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RUPTURE AND RESISTANCE: GENDER RELATIONS AND LIFE TRAJECTORIES
IN THE BABACU PALM FORESTS OF BRAZIL
By
NOEMI SAKIARA MIYASAKA PORRO
A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT
OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
2002
RUPTURE AND RESISTANCE: GENDER RELATIONS AND LIFE TRAJECTORIES
IN THE BABA(U PALM FORESTS OF BRAZIL
By
NOEMI SAKIARA MIYASAKA PORRO
A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT
OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
2002
Copyright 2002
By
Noemi Sakiara Miyasaka Porro
To Roberto, Felipe, Pedro and Ana.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am deeply grateful to the people whose trajectories I had the privilege to cross
throughout my journey in the babaqu palm forests in Brazil. Through a symbolic
recognition of dona Vitalina Andrade and senhor Manoel Rodrigues de Sousa, I
acknowledge my extended gratitude to each and every man and woman whose insightful
and humorous companionship guided my learning path through the Mearim valley.
During my years as a practitioner and a fieldworker, I was supported by several
grassroots organizations, especially ASSEMA, Movimento Interestadual das
Quebradeiras de C6co Babaqu, Cooperativa dos Produtores Agro-Extrativistas de Lago
do Junco, Associacao das Trabalhadoras Rurais de Lago do Junco, associations, unions
and parishes of Lago do Junco, Esperantin6polis, Sao Luis Gonzaga, and Lima Campos.
During my years as a student, my chair and friend Dr. Marianne Schmink wisely
mentored my academic trajectory and return to professional life. Dr. Peter Hildebrand,
Dr. Anthony Oliver-Smith, Dr. Alfredo Wagner, Dr. David Wigston, Dr. Irma
McClaurin, and Dr. Stephen Perz joined the hard job of my intellectual guidance. I have
enjoyed both the freedom to hold my own opinions, and the challenge of defending them.
My Ph.D. program at the Department of Anthropology at UF was financially
supported by the Hewlett Foundation, the Charles Wagley Fund, the Florida-Brazil
Institute, the Tropical Conservation and Development Program, the Center for Latin
American Studies at UF, the Inter-American Foundation, the Research Foundation /
SUNY / World Wildlife Fund/ USAID, the Compton Foundation/ Department of Botany,
the 0. Ruth McQuown Fund/ Women Studies Program, and the Department of
Anthropology at UF. Practical aspects of my education came also from occasional jobs
offered by the Center for International Forestry Research, the WIDTECH, ICRW, DAI,
USAID program and the Forest Stewardship Council. Special thanks are due to Dr.
Charles Wood, Hannah Covert, and the entire administrative staff at the TCD program
and the Center for Latin American Studies, for their caring support during many years.
I want also to recognize dona Dij6 Bringelo, Antonia de Brito, Leonice Pereira,
Carol Magalhaes, Luciene Figueiredo, M. Alaides de Souza, Sebastiana Sirqueira,
Diocina Lopes, frei Adolfo Themme, Rosana and Ebine, Alfredo Wagner, Domingos
Cardoso, Joaquim Shiraishi, Querubina Neta, Jaime de Oliveira, Raimundo Vital,
Francisco de Paula, Gl6ria Gaia, Helciane Arafijo, Cynthia Carvalho, Patricia Nunes,
Dada Chagas, Valdener Miranda, Teresinha Alvino, Ildeth Sousa, Jodo Valdeci, Lindalva
Careiro, Maria Jose Pereira, Raimunda Gomes, Manoel Ferreira, Antonia Moreira,
Magna Cunha, Antonino Sobrinho, d. Zezeca and d. Dade, Dora Herminio, M. Jos6
Gontijo, Barbara Goraeb, Paul, Joelma and William Losch, Mariana, Jorge and Andres
Aragon, Elli Sujita, Richard Wallace, Kristen Conway, Mrs. Bernice, Sarah Fedler, Erva
Gilliam, Rhonda Riley, Carol Colfer, Omaira Bolanos, Diana Alvira, Vicky, Vincent and
Clara Reyes, Kuniko Chijiwa, Dorothy Stang, Kevin Veach and Carmen Roca. The honor
of their friendship has pushed me to learn about the ways of life in the Mearim valley and
about my own ways through life.
To my grandparents Shigeru and Koyuki Sakiara, my parents Kazuco and Shiro
Miyasaka, and in-laws Ada and Antonio Porro, I extend my deepest gratitude. With
Pedro, Felipe and Roberto Porro, I celebrate the joy of being alive and together.
PREFACE
At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial and any question about sex is
that one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold
whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one's audience the chance of
drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the
idiosyncrasies of the speaker.
Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked;
the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow
fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating. I will not trouble you with that
thought now, though if you look carefully you may find it for yourselves in the
course of what I am going to say (Woolf 1981: 4-5).
Through this ethnography, I intend to show how I came to hold my opinion about
gender relations. It meshes narratives by people living in the babayu palm forests and
accounts of my own journey throughout the Mearim Valley, in the Amazonian state of
Maranhdo, Brazil. It focuses on social relations among men and women struggling to
control their ways of life in a context of social antagonism. In the situations studied with
support of political economy and feminist theoretical frameworks, local discourse and
practice of gender relations often contradict development approaches. My aim was to
investigate gender relations through these contradictions. This investigation required a
consideration of discourses labeled as "gender and development," currently involving the
scenario of sustainable development in the Brazilian Amazon; and affecting gendered,
ethnic-based forms ofbabaqu forest livelihoods.
This dissertation also takes me one step closer to my dream of becoming an
ethnographer. After some preliminary ethnographic experiments, I realized that I had to
include myself as part of the data into the analysis to better explain my findings. Far from
intending to write an auto-ethnography per se, I could not pretend an "objective" outsider
standpoint either, but integrated some elements of my own life experience in the Mearim
valley as a research strategy to validate and share my learning.
Warned by the postmodern critique about the problems regarding the authoritarian
representation of the "Other" (Marcus and Fischer 1986), I applied to myself as an
ethnographer that constant exercise of questioning proposed by Foucault (1972: 50-55):
Who is writing? What kinds of qualification does the author have? From which kind of
social relations does her enunciation emerge? What are the institutional sites from which
she writes? What tools do these institutions provide to her? I offer, therefore, my reading
and analysis of the situations studied, while positioning my authorship as a woman, a
married mother, a Brazilian descendant of Japanese peasants, a grassroots practitioner
and a scholar trained in an American university.
In 1983, I graduated as an agronomic engineer with a concentration in Ecology, at
the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Having nothing like the political resistance of the
1960s, "left wing" students turned to alternative agriculture, agro-ecology, and adaptive
technologies as our ways to come together to oppose "conservative modernization"
driving the development model that predominated in Agronomy schools at those times.
To celebrate graduation, a dozen of these half "greens," half anarchist graduates opted for
a trip to the Amazon of the rain forests, of the resisting Indians and peasants.
After our planned tour together through major research institutions and sites, my
boyfriend, Roberto Porro, and I decided not to return with the group; and crossing the
states of Amazon and Pard by river, we ended up in a peasant village on the coast of the
state of Maranhao. We were enchanted by their unique, humored way of life. Their
village was the reversal of images of the rural isolation of individual farms, which
presumably would prevent them from joining unionized proletarians in the revolution
imagined in our rural sociology classes. At any rate, after hanging around with fishermen
and agriculturalist peasants, we thumbed back to the South. However, this first
experience in a peasant village had already hooked us, especially when we learned that
our host was murdered soon after we left, because of a conflict over his land, and that the
whole village would be relocated to make way for the future Air Space Launching Base
of Alcantara.'
We began to make plans to marry, head back north, run a nice goat farm in a
peasant village in the forest, and live an ecologically and socially sound life by a riverine
beach. It was only 2 years later, already married and with a baby boy, when we met a
Franciscan friar who invited us to work on an agricultural project in the state of
Maranhao. Finally, in 1986, we indeed moved up north, not to run our own goat farm in a
nice forested area, but to work with a dynamic social movement of peasants facing
agrarian conflicts in the Mearim valley, a so-called former expansion frontier, mostly
covered by degraded secondary growth, palm forests, and pastures. Roberto was hired by
the Franciscan friars to coordinate a German-funded agricultural project based in the
municipality of Lago do Junco, which was closely involved with the CEBs, Eclesial Base
Communities, inspired by Liberation Theology. A semi-boarding school, also linked to
the pastoral movements, hired me to manage a Belgian-funded educational project for
peasant teenagers in the neighboring municipality of Po9go de Pedras.
'For the case of the Air Space Launching Base of Alcantara, see Almeida's (2001:137-141)
Human Rights in Brazil 2001.
In the years in which agrarian conflicts involving disputes over land tenure and
property rights took place in the Mearim valley, throughout the 1970s and 1980s,2 the
Franciscan friars supported villages in their struggle for recognition of their right to the
land. While most of the villages were swept away, some achieved their rights through
open conflict, and eventual governmental action through so-called Agrarian Reform,
being mistakenly denominated thereafter as "settlements."3 Still other villages managed
to negotiate and purchase the land from the pretense landlords. This movement became
locally known as the Mutirdo or A Luta, the collective struggle.
The villages, however, either "reformed" or not, continued struggling against the
effects of land concentration. Since Agrarian Reform was not massively applied in a way
that its effects would be felt even in nonreformed land, these reformed areas became
islands in a sea of landless situations, suffering pressures on their resources. By the mid
1980s, the People of the Mutirdo, or People of Struggle, began to discuss how to remain
on their "reformed" lands. Again, with the support of the church and NGOs, they chose
among the few available alternatives for experimenting with projects to collectively
organize their formal land tenure, production, and commercialization. For 3 years, we
were involved in this process, carried out in the realm of the Catholic church.
In 1989, after leaving these jobs, already with our second son, we moved to
Pedreiras, a more central town in the Mearim valley, to participate in the founding of a
grassroots organization, formed by people who had fought for the land, and opted for
2 See Almeida, A. 1990. The State and Land Conflicts in Amazonia: from 1964 to 1988. In The
Future ofAmazonia: Destruction or Sustainable Development?eds, D. Goodman and A. Hall.
3 According to INCRA, settlement is the process that follows land expropriation and tenure
emission, which involves plot demarcation, credits for food, housing, agricultural inputs, and
productive activities, in addition to infrastructure such as roads, electricity, water and schools
(INCRA 1984, INCRA 2001).
managing their resources also through economic projects carried out in the realm of the
social movements. Maintaining a partnership with the church, we dreamed of an
organization directed not for, not with, but by the peasants themselves. A board of
coordinators was elected among leaders related to the unions and grassroots organizations
from four municipalities of the Mearim Valley: Lago do Junco, Esperantin6polis, Sao
Luis Gonzaga, and Lima Campos. This assembly of grassroots leaders founded ASSEMA
- Association in Settlement Areas in the State of Maranhao.
Roberto and I became their professional volunteers (and later, employees) and soon
after were joined by a teacher, Luciene Figueiredo; and an agricultural technician, Jaime
Conrado. First CESE Coordenadoria Ecumanica do Servigo, and soon after, OXFAM,
Inter-American Foundation, and Ford Foundation funded ASSEMA's projects. Later,
Misereor, Terre des Hommes, Bread for the World and IBAMA supported the group with
their resources. Currently, Action Aid, Grassroots, Christian Aid, Coer Unite and DED
have joined efforts, and further government-funded projects, PROCERA and PDA, have
been carried out. Accessing their rights to public resources, as was written in the Agrarian
Reform Plan, involved a concomitant process ofpoliticization, since the formal Land
Reform program was anything but what was actually happening on those lands. In this
process, clashes and convergences among diverse cultural, economic and political
backgrounds, including ours, were constant at each step. Throughout this learning
process, ASSEMA was my classroom for a meaningful 52 years.
In 1994, we left for Bel6m, the largest capital in the Amazon, but continued to
provide occasional services to ASSEMA. After 8 years managing rural development
projects as a practitioner, Roberto felt the need to go back to academia, and moved to the
US for a short-term non-degree program. After being apart for 2 months, I ended up
quitting my 7-month-old job as a consultant for a German cooperation agency in Bel6m,
and joined Roberto and the children in the US. As an unemployed spouse without a work
permit, I also ended up going back to academia. In 1996, while working on my
2-year-long master's program in Tropical Development and Conservation, I fell in love
with Anthropology. I marveled to find a discipline concerned with theoretical and
empirical instruments to deal with the realities I still could not explain. What began as
"something-to-do-while-waiting-for-my-husband," turned into a lengthier pursuit in
Anthropology, not surprisingly trying to figure out the mysteries of gender relations.
As a late novice introduced to the discipline at the Ph.D. level, I jumped into the
ethnographies, enchanted with the methodological field procedures providing insightful
conceptual findings. I was fascinated to review the unexplainable situations lived as a
practitioner, now supported by the theories that, although based on distinct, idiographic
situations and empirical evidence, were made anthropologically meaningful by the
ethnographer. I began to dream of being an ethnographer. So, after 3 more years of
coursework and research, there I was, once more going back to the field for the last
summer of my field research. But so many things were still missing to unleash the magic
of being an ethnographer. Still, I open my dissertation by describing that entrance to the
field, as ethnographers usually do.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
page
A CK N O W LED G M EN TS ................................................................................................. iv
P R E F A C E .......................................................................................................................... v i
A B ST R A C T ................................ ................... ......................................... ..... xv
CHAPTER
1 IN TR O D U C TIO N ...................................................................................................... 1
Going Back to the Mearim Valley: the Research Setting......................................... 1
Looking for M y Research Site....................................... ................................. 1
Finding the Site of Trabalho Sem Patrao, Work without a Boss .......................... 3
Who They Are and Who I Am: the Formation of the Object of Research................... 6
The Researched: W ho They Are..................................... ............................... 6
The Researcher: W ho I Am ................................................. ........................... 19
The Research Relation: Researcher and Researched in the Same Text................ 22
Where Should We Walk Through: the Theoretical Framework............................... 27
Gender in an Operative Field of Knowledge ..................................... ............ 30
Gender in an Anthropological Field of Knowledge............................................. 35
Gender in an Interactive Field of Knowledge.................................... ........... 41
Walking My Path: the Ethnographic Dissertation .................................... ........... 46
Research Questions and Design............................................... ...................... 52
Research M ethodology ....................................................... ........................... 56
C chapter O organization ........................................... .................................................. 58
2 MARIA PRETINHO MADE INVISIBLE: SOCIAL BLINDNESS IN THE
CONSTRUCTION OF GENDER IN LAGO DO JUNCO, A MUNICIPALITY IN
TH E M EARIM VA LLEY ........................................................................................62
Introduction: the Trajectory of Maria Pretinho Made Invisible.................................... 62
Entering the Field for the First Time ............................................... ..................... 66
Arriving at the Town of Lago do Junco: No Signs of Maria Pretinho................. 66
Getting a ride with the church to get on the road with the people .................66
There werefazendeiros on this road...........................................................69
There was a church project on the top of the hill................................... ..78
Proceeding Toward the Interior: the Margins that Were Centers...................... 81
A state of disconnected structures.................................................................81
A state of nonstructured connections.......................................................88
Learning a W ay of Life ......................................................................................... .. 92
Men and Women in the Making of Roga......................................... ............ .. 92
T he practices ............................................................................................ . 92
T he sym bols ..................................................... ......................................... 100
Men and Women in the Making of a Social Movement.................................... 104
Conflicts, agreements and an unsolved state ............................................. 104
From Mutirao to union, associations and cooperatives ............................... 13
Men and Women in the Making of a Municipality............................................ 119
Looking for Maria Pretinho in the numbers ................................................119
Looking for Maria Pretinho in local discourses...........................................123
Conclusion: Social Blindness in the Construction of Gender................................... 128
3 DONA VALERIANA PARGA MADE VISIBLE: DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS
IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF GENDER IN MONTE ALEGRE, A VILLAGE
IN THE MEARIM VALLEY ..............................................................................131
Introduction ........................................................................................................ . 131
The Construction of Gender in the Formation of Monte Alegre .............................. 133
Contextualizing the Narrative .............................................................................. 133
Listening to the N arrative ................................................................................... 136
Reading the N arrative ......................................................................................... 146
T im e of captivity ............................................................................................155
Time of "being owner of one's self......................................................... 162
Tim e of struggle........................................ ........................................ 169
The Challenge of Gender in the "Development" of Monte Alegre ........................ 173
The Visible and Invisible Matters that Led the Development Projects to Fail.... 173
Productive projects......................................................................................... 178
Infrastructural projects ................................................................................. 80
The Visible Women Who Assumed the Debts .................................................. 182
Conclusion: Social Visibility in the Construction of Gender ................................. 187
4 DONA VITALINA ANDRADE MAKING THE "SELF" VISIBLE:
ARTICULATED ETHNICITIES IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF GENDER
AMONG THE ANDRADES, A FAMILY IN THE MEARIM VALLEY .................197
Introdu action ................................................................................................................. 197
The Construction of Gender in Dona Vitalina's Family........................................... 202
The Pargas in the Construction of Gender in Dona Vitalina's Family..................... 221
The Sakiaras in the Construction of Gender in Dona Vitalina's Family .................. 230
C conclusion ......................................................................................................... . 249
5 A QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF GENDER RELATIONS IN A PEASANT
ECONOMY IN THE MEARIM VALLEY ...............................................................251
Introdu action ..................................................................... ...................................... 25 1
M ethods..................................................................................................... . ... 252
Theoretical Perspectives .................................. ....... 254
Applicability of the Gender Concept ................................................................. 255
On the Economics of the Family and of the Village....................... ........ 260
On the Economics of Gender Throughout the Life Cycle ...................................... 267
Raising Boys and Girls: "Girls Are Put on Girls' Work and Boys on Boys'
W ork"......................... ... ................. ....................... ...... 267
Growing as Young Women and Young Men: "The Older Ones Tried, But as
the Work Got Heavier ... out of School!" ......................................... 273
Becoming Men and Women: "When You Marry, Then, the Roga is Yours;
You Are the Owner of Yourself........................................ 277
Getting Old: "The Old Woman Having her Little Social Security...It Doesn't
Solve Everything, But It Helps at Lot!"......... ................... 287
Shared Notions and Symbols in the Construction of a Gendered Economy ............ 295
C conclusion ........................................... ..... .. ................ ......... ....................... 303
6 REFLECTIONS AND CONCLUSIONS: GENDER RELATIONS IN THE
M EA R IM V A LLEY ........................... ........................... ....... ..........................306
Introdu action ................................................................................................................. 306
Leaving the Mearim Valley One More Time ............................... ......... 309
Rites of Death in the Land of the Landlords..................................... ... 310
Trabalho Livre within and outside Terra Liberta........................................... 319
Answering Research Questions ........... .............................................. 321
What Forms of Gender and Other Social Relations Are Made Invisible
(by the V various A ctors)? .......................................................................... 321
How Are Gender and Other Social Relations Transformed in Times of
Conflict, Struggle and Political Resistance? ............................ ..... 327
How Do Multiple Forms of Gender Relations Combine and Evolve in
Specific Trajectories of Village Formation and Struggles?..................... 335
Conclusion: Gender Relations in the Mearim Valley................................... 341
LIST OF REFERENCES ........................................................ 351
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .............................................................................364
Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School
of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
RUPTURE AND RESISTANCE: GENDER RELATIONS AND LIFE TRAJECTORIES
IN THE BABA(U PALM FORESTS OF BRAZIL
By
Noemi Sakiara Miyasaka Porro
December 2002
Chairwoman: Dr. Marianne Schmink
Major Department: Department of Anthropology
This ethnography of the people living in babaqu palm forests of the Mearim
Valley, in the Eastern Amazonian state of Maranhao, Brazil, is a study of social relations
among men and women struggling for their ways of life in a context of social
antagonism. I focus my analysis on trabalho livre, a form of labor that emerged from a
material and symbolic set of social relations from which gender relations cannot be
dissociated. Supported by political economy and feminist frameworks, I present my
findings through five life trajectories, examined in different social contexts.
Multiple forms of gender relations intertwined in these trajectories are made
invisible by Development discourses, promoted through policies and projects that affect
their gendered, ethnic-based, peasant ways of life. Adding to the study of gender in the
field inhabited by grassroots organizations, NGOs, and development agents, I also
investigate gender relations among the so-called nonparticipants of development projects.
This dissertation suggests that discourses and practices that consider gender
relations to be the result of a single, continuous, and all-encompassing history may be
present not only in dominant sectors, but also in the social movement itself. Discursive
and nondiscursive practices that promote uniformity, discipline, regulation, and overall
control over ways of life, including ways of living gender relations, on behalf of
predefined sustainable developments or feminisms, perpetuate power relations that hold
women and men in relations of domination. I conclude that peasant gender relations in
the Mearim valley are intrinsic and integral parts of dialectical constructions of gender in
impersonal "dominant sectors," but also in the realm of the social movements, where I
circulate as a member of society, a researcher and a practitioner. I suggest, therefore,
continuous scrutiny in both spheres through "thick" ethnographic research, aiming at a
self-critical reading of a multi-faceted general history that has been denied and made
invisible by the total history of global and national society.
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
Going Back to the Mearim Valley: the Research Setting
Looking for My Research Site
A sea ofbabaqu palms waved, little dots in a green landscape as I landed in the
capital of Maranhao, announcing this half Amazonian half Northeastern Brazilian state.
As soon as the airplane opened its doors, humidity and heat penetrated my clothes and
soul, warning me that I had finally arrived in the so-called Middle-North region, on a
summer afternoon of 2000. I had just finished with those bureaucracies of research forms
and permits, and was anxious to begin my dissertation fieldwork in the Mearim Valley,
300 km south from the coastal capital Sao Luis, about 6 hours by bus on a lousy road.
The valley is part of extensive and highly homogeneous babaqu palm forests that
cover more than 18 million hectares in northern and northeastern Brazil (MIC/STI 1982),
in which an estimated 500,000 families' live on agricultural and extractive activities
(Figure 1-1). My goal was to understand interactions among locally observed gender
relations, and discourses and practices promoted by Agencies of Development, related to
"gender and development." As a student in Tropical Conservation and Development and
later in Anthropology, I had returned every summer to the so-called babaqu forest region.
Even so, at each arrival, the homogeneous greenness and architecture of these palm
'The number of people working with babaqu extraction is estimated at 500,000 families
throughout Brazil (Anderson et al. 1991:9), with 300,000 families in the state of Maranhao alone
(Associag9o Brasileira das Indfstrias de Babaqu, cited in Almeida 1995:48, Anderson et al.
1991:97).
forests still surprises me. This time, however, the full realization that I had indeed arrived
at my research site came only later on. Somehow, my anthropological training was asking
for evidence other than the geographic signs.
Figure 1-1. Map of Brazil showing areas of occurrence of babagu palm forests, and detail
of the different ecological regions of these forests in the map of the state of
Maranhao. The research site is located in the designated Regido dos Cocais.
Source: MIC/STI 1982
On obtaining different departure schedules from each person I had asked, and in
spite of a crazy race from the airport to the bus station, I ended up missing the last bus of
the day from the capital, to the Mearim Valley. Forced to stay until the next day, I headed
to the closest hotel, but had to argue with the cab driver who tried to rip me off. I felt that
I had begun to fully participate in that arena of no schedules and no rules governing the
institutionalized informal economy. Next, trying to gain some time in this unplanned
extra day in the capital, I thought of contacting some public officers at the governmental
institutions related to my research, but the room telephones of my affordable hotel were
simply mute: another sign of decline common to many small enterprises shadowed by the
globally franchised hotel chains. At the moment, anxious to get to my geographical site,
these signs, which later helped me to understand the social site of my research, were only
distressing difficulties to overcome.
There I was then, sweating on the sidewalk in front of my hotel, in the midst of the
intense and noisy traffic of Guajajaras Avenue, under a vandalized public phone shelter. I
knew better than to expect a public employee to talk to someone calling in the last
working hour of the day. My next move was to reach colleagues and friends, but seconds
of local calls to mostly cell-phone holders swallowed all the units of my modern
magnetic telephone card, as I heard "try later" from professionally anonymous voices of
different private companies. It was nothing close to the paradise of efficiency promised
by the Brazilian privatization policies. I would soon learn of similar situations for the
privatization of water and electricity.
It began to rain on this hot day of July. Putting aside my unsuccessful attempts to
make my research days efficient, I finally gave up on my list of contacts. Protected by the
telephone shelter, I relaxed and freed my eyes for the world.
Finding the Site of Trabalho Sem Patrao, Work without a Boss
Two men who could be categorized as a mulato and a caboclo2 were pulling an old
wooden wagon full of cardboard, broken furniture, and old rusty metal, disturbing the
already chaotic traffic in the large avenue. As a burned car seat fell from their load, rusty
springs popping out of the incinerated cover, passing students warned and cheered the
men. As one of the men managed to hold the traffic, the other choreographically ran back
2 Mulato and caboclo are designations in the regional race-based social categorization indicating
the offspring of white and black, and white and indigenous parents, respectively.
for the seat, throwing jokes to a mass of irritated drivers. Ei, patraozinho, calma ai que
sem assento meu carro ndo anda! "Hey, little boss, calm down there 'cause my car can't
run without a seat!"
The obnoxious junk disturbing the busy flow of modern life was a treasure they
could not afford to leave behind. I guessed at the meager payment they would get for this
stressful job to feed the many children I imagined for each man. However, looking at this
uniquely cheerful while humiliating memento, I was completely certain that it was not
my imagination: I had finally arrived, not to my geographic, but to my social site. There
it was: the site of people living by trabalho sem patrdo, work without a patron. Through
the years I have lived and researched in the Mearim valley and other sites in the Amazon,
I came to learn of ways of life3 carried out by social groups who are related by central
symbolisms and practices aiming at freedom from the control of a boss.
By experience, I just knew that the expressions, words, laughs and attitudes
exchanged were all about the people I wanted to understand. In the same way I could see
the unmistakable geography of the babagu forests and the easily recognizable economic
context common to most of the so-called developing countries facing globalization, I
could also clearly identify the subjects of what I wanted to research. It was something
about that unique form of resistance, not defined by race, origin, geographical location, or
type of economic activity, but this time expressed by that humored defiance, common to
ways of life based on trabalho sem patrdo. It seemed to me that this commonality leads
to the formation of a people, which in the case of the Mearim valley, has emerged from
trajectories of slavery, detribalization, and forced migration.
3 Ways of life are "ways that human beings have to construct their lives throughout the process of
living them" (Geertz 1983:29)
5
Being part of a stream dominated by modem, even imported cars, they push
wagons. Swallowed by chaotic traffic rushed by globalized economies, they go against
the flow, struggling for what is meaningful to them. Although they have never managed
to effectively challenge the oppression, they were never completely dominated by it
either. Swallowed but never homogenized, marginalized but not entirely excluded, they
are in the cities and they are in the countryside. They are seen even in modem factories,
but they also slash and bum forests to produce. They consume their underclassified type
of rice, but also fancy satellite dishes for TVs run by old batteries. And, as we will see
later, levels of income, location of dwelling, types of occupation, and overall
categorization by development parameters do not help much to understand their gender
relations.
Through this event on the very first day of my field research, I realized that the
crucial problem to make the right entrance to my study was to clearly delineate the object
of my research, and to clarify the fields of knowledge in which I would work. Depending
on how I made my delimitation, I could be either creating artificial boundaries, validating
nonexistent objects of research, or erasing subjects and livelihoods just because they were
not behaving accordingly, or staying where I did not expect to find them. All these noises
of the globalized life were distracting me from listening to the voices I needed to hear and
making invisible what I should see. I had not even approached the Mearim Valley; how
could I be so sure that they were around? Why am I saying "they," myself a Brazilian,
and they not having any other "official" identification than that? Do we not speak the
same language and use the same clothes made in China, paying with the same currency
devalued by the global financial market? Who are these people, the subjects of ways of
life I am willing to research, after all? And who am I to dare studying a people for whom
I could not even figure out a proper identification?
Who They Are and Who I Am: the Formation of the Object of Research
The Researched: Who They Are
When someone asks what is the object of my research, I cannot simply answer that
it is the culture of "the Guajajara" or "the Canela" as would the anthropologists who
work with these indigenous groups with a recognized social identity. There is a Guajajara
nation and a Guajajara territory; each Guajajara knows who belongs to it, and in a general
sense the meaning of being a Guajajara pervades every dimension of the interpretation of
their lives, including gender relations.4
This is not the case of the people I am talking about. Anthropologists mostly
conceptualize these people as peasants, for their distinct mode of production is articulated
with market oriented or capitalist modes.5 Marx (1967:761) referred to peasants as related
to a petty mode of production, "where the laborer is the private owner of his own means
of labor set in action by himself." Distinguishing them from farmers, in the first volume
4 For indigenous groups without an officially recognized ethnic identity, like many groups based
in the Northeastern territories, there are attempts to recognize the significance of their ethnicity.
Debates in contemporary anthropology that challenge excluding concepts such as "closed tribe"
and "indigenous people" have intended to redeem their invisibility. See Oliveira Filho 1998.
5 Along the line of the classical concepts, Alfred Kroeber provides a definition: "Peasants are
definitely rural yet live in relation to market towns; they form a class segment of a larger
population, which usually contains also urban centers, sometimes metropolitan capitals. They
constitute part societies and part cultures. They lack the isolation, the political autonomy and the
self sufficiency of tribal populations; but their local units retain much of their old identity,
integration and attachments to soils and cults" (1948:284). Another example is Raymond Firth's
definition in which peasants are "a socio economic system of small-scale producers with a
relatively simple, non-industrial technology" (1964:17) involving a "set of structural and social
relationships rather than a technological category of persons engaged in the same employment"
(ibid:18). A third example is Eric Wolf's definition expressing dialectical relations: peasants are
"rural cultivators whose surpluses are transferred to a dominant group of rulers that uses the
surpluses both to underwrite its own standard of living and to distribute the remainder to groups
of Capital, Marx presented the petty mode as a transient mode, to be dissolved as the
"historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production," or the
primitive accumulation, evolved (1967:714). Otherwise, society would be fated to
mediocrity and narrowness, because "this mode of production presupposes parceling of
the soil and scattering of the other means of production ... (I)t excludes co-operation,
division of labor within each process of production, the control over, and the productive
application of the forces of nature by society, and the free development of the social
productive powers" (1967:761-2).
A more idiographic view of diverse peasant social groups worldwide would show
diverse social situations in which peasants adopt a common use of land, and
cooperatively organize their productive powers according to socially established rules.6
Besides, the development of the social productive powers entailed a diversity of
interconnected modes. De Janvry, using Marxist analytical tools, argued for an
integrative view to explain the situation of the peasantry, condemning dual segmentations
such as growth and stagnation, poverty and wealth, development and underdevelopment,
as proposed by the neo-classic and Modernization theorists. He opted for a dialectical
perspective, accounting for societies' contradictions, conflicts, movements, and changes,
analyzed through historical materialism. De Janvry constructed models of articulated and
in society that do not farm but must be fed for their specific goods and services in turn" (1966:3-
4).
6 It is important to note that Marx's analysis is based on a historical approach specific to the
Western European peasants in a given period, and that this view varied throughout his process of
theoretical construction. See letter to Vera Zasulich in 1881 (Shanin 1983). Therefore, in the third
volume of Capital, he even considered the possibility of peasants making the full development of
the capitalist mode more difficult (1967:196). This suggests that the evolution of each peasant
group should be analyzed in its own time and place, in their unique interaction with other social
groups throughout history. This is even more necessary for peasantries such as that of the Mearim
disarticulated economies to show how economies worldwide are connected according to
a capitalist rationality: peasants would be a class or part of a class with a specific
economy that is articulated with a capitalist economy.7
However, in practice, in the research environment and activism where I circulate,
peasants are mostly identified now by the economic activity that is meaningful to the
market (in an overall process of development), or to conservation (in a process of
sustainable development): seringueiros, quebradeiras de coco, marisqueiras, etc. (rubber
tappers, babacu nut breakers, shellfish gatherers). Such identities, at least originally, were
not defined by themselves, but ascribed by sectors that benefited from them:
seringalistas, marreteiros, bodegueiro, fazendeiros, mercador (situational designations
for landlords and merchants). Later, the subjects transformed these ascribed
identifications into self-designated political identities, and agents with interests in
conservation, sustainable development, and social change reinforced the significance of
these activities and management systems.
Attention to this mode of identification is crucial in delineating the object of my
research on gender, as it implies an instrumentality toward a preconceived end that
defines a specific research perspective and visibility. As a practitioner, a master's
degree-holder in conservation and development, a would-be gender expert, it is
valley, whose social genesis occurred in the realm of conflicts such as slavery, detribalization,
and forced migration.
7 According to him, in articulated economies, there is a social division of labor, with a sectoral
articulation between production of capital goods and consumption goods. Such production
provides returns to capital and returns to labor, which are socially distributed among the
articulated social classes. In disarticulated economies, the modem production sectors are directed
to exports or industry with import of capital and technology, and provide returns only to capital
(and the distribution of capital will depend on the balance of payments between importers and
exporters, which is dependent on the terms of trade in the international market). The returns to
instrumental to view the women I am studying as quebradeiras, because of their potential
for sustainable management and as agents of change in gender relations. But, is
quebradeira the woman herself, an integral member of her people, whose identity is
submerged to all aspects of this people's social life? Or is quebradeira just an
identification that responds to my interests and fits into my research inquiry? Surely,
there is no problem in studying a fragment, or an aspect of something; however, I need to
be clear that this selected aspect is only one part of a person's identity; the part that I am
interested in.
Alternatively, I may say that I am studying people who live in the Mearim valley,
slashing and burning their roqas,8 clearing pastures, and selling babaqu kernels. Local
merchants, governmental agents, and union leaders would identify them as rural workers
or producers. For breaking babacu fruits, extracting so-called nontimber forest resources,
and defending palm forests, conservationists and militants would identify them as
traditional people, or forest dwellers, stressing the fragment of their lives that intersects
with common interests. However, they are also mining gold in Suriname, or slashing
primary forests along the Transamazon in Para, or remodeling buildings in Sao Paulo.
They have also trespassed and blurred, physically and culturally, the lines between their
rural villages and urban Amazonian towns.9 Although I interviewed people who barely
exchanged ideas with someone in a neighboring village, I also talked to people who
labor are provided only by the traditional sector of production of wage-goods. In this economy,
the capacity for consumption is defined in the exterior and by the elites' demands for luxuries.
8 Rogas can be viewed as the physical gap in the forest, where people cultivate rice, corn, beans,
cassava and a variety of other vegetables such as squash, okra, tomatoes, cuxa and cucumber.
Roca also implies a complex social organization and results in the maintenance of a way of life
(Porro 1997).
9 See IBGE's concepts of rural and urban in Census 2000 (IBGE 2000a).
explained to me how a letter of exporting credit works, and for whom New York or Bonn
are becoming just extra places for negotiating their so-called 'eco,' 'green' products.
In trying to delineate the object of my research gender relations of a people
through an anthropological inquiry I looked for help in the classic ethnographies. When
I first opened Argonauts of the Western Pacific, I was delighted by Malinowski's
description of his entrance to the field. He told how he landed on a tropical beach of the
Western Pacific close to a native village, saw the launch that had brought him go sailing
away, and faced the uncertainties of living among the "savages," without a cell phone,
e-mail account, GPS, and the like."1 Despite these uncertainties, anthropological research
at his time allowed him the certainties of territory boundaries, ethnic identities, culturally
defined occupations, and all sorts of material culture represented by specific pottery,
basketry, architecture and so on. He knew that the Mailu would be at certain places,
doing certain things, speaking a certain language, because these were the very definition
of being a Mailu.
In the Nuer's case, similarly, at least the ethnic boundaries were clear. According to
Pritchard, by 'people' he meant "all persons who speak the same language and have, in
other respects, the same culture, and consider themselves to be distinct from like
aggregates" (Evans-Pritchard 1940:5). Unlike the Nuer or the Mailu, the Motu, or the
Massim, the subjects of my research do not have a definite territory, a distinct material
culture, or even a proper name delimiting an identity per se. If I call them peasants (for
lack of a more precise identification) I discover that the peasant concept, which
supposedly served to examine this social category, is under scrutiny (Kearney 1996).
Unlike campesinos (peasants in other Latin American countries), in their discourses the
interviewees do not identify themselves as camponeses (the Portuguese translation for
peasants).
Historians could trace the subjects of my research as the descendants of enslaved
natives of different African tribes in the Guinea Coast, Cape Verde, Angola, Luanda and
Benguela, and probably from Sudan or Ethiopia, and of detribalized individuals from
swept away, distinct, indigenous nations such as Timbiras, Kanela, and Guajajaras. They
were miscegenated with Europeans mostly from Portugal, France and Holland, and with
Lebanese. Does the lack of language, material culture, or other visible distinction from
"like aggregates," mean that there are no "people" to be anthropologically studied? Did
they disappear as a people, a social group with a distinct ethnicity?
As I began my dissertation, my anthropological intention was to discuss gender
relations in the realm of a people's culture. However, how could I do that if the subjects
of my research seemed just the leftover descendants of already disappeared peoples? As a
contemporary anthropologist without a "Kanela nation" to study, should I study them as
the "poor," as an interviewee referred to themselves as "the nation of the poor"? The
"landless," the "displaced," the "traditional"? Should I adopt emergent political and
occupational identities such as "quebradeiras de c6co babagu" or "seringueiros"? And for
the sake of my interests in gender and conservation issues, should I study them in a
fragmentary fashion, electing the "women" (or the "extractor women") as another
endangered category? Would their gender relations be different from those of other
equally poor, landless, traditional women of Brazilian society, just adapted to their
economic specifics?
10 See Stocking (1992) for other views of Malinowsky's entrance in the field.
These questions that troubled my research are nothing new, and probably noticed
also by the development agencies and grassroots organizations acting everywhere in the
Amazon. What to do with these surely noticed, but poorly identified, and little known
peasantry as a people? What are the ethnic boundaries defining them as a people?
Although pointing out a necessary attention to diversity and cultural matters, too often
these concerns are overcome by the rhythm and demands of development projects, which
apparently erase them. Nonetheless, I believe these questions are at the core of the
consistent failures of projects and policies aiming at sustainable development goals
supported by "gender and development" initiatives. To understand their ethnic
boundaries, which delimit the meaning of being a people, may tell us why they do not
participate, or participate in terms that clash with terms imposed by development
projects.
In this search for approaching gender as something meaningful to an
anthropologically defined people, should I go for an archaeology of what is still
identifiable in a past culture, excavating clues to figure out their pristine gender relations?
Has the core of their cultural realm faded, if it ever existed, in the vagaries of an
uncertain citizenship said to be provided by the Brazilian nation-state, so much that they
do not even have a culturally defined identity?
Contemporary anthropology has for quite a while been changing its focus from
ethnic as exotic, to ethnic as belonging to a social group defined by criteria not always
based on material culture, geographic location, or specific activities, but historically and
socially constructed meanings that may or may not involve these. Barth was the first to
develop the concept of ethnic boundaries to deal with social groups defined by ethnicity,
instead of looking at the fixed structure of a society and the organic functions of its
cultural parts. As a student of Leach and Firth, Barth considered some of the more
dynamic concepts offered by structural-functionalists of the 1940s and 1950s. However,
along with Gluckman, he was primarily involved with the foci of the anthropology of the
1960s: social change and its dynamic processes (Barth 1969; Previtera 1995).
According to Barth (1969:15), "ethnicity is a form of social organization; this
implies that the critical focus for investigation becomes the ethnic boundary that defines
the group rather than the cultural stuff that it encloses; the critical feature of ethnic group
is the characteristic of self-ascription and ascription by the others." Barth distinguishes
ethnicity from culture for its intrinsic interacting approach, in contrast with a more
inertial and constraint-like weight of knowledge and value inherent to the construction of
the concept of culture (as for example: Durkheim's "social law" or Tylor's definition of
culture). 1 Rather than behavioral or trait patterns, ethnicity is used to learn why and how
the subjects opt to identify themselves with a given social group, and to agree on criteria
of differences and similarities in specific social situations.
The concept of ethnicity is constructed allowing greater attention to agency,
diversity of interests, and levels of collectivity, which are more coherent with our
material existence in which "actors are forced to intentionally act, modifying
preconditions in a dialectical interaction," (Barth 1969) while still maintaining the
significance of symbols and meanings. In Barth's conceptualization, the historical
1' Tylor defines culture as a "complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law,
custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society" (1871,
cited in McGee and Warms 1996:26). Durkheim stated that the object of study of sociology were
'social facts,' which were not biological or psychological phenomena, but "a category of facts
with very distinctive characteristics, it consists of ways of acting, thinking, and feeling, external
to the individual, and endowed with a power of coercion, by reason of which they control him"
approach should not be confounded with historicism or historical determinism, and
concepts related to structuralism and functionalism may serve only at the micro-level, to
avoid fatal distortions. Therefore, for the purpose of this dissertation, the Mearim valley
as a geographic place is just a point of departure to design the operational limits of my
research site, as it is then defined much more dynamically by the ideals, the discourses
and practices of a people struggling for trabalho livre to indicate their ethnic boundaries.
Trabalho livre or trabalho sem patrio is a concept of labor that emerged from
multiple life trajectories intertwined with the history of the Mearim valley. This form of
labor is the foundation of the ways of life of a people, who have struggled throughout
slavery, forced migration, and agrarian conflicts. Trabalho livre is both the cause and the
consequence of ways of life in which these social actors make themselves "illegible" to
the authorities and dominant sectors. Through trabalho livre, peasants in the Mearim
valley struggle to free themselves from dominant manipulation. As Scott (1998:183)
affirms, "legibility is a condition of manipulation." Trabalho livre entails a material and
symbolic set of social relations, from which gender relations cannot be dissociated, and is
based on principles of autonomy in the control over their family labor, and in the
common use of land and forest resources, which demarcate their ethnicities.
Having dealt with the theoretical problem of establishing the boundaries of my
object of research, there was still the question of the very formation of this object. I draw
on Foucault's (1972) work to carry out this discussion, essential to the opening of this
dissertation. He uses as an illustration the discourse of psychopathology since the
nineteenth century in Europe, and the formation of its object of research. Foucault said
that, in our attempts to delineate the object of our studies, by the practice of our own
(1895, cited in McGee and Warms 1996:86). See Durkheim's (1895) Rules of the Sociological
discourses, we end up in fact creating, forming an object in its own, which is not the very
object that we intend to study. "This formation is made possible by a group of relations
established between authorities of emergence, delimitation, and specification .... These
relations are established between institutions, economic and social processes, behavioral
patterns, systems of norms, techniques, types of classification, modes of characterization;
and these relations are not present in the object" (1972:44-45).
I give an illustration of my reading of Foucault. In a conference on tropical
conservation and development held at UF in 2002, a scientific authority, advocating for
the establishment of parks to preserve nature, showed apparently convincing pictures to
demonstrate the efficiency of parks in protecting forests against the advancement of
shantytowns, and challenged the participants to refute the unquestionable right of the
future generations. A hanging question in my mind was: whose future generation? If
one's child is dead of hunger today, because land is so concentrated, whose will be the
right to see a forest in the future? Above all, who are the authorities delimiting and
classifying types of nature to preserve, and selecting types of people to enjoy them in the
future?
Although any one of the individuals living in the pictured shantytown was
consuming much less energy and resources than any of those privileged to leave
descendants to visit the park in the present and future, the rate of energy and resource
consumption was not the institutionalized mode to select and characterize them. A picture
showed the clear boundary between the park and the shantytown, but no questions arose
about boundaries between the "green" discourse and the
Method and Tylor's (1871) The Science of Culture. In Primitive Culture. London: John Murray.
laptop-paper-battery-air-conditioning-frequent-flyer practices of any of us participating in
the conference.
Sustainability (the capacity of reproduction of resources and relations within a
given system) is a result of specific relations between people and nature; relations based
on short- and long-term conservation practices involving social and natural resources.
However, most likely, relations extraneous to these mentioned relations that form
sustainability itself (the real thing) delineate the formation of sustainability as an object
of research. Surely relations that I am calling extraneous to sustainability itself (relations
among scientific, political, or social leader authorities) do influence how people are going
to relate with nature. However, these relations (relations that I myself live as a scientist, a
consumer, a member of the privileged classes) should not define the formation of my
object of research. Rather, these relations should be scrutinized in my research. They are
part of my data, but do not define them.
In the process of choosing and delineating the object of my research, while
selecting my bibliography, courses and advisors, which provided me with specific
theoretical and methodological instruments, I made use of concepts related to my
trajectory as a practitioner and a candidate for a doctorate. By working under the
guidance of the church, NGOs, and agencies of cooperation, conservation, and
development; and by listening to and reading the recommended authors and authorities
(conservationists, development and gender experts), I absorbed whole constructions of
what is development and what is underdevelopment, what is nature and what is
conservation, what is a woman, what is a man, and what their relations should look like,
what is global and what is local. I selected the necessary concepts and methods used for
these constructions.
The social genesis and application of these selected concepts should be scrutinized
in order to clarify their relations to the proposed object of my research: gender relations
associated with trabalho livre, in the face of development discourses. As Foucault
exemplifies, when the psychopathologist authorities attempt to objectively define, let's
say, 'madness without delirium,' they actually create it as an object by the means of a
related discourse sustained by the power of their authority. Can the words of this
discourse actually create a real 'mad man without delirium'? As Escobar (1991) invites
us to think, can imposing discourses of development create a real 'underdeveloped'
people? These are the relations between discourses and things one is led to think about
when proposing an object of study.
As I wanted to study gender and discourses related to "gender and development," I
attempted to delineate women, men, and Amazonian nature. Actually, beforehand, I had
in my mind a state of "disease," in which endangered nature and women were in troubled
relations, and my study was supposed to be part of an intervention to fix them. Aimed to
delineate the object of my research, by the force of the techniques, procedures, and forms
of visualization and selection of my instruments of research, I vested my authority as an
experienced grassroots practitioner and Ph.D. candidate, to enunciate and form my
object, and imagined that the models, structures, instruments, and data constituting my
object of research were the actual people I am trying to understand.
Foucault suggested that I should not, in search of the real 'thing,' try to destroy
these creations or the 'discourses' I have constructed to form the object of my research.
Rather, I should discover how and why 'gender relations among Amazonian peasants in
the context of sustainable development' became the object of my research. What are the
relations established between the author and the object of my research? How were the
concepts used in this selection originated? Why am I using this and not that discourse in
describing my object? I should not deny or deviate from the fact that I have indeed
created a discourse and object, as an image of the 'thing' that I wish to understand,
because "in analyzing the discourses themselves, one sees the loosening of the embrace,
apparently so tight, of words and things, and the emergence of a group of rules proper to
the discursive practice"(Foucault 1972:49). Answering these questions, I learn about the
"practices that systematically form the objects of which (I) speak" (1972:49) and then I
get closer to an understanding of them.
Therefore, as I begin my dissertation, I assume that my ethnography is about people
whose identity and history have been denied and made socially invisible by the global
and national society. It is about people who are currently struggling to control their ways
of life, in which trabalho livre is an ideal pursued, and lived in their everyday practices.
Trabalho livre is indeed the basis of their mode of production, and therefore, delineates
social class, but more than that, it is the basis of their mode of living, including living
gender relations. They may strategically assume multiple identities, which may be
situational and strategic, but these are all based on principles delineated by their ethnicity,
which profoundly affects and is affected by their struggles for these ways of life. In
conflicting contexts, I focus on gender relations as part of their ethnic principles,
expecting to figure out who they are.
In my ethnography, I also intend to approach who they are (by scrutinizing the
relation between the researcher and the researched); and therefore to disclose who I am
(the position of the ethnographer and the author). The relativity between the author and
the people studied clarifies the text I intend to produce. This research strategy deals with
the pertinent critique of the authoritarian and omnipotent author (Clifford and Marcus
1986, Rosenau 1992).
The Researcher: Who I Am
As an agronomist whose debut in anthropology came late in her working career,
still struggling with the possibilities of modem ethnography, I marveled at the validity of
idiographic accounting obtained through systematic direct and participant observation. I
was shocked at some of the pertinent critiques by those labeled as postmodernists and
poststructuralists. Yearning to land on a solid theoretical field where I could safely solve
accumulated questions, I got trapped in debates in which critiques failed to replace a
defeated explanation by another paradigm. Rather, it could well be that there would be no
paradigm after all (Clifford and Marcus 1986).
Within this diffuse theoretical and methodological mode currently reigning in the
discipline, I still believed that my long-term concern for answers to lived experiences
would help me to clear the path for my inquiries, separating preposterous provocations
from fertile critiques. However, it was again the reading of classical ethnographies that
helped me to craft my formation as an ethnographer. I take Malinowski's example again
to illustrate my point. The publication of some personal accounts after his death show
how relations between researched and researcher may affect research results. At the level
of impressions, my disappointment with Malinowski's racist or sexist remarks in
disclosed private writings clashed with my enchantment with his work as an
ethnographer.12 The fact that he did not use the same derogatory terms in his published
ethnography as he did in his private diary, shows that even at that time, they were like
hidden sins, not appropriate for an author, especially an anthropologist. At the research
level, however, the contrast between his ethnography and his private accounts13 led me to
investigate my own "hidden sins." It compelled me to hunt for my camouflaged "ghosts,"
which the contemporaneous world does not allow me to see, as in these
development-oriented globalized times, they are taken as natural or acceptable, just as
many of Malinowski's remarks were not so "politically incorrect" in his colonial time.
In a letter to his future wife, on November 10, 1917, he wrote: "Morover, it seems
so absurd to write things about the kula, when any nigger walking about the street in a
dirty lavalava might know much more about it than I do!" (1995:48).14 His distress was
to realize that, in spite of all sorts of ignorance he attributed to the subject, and in spite of
all the knowledge on his own side, the subject knew what he did not: the secret of the
economics of kula. Today, the opposite happens; rather than distress, the so-called
politically correct researchers are ready to recognize that, in spite of all the social and
material deprivation that local people have suffered throughout history, they hold what
we do not: local knowledge. There is now a sense in which local people have become
respected for their potential contributions to scientific research. We expect that such
knowledge will be the key to great achievements, be it a community-based sustainable
12 See Stocking 1992 and Malinowski and Masson 1995.
3 By the end of the 1930s, in London, Malinowski had the opportunity to eliminate some of his
letters, but instead he highlighted parts, ordered them, and kept the letters with his other papers, in
his office and his house (Malinowski and Masson 1995).
14 The kula is a form of inter-tribal exchange involving the circulation of symbolic and material
goods among partners throughout the Trobriand Islands. The economic anthropological analysis
of this practice led to understand the complex institutions and principles among the Trobrianders.
See Malinowski 1961.
forest management or fairness in noncapitalist gender relations leading to better resource
management.
However, during my research I came to realize that my hidden sins emerged when
there were indications that these local people might not hold in and by themselves, the
key to the desired "sustainable management" or "gender and development." I was
troubled to learn that the key is not the imagined isolation of closed traditional people,
but the unveiling of more complex and inclusive realms and relations. I recall the distress
of a young forester who told me almost in secret: "To tell the truth, these seringueiros,15
traditional rubber tappers, do not mind cutting their forests as long as good money falls
into their hands!" I also was confused to realize that regarding outcomes in the grassroots
organizations, women in decision-making positions were not much different than men.
Contemporary notions of racial or female "inferiority" permeated Malinowski's
private writings, and had consequent implications in his ethnography: erasing women
from it. I realized that a contemporary assumed and discoursed type of "superiority" of
women, forest dwellers, or communities also permeated my writings, and these had
implications for my research: invention of an object of research. Investigating why was I
assigning superior positions to certain categories, with which expectations and charges, I
found it necessary to include my Self in the investigation.
In the process of examining not only anthropological Others, but also my Self, by
contrast and comparison, I could trace cultural differences and similarities, and above all,
15 During the rubber boom, rubber tappers lived from extractive activities that did not harm the
Amazonian forests. After the boom, greater labor allocation was directed to agriculture, as tappers
needed to survive without the cash from this extractive product. As political and economic
conditions changed and cattle ranching, agriculture and timber extraction took greater shares of
the forests, conservationist discourses pointing to "traditional" rubber tapping as the key to
conserving the forests clashed with current strategies adopted by the rubber tappers.
elicit the connections between Self and Other that make and continuously reproduce
discourses of them as distinct and isolated social entities. In my pursuit to understand
gender relations, I tried to establish the connections between the subjects and my
discourses and practices on gender. I wanted to understand why and how we, researchers
and practitioners, invest so much on gender issues of the Other to promote the social
changes we, as untouchable authors, want and take for granted as desirable for all.
Another way to avoid paradigmatic authority was that proposed by Marcus and
Fischer (1986), treating anthropological inquiries as experiments, freeing us from the
authority of paradigms and, picking a concept here, a method there, trying new ways of
doing anthropology. A decade and a half has passed and neither a new paradigm nor a
nonparadigmatic era has been established yet, allowing us to still talk about an
experimental phase. However, while experimentation allows greater freedom from the
paradigms and also results in less authoritative findings, it may also imply less
commitment, greater illusion of manipulation, and less consequential statements. By
putting my own experiences in as part of the research, I attempt to transform the
experimental character of the research into experiential, which stresses taking part and
responsibility for it. With the lightness and humbleness of the experimental perspective, it
is carried out with the commitment of the undeletable nature of interconnected lived
experiences. In this manner, I can keep surveillance, not on the author herself, who must
be free to write, but on the ghost of authoritarian authorship.
The Research Relation: Researcher and Researched in the Same Text
As a practitioner, I have been beaten so many times as a consequence of misreading
multiple realities as my own, that the postmodern warning about the problems of
ethnography as the "real" description of a culture was a readily accepted critique. It
sounded fair enough to have in mind the image of a text, a simple although expectedly
useful, representation of the results of my fieldwork. As the research advanced, I
confirmed that the distance between myself, as an author, and the subjects, whose
realities I was aiming to represent as a text, was indeed immense. Whatever efforts for an
accurate, at least valid representation of the subjects' realities would not reach that
objectivity prescribed by Piaget. "Objectivity consists in so fully realizing the countless
intrusions of the self in everyday thought and the countless illusions which result -
illusions of sense, language, point of view, value, etc. that the preliminary step to every
judgment is the effort to exclude the intrusive self" (Piaget 1972:34, cited in Keller
1985:117). So, as I could not exclude it, I found it better to include the self at once, and
keep on eye on it.
This does not mean that I want to go "native," considering that we are all Brazilians
so to speak, as I still think that the distinction Self-Other is a useful research strategy,
which does not necessarily lead to dualisms, 16 but helps to understand how these distinct
parts can be connected. Besides, as Rosaldo said so well, "not unlike other ethnographers,
so-called natives can be insightful, sociologically correct, axe-grinding, self-interested, or
mistaken" (1989:50). Nonetheless, while trying to make sense of my collected data, I
realized that the distance between subjects and me was not qualitatively like that between
a text and a neutral and impersonal author.
It might have been if I was writing this dissertation after the first year and a half of
living in Maranhao. But along the way, occasionally, there were those snaps in our
sociologically distant lives in which the author was thrown into the text and the
characters just absorbed her as part of the script. I might just be thrown back out as
suddenly as I was in, but my authorship would never be the same again. Actually, the text
itself was changed, not only by the impersonal sequences of economic, social or
ecological processes, but also by a minuscule, and yet detectable, and therefore
analyzable, participation of the author, transformed then into actor. The anthropological
and sociological distance between the actual subjects remained, indeed, but shared
experiences made it acquire different meanings, calling for a more holistic approach,
greater historical responsibility, and ultimately demanding self-critique.
In methodological terms, the figures of an authoritarian, neutrally positioned author
and a bi-dimensional, flat text became imprecise, and called for other methodological
devices. I propose for this dissertation a methodology fit for practitioners and applied
anthropologists turned into ethnographers, in which the concept of shared experience is
used for analytical purposes. I agree with Rabinow (1982) that a story is only worth
telling when essential and interconnected changes happen to both researched and
researcher, as an integrated, shared experience turned into a text.
I am not claiming that the resulting text, the telling of an experience or the
description of its circumstances, is a unifying reality for both researcher and researched.
Rather, I suggest greater attention to shared experience as a strategy to simply deal with
multiple realities, and the understanding of one experience as thresholds to other
experiences, especially those in gender relations, as they are an essential and complex
part of social life. As Turner (1982:84) says, "in social life cognitive, affective and
volitional elements are bound up with one another and are alike primary, seldom found in
their pure form, often hybridized, and only comprehensible by the investigator as lived
experience, his/hers as well as, and in relation to, thiss"
16 See Kearney's (1996) differentiation between the modernist Self and non-modernist Self.
In addition, being the author and simultaneously part of the text, I propose to
enhance the notion of text with the idea of environment, not in a biophysical, but in a
virtual sense, suggesting a more interactive and multi-dimensional text. With the same
figure of speech that I say that I am producing my dissertation in a Windows
environment, I invite the reader to read and experience my text as a virtual environment
that I assumedly created for representation matters. However, approximating my being
part author and part actor, I share the view of my experience as perceived by myself in an
attempt to explain why I presented my text as I did. In this way, I invite the reader to
think about why s/he reads it in the way s/he does. The following narrative may illustrate
my proposition.
We had arrived in Lago do Junco in 1986, a year of drought. People were not fully
recovered from the much more severe drought of 1983, so that it had a cumulative effect.
An examination of economic, environmental and sociological data for that period could
show the effects of the meager "subsistence" fields, rogas. These effects could also be
seen in the squalid legs and arms of the many have-nots of Lago do Junco, who used to
visit me at the time. After the first months of our arrival, as a young mother in my mid
twenties and the wife of the coordinator of the priest's project, I thought I had reasonably
overcome the initial stage of "culture shock," and begun to situate myself in that dynamic
position in-between charity and assistance, and social practice and advocacy.
But when Maria Mandioca came for the third time in a short period to visit me with
her many emaciated children, once again, at their sight, I sent my thoughts to Biafra,
unbearable as it was to admit starvation with names and known faces so geographically
close, within my own country and my home. My bemused distress contrasted with
Maria's singular sense of humor, so it was hard to make sense of the positions of our
relationship. Even then, I had the impression that she had come more for the fun of
watching my weirdness than anything else, which made our perceived positions not quite
hierarchical. With my own healthy baby playing and running around, I had taught Maria
to treat Simone, her undernourished, dehydrated younger baby, following the directions
of the nationwide campaign of a homemade antidehydration mix. I had shared some food
that I knew was just a cloak for their hunger and my guilt. On this third visit, however,
Simone arrived already shivering from a burning fever. While waiting for transportation
to the infirmary in the neighboring town, following the instructions left by the doctor
working in the project, I bathed her skeletal little body to cool down the fever.
The experience of caressing her denied babyhood wrapped in that scaly, flaccid
skin changed my life, my reading, and my authorship for well beyond her death, hours
later. For a snapshot, a lapse in the social order compressed the infinite distance between
hers and my safe, fully lived life into a single point of shared experience of social
impotence. All the material and historical conditions remained, but the author perceiving
and interpreting them changed. Was it just an intellectual experience, at the expense of
her experience with death, which I am writing down without her informed consent? I do
not know. But what I know is that it is exactly this undeletable lesson of "not knowing"
that made this experience a transforming door to the next experience. This experience, an
unstructured environment of social nonsense, turned into a text, undeniably, and ever
since questions and ridicules the authority and power of my authorship, because for a
moment I was part of a text. Thinking about it now, I believe her death did not enunciate
a postmodern death of the author (Rosenau 1992). Rather, this experience preannounced
the painful and lengthy delivery of an author-actor with a specific combination of power
and powerlessness of her own. Writing about shared experiences is therefore based on the
awareness of such a combination, which demands shared responsibilities and risks, and a
careful selection of a theoretical framework.
Where Should We Walk Through: the Theoretical Framework
The ultimate anthropological advice I got from professors and literature before
leaving for the field was to care for the diversity, to expect the unexpected, and to listen
to divergences. Surely I had lots of these, but I was also amazed to hear women in social
movements in different sites in the Amazon, and probably the world around, repeating
the exact same words I had read in my books: "Sex is a biological construction! Gender is
a social construction! Without gender, no sustainable development!" What social
construction is gender after all, to be spoken of so uniformly everywhere? How was this
"common" discourse formed? Or how was it broadcast? By which means were the
notions of gender and sustainable development germinated? What presuppositions did
they involve? From which positions and by whom were they first and continuously
spelled out, impregnating a totalizing language and history of gender relations? Do these
reverberating slogans carry the same goals and effects everywhere? Or do they collide
with other equally powerful (and imposed or proposed) discourses, then being restricted
to certain places, certain social groups, and hierarchies of interest? And above all, what
local discursive and nondiscursive practices do they supplant?
The different situations in which I heard these uniform discourses were
circumscribed to the organized social movements. They belonged to dialogues carried out
in the interface between local social movements and development initiatives. However,
even in these contexts, this uniformity is questioned. During my fieldwork, I had the
opportunity to participate in some of the "women's meetings" promoted by NGOs or
grassroots organizations. In one of these meetings, dona Zl6ia, answering what gender
meant to her, without a pint of irony or cynicism, said: "Genero? G&nero prd mim d o
arroz, ofeijUo, o milho!" Gender? Gender for me is rice, beans, corn!" In Portuguese,
gender is translated as genero, which is indeed a form to categorize men and women, but
genero can be also used in the expression genero alimenticio, meaning edible genre.
Her observation led me to think that: Some women have made the option to really
get into the gender discussions carried out within the social movements as a means to
find new ways to deal with relations between men and women. But some other women
wanted less interference and control in the way they were struggling against their men,
and more support on the obstacles against their struggles for survival with their men.
Nonetheless, the discourses in unison on gender as a solution for the malady of
underdevelopment somehow superseded any discontinuous or dissonant discourse,
presenting all women as a same "Third world woman" speaking about the same gender.
In the literature, authors have also pointed out these differences in meanings and
discourses, which, because of power differentials, result in economic and ecological
material changes. For example, Niekisch (1992) talks about how Europeans' views on
nature have been imposed on forest management of tropical ecosystems originated from
diverse peoples and histories. Through the direct translation and extrapolation of their
terminology and categories, European forestry aiming to engineer the use of forests for
selected marketable timber, reduced a multitude of complex components and species and
relations, labeling them as nontimber forest products. In this mode, entire forests of
babaqu palms were dislocated from center stage, as nontimber sources, and for better or
for worse, to the margins of the focus of attention of investors and donors. These
powerful extraneous discursive and nondiscursive practices driven by market
development began to permeate local ones, daunting local practices of gender relations
and development. Women, who mostly do not participate in timber extraction but in
"nontimber" extraction, were turned into "non-men," being defined by what they were
not. Gradually, even in the so-called community-based forest management projects, flora
and fauna were thereafter designated as "timber and nontimber." And the same happened
with the diverse social groups and relations among them, then reduced into "managers or
non-managers," "participants or non-participants," "organized or disorganized,"
establishing a common language and totalizing history for tropical forests and peoples
around the globe.
I therefore sought a theoretical framework that did not reproduce these discourses
as truths, but rather recognized them, and identified the genesis and use of related notions
and concepts, analyzing them in the different fields of knowledge related to my research.
I discuss the notions of gender here as belonging basically to two distinct fields of
knowledge. One is constructed in close relation to the operative processes of
development as a policy defining international relations, which encompasses agencies
and institutions focusing on so-called poverty alleviation in the Third World. Attention to
women, and later to gender, is an intrinsic and integral part of this operational realm,
where overall debates are about efficiency in reaching development goals.
The other field of knowledge is related to theories and conceptual frameworks
constructed within specific disciplines, and therefore, more subject to debates in which
the ideologies involved are also the object of scrutiny. Development is examined mostly
as an expression of liberal neo-classical economic thought, and expansion of capitalism
by Western powers. Regarding gender in Anthropology, if before it was confined to
I chapters on marriage and kinship, attention to gender aims increasingly to understand the
inequalities and conflicts brought about by economic and ecological changes. Going
I deeper in this disciplinary field, the gender question mobilized anthropologists and
I feminists to analyze inequalities and conflicts among the very scholars, men and women,
speaking from the so-called First and Third Worlds. In sum, as we will discuss next, this
I is a field of knowledge marked by strongly opposing views of gender and development,
I and by a myriad of positions on how to deal with them.
Gender in an Operative Field of Knowledge
U In this operative field, knowledge is produced by elaborating on the success or
I failure of an intervention at either micro or macro level, or envisioning the application of
future actions, aiming to establish development policies. 17 Therefore, permeating the
I research, there is usually an implicit intention of intervention, and attention to gender is
I viewed as a way to operationalize these interventions, as for example, control over
reproduction: "Gender bias is also the single most important cause of rapid population
I growth" (Jacobson 1992); or economic distribution: "gender is a major social factor in
I achieving growth and equity, therefore projects need to mainstream gender" (Moser et al.
1999:13).
3 As institutional bodies ruling this field of knowledge, I selected as major examples
I acting in the Mearim valley: the World Bank (via Northeast Integrated Development
Program and Rural Poverty Alleviation Project Maranhao) and UN (via UNDP and
17 For a thorough analysis of the 'women and development' and 'gender and development'
I approaches, see Kabeer's Reversed Realities (1994).
I
UNICEF). These institutions spell out their gender discourses within an overall
development discourse through conferences, policies, programs and decades of
development, affecting governments and NGOs. "This apparatus came into existence
roughly in the period of 1945 to 1955 and has not since ceased to produce new
arrangements of knowledge and power, new practices, theories, strategies, and so on. In
sum, it has successfully deployed a regime of government over the Third World, a space
for subject peoples that ensures certain control over it" (Escobar 1995a:9).
Regarding gender, the knowledge produced in this field had a major pioneer in
Ester Boserup, who had worked for the Danish government and later for the UN
Economic Commission for Europe. Her intercontinental analysis of agriculture and
technology reflected the goal of intervention, both by controlling reproduction and by
educating girls so that they would not become "inferior workers" (Boserup 1970:220).
Throughout the decades of development, this focus on women, initially assumed by
sectors or programs within these international institutions, such as WID (Women in
Development), was gradually transferred to gender, assumed by both WID and GAD
(Gender and Development).
In initial stages, WID addressed women as homogeneous and isolated targets,
seeking to integrate them more efficiently in a development process. Taking development
as a given, the WID approach intended to understand the specificity of women's roles,
their responsibilities in production and reproduction, assuming women as a homogeneous
category. WID aimed to increase productivity by improving their access to and control of
resources and benefits. The main idea was to make the process of development more
efficient. After about a decade, GAD emerged, approaching women in their socially
constructed relations with men, taking into consideration other social relations (ethnicity,
class, age, race). This perspective resulted in a potentially more conflicted approach, in
that it addresses subordination and inequality, which not only challenges power relations
between men and women within the household, but also power relations in the
development process itself. GAD, since its conceptualization, aimed to introduce social
change (Moser 1993).
In theory, these are the distinctions, and the critiques to WID seem very pertinent.
Though both originated in the context of UN conferences, GAD emerged in 1995
informed and departing from the experiences of WID, which was originated in 1975.
Currently, the groups who are still labeled as WID use mostly the same conceptual
frameworks and practices as GAD, leading me to think of them more as phases than
contrasting approaches. For example, Tinker (1995), who was viewed as pro-WID, wrote
against sectoral programs that isolate and fragment women's lives, advocating for an
inclusion of men in domestic issues. On the other hand, practitioners working with GAD
often ask why they speak of gender when in practice they are working with women only.
In 1999, the World Bank personnel were still unclear about GAD since "World
Bank policy documents on gender lack a common conceptual rationale, language, and
underlying policy approach" (Moser et al.1999:5). The solution was to make a sort of
manual with text boxes, lists of orderly, synthesized findings, and tables. As Moser states
from the beginning of her work, it was a "desk study." After all, "incorporating gender
analysis and gender informed strategies into the Bank's lending and nonlending
operations and research programs is an effective method of improving both the
performance and relevance of World Bank projects" (World Bank 2000).
I understand that many relevant concepts arose from the contexts of UN and World
Bank efforts in implementing GAD, and that they inform aspects of my own research.
However, as an approach I do not think it is fit for ethnographic, long-term, in-depth
anthropological research, because it has at its foundation the aim of a priori intervention
and, to my knowledge, its construction is not based on adequate fieldwork. "This (GAD)
is essential to ensure consistently effective and sustainable interventions" (Moser et al.
1999). In this time in which we are searching for a plural conceptualization of gender,
how can I use a definition of gender, neatly confined in one of the many text-boxes of
manuals, determined a priori, in desk studies in the World Bank's offices? Besides, GAD
is not for just any women, GAD is for women in "underdeveloped" countries. In this
sense, women who do not perceive themselves as "underdeveloped" or in need to be
"developed," have to find their own ways to conceptualize gender, because "GAD
identifies gender as an integral part of a development strategy" (Moser et al. 1999:3). As
an approach, I believe that both WID and GAD are overall approaches to resolve the
UN's and the World Bank's projects, and not necessarily people's projects.
Diverse actors circulate in this field of knowledge. Among them, Tinker (1990,
cited in Kabeer 1996:12) identifies those operating in a pragmatic mode, related to a
mission and agenda viewed as concrete, current, and urgent. The operational and
pragmatic character of their production led Tinker to assume non ideological intentions.
This assumption was rightly criticized by Kabeer, because it necessarily implies a
totalizing, unifying world-view, which makes its hegemonic agenda seemed to be
accepted and adopted for all, "dispensing with the need to spell out the theoretical
premises on which it is founded...However, no advocacy, scholarship or policy is
entirely free from theory or innocent of ideology" (1994:12).
In this field of knowledge, operational definitions such as these spelled by the UN
emerged as central discourses: "There are two kinds of differences between women and
men: sex and gender. Sex is determined by the physical differences exhibited by females
and males. Gender refers to the socially determined differences between the two sexes:
the relationship between women and men and their social roles in their societies or
communities. Gender roles arise from the socially assigned differences between women
and men. Perceptions about men vis-a-vis women are changeable and vary with class,
race, caste, ethnicity, religion, and age and also with time" (UN 1999).
In spite of these apparently straightforward, neutral, ideologically exempted
operational definitions, we can identify specific intentions in the rationales to apply these
definitions. In these rationales we can better recognize elements and intentions related to
the world-view criticized by Kabeer, as in this example given by the World Bank.
"Incorporating gender analysis and gender informed strategies into the Bank's lending
and non lending operations and research programs is an effective method of improving
both the performance and relevance of World Bank projects. If projects in Latin America
and the Caribbean are to effectively achieve this, they should consider whether men's and
women's demands, preferences and existing opportunities differ and, if so, ensure
projects and services are tailored to the needs of both."'8
However, how development not only tailored projects and services to the people's
needs, categorizing them and planning responses, but also tailored the needs themselves,
18 (www.worldbank.org/gender 1999)
was discussed in Escobar's work, which belongs to the second field of knowledge
discussed.
Gender in an Anthropological Field of Knowledge
The field of knowledge regarding gender and development here discussed was
constructed within the discipline of Anthropology almost contemporarily to the "gender
and development" in the operational field, and marked by conflicting positions. 19 By the
end of the 1960s, Hymes (1969) was already urging anthropologists to challenge
development. In the 1980s, Murray (1987:235) published his positive view on a
development project "rooted in anthropological research and whose very character was
determined by ongoing anthropological direction and anthropologically informed
managerial prodding." Meanwhile, Bennet (1988) discussed the ambiguity common to
anthropologists either participating or non participating in development processes
involving the subjects they used to study. In the beginning of the 1990s, Escobar (1991)
criticized Murray's work, initiating a series of publications against development in Latin
America.
In the meanwhile, at the time the absence of women in the first decades of
development began to be questioned, socio-cultural feminist anthropologists were also
shaking the static and harmonious ethnographic male-centered household built by male
anthropologists. Ortner (1972) questioned Radcliffe-Brown and Levi-Strauss. Leacock
(1977) and Leacock and Etienne (1980) challenged Evans-Pritchard, Levi-Strauss, Harris,
and Meillassoux. Using different arguments and perspectives, male anthropologists were
attributing the supposedly universal subordination of women to biological reproductive
19 See Gender at the Crossroads ofKnowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era,
by Leonardo (1991) and Feminism and Anthropology, by Moore (1988).
causes. In coherent structures and organic functions of a society, they marginalized
women as social actors and objectified them as reproducers.
New readings on Marx by Leacock and Sacks, on Weber by Rosaldo, on Lacan
and Freud by Chodorow (Leonardo 1991) set the stage for gender in this anthropological
field of knowledge. Although the study of gender relations in Anthropology shares
notions and methods that emerged in the operative field of knowledge of gender, its focus
on the production of theory, concepts, methodologies, research strategies, and analysis of
empirical observations tends to be less compromised with development goals. In cases of
a more applied perspective, the interventions are not directly driven by development
motifs as goals, and often there is advocacy against development actions and institutions.
Although also informed by the operational approach, and sometimes funded by the same
agencies, it has mostly followed a pace and pursued inquiries diverse in nature and
perspective.
Departing from restricted chapters on marriage and kinship, ethnographers began to
listen to women's voices, and question their invisibility not only in reproduction and
production matters at domestic level, but also in public and political domains. In addition,
contributions from scholars of gay and lesbian, black, and colonized backgrounds
challenged monolithic conceptualizations of gender, demanding a more plural
conceptualization of gender as a departure from total discourses led by Western white
feminists. Furthermore, this conceptualization is better seen as the "coming out" of other
feminisms, which existed long before the emergence of Western feminism, in the lives of
people around the globe. It emerged for broader audiences in the wake of the deep social,
economic, and cultural changes, contemporaneous to women's movements and the
reorganization of the leftist movements beginning in the 1970s, and evolving into new
forms since then. The emergence of new conceptualizations of gender, gestated and
delivered by several sectors of diverse social segments, especially the black, lesbian and
gay movements, and movements of women oppressed by colonialism and development,
has been expressed in this disciplinary field of knowledge by a multiplicity of critiques
and new theoretical constructions.
Beginning with de Beauvoir's (1993) famous phrase: "we are not born women, but
become women," the conceptualization of gender as a social construction distinct from
biological sex has endured several intellectual inquiries. De Beauvoir unmakes
essentialist constructions of the social category women, showing that becoming a woman
is a project that one undertakes within a field of social relations, which are established in
such ways that limit the female subject from her birth. Given such limitations, although
not nature-based, but observed in most if not all societies, Western feminists assumed a
sisterhood among women. The idea of sisterhood is based on the premise of a single
gender identity, constructed in opposition to men, and related to women's universal
subordination, cross-cutting class, race, age, sexual orientation or ethnic categorizations.
However, white Western feminists were challenged by a new conceptualization of
gender, which is associated with the concept of identity as self-ascribed and ascribed by
society (Terborg-Penn 1987:50). The alleged universal experience of being a woman was
questioned by the black women's movement because being a "black woman" is different
than just "being a woman" or just "being a black person," since one's identity is not
dissociable. (And this is a major concept for my dissertation, since I view peasant identity
based on trabalho livre, as inseparable from one's identity as a woman or a man). Black
feminism was then constructed as a distinct, disruptive feminism, because if white
feminism is a form of liberation that does not effectively problematize racism, it can be
viewed instead as a form of oppression. Besides, social experiences in slavery,
colonialism, neo-colonialism, apartheid, and underdevelopment surely bred distinct
feminist practice and theory. According to Sudarkasa (1987), gender differences related
to African societies are not necessarily hierarchical, leading to less oppositional relations
between (black) men and women, and distinct conceptualization of gender.
By contrast, the lesbian critique against the white Western feminist concept of
gender was exactly because of its association with identity, in the sense that identity
indicates a commonality toward one main unit. Advocating against gender as a binary,
lesbian gender theory criticizes gender identity for agglutinating a diversity of gender
relations toward only one of the two units taken for granted by society in general. Phelan
(1994) criticizes de Beauvoir's distinction of women from men by placing women in a
position of "missing something," something which should be regained in the field of
social relations. Feminists moved by Beauvoir's thoughts struggled to achieve "equality"
to men's rights (actually, equality to dominant men's rights). Instead, Phelan (1994:2)
states, "we can never be free to be other than what we are; we can never be 'men' as well
as men can, and we will never be 'women' just as heterosexual women might be."
Therefore, their concept of gender does not hold a binary, but a multiplicity of identities,
and I could see the rightness of her point in several situations in the Mearim valley.
As a third major trend, the conceptualization of gender among women oppressed by
colonialism, development, and globalization presented also a multiplicity of expressions,
even within each country, region, or village. Such conceptualization was deeply
connected to their situation of women exploited by peripheral capitalism, and had a very
informal character. Let's take as an example the women's urban movement in Sao Paulo,
which began as popular mobilizations for practical needs, but in the 1970s and 1980s
transformed into gender-specific strategic interests. At that point, disagreements
regarding a "hierarchy of oppressions" began to divide women as feminist,
partisan-feminist, antifeminist, antipartisan, women-only and men-and-women
movements (Alvarez 1990: 110-136). In Caldeira's (1990:47-75) research with urban
Eclesial Base Communities, heterogeneity of expressions is also a key to understand how
the emergence of gender issues among women provoked wide cultural changes.
These changes led to new forms of political mobilization, many times, displacing
traditional categories such as class, parties, and formal institutions. This was overly
chaotic to Western feminists' understanding, and was regarded as false consciousness,
not feminism, and politically immature. To which, Corcoran-Nantes (1993:155) responds
that women's mobilizations have intrinsically intertwined gender and issues of family
struggles to survive, so essential for developing countries; "whether they choose to
describe these as feminist or not is irrelevant. What is important for women of the
popular classes is that their concerns are firmly on the political agenda." I believe that
Latin America's conceptualization of gender is one that better questioned the Western
feminist "displacement of the production paradigm."
In sum, this plural conceptualization of gender defied the view of the white
woman's experiences as representing all women's experiences, and white Western
feminisms as representing all feminisms. However, the question posed by Benhabib and
Cornell (1987) remains not clearly answered in practice: how can this discourse of
universal sisterhood be compatible with the feminist ideals of social change, since it
erases other essential differences determining women's subordination? On the other
hand, with such a plurality of perspectives, is it still possible to conceptualize gender as a
principle ordering societies, and feminism as an attempt to re-order it?
bell hooks states that all white males oppress white females and black men and
women, all white females oppress black men and women, and all black men oppress
black women. Therefore, gender differences would be undermined by race. Latino,
Asian, and African women might say that all, whether black or white, male or female,
privileged members of economic systems sustaining the capitalist "core" in the so-called
First World are oppressors of all subordinated members of peripheral capitalism. It
follows that globalized relations would undermine the transformational political character
imbued in the conceptualization of gender.
Mohanty provoked a harsh debate that symbolizes the fragmentation caused by the
plural conceptualization of gender in "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and
Colonial Discourses," in which she revealed the causes and consequences on theoretical
as well as practical grounds of maintaining the sisterhood. Two years later, Mohanty
(1993, cited in Gallin, Ferguson and Harper 1995:3) proposed the idea of "imagined
communities." This is a concept, strategic and temporary in character, to create
"imagined communities of women with divergent histories and social locations, woven
together by the political threads of opposition to forms of domination that are not only
pervasive but systemic." If these imagined communities of women will work, it has yet to
be seen, but at any rate, the importance of gender has come a long way, attaining its own
space in the academic debates.
Gender in an Interactive Field of Knowledge
The construction of a critical thought for my anthropological inquiry began with a
historical materialist perspective, structured under a Marxist orientation, since I viewed
negotiations on the contradictions of gender relations as part of struggles for social
change. The explanatory power of this approach helped me to safely work on the
articulations between and contradictions within the different modes of production in the
Mearim valley. This was my point of departure to understand the peasantry in the
Mearim Valley, because I wanted to understand gender relations as integral parts of
overall social relations, keeping a distance from the Western Feminist 'displacement of
the production paradigm' and essentialist assumptions (e.g. Shiva 1988, Mies et al 1988),
and relations of production seemed a fundamental aspect in explaining my observations.
However, the social relations related to production that the Marxist approach
allowed me to grasp had broader and rougher tuning than those required to understand
gender as part of social relations of specific peoples, and class alone did not suffice to
explain both the gender contradictions internal to the social units lived by these peoples
and among different sectors within the working class. Foucault has referred to Marx as
one of the pioneers in breaking with history as a coherently arranged continuum, bringing
conflict and contradiction as disruptions to the unison history told by a supposedly
cohesive subject named humanity (1972:13). Nonetheless, my stay in the villages of the
Mearim valley showed further and less sharply defined contradictions than class
struggles. Surely the concept of class could be further elaborated; as in terms of gender,
Engels had said: "The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the
development of the antagonisms between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and
the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male" (Engels
1972:129). However, in spite of this attribution of original "sin," in the form Marxism
was worked out, unequal class relations minimized gender inequalities to the point of
considering women's struggles against male dominance to be a false consciousness,
disturbing class struggles against capitalism (Maguire 1984). An illustration of this
perspective was the opposition assumed by the union movement in the Mearim valley,
when grassroots women's organizations began to emerge in the late 1980s, alleging that
they were dividing the movement. Later, when it was seen as unavoidable, somewhat
marginal or cosmetic secretariats of women were created.
Kabeer discussed how Marxist feminists (e.g., Safa 1980) attributed oppression of
women by men mostly as a consequence of capitalist oppression of both, and contrasted
these findings to other scholars (e.g., Mies 1980) who attributed women's oppression to
men, especially white men, not as part of a class, but as male human beings in essentialist
terms. The author considers that both approaches "present women as having no choice at
all in the face of overarching structures of power" (1994:54). Indeed, according to
Rakowsky (1995: 286-294), the reactions to the current economic changes promoted by
capitalism cannot be categorized either by class or by gender alone. As economic
exploitation and consequently men's and children's dependence on women increased,
reactions from men varied immensely, ranging from greater valuation of women to
greater violence toward women, and these were results of numerous interacting factors,
varying according to social situations. In addition, as the collection edited by Mohanty,
Russo and Torres (1991) shows, the choices by the so-called "Third World" women
presented a diversity among themselves and a politics of their own to negotiate.
In the same way, the gender contradictions and disruptions that I observed in the
Mearim valley were so fluidly mobile, with such a dynamic permeability, that I felt class
and even the sharply defined binary man-woman categories, demanded further
investigations. I indeed found help from the intellectual investments and the knowledge
accumulated by Marxist feminists (Etienne, Leacock, Leach, Saffiotti) who provided
questioning useful to organize an initial structural framework for working on gender
relations. These are clearly both cause and consequence of merges and clashes among
antagonistic social categories, intra and inter classes. However, the more idiographic my
fieldwork became, the greater the levels of abstraction it demanded. Although my path of
thinking could not dispense with intellectual instruments similar to those that made class
and class relations such explanatory levers, I intended that they work rather as launching
platforms than paradigmatic constraints.
For example, Saffiotti (1977) saw in the intrafamily gender relations in so-called
precapitalist societies, in which women's labor was, although voluntarily and informally,
extracted and alienated from them, the open door for the entrance of the capitalist
relations. I indeed observed several situations in the Mearim valley in which women
received unfair returns for their work, and registered histories telling how these processes
were carried out through several generations. But I also observed situations in which
these intragroup contradictions, rather than propitiating an automatic, free pass to
capitalism, were integral parts of ways of life negotiated among their insiders on a daily
basis. The continuous resilience of these ways of life, with all these internal
contradictions, demonstrates that these social groups have specific forms of resistance
and are not presomething, but, although articulated with capitalism, have an evolving
path of their own. Therefore, talking about gender demanded a finer compass to guide the
understanding of the categories and relations, which compose the discursive practices
swaying the fields of knowledge through which I need to walk.
Coming from experiences lived at the grassroots, observing the contradictions and
mobility of everyday decisions being negotiated between genders vis-a-vis those among
families, sectors of villages, and classes, I decided to begin by organizing my data
according to a Marxist orientation. However, I intended to maintain an open framework
of investigation, in which incompatibilities and divergences were neither forced to fit into
a class model nor erased if they did not fit. Rather, they should be identified and
questioned for the importance of their presence. For example, as I observed women-only
couples leading the most-poor households, I would not discount the experience because
they were only two couples out of sixty in the village. Rather, they became thresholds to
understand the dynamics of contradictions and ruptures of gender norms that make a
village a unit. In another example, I would not attribute false consciousness to those
engaged in interclass alliances or dependencies, because little-known relations (e.g.,
compadrios, resource trading, and especially gender relations) adding to relations of
production may be at play.
In different scales, several attempts to solve these unknown relations have been
made. In the field of knowledge driven by development, for example, the UN has
established the Human Development Indices (HDI), which intends to more accurately
measure well-being than the conventional GDP and GNP. Improvements to incorporate
gender-equity-sensitive indices (GESI) were proposed to the UN as a way to account for
diversity (Anand and Sen 1996). However, we need to be aware that statistical indices on
national data sets, which guide policies driving the agencies of development, cannot
capture thoroughly the nuances in gender inequalities. For example, unlike cases in
Africa, where girls have lower schooling, or in India, where girls and women have higher
mortality rates, Brazil's basic data show the opposite. Do these data indicate that
Brazilian women, especially in the North and Northeast deserve less attention than others
labeled as Third World women, or that men should be automatically prioritized as the
object of development policies instead?
During a discussion with women in the Mearim valley, I talked about the data
shown in the table below, to foment our debate on gender inequalities. Women were
surprised with these data, as if accepting that women in their region have better literacy,
schooling, and life expectancy rates than men's, would damage the discourses sustaining
their movement. My intention was to further discuss these important data, but placing
them in the realm of the complex social relations that produce them.
Table 1-1. Basic indicators for Brazil, north and northeast region
Illiteracy rate for Schooling rate Life expectancy Infantile Infantile mortality rate for
people 15 years for children 7 to at birth (2) mortality rate/ 5 year-old and below/
old and up (1) 14 ears old (1) thousand (3) thousand (4)
Men Women Men Women Men Women Men Women Men Women
Brazil 13.3 13.3 95.3 96.1 64.6 72.3 39.4 30.0 65.5 56.0
North 11.7 11.5 95.3 95.7 65.3 71.4 37.8 27.3
Northeast 28.7 24.6 93.2 95.0 62.4 68.5 58.9 46.3 105.7 86.1
Source: (1) PNAD 1999 [CD-ROM]. Microdata. Rio de Janeiro: IBGE, 2000. Data for illiteracy and schooling exclude
the rural population of Rond6nia, Acre, Amazonas, Roraima, Para and AmapA. (2) Estimations for 1999 extracted from
document IBGE/DPE/DEPIS "projection of population of Large Regions by sex and age 1991 2020." (3) Source:
IBGE/DPE/Departamento de Populaq o e Indicadores Sociais. Divisao de Estudos e Andlises da DinAmica
DemogrAfica. Projeto UNFPA/Brazil (BRA/98/P08). Sistema Integrado de Projeq6es e Estimativas Populacionais e
Indicadores S6cio-DemogrAficos. Estimations obtained by applying indirect demographic techniques for mortality on
information on survival of born alive children provided by women and collected by PNAD 1996. Because of the
technique applied, the results of these estimations refer to 1993/94 and not to 1996. (4) Same source as 3), but data
refer to 1996.
We concluded that models that take these indices, or their interpretations, as sole
reasons for emphasizing attention to gender cannot respond to the gender inequalities that
oppress women and men in the Mearim valley. Rather, we needed to ask ourselves, why,
in spite of these indices, local discourses either by men or by women elicited male
dominance and disadvantages in being a woman? Why, although well aware of the
Brazilian indices, agents of development keep a strong discourse on gender, focusing on
women and development? The apparent convergence between the social movements and
development agencies' discourses seems to form a coherent logical discursive body. Why
then are women (at the margins of the so-called social movements) so reluctant or
indifferent to participate in the proposed endeavors to develop themselves, discontinuing
the logic established by the convergent discourse? I believe that part of the answer is
related to the ruptures and discontinuities discussed by Foucault.
Walking My Path: the Ethnographic Dissertation
Foucault suggests that to study certain discursive practices and the knowledge they
form, one should examine related phenomena of rupture and discontinuity. As I identified
certain discrepancies between the academic explanations about gender and my field
observations, I decided to initiate my research looking at gender as discursive and non
discursive (policies, programs, projects) practices. I began an examination of these
practices by both international agencies of development and grassroots organizations
involved with peasant movements in the Mearim valley. I traced them in both my
literature review (including academic work and products emerged from operative
grounds) and fieldwork. I found that while development agencies and NGOs and formal
grassroots organizations have quite convergent discourses regarding gender and ways to
operationalize it, a diversity of life trajectories has expressed discontinuities,
interruptions, and even colliding discursive and non discursive practices. In Monte
Alegre, for example, life trajectory narratives and the daily living of men and women
expressed a form of social organization that breaks with either victimized women or
women empowered by extraneous agencies. Explanations for the myth of the male
breadwinner (Safa 1995) and the myth of the housewife (Fortmann and Rocheleau 1985,
Thomas-Slayter and Rocheleau 1995) gain new perspectives from those matrifocal
households.
I had looked for support in the historic approach, trying to identify the historical
events and periods, and the social structures and conjunctures, through genealogies and
historical archives, to explain the observed gender relations, but the fluidity and the
contradictory character of the relations did not allow a direct cause-effect explanation,
suggesting rather discontinuities. Foucault questions conventional procedures of
organizing data in periods and hierarchies, which systematize observations into
structurally organized units, composing continuities preestablished by disciplines such as
history, economy, and sociology. He argues against the reduction of all phenomena and
all diversity within societies to one single "face" that fits the logic of certain continuous
sequences of periods and structures in history. He calls this total history, and argues for a
general history, which would account for all the different and discontinuous trajectories
lived by diverse social groups (Foucault 1972:9-10).
I am ethnographically studying a peasantry whose very origin emerges from the
disruption of cultural processes previously carried out by diverse indigenous and African
societies. Therefore, I agree that ancient, modem or contemporary history as
conventionally taught in the Western mode, and the documents available to me by the
writers of this history, should not be sources of automatic and direct reading in
understanding the emic perspective of the subjects. According to Foucault, "history is one
way in which a society recognizes and develops a mass of documentation with which it
is inextricably linked" (1972:7). If this is true, people who are excluded as subjects of a
society are also inextricably absent, as subjects, from the documents that form the history
of this society.
In addition, the subjects I want to study not only have histories diverse from a total
history, but also are diverse among themselves. I believe that an African enslaved man
and a detribalized Kanela woman, even working on the same cotton farm by the end of
the 19th century, might have perceived and lived "the" history of the economic transitions
from colony to empire to republic very differently. A coherent, continuous and total
history is only possible when one assumes an artificially collective, conscious, and
all-encompassing subject named humanity. This erases the diversity of conflicting
livelihoods, considering certain unfit members of societies either as objects or as
represented "subjects" with a consciousness that is not their own, but transplanted from
the authorities telling the total history.
I exemplify my reading of Foucault by taking the historical figure of Zumbi, the
leader of the quilombo of Palmares, formed c. 1630, the large and long-lasting maroon
group in Brazil, as an example. 20 The so-called multi-ethnic Brazilian society celebrates
today a representation of Zumbi that fits in the currently accepted discourse of black
consciousness. This historical analysis, however, while it transforms Zumbi, who was
assassinated by the government in 1695, into a hero, intends to fit the disruptions he
promoted into a historical continuum. It implies that as society advances and changes,
20 Although conventional and out-of-date legal instruments and definitions of quilombos state that
they are the remnant descendants of the runway slaves residing the archaeological sites where
their ancestors formed outlaw communities prior to the abolition of slavery, "they are neither
residual and archaeological remnants nor isolated groups of an extremely homogeneous
population, and were not always constituted from insurrectional or rebel movements. They
progress takes care of injustices that happen along the way. This analysis belongs to a
system of thought that consistently attempts coherency and continuity, so that it can
control and handle present disruptions. The authors and readers of this history view
themselves as a total subject possessing a single conscience. This hegemonic
consciousness can celebrate Zumbi today because it has granted abolition, decriminalized
his rebellion, and now hopes for the integration of the blacks in its societal body, so
that the history of this subject can continue. Nonetheless, we cannot tolerate a current
rebellion by black delinquents at FEBEM (Brazilian institution who supposedly would
care for the so-called delinquent minors), because this is what disrupts the continuity of
our history today, and this is what our consciousness criminalizes in the present. "Making
historical analysis the discourse of the continuous and making human consciousness the
original subject of all historical development and all action are the two sides of the same
system of thought" (Foucault 1972:12).
I realized then that it was not the visible fact that I was non black, an outsider,
Western educated, etc., by itself that was preventing me from understanding the subjects
of my research. Rather, it was that my research perspective was embedded in this system
of thought. I learned that I had chosen Monte Alegre as a research subject because
warrior black women, defending their land and palms, were exactly what I wanted to fit
in my own discourse of gender and sustainability. However, when they did not fit in the
projects with which I expected to help them, well intentionally aimed at environmental
sustainability and gender fairness, I could only conclude that they were not prepared or
consist of groups that developed resistance practices in the maintenance and reproduction of their
characteristic ways of life in a determined place" (Fundagao Palmares 2000:14, 66-70).
organized yet. The explanation was that there was a lack of the right consciousness and
empowerment, so they could not yet participate in "my" totalizing history.
According to Foucault, instead of hiding these thoughts, munching them in my
private accounts, I should rather research them, and should question: first, why certain
observations do not fit in these continuities, and second, why one is compelled to fit
otherwise disruptive observations into these acceptable continuities. To identify both the
continuities and the disruptions, I searched for the loci where trajectories diverged from
dominant discourses on gender. I examined local forms of living gender relations that
seemed points of dispersion from that body of knowledge accumulated in conferences
and fora driven by international agencies of development, and the establishment of non
discursive practices such as polices and programs throughout related decades. Although I
certainly have registered discourses and practices reverberating those prescribed in the
reports and conferences of the World Bank and UN, this uniformity was heard mostly in
the public face of recognized social movements. Ethnographic fieldwork at the margins
of contexts circulated by grassroots organizations, NGOs, and agencies of development
assured the register of a multiplicity of views and expressions of gender as phenomena of
disruption.
For example, the widespread "gender analysis" training, proposed by the "Harvard
team" of the WID sector in the World Bank, in the 1980s, to train its own and other
international agencies' staff (such as USAID, IDRC, and UNDP), examines access to and
control of resources assigned to men and women's roles. 21 Although this approach is
suggested only as a framework to gather and organize data into a gender perspective,
leaving the analysis and conclusion to the researcher and participants (Overholt et al.
1984), it does set a specific social visibility. Carrying out ethnographic fieldwork, I was
unable to thoroughly approach the complex gender-based struggles observed in the field
with this instrumental, without getting blind spots and bumping into "invisible" actors
and relations. The diversities and complexities of access and control expressed in the life
trajectories lived by both women and men, and the fluid hierarchies of negotiations
among the several social categories involved, demanded a more dynamic, relational, and
critical approach to these aspects. Besides, gender analysis as a process of knowledge
acquisition was viewed as a "diagnostic tool." Gender analysis training implied that the
"disease" vector would be somewhere in the surroundings of the "sick" Third World
woman, while the "doctor" herself was out of suspicion, or somehow impersonalized in
the First World.
One of the reasons for these limitations is the epistemology of this process of
knowledge acquisition, which implies an instrumentality specifically adequate to a
certain field of knowledge, that related to the goals of the development agencies:
intervention for poverty alleviation and sustainable growth in a cost-effective way,
through the introduction of women in a predefined process of development. Within this
field of knowledge, although gender has a quite inclusive definition, the diversity and
complexity of gender relations end up being played down by the urges of the rhythms,
play of forces and motivations of development, which is the ultimate goal of the
institutions sustaining this field of knowledge.
21 The NGOs supporting ASSEMA, such as OXFAM and Christian Aid, were more related to
"Gender Planning" training. See this approach led by Moser in Gender Planning and
Development (1993).
Foucault suggests that to examine issues in such a preponderant field of knowledge
requires those epistemological acts and thresholds described by Bachelard, "which
suspend the continuous accumulation of knowledge, interrupt its slow development, and
force it to enter a new time, cut it off from its empirical origin and its original
motivations" (1972:4). I needed therefore to put the knowledge prescribed by the World
Bank and similar agencies on hold, to suspend my intention to "save" the women and to
open myself to experiences of local knowledge. This was necessary because the
discursive practice toward gender was drawing "all phenomena around a single center a
principle, a meaning, a spirit, a world-view, an overall shape" (Foucault 1972:10):
development. One should then look for the "dispersion of points of choice" (1972:37),
identifying where the dispersion of trajectories is detected. My intention became,
therefore, to search for disruptive life trajectories composing a general history of gender
in the Mearim valley, organizing my own view of the dispersion and discontinuities of
the diverse experiences on gender relations.
Therefore, instead of embracing a paradigm and a single theoretical framework, I
keep in mind the insights provided by the accumulation of knowledge and research
efforts, which will support my ethnographic endeavor in answering the following
questions.
Research Questions and Design
In this mode of research, I try to answer the questions below throughout this
dissertation.
* What forms of gender and other social relations are made invisible (by the various
actors)?
* How are gender and other social relations transformed in times of conflict, struggle,
and political resistance?
S How do multiple forms of gender relations combine and evolve in specific
trajectories of village formation and struggle?
Specific theoretical discussions on these research questions will be carried out throughout
related chapters, which were based on the following general research design. My field
research was formally carried out in eight months divided in 2 three-month periods in the
summers of 1999 and 2000, and 2 months in the winter of 2001. Aiming to control for
some of the environmental variables, I designed the process of data collection within
known ecosystems. As indicated in Figure 1-2, I selected 9 municipalities scattered
throughout the Cocais ecological region (MIC/STI 1982). Monte Alegre, a village in the
municipality of Sao Luiz Gonzaga, formed mostly by the descendents of slaves of a
decadent cotton farm of the end of the 19t century, hereafter called terra depreto,22 land
of the blacks, was elected as the primary site of my ethnographic research.
In addition to Monte Alegre, I chose two other terras de preto (Olho d'Agua dos
Grilos and Santo Antonio dos Sardinhas,) and six other villages (Ludovico, Pau Santo,
Coroati, Bom Principio, Sao Josd dos Mouras, and Veloso) to collect qualitative and
quantitative data. Combinations of blacks and Northeastern migrants comprise these six
villages, usually called centros, centers. Both at the survey stage and to test against some
of the concepts I had developed after the first stage, I went to six other villages (P6 de
Pequi, Angical, Sao Lourengo, Vila Dola, Pacas and Sitio Novo) in which the conditions
regarding agrarian and social organization differed from the villages I had elected as
focus sites. In the last two mentioned villages, I applied a short qualitative survey to
22 According to Almeida (1989), terras depreto are those lands which were donated, bought or
acquired by former slave families, with or without a legal document. There are some cases in
which the state conceded land for these families as compensation for services in warfare. The
author highlights as a main characteristic of these social formations the use of the land
(1989:174).
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municipalities in which research sites were located. Source MIC/STI 1982
check on some variables. These six villages were totally unknown to me and, are
estate privately owned by individuals, families or entrepreneurs, named fazendeiros. In the
i ..., ..] ...I .. , ..
s._ i. J .. A. M, -' .-WiAs .
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check on some variables. These six villages were totally unknown to me and, are
Mearim valley, these units usually hold more than one mode of production, having a capitalist
urban neighborhoods in the municipalities of Cod6 and Olho d'Agua das Cunhas, where
people were practicing variations of the same mode of production.My intention was to
contrast social situations observed in diverse settings to better refine my view on gender
relations.
Qualitative data were systematically obtained from 48 men and 52 women through
ethnographic interviews conducted by myself. Quantitative data regarding demographic
and economic variables were collected through 800 structured questionnaires applied to
434 interviewees, in consecutive years, with the help of locally hired assistants, high
school-level youths in their 20s, trained by myself. I also carried out a process of shared
interviewing, as Roberto and I assumed that a man interviewing men and women would
obtain different results than a woman interviewer and vice-versa. Quotes from his
interviews will be indicated in the text.
One data set essential to my work is my collection of life histories and diaries by
the subjects themselves. Throughout the years in the Mearim valley, here and there I met
opportunities to ask literate people willing to write about their experiences and share the
originals with me. Although these opportunities were rare, given the level of illiteracy
and time constraints of many key interviewees, these treasures were explosions of life
hidden in tortuous, suffered calligraphies. These monographs, partly directed to me, but
partly written as a diary, provided me another perspective from that of the recorded and
transcribed interviews, which although open-ended were nonetheless a dialogue subject
to different forms of interference. Another experimental method of data collection was
base, but often comprehending other types of economic relations. Variations are due mostly to the
political arrangements providing for its origin and maintenance throughout time. Usually with
few employees, its main activity has been extensive cattle ranching, through labor extraction from
residing landless families.
recorded interviews carried out by grandchildren with their grandparents, and by
daughters with their mothers. In one way or another, the emphasis was to understand the
content by examining the relations involved to obtain it, in addition to the information
itself.
In addition to fieldwork in the villages, I also invested in archival research for
historical data in the Benedito Leite Public Library, Public Archive of the State of the
Maranhao, Academia Maranhense de Letras, used bookstores, and local parochial
archives. Contemporary archival data were obtained at INCRA National Institute for
Colonization and Agrarian Reform, ITERMA Land Institute of the State of Maranhao,
NGOs, Bank of the State of Maranhao, and my own files from my former job as
practitioner.
Research Methodology
My concerns with transparency of representation and immediacy of experience, as
prescribed by premodem ethnography, did not aim at positivist and objectivist goals of
finding the truth. Instead, for the specific, selected issues, to which I thought my research
would benefit from objective information involving material conditions, I applied a
structured questionnaire following basic statistical procedures. From modem
ethnography, I took advantage of techniques of participant observation, experimental and
visual methods, and ethnographic interviewing. From the crisis that followed modem
ethnography, I took lessons from critiques of its practices (e.g. frozen and fragmented
representations) and results (e.g, collusion to colonialism). Current ethnography,
interpretative, postmodern, and feminist contributions helped me to adapt different
approaches to find my own (See Denzin 1994 and 1997).
Insights from Marcus, Clifford, Fischer, and Foucault led me to recognize the
inseparability of the author's subjectivity and the representation of Other's realities.
Therefore, the life trajectories I discuss in this dissertation do not intend to be historical
truths about the subjects, but are accounts of what and how I heard and selected parts, and
presented them in ways that made sense to me and to the reader at whom I am aiming at.
According to Marcus and Fischer, ethnography is determined by its context, rhetoric,
institutions, generalization, political standing, and history, so I need to recognize the
partial nature of my accounts. The validity of the trajectories I am presenting does not
come from an assumed immediacy of "being there," but by how I specify who speaks,
who writes, when, where, with or to whom/ under what institutional or historical
constraints (Foucault 1972).
The life trajectories studied here are not representations of cultural types, but
allegories spelled out by gendered subjects (Clifford and Marcus 1986:19) to a gendered
researcher. The narratives and life trajectories are not direct representations or synthesis,
but allegorical instruments "to tell a story" about ways of life (Clifford 1986:98-100), and
from this story, the reader and the author may extract theoretical and practical findings of
this dissertation. As a research strategy to better tell this story, I describe aspects of my
life experiences in the Mearim valley to set the context of my research. This "form of
self-narrative that places the Self within a social context" (Reed-Danahay 1997:9),
intends to identify the blind spots of my perspective, and aim for a more inclusive and
self-critical ethnography. I rely on a more reflexive, blended narrative method, to produce
a self-ethnographic text (Hayano 1979), including narratives about myself as a familiar
"window on the objective facts of historical and ethnographic events" (Peacock and
Holland 1993, cited in Brettel 1997:225).
Chapter Organization
Through this ethnography, I intend to analyze ways of life in the Mearim valley,
where gender relations cannot be dissociated from trabalho sem patrdo, both a material
and symbolic set of social relations performed ideally in a land free of landlords, through
practices of common use of land and forest resources. The next three chapters of this
dissertation refer to life trajectories examined through narratives contextualized in a
municipality, a village, and a family. The theme linking these first three chapters is the
visibility attributed to specific social actors, related to gender issues, in different social
situations.
In Chapter 2, I present the little known life trajectory of Maria Pretinho, a former
slave head of household, whose life trajectory was made invisible by the cumulative
twists in historical accounts constructing the municipality of Lago do Junco, a place she
and her sons had founded in 1925. As the Franciscans friars working there had chosen
Lago do Junco as our first residence, I describe our entrance to the field as an
ethnographic strategy to delimit the object of research and visualize selected aspects of
the research. I selected the context of Lago do Junco as a municipality for this analysis
because its formation involves the social, political and economic aspects that answer my
first research question: What forms of gender and other social relations are made
invisible (by the various actors)?
In Chapter 3, I present the trajectory of dona Valeriana Parga in the formation of
Monte Alegre, a single village in the municipality of Sao Luis Gonzaga, to introduce the
view of a field marked by a diversity of life trajectories. A narrative by her descendants
illustrates how the village was formed throughout times of captivity, trabalho livre, and
struggle for their land. My choice of Monte Alegre is because of its strong illustration of
how the visibility won through their struggle over land was appropriated by
developmental matters of the state. Analyzing their allegorical representation, I attempt to
answer the second research question: How are gender and other social relations
transformed in times of conflict, struggle, and political resistance?
In Chapter 4, idiographically deepening my analysis, through the trajectory of dona
Vitalina Andrade, I examine gender relations within a single family, the Andrades.
Looking at genealogies and few historical documents, I carry out a kinship and marriage
study as a point of departure to understand gender relations at the family level. Rather
than searching for organic functions engendering structural cohesion, I identify the
contradictions and dispersion in the dynamic process through which families build a
village. However, to answer the third research question: How do multiple forms of
gender relations combine and evolve in specific trajectories of village formation and
struggle? I needed to expand my analysis. I contrasted two other families with the
Andrade family: the masters' Parga family and the Sakiaras, 24 a family of Japanese
peasants who came to substitute for the slave labor.
Having discussed gender as a social relation in several contexts and under different
angles of visibility, I expect to have fine-tuned my understanding of the diverse
discourses and practices from the different actors in their dynamic positioning. I believe
my analytical instrumental is sharpened to detect attempts to totalize and control, and
detect the nuances of interaction of the symbols with their material expression. With this
awareness gained, in Chapter 5, I draw some interpretations on quantitative and
qualitative data collected in seven other villages in the Mearim valley, in addition to
Monte Alegre. The results of statistical manipulation, which I interpret and discuss in the
light of Chayanov's theory of the peasant economy, refer to villages with relative access
to land and forest resources. My intention is to identify the diversities and specificities of
the Mearim valley peasant economy through quantitative data. Situating gender
throughout four stages in a life cycle, I analyze some of the differences between the
people of the Mearim valley and either the Chayanovian peasant or the capitalist farmer.
In Chapter 6, I pass through villages where I had never been, where forms of
resistances are not recognized as social movements, to check on the concepts and ideas
learned from my main sites. To answer my three research questions, I carry out a
theoretical discussion on gender relations in the political economy of the Mearim valley. I
begin by exploring statements on the demise of the peasantry as a form to minimize the
disruptive character of trabalho sem patrdo and engulf the peasantry in the monolithic
and shared road of development of capitalism. I carry on the Marxist insights on
disruption presented by class antagonisms, to other forms of discontinuities presented by
ethnicity in the dispersion of ways of life.
In this chapter, I bring together insights gained from the multiple trajectories and
situations studied, to discuss the clashes and convergences of the material and symbolic
conditions delineating ways of life centered on trabalho sem patrao, a form of labor from
which gender relations cannot be dissociated. As I conclude, I expect to have presented a
fair story about the how multiple forms of gender relations are combined, and often
reversed and overturned during conflicts and struggles. And I hope I have embraced my
24 It reads Sakihara, but as many Japanese names, it was changed by notary offices in Brazil.
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reader with the view of this multi-faceted general history that has been denied and made
invisible by the total history of global and national society.
CHAPTER 2
MARIA PRETINHO MADE INVISIBLE: SOCIAL BLINDNESS IN THE
CONSTRUCTION OF GENDER IN LAGO DO JUNCO, A MUNICIPALITY IN THE
MEARIM VALLEY
Introduction: the Trajectory of Maria Pretinho Made Invisible
In the Chapter 1, I presented my research setting and its components: the
researched, the researcher, the research site and questions. I also introduced the fields of
knowledge through which the research would be approached. I stated my decision to put
dominant discourses of gender on hold, and open myself to new knowledge. In this
chapter, therefore, as I describe my entrance to the field for the first time, my objective is
to get rid of any preestablished frames that imply assumed knowledge, and may disturb
the ethnographic explorations of unknown territories.
My intention is to reverse what that little boy did when he screamed that the
emperor had no clothes. In that story, the different actors, afraid of unveiling ignorance in
front of authority, ended up "seeing" what was invisible. In this chapter, we will work on
the reasons why the different social actors in the Mearim valley were making invisible
what was otherwise visible. My argument is that, for fear of contradicting well
established discourses on gender, and becoming unfit for goals of development (e.g.,
project funding), liberation (e.g., church support), knowledge (e.g., scholarly approval),
or a social movement (e.g., activists approval), we end up blind to a multitude of
trajectories and relations that otherwise would be visible.
I believe that the safety of preestablished analytical frameworks, based on well-
accepted discourses on gender, prevents us from understanding the multiple forms of
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gender relations that are made invisible by our cultural blindness. In the moment I spelled
out the word "gender," it seemed that everybody already knew exactly what my research
I was about. Either at UF or at ASSEMA, the word "gender" recalled discourses related to
"women in development" or "gender and development." It seemed that these uniform
U discourses of gender that currently permeate the academy, agencies and grassroots
3 organizations had already synthesized all that was to be understood, and we were ready to
apply such syntheses in the field. However,
U all these syntheses that are accepted without question, must remain in suspense.
They must not be rejected definitively of course, but the tranquility with which they
I are accepted must be disturbed; we must show that they do not come about of
themselves, but are always the result of a construction the rules of which must be
known, and the justifications of which must be scrutinized: we must define in what
I conditions and in view of which analyses certain of them are legitimate; and we
must indicate which of them can never be accepted in any circumstances (Foucault
1972:26).
I One way to break with the notion of gender as a well-known and reductive
I synthesis is to identify "the dispersion of the points of choice" (Foucault 1972:37). The
dispersion of points of choice should be studied by looking at the intersection between
I cultural norms defined by a people's ethnicity and the agency of its members in living
I these norms. By identifying loci of diversity of trajectories, and the points in which social
actors make different choices and take divergent directions, which do not fit into the
I continuous total history, I can start to collect and examine discontinuous trajectories that
I build the general history of gender in the Mearim valley.
To achieve my intent, I started by examining gender relations in the Mearim valley
U through the few available accounts of the life trajectory of the former slave Maria
I Pretinho and her sons. Although the Pretinho family was the founder of Lago do Junco in
1925, and although it was the first municipality we were introduced to in the Mearim
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valley in 1986, her trajectory was absolutely unknown to us until 2001. In his last
fieldwork, Roberto Porro obtained accounts of her life through an interview given by
Dona Maria Jos6 Pinheiro, our next-door neighbor for 4 years, a descendant of the
fazendeiros who have ruled Lago do Junco basically since the 1930s. The biographical
details of Maria Pretinho's life are practically lost, but it is exactly this unconcealed
social invisibility that has a major explanatory power in the process of constructing
gender relations in the Mearim valley.
Rather than excavating traces left by her, or making guesses about her, I examine
how someone like me, entering Lago do Junco, is led to a blindness to her history, and
consequently, toward a diversity of explanations for the present realities. Therefore, what
I am calling "the trajectory of Maria Pretinho" is not exactly that of a woman who lived
and died in the beginning of the last century, but the representation of a multitude of
trajectories hidden by local and official discourses. By examining the social blindness
that makes "her" invisible, I intend to understand the current actors and context of this
erasing process, and its effects on gender relations.
I selected the municipality of Lago do Junco as a scenario for this inquiry on social
invisibility, because it offers a good representation of the dialectical forces inducing a
dispersion of forms of living gender relations in the Mearim valley. The narrative about
Lago do Junco integrates effects of agrarian policies, systems of political representation,
and pastoral actions on the social relations within and among its villages, and between
them and other sectors of this municipality. I take as a point of departure the description
of Lago do Junco as a biophysical, social, economic, and political environment, in which
I begin to refine my questions about gender relations. Through the examination of the
official and the oral history of the town and the villages, I place my focus in their
interconnections, to detect what is made invisible and what is not.
Therefore, this is neither a geographical area study nor a historical examination of a
period, but an ethnographic study of a theme, gender relations, contextualized in a time
and place, carried out by an equally scrutinized observer. I organize this description using
the methodological concept of social situation. As suggested by Gluckman, social
situations "are events [the researcher] observes, and from them and their
interrelationships in a particular society, he abstracts the social structure, relationships,
institutions, etc. of that society. By them and by new situations, he must check the
validity of his generalizations" (1958:2). Throughout the text, I position my own insertion
in such a scenario to clarify how and why I am selecting specific windows through which
I establish my points of observation of the object of research, as a means to avoid taking
this specific view as the single, unifying reality of the Mearim Valley. Nevertheless, by
working on this idiographic data systematized ethnographically, I expect to obtain
reliable and valid concepts useful for situations beyond the valley and time period.
Focusing on gender relations operating in the local system of production observed
in the municipality of Lago do Junco, I begin to explore its connections to local, national
and international processes leading governmental policies and Catholic actions in the
Amazon. Such a step allows me to clarify my original conception of gender relations with
which I, an agronomist and social practitioner intending to promote local development
and conservation, at the service of the church, wished to liberate my fellow oppressed
women. As a result, I can contrast such a preconceived notion and the observed relations
that submerged the naYvet6 of my ignorance. From this contrast, by the end of the chapter,
I expect to present the social situations at the municipal level leading to dispersion of
trajectories and potential changes in gender relations, and to spell out further questions
for the next levels in which I intend to explore the meaning of gender in the Mearim
Valley.
In section II, I describe the town and the interior of Lago do Junco, setting the stage
through which I was introduced to its geography, history and politics, while gathering
related social situations for later analysis. I examine the relations within and between
these two social environments and respective main agents: the town and the villages, the
landlords and the peasants, and their respective allies. In section III, I describe a way of
life emerging from these social relations, the joining of the church in defense of the land
and liberation goals, and the system of political representation and governmental acts, as
locally processed by the people. I finish the section by discussing the formation of social
movements in Lago do Junco. In section IV, I conclude this chapter by identifying the
relations still generating social invisibilities. The reasons why Maria Pretinho was made
invisible help me to elicit the situations at the municipal level that induced a dispersion of
trajectories, and delineate the first ideas toward a conceptualization of gender in the
Mearim valley.
Entering the Field for the First Time
Arriving at the Town of Lago do Junco: No Signs of Maria Pretinho
Getting a ride with the church to get on the road with the people
Getting a ride from the Catholic church, we entered the Mearim Valley for the first
time in March of 1986. A cheerful German agronomist working for Misereor, an agency
of cooperation linked to the Catholic church in Germany, and collaborating with the
Franciscan vice-province of Bacabal that had hired Roberto, picked us up at the capital
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airport. He would take two German Catholic volunteers and us to the interior of
Maranhao in a four-wheel-drive Toyota, a vehicle known locally as "the priests' car." He
and his wife, a nurse, had worked in Africa, and Northeastern Brazil would add to their
experience in the so-called Third World.
Leaving our non-Catholic, middle-class lives in SAo Paulo, we began to participate
in a perceptual environment in which Maranhao belonged to a whole block of
underdeveloped countries, clearly mapped by governments, and national and
international institutions, including the church, each one with its intervention agendas.
The German agronomist and nurse formed the ideal pair to help to fix the impoverishing
system of production, and heal the consequent "Third World" ailments. I think of being
introduced by them in the job, as an honor. Notwithstanding, it was also a means to train
Brazilians, the locals, to absorb this view and a missionary spirit, to be the carriers of the
good news, be it a new system of cultivation, a way to treat diarrhea, or a Christian way
to introduce a certain kind of development. Poverty was out there, and combating it was
our mission, in the spirit of the Liberation Theology embraced by the Franciscans.
At the theological level, since the 1960s, Latin American theologians were
proposing "liberation in the oppressed and exploited land of Latin America," and
Gutierrez, in his analysis on development, would propose substituting it by liberation, as
a better expression of the goal of life with dignity, and agency for one's own destiny
(Gutierrez 1988:14-17, 64). In Brazil, Friar Boff would say, regarding what had been
proposed for the so-called Third World, "the development in question is obviously not
the development of the nation as a people. Rather what is meant is development of
capitalist categories, a development whose sole subjects and beneficiaries are the elite
minorities" (Boff 1989:196).
At the practical level, however, by that time, it was not clear how liberation in the
practice of improving production would be different from development, at least for most
of the grassroots agronomist agents in the field such as us. Although many agents
proposed adaptive or alternative technologies to achieve development in a more
sustainable or politically correct way, only a few stopped to ask if and how people
wanted such development, or even wondered what it was, after all. Regarding gender,
liberation proposed participation of women as subjects, but at least in principle, so did
discourses on "gender and development."
Inexperienced or plain ignorant, by the time we entered the field, we were just
happy to know that we were not going to spend our lives dealing with pesticides or
agricultural bulldozers to enrich Monsanto or Caterpillar, as much of our training as
agronomists had directed us. Being on the proper side of the class struggle was already a
good start, we thought. We were about to become agents of development and
conservation in the poorest Brazilian state,' where social movements were alive and some
secondary forests still stood. Very soon we began to realize that this was not enough, and
what a long way we would have to go to figure out the meanings of development and
conservation, later integrated in concepts related to "sustainable development." Even
though we were not Catholics, we had the opportunity to go through this learning cycle
within a politicized grassroots movement, as since the 1970s, sectors of the Catholic
S91% of all municipalities of the state of Maranhao live in conditions that critically affect
childhood mortality, 66% of rural households lack access to proper sanitation facilities, and 86%
have inadequate access to safe water. 66% of total heads of households in the rural areas have less
church were the most relevant institutional channel bringing visibility to the social
movements in the Amazon, and they had opted for getting on the road with the poor.2
There werefazendeiros on this road
Our destination, Lago do Junco, was a town between the Graja-i and Mearim rivers,
the Mearim Valley, which averages annual temperatures ranging from 240 to 280C, and
annual rainfall between 1,500 mm to 2,000 mm, mostly concentrated in the "winter"
season running between December and May. The majestic parade of babaqu palms
(Attalea speciosa, syn. Orbignyaphalerata) on each side of the road, standing out in
some pastures, contrasted with the flat carpet ofjaraguc grass, or the so called capim
lageado (Hyperrhania rufa), that resulted from the complete elimination of the palms in
some otherfazendas. Both species adapted extraordinarily well in the soils of the
ecological zone "Cocais," such as the eutrophic red-yellow podzolic soil type
encountered in the uplands of the Mearim valley. The alluvial soils in the bottomlands
were also associated with the dense stands of babaqu palms (Anderson et al 1991:19),
providing ideal conditions for rice cultivation by the peasants. Although the rains were
not so good in that year's irregular winter, the landscape still looked green and fresh.
Joyful children, jumping in the igarap&s3 that crossed the roads, expressed the vibrancy
of this season.
This joy contrasted with the cruelty of the human built environment. Here and
there, squeezed between the road and the fazendas' barbed wire fences, there were
than or equivalent to one minimum wage (U$120 in 1997) (IBGE/UNICEF 1991, cited in World
Bank 1997).
2 See Schmink and Wood 1992:180-183; Adriance (1995); Hoonaert (1992); and Schmink
(1992).
3 Igarapis are seasonally intermittent water streams, which allow fishing as an important activity
integrated to the agricultural and extractive peasant calendar.
houses, sometimes lines of twenty to thirty taipa4 houses on both sides. Fazendas had not
only taken over every single piece of land with easy access along the roads, but had also
advanced well into the interior. We learned that these houses were villages of people
displaced from the interior by thefazendas, becoming what are called nowpovoados de
beira depista, roadside villages. There, men have become a source of cheap labor for
clearing pastures and women extractors of babaqu kernels, husks, and charcoal, gathered
from what was left of the forests: palms scattered throughout pastures. To respond to
these economic and ecological crises, members of the church in the Mearim valley, like
others throughout Latin America, dared to find their social role and place on these roads.
The Franciscans in the Mearim valley expressed this commitment through several
initiatives in social mobilization, and started ACESA, a project on education in health
and agriculture, with its headquarters in Lago do Junco.
The town of Lago do Junco had a different origin than these roadside villages, but
was equally a place with multiple histories within its general history, involving
post-slavery, immigration, and frontier settlement processes. Dona Maria Jose Pinheiro,
68 years old, daughter born to one of the mainfazendeiros in the municipality considered
to be its founder, tells her history of Lago do Junco: "My father arrived here in 1925; he
had run away from Grajaf, 5 and came with uns Pretinhos, some Little Blacks, by the
4 Taipa houses are the usual mud-and-wattle type of houses framed by wood poles in each corner,
with a double net of babacu leaf stems tied with cip6 escada, a vine, structuring the walls, which
are filled with mud. The roof is made of thin round branches placed in an orderly way, and
covered with whole young babaqu leaves neatly tied to them with cip6 escada. Doors and
windows are usually made of unprocessed wood or mats handcrafted with babacu young leaves.
5 In the shaky period after the abolition of slavery and subsequent changes in the rural economy,
followed by the fall of the empire and rise of an uncertain republic, violence spread throughout
the so-called sertlo maranhense, and the town of Grajaui was one of the famous spots of agrarian
conflict. Extended families divided between liberals and conservatives were struggling for local
power, while former slaves were struggling for survival. Defeated rural leaders had their family
name of Abel Pretinho, Antonio Pretinho, and an old woman, Maria, who was their
mother, and there were Cicero Pretinho, Jflio Pretinho, all brothers ... They came,
slashing a trail, making their way with machetes, axes. Dad was 15 years old in 1925.
The others (the black men) were already adult men." According to her father, an Indian
they met in the middle of the forest gave directions to a lake full of straw weeds, named
thereafter Lago do Junco, Lake of the Straw Weed, on the banks of which the Pretinho
family settled themselves, becoming the assituantes, 6 the first ones to arrive and found a
settlement.
The Pretinho's settlement was made within the large municipality of Sao Luis
Gonzaga, which was accessed to the capital Sao Luis through the Mearim river and had
commercial connections with Caxias, then known as Aldeias Altas, where cotton
production had been established since the second half of the 18th century. However,
having come from Grajaui, Maria Pretinho and the ones who followed her seem to belong
to another movement. A southern town founded in 1811, Grajau, earlier known as Porto
da Chapada, was the result of a cattle ranching movement coming from Bahia, and
passing through Pastos Bons, which in 1751 already had forty fourfazendas. While some
headed toward the west, in the direction of the Araguaia-Tocantins, others went up east to
the Mearim, one of the humid valleys of Maranhao (Velho 1972:24). More than 30
members sent away, and the humid valley of the Mearim river began to serve as a destination for
them and for former slaves in search of the terra sem dono, the land without landlords.
6 Assituantes are the first people to arrive and settle in a place, the pioneers. They usually build
the first shelters, and then houses, and plant the first roqas, which are going to provide support to
them and to the newcomers. These give them the right to organize the settlement according to
culturally established meanings and norms. Assituar implies, therefore, not only to have the
material resources to hold on to that land until the first harvests, but to have the power to
articulate the social relations in which people will be engaged in that land.
years after abolition, to live on trabalho livre, black families were still moving in search
of lands without landlords, often led by women.
In her narrative, the daughter of the accompanying white boy refers vaguely to
Maria as a subject: "there was an old woman" or "the old woman." Nonetheless, we can
imply Maria's leadership from the details of her actions in the process of founding Lago
do Junco. Consistent to roles assumed by women in former slaves' and their descendants'
families, Maria brought together the social and material means to establish a peasant
settlement in a land free of landlords. She not only organized the means of material
production, but also social reproduction, taking care of the sick, organizing parties, and
leading religious matters. "They had parties at night, they danced, men with men."
As one of the men in the pioneer group died while trying to slash a large tree to
plant roga, Maria Pretinho made a promise to God, and ordered the construction of a
chapel and saint statues to protect the people. The wooden statues were ordered from a
woodcrafter and displayed in the chapel, consistent with the unique Christianity that
emerged in the Amazon, free from the dominance of priests and sacraments, but "very
devotional, non-sacramental, but intensely devoted to the veneration of the saints"
(Hooraert 1992:401).
This unique way to live religion was accompanied by unique ways to live gender.
Women leading pioneers, commanding religious matters, and men dancing with men
were very different from the discourse practiced by the most vocal contemporary
residents of Lago do Junco. "Man does not dance with man, ever!" "Women take care of
7 There are no statistical data about the significance of the groups led by women in these
movements, but in my qualitative interviews, they were not rare. In 2000, doing fieldwork in the
westernmost state of Acre, I interviewed an old black woman whose grandmother, a midwife, led
a group from the northeast up to the frontiers with Bolivia.
the church's things, it is to keep everything very well organized... The priest rules." In
Maria's case, instead of the omnipresent patriarchal Latino husband (Boserup 1970, Nash
and Safa 1980), in the role of the female head of household, we imply the absent father
or, more probably, absent fathers, and in the role of religious leader, the absent priest.
The official history smudges these disruptive histories. In the same way that the
Indian and the Pretinho brothers' achievements in finding the right place, establishing the
first roqas and structures in Lago do Junco were minimized, Maria's trajectory turned
into a folkloric amusement, or a not-valid history. The road replaced her trails; the house
of afazendeiro displaced her chapel; and the statues were stolen mysteriously. Not only
in the official history, but in the very local accounting in the mouths of the haves and
have-nots of Lago do Junco, the legacy of Maria Pretinho and her sons was made
invisible. And as we joined the social movements in 1986, her history was not visible
there either.
It seems that very early in the narrative, other characters, relations and devotions
took over the central roles and shares of the total history, economy, and politics of Lago
do Junco. Although slavery had been formally abolished since 1888, rules were
differently applied to the leading old black woman and the accompanying young white
teen. Power differentials ruling the colony, and later the empire and republic, validated
specific subjective perceptions of gender, ethnicity, and race. The subjective perceptions
of the white male settlers were more valid than Maria Pretinho's perceptions and
practices, and constructed objective structures reproducing these differentials (Bourdieu
1999). These objective structures and hierarchies defined differentiated access to land and
forest resources, to markets and public services, and above all, to political representation.
Specific definitions of gender, ethnicity and race became selecting factors in the
historical formation of citizenship in Lago do Junco, and the Pretinho family was
displaced from their symbolic roles as assituantes.
These displacements also involved forms of gender relations considered disruptive.
Other forms of gender relations took their place, while gender relations lived by Maria
Pretinho became invisible for their noncompliant character. As the daughter of the white
boy describes her own life: "The women here were housewives to take care of their
houses, only having children, and raising them with the help of their husbands. But it was
not for the women to work on servigo grosseiro, rough work, no. I never worked, had a
job... My husband had condition." Her husband decided and provided for everything.
And this is the visible picture consistent with the totalizing discourse about the Latino
women at all class levels, who had to bow to the patriarchal father in all matters outside
the home (Nash and Safa 1980).
Therefore, when we arrived in Lago do Junco 60 years later, the names of the
patriarchs Joao Corr6a, Narcisio Rodrigues, Didi Arruda, Leao Leda, Juca Pinheiro, and
coronel8 Hosano Gomes Ferreira, thefazendeiros, were the ones introduced to us as the
ruling past and present of Lago do Junco. And in the years I lived there, I had never
heard, as I never asked, about Maria Pretinho, taking the official and popular accounts as
the total history of Lago do Junco, and becoming myself another instrument of its
reproduction. In the present, there were no black, let alone black womenfazendeiras, and
8 Coronel was a title conceded by the provincial government in the hierarchy of the Guarda
Nacional, created in 1831 by Diogo Feij6, to designate the commander-in-chief of a municipality,
usually the most powerful fazendeiro, merchant or, later, industrialist. By the end of the 191h
century, with the extinction of the Guarda Nacional, the term remained during the republican
regime to designate the political chiefs, who continued to rule locally as patriarchs. "The term
Indians were just a folkloric past. From the mists of Lago do Junco's clashing histories,
we can begin also to surmise clashing notions of gender.
For the official history, the genealogy of municipalities (IBGE 1999. Genealogia
dos Municipios. Unpublished document of IBGE/state of Maranhao. Sao Luis: IBGE
IBGE 1999a) explains the origin of Lago do Junco as a political division. Sao Luis, the
first city in Maranhao, was founded in 1612, giving origin to Itapecuru Mirim in 1817,
which was disaggregated into several municipalities throughout the years. Among them,
in the locality where the formerfazenda Machado was established, which in 1844 was
made into a Freguesia,9 Sao Luis Gonzaga was declared a municipality in 1854. Lago do
Junco, settled by the Pretinhos in 1925, was one of its localities, which turned into a
municipality itself in 1961, in response to the demands of the heads of the most weighty
extended families. Similarly, because of long years of disputes among these so-called
political leaders, one of Lago do Junco's rival villages, Lago dos Rodrigues, also became
a municipality in 1994, taking 117.8 km2 and leaving Lago do Junco with its current 600
km2 (IBGE 1999a).
Certainly I had already heard and read in school text books about coronelismo'0
and voto de cabresto,' coerced vote, but being raised in a social environment completely
coronelismo penetrated the political-social evolution of our country, particularly in the party
politics of the Brazilian municipalities" (Basilio de Magalhaes, cited in Leal 1949:21)
9 Freguesias were circumscriptions defined by the Catholic Church, being groups of villages
aggregated around a main church.
10 See Leal's (1975) Coronelismo, Enxada e Voto and Hoefl's (1985) Harnessing the Interior
Vote: the Impact of Economic Change, Unbalanced Development and Authoritarianism on the
Local Politics of Northeast Brazil.
" Voto de cabresto is an allusion to a domesticated animal's obedience, as cabresto means bit.
Part of the violence between rival groups, this intense and broad engagement with local party
politics can be also observed in electoral processes involving voto de cabresto: induced or forced
vote by economic, psychological or physical coercion. In Brazil voting is mandatory. For
example, Lago do Junco currently has 9,827 residents. Its 5,903 residents, 16 years old and up,
registered as voters (60%) have demonstrated high electoral commitment in the last election, in
alienated from party politics, the intensity and personal nature of northeast conflicts over
local political leadership still in the 1980s, seemed the ultimate demonstration that I was
indeed in another social universe. The unique and violent local politics were based on the
dominance offazendeiros, sometimes also assuming the role of comerciantes, merchants,
struggling among themselves, and controlling peasants living in their domains or
dependent on their commerce. As initially land tenure was not an issue because of its
abundance, power was often concentrated in the hands of these merchants (Velho
1972:41). "The richest man in Lago do Junco, [coronel Hosano] started with a little store,
so small that his counter was made of babagu stems, which my father helped him to
make." Later, the social roles of merchants andfazendeiros were linked also to that of
doutor, someone graduated in Medicine or Law (Leal 1975:23, Nunes 2000:285-288). As
thefazendas declined, the agrarian elite perpetuated their power through specific
professions designated as appropriate to the leading sector. In our example, the
fazendeiros coronel Hosano and Ledo Leda both had sons educated as doctors in
medicine. 12
Coincidently, at the time of our arrival, one of them, doctor Haroldo Leda, son of
our next-door neighbor Ledo Leda, 13 was fighting against thefazendeiros holding
municipal power. Chiefs of extended families craving local leadership and their
which 68% of them actually voted. Most of the invalidated attempted votes can be attributed to
illiteracy.
12 According to Nunes' (2000) study on Maranhro: Medicine, Power, and Intellectual Production,
between 1930 and 1996, there were four state governors graduated in Medicine and seven in Law,
besides three vice-governors and six capital mayors who were doctors.
13 Leao Leda, brought to Lago do Junco by his aunt, Colonel Hosano's wife, was himself related
to Captain Leao Leda and Major Luis Leda, the caudilhos involved in violent conflicts between
conservatives and liberals in Grajad at the turn of the century. As opposition forces prevailed in
the region, Captain Leao Leda moved to Alto Araguaia, while others headed up to the humid
valley of Mearim. See Abranches (1993).
aggregates, the so-called politicos, politicians, were in the middle of a series of murders
based on mutual revenge. People from both sides were being killed on a monthly basis.
Even the mayor had suffered an ambush. She was the wife of a majorfazendeiro, a
political chief of the rival village Lago dos Rodrigues, whose wrongdoings impeded his
own candidacy, but not the continuation of his political aspirations through her, until his
assassination. Definitely not a mere puppet in his hands, she continued her own career,
another situation that contradicts the stereotype of Latino woman.14 So, we need to
distinguish here what kind of social invisibility we are going to talk about.
With a prosthetic to substitute for her half-shot face, she lived in the capital in this
common situation known as absenteeism (Leal 1975:24), like most of the mayors in the
region who could not stand the precarious conditions of their domains. In fact, in 1986,
the year when it was finally and precariously connected to TV, Lago do Junco had about
700 houses: old decayed brick houses on the main and only paved street, and a majority
of taipa houses on secondary dirt streets. There were also a decadent market, a rice mill,
a post office, one kindergarten, a handful of schools, 15 an infirmary, a nightclub, and a
dozen food stores. To complete the picture, there were a small protestant church, 16 and a
Catholic church and parish house facing each other at the top of the hill, on the main
street.
14 The best representation of this contradiction would be the re-elected governor of Maranhao,
Roseanna Samey, who became the first woman to run for presidency, until her fall due to political
wrongdoings.
15 In 2002, Lago do Junco had 2 pre-schools, 35 elementary and middle schools, and 2 high
schools. There were no banks or hospitals.
16 See Dreher (1992) Hist6ria dos Protestantes na Amaz6nia atd 1980.
There was a church project on the top of the hill
Exactly in the same spot where the Pretinho family had planted the first ro9a of
Lago do Junco, Coronel Hosano Gomes Ferreira had built this oldest house in town,
which German Franciscan friars later bought, using it as a novice-training center for some
years until they decided to transfer it to a village. Then, this large three-wing house that
sheltered the coronel's extended family, aggregates and commerce, became our home for
the 31/2 years in which Roberto was working for the Catholic church, with the other two
wings occupied by a kindergarten and the project headquarters. Our neighbors in the
single paved street were mostly local fazendeiros and their aggregates, since the poorest
people displaced by land concentration lived in the secondary dirt streets, and along the
sides of the state road. In a "hundred years of solitude" atmosphere, the house had its own
charm with snakes, tarantulas and marsupials as occasional co-residents until we could
settle ourselves thoroughly, responding to our expectations of what an Amazonian place
should look like.
However, we were not aware of what expectations each segment of Lago do Junco
had of us. Like most local development agents, we were not even aware that the so-called
"community" was not the imagined harmonious, homogeneous, and cohesive social
body, but full of contradictions and a focus of dispersion itself. Only now do I wonder
how the many descendants of the made-invisible Maria Pretinho might have perceived
the sequence of colonels, priests and development agents in that house, dominating the
landscape where their ancestors had pioneered a settlement. "The first roqa they planted
was right here, on the top of this hill." But at that time, with our perceptions soaked with
the Amazonian imaginary, unaware of different perceptions, from the colonel's house on
the top of the hill, and under the guidance of the church, we began our interactions with
the people of Lago do Junco.
The Franciscan brothers had founded their Custody in the municipality of Bacabal,
the major city in the Mearim valley, in the beginning of the 1950s. 17 In 1968, they
erected the Diocese of Bacabal, a far-reaching missionary field for the friars of the
Province of Saxony (Germany), which became the Franciscan Vice-Province of the
Assumption in 1992. The friars had such an influence that people used to refer to them as
chronological markers, in that every event happened at, before, or after "the time of such
and such friar." According to a local account, even the destiny of Lago do Junco was
determined by them, as people told me that long ago, someone was disturbing the mass,
and the priest spit at the church's gate and cursed the town. "This is why Lago do Junco
never goes forward." Of course, this account, common to many stagnated towns, was told
to me by the discontented side of a divided town, which made up the majority of its
"urban" society: 8 people who did approve of the church's option for the poor, but not for
the kind of poor who claimed rights to land.
Consistent with the rise of CEB's, the Eclesial Base Communities that were the
practical expression of Liberation Theology, the late 1970s and 1980s were the peak of
17 The presence of the Franciscan friars in the Amazon dated from the beginning of the 17th
century. In 1637, in the "Relagao sobre as coisas pertencentes 'a conservag~o e aumento do
Estado do Maranhao," report concerning the conservation and expansion of the state of
Maranhao, the captain-mor Jacome R. de Noronha recommends that Franciscans should take care
of the Indians, who were influenced by the Dutch, British, and French (Moreira Neto 1992).
18 According to the IBGE 2000 Census, there are 2,839 residents in the urban (28%) against 6,988
in the rural (72%) areas of Lago do Junco, Maranhao being the only Brazilian state with a
majority rural population.
the church's actions against land concentration in the Mearim valley. 19 The Diocese of
Bacabal directed by the German Franciscan friars had resources and political will to
invest in a practice of Liberation Theology, which spread throughout the country at the
time. This divided the Catholics who are the majority of Lago do Junco. Meanwhile,
Protestants of Assembly of God and Christian Congregations literally followed the
commandment to not challenge the authorities, and to "give to Caesar what was
Caesar's" (Dreher 1992:339).
Being introduced to the people in the valley by the priests was a definite mark, both
on our perceptions of people and on their perceptions of us. At a first glance, once one
was said to work for the priest or to be with the priest, one's position was defined either
with the People of Struggle, also named "people of the interior," or with the people
against them, the "people of the town," or more specifically donos de terra, land owners
or donos de gado, cattle owners. 20 Of course, these political and geographical
denominations were not clear divisions, since many people in the interior were against
Agrarian Reform and vice versa. Besides, in a more accurate examination, people
participated in so many social planes that these clear divisions made sense only under
specific situations. Nonetheless, being categorized as "people of the church" implied
19 See Boffs (1986) Church, Charisma and Power: Liberation Theology and the Institutional
Church. For contrasting views of the movement, see Gutierrez 1973 A Theology ofLiberation,
and Novak 1990 Subverting the Churches. Forbes January 22, 1990, 94.
20 Examining the transcribed interviews, we can trace a single terminological structure to the
terms fazenda de escravo andfazenda de gado, slave ranch and cattle ranch, and dono de gente
and dono de gado, people's owner and cattle's owner. I interpreted the reference to this structure
as an acknowledgement of a society that objectifies both cattle and slaves, and an indication that,
although acknowledging and living under such rules, the notion of being an owner of land, was as
absurd an idea as being the owner of people. During slavery, sectors of the Catholic church lived
this structure as owners of land, cattle, and people. Carmelites and Mercedaries ownedfazendas
where there were "mais de cento e cincoenta escravos entire machos e femeas, o gado vacuum
chega a perto de trinta mil cabegas e grande n6mero do cavalar," more than a hundred and fifty
many assumptions, including how I was supposed to live my gender and deal with a
gendered world, and consequently, affected my experience and my reading of it.
In my search for the meaning of gender relations at the municipal level, I took the
town initially as a central observing point (because it was the center of the project), but
soon I learned that the villages in the interior were not the margins of the town at all.
Examining the system of production carried out in the villages, which were modeled in
interaction with both the natural and social environments, and emerged from conflictive
relations, I learned that the way of life lived by Maria Pretinho was not gone. Rather, that
way of life based on trabalho sem patrio as practiced in the villages, was the origin, the
center, and foundation of Lago do Junco's social and economic life. The invisibility was
not hers, but emerged in the conflictive social relations that constitute Lago do Junco and
affected my experience and my reading of it. The invisibility was in the relations
informing the delineation of my research object. As Foucault had said, it was not in the
object itself. Therefore, an ethnographic scrutiny on these conflictive relations offered us
a fertile ground to expand our understanding of invisible trajectories forming Lago do
Junco, and consequently hidden forms of gender relations.
Proceeding Toward the Interior: the Margins that Were Centers
A state of disconnected structures
Friar Adolfo Themme, the local parish priest in 1986, was a key figure in the
struggles for land in Lago do Junco. Venerated by some and ostracized by others, he used
to carry out, like many priests of his order, his desobrigas, visits from village to village,
baptizing, marrying, and preaching that land for those who work on it is part of God's
slaves among male and females; the cattle was around thirty thousand and a great number of
horses (Moreira Neto 1992:233).
will. He accepted us with an open heart, and remains a spiritual figure to us until today. It
took me years to fully realize it, but he taught me that the fact that my entrance and
settlement in the field happened through the town ofLago do Junco, did not mean it was
the center of Lago do Junco. Furtado (1964) also refutes this notion of marginality
attributed to rural areas.
It was interesting to note that the villages in the interior are locally called centros,
centers, and the rest of the world, beira, margin. "N6s, o povo vai ai prAs beira, prA
buscar a condigao, que aqui no centro nao ta tendo. Mas o lugar mesmo 6 aqui." (We, the
people, go outside to get some [means of living], because here in the center we don't
have them [at this time]. But our place is right here). As a matter of fact, this is not only a
matter of how geography could be perceived and named differently, but as people live
according to their perceptions, everyday practices are lived disconnected from
supposedly accepted structures, in this case, an administrative hierarchy centering the
urban. Through time, I would learn of other perceptions making structures disconnected
from what people were living.
Weeks after we had arrived in Lago do Junco, Friar Adolfo showed up to invite me
to go to the village of Sao Manoel, 24 kilometers from town on a terribly bad dirt road.
Adelino Barbosa, a former peasant who had become afazendeiro, had given orders to
tear down almost 40 taipa houses, by pulling each dwelling's master pole with a tractor.
Even the chapel was levelled. The intriguing fact was that Adelino was not an outsider
capitalist entrepreneur, or from a family offazendeiros, but he used to be "poor, that kind
of poor that when he bought a kilo of meat, he did not have the means to pay for it on the
same day. When the person who had sold the meat came to ask him for the money, he
had to run to the forest to break babagu in order to pay for that kilo of meat. He did not
have any means. Later he improved his life" (Caubi Jose de Lima, 50 years old, Sao
Manoel, interviewed by Roberto Porro). Note here how the inversion of gender role
(babaqu breaking, a woman's task) was used to illustrate ultimate poverty.
Interviewees told me that improvement in Adelino's life came through "hard
work," but essentially through social relations resulting in formal acquisition of land. In
1959, the Land Law was directed to authorize and legalize the sale of land to juridical or
physical persona politically or financially suitable to buy it. The law completely ignored
the existence of peasants and indigenes as social groups already living on it, who could
have benefited by a regularization of their actual possession. This and subsequent Land
Laws responded to the relations among local corondis and other municipal political
leaders and state and federal representatives. These laws affected the on-going formation
of the peasantry and the construction of their ways of life through the agro-extractive
system of production, in the villages and forests on the lands hitherto without landlords.
By the beginning of the 1950s, the vice-mayor began to buy some direitos de posse,2' and
to survey greatly expanded areas around cheaply purchased domains.
Throughout the villages, the memories of displacement are alive. "[In 1947], it was
all devoluto; 22 we worked, lived, we did what we wanted, but by the 1960s, a sale of land
began to those people who had resources; it was not for everybody" (Milton Monteiro, 57
21 Direito de posse, right of possession, is a right based on the lex utilis, which establishes that
those who actually utilize certain resources, land in this case, have the right to possess it. Such
philosophical understanding did not prevent antagonistic groups from expropriating long-term
assituantes, by violent means or unfair purchases, expanding the alleged area, and claiming such
rights of possession for themselves.
22 Terras devolutas were unclaimed lands, which were not counted in the private or public
patrimony. Since the Federal Constitution of 1891, such lands belong to the States in which they
are located, and are distinct from Federal lands (Shiraishi 1998:27).
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