the schema originally delineated by Henry Hubert and Marcel Mauss (1964) for rituals of sacrifice, the model of sacrifice I have identified is a type of self-sacrifice characterized by a compression of ritual roles into the single person. Thus the sufferer is simultaneously victim (one who is sacrificed), sacrificer (one who performs the sacrifice), and sacrifier (one who benefits from the ritual).1 However, for this kind of sacrifice to be effective within Christian cosmological terms, there have to be two categories of sacrifier: the “suffering one” plus his or her audience/community. In the context of the ethnography presented here, the first category is made up of individual men and women who, through discourses and performances of suffering, consciously cast themselves as sacrificial victims. The second category comprises the wider group of their friends and kinsmen: all those who make up the social world of the sufferer, and who benefit either consciously or unconsciously from the sacrifices made on their behalf by the suffering person. Archetypal people to

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fall into this second category are the children of celebrated sofredoras and trabalhadores and the patients of rezadeiras. When people from this second category of sacrifier actively present other people as sofredoras and trabalhadores, they turn them into sacrificial victims, thus also performing the function of sacrificers. For the sufferer, self-sacrifice is an act of simultaneous commemoration, communion, and expiation; a process of drawing together the sacred and profane. Rather than constituting a sacrifice to God, it constitutes a sacrifice of God. This is because at its most basic level, it is an emulation and commemoration of the Passion, of the original sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross. Indeed, as Hubert and Mauss long ago noted, sacrifice is one of the fundamental themes of divine legend. It is in the sacrifice of a divine personage, that sacrifice attains “its highest expression” (1964: 77). This form of emulative commemoration, I have argued, constitutes a form of religious practice in itself, one which potentially effects a transformation in both the sacrifier and the God. For the sacrifier, the transformation occurs via a process of sacralization, turning the sacrifier into a spiritual mediator between the divine and profane worlds. This was illustrated most clearly in the case of the rezadeira Celestina, whose sacrificial identification with God was great enough to transform her into a vessel for the channeling of divine healing. In such a case, it is not merely that the rezadeira is able to commune effectively with the divine, but her own divine nature is emphasized. At its most extreme level, seen locally in the case of suffering rezadeiras (or more generally, in the suffering and martyrdom of certain canonized saints), identification with the Passion is complete. The sacrifier does not merely emulate God, but she herself becomes in part divine. Her supernatural healing powers are testament to this. As the ethnographic examples I have provided reveal, the sacrificial discourse depends for its functioning upon the role of the audience or group. As Valerio Valeri argues of Hawaiian sacrifice, the “symbolic action” that effects transformations of the relationships of sacrifier, god, and group happens “by representing them in public” (1985: 71). For Valeri, a failing of Hubert and Mauss’s sacrificial theory lies in the way it treats sacrifice as a bilateral relationship between the sacrifier and god and fails to stress that the collective judgment of the audience always mediates that relationship. In the Santa Lucian context, as I have shown, it is the listening audience who consummates the sacrifice by accepting the gift of suffering that is proffered by the sufferer for their benefit. This, in turn, establishes the sacrificial

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nature of the narrative produced. The listening audience also plays an important role in reinforcing the message and product of sacrifice by reproducing suffering narratives, when necessary, on the sufferer’s behalf; the ultimate reinforcement being the bestowal of titles such as sofredora and trabalhador to certain individuals. Valeri’s explicit recognition that it is the judgment of the collective audience that lends the sacrificial process much of its efficacy is an important one. But it might well be argued that the “audience,” although oblique, has never been entirely absent from the Durkheimian paradigm put forward by Hubert and Mauss. Indeed, as they themselves argue, sacrifice works to redeem individuals from “social obloquy,” thus enabling them to “re-enter the community” (1964: 103). Such an assessment certainly seems to be true in the context of those individuals who had committed serious offences. Had the man who murdered his wife with a scythe not carried the moral title of trabalhador, one wonders whether he would have been able to remain living within the community at all. Within the different life stages I have discussed in this book, the direction in which sacrifice can be said to occur varies. Thus, the sacrificial narratives of married men and women might be read as producing a movement from a state of relative profanity to a state of increased divinity. However, according to my analysis of the casamento de matuto ritual, a sacrificial movement might also be seen in the opposite direction. In the performance of casamento de matuto, children’s innocence (and concomitant spiritual purity) is sacrificed in order that they acquire important knowledge about the world. The movement in this ritual is not, then, to increase divinity but rather to expel it. Children are too pure, too close to God, and must be actively distanced from this state in order to live productively in the world. A common language within the anthropological literature on Catholicism is that of purity and pollution. This maps onto a wellelaborated tension, supposedly inherent within salvationist religions, between the immanent and the transcendental. The sacred realm is, by definition, pure; the profane realm, by definition, polluted. Such a tension is particularly marked within the work of William Christian who argues that Catholicism is a purity centered religion: In a religion that centres early and often on purity, young children are made living ideals of the way to be, as if to prove purity possible and remind adults that while they are no longer pure they hold the potential germ of purity. . . . Over half of the images in the parish churches of the valley include a representation of the infant Jesus. The day-to-day

CONCLUSION

181

life in these villages could be called child-centered because it is purity centered. (1972: 156)

For the Spanish peasants of Christian’s study, devotional activities and visits to shrines dotted about the landscape form part of an ongoing quest for purity. Such shrines are spatially removed from sites of profane activities such as villages and cultivated fields; their purpose, in part, being to “cleanse” individuals of the pollution they incur at these sites. Devotees leave the shrines feeling spiritually “cleansed” and restored to a state of spiritual purity. Purity, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary is “freedom from physical contamination or moral pollution.” A quest for purity suggests, ipso facto, an incommensurable division between sacred and profane, an “abyss” between God and Man that is, by Marshall Sahlin’s definition, “doleful” in nature because it is impossible to bridge (Sahlins 1996).2 For Catholic Santa Lucian’s, however, spiritual vitality can and must be sought within the abyss. Rather than emphasizing purity, we have seen that Santa Lucian people elevate certain categorically impure types of people to spiritual prominence. Moreover, we have observed how the practice of educating children about the ways of married adults via playfully ritualized games constitutes a way of ridding children of their innocence—of doing away with their spiritual purity. Given local understandings about the worldly impracticality of purity in general, it is in fact questionable whether “purity,” in the Santa Lucian context, is a religious goal at all. Indeed, rather than cleansing themselves of sin Santa Lucian people seek merely to contextualize their acts of sin in relation to acts of self-sacrifice. In everyday life Santa Lucian Catholics strive to unite two spheres: to sin virtuously, to be close to God, not despite the central Christian paradox, but in some sense because of it. Spiritual perfection can and must be sought, within the “doleful abyss.” A Parting Gift It was my last week in the village, and I was sitting on my own in the back courtyard of the chapel. It was nearing the end of my stay, and I was feeling tired and a bit glum. Suddenly, the chapel door banged open in the breeze, disturbing my quiet solitude, and mental cataloguing of everything that was wrong with the world. Listening intently I could make out the sound of a broom being swept across the floor and, rising above it, a high warbling voice, singing some sort of hymn, or perhaps just an old song. It was Dida preparing the

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chapel for mass the next day. I froze to the spot, listening and hoping that she would not come out and catch me there, alone and morose. Did she know I was there, I wondered, or was she unaware? Should I stay put, or make my presence known? Suddenly there was another voice. Another woman had entered the chapel: Woman: Oh Dida woman, I brought these flowers for the altar. The Padre likes the place to look nice. How is the English girl? Dida: Maya? She goes back to her country next week you know. Woman: Already? Virgin Maria! But it seems like yesterday she arrived. Why is she going already woman? Dida: She finished that work that she came here to do. Woman: Ah what work, eh, Dida? Work that takes you so far from home! Dida: I know, woman. That girl has suffered for her work. To spend so long away from her parents, to come here without knowing anyone, not even the language, Ave Maria! She has suffered, yes. Woman: What suffering! Poor creature must be glad to be going home.

Notes

Introduction 1. Scott offers this term in contribution to wider debates within the anthropology of Christianity over what Christianity means in diverse cultural contexts, and how Christianity as a particular ideological system shapes people’s understanding of it, and their attempts to live out Christian beliefs (Barker 2003; Garriott and O’Neill 2008; Robbins 2004; Scott 2005). Working toward a rapprochement between the views of anti-essentialists and culture theorists, Scott argues for a nonmonolithic view of Christianity in which Christians engage simultaneously with multiple interlocking macro and micro Christian logics. A nonmonolithic view in which “whatever points of entrée people engage and re-engage with Christianity, they aspire to systematicity by following through the implications of Christian language, truth claims, and values” (2005: 102). 2. However, Cannell questions the notion that Christianity is exclusively a religion of transcendence, arguing that historically, theologically, and cross-culturally “transcendent” Christianity “was never unambiguously ‘other worldly,’ and even orthodox Christianity contained within it the shadows of its own alternative ways of thinking” (2006). 3. Recent ethnographic investigations explore in-depth the ways language ideologies shape different forms of Christian practice. See for example Robbins (2001), Coleman (1996), Harding (2000), and Placido (2001) on the theme of Christianity as a “religion of talk” (Robbins 2001). See Knauft (2002), and Engelke (2007) for discussion of the semantics and pragmatics of Bible use. 4. For paradox resulting from two opposing cultural traditions see, for example, Robbins (2004). Another interesting example is to be found in the work of Harris (2006) and Orta (2000, 2004). Where Harris depicts Bolivian Aymara as having to “hide” remnants of traditional culture from the Catholic institution, Orta explores the more recent adherence to an ideology of “inculturation,” in which the Aymara, to be true Christians, must strive to be more Indian.

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NOTES

5. A similar trajectory has unfolded in the Mediterranean literature. In Greece, for example, writers have laid particular emphasis on women’s exclusion from the public arena, the social rules that place women under male control, and the necessity of female modesty for the maintenance of male honor (Campbell 1964, 1966; Delaney 1987; du Boulay 1974, 1991; Gilmore 1983, 1987; Herzfeld 1985, 1986, 1991; Peristiany 1966). For an overview on the themes of gender and sexuality in this literature see Loizos and Papataxiarchis (1991). 6. For general reviews of gender studies within anthropology, see Moore (1988; 1993; 1994). For a more detailed review of gender studies in Latin America see Nash (1989), or Melhuus and Stølen (1996). 7. An interesting exception is the work of Lyons (2001; 2005).

1

The Land and the People

1. 2000 census (www.world-gazetteer.com.) 2. In a detailed historical tracing of the concept of the Brazilian Northeast, Albuquerque (1999) has pointed out that it was only through certain specific historical developments that the concept of a “Northeast” became salient at all. During the nineteenth century, Northeastern regionalism began to take hold and the concept of the Northeast began to be romanticized in literature, defined by geographers, and intellectually objectified as having a particular history and character. See also Oliveira de Andrade (2000) for essays on the cultural and intellectual tradition of the region. 3. See, for example, Mitchell (1981). 4. For detail on the sociopolitical causes and consequences of drought in the Northeast, see Andrade (1980); Hall (1981); and Reis (1981). For an anthropological discussion of drought and its link to modern day sugar plantations see Scheper-Hughes (1992). For an account of how drought has impacted upon the region’s culture and become embedded in Northeastern identity see Arons (2004). 5. De Castro (1969: 220); Galeano (1975: 75); Scheper-Hughes (1992: 31). 6. Some of the most classic and oft-televised novels of Jorge Amado (Gabriela, Cravo e Canela; Tieta do Nordeste; Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos) are set in the Brazilian Northeast, and play heavily upon the traditional “backwater” image of the region. 7. For more on the history of the Catholic Church in Brazil see Levine (1980), and Bruneau (1982). On historical and other aspects of folk and popular Catholicism within Brazil, see Azzi (1978) and Brun (1989). 8. For examples of popular works of literature, see the novel Cangaceiros by José Lins do Rego, and the various cordel poems dedicated to the lives and exploits of the famous sertanejo bandit Lampião and the mystic leader Padre Cícero. For examples of scholarly works on religious

NOTES

9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

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mystics and messianic cults in the Northeast see da Cunha (1944); Levine (1992); Pessar (2004); and Slater (1986). For recent scholarly works on banditry and violence in the Northeast, see de Mello (2004); Freixinho (2003), who identifies religious fanaticism, violence, and banditry as the dominant influences on the history and culture of the sertanejo; and Marques (2002), who discusses the historical roots of violence in the sertão in relation to modern-day manifestations of violence and vendetta among sertanejo families. In 2001, at the time of research. For a detailed description of this kind of agricultural cycle and of the types of labor it involves, see Woortman and Woortman (1997). The use of the term agricultor as an occupational description became widespread in the 1980s when state pensions would only be granted to rural people whose identity cards and marriage certificates registered this as their profession. Before this official amendment, women were more likely to define themselves as housewives and men would cite other types of occupation that they perceived as carrying more status than that of agricultor. See Slater (1986) on pilgrims in Juazeiro. Anti-clericalism is a widely noted phenomenon among Catholic peasantries. See discussions by Pina-Cabral (1986: 210–212), Christian (1972:145–152), and Cannell (2006). All place names and names of people have been changed to protect identities, with the exception of names of people who requested that their actual names be used.

2

Marriage in Santa Lucia

1. Related would include nieces and first cousins from either the mother’s or father’s side. 2. A similar finding is reported by Fukui among peasants of the Sertão (1979: 132). 3. The same practice is noted by Rebhun (1999). 4. With a motorbike a man is also thought to be freer to have sexual encounters with women other than his wife or girlfriend. Therefore wives in particular take a ubiquitously ambivalent attitude toward their husbands’ motorbikes: they appear to appreciate taking lifts on the back of them when in need of transport, but are constantly trying to persuade their husbands to sell them. 5. For anthropological discussions of the Christian problematization of sex and sexuality, see Christian (1972); du Boulay (1974); and PinaCabral (1986). For general discussions of sex and sexuality in Christian theology and discourse, see Pagels (1988) and Warner (2000). 6. St Augustine’s doctrine of original sin fused sexuality and sin indissolubly in the imagination of the Christian West. He taught that in

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NOTES

the garden of Eden, married sex had been good—a part of God’s plan. After the Fall, sexuality became a sign of humanity’s inherent sinfulness and disobedience to God. 7. The contraceptive pill is readily available at the village health post, and sterilization operations are widely encouraged for women who already have two or three children. 8. The huge popular devotion within the Northeast of Brazil to the friar Freire Damião is a notable example. 9. For an interesting discussion of humorous genital symbolism in popular Portuguese culture, see Pina-Cabral (1993).

3

The Bearing of Burdens: Suffering, Containment, and Healing

1. For interesting explorations of suffering that do not have gender as an overarching concern, see Asad (1983), Taussig (1987), and Scarry (1985) who, following Foucault (1975), have all observed a relation between pain and confessional discourse in the construction of the truth claims of a dominant institution. In so doing they remind us of the fact that pain as an institutional, juridical, and political idiom is a central social construct in many political cultures. While the focus of these theorists has been upon the painful domination and manipulation of the subject by institutions, others have revealed the subject’s use of pain in order to challenge and resist institutions (Bynum 1987; Caraveli 1986; Dubisch 1995; Seremetakis 1991). In this context, the techniques of domination and the techniques of resistance are characterized by the same problematic: the relationship between the force of suffering and the establishment of truth claims. 2. As Lutz and White point out, the social impact of emotional communication is based on moral inferences shared by social actors. Situated emotional expression can therefore be seen as a “language of the self” that generates and actively reproduces specific social structures and ideational configurations (1986: 417). 3. Following Bakhtin, a speech genre is not a form of language, but a typical form of utterance that corresponds to typical situations of speech communication, typical themes and also to “particular contacts between the meanings of words and actual concrete reality under certain typical circumstances” (1986: 87). 4. Such titles can also apply to men, a topic I discuss further in chapter four. 5. Evil eye is a folk affliction where people are made ill as a result of another’s envy (enveja). Symptoms include general weakness and loss of appetite. It is commonly cured through the prayer of a faith healer (rezador). 6. Of the eleven rezadores that I came to know, only two were men.

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7. Certain contextual and sociohistorical differences deserve mention, such as the theological, liturgical, and practical variation between Greek Orthodox Christianity and Roman Catholicism in different parts of the world. In answer to this, I draw on the fact that both of these religions draw broadly upon the same cultural and biblical tradition and share many of the same rituals. As Dubisch herself observes, on the Greek Island of Tinos, Catholicism is felt to be “similar enough to Orthodoxy to be considered a Christian religion whereas Protestantism is not” (1995: 59). Points of theological variation aside, the focus in this chapter (as with much of the literature cited) is not on “official” religious outlook or institutionalized practice, but rather on folk rituals and perceptions. 8. Noting the tendency of Greek women to elaborate on topics of suffering and tribulation in the context of ordinary conversations, Dubisch came to view suffering as a “pervasive cultural expression” (1995: 214). Seremetakis (1991) and Caraveli (1986) observed in similar fashion, that women were just as fond of performing laments in nonritual contexts, such as whilst tending graves, and carrying out agricultural labor or domestic chores. 9. A term also employed by Caraveli (1986) and Magrini (1998). 10. Dubisch, for example, takes lengthy issue with theorists such as Herzfeld who have regarded womanhood as tied unproblematically to “natural” biological processes and the “private” domestic realm and, thus, as not requiring the same public performance as manhood. Dramatic and articulate performance of womanhood is to be found, she argues, in various practices, but particularly within women’s ritual excursions: “Visiting the cemetery, attending a liturgy at a country church, going on a pilgrimage” (1995: 211). In addition to these, Dubisch cites biography encapsulated within the ritual process of lament performance, and women’s accounts about themselves as an example of narrative performance. Such accounts are not simply “personal,” she argues, they are about “being a woman” (1995: 212). 11. With the exception of Christian who points out that it is categorically adult, married women who are most likely to visit shrines and engage in “cycles of purification” (1972: 155). 12. While marriage and childbirth are intrinsically linked, it is interesting to note that married women who are childless are still labeled sofredoras. This suggests that the link between suffering and marriage cannot be reduced to the “natural” experience of childbirth. 13. Christian use of the term ‘The Passion” describes what happened to Jesus at the end of his life, encapsulating the five sorrowful mysteries described in Mark’s Gospel as the agony in the garden of Gethsemane (Mark 14.32–42); the scourging (Mark 14.61–65; 15.1–15); the crowning with thorns (Mark 15.16–20); the carrying of the cross (Mark 15.21–25); and the crucifixion (Mark 15.25–39). In ordinary modern usage the word passion (paixão) means love (amor),

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NOTES

particularly love expressed in physical terms, or with great intensity. In Christian usage, the term “Passion” encompasses suffering, love, refusal to retaliate, and endurance (Hammond 2007: vii). 14. Américo Falcão. Cited in Almeida (1947).

4

Working to Sweat: Labor, Narrative, and Redemption

1. For a wider historical overview of the concept of work in Europe, see Anthony (1977), Applebaum (1992), Beder (2000), and Bernstein (1997). For anthropological discussions on work, see for example the collection of essays contained in Wallman (1979). For an ethnographic discussion of work relating to Brazil, see Robben (1989). 2. It needs to be borne in mind that historically and up until the present day, peasants in many parts of the Northeastern interior favor a seminomadic existence based on itinerant agriculture, supplemented by hunting, gathering, and fishing. The mobility and inherent flexibility of this way of life enables a type of resistance to the imposition of wage labor and the low salaries and exploitative conditions that accompany it (Carvalho-Branco 1997: 31–32). 3. For a detailed description of this kind of agricultural cycle and of the types of labor it involves, see Woortman and Woortman (1997). 4. For an elaboration of Liberation theology, see Boff, C. (1978); and Boff, L. and Boff, C. (1986). 5. For an evocative description of Liberationist practice in Northeast Brazil during the early 1980s, see Scheper-Hughes (1992: 517–527). For a discussion of Catholic Liberationist base communities, and an analysis of the demise of Liberationist style worship in Brazil, see Burdick (1993). 6. Authors of all songs cited are anonymous. 7. Woortman and Woortman (1997: 138–140) make a similar connection between the sexual reproductive life of couples and the reproductive life of crops. There is a symbolic connection made between the flowering crop in its “hottest” phase and the “hot” sexual appetite of women. It is observed that the roçado is analogous to the vagina. When a woman marries, she shaves her pubic hair, a process idiomatically described as “clearing forest” for her husband to “plant” in. 8. For an overview on moral attitudes to commerce in early Christian, Hebrew, Roman, and Greek philosophy, see Hengle (1974) and Beder (2000). 9. In the run up to the 2002 general election, Lula was a popular candidate among villagers because it was well known that he had lost a finger during his time as a metalworker in São Paulo. This, along with the fact that he was also known to have experienced hunger in

NOTES

10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

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childhood, was taken as “proof” that he was a suffered trabalhador and would therefore make a caring and hard working president. For more on the socioeconomic background affecting forms of rural labor in Brazil, see Correia de Andrade (1998); Garcia (1990); and Velho (1982). All names and some details in the following accounts have been changed. The doctrine of predestination is based upon the notion that God’s grace is a gift, not a reward. This means that God has selected some from the mass of fallen humanity who are predestined for salvation. For a fuller discussion, see McGrath (1997 [1994]: 449–451). It is important to note, however, that although the attainment of wealth as a fruit of labor in a calling was a sign of God’s blessing, the pursuit of wealth as an end in itself was highly reprehensible. According to Weber, the Protestant-capitalist ethic involved the pursuit of profit for an end other than the goods, pleasure, and position it could buy. It stressed “worldly asceticism” through “restless, continuous, systematic work,” and the reinvestment of profits into business (Weber 1967: 157). The debate can be traced back to the Pelagian controversy that drew attention to the question of whether salvation was a reward for good behavior, or a gift from God. Grace according to Augustine was God’s freely given and unmerited gift to humanity’s frail condition. In this view, sinners could not earn salvation, in that there was nothing that they could achieve or perform that would oblige God to reward them. For Pelagius, grace was understood as inhering in human faculties, thus supporting the view that humans could earn their salvation through their own achievements. In the late medieval period, the debate continued under the growing influence of voluntarism. Whereas for Aquinas, writes McGrath: “the divine intellect recognizes the inherent value of an action and rewards it accordingly,” the voluntarist approach placed the emphasis upon the divine will, such that “there was thus no direct link between the moral and meritous value of a human action” (1997 [1994]: 436). On Good Friday, drinking is theoretically prohibited. In reality, men continue to drink, but substitute beer and cane spirit for red wine. See also Seremetakis (1991: 201–206), who observes that rural Greek women make an explicit connection between the pain of agricultural labor and the pain of loss through death.

5 Virtuous Husbands, Powerful Wives: Marriage and the Dangers of Power 1. Rebhun describes something similar when she posed the question to Northeast Brazilians “What does the word amor mean?” and received

190

2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

NOTES

answers that focused more on honest business practices, interpersonal respect, public obligations to support and protect the weak and courtesy in general, rather than on deep personal affection, intimate acquaintance, or sexual attraction (1996: 65–66). The sítio denotes the land surrounding any one household on which animals are kept and fruits or garden produce grown. It does not include the roçado—land which is usually farther a field from the house, used for agriculture or pasture. As parental obligation lies strictly with one’s children, parents habitually welcome their married daughters (and sons) back into their household when they are experiencing marital problems. In such situations, the young husband or wife’s affines have little power of persuasion to make them return. As such, it commonly falls to someone like a parent but slightly more removed such as a maternal aunt, to urge them back to their own house. Sinara, a young woman who had married two years before, was famous for the number of times she had returned. She had reportedly gone back to her parent’s house three times in the first year of her marriage, and in the end it was her maternal aunt who told her off for doing so. For a detailed exploration of the sociopolitical history of the “honor defence” argument in Brazil, see Caulfied (2000). In his critical reflections on the Mexican myths of La Malinche and the Virgin of Guadalupe, Paz (1988) links the devalued “openness” of women to a dominant “master narrative” of the Conquest. In this, it is women, through their openness to rape and marriage, who lay themselves bare to the power and force of European conquistadors. La Malinche was the Indian woman who was given to Hernán Cortés in tribute after he had defeated Indians on the coast of Tabasco in 1519. According to various authors on the topic (Paz 1988), Malinche has come to symbolize the Conquest and the form of the “encounter” between the Spanish invaders and the subjugated native populations. The Virgin of Guadalupe appeared to Juan Diego (a converted Indian) in 1531. In the myth, she leads her people, through her suffering and sacrifice, to victory. Hence taken together, both myths attempt to come to terms with the past and the future through the idioms of sexuality, loyalty, and betrayal. Respeito is a much used concept in Santa Lucia, the consensus being that one must treat with respeito even people who do not have respeito for you. For an interesting and resonant exploration of this concept in relation to religious practice and political process among Quichua speakers in highland Ecuador see Lyons (2001; 2005). Although wife murder is relatively infrequent, husbands who desert their families to start up a new life elsewhere are quite common. In 1985 the Conselho Nacional dos Direitos da Mulher (National Council on Women’s Rights) was established in Brazil and a system of “integrated services” was put in place that included the creation of

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191

shelters and new institutions to provide legal and psychological services to victims of domestic and sexual violence (Alvarez 1990).

6

From Innocence to Knowledge

1. On the historical link between children and larger sociopolitical orders, see Szuchman (1988), who argues that children have been vital to Argentinian notions of authority and nationhood, and Del Priori (1999) for treatment of Latin American children in relation to labor, crime, maritime history, and other topics. 2. In theory, older boys should attend church as regularly as girls do. But as men tend to participate far less in official church activities than women, in practice, boys face less pressure. 3. See, for example, DaMatta (1985), who has interpreted the Brazilian carnival as a rite of “disorder” that functions to challenge and invert social hierarchy. 4. The rezadeira has absorbed the evil. Her purity cancels it out which is why it will not, in turn, afflict her. It is important to note, however, that people always stress that theoretically she might become afflicted. In a way, this contributes toward the sense of danger healing holds, and the sacrifice healing involves of the self, on behalf of others. This is how such healers earn their respect. 5. There were various stories of this type. For example, one revolved around the first time a car arrived in the village and how the men, thinking it was some sort of strange beast, started beating it with sticks. Another common version concerned misunderstandings over first sightings of airplanes, in which husbands and wives, thinking the end of the world is nigh, run home to confess to one another their adulterous affairs and other misdemeanors. All such stories suggest, in different ways, a moment of loss of innocence. 6. For a comprehensive summary of practice and performance based theories of ritual, see Bell (1997: 72–79).

Conclusion 1. This challenges the argument put forward by Hubert and Mauss that sacrificial practices are dependent on the presence of an intermediary: “we know that with no intermediary, there is no sacrifice” (1964: 100). According to this line of reasoning, the fact that in most ritual sacrifices the victim is distinct from the sacrifier and the god is important because it separates while uniting them: “they draw close to each other, without giving themselves to each other entirely” (1964: 100). The exception to this, they argue, is the sacrifice of the god, who is at the same time the sacrifier, is one with the victim and sometimes even with the sacrificer. Such mixing is possible, they state, “only for mythical, that is, ideal beings” (1964: 101).

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NOTES

2. I do not utilize Durkheim’s distinction between impurity and profanity as this is not a feature of local thought. Santa Lucian people do not make a clear distinction between impurity as an active violation of the sacred as opposed to profanity as being merely outside the sacred system or beyond it.

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Index

Adam and Eve, biblical story of, see Genesis adultery, 112, 137 affinity, 61–62 in cases of ‘speech games’, 163 agreste, 17, 23, 24 alcoholism, 111–112 amor, see love andocentric, bias in ethnographic literature, 9, 86 anti-clericalism, 9, 31, 62 Antonio Conselheiro, 24 asceticism as alternative to marriage, 62–64 as Christian stereotype, 5 medieval, 118, see also Bynum, Caroline Walker popular mistrust of, 63 techniques-of-the-self, 89, 90, 116 backlands, the, 23–25 bachelor, 62 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 90 bandits, 24 barraca, 25, see also alcoholism Behar, Ruth, 69 Bible, 32 body, the bodiliness of Christ, 117 closed body, 74 as container, 74–84 open body, 74, 78, see also peito aberto

ritual closing of, 76, 78, see also reza de parto bricks, see house Briggs, Jean, 165 Burdick, John, 103 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 114, 116, 117, 118 Cannell, Fenella, 3, 117, 129, 183 n 2 carnival, 31 casa de farinha, 19, 25, 26–27, 28, 36, 54, 134 casamento de matuto, 30, 165–172 catechism, 29 cattle cattlemen, 20, 23 cattle rearing, 20, 23 ranches, 20 celebração da palavra, 30 chá de cozinha, 51 chapel, local, 29, 157–158 child in Christian discourses, 173 local concept of, 155–159 childbirth, 76–78 childhood problematization of, 173–174 in protectionist discourse, 173 in Santa Lucia, 147 Christ depiction of, 35, 88 emulation of, 32, 34, 72, 114–115, 118 physicality of, 115–119

208

INDEX

Christian, William, 57, 65, 79, 104, 116, 180–181 Christianity anthropology of, 3–5 and conversion, 4, 5 language of, 2–5, 183 n 3 mythology of, 33 Christmas, 30 churching of women, 79 colonisation of Brazilian Northeast, 21, 23 see also land commerce, see negócio confession, 29, 58, 59 contraception, 45–46, 59, 186 n 7 cosmology, western, 2 courtship, 43–51 crente, see Pentecostalism dancing, 46–47 dating, see courtship death, 7, 59 as social, 137, 143–144 suicide, 75 see also Violence dependency peasant resistance to, 25 see also patron-client relations devil, the, 33 see also evil dichotomy ‘dichotomous women’ and ‘continuous men’, 141 of spirit – flesh, 5, 116–119 difference as gender trope, 9–12 disjuncture of moral values, see moral: paradox worldly, 7 distance between human and divine, 32, 116 and direction of movement toward/ away from divine, 180–181 see also ‘problem of presence’ ‘doleful abyss’, 2, 6, 7, 14, 36, 181 see also theology

drought, 7, 21, 22, 28, 68, 71 Dubisch, Jill, 187 nn 8, 10 Durkheim ‘Durkheimian problematic’, 5 Eade, John and Michael Sallnow, 91–92 Easter, 30, 31 elaborated suffering definition of, 68 discussion of within literature, 68–69, 85–87, 187 n 8 see also suffering emotions cultural nature of, 69–70 as spiritual challenge, 60 Engelke, Matthew, 4, 7 equivalence, see unity evil, 33 evil eye, see mau olhado Fall, biblical notion of, 2, 33, 131 farinha, 19, 27 fatherhood, 112–114 in definition of a ‘family’, 136 see also love fazenda, 17, 21, 24 fazendeiro, 24, 28 see also cattle femininity, concept of, 8, 9 feminist theories in anthropology of Latin America, 8, 9, 69, 144, 145–146 festas, 30, 46 see also saint’s days of São Pedro and São João 30, 46, 165, 167 festivals, religious, see festas first communion, 156 forró, see dancing freedom, of moral choice, 5, 7 Freyre, Gilberto, 22 gender antagonism, 8, 9, 11, 69,123, 140–141, 145

INDEX

of anthropologist and effect on fieldwork, 37–38 as difference, 8, 114, 145–146 in ethnography of Catholic societies, 8–9, 187 n 10 in ethnography of Latin American societies, 8–11, 68–69 as symbolic construct, 10, 11, 34, 146 gendered division of labor, 8, 132 morality, 10, 139–141 Genesis, 33, 34, 114, 150 gift, 9, 90–92 Gow, Peter, 4, 81

209

innocence, 3, 152–155, 191 n 5 and ignorance, 158–159 see also matuto Jesuit Missionaries, 23 Juazeiro do Norte, see pilgrimage, local forms of Judeo-Christian models within Western anthropology, 3 knowledge in a ‘productive life’, 5, 131 types of, 150–151

Holy Communion, 30 Holy Week, 31 see also Easter honor honor killings in Latin American societies, 139–141 honor-shame complex in Santa Lucia, 142 house building, 47–50 ownership, 137 household kinship structure of, 44 percentage data for Santa Lucia, 25–27 Hubert and Mauss, 91, 178, 179, 191 n 1

labor, see work and ideology, 96–97 Laidlaw, James, 89 Lambek, Michael, 125, 126 Lampeão, see bandits land average size of holdings in Santa Lucia, 28–29 colonisation of backlands, 23 and latifúndio system, 21, 24 unequal distribution of, 21 Leibovich, Anna, 115 liberation theology, 12, 101–103 “logical trajectory,” 3 love agape, 126 and fathers, 112–113 in marriage, 138, see also respect and power, 126–127

iconoclasm, in Protestant tradition, 3–4 identity, social of Santa Lucian people, 19–20, 27, 185 n 11 sofredor as label of, 73 trabalhador as label of, 104–105 see also matuto indigenous peoples, of Northeast Brazil, see Tupinamba infidelity, see adultery

machismo, 13, see also masculinity Madonna, see Virgin Mary ‘& whore complex’, 140 malandragem, 159, 160 manioc, 26, see also casa de farinha Marianismo, 68–69 Marriage, 7 advice and spiritual preparation for, 39, 52, 134, 136 pitfalls of, 53–62, 139 pleasures of, 41, 59

210

INDEX

Marriage—Continued politics of being ‘unmarried anthropologist’, 39, 41 preferences, 45 sacred character of, 42 masculinity, 8, 9, 50, 55, 111 in theoretical approach of Melhuus, 140 mass, 30, 31 Mater Dolorosa, 85, see also elaborated suffering matuto, 20, 166–167 mau olhado, 74, 78, 81, 186 n 5 Melhuus, Marit, 10, 123, 140–141 messianic movements, 23 migration drought, 22, 28 labor, 25, 28, 61–62 moral accountability, 58 paradox, 2, 6, 7, 183 n 4; and paradox of affinity, 61 personhood, 8, 58 transgression, 2, 8, 13, 64–65, 109–112, 119, 139 morality anthropological theories of, 5–6 and children, 148–149 ‘of freedom’, 6, 88–90 physical embodiment of, 115–119 ‘of reproduction’, 5–6 as type of play, 165 motherhood, 76–80, 136 see also suffering motorbikes, see transport mutirão, 50–51 narrative, 88 see also suffering and labor negócio, 60–61, 154 Northeast, the concept of, 20, 184 n 2 division from south, 21 structural subordination of, 12, 22 novena, 29

orgulho, see pride Original Sin, 173, 174 other worldly, see transcendence Padre Cicero, 24, 31 parable biblical, of the camel and the eye of a needle, 130 of loaves and fishes, 35 knowledge of, 32, 34, 35, 130 moral, of marital relations, 144 paradox, moral in anthropology of religion, 2–5 in lives of Santa Lucians, 7–8, 14, 15 Parry, Jonathan, 91, 116 Passion, the, 33, 187 n 13 as template for human existence, 34 patriarchy as analytical term, 13 in social structure, 12–14 patron-client relations, 22, 28–29, 127–128, 129 peasant farmers of Northeast, 25–28 ‘peasantariat’, 25 peito aberto, 75–76 Pentecostalism, 29, 32, 34 personhood, 8 pilgrimage, local forms of, 31 Pina Cabral, João de, 5, 42 plantation system, see sugarcane play, 159–161 in casamento de matuto, 168–171 as creation of ‘ethical identities’, 172–173 and potential for sin, 159, 160 post-partum prayer ritual see reza de parto poverty in Northeast Brazil, 7, 21 power, 12–14 analytical concept of, 141 and ‘knowledge’, 129–132, 142–143 in legal structure, 144

INDEX

local concept of, 125–132 and love, 126–128 men’s over women, 13, 123–125 and pride, 128–129 prefeitura, 28, 152, 169 pregnancy, 76 pride, 126, 128–129, 134, 151 priest, 29, 126 sermons by, 31, 33, 100, 156 priesthood as alternative to marriage, 62 see also asceticism ‘problem of presence’, 4 promessa, see votive offerings Protestantism anthropology of, 3–4, 7 in contrast to Catholicism, 7 see also Christianity, the anthropology of; Pentecostalism Ranch Owners, 24, 28 representation, anthropological politics of, 39 respect, 190 n 6 between generations, 164 in marriage, 138 between parents and children, 44, 155 responsibility absence of for young, 43–45 financial, in marriage, 55–56 moral, see morality social, in marriage, 53 retirantes, see migration reza de parto, 78–79 rezador/rezadeira, 76, 81–84, 164, 165, 179, 191 n 4 risk, in relation to marriage, 41, 52–53, 58 Robbins, Joel, 5, 6, 148–149 rosary, 29, 30, 31 sacred geography, 5 sacrifice, 90, 115, 119, 178–181, 191 n 1

211

see also suffering, and sacrificial discourse Sahlins, Marshall, 2–3, 181 saint saint’s days of São Pedro and São João, 30, 46, 165, 167 sameness as cultural value and moralontological concept, 11 of moral outlook, see unity Satan, see devil, the Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 22 Scott, Michael, 3, 5, 183 n 1 seca, see drought self-awareness local concept of, 131 relation to evil, 152 relation to knowledge, 131, 132, 151, see also knowledge seminomadic lifestyle, 25, 188 n 2 semisubsistence agriculture, 25 Seremetakis, Nadia, 86, 189 n 16 sertão, 20, 23–24 literature on, 184–185 n 8 and sertanejo, 24, 184–185 n 8 sex and agricultural work, 103–104, 188 n 7 before marriage, 45–46 differences in sexual appetite, 137 as knowledge, 151 within marriage, 59–60, 185 n 4 sharecropping, 17, 22, 24, 25, 62 and shared livestock rearing, 26 sin, 59, 77, 103–104 see also moral: paradox; sex; transgression; Violence slavery, 22, 23 and labor ideology, 96–97 social inequality, 7 sofredor/sofredora, see suffering as identity label ‘speech games’, 161–165 speech genre, 71, 72 spinster, 62

212

INDEX

spirit-flesh dichotomy, see dichotomy spiritual challenge, 7, 14 conflict, 14 healer/healing, see rezador/ rezadeira vitality, 14 ‘stable conflict’, 6, 148 status, social change in after marriage, 55 spiritual, change in after marriage, 58 Stølen, Kristi Anne, 10, 123 Strathern, Marilyn, 11, 124, 146 suffering as age related, 87 in daily conversation, 71–72 in Dona Lourdes’ narrative, 70–71 effects on the body, 74, 75 as identity label, 73–74 as idiom of containment, 74–84 and labor, 115-116 of the Northeast, 22 and sacrificial discourse, 84, 88–92, 117 as skill, 74–75 in Tia Ana’s life, 67–68 as type of exchange, 90, 92, 189 n 14, see also gift voluntaristic character of, 90, see also morality, ‘of freedom’ sugarcane, 22 suicide, see death tenant farming, 23, 24 theology Calvinist, 110 Catholic, 11 legacy of in human sciences, 2–3 local discussions and versions of, 31–36, 152–153 trabalhador/eira as identity title, 104–105, 188– 189 n 9 trabalho, see work transcendence, 3, 183 n 2

transgression, see moral transport, 49–50, 56 Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, see Genesis trousseau, 51 Tupinamba, 23 unity essential nature of all persons, 11–12 of moral concerns, 142, 145–146 Valeri, Valerio, 179, 180 Via Sacra procession, 31 Violence husbands toward wives, 11, 121–125, 134, 135, 190 n 8 men toward families, 109 socio-economic and structural, 12, see also Northeast of wives toward husbands, 137 virginity, 45–46, 62, 78 Virgin Mary, 9, 79–80, 85, 91 votive offerings, 30 wage labor, 25–26 Warner, Marina, 79 Weber, Max, 110, 189 n 13 wedding feast and preparation, 51–52 ‘shotgun wedding’, see casamento de matuto work gendered division of, see gender historical associations of, 96–97 local definitions of, 98–100 narratives of, 104–109 and religious discourse, 100–103, see also liberation theology and sin, 103–104 types of within Santa Lucia, 25–28 youth, 43–45 moral status of, 157–159 zona da mata, 17, 20, 21, 22, 23

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