Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil: Santana de Parnaiba, 1580-1822.

Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil: Santana de Parnaiba, 1580-1822. By Alida C. Metcalf (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. xxi plus 280 pp. $22.95).

First published in 1992 by the University of California Press, the republication of this fine study in paperback is good news for College teachers. While it could have benefited from incorporation of the substantial scholarship of the last decade focusing on the history of the Brazilian family, slavery and the peasantry, the basic research stands up well. This book will be especially useful for graduate courses and even undergraduate seminars.

Alida Metcalf tells the story of "how families survived in the world of colonial Brazil" (p. 1) based on the experiences of the slaves and small farmers of Santana de Parnaiba in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She argues that family strategies were critical to the successful colonization of the Brazilian frontier and also are the key to understanding the origins of social stratification. The town of Santana de Parnaiba began as a part of the frontier; community members "transformed land into private property and Indians into personal slaves" (66) and thus originated the hierarchical social order that became characteristic of Parnaiba. Although Indian slavery was not legal, Indian slaves or "administrados" were nevertheless included in wills as part of inheritance until 1758. The frontier provided the resources that allowed a small elite to form and to become wealthy and powerful in a town such as Santana de Parnaiba. (4). Thus Metcalf argues that the way the Brazilian frontier developed is one of the roots of inequality in Brazilian society and continues to this day. (5)

The book is based on a substantial body of primary documentation: manuscript censuses for 1775, 1798 and 1820, parish records of baptisms, marriages, and deaths, property inventories and wills over a two hundred year period, and town council records including registration of slave manumissions. Metcalf utilized both qualitative and quantitative analysis to reconstruct the life of the community over time in terms of the family and class. Metcalf devoted a chapter each to Planter Families, Peasant Families and Slave Families, analyzing the household economy, family strategies and dynamics of each of these population groups. The groups were differentiated by means of production--including ownership of land and/or slaves, and relationship to the market--as well as legal status. This approach was made especially effective by following individual households in each category through a series of censuses. The methodology is discussed in a useful appendix. The text is organized in six chapters plus an introduction and a conclusion.

Metcalf's most important argument stipulates that the planter class maintained itself through inheritance strategies that privileged one heir--usually a daughter and son-in-law--to succeed the parents in Parnaiba. Portuguese inheritance law specifically made all legitimate children equal heirs, regardless of gender or order of birth. Nevertheless Metcalf argues that differences were made through judicious use of the dowry, the disposition of the "third" of the estate not automatically distributed to the heirs, and private agreements among heirs to sell their portions to the chosen sibling. Metcalf reached this conclusion after studying the number of slaves owned by a family, how these were distributed in dowries and inheritance received and then in several succeeding censuses. She found that over time slaves and other property were unequally held by heirs, and that often the more fortunate stayed in Parnaiba while siblings migrated. One problem with this analysis is that it neglects wealth brought in by the marriage dowries of wives of sons in the same period, as well as the emerging significance of commerce as a source of wealth. Muriel Nazzari has argued that in the eighteenth century "marriage bargain" husbands brought in more wealth typically than wives, and that inheritance was less important than commerce. (1) The fact that children and their spouses did not fare equally in eighteenth-century Brazil was not solely a product of inheritance or family strategies. Individual characteristics, career choice and private business initiatives also played a part. While Metcalf's thesis here is not fully convincing to this reviewer, the discussion of the unequal wealth of siblings in planter families as well as their divergent roads in life is certainly fascinating and unexpected.

"Families of Peasants" followed mixed strategies of survival. Most obvious was the importance of children as labor in the household economy. Since the families moved often, this category of family was a particular challenge to trace between censuses. Metcalf concluded that the rise of cash crops and export agriculture resulted in the dispersal of many of these families by the early nineteenth century (151-152).

The chapter on "Families of Slaves" is especially rich and insightful. Perhaps most important is Metcalf's emphasis on how changes in the family circumstances or economic situation of the master could impact the slave family. To begin with even the possibility of marriage and a family for an individual slave varied with how many slaves a master owned and whether the household was rural or urban. The more prosperous the planter and the more slaves s/he had the more likely a slave could marry and have a family. However, family life was usually only secure as long as the master's household was intact. Death of a planter or his wife often set off a process that resulted in members of a slave family being separated by inheritance or sale. This depiction of the slave life and community in the Brazilian interior was fairly unique in the literature in 1992, though insights from the 1999 study by Kathleen Higgins on slave life in eighteenth-century Minas Gerais among other studies substantially add to our knowledge of Brazilian slave families. (2)

In her conclusion Metcalf agrees with Gilberto Freyre's argument that it was the family, rather than the crown or economic institutions, that was the main colonizing force in Brazil. More significant is her disagreement with Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis of the equalizing effect of the frontier. For Metcalf the frontier provided a basis for the unequal social hierarchy of Parnaiba, depending upon access and control of the vast resources of the Brazilian wilderness. Planters were able to utilize Portuguese law and political institutions to gain permanent legal control of resources. Peasants, Indians and even slaves might temporarily claim the same resources but did not have the means to legitimate their claim. Thus a narrative that seemed focused on individual and family strategies ultimately seems to have depended most critically on legal rights and political access.

Elizabeth A. Kuznesof

University of Kansas 

ENDNOTES

1. Muriel Nazzari. Disappearance of the Dowry: Women, Families, and Social Change in Sao Paulo, Brazil (1600-1900) (Stanford, 1991), 77-79.

2. Kathleen J. Higgins. "Licentious Liberty" in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region: Slavery, Gender and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Sabara, Minas Gerais (University Park, PA, 1999).