Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil

Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil PDF Author: Alida C. Metcalf
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 9780292706521
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil was originally published by the University of California Press in 1992. Alida Metcalf has written a new preface for this first paperback edition.

Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil

Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil PDF Author: Alida C. Metcalf
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 9780292706521
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil was originally published by the University of California Press in 1992. Alida Metcalf has written a new preface for this first paperback edition.

Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil

Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil PDF Author: Alida C. Metcalf
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780520075740
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Colonial families in the Brazilian town of Santana de Parnaba lived on the fringe of settlement in a vast and perilous continent. In her revealing community history, Metcalf tells how these settlers pursued family strategies that adapted European custom to the American environment. Turning to recorded events such as marriages, baptisms, and especially inheritances, she discovers that as the newcomers transformed the wilderness into a settled agricultural community, they laid the foundation for a class society of planters, peasants, and slaves. With an engaging description of family life at all three levels of society, the author shows how the families most successful in exploiting and controlling the resources of the wilderness gained wealth, power, and social dominance. Metcalf challenges accepted views by contending that not only external economic forces but also colonial family strategies paved the way for an inegalitarian society in Brazil. Her portrayal of frontier survival and coping, together with the heedless exploitation of wilderness resources, brings a historical perspective to the consideration of Brazil's last frontier, the Amazon. Colonial families in the Brazilian town of Santana de Parnaba lived on the fringe of settlement in a vast and perilous continent. In her revealing community history, Metcalf tells how these settlers pursued family strategies that adapted European custom to the American environment. Turning to recorded events such as marriages, baptisms, and especially inheritances, she discovers that as the newcomers transformed the wilderness into a settled agricultural community, they laid the foundation for a class society of planters, peasants, and slaves. With an engaging description of family life at all three levels of society, the author shows how the families most successful in exploiting and controlling the resources of the wilderness gained wealth, power, and social dominance. Metcalf challenges accepted views by contending that not only external economic forces but also colonial family strategies paved the way for an inegalitarian society in Brazil. Her portrayal of frontier survival and coping, together with the heedless exploitation of wilderness resources, brings a historical perspective to the consideration of Brazil's last frontier, the Amazon.

Colonial Brazil

Colonial Brazil PDF Author: Leslie Bethell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521349253
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
Colonial Brazil provides a continuous history of the Portuguese Empire in Brazil from the beginnings of the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

Families of Planters, Peasants, and Slaves

Families of Planters, Peasants, and Slaves PDF Author: Alida C. Metcalf
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Families
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description


The Return of Hans Staden

The Return of Hans Staden PDF Author: Eve M. Duffy
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421403463
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
Hans Staden’s sixteenth-century account of shipwreck and captivity by the Tupinambá Indians of Brazil was an early modern bestseller. This retelling of the German sailor’s eyewitness account known as the True History shows both why it was so popular at the time and why it remains an important tool for understanding the opening of the Atlantic world. Eve M. Duffy and Alida C. Metcalf carefully reconstruct Staden’s life as a German soldier, his two expeditions to the Americas, and his subsequent shipwreck, captivity, brush with cannibalism, escape, and return. The authors explore how these events and experiences were recreated in the text and images of the True History. Focusing on Staden’s multiple roles as a go-between, Duffy and Metcalf address many of the issues that emerge when cultures come into contact and conflict. An artful and accessible interpretation, The Return of Hans Staden takes a text best known for its sensational tale of cannibalism and shows how it can be reinterpreted as a window into the precariousness of lives on both sides of early modern encounters, when such issues as truth and lying, violence, religious belief, and cultural difference were key to the formation of the Atlantic world.

Disappearance of the Dowry

Disappearance of the Dowry PDF Author: Muriel Nazzari
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804743622
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Why did a practice that had been considered a duty stop being a duty, or, conversely, why did daughters lose the right they had previously enjoyed of receiving from their parents the wherewithal to contribute to the support of their marriage? Despite the many historical and anthropological studies about dowry, to the best of my knowledge this is the first analysis of its disappearance. My hypothesis at a general level is that the institution of dowry was among the many fetters to the development of capitalism, such as entail, monopolies, and the privileges of the nobility, of churchmen, and of army officers, that disappeared as the influence of industrial capital spread worldwide. Yet entail, monopolies, and privileges were abolished legally, whereas the dowry was not abolished legally, it disappeared in practice. Thus the question remains: what led individual families to change their customs regarding dowry? And they changed remarkably. I found that, in the seventeenth century, practically all propertied families in São Paulo endowed every one of their daughters, favoring them by giving dowries far exceeding the value of what their brothers would inherit later on. By the early nineteenth century, in contrast, long before the custom of dowry had disappeared, less than a third of the propertied families in São Paulo were endowing their daughters, and those who did gave comparatively smaller dowries, with a very different content, while some families endowed only one or two of several daughters. How to explain this transformation in customs? I will argue throughout this book that the practice of dowry altered because of changes in society, the family, and marriage. Since dowry is a transfer of property between family members, changes in the concept of property, in the way property is acquired and held, or in business practices are relevant to an understanding of change in the institution of dowry, as are changes in the function of the family in society, the way it is integrated into production, and how it supports its members. The changes experienced by Brazilian society that help explain the decline and disappearance of the dowry are many of the same transformations that have been observed in more central regions of the Western world. Through a long process that started in the eighteenth century and continued into the early twentieth century, Brazil changed from a hierarchical, ancien régime type of society in which status, family, and patron-client relations were primary to a more individualistic society in which contract and the market increasingly reigned. A society divided vertically into family clans changed gradually into a society divided horizontally into classes. As the state grew stronger, it took over functions previously performed by the family, which in seventeenth-century São Paulo's frontier society had included municipal government and defense. Between the seventeenth and the late nineteenth centuries, a new concept of private property developed. The family changed from being the locus of both production and consumption to being principally the locus of consumption, while "family" and "business" became formally separate. The power of the larger kin declined and the conjugal family became more important, and marriage was transformed from predominantly a property matter to an avowed "love" relationship, the economic underpinnings of which were no longer made explicit. At the same time there was a change from the strong authority of the patriarch over adult sons and daughters to their greater independence, and from arranged marriages to marriages freely chosen by the bride and groom. These transformations took place in Brazil starting in the eighteenth century and continuing throughout the nineteenth century in a gradual and complex manner so that both old and new characteristics often coexisted at a given time, sometimes even within the same family. As these changes occurred, the

Frontiers of Citizenship

Frontiers of Citizenship PDF Author: Yuko Miki
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108417507
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
An engaging, innovative history of Brazil's black and indigenous people that redefines our understanding of slavery, citizenship, and national identity. This book focuses on the interconnected histories of black and indigenous people on Brazil's Atlantic frontier, and makes a case for the frontier as a key space that defined the boundaries and limitations of Brazilian citizenship.

Land, Protest, and Politics

Land, Protest, and Politics PDF Author: Gabriel Ondetti
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271047844
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Brazil is a country of extreme inequalities, one of the most important of which is the acute concentration of rural land ownership. In recent decades, however, poor landless workers have mounted a major challenge to this state of affairs. A broad grassroots social movement led by the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST) has mobilized hundreds of thousands of families to pressure authorities for land reform through mass protest. This book explores the evolution of the landless movement from its birth during the twilight years of Brazil&’s military dictatorship through the first government of Luiz In&ácio Lula da Silva. It uses this case to test a number of major theoretical perspectives on social movements and engages in a critical dialogue with both contemporary political opportunity theory and Mancur Olson&’s classic economic theory of collective action. Ondetti seeks to explain the major moments of change in the landless movement's growth trajectory: its initial emergence in the late 1970s and early 80s, its rapid takeoff in the mid-1990s, its acute but ultimately temporary crisis in the early 2000s, and its resurgence during Lula's first term in office. He finds strong support for the influential, but much-criticized political opportunity perspective. At the same time, however, he underscores some of the problems with how political opportunity has been conceptualized in the past. The book also seeks to shed light on the anomalous fact that the landless movement continued to expand in the decade following the restoration of Brazilian democracy in 1985 despite the general trend toward social-movement decline. His argument, which highlights the unusual structure of incentives involved in the struggle for land in Brazil, casts doubt on a key assumption underlying Olson's theory.

Go-betweens and the Colonization of Brazil

Go-betweens and the Colonization of Brazil PDF Author: Alida C. Metcalf
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292748604
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
Doña Marina (La Malinche) ...Pocahontas ...Sacagawea—their names live on in historical memory because these women bridged the indigenous American and European worlds, opening the way for the cultural encounters, collisions, and fusions that shaped the social and even physical landscape of the modern Americas. But these famous individuals were only a few of the many thousands of people who, intentionally or otherwise, served as "go-betweens" as Europeans explored and colonized the New World. In this innovative history, Alida Metcalf thoroughly investigates the many roles played by go-betweens in the colonization of sixteenth-century Brazil. She finds that many individuals created physical links among Europe, Africa, and Brazil—explorers, traders, settlers, and slaves circulated goods, plants, animals, and diseases. Intercultural liaisons produced mixed-race children. At the cultural level, Jesuit priests and African slaves infused native Brazilian traditions with their own religious practices, while translators became influential go-betweens, negotiating the terms of trade, interaction, and exchange. Most powerful of all, as Metcalf shows, were those go-betweens who interpreted or represented new lands and peoples through writings, maps, religion, and the oral tradition. Metcalf's convincing demonstration that colonization is always mediated by third parties has relevance far beyond the Brazilian case, even as it opens a revealing new window on the first century of Brazilian history.

Marriage and the Family on the Colonial Frontier

Marriage and the Family on the Colonial Frontier PDF Author: David Thomson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description