Mayblin - Gender, Catholicism and Morality in Brazil

CONTEMPOR ARY A NTHROPOLOGY OF R ELIGION
A series published with the Society for the

Anthropology of Religion
Robert Hefner, Series Editor

Boston University
Published by Palgrave Macmillan
Body / Meaning / Healing
By Thomas J. Csordas
The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga,
Madagascar
By Michael Lambek
After the Rescue: Jewish Identity and Community in
Contemporary Denmark
By Andrew Buckser
Empowering the Past, Confronting the Future
By Andrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart
Islam Obscured: The Rhetoric of Anthropological Representation
By Daniel Martin Varisco
Islam, Memory, and Morality in Yemen: Ruling
Families in Transition
By Gabrielle Vom Bruck
A Peaceful Jihad: Negotiating Identity and Modernity
in Muslim Java
By Ronald Lukens-Bull
The Road to Clarity: Seventh-Day Adventism in Madagascar
By Eva Keller
Yoruba in Diaspora: An African Church in London
By Hermione Harris
Islamic Narrative and Authority in Southeast Asia: From the
16th to the 21st Century
By Thomas Gibson
Evangelicalism and Conflict in Northern Ireland
Gladys Ganiel
Christianity in the Local Context
Brian M. Howell
Missions and Conversions
Thomas Pearson
Gender, Catholicism, and Morality in Brazil: Virtuous Husbands,
Powerful Wives
Maya Mayblin
Gender, Catholicism, and
Morality in Brazil
Virtuous Husbands, Powerful Wives
Maya Mayblin
GENDER, CATHOLICISM, AND MORALITY IN BRAZIL
Copyright © Maya Mayblin, 2010.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2010 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN: 978–0–230–62312–5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mayblin, Maya.
Gender, Catholicism, and morality in Brazil : virtuous husbands, powerful
wives / Maya Mayblin.
p. cm.—(Contemporary anthropology of religion)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978–0–230–62312–5 (alk. paper)
1. Christian sociology—Brazil—Pernambuco. 2. Catholic Church—
Brazil—Pernambuco. 3. Marriage—Brazil—Pernambuco. 4. Sex
role—Brazil—Pernambuco. 5. Christian sociology—Catholic Church.
6. Marriage—Religious aspects—Catholic Church. 7. Sex role—Religious
aspects—Catholic Church. 8. Pernambuco (Brazil)—Religious life and
customs. I. Title.
BX1467.P4M39 2010
306.6'34165098134—dc22 2009035740
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: March 2010
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America.
For Magnus, my virtuous husband.
To marry without love is not a sin, but to die without having
learnt to love is.
—Seu Luis, fifty-four years old, Santa Lucia
Contents
List of Figures ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
1 The Land and the People 17
2 Marriage in Santa Lucia 41
3 The Bearing of Burdens: Suffering, Containment, and
Healing 67
4 Working to Sweat: Labor, Narrative, and Redemption 95
5 Virtuous Husbands, Powerful Wives: Marriage and
the Dangers of Power 121
6 From Innocence to Knowledge 147
Conclusion 177
Notes 183
Bibliography 193
Index 207
This page intentionally left blank
Figures
1.1 Map of region 18

1.2 Trabalhador lifting hay 26
1.3 Santa Lucian woman 40
3.1 Rezadeira measuring patient’s chest 81
3.2 Rezadeira weeping 82
6.1 Casamento de matuto 167
Acknowledgments
Many people have helped this book along its way, and I am indebted
to every one of them. My greatest debt is to the people of “Santa
Lucia,” who welcomed me into their lives with generosity and good
spirit. I am especially grateful for the warmth and care provided to
me by my host parents, Rita Cassia Oliveira Cadete and José Amauri
Cadete, and to Maria de Lourdes Alves, Manuel Cadete da Silva,
Maria de Lourdes Cadete, Fabiana Oliveira Cadete Almeida, Andre
Alves Almeida, and Maria Lucia Silva Oliveira, and Lucia de Luca
who taught me so much.
I am grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council for
providing me with a full postgraduate research award. A Malinowski
Grant and a Grant from the British Federation of Women Graduates
provided much needed financial assistance during the writing up
phase. The work on this project began in 2000 at the Department of
anthropology, London School of Economics. In Brazil, my research
was facilitated through my affiliation with the Universidade Federal
de Pernambuco, and I am thankful for the support I received from
both these institutions.
There are many in Brazil to whom I owe thanks for the invalu-
able friendship and the practical and intellectual guidance they pro-
vided along the way, including Father Edward Figaroa, Maria Luisa
and Carlos Peres da Costa, Dôra Cardoso da Silva, Rigoberta and all
the crèche workers: Rosa, Ivanulda, Martha, Mery, and Katia. Also,
Margarida and Almir de Oliveira, Adriano Bizerra and his family,
Dona Severina Precilia Teixeira, Gileno Vilaça, Eliete Maria da Silva,
Marcia de Isaac, Filipe Buckmeyer Wolff, Dimas Fereira de Oliveira,
Antônio Cabral, Scott Parry, Salete Cavalcanti, Marcio Goldman,
and Tania Stôlze-Lima.
While the shortcomings of this work remain exclusively my
own, earlier versions of this project benefited immensely from the
challenges and suggestions of teachers, colleagues, friends, and
xii ACK NOW LEDGMENT S
anonymous reviewers, including Peter Gow, the late Olivia Harris,

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

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

how spontaneous acts of violence and moral transgression are bal-
anced out by everyday sacrifices, and how narratives of sacrifice are
enacted and reenacted until they come to constitute part of the fabric
of the moral person. It seeks to explore ethnographically how people
in the community strive to relate to one another as undifferentiated
Christian equals, while negotiating the fact of difference in terms of
gender, power, and kinship. In particular, it focuses on how men and
women craft conjugal units and deal, or fail to deal, with the tensions
that arise. It is about how they suffer one another and suffer for one
another. About the labor, the physical and metaphysical labor, they
perform to feed, care for, and educate their young. About the work,
both practical and theological, they carry out to get along in the sin-
ful world, while remaining perto de Deus (close to God). In short,
this book is about the way in which a group of peasant farmers in the
impoverished Northeast of Brazil confront a particular moral para-
dox, in a particular place and point in time.
Christianity and the “Doleful Abyss”

The topic of moral paradox is a well-worn theme in Western aca-
demic scholarship. It may be linked, Marshall Sahlins notes, to the
“pleasure-pain principle” of human action; to the idea of an “irre-
sistible and egoistical human nature underlying social behavior, the
sense of society as an order of power or coercion, and a confidence in
the greater providential suffering figure among these anthropological
themes” (1996: 395). However, and as Sahlins observes, it takes some
“singular ideas of humanity, society, and nature to come up with
the triste trope that what life is all about is . . . the melioration of our
pains,” a triste trope that mainstream Judeo-Christian ideas about the
human condition have much to answer for (1996: 395). According to
Sahlins, it was in the biblical story of the Fall, that Adam’s sin opened
the “doleful abyss between the absolute perfection of God and the
radical wickedness of man” (1996: 396). It is in this theological
notion, he argues, that so much of Western cosmology, and as a result
Western anthropological theory, is rooted. The “doleful abyss” lurks
everywhere, informing everything from the model of the relationship
between self and nature to the social theories that suppose the inevi-
tability of power struggle and miscommunication in human interac-
tion. Indeed, native Western anthropology is so thoroughly saturated
with Judeo-Christian ideas that to attempt to avoid them is, as one
scholar suggests, “tantamount to abolishing anthropology itself”
INTRODUCTION 3
(Bargatzky 1996: 416). True, Sahlins’ argument is perhaps directed

mainly against scholars of a classical Enlightenment bent, whose proj-
ect whether witting or unwitting, is to exorcise theology from the
human sciences. If so, an interesting path lays ahead for an increasing
number of anthropologists whose embedded Judeo-Christian models
resonates unmistakably with the embedded models of their fervently
Christian, theologically minded informants. Although I myself am
not a Christian, the trope, the narrative vernacular of this book, if
you will, is resolutely and unabashedly Christian in origin. It explores
the “doleful abyss” or the antagonistic dualism between the absolute
perfection of God and the painful, inadequacies of Man. Although
I cannot claim to know precisely where my own philosophical tradi-
tions start and end, I would wager that they are not, in this par-
ticular instance, so far removed from many of my close friends and
informants in the village of Santa Lucia. I have come to believe that
together, we share a view of the human similar in type to Durkheim’s
understanding of man as “a presocial and sensuous animal, egocentri-
cally given to his own welfare, and, on the other hand, a social crea-
ture able to submit his self interest to the morality of society” (Sahlins
1996: 402). Rather than trying, as many scholars do, to step back
from these assumptions, my aim in this book is to step forward into
them and to leave them as the scaffold around and within which the
subsequent argument develops. This scaffold, I suggest, bears some
likeness to the “logical” part of what Michael Scott terms a “logical
trajectory,” whereby Christians (and some social theorists) “aspire to
systematicity by following through the implications of Christian lan-
guage, truth claims, and values” (2005: 102).1
If the scaffolding I make here explicit within my own approach
derives from an encompassing language of Christianity, then it is
hardly surprising that a major theme within much of the anthropolog-
ical literature on Christianity is the logical difficulty facing Christians
between the world of daily life and the world of ultimate religious
meaning. The tension is generally attributed to the otherworldly focus
of Christianity that promises access to transcendent divine power,
“but only at the cost of a privileging of the ‘life after death’ over the
life of this world, and the future life of the spirit over the present life
of the flesh” (Cannell 1999: 197).2 This has been productively exam-
ined in ethnographies of Protestantism via the challenges and offices
of differing semiotic ideologies. In the Protestant iconoclastic tradi-
tion, where the Holy is a singularly immaterial thing, anthropological
studies throw light on the anxious interplay between moral agency
and the ways people conceive of the relationship between words and
things (Keane 2007; Engelke and Tomlinson 2006). For Christians

such as the Friday Masowe Apostolics of Zimbabwe, the problem is
one of representation and authorization. This they attempt to resolve
through a radical and often painstaking differentiation between
words and things, a process that leads even to a rejection of the Bible
as too historically specific, too thing-like for a truly “live and direct”
faith (Engelke 2007).3
The issues dealt with in this strand of scholarship might usefully
be brought together under what Matthew Engelke (2007) refers to as
the “problem of presence,” a problem that gained prominence in the
philosophy of Hegel and whose roots lie in the distinctly Christian
trajectory of the Creation, the Fall, and the Crucifixion. It is in this
peculiar sequence of events that an irreconcilable distance between
God and Man was established; a distance that gave way to the simul-
taneous presence and absence of God and thus to the problem of
how best to access and worship Him. Notwithstanding the local and
historical complexity of Christianity as it appears in various parts of
the world, “the problem of presence” is, Engelke argues, one of those
fundamental paradoxes that make it possible to speak of an “anthro-
pology of Christianity” in more general terms.
Engelke’s point could be applied even more broadly, for paradox
provides social scientists with a useful epistemological peg on which
studies of religion and morality can be hung. Indeed, it is not always
easy to tell where the paradoxical elements of human “culture” end
and paradox as a strategy of scholarly production (wherein a problem
is first constructed to be resolved) begins. Nevertheless, if in speaking
about an “anthropology of Christianity,” we are to some extent speak-
ing about paradox, it is perhaps important to distinguish between
the lived experience of paradox that arises out of Christian ideology
itself—as revealed in many European and North American accounts
of Christianity—and that produced by the coexistence of two quite
different systems of values and traditions.4 Indeed “paradox” may
not always be the most helpful way of approaching the disjuncture
between Christian world views and those that predated Christian
missionization. In some accounts that emphasize indigenous conver-
sion to Christianity as a form of continuity with older traditions, the
potential for contradiction and disjuncture appears to have remained
merely a potential. As Peter Gow (2006) has argued, Piro people of
the Peruvian Amazon “failed” to convert to Christianity, not because
they did not understand Christianity, but because they did not think
of their cosmology as a religion parallel to evangelical Christianity.
Their experience of rupture and paradox was minimal because they
INTRODUCTION 5
did not see that the missionaries were trying to bring them an entirely
new and exclusive system of values. For other people, such as the
Arosi of the Solomon Islands, what paradox might have been has
given way to a productive kind of dialogue, in which the value of
the pre-Christian past is brought into alignment with Christian ideas
through “ethno-theologies” (Scott 2005).
Even within Christian ideology, the paradox contained within
its transcendent logic—and in particular its resultant and infa-
mous dichotomy between spirit and flesh—may not be as paradoxi-
cal as is generally perceived. As Fenella Cannell (2006) points out,
Christianity has always contained an aspect in which the flesh is an
essential part of redemption. From acts of self-mortification, to a
positive focus on material places, objects and substances, examples
proliferate that counter the paradoxical or “ascetic stereotype” of
Christianity (Cannell 2006) that has become embedded in anthropol-
ogy. For example, the importance of the material world comes across
clearly in João Pina-Cabral’s study of Catholicism among Portuguese
peasants where divine power can be tapped through various unortho-
dox forms of mediation, including a cult of “non-eaters” who live off
the Communion wafer alone, as well as a cult of incorrupt bodies
(Pina-Cabral 1986: 234–236). For the Spanish Catholics of William
Christian’s study (1972), spiritual pollution from the everyday world
is countered via a sacred geography, embedded in the physical terrain.
The performance of purificatory rites at sacred shrines around the vil-
lages of the Nansa Valley is central for the “transformation of divine
energy for human purposes” (1972: 101).
Ethics and Morality: Choice and Reproduction

A growing theme within the study of religion, and indeed within
anthropology more widely is the topic of morality (Gregory 2009;
Howell 1997; Laidlaw 2002; Robbins 2007; Sykes 2009; Zigon
2009). Within this emergent field, debate continues as to what con-
ceptual work “the moral” actually does. It is generally agreed that the
anthropological study of morality has traditionally been hampered by
the “Durkheimian problematic” wherein all normative social action
is, in some nebulous sense, equated with moral action (Robbins 2007;
Zigon 2009). However, and as Joel Robbins states, “a developing
consensus appears to hold that this conflation of morality with cul-
ture is not the way forward for an anthropology of morality” (2007:
294). What is needed, rather, is a general recognition of two differ-
ent kinds of morality or moral experience: one termed the “morality
of reproduction,” in which morality is nonconsciously reproduced as

people go about adhering to the norms of their society and another
termed the “morality of freedom,” in which people are consciously
aware of the freedom they have to choose what course of action to take
and to thereby promote as morally correct (Robbins 2007: 278).
Within the anthropology of Christianity, both Robbins (2004) and
Omri Elisha (2008) discuss the troublesome tension between action
and expectation or as Elisha sums up, “the gaps between one’s moral
ambitions and the conditions of existence that reinforce and simul-
taneously threaten to undermine them at every turn” (2008:155).
In these situations, moral paradox is experienced as “unreasonable
moments” (Gregory 2009), moments of contradiction wherein per-
sons are simultaneously pulled toward differing and incommensu-
rable ideals. For conservative evangelicals in Tennessee, the difficulty
of putting the theological concept of compassion into practice stems
from its coexisting imperative of accountability. For the Urapmin of
Papua New Guinea, there is a pull toward human agency or “wilful-
ness” that conflicts with the idea of obedience or “lawfulness” to
God (Robbins 2004). The abiding question for the Urapmin is how
does one live as a good person while existing in the midst of a social
world that routinely draws one into sin? (2004: 254). The moral dif-
ficulties, the “doleful abyss,” in the Urapmin context are deepened by
contradictions and conflicts between newer adopted Christian ideas
and indigenous conceptions of social structure: “It is the contradic-
tions and confusions that follow from this unsettled state of dual
cultural play that lead Urapmin to fall constantly short of their moral
goals,” argues Robbins (2004: 182).
The moral paradox I explore within the Santa Lucian context
might be better understood as a type of “stable conflict,” (Robbins
2007) one that forms an enduring part of Catholic Santa Lucian cul-
ture rather than arising out of any major change or sudden break with
a pre-Christian system of values. The moral paradox discussed in the
following chapters arises through the apparent disjuncture between
an ideal of religious purity that values innocence and worldly detach-
ment and the need for knowledge to live a productive life. For the
people of Santa Lucia, a desirable life is a productive one, and conse-
quently, a sinful one. It is one in which a child grows up to be knowl-
edgeable, to find a spouse and have children, and most importantly to
support a spouse and children. Such a path, as was constantly pointed
out to me, was neither easy nor spiritually clear cut. First, it neces-
sitated departure from a certain hallowed state of innocence. Second,
it brought with it grave responsibilities to feed, nurture, and protect
INTRODUCTION 7
the young in a region historically given to extreme manifestations of

social inequality, structural and interpersonal violence, poverty, and
drought.
The passage from innocence to knowledge is acknowledged as inev-
itable, the task facing Santa Lucians, however, is to mediate between
the sterility of pure innocence and the sinfulness of complete knowl-
edge in such a way as to demonstrate the virtue of choice; the choice
to align oneself with God despite forces that pull one away. Left
untended, knowledge and power may lead to death, both material
and spiritual. Alternatively, it can lead a person to forge a reputation
as someone exceptionally perto de Deus (close to God). In practice, as
will be shown, this moral paradox does not constitute an irrevocable
problem so much as a challenge to be lived and overcome.
Reclassifying this paradox—this “doleful abyss”—as a challenge
rather than a problem is an important task, because it reformulates it
as a positive means by which people can attain closeness to God, rather
than as a negative feature that dooms believers to a certain degree of
failure. In many ways, this difference between a positive and negative
evaluation of the same paradox maps onto many of the differences
between Catholic and Protestant Christianities. Many ethnographers
of the latter, however, have perhaps been overhasty in extending the
negative interpretation of the paradox to Christianity as a whole. If
as Engelke suggests, the paradox is one of the bases on which we
can speak of a coherent “anthropology of Christianity” we must also
be aware that it is within this shared paradox that some of the most
salient differences between strains of Christianity are located. From a
distance, Catholic Santa Lucians, like Pentecostal Friday Apostolics,
or evangelical Protestant Urapmin, appear to devote themselves to
an archetypal “impossible religion,” but look closer and one sees that
rather than paradox featuring as a troublesome stumbling block to
moral perfection, it constitutes a clear and legitimate means of engag-
ing with the divine, a source of spiritual vitality in and of itself, if, and
only if, one knows how to rework it.
Conjugal Relations: A Widening of the Abyss

If Christian doctrine presents a challenge for Santa Lucians, nowhere
does it do so more for ordinary men and women than in the context
of conjugal relations. Marriage is of course spiritually validated and
idealized by church and state, most explicitly on the day of the wed-
ding itself. However, and as the people I knew were frequently at
pains to point out, the view from the ground following the actual
wedding ceremony is quite different. Marriage, I was told, is where

morals ideals are tested out every single day. As a social institution, it
constitutes one of the most challenging aspects of worldly disjuncture
to negotiate, providing ample contexts for moral transgression in the
form of neglect of duty, adultery, and violence.
Given the focus of this work, on the tensions inherent within mar-
riage, one might expect a certain amount of gender antagonism to
predominate. In fact, something unexpectedly different in character
comes to the fore. Gender distinctions notwithstanding, men and
women in Santa Lucia share a singular sense of moral personhood.
For Santa Lucians, morality is a fundamentally ungendered phenom-
enon. Therefore in situations of religious paradox and moral trans-
gression, Santa Lucians strive to downplay the categorical differences
between the sexes that apply in other areas of life and emphasize
instead the essential singularity of human persons and their moral
concerns. As such, the ethnographic account that follows presents
something of a challenge to a long-standing tradition of feminist
anthropological research in Latin America, which has made gender
difference a central, persistent, and defining trope. Within this aca-
demic tradition narratives converge and diverge, variously revealing
aspects of women’s subordination and/or resistance to male hege-
mony and the multifarious ways in which femininity and masculinity
are defined, reconstructed, contested, and the like. What all such
accounts have in common is an overarching concern with the com-
manding significance of difference (complementary or antagonistic)
as an organizing principle of social life. This book offers an alter-
native to such a metanarrative, garnered from my informants’ own
styles of arguing: instead of difference being an organizing principle
of moral and religious life, it is the presumed unity, the fundamental
identity of adults as moral persons (whatever their sex) that is held to
play a defining role.
Gender in Latin America

In much of the literature on Catholic peasant societies in Latin
America, authors have drawn special attention to the effects of rigid
divisions and separations of gender. Men and women’s roles are pre-
sented as differing radically in terms of labor, power, moral stan-
dards, religious practice, and sexual propriety.5 In the “paradigm” of
Catholic societies that results, a kind of functional division is assumed
between the sexes: with “black-clad rosary-telling women” adopt-
ing the role of pious religious observers and honor-bound macho
INTRODUCTION 9
men indulging in “flamboyant anti-clericalism” (Cannell 2006: 9).

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

Catholic movements—whether conservative or radical—and carrying
on the religious life of communities on a day-to-day basis. . . . Women’s
quantitatively greater activity suggests one important sense in which
religiosity is “gendered”: in Latin America, and indeed it seems
throughout the Mediterranean Catholic world, religion falls into
women’s sphere of interests and competence despite their lack of formal

authority in the church. Women are expected to be more religious and
to maintain religious teachings, morals, and traditions in the home
and community (Stevens 1973). The sexual division of religious labor
may have implications for the way women perceive the church, reli-
gious symbolism, tradition, innovation, and so on, as well as for higher
levels of participation. (1997: 9)
Building on this academic tradition, gender theorists Marit Melhuus

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

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

ogy. This led in the second half of the twentieth century, to the gen-
eral advancement among the clergy, of a class-based understanding of
the person; one in which gender was, if not entirely absent, certainly
less central (Burdick 1993; Drogus 1997; Nagle 1997). In this con-
text, the Christian idea that God created all of humankind in his basic
image, coupled with the advance of a modern language of equality
and “human rights” has supported and encouraged a different con-
figuration of gender: one that downplays difference and division and
foregrounds an essential unity of kind.
Power
No treatment of gender, conjugality, and moral discourse would
be complete without some consideration of the matrices of power,
authority, and hierarchy that shape and constrain them in practice.
More often than not, analytical descriptions of “power relations” in
Latin America attempt to describe power in social scientific terms,
and much less effort has been made to understand what “power” is
held to constitute in local thinking or, what “power” or authority
might mean for those purported by scholars to wield it.7 In the Santa
Lucian context, however, it is precisely this alternative angle that is
required. Without it, one cannot begin to understand how violence,
suffering, transgression, and gender difference map onto a moral dis-
course that emphasizes human unity and equivalence of kinds. In the
following chapter, I situate Santa Lucians within the region known
as “the Northeast,” detailing their somewhat peripheral and subor-
dinate position within the wider political economy of Brazil. In the
ethnographic descriptions that fill the rest of the book, the material
situation of Santa Lucians—the economic strain and structural sub-
ordination they experience as poor, semisubsistence farmers within
the wider panorama—constitutes a subtle but important subtext to
their everyday predicaments and to their reasoning about Christian
morality in the world.
In chapter 5, I address “power” from a gendered perspective, as it
occurs in intimate social life, between husbands and wives. In doing
so, I take it as “given” that Santa Lucia is essentially a patriarchal soci-
ety, one in which men head and control family units and predomi-
nate in public and political affairs. The implications of this kind of
social structure (particularly in its effects on the lives of women) are
well-reported and analyzed in the social science literature, and I am
not interested in reproducing this type of argument here. However, I
INTRODUCTION 13
have come to believe that in foregrounding the analytical term “patri-

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

Chapter one sets the geographic and historical scene for the five main
chapters that follow, each of which presents a theme that becomes
salient at a different stage in a person’s life. I have chosen to subvert
the somewhat predictable chronology of these stages in the order of
writing by beginning, in chapter 2, with marriage itself—the moment
of transition, as it were, from youth to adulthood. Following this, in
chapters 3, 4, and 5, I discuss themes that apply exclusively to mar-
ried adults. In chapter 6 I return to childhood, thus returning to
a stage of life described at the very beginning of the book, before
marriage.
I have chosen to begin with the topic of marriage because it is the
moral and spiritual conflict that marriage generates that constitutes
the existential challenge underpinning the book as a whole. Thus,
in chapter 2, I describe the different types of problem that marriage
creates for people, ranging from the practical hardships of supporting
one’s own household, to the moral dilemmas of split kinship loyalties
and the spiritually polluting necessity of sin. If marriage is necessary
but dangerous because it leads individuals away from spiritual salva-
tion, the chapters that follow examine how people attempt to address
this challenge. In chapters 3 and 4, I discuss some of the alternative
religious discourses and practices by which married women and men,
respectively, attempt to deal with the spiritual pollution generated
by conjugal life, labor, and reproduction. Chapter three focuses on
women’s narratives of suffering while chapter 4 explores (predomi-
nantly) men’s narratives of labor.
In chapter 5, I discuss the sexual politics of power within the con-
jugal relationship. I continue to show that to be married is, in many
ways, to be in danger of various sorts. My focus of analysis is what
happens when it all goes wrong; when a marriage falls irreparably
apart through acts of violence perpetrated by husbands and wives. I
discuss local understandings of power within the conjugal relation-
ship and show how these contrast with received gender-based ana-
lytical models that have been used by other writers to understand
INTRODUCTION 15
power relations between the sexes and the sexual politics of domestic
violence. In this chapter, I elaborate a different perspective to the
heavily gendered analyses that have shaped the literature on Catholic
societies to date.
Having discussed the ways in which married adult men and women
deal with the existential problem that marriage poses for them as
individuals, in chapter 6 I examine how they, as parents, deal with the
challenge that marriage poses for their children. Parents desire that
their own children grow up to marry, be knowledgeable, live well,
and produce their own families. But they must also strive to prepare
children for the spiritual and moral dangers that such a path entails.
Children, I argue, embody something of a paradox: as innocents they
are idealized, but their constantly changing relationship with the
world is an endless source of anxiety to the adults who must guide the
process of growing up. This paradox is pursued in the last chapter of
the book by contrasting local concepts of knowledge (conhecimento/
sabedoria) and innocence (inocência) and situating these within two
particular contexts: everyday speech-games and an annual secular rit-
ual known as casamento de matuto. I argue that both types of interac-
tion constitute a means of educating children about the inevitability
of sin and moral conflict in a productive (i.e., a married) life.
Chapter 1
The Land and the People
Getting There
The village of Santa Lucia is a typical agreste settlement—one made
up of semi-itinerant traders, occasional migrant-workers, small-
holding farmers, and their share-cropping kin and neighbors. To
reach it involves a four-hour drive inland from the lower altitudes
of the littoral up into the higher plateaus of the semiarid agreste (see
figure 1.1). Leaving the favelas (shanty towns) on the outskirts of
Recife, one drives for an hour or so past undulating seas of vivid
green: miles and miles of sugarcane rolling up to and away from the
horizon. Small sugar plantation towns appear and disappear periodi-
cally: brightly painted houses nestling on slopes thick with vegeta-
tion. Not far from these one often notices a pair of grandiose gates,
leading to the residence of the local family landowners.
Continuing along the highway, solitary restaurants and clusters
of human establishments go by. Leaving these behind, one con-
tinues upward into thick tunnels sliced through the clay red hills.
After a slow, uphill wind the road straightens out and the air dries
out. Gradually the landscape flattens and the colors fade: brick-
red loam turns to beige dust, and green vegetation gives way to
grey-brown scrub. Entering the agreste, the heat becomes drier,
and isolated fazendas (farms) dedicated to cattle-breeding start to
come and go. After another two hours or so you can make out in
the distance, on the northwest horizon, the bluish outlines of the
Serra de Ororobá hills.
Some time after this, you may find yourself pulling into Santa
Lucia’s nearest market town, into a maze of cobbled streets lined with
pink- and peach-colored houses. Now passing snack bars and shop
fronts, a low-walled state school, a municipal building, a colonial
1.1 Map of region
Catholic church, and a gleaming new palace of Pentecostal worship.

You may pass through a market square heaving with bodies and bar-
gains and become momentarily transfixed by the volume of produce,
the rainbow of plastic wares, vials of tinctures, the heaving market
atmosphere. However, the village of Santa Lucia is located in foot-
hills approximately 1,300 meters above sea level. To reach it you must
pass through this market and continue westward, toward the city of
Garanhuns.
Turning off the main highway takes you onto a dusty track that
leads deep into the sítio (cultivated countryside). If you are proceeding
THE L AND AND THE PEOPLE 19
by motorbike taxi, then you will require an experienced rider, one

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

The state of Pernambuco where Santa Lucia is located was the first
state to be colonized by the Portuguese and covers an area of 37,946
square miles. It is significant for being part of the conglomerate
of Brazilian states that make up an area known as O Nordeste (the
Northeast) and stands as the region’s second most populous state
at approximately eight million.1 To speak of the Northeast is thus
to speak about a geographical area with certain historical, political,
juridical, economic, and climatic associations (Albuquerque 1999).2
But the “Northeast” is more than this, it is a concept that, from within
and without, has been variously romanticized, stigmatized, and laden
with a particular set of folk and scholarly connotations. It would be
impossible to introduce the village of Santa Lucia without first locat-
ing it as a village at the heart of the Northeast, for this in itself has
shaped the topic and nature of this study. When Santa Lucians refer to
themselves as “Northeasterners” they do so to distinguish themselves
from people from the south, central, and west of Brazil—particularly
from anyone hailing from the comparatively richer cities of Rio de
Janeiro or Sao Paulo. The distinction between the Northeast and the
rest of the Brazil is not new but has been sharpened in recent decades
by the advent of television. Even the poorest Northeastern houses
are flooded, daily, with televised news programs and telenovellas set
and made in the South, and it is through opposition to an image of
the South as inordinately whiter, richer, and more glamorous that
present-day Northeasterners derive their sense of identity.
One of the defining features of the Northeast is its division into
three geographic zones corresponding to the progressive dryness of
the climate. Along the eastern littoral that extends from Rio Grande
do Norte to Southern Bahia is the zona da mata: a flat, highly popu-
lated humid strip, originally covered in Atlantic forest and now domi-
nated by sugar plantations. West of the coast is the vast interior region
known as the sertão: a drought-prone wilderness of scrub growth
ribbed with rocky mountains, and occupying approximately half of
the Northeast as a whole (Andrade 1980: 21). In this region, where
rainfall averages only twenty-five inches annually, agriculture is gen-
erally limited and cattle rearing is the dominant occupation.
In the transitional area between the humid zona da mata along
the coast and the vast, semiarid sertão to the west is a region known as
the agreste, where rainfall is fairly reliable, averaging thirty to thirty-
five inches per year, but decreasing gradually in proportion to dis-
tance from the coast. One of the distinguishing features of the agreste
is its geographic diversity, resembling the semiarid sertão in its driest
parts, and the more thickly vegetated zona da mata in its most humid
zones. The agreste occupies the eastern portion of the Borborema
Plateau and extends toward the mountains of Rio Grande do Norte
and the southern part of Alagoas. In the Pernambucan agreste, where
Santa Lucia is located, the degree of moisture is insufficient for sugar
cultivation but permits the cultivation of beans, manioc, maize,
and, in certain more humid parts, fruits and vegetables. These three
major regions shade into one another and are integrated into a single
“Northeast” region by the constant circulation of people and goods.
Although three hundred years ago the Northeast was among the
richest areas of the Americas, it has since become famous for being
one of the poorest and most underdeveloped areas in Brazil. As
Rebhun writes,
the South boasts the major universities, museums, and cultural

resources, the largest cities and busiest airports, the most modern
banking system, and the biggest shopping malls . . . The Northeast
seems almost a separate country from the South, forming a sense
of abandonment reflected in persistent rumors of its sale to Japan in
return for national debt relief. (1999: 38)
Present-day poverty in the Northeast is the result of a multitude of

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

psyche.4 It is perhaps unsurprising then that characterizations of the
region by writers have tended to be stark and depressing. For exam-
ple, in 1969 Josué de Castro described the Northeast as “600,000
square miles of suffering”; in 1975 Eduardo Galeano defined the area
as “a concentration camp for more than thirty million people,” and in
1992, Nancy Scheper-Hughes wrote of the “pockmarked face of the
Brazilian Northeast.”5 Even popular Brazilian media such as televised
soap operas and literary novels have contributed to this emblematic
depiction of the region, and tourist shops and markets are filled with
ceramic figurines depicting images of retirantes—drought ravaged
families fleeing their homes in the sertão. As such, the Northeast of
Brazil has come to stand in the national imagination as a place of both
tragedy and heroism, of unjust and yet noble suffering.6
The suffering of the Northeast arguably extends back to the early
cultivation of sugar. Sugarcane cultivation was established in the zona
da mata by the Portuguese in the early sixteenth century and has
influenced Brazil’s economic, political, and social history ever since.
From the earliest days of colonization, sugar attracted large numbers
of settlers from Europe to the Northeast, settlers who prospered due
to their brutal exploitation of African slaves. The power and politics
of the plantation system and the stark social inequalities it spawned
are widely suggested as having defined almost every aspect of life for
slave and freeman, wage laborer, sharecropper, and migrant worker
from the seventeenth century through to the present day (Bastide
1964; De Castro 1969; Fraginals 1976; Freyre 1986; Galloway
1968; Genovese 1971; Hall 1981; Scheper-Hughes 1992). As D. E.
Goodman summarizes,
In all the sub-regions [of the Northeast] the same man-made charac-
teristic is present: an extreme inequality of land tenure which has, from
its beginning, shaped a rural structure in which there is an equally
extreme social inequality between classes untempered by any signifi-
cant sense of noblesse oblige or humanism on the part of the land-
owner to those working on the land. (1981: 4)
In his epic work The Masters and the Slaves (1986[1933]), Gilberto
Freyre dealt with the culture and social institutions of the plantation
from both an anthropological and a literary perspective. Later writ-
ers such as de Castro (1969), Manuel Moreno Fraginals (1976), and
Scheper-Hughes (1992) tackled plantation history from a resolutely
Marxist perspective, describing the industry as a “whoring social and
economic social formation if ever there was one” (Scheper-Hughes

1992: 34), its victims “sad half humans crushed like cane between
rollers that leave only juiceless husks behind” (de Castro 1969: 7).
However, while the social, political, and economic history of the
region as a whole grew out of and continued to be shaped by sugar
cultivation near the coast, in the semiarid interior another story
started to unfold, not of sugar and slavery, but of leather, cotton,
and tenant farming.
Bandits and Cattlemen: A Brief History of

the Backlands
Indigenous Tupinamba peoples had long been the principal inhab-
itants of the Northeast as European colonists from the coast began
to drive more deeply into the interior. As coastal lands once reserved
for pasture became absorbed into the plantation economy, colonial
ranchers had no choice but to explore the hinterlands. The settle-
ment of the interior by colonists was thus achieved little by little, as
cattlemen, Jesuit missionaries, outlaws, and runaway African slaves
traveled up the Ipanema River and proceeded inland along dry riv-
erbeds. According to Kelsey, the cattlemen who eventually founded
the great cattle and cotton estates of the semiarid interior were
“free colonists”: descendents of Portuguese farming folk who were
“ineligible through lack of capital and credit, name and rank to
receive grants of the fat lands on the seacoast” (1940: 163). Unable
to plant sugarcane in the zona da mata, they took advantage of
climatic conditions in the sertão and agreste that were favorable
for growing cotton and grazing cattle. In the process of establish-
ing huge cattle ranches Tupinamba people were driven off their
land, and with each animal requiring several hectares and very little
tending, the area remained sparsely populated for three hundred
years or more.
Due to their direct ties with Rome, the Jesuit missionaries were
eventually expelled by the Portuguese Crown from both Brazil and
Portugal in 1759. The Brazilian clergy remained weak throughout
the rest of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the colonial
church serving more as an arm of the civil bureaucracy. Throughout
the period between 1500 and 1822, only a handful of clerics served
the interior, and most communities had little or no contact with the
official Catholic Church. Popular religion was based around home
altars and folk rituals, and many inhabitants followed messianic move-
ments.7 A brief perusal of the historical literature on the Brazilian
Northeastern interior leaves one with a picture of a wild frontier land

dominated by drought and violence, banditry, and mysticism. As Vera
Kelsey wrote of this region in the 1930s,
When the full scale of this turbulent and little-known region, the
Brazilian equivalent of North America’s “wild and woolly” West, is
told, the exploits of Buffalo Bill and Jesse James, of cowboys and des-
perados, of Indian raids, prairie fires and mountain blizzards and all
the rest will become very pale indeed . . . Within these boundaries are
the desiccated sertões, lands where short-lived rivers run and arid plains
form a tragic background for periodic droughts and for one of the
great Brazilian types, the sertanejo . . . a man of endurance and daring,
rustic and undisciplined, an extremist whether he takes to religion or
to crime. (1940: 162)
This stereotype, which has been romanticized through the ages via
popular verses and ballads, continues to make a strong impression on
writings about the region, informing, in my view, some of even the
most recent scholarly works.8 A result of this is that anyone seeking
to gain a rough impression of the social and historical makeup of
the Northeastern interior would be forgiven for thinking it consisted
almost entirely of powerful, warring cattle barons, bandits on horse-
back, and wandering religious fanatics.
However, it is clear that the sertão and agreste’s inhabitants included,
alongside such famous bandits as Lampeão and charismatic mystics
such as Antonio Conselheiro and Padre Cicero, a class of rural tenant
farmers (forreiros) who practiced subsistence agriculture on the land
of the cattle barons. Peasant farmers were necessary to the latifun-
dio system as their agricultural produce was essential to a regional
economy otherwise dominated by large-scale cash-crop cultivation
and commercial cattle farming. Moreover, in the agreste in particular,
tenant sharecropping within the boundaries of large fazendas proved
an ideal way to clear forest and create pasture for the forever expand-
ing cattle stock of the fazendeiro.
In fact by the late 1850s, most inhabitants of the region were sub-
sistence farmers. The great majority of these remained tenants and
sharecroppers on larger landholdings, but many more had come to
privately possess their own small plots. This was especially the case
within the food-producing agreste, so that by the 1970s, more than
85 percent of the agricultural establishments of the agreste were made
up of properties occupying fewer than twenty hectares. Other people
survived via a combination of itinerant trading and slash and burn
agriculture together with hunting, gathering, and fishing. These
were poor people for whom tenant sharecropping was not the only
means of survival, and for whom servitude to a single patron was not
necessarily a permanent or inescapable condition. In fact, one of the
ongoing problems faced by plantation and cattle-ranch owners in the
second half of the nineteenth century, one that intensified after the
abolition of slavery in 1888, was the lack of a loyal and regular labor
force among the free rural population. Many peasants of the interior
shunned patron dependency in favor of a seminomadic lifestyle. The
mobility and inherent flexibility of this way of life enabled a certain
amount of resistance to the low wages and exploitative conditions
that accompanied a more sedentary life on the margins of the cattle-
farming and plantation economy (Carvalho-Branco 1997). Anthony
Pereira (1997) has described today’s Northeastern rural people as
“peasantariats,” lacking a total commitment either to subsistence
agriculture or to a wage economy. However, it would seem that it
is precisely this “lack of commitment,” this shifting between ten-
ant farming and legal, illegal, temporary, and seasonal wage labor in
cities, or on plantations, that has allowed Northeastern peasants to
retain a certain degree of social and economic freedom.
About Santa Lucia

Santa Lucia has one hundred and forty-four houses and has a popu-
lation of roughly five hundred and sixty-five people.9 Its amenities
include a primary school, a health post, a chapel, a casa de farinha,
one small grocery shop, one butcher’s shop, two barracas (drinking
shacks), and a well with a pump that serves the entire village. All
major amenities are strung out along a central street, and they are
interspersed with houses occupied by descendents of the village’s old-
est families. On the fringes of this central street, reaching up into the
hills, are smaller tracks where newer clusters of houses lie. Further
away on remote hilltops lie various isolated houses, surrounded by
agricultural land, but still pertaining to the village. In addition to the
well, the center of the village is crossed by a stream that swells into a
river during the winter months, and which residents use for bathing,
fishing, and washing clothes.
Making a Living
Work in Santa Lucia is based around semisubsistence agriculture and
livestock rearing. Approximately 65 percent of households (ninety-
three houses) in the village own small-holdings of land on which they
1.2 Trabalhador lifting hay
will grow any combination of the staple crops of manioc (mandioca),

beans (feijão), and corn (milho) for both sale and consumption. The
other 35 percent of households (fifty-one houses) in the village are
landless and survive by combining seasonal waged labor on other
people’s land with various share-cropping and shared live-stock
rearing arrangements (figure 1.2). The busiest time in the agricul-
tural cycle is the rainy winter season that begins in May and ends
in September. The time for planting beans and maize is May, for
harvesting in August. Manioc, however, has a much longer cycle. It
may be planted at any time of the year and harvested one to two years
later.10 The summer months, which comprise the rest of the year, are
characterized by the absence of rain. During this time, work in the
fields is greatly reduced, and it is common for male members of the
household, particularly young, unmarried men, to seek casual labor
on local fazendas, on sugar plantations nearer the coast, or as itiner-
ant traders at fairs throughout the region.
A major source of employment to the poorer landless strata is the
casa de farinha, which is in operation all year round. The casa de
farinha is located at the heart of the village, along the same stretch
of dirt road as the chapel, school, and health post. It is a large brick
shack, comprising two windowless areas whose stable-like doors open
onto the street. The first area is where the women work, sitting on low
stools scraping the dark, soily skin off the roots with knives and peel-
ing implements (raspadores). The second room is where the men work
the heavy machinery in shifts. Here, the peeled roots are processed
into fresh pulp that is pressed to remove its toxic liquids, then further
dehydrated through heating, and finally ground into the coarse whit-
ish powder known as farinha. The machines in the processing room
are large, rustic, and powered both by precarious electrical instal-
lations and by hand. Large wood-fired ovens built into the back of
the mill belch out constant clouds of thick, sour smoke. Once it has
left the ground, manioc is quickly perishable. For this reason, it has
to be processed without interruption almost from the moment of its
harvesting. Thus work in the mills does not follow a fixed pattern of
hours, tending to begin at almost any hour of the day and normally
ending at a very late hour of the night, if indeed it ends at all.
The casa de farinha is, as Santa Lucian people themselves profess,
the social and economic hub of the village. The mill itself resem-
bles an extended household: a place where kin work alongside one
another, drop by, and pass much time joking, conversing, and engag-
ing in gossip. It also provides the major source of income for fifty-six
individuals from a total of thirty-nine households. While those who
work inside the mill benefit from the employment it generates, there
are households who gain from the sale of manioc to the mill’s owner.
The conditions of work for men and women in the casa de farinha
vary substantially. Men are paid on an hourly basis and take home a
fixed-rate salary of forty-five reals per week plus a monthly supply of
the farinha for their families. Unlike men, women are not allowed to
take home farinha and are paid per hundred kilos of manioc scraped.
Thus a woman working for the same hours as a man is able to earn
approximately eighteen reals a week, and she earns this only if she is
an experienced peeler. People in Santa Lucia universally define them-
selves as agricultores (farmers), although few families survive solely
through agriculture.11 Some of the men are builders, carpenters, or
butchers, others are small traders owning shops and businesses in and
outside the village, and many women earn extra cash giving manicures,
taking in sewing, or by making cheese, or straw hats and brooms, for
sale in the market. Finally, 16 percent of households (twenty-three
houses) contain a member who works for the local council either as a
teacher, a health-post assistant, a cleaner, or a truck driver. Although
differing forms of wage labor evidently do exist, wage work is inher-
ently small scale, informal, and flexible.
For Santa Lucians, as for most poor rural Brazilians, sur-
vival involves a complex relationship with the social and natural
environment. Agricultural work is contingent not only upon the

season but also upon the climate that, in the semiarid Northeast,
is notoriously unpredictable. As is the case throughout the interior,
droughts and “dry years” (years where the rainfall is less than normal)
pepper the stories and personal recollections that one hears on an
almost daily basis (see also Arons 2004). Children in the village, with
no direct experience of famine or drought, can reel off tales of hunger
recounted to them by parents and grandparents, as though from per-
sonal experience. Many villagers also had, at some point in their lives,
gone to live elsewhere as part of a family, in search of a vida melhor
(better life). However, cyclical migration is also part of an overall way
of life based around seasonal flux and itinerant agriculture.
In fact, it is not just agricultural work, waged or otherwise, that
is seasonal and cyclical but work for the state as well. People who are
employed by the prefeitura (local council) are dependant upon politi-
cal seasons. As is common throughout most of Brazil, state employ-
ment occurs along lines of kinship, histories of friendship, and favors
owed through vote buying. Local elections are, therefore, fierce and
passionate battles involving rupture and intrigue at every level within
the community. In Santa Lucia, as in any locality within the region,
employment in local government is extremely desirable as it means a
regular, if minimum, monthly wage. However, persons holding such
jobs are only too well aware that a state employee’s financial secu-
rity is only as long as the political term of the administration that
employed them. Should the opposing candidate win at the next elec-
tion, all employees will be replaced.
Land, Power, and Hierarchy

The inhabitants of Santa Lucia are not rich, but their struggle for
survival does not entail quite such extreme levels of dependency on
richer patrons as is known to exist in other parts of the Northeast.
None of those I talked to could recollect an instance of a particularly
rich fazendeiro or powerful, landed coronel making his influence felt
in the area. As one old man emphatically said, “There were never
any big coronels around here. We never had anything like that. All
we ever had were farmers like us, but some with a little more wealth
than others.”
In local terms, the peasant farmers “with a little more wealth”
are and have always been direct descendants of the four families who
originally founded the settlement. These include the owner of the
casa de farinha, and all those who possess in the region of fifteen
to thirty hectares of land as opposed to the norm of two to three

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

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

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

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

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

that impedes the flow of graça (grace) from God to man.
It is also noteworthy that local accounts of the Genesis myth never
laid any emphasis on gender. Although the biblical claim that Eve
was made from Adam, or that she was the first to consider eating the
fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, is acknowledged on one level, it is
given only a very abstract and peripheral significance, if it is given any
at all. As in other moral and religious contexts, categories of gender
symbolizing a segmentation of two halves is subsumed beneath what
is felt to be the more fundamental segmentation: that between God
and mankind. In contexts of moral reasoning, therefore, what tends
to be emphasized are the perceived merits and failures of individuals
in relation to specific situations rather than the perceived merits and
failures of “women” as opposed to “men” in generalized terms.
If the Genesis myth explains how and why things are the way
they are in the world, the story of the Passion is, in local think-
ing, the template par excellence of how things could be. Jesus’ life
of benevolent self-abnegation is viewed as the ideal model of human
being-in-the-world; one that is theoretically achievable by all ordi-
nary people. Catholic Santa Lucians both make and are subject to
constant allusions to the Passion via the media, through music and
other forms of popular culture, and in their day-to-day discourse. In
church, sermons, songs, and homilies carry the message that the best
way to worship God is by emulating Christ. Rather than viewing such
emulation as significant primarily in terms of salvation in the hereaf-
ter, Santa Lucian people are just as likely to view Jesus’ incarnation,
crucifixion, and resurrection in the world as proof that heaven may be
achieved in the here and now. Over the course of my fieldwork, I came
to realize that although Santa Lucian people clearly acknowledge a
split between o mundo (this-world) and a world hereafter, such as o
céu (heaven) or o paraíso (paradise), they remain relatively uninspired
by heavenly or Eden-like concepts of time and place. What interests
them much more are the possibilities of divine manifestation in this
world. Thus the Pentecostal emphasis on the idea of a New Jerusalem
made, literally, from gold and silver is ridiculous to many Catholics I
spoke to. As my friend and assistant Lucinha explained,
My sister-in-law who is a crente [Pentecostal] told me that Paradise

is made of silver and gold; an absolute marvel to behold. Now, these
Pentecostals read the Bible very literally. This gold, this silver, doesn’t
mean to say it is real gold. When Jesus speaks of gold, he is talking of a
treasure, a good thing: his reign. This is why he came into the world.
Have you ever imagined the village of Santa Lucia where there was
only good? Wouldn’t that be a place of gold? If here in Santa Lucia, all
of us here, did like Jesus wouldn’t it be heaven? It would!
One of the most significant aspects of this kind of theology is its ten-
dency to tip toward the depiction of Jesus as an ordinary man. Not a
God-man with magician-like powers, but a real man, albeit an extremely
perceptive man, whose depth of compassion for his fellow humans and
intrinsic understanding of human psychology is in itself awe-inspiring.
This was the image of Jesus that my friend and informant Marcia
attempted to convey when on one occasion she sought to explain to me
the parable of the loaves and fishes. In Marcia’s view, when Jesus was
called upon to feed five thousand people in the desert, he humbly held
up five loaves and two fishes and offered to share these with the gath-
ered crowd. When the crowd saw this, they were so deeply moved by
the humility of this gesture that they were compelled to reveal the food
they had hidden about their persons. When five thousand people were
suddenly willing to emulate Christ and share what little they had with
those around them, something that seemed like a miracle occurred:
out of nowhere there was enough food for everyone. Through this
parable Marcia, like Lucinha, set out explicitly to contrast the ratio-
nal superiority of her Catholic understanding of the Bible with what
she considered as the unenlightened understandings of her Pentecostal
compatriots. But I believe that she was also attempting to convey some-
thing in particular to me, a foreign anthropologist: that although she
was from the stigmatized Northeast and a devout Catholic, she was
neither superstitious nor someone who believed in magic.
It is important to stress that although I have offered, here, certain
generalizations, every person’s religion is also, in various ways, idio-
syncratically his or her own. Moreover, just as the salience of religion
in Santa Lucian peoples’ lives varies so does the basic cosmological
notion. There is no singular take on many such points, including
the particulars of birth, death, and the trajectory of souls (almas) in
the afterlife. People are generally agreed about the existence of souls,
which they believe are sent into the world by God and detach from
bodies at physical death to enter either heaven or hell. However, they
are vague and divergent on the details of such processes: At what
point during conception and gestation does the soul enter the body?
What happens to the soul immediately after physical death? What
do heaven and hell as places actually look like? When asked about
such matters directly, informants were often quick to profess that they
“knew nothing” or were the “wrong person” to ask.
Nonetheless, speculation over theological matters never fails to

stir up a good deal of curiosity and interest. This sort of interest,
I noted, was just as likely to arise during conversations that I had
played no role in prompting. Whether in a Bible study meeting, in
the casa de farinha, or whilst seated in the shade of one another’s
doorways in late afternoon, discussions might veer onto the finer
points of what does and does not constitute sin, the nature of love,
whether it is truly possible to love one’s enemy, and whether God
regrets having given Man freewill. In such contexts, contributions
to theological debates vary. Some individuals partake with an air
of curious detachment, simply listening to others holding forth.
Other, more confident speakers will deliver improvised sermons or
relate something that they once heard a priest say, occasionally with
a good deal of performative hyperbole. In addition to this variation,
the manner of moral-religious philosophizing alters subtly with the
context. For example, during informal gatherings, a sense of joking
and irony often pervades much of the moral-ontological discussion
that occurs. Underpinning this kind of banter is a sense of pes-
simism about the human condition. A feeling that “in the end,” as
one friend joked, “no matter how hard he tries, a man does more
bad things than he does good.” It is perhaps for this reason, as I
hope to show in what follows, that Santa Lucians devote so much
energy to redressing the balance in other contexts, or at least to
rephrasing the existential challenge that confronts them in more
resolvable ways.
The Santa Lucian People and Me

In September 2002, I arrived in Recife to commence an eighteen-
month period of fieldwork. However, it was not until early 2003 that
I found myself heading for Santa Lucia. I arrived there one January
night, in the back of a pick-up truck, sitting atop my collection of
clothes, books, and odd bits of kitchenware. The pick-up stopped
outside a house, and as I clambered down from the truck, I remem-
ber wondering to myself why on earth the entire village had turned
up to watch. Paralyzed with self-consciousness, I stood in one spot
glancing around, until the mother of the house where I was to stay
stepped up and greeted me with a warm smile. I greeted her back,
and somewhere in the crowd someone laughed. I never learned who
or why, I simply assumed they were laughing at this bizarre stranger
who had descended out of nowhere, carting pots and pans and sport-
ing a funny accent.
My eventual acceptance as an antropologa here to study nossos

customes, nosso jeito da vida (our customs, our way of life) followed a
standard, if at times difficult, path. Despite this, I was lucky enough
to find myself living with a warm, tolerant, and humorous family,
who instantly incorporated me into their daily lives as though I were
a “daughter” of sorts. The household was composed of Amauri, his
wife Dida, and their two teenage daughters Fabiana, aged nineteen,
and Katiana, aged fourteen. Along the stretch of pavement beside my
house were the households of four of Dida’s siblings. It was not long
before I came to know this extended family and became friends with
Lucinha (Dida’s sister-in-law) and Lourdinha (Dida’s sister). Both of
these women were instrumental to my research: allowing me to join
them on daily outings, introducing me to new people, assisting me
with interviews, and occasionally explaining jokes and asides that had
gone over my head. I came to spend almost as much time in the
houses of these women as I did in my own.
Whatever drawbacks there were to my choice of field site, the com-
municativeness of its inhabitants seemed to more than make up for
it. Most people were friendly, several were known locally as conver-
sadores (conversationalists) and seemed only too happy to regale me
with stories and anecdotes. As a resident anthropologist it was often
frustrating that the best data would occur whenever I least expected
it—during casual encounters, and at moments when it would have
been impossible to make notes. At certain points I conceded to these
trends, abandoning the illusion that my research would follow any
predevised and coherent order I had set for it. In fact, I had little
choice. Although I was an educated foreigner and, in material terms,
more privileged than any of my informants, these facts paled in the
rough and tumble of everyday life. The Santa Lucians I came to know
well clearly had their own fixations and preoccupations. They were far
more eloquent and dexterous with their language than I would ever
be, and consequently far better equipped to mould our conversational
encounters. This slight imbalance was perhaps in the end fortuitous,
for over the long term, the themes that emerged from my research as
most interesting and salient were clearly the things that seemed to
matter most to them.
For the obvious reason that I myself was a woman, the bulk of my
participant observation was carried out among women, performing
activities such as attending chapel, preparing food, sweeping floors,
and scraping manioc. It was during such times when banter ticked
back and forth, and I was more or less ignored, that I felt I learnt
the most about Santa Lucian life. Opportunely for me, women were
also in the habit of paying visits to one another in the late afternoon,
visits to which I was often invited. Rather than being based around
the performance of some communal work activity, visits constituted
a form of social interaction between women that involved simply sit-
ting and talking together. Such occasions were usefully appropriated
by me for lengthier conversations with people about their lives. “Ask
a question, ask!” certain women would demand whenever I came to
visit. Ironically, I would find that the minute I was commanded to
ask a question, all questions would mysteriously evaporate from my
head. Quite often I found Santa Lucian people would end up inter-
viewing me.
My participant observation with men was inevitably more limited.
Having gained acceptance within the community as “a daughter”
in the house of a local family, I felt it would have been inappropri-
ate for me to accompany men I did not know to work or to enter
those male spaces such as the pool room and the drinking shack
where men tended to spend most of their time when they were not
in the fields or at home. I was, therefore, unable to collect data on
a significant aspect of village life: the male world of the bar room,
where men drink, build alliances, discuss negócio (business), and
contest and affirm their social status. However, the fact that I was
part of a family in the village allowed me to spend legitimate time
in the company of its immediate male members. Over the course
of my stay, my host father Amauri became a good friend and a key
informant. On occasion I would accompany him on the back of his
motorbike as he made his daily rounds, bartering and negotiating
the sale of livestock and other objects with various male acquain-
tances. Amauri’s father, Seu Mané, was another man with whom
I was able to spend a good amount of time, watching as he tilled
the earth or fed the livestock, or simply sitting with him in the
shade of his backyard, chatting about this and that. Unmarried men
of my own age were more difficult to access as I was required to
maintain a respectful distance from them, as they were from me.
A notable exception to this was twenty-one-year-old André who,
because he was Fabiana’s fiancé, would often interact with me quite
freely. And once I had established regular contact with Seu Mané, it
became easier to become acquainted with some of Amauri’s younger
brothers who I sought out for their views on particular matters. As
time went on and people in the village became accustomed to my
going about with a particular project, my assistant and I were able
to arrange formal visits and interviews with various older men, in
their homes. In this way I strived as best as I could to balance out
the female bias of my data collection although I cannot claim to

have eradicated it entirely.
An unanticipated result of my being unmarried at that time was
that it led women to bring up the subject of marriage quite often.
Indeed, the very assumption that I was innocent about married life
seemed to generate in women a desire to describe their own experi-
ences of conjugality. Time and again, those married women I knew
well would go out of their way to talk frankly to me about topics that
I, in theory, could know little about: sex, contraception, domestic
violence, and so forth. I often had the feeling that this was partly
because I was an outsider—someone to whom they could relate such
things without risk of judgment—but it also seemed in keeping with
the way older married women generally related to younger women of
marriageable age. Many such descriptions were offered in the form of
warnings about the difficulties and travails that marriage and moth-
erhood entailed and were in line with older women’s role in prepar-
ing younger women for their own potential futures as mothers and
wives.
Much has been written by anthropologists about the difficul-
ties of turning lived field experiences into written text. The poli-
tics of anthropological representation is a well-worn theme, a theme
succinctly summarized by one anthropologist as “a positioned
1.3 Santa Lucian woman

knowledge of peoples who are made part other by the observer’s

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

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

ticular value on the sacramental character of the church wedding, for
it is this event that gives the political, economic, and reproductive
outcomes of a union spiritual legitimacy and social weight. As João
Pina-Cabral has argued for the Catholic peasants of the Portuguese
Alto Minho, it is the sacred character of religious marriage that forms
the basis of understandings of conjugal households and provides it
with particular cosmological significance:
Marriage and the household assume a sacred character precisely

because they mediate between the evil of sex and the necessary repro-
duction of the group. Divinity and perfect sanctity are beyond the
reach of ordinary human beings. Nevertheless, within the household,
and via the sacrament of the marriage, the ideal of purity in reproduc-
tion is achieved. (1986: 50)
The legitimizing nature of marriage for women especially is in evidence

in certain Catholic and Orthodox societies where Old Testament and
Hellenic discourses shape ideas about gender and cosmos. Among the
Greek peasants of Juliet du Boulay’s study, for example, the endur-
ing perception that a woman’s nature “holds the seeds of the greatest
corruption—a lack of intelligence and a predisposition to sensuality”
(1974: 134) is mitigated by the process of marriage that turns women
into valued mothers and housewives. As such, argues du Boulay,
marriage represents the only relationship “which makes possible for
woman the transcendence of her nature which is a part of her social
and metaphysical heritage” (1974: 135).
In using the term marriage, however, I do so in a sense that
includes couples who have set up house together without an actual
wedding taking place. In the region where Santa Lucia is based, this
type of arrangement is common, particularly among poorer house-
holds. Established cohabiting couples with children are generally
given “married” status and may refer to one another as meu marido
(my husband) or minha espousa (my wife). It is often only in passing
or by accident that one learns that an official wedding or ceremony
never took place. In Santa Lucia itself, couples who marry with offi-
cial state and church ceremonies outnumber those who do not. This
is not to deny that other types of arrangement do exist, even within
the village itself. At the time of my research three young, unmarried
mothers lived in their parents’ houses, and various husbands had long
since deserted their families, leaving their wives in Santa Lucia to live
and raise their children alone. My focus in this chapter, however, is on
M A R R I AG E I N S A N TA L U C I A 43
young people and the profound changes that take place in their lives
as soon as they become sexually and publicly linked to someone of
the opposite sex, whether by official wedding or simply by setting up
house together. In doing so I wish to explore what exactly it is about
married life in Santa Lucia that leads it to be associated with “suf-
fering” and with “risk.” The risk marriage entails, and how people
attempt to negotiate this risk is the central subject of this book. In
this chapter, therefore, I not only explore a specific problem, but also
set the ethnographic scene for all that follows.
For the sake of argument, I begin by describing the most com-
mon path taken by young people in Santa Lucia: a path that begins
in courtship, progresses into an engagement, and ends in marriage
in a civil registry office followed by a ceremony in a church. I shall
investigate the claim, made by so many Santa Lucians, that mar-
riage is an occasion of sudden and overwhelming mudança (change)
in a person’s life; one that ushers in a hitherto unknown potential
for risco (risk) and sofrimento (suffering). I shall approach this claim
by looking at the actual changes that marriage occasions in men’s
and women’s lives and also by examining some of the lived concrete
problems and social and spiritual dilemmas commonly faced by mar-
ried couples. Finally, I shall explore attitudes toward those who have
sought an alternative path to that of marriage; namely Catholic priests
and religious ascetics. I shall argue that people’s attitudes toward such
alternatives are at best ambiguous, and at worst, hostile. However,
the ambiguity of people’s attitudes toward these alternatives suggests
not only that marriage is a socially productive and therefore neces-
sary path, but also that although its spiritual risks are great, so are its
spiritual rewards.
The Marriage Process

Being Young, Being “Solteira”
To be jovem (young) and solteira (single) in Santa Lucia is to be more
or less any age provided one is unmarried and/or living with par-
ents or guardians. Even those who clearly have a long-term namo-
rado/namorada (boy/girlfriend) are still considered “single” and
will be until the day they move together into their own house. For
many couples, there is an interim stage in which their commitment
becomes official. During this phase, couples are known as noivos
(fiancés). Frequently, however, men and women may stay living under
their parents’ roof well into their thirties, and if they never marry
they are unlikely to leave at all. Most households are headed by the
conjugal couple, and all others living with them are, regardless of age,
under their authority. This situation is particularly marked for chil-
dren who are expected to demonstrate utmost levels of respect toward
their parents. Rules that must be adhered to include addressing one’s
parents in the distant, respectful register; requesting each parent’s
blessing upon waking each morning and obeying all parental orders
without complaint. Older people recall that in the past, children were
also expected to stand up when a parent walked into a room and to
ask for forgiveness if they wished to cross a parent’s path. Today the
rules for showing respect are fewer, but those that remain are strictly
observed.
In general, while young people remain under their parents’ author-
ity, they are not expected to contribute financially toward the basic
upkeep of the house. They are, however, expected to ajuda (help)
their parents by carrying out tasks and chores at home, in the casa de
farinha, and sometimes in the fields. It is important to note, however,
that from puberty onward, young people labor not only to help out
their parents, but also to earn their own money. Doing so, they will
then be expected to buy their own school supplies, clothes, toiletries,
and any other luxury items they might want or need. Only in the
poorest of families, or under exceptional circumstances such as the
death or illness of the household’s main earner, are children expected
to contribute toward the cost of daily upkeep. In many of Santa
Lucia’s households, therefore, unmarried men who work are likely
to be better off than their own fathers in terms of disposable income.
Unlike their fathers and married peers, they possess the money to
buy consumer items, such as watches, motorbikes, and stereos and
to cruise the highways eating and drinking in churrascarias (bar and
grill restaurants).
Once their basic household duties have been performed, whether
or not and how much, young men and women work outside the
home is up to them. In contrast to married adults, unmarried peo-
ple have a good deal of time to pursue nonwork activities. When
not at school, studying, or performing chores, girls tend to fill their
hours doing one another’s hair and nails, going to festas (dances/
festivals), watching local football matches, listening to music on
the radio, or watching Brazilian soap operas on television. In addi-
tion to attending festas and playing football, young men are likely
to spend time buying and selling motorbikes and other forms of
transport, playing pool, and drinking at the barraca. Pass even
a day in the village, and one is likely to be struck by a qualitative
difference in the lives of married and single adults: a young, unmar-

ried woman may pass an entire day on the chapel steps gossiping
with her friends while her mother bustles to and fro, transporting
washing, balancing buckets of water on her head, shelling beans,
herding livestock, cooking, and sweeping the front yard. A young
unmarried man will rev loudly through the village streets, flashing
his new motorbike while his father watches from the sidewalk, in
ragged, working clothes. But this kind of difference is generally
indulged by older village residents, the pervasive attitude being that
the premarital phase is rightfully one of farar e divertimento (fun
and games), because it is the only time in the life cycle one is truly
free to do so. This was made clear to me one day when, in response
to Dida complaining about her heavy workload, I asked why her
two teenage daughters did not perform more chores around the
house: “Ah, I let them be,” she replied “for once married, they too
will know real work.”
Festas and Courtship

In Santa Lucia, the stated preference is for marriage within the vil-
lage. Boys are encouraged to marry nonrelated girls from within the
village because, it is said, that way they already know everyone and
will not have trouble fitting in.1 Marrying within the village is also
held to be ideal because a girl remains close to her parents. In practice,
many men end up marrying women from neighboring villages; how-
ever, the endogamous ideal is sustained as much as possible through a
preference for marrying women from villages within a seven to eight
kilometer radius.2 Aside from the preference for marrying within the
village, who one marries is a matter of personal choice. Most mar-
riages occur after a period of namoro (dating) that has lasted for at
least a year or more. Residence has a tendency to be virilocal in that
a woman will move to a house built on her husband’s family’s land.
Exceptions to this happen when landless men marry landed women;
in this event the man is likely to move into a house on his wife’s fam-
ily’s land.
Sex before marriage is officially acknowledged as a pecado (sin),
both for men and women. In practice, however, men in particular
are encouraged, even expected, to be sexually active from their early
teens. Girls, by contrast, are ideally expected to be virgins on their
wedding day, but often become sexually active from just as early an
age as boys. Many teenage girls discreetly avail themselves of the con-
traceptive pill, which can be bought over the counter in any pharmacy,
and some even obtain it for free from the local health post. Of the
young, unmarried girls who became pregnant during the time of my
fieldwork, I knew of at least two who subsequently had marriages
hurriedly arranged for them. With time, some of the older married
women I came to know well admitted that they had not been virgins
on their wedding day. Although premarital pregnancy is still regarded
as something of a scandal, it does not provoke as severe a reaction as
it did a few generations ago.
Many young people begin dating someone of the opposite sex at
a festa. Throughout the year and across the region, festas are held in
different towns and villages to commemorate patron saints’ days, cel-
ebrate religious holidays and, in the run-up to an election, to rally sup-
port for the local administration. A typical festa runs for two or three
days and involves fairground rides, food stalls, bars, and a constant
stream of different bands that play forró (regional music). Although
festas are attended by people from all social backgrounds, they are
particularly popular with young people from rural areas who live in
more isolated kin-based communities and have little opportunity to
meet members of the opposite sex who are not their immediate cous-
ins, nieces, or nephews. In their midteens, boys become increasingly
obsessed with buying motorbikes that will transport them out of the
village and across the region to meet girls at festas.
A local festa is always an animated affair, one that takes over the
entire village for the length of its duration. Weeks beforehand, rumors
begin as to who will be wearing what, which bands will be playing,
and how many people are expected to come from other parts of the
region. As the sun goes down and stars begin to light the evening sky,
a procession of motorbikes heads out of the village in the direction of
the town or village where the festa is to be held. Well before the band
is due to take to the stage young men begin pouring into the area on
gleaming motorbikes, as do groups of girls wearing tight jeans and
colorful lycra tops. While waiting for the band to start up, alcohol is
consumed, jokes are exchanged, furtive glances are cast, and anticipa-
tion prevails.
Dancing lasts for several hours, sometimes going on into the fol-
lowing day. Forró is ostensibly an innocent pursuit, but like many
dances performed with an opposite sex partner, it is readily appropri-
ated as a way of demonstrating sexual interest in someone. Single men
are apt to use dancing as a way of becoming intimate with a woman.
Similarly, women may signal whether they like a man via the level of
physical distance and pressure they maintain in their posture during
the dance. An implicit connection is made between being a good
dancer, that is someone who possesses ritmo (rhythm) and having

sexual prowess. Popular jokes and innuendos suggest that a person
who lacks rhythm on the dance floor is bound to lack rhythm in
bed. The public intimacy afforded by forró dancing is evident in the
kinds of discussions that take place after a festa: open teasing between
the generations goes on based upon who was sighted dancing with
whom. Intimate discussion among peers builds upon this, involving
explicit disclosures about sexual experiences that occurred during and
after the festivities. Dancing, then, is often a first step on the path
namoro, which may in time lead to marriage.
Given the sexual connotations of dancing with someone of the
opposite sex it may seem strange that despite the preoccupation with
chastity and virginity before marriage, dancing is something that
only unmarried people do. Married people rarely dance, and when
they do it is only ever for very brief, curtailed periods. Instead, they
adopt the role of spectators, watching the younger ones shuffle and
gyrate. Such moments often provoke married people into reminiscing
about their own premarital dancing days, and it is common to hear
boastful recollections about how well a person used to dance back in
the day when they were solteiro (single). Occasionally someone from
an older generation will express disapproval of modern forms of forró,
with its sexual lyrics and lewder styles of dancing, but in general the
sexual undercurrent of the festa is viewed as legitimate. “See how they
dance now,” a married woman once commented to me, regarding the
couple gyrating before her; “once they are married, dancing like that
will end!”
Bikes versus Bricks: The Process of Building a House

When a boy and girl become namorada e namorado (girlfriend and
boyfriend), they still attend festas but mainly to dance with one
another. Once their courtship is official, it becomes customary for
the boy to pass the whole of Sunday at his girlfriend’s house. There
on the front porch, under the watchful gaze of her entire family, the
couple spend time together. Secret sexual liaisons are easily arranged,
however, particularly if the girl has a pretext for leaving the house
alone, such as attending school, and the boy has access to some pri-
vate form of transport. When a couple have been in a serious relation-
ship for some time, it is expected that they will eventually marry. For
many young couples, the intention to marry arises gradually over the
course of a steady relationship. Before actually discussing the prospect
of marriage with his girlfriend, a boy may begin to demonstrate his
intention to marry her by embarking upon the protracted process of

purchasing materials needed to build a house. Early on in my field-
work, I asked Fabiana whether she planned to marry. “By the end of
the year I hope,” was her reply. Surprised, I asked whether she and
Andre were officially engaged. “Not exactly,” she responded, “but
he has started to buy the bricks, so I think it is only a matter of time
before he asks.” Once a boy has secured a plot of land from his father,
or perhaps bought a plot of land on which to build on for himself,
he begins to invest his money in bricks that will pile up slowly, either
in his parent’s front yard or on the plot of land where the house is to
be built. The pile of bricks increases in size, month by month. Only
when it has reached a reasonable height (i.e., sufficient to build the
outer walls of the house), he will begin to purchase additional mate-
rials, such as sacks of cement, timber, terracotta tiles for the roof, a
kitchen sink, and so forth. The construction of the house will then
commence and continue sporadically from month to month depend-
ing upon the amount of money available to be spent on it. When the
house is nearing completion, it is the boy’s responsibility to furnish
it with all the essential items. For couples belonging to small-holding
families, the basic furniture requirement for marriage is a double bed,
a table with chairs, a sofa, an aluminum pan rack for the kitchen, and
a television with a separate antenna. Fridges, gas cookers, and glass-
fronted cabinets in which to house televisions and display ornaments
are considered luxury items and can be purchased or acquired in the
years to come.
The practice of purchasing building materials gradually rather
than saving up money to buy everything in one go was explained
to me in terms of inflation. For most people who exist on low and
unreliable incomes, dramatic fluctuations in the Brazilian currency
from one month to the next make saving money rather pointless.
The pervasive attitude is to buy whatever one can as soon as possible,
before its market value increases. This protracted and rather public
process of purchasing materials, whatever its dominant motivation,
has, however, a certain social benefit. It signals to the families of both
the boy and the girl that the couple intend to marry, and it gives time
to both sets of parents to grow accustomed to the idea and to let their
views on the impending union be known. Thus by the time the boy
has reached the stage of having to officially request his future father-
in-law’s permission to marry the girl, he has a fair idea of whether the
request will go smoothly. Normally, if a boy has been diligent enough
to work hard and plough his earnings into bricks for a house, he will
be considered a suitable future husband for a girl, and there will be no
objection on the part of her parents. In one case I knew of, however,
the girl’s parents had openly disapproved of the marriage prompting
the couple to elope. In another case, it became known that the young
couple had eloped to São Paulo because the boy had neither the funds
nor the land on which to build a house. Some months later the couple
returned, expecting a baby. At this juncture the girl’s parents helped
the couple to build their own house and a marriage took place.
Couples intending to marry do not always need to build their own
houses. On occasion one or another partner will inherit a house, or
if one set of parents possess the financial means, they will buy the
young couple their own house as a form of wedding gift. If the boy is
particularly poor, or not given to the idea of committing his earnings
to building materials, it is not unheard of for a girl to work and invest
her own money in a pile of bricks and cement. One woman I knew
well proudly advertised the fact that she had built her own house
because she had been desperate to marry, and her fiancé had been too
lazy to get on with it. In most cases, however, the boy takes on the
major financial commitment in establishing the future household,
and the girl watches closely as the pile of bricks slowly increases.
The size of a pile of bricks and the speed with which it grows can
signal a man’s level of commitment to his future wife. A pile of bricks
can take anything from months to years to grow into a proper house,
depending upon the success of that agricultural year, the reliability of
the house-builder’s income, and, of course, his or her eagerness to get
married. Brick piles slow down and stop growing for various reasons.
Some people begin growing piles of bricks and then forget about
them for months at a time. When courting couples fall out or break
up, piles of bricks may stop growing. However, a common reason for
a pile to stop growing is because the man’s income has been diverted
into some other major expense such as buying or running a car or a
motorbike. One girl in the village had been waiting for a pile of bricks
to transform into a house for over three years. When I asked her why
she thought it was taking so long, she cited her boyfriend’s passion for
motorbikes: “that bike of his eats up all his money,” she explained.
The contest between bricks and motorbikes is, in many ways, a
deeply symbolic one. It underscores the gender-driven tension that
men confront throughout their lives between mobility and fixity.
Married women, for example, never ride motorbikes on their own,
even though they might have done when they were single. From the
moment that a woman gets married the ideal is that she gives up a
large part of the former independent mobility she may have enjoyed
and becomes ever more fixed—like the bricks of her house—to the
domestic sphere. In time, the house and the land surrounding it

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

Once the house is nearing completion, the boy pays a visit to the
girl’s family and formally requests her father’s permission to marry
her. Only when permission has been granted may he place a gold
wedding band on the ring finger of the girl’s right hand and wear one
on the same finger himself, as a symbol of their engagement. When
the house is ready but still unpainted, the girl organizes a mutirão
(voluntary work party) made up of unmarried female age-mates to

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

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

discontinuity between one kind of life and the next. In the next sec-
tion, I use ethnographic description to evoke the changes in social
status that recently married people undergo and the practical hard-
ships that often accompany them. In the subsequent section, I explore
some of the moral and spiritual dilemmas that married people are
exposed to; dilemmas that cause marriage to be categorized as a risco
(risk) because it necessitates entering into sin, leading the person away
from God.
Practical Survival and Social Responsibility

Giovani and Isabella were a quiet and congenial couple in their early
twenties. They had been married for two years and had a one-year-
old daughter. One day they agreed to do an interview with me on
their experience of married life. After hearing about their wedding,
and looking through their wedding album, I asked them how their
lives had changed since being single. Isabella and Giovani thought
about my question and glanced at one another shyly. “Life now is dif-
ferent in many ways,” Isabella ventured, “from one day to the next,
everything changes.” Giovani nodded in agreement and joined in:
“Married life is a lot harder. How can I explain it?” He paused, grasp-
ing for the right words and then went on: “When single, if you work
you eat, if you don’t work you still eat. When married, if you work you
eat, if you don’t work you don’t eat.”
Somehow Giovani’s earnest expression coupled with his carefully
chosen words communicated a great deal more to me on this occa-
sion than the obvious fact that marriage entails the setting up of an
independent productive unit. What was communicated was an experi-
ence of new and overwhelming responsibility. In truth, I had often
picked up on such a feeling when in the company of young, recently
married people, noting in them a peculiar mixture of burden and
bewilderment. On my return to Santa Lucia, a year or so after my
initial fieldwork, I went to visit my old friends Marcio and Edivania
in their new house. The pair had been engaged during the time of
my previous stay. In my absence they had married, and by the time I
returned they had been married for two months. I had come to know
both Marcio and Edivania as engaging and fun loving people. On the
day I went to visit them they warmly welcomed me into their house.
In accordance with his role as head of the household, Marcio took
the lead in showing me around the two freshly cemented rooms of
their recently built house. He offered me a seat on a brand new sofa
and ordered Edivania to bring me a glass of beer. Before me on a shelf

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

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

status. A young woman goes from being referred to as a moça (girl)
to a mulher (woman) and switches from living in her parents’ house
under their authority to living in her own where she is the dona da
casa (female head of house/housewife). A similar change in status
is experienced by the husband who turns from a rapaz (boy) into a
homem (man) and becomes the dono da casa (head of house). There
is no doubt that marriage offers young people a welcome escape from
parental control and an increase in social status; however, the plea-
sures of conjugal autonomy come at a price.
The responsibilities of married life descend immediately upon a
couple the day after their wedding, and once they have descended,
they are with the person for life. For men, marriage means working
to support one’s household. Most young men will have started work-
ing full time long before getting married, therefore the amount of
labor they perform may not actually increase. After marrying, how-
ever, work is no longer a matter of choice. A married man is obliged to
work, whether that work is near or far from his home. The newfound
obligation to labor and to spend all earnings on the conjugal unit is
experienced by men as a radical change in their lives. Before mar-
riage how much money a man spends on the construction of his own
future house is his decision, and what is left over is likely to be spent
on clothes, transport of various kinds, festas, and drinking sprees
with other male friends. Once married, a man’s earnings must be
spent first and foremost on the household he has set up with his wife.
In almost all cases, the transition in spending priority makes mascu-
line recreational activity difficult to finance and a conflict of interest
emerges. It is often the case that in the first year of marriage, a wife
will be less able to earn money outside the home due to the pressures
of pregnancy, lactation, and child-rearing. This is the time that a man
is most likely to relinquish whatever transport he might own. Men
would often speak regretfully about the change in lifestyle that mar-
riage had wrought on them. On my return to the village, Andre and
Fabiana had been married almost a year. Once, as I sat reminiscing
with Andre about the festas we had been to in the past, he reminded
me that when he was a single man he had once owned a motorbike.
“Man!” he exclaimed, “with that bike I used to go to every festa that
was on. Now it is changed, now we have to eat. Well, we have to eat,
so where is the money for festas to come from?”
For women, marriage bestows a similarly heavy set of obligations.
Depending upon the social and economic status of her husband, a
woman may acquire the responsibility of working outside the home
to support the household on top of all domestic chores. This is often
the case due to the fact that women tend to achieve a higher level of
education than men and are thus more likely to gain salaried work as
teachers and health post workers in the local municipality. In addition
to this, marriage confers upon women a hitherto unknown amount
of domestic work. One of the key chores that separate married from
unmarried women, for example, is the washing of clothes. An unmar-
ried woman living at home may help out with smaller tasks such as the
hanging out of washed items, but the bulk of the wash is always the
responsibility of the dona da casa. Washing clothes by hand is a tiring
job that requires strength and a certain level of acquired technique.
The larger a woman’s household, the more hours she must spend
scrubbing and wringing out denim jeans, cotton shirts, and woolen
blankets. It is a job that can take up two days of every week, a job that
many women say they only do a pús (reluctantly, by force). The same
applies for the preparation of food: if a recently married girl is unable
to cook, she and her husband are likely to go hungry. Once married,
it is unacceptable for a couple to turn up at the house of either of their
parents expecting to eat without having been invited.
For girls, marriage is always more complicated in practice than it
appears when single. The young wives I talked to were full of stories
about how they thought they were prepared for the tasks of married
life only to find, upon marrying, that there was still so much to learn.
Fabiana, for example, was still unable to kill a chicken months after
having been married. She would routinely beg Dida to perform this
task, while Dida would forcefully urge her to learn to do it herself.
Isabella recalled for me how she did not know how to bake the corn-
meal cake that her husband Giovani liked to eat before work in the
mornings. After various disastrous attempts she had borrowed more

eggs from a neighbor to try once again, and once again the result was
inedible. She related how upset she had been for wasting the week’s
food supply, and how guilty she had felt when Giovani went off to
work the next morning without eating at all.
The sudden transition involved in marriage is generally acknowl-
edged as producing problems for young women who may not have yet
acquired all the skills necessary for running a house. It is therefore
common, in the first two weeks following the wedding, for female
kin to spend a lot of time visiting the new bride in her home, offering
to help her with her work and providing advice on how to do things.
In the week following the wedding, Fabiana’s house was filled most
hours of the day with visiting female relatives, who helped her to
sweep her floor, hang out her washing, and prepare Andre’s meals. On
one occasion I was present as Dona Maria, Fabiana’s mother-in-law,
suddenly appeared at the back door while Fabiana was cooking. “You
have to add coriander to the meat while it is cooking or it won’t do,”
she said, leaning against the doorframe with folded arms. Dishcloth
in hand and looking mildly beleaguered, Fabiana peered into her pot.
Dona Maria came into the kitchen, pushed up her sleeves, and began
helping Fabiana to prepare her husband’s lunch.
Moral Dilemmas and Spiritual Accountability

Whereas Pina-Cabral (1986) and du Boulay (1974) have drawn out
the positive and legitimating nature of divinely ordained Christian
marriage, William Christian (1972) has proposed a more negative
view of marriage, emphasizing its ultimately profane character. For
Christian, writing of Spanish Catholic peasants, marriage is morally
and cosmologically problematic despite its social productiveness and
sacramental tenor:
The final step of the descent from the mountain, the irremediable exit
from the Garden of Eden, is marriage. In San Sebastian the mothers
cry when their daughters are wed. I asked my widowed landlady why.
Her response was, “Because they know in advance what kind of life the
couple is in for. And it will not be good. Crosses, Crosses, and more
Crosses.” Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden to live by the
sweat of their brow. Eve had to suffer the pains of childbirth, and even
Jesus had to carry his Cross before the Resurrection. (1972: 157)
For Christian, the polluting nature of marriage is based primarily

upon the inherent impurity of sexual union, but it also overlaps with
those active years of the life cycle that manifest a tension between the
concepts of human nature as “dominated by self-interest” and human
nature as “devoted to the service and glory of God” (1972: 157).
Such observations appear to resonate with perceptions of marriage
among Santa Lucians.
In Santa Lucia, the overnight increase in responsibility that mar-
riage enforces is matched by an overnight change in spiritual status.
In local perception, marriage is a place from which there is no return;
not merely in the sense that divorce is strongly frowned upon, but
because it is a stage in the life course that is deemed to irrevocably
change the inner person both in the eyes of society and in the eyes
of God. Despite the fact that a marriage is a profoundly welcome and
celebratory event, it brings a whole new set of moral conundrums to
bear on the lives of the newly weds. As it bestows full adulthood on
persons, it marks the moment from which they are held fully account-
able for sinful thoughts and acts. It is this increase in moral account-
ability, I believe, that Santa Lucians have in mind when they speak
about marriage as a high-risk venture. And it is this increase in moral
accountability that Dida was alluding to when, shortly before Fabiana
and Andre’s wedding, she remarked to her future son-in-law: “You
have to go and confess and soon, because once you are married you
really start to sin.”
Dida’s comment to Andre alerted me to the widely held belief
that married life poses spiritual challenges. As my friend Lucinha
once explained during an interview, married people are felt to be
more likely than unmarried people to be proud, covetous, greedy,
and selfish:
Lucinha: I will tell you how it is: when one marries, life becomes more
complicated. When you are single, all you think about are foolish
things, what will I wear to the next festa? That sort of thing. When
a person marries, he starts to notice things that he never noticed
before.
Maya: What sort of things does he notice?
Lucinha: When I married I noticed that we were poor. If one is a dona
da casa, one notices what the house next door is like—if it is better
or worse than yours. One becomes covetous, envious.
Maya: But do you think that God minds if a person wants to have a
nice house?
Lucinha: No, I don’t think God minds. But it does say in the Bible
that to want what other people have is a sin. And also, one cannot
have too much pride in one’s things. The business of pride is a very
big sin.
For both men and women, then, marriage is a stage in which social
competitiveness is thought to come most naturally to the fore.
Married people, as largely self-reliant persons, are perceived as having
a greater tendency to compare their success against that of others.
They are commonly recognized as being more susceptible to feel-
ings of envy and pride regarding the products of marriage such as
houses, work, and children. And pride and envy, as either conscious
or unconscious expressions of evil, are widely acknowledged to be
serious pecados (sins).
One of the most problematic aspects of marriage, however, is that
it marks the moment from which people become socially recognized
as sexually active. In Santa Lucia it is generally recognized that sex,
even within marriage, is dangerous and potentially spiritually pollut-
ing. Jokes and stories about brides and grooms depict marriage as an
ambiguous spiritual concession to the inevitability of desejo or tesão
(lust, sexual desire).5 Although reproduction is acknowledged as a
positive consequence of copulation, desejo is inherently problematic
for several interconnected reasons. Many people I talked to regarded
the fall of Adam and Eve, in true Augustinian fashion, as being down
to the acquisition of a type of consciousness that led to sexual desire.6
Some of my informants saw this as part of the justification of the
Catholic Church’s prohibition on the use of contraception and any
sexual practice that does not allow for conception to occur. A much
more public and worrisome dilemma is thus faced by most village
women upon marriage when they have to decide whether to use con-
traception.7 In the same interview, Lucinha told me that the most
difficult decision of her life had been her decision to operate against
having more children after the birth of her third child. Afterward she
had felt an urgent need to confess her pecado to her priest but was
unable to pluck up the courage to do so. Eventually, she traveled to
another town where she was able to confess with a priest who did not
know her.
In discussing this sensitive topic with me, however, Lucinha also
made it clear that she regarded sexual pleasure for its own sake, within
marriage, as a necessary means of “living well” together with her hus-
band. The danger of sex, she told me, lay in the fact that it made
people think só em si mesmo, em sua prazer (only in oneself, only in
one’s own pleasure). In short, it is more often the egocentric emo-
tions generated by sex such as guloso (greed), orgulho (pride), vaidade
(vanity), and ciúme (jealousy), rather than the act in and of itself,
that are the cause of spiritual pollution and potentially of spiritual,
social, and even physical death. All sexual jealousy between couples
that results in violence is put down as evidence of this fact. And it is

precisely within marriage that the consequences of such emotions are
most violently and poignantly played out, thus accounting for the
batidas (beatings), desgosto (hurts), and traição (betrayal) perceived
as common to married life. In chapter 5, I will explore this theme in
more detail. What I want to point out here is simply that for my infor-
mants, it is not sexual intercourse per se that spiritually pollutes the
person so much as the dangerous and destructive emotions it gives
rise to, emotions such as pride and possessiveness that in turn may
lead to sinful, violent acts.
If the moral dilemma of contraception is one that is faced pre-
dominantly by women, the moral dilemma of negócio (commerce) is
faced predominantly by men. An important part of any man’s role as
family provider lies in his ability to negociar (deal in commerce/do
business). Negócio is a skill that both men and women may develop,
although it is predominantly associated with men. Traditionally,
it is a husband’s role to negotiate an exchange for any livestock or
agricultural produce that his household produces, once or twice a
year, with the owner of the local amarzem (grain store). It is also
a husband’s role to make the weekly food purchase at market. To
be good at these essential tasks a man must have a cabeça fria (cold
head) and be sabido (knowing, cunning, clever). The moral, religious
problem that such personal qualities pose shall be discussed further
in chapters 5 and 6. What needs to be stressed here is that for Santa
Lucians, a talent for commerce involves an ability to pensar em van-
tagem (gain the upper hand). This is a quintessentially selfish act
whereby one man profits at another’s expense. It was pointed out to
me on various occasions that innocent people could not be sabido.
Being sabido implies a certain knowledge of the world and especially
of gente (people) based on worldly, lived experience. Children, for
example, are categorically opposed to gente sabida (cunning, clever
people), and hence adults in possession of childish innocence are said
to be ruim de negócio (bad at business).
For men, however, the doing of negócio is not restricted to weekly
trips to market or an annual negotiation with the owner of a local
amarzem or casa de farinha. It is a constant and ongoing obsession.
The buying and selling of goods and livestock for profit are done as
much to improve one’s social status and for divertimento (enjoyment)
as it is to make money. Men, young and old, are constantly seeking
to barter for or buy one another’s cattle, caged birds, motorbikes,
bicycles, or any other item that might be sold on to somebody else
for a profit. The apical expression of this obsession is the feira de
troca (exchange fair), which occurs once a week in the local town on
the day of the food market. On a jumbled side street, set apart from
the main market, men can take along virtually anything for sale and
exchange. Items on display at this fair tend to range rather eclectically
from worn-out pairs of shoes, broken watches, and newborn pup-
pies to brand new bicycles, helmets, and motorbikes. Men who are
very sabido can make a lot of money through negócio, and although
little of the income derived in this way is, in practice, expended on
the household, it is generally believed that a man’s talent for negócio
will benefit his family at least in terms of prestige. Thus the ability to
pensar em vantagem is acknowledged as being one of the skills neces-
sary to be classed as a good husband/provider. When a young man
called Luciano became engaged to be married, other men joked that
he was too burro (naïve, stupid) to be a good husband. This was based
purely on the supposed fact that Luciano was bad at negócio. He was
mercilessly teased that his new wife would have to take charge of his
negócio if she did not want to spend the rest of her life eating her food
puro (pure)—as in rice and beans without meat.
Above all, however, it is the whole new set of affinal relations that
marriage brings about that forces the married couple into making
morally difficult choices about whose side of the family joint resources
should be divided. The moral dilemma faced in such circumstances
is particularly acute for men who, in most cases, have the final say in
decisions about how to spend and divide up resources such as land
and accommodation. In Santa Lucia, kinship is reckoned bilaterally
and inheritance is equally distributed between males and females.
Residence is predominantly virilocal, but once a woman is married
she is thought to have an equal claim over her husband’s resources,
as does he over hers. After a couple is married, kin on both sides
continue to exert demands on the couple’s time, labor, and particu-
larly on their resources. The injunction to share land and labor with
close consanguineal kin is strong, and this, unsurprisingly, can lead
to accusations of selfishness and wrongful conduct from either side of
the family. Men, in particular, always face pressure to work in partner-
ship with brothers rather than brothers-in-law. A classic tension thus
arises when a married brother goes to work in São Paulo and is faced
with the choice of leaving his parcel of land in the hands of a male
consanguine or an affinal brother-in-law. In the majority of cases, the
land is lent to a consanguineally related brother rather than divided
on a more equal basis with an affine, and this occurs even in those
cases where the land being left is the actual inheritance of the wife.
This happened to Dida and Amauri when they moved to São Paulo
for three years before my stay. The land that was Dida’s inheritance
was the only land that the couple owned, and, rather than accept
an offer of share-cropping from a brother-in-law, Amauri decided to
allow his brother who owned no land at all to work it alone while they
were away.
Similar tensions arise when it comes to caring for aged relatives. If
a couple have no sons and no unmarried daughters at home to help
look after them, they may depend upon the material support of a son-
in-law. A man in such a position is often divided between having to
support both his own and his wife’s parents—a situation that often
leads to marital disputes.
The Alternative to Marriage

Although marriage situates the individual within webs of conflict-
ing relations and brings about a greater temptation—if not a certain
necessity—to sin, those who do not marry are regarded as anoma-
lies. Older bachelors are rare, but spinsters are common due to the
custom parents have of encouraging at least one daughter to remain
unmarried to look after them as they age. In return, a spinster eventu-
ally inherits her parent’s house where she will continue to live, often
with an adopted niece or nephew to keep her company. A spinster
(solteirona) is most often referred to as moça regardless of her age;
a term that connotes her supposed state of continued virginity. In
Santa Lucia such women may be actively involved in the community
affairs, in particular those relating to the local church, but they are
often ridiculed behind their backs. Most young women display no
desire to remain unmarried, some even warn their parents in jest that
they do not wish to be the one to remain behind to look after them
in their old age.
The path of priesthood or religious asceticism is another alterna-
tive to marriage, but this, too, is regarded somewhat ambivalently.
Among the Northeastern laity there exists a strong inclination toward
anticlericalism; an anticlericalism that is at once resonant with the
kind commonly found throughout the Catholic world and at the same
time subtly specific to the social and historical context of Northeast
Brazil—a point I develop in subsequent chapters. During my stay
in Santa Lucia, I lived opposite Edison, a twelve-year-old boy who
everyone teased because of his apparent fondness for prayer and for
regularly attending church. Edison once admitted that he wanted to
become a priest when he grew up and everyone thought this was
funny. His mother was the only person in the street who seemed
to want to encourage this ambition. One day she quietly took me

aside to show me the many drawings her son had made of the village
chapel, replete with depictions of himself in priests’ robes standing
beside it and chickens running about in the chapel yard.
There is less of a tendency to be openly and overtly antagonis-
tic toward cloistered monks and nuns because these types of people
do not have any regular or sustained dealings with lay communities.
Moreover, the ascetic calling is felt to have its place and is, on one
level, a fundamentally respectable one. Were ascetics not felt to have
some kind of special access to the divine, it is unlikely that there
would exist such a widespread belief in the supernatural efficacy of
the various Catholic saints (popular and official) that figure in local
devotions.8 However, there exists an alternative discourse challenging
the notion that the ascetic’s access to divinity is necessarily a privi-
leged one. This discourse manifests itself most explicitly through the
depiction of nuns, monks, and priests as hypocritically dominated by,
rather than in command of, their sensual passions. Thus, when some-
one is thought to have a larger than usual appetite for food, people
joke that they “eat like a Padre.” World renouncers such as monks and
nuns, and even passing lay missionaries are targeted mainly through
humor and ridicule. Northeastern clay figurines, woodcuts, and
popular verses are littered with references to greedy clerics and sexu-
ally promiscuous ascetics. Humorous rendering of monks with erec-
tions and nuns with pregnant bellies may not be specific to Brazilian
Catholic culture, but the particularities of the humor—the context
and nature of the dialectic it sets up—are.9 The fact that this kind of
humor is commonly relished among the Northeastern laity reflects
on one level a popular mistrust of the corruptible nature of religious
institutions, but it also refers, by oblique inversion, to the spiritual
authenticity of the ordinary layman. The example of a young woman
in the village called Maria do Carmo illustrates this point in a more
direct manner. Maria do Carmo was preparing to become a novice
nun but it was known to everyone that this had been, initially at
least, against her parents’ wishes. Eventually, however, her parents
had come to accept the idea, although Maria do Carmo’s father was
clearly still ambivalent about his daughter’s vocation. When once I
asked him about it he said the following:
Well, I was against it. What father doesn’t want his daughter to marry
and give him grandchildren? I said to her: “My child, if you are sure
you want that life, you have my blessing. But know that if you want to
live in the world, to work as we do, God will smile for you still.”
The idea that “God smiles” even for those who do not enter the clois-
ter is linked, in a direct sense, to the work and sacrifice that must be
performed if one is to remain outside of it. The idea being evinced
is that cloistered ascetics live an easier life, not a more difficult one,
and this fact constitutes an obvious obstacle to the ascetic’s spiritual
ambitions. The notion that nuns do not work was echoed on vari-
ous other occasions, most notably one in which Dida lost her temper
because her daughters had failed to clear away the breakfast things.
From my room in the house I heard her chastisement: “What laziness
is this? At this rate you girls might as well join a convent and become
nuns!” Off-hand comments such as this one are suggestive of the way
Santa Lucian people view the two alternative paths by which spiritual
permanence might be achieved. Either a person chooses to bypass
the polluting nature of sex, commerce, and divided kinship loyalties
via priesthood or some other form of institutionalized asceticism, or
they choose to marry and submit themselves to the spiritual chal-
lenges of conjugal life but through hard work and sacrifice transcend
them. Marriage may represent a submission to the polluting possibili-
ties of life do mundo (in the world), but the notable twist is that it is
this very fact that marks out the spiritual achievements of the mar-
ried individual as all the more remarkable. Herein it stands to reason
that the manner in which one submits to such possibilities takes on
crucial importance. For it is not simply whether one marries that will
ultimately determine the destiny of one’s soul in the afterlife or the
nature of one’s relationship with God in this life; it is how one per-
forms and embodies the challenge of being a married person.
Conclusion
In this chapter I have shown how marriage tends to be experienced
by persons as an overwhelming transition to a state of increased social
responsibility, bringing hardship and a sense of radical rupture from
the life that went before. The Janus-faced nature of the power, pres-
tige, and fulfillment that conjugal life promises is made evident at
various turns. Marriage requires couples to make morally difficult
decisions, to carry out spiritually polluting activities and to negotiate
multiple new temptations toward envy, greed, selfishness, and pride.
Within this complex sphere, moral knowledge about the world and
the ability to compete selfishly by using it are necessary for survival.
Married people “know” the world, they are able to judge and be
taken into account, but in turn they will be judged and be held to
account. In many ways, the Santa Lucian case appears to support
William Christian’s analysis that worldly marriage (for men as much

as for women) represents a symbolic exit from Eden. However, in the
Santa Lucian case, the exit is not just symbolic, it is phenomenologi-
cally real and experientially complex for those who must negotiate it.
This will become clearer in chapter 5 where I examine the kinds of
social and physical violence that marriage can lead to by exploring
attitudes to violence between spouses. In this chapter I have sought
to reveal the spiritual problem marriage gives rise to by showing how
it brings the individual into conflict with close consanguineal rela-
tives and affines, how it involves commerce that is explicitly predi-
cated upon “gaining the upper hand,” and how it facilitates sexual
union that in turn arouses sinful emotions such as lust, jealousy, and
pride. It is for these reasons that marriage, despite its sacramental
nature, is considered a dangerous path to tread, leading the person
ever away from God.
Yet it is also plain that despite such social and spiritual transgres-
sions, marriage is necessary for the reproduction of the household,
and religious celibacy is not considered a desirable alternative choice.
This introduces the notion that transgression is itself a permissible
social form; one that may be central to the ethnotheological discourse
of my informants. What I hope to demonstrate in the chapters that
follow is how Santa Lucian people attempt to embrace and reframe
the transgression that marriage entails. And to show how in doing so,
what appears at first to be a negative predicament comes to be seen as
a positive strategy in the encompassing social and spiritual order.
Chapter 3
The Bearing of Burdens: Suffering,

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

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

yes, and now I wait for Him.” The old lady looked out of the open
doorway with an air of thoughtfulness, but no more was said.
An awkward time passed with the three of us in that room together,
glancing back and forth, in silence. Moça kept gazing at her aunt,
willing her to speak, but finally we stood up to leave. As we walked
back to the village, Moça, who was obviously dissatisfied with the
result of the visit, went on to tell me herself about Tia Ana’s life of
suffering. She told me how Tia Ana had traveled about the country
in search of work to feed her children, of the years that she had spent
caring for her blind mother-in-law, of her late husband’s compulsion
to gamble away their money, and of the terrible hunger that she had
endured in the great drought. Although mildly embarrassed by the
situation that had just unfolded, on some implicit level I understood
Moça’s insistence that I know of her aunt’s suffering. For Moça, it was
important that I perceive Tia Ana first and foremost for what she was
popularly perceived to be: a sofredora (one who has suffered greatly).
In Santa Lucia suffering is a powerful and pervasive idiom. It may
be deployed via speech acts or physical behaviors in various contexts:
from casual greetings to formal visits, from devotional and healing
ritual to political gatherings. In many ways it could be read as belong-
ing to a tradition of what I here term “elaborated suffering” within
Orthodox and Catholic cultures, in which suffering is publicly elabo-
rated, performed, and expressed.
Within the literature on Catholic and Orthodox peasantries in
Europe, women’s public and often dramatic performances of suffer-
ing are most noted in relation to rituals concerning death (Danforth
1982; Caraveli 1986; Seremetakis 1991) and pilgrimage (Christian
1972; Dahlberg 1987, 1991; Dubisch 1995). Elaborated suffering
in such contexts has been analyzed as central to a range of impor-
tant processes from expiation and divine mediation (Caraveli 1986;
Seremetakis 1991), social bonding (Caraveli 1986; Dubisch 1995),
and historical embodiment (Pandolfi 1991) to gender construc-
tion and political resistance (Caraveli 1986; Dubisch 1995; Magrini
1998; Seremetakis 1991). Anthropologists of Latin America writing
about women’s elaborated suffering have tended to take a rather more
politicized approach, seeking to locate it within wider discussions of
Catholic misogynism and patriarchal oppression. In a much cited
and heavily critiqued article by Evelyn Stevens (1973), the cultural
emphasis on suffering in many Latin American cultures has been
linked to an ideology of Marianismo—the “other face of Machismo.”
Marianismo is said to concern an ideal of womanhood deriving from
T H E B E A R I N G O F B U R D EN S 69
religion and myth as passive, self-sacrificing, and spiritually elevated

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

suffering as an embodied, conceptual, and moral construct.
The chapter is split into two main sections. In the first I present
some of my own ethnographic data on elaborated suffering in Santa
Lucia. To convey something of the power and pervasiveness of this
phenomenon in the Santa Lucian lived-world, I shall draw it out in
relation to a mixture of everyday and ritualized contexts. These range
from speech genres specific to social visits and greetings to actions
within healing rituals. I then go on to examine the metaphor of con-
tainment by which suffering is locally conceptualized. This metaphor,
I shall argue, arises in a variety of interlinked contexts, thus embed-
ding different categories of person in an overarching semiology of
suffering, sacrifice, and spiritual redemption. The examples I provide
center mainly on women; however, it is crucial to bear in mind that
this is more a product of the way I have chosen to divide up and pres-
ent the data than a reflection of any fundamental difference between
genders. It should be recognized that the argument I make here is
both coterminous with, and complementary to, data presented in the
following chapter that relates mainly to men.
In the second part of the chapter, I return to my discussion of
other ethnographic contexts, where women’s elaborated suffering is
argued to serve an encompassing need to produce and express gender
identity. In contrast to this type of analysis, I suggest that in Santa
Lucia elaborated suffering serves an essentially ungendered existen-
tial challenge—one that is merely shaped by, but not derived from, a
need to produce social difference between the sexes. Using the work
of anthropologists such as James Laidlaw (2002) and Joel Robbins
(2007) on morality and Andrea Dahlberg (1987, 1991), John Eade
(1991), and Michael Sallnow (1991) on Christian pilgrimage, I shall
offer a different perspective on what the expression of suffering pro-
duces, as well as addressing why suffering, more than any other emo-
tion, should be socially productive at all.
Narratives of Suffering in Santa Lucia

Similar to Tia Ana, Dona Lourdes was a woman who was also
renowned for her suffering. One day she agreed to provide me with
her life story. Her narrative began with the following words:
I was a person who suffered. Ever since the beginning I suffered. I

don’t like to recount my life, no, because just speaking about it makes
me cry! I was raised in the house of my grandmother. There my mother
started to raise us with suffering. She suffered, suffered so much to

raise us. Look, seems there were nearly twenty of us children there in
the house, in my grandmother’s house. And didn’t I then go and have
twenty-two of my own?
In the course of Dona Lourdes’s narrative, I learnt of her poverty-

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

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

such displays of emotion is one of benign detachment. Such detach-
ment, far from signaling insensitivity to the feelings of others is actu-
ally very much in keeping with the situated nature of such speech.
The narrative performance is as much a bringing-forth of suffering as
it is a discursive reflection of it. Counteracting this process with utter-
ances designed to dilute the sentiment would be to divest the speaker
of the chance to relive and thus to make productive her suffering.
The Politics of Labels

During my time in the field, my informants would routinely point
out to me those women—usually of middle age or older—who bore
the title of sofredora. I would be introduced to such women with
phrases such as “esta é a Dona X, ela é uma sofredora” (this here is
Dona X, she is a suffered person) or “esta é a sofreda Dona X” (this
is the suffering one, Dona X).4 The title of sofredora possesses par-
ticular significance because other persons bestow it. Thus, while any
woman might present herself as a suffering person, being known and
labeled as a sofredora constitutes an act of “consummation,” to bor-
row Mikhail Bakhtin’s phrase (1986). Defining someone in this way
is a mark of respect, but it also constitutes an act of social participa-
tion in a general quest to negotiate the sin that accrues to those of
married status. Only a select group of older women are regularly and
publicly defined in this way. Such women often maintain, in public at
least, an air of gravitas, and they are treated affectionately and rever-
ently by other members of the community.
Titled sofredoras were frequently singled out for my attention, and
the manner in which I would be taken about the village and presented
to them not only indicated the esteem in which these women were
held but also revealed to me the power of sufferers to elicit ongoing
relations of exchange and reciprocity. Indeed, the pressure to respond
to the suffering performances of certain individuals was not restricted
to me as a wealthy outsider; it clearly affected people within the vil-
lage itself. Dona Lourdes, Amauri’s mother, was a case in point.
Dona Lourdes, as a well-known sofredora, constantly elicited atten-
tion from her grown-up sons and daughters. On occasion Amauri
would appear worn out by his mother’s elaborated suffering, and the
obligation it put him under to give her his undivided attention. At
such times he would order Dida to go and visit her on his behalf.
Dida clearly resented this pattern, claiming that she had been tend-
ing to her mother-in-law on Amauri’s behalf for years. In a moment
of frankness, when Amauri was not present, Dida commented wryly

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

many of which connote this idiom of carrying and containment. A
common shorthand for signifying that having many children or much
work leads to suffering is via the term carregado, deriving from the
root verb carregar, meaning “to carry.” Hence one hears phrases such
as “ela é carregada de filhos” (she is carried/weighed-down with chil-
dren) or “ele está carregado de trabalho” (he is carried/weighed-down
with work) implying a sense of encumbrance and endurance. Another
word used in lieu of the verb sofrer is aguentar (to withstand, to bear
up under). Thus, when producing narratives of suffering, women will
commonly talk in the past tense about the hunger, loss, or pain that
“eu aguentei” (I bore). The linguistic metaphors and social contexts
that relate to the concept of suffering in Santa Lucia are evocative of
the Latin root of the word sofrer that means “to bear/to contain/
to carry,” such that just as a pot carries and contains water, people
“carry” and “contain” suffering.
Verbal expressions of suffering as containment echo ways in which
the body is often depicted. Suffering is presented as being linked not
only to the subject’s personhood in an abstract, intentional, or voli-
tional sense but also to its manifestation in the world as a human
being in possession of a physical body. Herein the suffering person’s
body is like a container; one that may just as well rupture from the
weight of its content. Such was the case with one woman in the village
who was said to have become doida (crazy), when her son drowned
several years back. People were given to observing that this particular
woman had suffered from an “open” constitution that, like a cracked
vessel, had left her unable to properly bear her own suffering.
It is interesting to note, however, that whereas pity is extended
toward a woman who becomes doida, married women who commit
suicide are publicly condemned. For married women with dependents
to feed and look after, suicide is regarded as an apical expression of
selfishness in that it constitutes a form of self-destruction that ben-
efits only the self. Rather than being understood as a tragic side-effect
of womanly suffering, suicide is perceived as preeminently sinful, not
because it overrides God’s will to bestow life or death, but because it
suggests a selfish unwillingness to bear suffering on behalf of others.
An important distinction is therefore made between those who are
afflicted with a weak body and are therefore unable to suffer correctly
and those who opt selfishly to escape from suffering altogether.
The folk sickness peito aberto, which literally translated means
“open chest” is an interesting case for consideration because it
appears to leave people with a weakened capacity for suffering. Peito
aberto is a common ailment affecting both men and women, one that
is curable only through prayer by a rezador (prayer-person). There is
no precise or singular definition of its cause or symptoms but most
people describe peito aberto as a peculiar feeling in the back or chest
that occurs when the peito (chest) becomes aberto (open). This, it is
said, happens from excessive lifting of weight or from trabalho pesado
(heavy work) in general. When a person has peito aberto, their capacity
for physical labor is impaired; they may feel weak, their chest might
ache, and they are advised to abstain from all kinds of heavy labor (see
also Rebhun 1994).
The prayer for peito aberto is one that I saw performed on several
occasions for both sexes. The rezador begins by measuring the cir-
cumference of the patient’s rib cage with a towel or length of cloth.
The cloth is then placed back around the patient’s rib cage and the
ends are twisted together where they meet in the middle of their
chest (see figure 3.1). Using one hand to forcefully twist the material,
an action that “closes” the chest, the rezador uses the thumb of her
other hand to repeatedly press the sign of a cross into the center of
the patient’s upper chest, whilst repeating chants under her breath. At
the end of a lengthy period of chanting and tight twisting, the reza-
dor uses the cloth to measure, once more, the circumference of the
patient’s chest. She then shows the patient how much his or her chest
has been closed by. This understanding of the chest as a typically
closed structure that may become open is not only metaphoric but
also literal, and patients are always very interested to see by exactly
how much their chest has been closed. Once a person is cured, he is
able to work again, in particular to aguentar (withstand) heavy loads
once more. It is in cases of peito aberto that the container-like notion
of the body becomes most evident. But the concept is implicit in two
other contexts as well: childbearing and healing.
The Mother as Container

In Santa Lucia, pregnancy is the capacity to bear par excellence; the
womb being the archetypal container. However, it is not only or
specifically babies that women “carry” inside their bodies, but also
suffering. Pregnancy is held to be an uncomfortable condition, and
pregnant women are generally described as doente (ill). Illness, in this
sense, does not convey pregnancy as a pathological problem so much
as a drawn out process of bearing and encumbrance. This process, as
it is locally conceived, reaches its apical expression in the rupture and
suffering of labor.
One morning as I was walking alongside Dida, we stopped to

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

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

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

of mother and newborn, in the discourse of younger women, idioms of
bodily closure were notably intertwined with biomedical warnings
about the danger of postpartum infections. Although it is thus impor-
tant to recognize such discourses to be the shifting product of situated
social practices, certain symbols appear to be recurrent.
Mending the “unsound vessel”

It might be observed that the postpartum prayer ritual bears some
resemblance to an old Catholic ritual of churching women after child-
birth; a practice technically defined by the church as an act of thanks-
giving. According to William Christian, however, the symbolism of
the churching ceremony speaks heavily of purification:
The ritual has the woman being first purified with holy water,
then escorted back into the most sacred part of the church by the
priest . . . The fact that popular belief clings to the notion that women
are impure until churched testifies to the clarity with which the sym-
bolism is perceived. (1972: 154)
The notion that Catholic women are perceived as polluted after child-
birth is echoed strongly by Dahlberg who observes that
The central activities of pilgrims at Lourdes involve purifying the self,

especially the physical self. Bathing and washing in the water are about
cleansing oneself from sin . . . what are the specific sins these women
hope to rid themselves of? They are the sins of the open body; sexual
pollution and its product, birth. (1987: 244)
The argument that women in Christianity stand for the biological

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

“spring shut up,” a “fountain sealed.” (2000: 73)
In historical terms, there has clearly been a precedent for the

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

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

3.2 Rezadeira weeping
mattered was the strength of that person’s faith. It was sometimes

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

because, as he put it, “o rezador nunca vai pra frente” (a rezador never
gets ahead), by which he meant advances economically.
The most powerful and renowned rezadeira in Santa Lucia was
Celestina, a woman known and titled as a super sofredora. Celestina
was middle-aged and lived with her husband, some of her children,
and various grandchildren on a steep, sandy incline some distance
from the village. Their home was a brick shack that lacked running
water and electricity, and it was in urgent need of repair. In many ways
Celestina was no different from the other landless peasants living in
poverty within the region, but her hardship was commonly noted
as being more than the average person’s lot. Celestina maintained
a peculiar position within the village, at once socially marginal and
spiritually powerful. She kept a certain distance from other people—
often to be spotted walking on her own along dirt roads in the sur-
rounding countryside or sitting anonymously on a back pew of the
chapel during mass. She also possessed about her an air of harrowed
intensity, one which seemed to be only partly accounted for by the
various stories that circulated about her behind her back. The stories
that were told about Celestina concerned transgression and suffer-
ing. The men of her household were rumored to drink heavily and
be involved in criminal activities, and this situation was compounded
by the fact that two of Celestina’s daughters were single mothers who
remained dependent on her to survive. In addition to this, it was
said that Celestina’s sister had long ago stolen her identity to claim a
state pension. Because of this deceit, Celestina herself was unable to
draw a state pension and, burdened with feeding a large household,
struggled to make ends meet.
Despite this purported situation—or perhaps because of it—
Celestina was the most renowned rezadeira in the region, and people
would walk miles from neighboring villages to receive her healing
prayer. Those whom I spoke to found it difficult to verbalize why,
exactly, they considered Celestina better than any other rezadeira.
All they could say was that her prayer was strong, and that it worked
to cure them of their afflictions. However, it appeared in many ways
that Celestina’s faith was indexed by her suffering. Her infamous life
of struggle helped to cast her as someone with a heightened ability
to treat and recognize the suffering of others. The following is an
excerpt from a recorded conversation with Celestina:
Maya: Why would you say people seek you out more than any other
rezadeira?
Celestina: Because my faith is very strong. People see how strong it is.
That is why they come.
Maya: Why is your faith so strong?
Celestina: For someone like me, suffered the way I am, faith is every-
thing. People know this, they think, “Surely, if she didn’t have
faith, she wouldn’t be alive.”
In Celestina’s words, suffering is the encompassing value in terms

of which everything else is expressed. This goes some way toward
explaining the apparent disjuncture between verbally elaborated theo-
ries about ideal healers and ideal healers in practice. Theoretically, the
efficacy of prayer rests upon faith coupled with youth, purity, and vir-
ginity. In practice, however, the efficacy of a rezadeira’s prayer rests
not on her youth or virginal purity, but on the suffering she endures
as a worldly, aged, and sexually experienced person. A parallel thus
becomes observable between the archetypal suffering mother and
the respected rezadeira: the rezadeira is the acme of suffering; she
is the paradigmatic suffering mother and hence a powerful vessel for
the channeling of God’s grace. The techniques of prayer enacted by the
rezadeira recapitulate a semiology of suffering based on bodily con-
tainment. The act of containment is an act of sacrifice in that it involves
the rezadeira sacrificing her body for the benefit of her patient. As she
prays, the rezadeira yawns over and over, thereby absorbing and tak-
ing unto herself the suffering and affliction of the patient. In this way,
like the mother who bears suffering on behalf of her children, the
rezadeira bears malediction on behalf of the afflicted.
Suffering and Womanhood in Catholic and

Orthodox Cultures
Having explored some expressions of suffering in the village of Santa
Lucia, I want to expand and consider these against expressions of
suffering in other Catholic and Orthodox cultures.7 Elaborate public
displays of suffering have been noted by anthropologists not only in
highly ritualized contexts such as death rituals (Seremetakis 1991;
Caraveli 1986) and devotional practices performed at shrines and
during religious processions (Dubisch 1995) but also in the context
of everyday speech and praxis.8
Although the nature of expressions vary with the context, a set of
common, symbolic behaviors often form an observable part of women’s
elaborated suffering: crawling toward shrines on one’s knees, walking
barefoot, dragging the tongue on the ground, breast-beating, shouting,
wailing, weeping, and swooning. According to Tullia Magrini (1998),

such behaviors constitute a “work of pain” specific to women. Magrini
explains her choice of the term “work of pain” by drawing out its paral-
lel to the term “kin work” adopted by Micaela Di Leonardo to describe
American women’s task of sustaining family networks (1984). However,
she does not speculate what the end product of such “work” might be.
In the following sections, I put forward some suggestions on what the
end product of such a work might be in the Brazilian context. Before
doing so, however, let us explore, in more depth, what the dominant
perspective on elaborated suffering within this literature has been.
The Gender of the Sufferer

Some of the most developed theoretical explanations for elaborated
suffering are to be found in the work of Anna Caraveli (1980, 1986),
Jill Dubisch (1995), and Nadia Seremetakis (1991). Within their work
lies the claim that women’s expressions of suffering are indexical of
their gendered performances. In other words, suffering and its public
performance are an intrinsic part of what constitutes female identity;
its work is to simultaneously define, elaborate, and elevate a sphere of
feminine value distinct from that of masculine identity and politics.
Within this literature, suffering appears as a cultural motif with
both practical and ideological purchase. On an ideological level,
argues Dubisch, the elaboration of pain and suffering in devotional
practices and everyday life more generally constitutes a “poetics of
womanhood” in which women construct distinctive and powerful
images of what it is to be a woman.9 In the devotional context of pil-
grimage, women’s ability to identify with the Panayia (Virgin Mary)
as a suffering mother lends a particular moral force to their own
elaborated suffering, for it draws on powerful religious imagery and
aligns women with the major figure of Orthodox devotional practice
(1995: 217).
Magrini, too, observes that in Catholic and Orthodox cultures, the
role of women as pain-bearers finds exceptional support in the cult
of the Mater Dolorosa (Magrini 1998: 11). The fact that Catholic and
Orthodox women often identify with the elevated sufferings of Mary,
Mother of God, is indeed a point much noted (Cannell 1999, Drogus
1997, Hammington 1995, Warner 2000). However, as well as cel-
ebrating certain ideal values encapsulated by this important religious
figure, Dubisch suggests that elaborated suffering may serve as a basis
for women’s identification with other women on the grounds of shared
experience (1995: 214)—a point also made by Caraveli (1980, 1986),
in reference to the “community of pain” that she claimed united her

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

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

fering is an exclusively feminine practice has not been addressed.
In Santa Lucia, the extent to which elaborated suffering consti-
tutes a display of “womanhood” is secondary to its constitution of
basic moral “personhood”—that is, of moral identity in a quintes-
sentially abstract and genderless sense. First, not all women produce
narratives of suffering, whether in ritual or in other contexts, and
second, it is evident that men, too, have access to culturally recog-
nized discourses on suffering and pain. This second point shall be
discussed more fully in the following chapter on labor discourse. The
first, however, comprises an important detail that is mostly absent
in the literature on Catholic and Orthodox societies, and which I
shall discuss below.11 Together these two factors suggest that in the
context of Santa Lucia, elaborated suffering is not concerned with the
construction of femininity in opposition to masculinity so much as
with morality in opposition to immorality.
Age and Suffering

In Santa Lucia it is significant that only married women perform
the suffering narratives I have described or are labeled as sofredoras.
Never did I hear an unmarried woman young, old, or middle aged
define herself as a sofredora. Even pressing various unmarried women
on the topic of their own suffering, I found it impossible to get them
to reproduce the same narratives with the same conviction. In certain
cases, this was despite having experienced the same events (i.e., pov-
erty, death, illness) that had made up the suffering narratives of their
married, female counterparts.
Although it is probable that younger generations of women are
processing change in their cultural experience and expectations of
suffering, it is also clearly the case that cultural performances of pain
and suffering are believed to be the preserve of “older” (read: mar-
ried) women. In short, narratives of suffering, much like storytell-
ing among Piro people, are a practice one grows into (Gow 1991).
Younger women with less-worldly experience are not expected to cast
themselves as sufferers, for they are not expected to be as experienced
in matters that bring about sin.12
Given that suffering is elaborated exclusively by married women,
it would seem that it offers some way of dealing with the dilemma of
having to live productively, yet sinfully, in the world, and hence of
re-vivifying one’s failing relationship with God. Marriage is thus cen-
tral to understanding the suffering complex: it simultaneously creates
an existential conundrum and offers a way out of it. In the following

section I shall explore the logic of exchange that underpins the suffer-
ing discourse and makes suffering such a socially productive idiom.
The Suffering Narrative as a Performance of Sacrifice

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

ascetical, self-denying value systems, a notable example of which is the
morality of the Jains described by Laidlaw (2002). Nevertheless, sub-
tle differences are to be found between different types of self-denying
morality. In the Jain case, for example, as with certain kinds of insti-
tutionalized Christian ascetic practice, self-destruction in the form of
renunciation of the world and its pleasures is aimed at ridding oneself
of personal distinction to become, in the end, “a pure soul . . . finally
identical with every other purified soul” (2002: 326). In practice
self-destruction in the form of world renunciation may be a highly
individualistic morality, not necessarily motivated by the immediate
needs of one’s close kin and community. In fact, in the Jain practice,
as Laidlaw writes, “The self that is discovered and renounced includes
all one’s kinship and other social relations” (2002: 326). In the lay
Christian morality of Santa Lucians, however, renunciation (in the
form of elaborated suffering) is an intrinsically social phenomenon.
Rather than shedding one’s social and kin ties, elaborated suffering
enacts a subtle shaving away of certain worldly layers—physical com-
forts and material possessions—layers that stand between individuals
and their fellow Christians. In the Santa Lucian context, the logic of
self-denial is thus sacrifice; unless some benefit accrues to others, suf-
fering contains no value.
For Laidlaw, formalized techniques of the self such as the con-
fession and penance developed within Christian monastic traditions
and the confessional rite of pratikraman practiced by Jains represent
examples of what he calls “ethical projects,” whereby “people have
purposefully made themselves into certain kinds of persons” (2002:
324). In his contribution to this field of debate, Laidlaw elaborates on
the precise concept and meaning of “freedom” as it applies to people’s
behavior when they choose to follow certain institutionalized codes
and forms of moral practice. His argument being that although rites
like that of pratikraman may include an element of socially imposed
rules (or “moral reproduction,” to use Robbin’s phrase), they none-
theless represent an exercise of freedom, for “nothing in the rules
would make sense without understanding the ethical project from
which they derive” (2002: 326). We might view elaborated suffering
in a similar way, as constituting something of an “ethical project” in
Laidlaw’s terms. For while the norms and etiquettes of elaborated
suffering may, in some sense, be socially given, they constitute a per-
sonal project that is freely entered into.
The “freedom” exercised in elaborated suffering is, as always, of a
kind specific to its context. Through vocalization that remolds and
retells the past for the sake of the present, what was unconscious is
made conscious. Narratives of suffering are, in this sense, as much
the creation of a reality as they are its post hoc reflection. To under-
line this point we might turn productively to Bakhtin whose study
of “speech acts” lead him to argue that “emotion, evaluation and
expression [ . . . ] are born only in the process of its live usage in a con-
crete utterance” (1986: 87). In the concrete utterance of suffering,
morality is “born” as it were. A parallel might here be drawn between
the ontological and linguistic values of suffering narratives, and other
forms of Christian oratory, such as hymn, confession, testimony, and
prayer.
However, it is the choice of the narrator to cast his or her sufferings
as sacrifice that makes this a truly voluntaristic exercise, one compa-
rable to the voluntarism of mortification practices in other forms of
Catholicism (Eade and Sallnow 1991; Sallnow 1991). The exchange
of suffering for grace is a well-established notion within the Catholic
tradition and underlies the practice of penance in which bodily priva-
tions such as fasting, self-flagellation, going barefoot, crawling on the
knees, and so forth, are thought to win the penitential devotee God’s
forgiveness and grace. However, the willful subordination of the pas-
sions and the notion of self-discipline in the practice of bodily mor-
tification hinges on its chosen and self-inflicted character (Dahlberg
1987; Foucault 1995; Laidlaw 2002). This voluntarism is what defines
the suffering as an offering of sacrifice, thus differentiating the actual
(or metaphorical) death of the sufferer from the death of a victim of
murder or suicide. For the suffering that derives from ordinary every-
day contexts to take on a voluntaristic and sacrificial flavor, it thus
has to be actively reconstructed as such. Types of elaborated suffering
that recreate an experience of suffering while objectifying it, submit
to suffering while remolding it, achieve this.
Sacrificial Suffering and Symbolic Exchange

If everyday narratives skillfully cast suffering as an act of self-sacrifice,
the notion of sacrifice in turn suggests the gift-like potential of suf-
fering. But what kind of gift is suffering perceived to constitute? On
one level, one could clearly argue that it is the Christian “free gift,”
exemplified in the sacrifice of Christ, that is echoed and embedded in
the elaborated suffering of Santa Lucian women. For Santa Lucians
(as for Catholics more widely), to suffer on behalf of others is overtly
recognized as a giving of oneself without expectation of return. In the
Santa Lucian context, this idea attains its most elaborate expression in
the injunction against paying the rezadeira and against even uttering
the word obrigado (thank you) in return for a healing session. The
free gift embodied in the ideal suffering mother (or rezadeira) makes
her part of the pantheon of human saints able to act as mediators with
the divine. As one local saying suggests, Deus criou mãe por que não
conseguia estar em todos os lugares ao mesmo tempo cuidando dos seus
filhos (God created mother because he could not be in all places at the
same time looking after his children). And in the following popular
verse, the mediative capacity of the eternally giving mother makes her
into a saint like any other:
Eu vi minha mãe rezando I saw my mother praying

Aos pés da Virgem Maria At the feet of the Virgin Mary
Era uma santa escutando It was one saint listening
O que outra santa dizia14 To what the other saint said
However, as Hubert and Mauss long ago noted, the abnegation and
submission that defines the practice of sacrifice are “not without their
selfish aspect . . . Disinterest is mingled with self-interest. That is why
it has been so frequently conceived of as a form of contract” (1964:
100). According to Jonathan Parry (1986), the ideology of altruistic
giving is inextricably linked to the ideology of the reciprocated gift
and self-interest. In the Christian world, he argues, a “universalistic
conception of purely disinterested giving” has developed simultane-
ously alongside the notion of “pure utility” (1986: 468). And cer-
tainly, in the Santa Lucian context, one finds a certain amount of
ambiguity and conflict between these two ideologies, for while the
selfless suffering and abnegation of Santa Lucian women is clearly
meant to eschew notions of earthly reward, it is implicitly understood
that it will reap spiritual dividends.
As Eade and Sallnow point out, for a strongly Salvationist religion
such as Catholicism, “it is questionable whether the notion of purely
disinterested giving can be anything other than a fiction” (1991: 25).
Indeed, much has been written about the overtly transactional ethic
of devotional exercises in Catholic cultures. One sees the manifold
self-interested exchanges between humans and the divine most clearly
in the literature on Christian pilgrimage cults where, using the shrine
divinity as a mediator,
physical suffering and penance are exchanged for material and spiri-
tual favours, contracts are forged with the saints, sin is amortized
by means of a tariff of devotional or ascetic practices, and many
indulgences may be earned merely by dint of having attended the

shrine festival and having expended earthly time in doing so. (Eade
and Sallnow 1991: 240)
In his discussion of the Andean shrine of Señor de Wank’a in Southern

Peru, Sallnow (1991) points out that bodily mortifications and devo-
tional practices are primarily geared toward prompting thaumaturgic
intervention in the affairs of the living here and now, rather than
gaining grace and spiritual intervention in the hereafter. This would
suggest that expressions of suffering cast as self-sacrifice may not nec-
essarily be solely about securing reward in the next world, but also in
this one.
The latter point can certainly be made for Santa Lucia where,
at times, suffering appears to be just as much about exchange with
humans as it is about establishing credentials with the divine. Suffering
could thus be said to be productive, not only because it elicits reward
in the next world, but also because of the productive social relations it
gives rise to in the present one. The role played by the sufferer’s audi-
ence is, in this sense, paramount, for sufferers cannot exist alone: they
are defined and made valuable by their audiences. As the application
or withholding of the title sofredora reveals, suffering narratives rep-
resent a genre of politics in which individuals may compete and attain
a certain amount of prestige. Being seen to have suffered constitutes
a powerful way of eliciting care and material reward from those one
has suffered for.
In returning to the theme of the gift, however, it should be noted
that although sacrificial suffering in Santa Lucia clearly constitutes a
form of currency with which to elicit exchange, its power to evince a
return derives, paradoxically, from the idea of it being in the Christian
sense, a disinterested form of gift. Suffering is only productive in the
Santa Lucian context because it stands hierarchically opposed to an
ideology of reciprocity and return.
Conclusion
In the last chapter, we looked at the spiritual challenges to which mar-
ried people are exposed. In this chapter we have looked at one solu-
tion to the existential challenge that marriage generates through a
focus on elaborated suffering. We have seen how suffering constitutes
a sacrificial idiom through which married, adult women transfigure
and deal with the problem of sin in their lives, as well as providing
them with an effective means of fostering productive social relations.
I have described how the ideological basis for the expression of suf-
fering turns upon a notion of bodily containment that arises literally
and metaphorically in various contexts. Suffering is therefore evinced
predominantly in terms of a capacity to bear on behalf of others, and
the value of such a capacity derives from its sacrificial, gift-like nature.
Thus, by making themselves into sacrificial containers of suffering,
women create and define the nature of their social relationships both
with other human beings and with the divine.
The examples I drew upon, both from my own data and from the
relevant literature, have all concerned women rather than men and
hence reveal a gendered aspect to this phenomenon. In Santa Lucia,
women are more likely than men to employ specific types of speech
genres that help them to “re-live” their suffering, thus casting it as
a voluntaristic and sacrificial act. Women are also more likely than
men to symbolically capitalize on their suffering by assuming the role
of paradigmatic “gifting mother” through healership. It is perhaps
because of this that women are generally more likely than men to be
defined and labeled as sofredoras.
Nevertheless, to argue that this constitutes, above all, a “poet-
ics of womanhood” would be to put the proverbial cart before the
horse: it does not explain why suffering, in particular, is such a pro-
ductive vehicle for this purpose. I have argued that by examining the
moral ontology of sacrifice underpinning the concept of suffering,
an alternative understanding can be gained. The recognition that it
is primarily older, married women—those who are most immersed
in, and accountable for sin—who engage the suffering trope suggests
that men in a similar position might also make a purchase upon it.
And indeed they do, as evidenced by the fact that men can and do
become healers or fall victim to peito aberto. In this chapter, then, we
have explored the suffering dynamic as it applies predominantly to
women. Let us now turn, in the following chapter, to explore how it
relates to men.
Chapter 4
Working to Sweat: Labor, Narrative,

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

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

undergone complex historical transformations.1 From the time of
Portuguese invasion in the sixteenth century, work was intrinsically
bound up with the violent and extractive project of colonial-capitalist
expansion. Up until the second half of the nineteenth century, the
context and nature of labor in agriculture, livestock rearing, and min-
eral extraction led to its perception as a degrading physical activity
connected to the uncivilized domain of nature and disassociated from
the superior realm of culture and commerce. Work, as something
performed predominantly by slaves, was a stigmatized concept and
bore connotations of pain, of terror, and of “moral misery” (Pordeus
2000: 129). It was only with the abolition of slavery in 1888, the
influx of German and Italian emigrants to the south of the country,
and the growth of urban centers that the concept of work lost some
of its more negative associations and became a marker of personal
identity and moral value (Pordeus 2000).
As Michel Foucault (1975) argues, the pedagogy of work—the
process of creating docile and productive bodies through institu-
tional and ideological policing—became prevalent in Europe dur-
ing the capitalist expansion of the eighteenth century. According to
da Silva Diniz (1991), a similar process only got underway in Brazil at
the end of the nineteenth century, precipitated by the same motives.
It was at this point that Brazilian landowners and entrepreneurs were
faced with the question of how to replace slaves with free workers
in a historical context where large portions of the population had
not been educated for “regular and disciplined work” (da Silva Diniz
1991: 15). The conversion of large contingents of poor, freed men
into disciplined workers demanded the creation of a juridical appara-
tus that obliged the freed man to integrate into the world of salaried
labor, but to legitimize the new repressive measures, work needed to
shed its negative connotations derived from three centuries of slavery.
Positive changes in the conception of work among the bourgeois elite
themselves led to the creation of schools of agriculture and centers of
apprenticeship designed to educate and discipline the rural poor. At
the same time, anti-vagabond legislation proliferated in an effort to
discourage rural people from their subsistence based, seminomadic
lifestyles. Prisons, orphanages, and corrective workhouses sprung up
throughout the region as a means of punishing those who refused to
assume a sedentary existence based on wage labor and comply with
the new laws. According to da Silva Diniz, the sum of such mea-
sures amounted to the propagation of a new ideology by the elite
classes—one which equated the moral qualities of individuals with
W O R K I N G T O S W E AT 97
their dedication to wage labor (1991). The concept of work in Brazil,

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

the distinctly embodied type of morality that labor here produces,
and the culturally specific type of Christian soul/body dualism that
Santa Lucians work with.
Work versus “true work”

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

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

land that is para trabalhar (for working) meaning agricultural work
as opposed to land that may be more stony and less fertile that is para
criar (for rearing), meaning to graze livestock on.
Although rearing animals is not thought to require the same
amount of effort as crop planting and is therefore not described as
work as such, people in Santa Lucia frequently use the verb lutar
(struggle) in reference to labor involving animals. Thus it may be said
of someone whose main income comes from cattle rearing, that they
“struggle with cattle” (luta com gado). Indeed, people often supple-
ment the verb trabalhar for lutar for any work-like activity at all,
therefore emphasizing the sense of force and effort that “true-work”
involves.
Work in Religious Discourse

Concepts of labor in Santa Lucia resound with the tropes of Christian
mythology. In catechism, children are taught the story of the Garden
of Eden as the source of Original Sin and the cause of mankind’s
exposure to the passions, to sorrow, and to death. Here they learn
that Adam and Eve are cast out of the Garden of Eden for eating fruit
from the Tree of Knowledge and are condemned by God to toil in
the fields and to suffer pain in childbirth. In a sermon during the holy
week of Easter, Padre Augusto referred the congregation to Chapter
Three of Genesis:
cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the
days of your life . . . In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you
return to the ground.’ What does this mean, people? It means that
we must toil to survive. And it is not easy, no. I hear you complain to
yourselves: [puts on rural layman’s accent] “Ai, what have I done to
deserve such punishment?” In their heart, who amongst us likes to
toil? But let no one here be afraid to assume this cross, this heavy cross.
For if God himself could suffer, why not us?
The meaning given to labor in this story is, from the outset, a highly
ambivalent one. Labor is, on one level, the result of sin and a form of
punishment, but on another level it is imbued with a strong, soterio-
logical significance. As we shall see in the ethnography that follows,
the mental and physical demands work makes on the person facili-
tates an oblique identification with Christ’s bodily martyrdom. As
discussed in the previous chapter, the idiom of the suffering Christ is
pervasive in daily forms of discourse, and it encompasses the practice

of elaborated suffering. Labor, however, occupies a unique position
in such discourse, as it has played a key role in the history of the
Brazilian theological and liturgical tradition.
Legacies of Liberation Theology

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

que muito trabalhei hard
Cumpri o meu dever, Performed my duty, in You I
e em Ti eu confiei. trusted
Lutei o dia inteiro para Struggled the entire day, to
ganhar o pão earn bread
Não pensei em dinheiro, Thinking not of money,
pensei na salvação. thinking of salvation.
Espero que encerre o I hope the farmer’s sorrow

mal do lavrador will end
Que sofre sem a terra, Who suffers without land,
que sofre sem valor. who suffers
Without value
(Do altar de Deus) (At the altar of God)
Somos povo, somos gente We are people, we are human

Somos o povo de Deus We are the people of God
Queremos terra na terra We want land on earth
Já temos terra no céu. We have land in heaven
Queremos plantar a roça We want to plant the field

Onde plantamos o amor Where we plant love
Lavrador, a terra é nossa Farmer, the land is ours
De um afã é um só Senhor Rally yourselves, there is
only one Lord
(Somos povo, Somos Gente) (We are people, We are
human)
Tu que me chamas amigo You who call me friend

Vem provar-me que o és Prove to me that you are
Vem para a roça comigo Come to the field with me
Na terra suja os pés Dirty your feet in the soil
Eu vou contigo pra roça I’ll go with you to the field

Eu vou comer do teu pão I will eat of your bread
Tu dás-me a força da vida You give me the force of life
Eu dou-te a minha canção I’ll give you my song
(Canta amigo canta) (Sing friend sing)6
In the narrative of Liberation theology, the peasant is an unequivocally

heroic figure whose localized struggle against the landowning elite is a
manifestation of a wider, ongoing Christian battle against evil. Rural

labor is cast as humble, arduous, unremunerated, and dignified. In the
roçado the peasant farmer plants love (amor), his labor a supreme symbol
of Christian nurture and self-abnegation. Through this is produced the
“daily bread” (pão de cada dia), the force of life (a força da vida) itself.
By the middle of the 1980s onward, however, a variety of social
and political forces converged, that slowed down and in some ways
reversed the progressive Liberationist ethic. Various scholars have
since sought to illuminate why the popular church went into crisis,
and the assumption within this literature has been that Liberation
theology basically failed, and as such “broke its promise to the poor”
(Nagle 1997; Vásquez 1998). However, and as Burdick suggests, an
important and rarely asked question we might ask is whether and to
what extent Liberation theology has continued to influence Brazilian
social and political, and cultural values, despite its structural demise
(Burdick 1999: 423). In Santa Lucia, as has been shown, aspects of
Liberation ideology arguably still echo in the way that ordinary Santa
Lucian people conceptualize agricultural labor, with one significant
difference: rather than viewing themselves as a class of righteous
heroes pitted against the wider forces of evil, Santa Lucians perceive
themselves as ordinary persons pitted—oftentimes via that arduous
labor—against their own sinfulness.
Labor and Sin

The first sense in which the sphere of labor is polluting is tied to its sexual
connotations. This is particularly true of work in connection with the
roçado that begins for an individual at a point in their life cycle where they
are becoming sexually aware. As I describe elsewhere, initiating children
into agricultural work is held to be both a way of controlling and a way
of encouraging that awareness (Mayblin forthcoming). The process of
digging holes (cavando buracos) to plant (plantar), or “bury” (enterrar)
new crops is, unsurprisingly, envisaged as a sexual act. This is especially
true in the case of the manioc plant that is grown from stiff pieces of stem
called maniva, often referred to by the idiomatic term for penis, pau.
The analogy is not lost on locals who joke that manioc is “born” after
the pau has been “buried” in the hole. The growth of the crop is often
linked in local discourse to the growth of persons. New crops “sprout”
(brota), as do young people. When a person is described as broto, the
connotation, depending upon the context, is that they are innocent and
naïve or downright stupid. As the crop, like the person, grows tall and
ripe, it becomes maduro (mature and fertile), like a married person. It is
at this point in the life cycle of both crop and person, just before har-
vest, that the roçado becomes the ideal place for sexual intercourse. It is
joked and hinted that lovers and married couples like to take advantage
of the relative privacy afforded by roçado at this time of year, and I was
told that in the past, women desperate for children would attempt to
conceive in crop fields shortly before harvest.7
The second sense in which the sphere of labor is polluting,
relates to its connection with commerce. As discussed in chapter 2,
the exchange relations of market based negócio demands a certain
degree of human awareness glossed in local parlance as consciência
(awareness) or esperteza (cunning). Such qualities are perceived as
antithetical to Christian moral values, and the pervasive opinion
is that intense and aggressive forms of haggling over prices con-
stitute a type of pecado (sin).8 William Christian (1972) makes a
similar observation regarding perceptions of work among Spanish
peasants. However, there the distinction applies only to migrant
labor that occurs away from the village in the amoral space of the
city: “Because the city is an amoral place, all rules of behaviour are
off . . . The active life outside the village, at least as recounted after-
ward, rests on the principle that human nature, if left to itself, has
self-interest as the mainspring of its actions” (1972: 163). In Santa
Lucia, no such distinction is made. Vice is thought to be inher-
ent to economic survival, wherever one works. Moreover, Santa
Lucian people perceive themselves as intrinsically connected, if
not to the city, at least to the local market towns, where the moral
sphere of kinship is somewhat less pronounced and perceived amoral
exchange relations predominate. Nevertheless, the forced and diffi-
cult nature of laborious activity can counteract the amoral character
of exchange, for it provides a culturally recognized context for the
enactment of self-sacrifice to occur.
Narratives of Labor
In Santa Lucia people are always eager to comment on whether a
particular person is a trabalhador. As time went by, more and more
people were explicitly singled out for me in this manner, and I started
to observe that discussions of other people’s characters would inevita-
bly circle around assertions over whether the person in question was a
trabalhador (in the case of a man) or a trabalhadeira in the case of a
woman. Thus in much the same way that certain women were known
as sofredoras, some men and women were known as trabalhadores—a
title that conferred respect and approval.
The significance of this form of labeling was such that it was fre-
quently the target of parody among Santa Lucian people themselves,
such as when one young man, mimicking his own mother describing
a prospective son-in-law, said, “He’s a good man, a real trabalhador!”
Although both women and men are singled out in this way for their
commitment to work, a gendered element is discernible. Although
women are more likely than men to be labeled as sofredoras, they are
nevertheless also observably trabalhadeiras, indeed it is in their work
that they most clearly suffer. Men, however, are more likely to be sin-
gled out and labeled as trabalhadores, although the value of this label
comes from the suffering it implies. The label of trabalhador is there-
fore used and applied predominantly in relation to men. However, the
prestige of being a trabalhador is no more and no less than that of the
female sofredora. It is simply that whereas women tend to frame their
narratives through a generalized idiom of suffering, men tend to frame
theirs through the more specific idiom of suffering through labor.
The opposite of being a trabalhador is to be preguiçoso (lazy), a term
that implies a certain lack of morality. To label a person preguiçoso is
to say they lack consideration (consideração) and respect (respeito) for
others. Another term opposed to that of trabalhador is that of marajá
that, literally translated, means “maharaja,” and it denotes somebody
who earns money without working very hard to attain it. In contrast
to the virtuous trabalhador, the immoral marajá is someone who
gets rich by exploiting the labor of others.
In addition to such labeling, there exists the practice of exchanging
stories about labor. This was revealed, not only through interviews in
which I pursued the subject, but also through the spontaneous nar-
ratives people would tell among themselves when gathered socially.
The stories and narratives I listened to and collected were striking for
the attention they paid to the concept of physical suffering. In all nar-
rations the body was in some way central, with the teller sometimes
breaking off midsentence to show-off some bodily scar or physical
complaint acquired in the process of that labor.9 The following four
extracts are taken from labor narratives that were produced by people
of different backgrounds, genders, and ages.
The first of these is by a thirty-five-year-old married woman called
Gloria who works as a primary school teacher. She has secondary
education, a teaching diploma, and belongs to one of Santa Lucia’s
wealthier families:
I get up at five in the morning to sweep the house, make the breakfast
and prepare the lunch. I leave everything ready so that my girls can heat
it up for their father. By six I have left the house for work. It takes me
one and half hours to get to the school where I teach. I go on foot to
town and it takes me one hour to get there. From there I catch the bus
to the school. And then I teach all morning until midday. Look, I have
been teaching for eleven years. Eleven years of suffering. Only Nossa
Senhora (Our Lady) knows what I have endured. It falls to me to disci-
pline the children as well as to teach them. And we have no resources to
do the job. Do you think the prefeitura gives us any resources to teach
with? It gives nothing. I work hard. When I work very hard Maya, my
blood pressure drops low, and I feel a terrible pain in my legs.
Antonio is a twenty-seven-year-old man who, although never having

graduated, has several years of secondary schooling. He holds down
various casual jobs in local commerce, in addition to the share-cropping
work, which he does in partnership with his brothers. In the following
passage, he gives an account of a past job he had as a traveling cigarette
vendor. On the occasion being described, he had fallen asleep and been
robbed of his cigarettes, his money, and various other possessions.
What could I do? Well, I decided to walk. I had not eaten all day and
the sun was burning hot. Twenty-four kilometres I walked to get home.
I had lost everything, I was thirsty, and I was on foot. This is what the
poor man suffers, well, what life is like for the humble Northeasterner.
Seu Luis is a small-holder and independent producer. He is married,

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

to Dona Lourdes, and father of twelve grown-up children. In the
following passage, He describes what he remembers as the most ardu-

ous work of his life, working in the casa de farinha:
Mixing manioc. Today they don’t do it anymore, no. Today people

make manioc flour in a factory, everything with an electric motor,
everything motorized. To mix flour in the old days, was with one’s
arms. It was virtually the heaviest work there was in the world . . . Back
in those days I worked the whole week for three cruzeiros. I started
on a Tuesday, worked until Saturday, often Sunday. There were nights
I worked at night, the day, the night, and the day after that until six
in the morning. I didn’t stop mixing. Yes, my child, I suffered. Look,
I mixed that flour in the mouth of the oven, the heat was so intense,
see this leg here, all the hairs on this leg burnt off. This was the thing:
there were times I passed two, three days there working without stop.
Without being able to come home. The shift was thirteen hours,
but sometimes the next guy to take my place wouldn’t turn up, so I
couldn’t leave work. Well, my patron would say “You take on his shift
and tomorrow early you go home to sleep so you can start back again at
night.” So I would do thirty-six hours. All that was left was for me to
drop dead, Maya. Ah, it was too much, too much. And do you think I
had the strength to reach home and say: “Ah, now I’m home I’ll have
a bath!” Who on earth would have had? Many times I would just wash
my feet and fall asleep right there. Another thing Maya, I tired of leav-
ing the casa de farinha with this leg of mine, hot, hot, from the heat of
the ovens, and when I reached the river—back in this time there was
lots of rain—I’d arrive and the river would be this high. Often I’d have
to take off my trousers to pass. That cold river. I thought to myself : I’m
going to enter but I won’t get out because surely before that I’ll die.
I was afraid for my life, afraid that from the heat of the oven I would
explode there in that cold water. The water was icy, and I would have to
ascend the road flooded with that water. I walked in that icy water until
I reached home. Now this wasn’t only one time, nor two, nor three, no.
I did it because I had to. Not because I wanted to. Well, I suffered and
thank God I never became disabled with this business. I suffered a lot,
worked a lot, today I don’t work any more, but then I can’t. Today I live
with a bad back. Yes, I suffered, Ave Maria, I suffered.
When I prompted Seu Mané for his reason for enduring such condi-
tions, he indicated to his family:
What else could I do, Maya, with Lourdes at home, every year with
another baby. If I had been another kind of man I would have left,
gone off into the world. Well, there are men who will do that, as we
know. Imagine if I had! I would have suffered less that way. But a
father has to feed his children. So I stayed.
I shall return further on to look at reasons for the performance and

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

in the account produced by Seu Mané, whose position as a landless
laborer left him no choice but to perform some of the most arduous
and exploitative work there was.10
Labor as Atonement
Although the type of person making a claim on the work-as-suffering
discourse varies widely, those most likely to engage with it are mar-
ried men. Married people, as I discussed in chapter 2, are necessarily
mired in spiritually polluting activities. Be this as it may, some mar-
ried people are tempted to worse misdeeds than others. Indeed, the
significance to being a trabalhador only became fully clear to me
when I began to hear it used specifically in connection with two local
men, both of whom were widely known to have committed serious
offences.11
The case of Seu José, the weary laborer I described in the very
opening paragraph of this book, provides one example. Seu José was
a landless laborer, and the father of six young children who ran about
the village, often begging at other people’s back doors for food. Seu
José worked much of the week and passed a good deal of his spare
time drinking, like any other man. And like many other men, he was
reportedly prone to the odd violent outburst. On this occasion, how-
ever, he had gone one step further than usual and, fuelled with alco-
hol, had set fire to his own house with his wife and six children still
inside it. Fortunately no one was hurt, but Seu José had fled Santa
Lucia for a few days in case the police were alerted. The other man,
Seu Roberto was in his late sixties and had long ago murdered his
wife with a scythe in a fit of drunken jealousy. Attitudes toward the
offence committed by Seu Roberto are complex, and it will therefore
be discussed more fully in the next chapter. The nature of both these
acts, however, is such that one might expect irreparable damage to
have occurred to each man’s relations within the community. In fact,
this did not appear to be the case and both men were able to continue
living in the community.
When I queried friends in Santa Lucia on why these men had
been accepted back into their respective families, explanations circled
around the fact that they were muito trabalhadores (very hard work-
ers). In talking about Seu Roberto, informants would often com-
ment on the long hours he spent alone on his land, laboring without
help—not, apparently, because he could not afford to hire some, but
because he liked the hard work. Similar comments were made about
Seu José who worked as a sharecropper and hired himself out when-
ever possible in casual labor, making, firing, and transporting bricks,
digging wells and ditches, and loading sacks of farinha onto trucks
for transportation to towns.
On one occasion, Dida and Amauri were discussing Seu José’s
predicament. Dida was concerned that his numerous children were
becoming something of a nuisance, sleeping in the streets and con-
stantly begging for food at other people’s houses. “The problem is
with the parents,” she surmised. Amauri, however, came to Seu José’s
defense. “The man may be poor,” he said “but no one can deny he
is a true trabalhador. Do you think it is easy for a man to feed seven
stomachs?” Amauri was trying to make the point that although the
value in material terms was small, too small to sustain his large family,
its sacrificial value was high, high enough to warrant a certain level of
forgiveness for moral transgression.
An interesting parallel may be noted between the redemptive work
ethic of Santa Lucians and that which Max Weber (1967) linked to
European Protestantism: both posit labor as a route to spiritual salva-
tion, although in subtly differing ways. Whereas Santa Lucian people
reject the idea that labor’s moral production is in any way connected to
its level of material production, in Weber’s understanding of Calvinist
theology, material and moral production may merge in that wealth
can signal God’s blessing. Weber argued that following the Protestant
Reformation, the acquisition of wealth became an approved and wor-
thy goal: economic productivity was potentially a sign of God’s grace
and being a hard and diligent worker presented a way for individuals
to demonstrate their predestination.12 Thus, those who accumulated
came to be considered the very pinnacle of morality itself, since they
testified to the bourgeois virtues of thrift, diligence, hard work, dedi-
cation, and persistence (Marshall 1982: 107).13
In the Catholic Santa Lucian tradition, by contrast, the two spheres
of morality and economic productivity are maintained as distinct.
Although wealth and moral worth are in no way incommensurable,
wealth is viewed rather unequivocally as a danger to the soul and a
hindrance to spiritual achievement. Wealth, although always desirable,
has the ability to transform individuals into marajás (exploitative,
amoral persons), and in this sense can jeopardize a person’s chance of
salvation. For Santa Lucians, industriousness is not, as the Calvinist
position might imply, a sign that a person is already saved, it is simply
a means of attaining salvation. The difference is one of chronology: in
the Calvinist philosophy salvation comes earlier; in the Catholic tradi-
tion it comes later. This variation stems from the concept of grace that
in the Augustinian philosophy is a gift but in the Catholic tradition

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

tomed to dealing with a husband regularly passed out from alcohol
consumption. Lourdinha was an outspoken, energetic woman who
seemed to know every single person in the region by name and had
clear opinions about everything. I had often heard her complain that
weekend cachaceiros made the village feio (ugly) and were a bad exam-
ple to the young. I was therefore surprised when on this particular
day she called out affectionately to a man slumped at the foot of the
barraca in an advanced state of drunkenness “Oh José, all the world
knows that you struggle all week just to escape with a little cachaça
at the end!” The rationale Lourdinha was tapping into was one I had
noted in my interviews with men before: that drinking, aside from its
obvious social functions, offers a means of forgetting the hard work
one has endured during the week. It is not, therefore, simply because
he spends his week upholding his duties as a family provider that the
weekend drunk is tolerated, but because in needing to forget, he is
cast quite specifically as a suffering man. Paradoxically, heavy week-
end drinking may be interpreted as testament to the existence of sac-
rifice and suffering in a man’s life and therefore as a public statement
of his moral worth.
Love and Fatherhood

Moral people are often referred to as pessoas de amor (people of love).
The concept of love, which I elaborate more fully in the next chap-
ter, is deeply significant in Santa Lucia as it underpins ecclesiastical
teachings about morality that extend to virtually all areas of life. A
“good man” (o bom homen), it was generally stated, was to be found
in two places: either in a field swinging a hoe or at home with his
family. Once, as I sat passing the afternoon with Dida and family on
the doorstep, conversation turned to the topic of adultery. Amauri
lamented the fact that all the cuckolded men he had ever known were
not bad men who had treated their wives unfairly, but good men who
had loved their wives and children dearly. He knew this, he told us,
because everyone in question was a trabalhador. When I asked him
why being a trabalhador should signify love, he referred to a particu-
lar villager:
Take Zé Preto. He is what I would call a good man, a man who shows
his love for others. He’s not one of these who lives only to drink and
have fun. Every single day he passes by the house, he doesn’t miss a
day. Well, you must have seen him pass by, early, with his hoe. There
is a guy that lives to sweat, goes from his house to the hoe, from the
hoe to his house. As far as I’m concerned a man like that has to love
his family.
Similar equations were expressed by women in relation to older male

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

phenomenon, not a verbal one. This notion, I would argue, is partic-
ularly applicable to married men whose gender precludes them from
open forms of emotional expression. Herein, the supreme expression
of a father or husband’s love tends to lie in his alter-centered deeds
and in the labor he enacts on behalf of his household.
Although both mothers and fathers labor to provide for house-

holds, fathers are the ones most likely to do wage work. Moreover,
at least half of what a household as a unit produces from its land will
be turned over for sale in the market to wholesale dealers in agricul-
tural produce, and this dealing with outsiders is generally a husband’s
job. The role of provider is more strongly associated with men than
it is with women—for as Seu Mané put it earlier, “a man’s obliga-
tion is to feed his children.” Thus it is men who, in local imaginings,
bear the larger load when it comes to providing for the entire fam-
ily. Moreover, in a region historically afflicted by extremes of social
inequality, drought, and land shortage, feeding a family is implicitly
associated with hardship and struggle. In local imaginings, providers
are persons burdened with an exceptionally heavy Cross. The peasant
father-provider is simultaneously identified with Adam, cast out into
the world, and the crucified Jesus. Sociohistorical factors here con-
verge with latent symbolic configurations about labor derived from
the Genesis myth, casting the provider as a distinctive type of worldly
Christian hero ordained on a mission of spiritual import.
It would be mistaken, however, to overplay the gendered aspect
of the labor-as-suffering complex. For as we have seen, women are as
apt to make claims on the discourse as men. This is hardly surpris-
ing given that both men and women exist in the same universe of
symbols, and they are exposed to the same scriptural doctrines and
preachings. Bynum makes a similar point regarding gender in Europe
in the late Middle Ages when she points out that whereas male ascet-
ics tended to renounce wealth and power, women ascetics tended to
renounce food (1987: 295). However, women’s piety, she argues, was
not inherently different from that of men’s, but rather a different
appropriation of symbols toward the same ends. Indeed, in the Santa
Lucian context, what stands out is not the issue of differentiation so
much as correspondence between the various kinds of gendered nar-
ratives produced.
Labor, the Body, and Redemption

In seeking to analyze the labor narrative, it is important to recognize
the sense in which it presents us, whether intentionally or not, with
a form of critical reflection, and historical embodiment of what it
means to be poor, rural, and from the Northeast of Brazil. Discernible
within such accounts are layers of individuated awareness about the
nature of suffering and its causation by social structure and political
circumstance beyond the ordinary person’s control.
However, it might also be said that such narratives embody all of

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

understood as a powerful and effective technique-of-the-self, enabling
a reconstruction of human/divine relations. The Spanish peasants of
Christian’s study, it could be said, are involved in a similar project:
to resolve the inherent tension based on living in the world. To these
ends they employ two main strategies. One of these is “a sensible
recognition on their part of the impossibility of the ethical demands
made upon them” (1972: 158). The other is to cyclically cleanse them-
selves of pollution through informal “rites of purification” at shrines.
Purificatory rites such as those documented by Christian revolve
around an intensely asymmetrical human-divine relationship in which
the person takes on the more passive role of requesting forgiveness
and salvation through prayer but without knowing for sure whether it
will be granted. The trabalhador, on the other hand, by tapping into
the generative potency of sacrifice, constitutes himself more equally
in relation to the divine. Through his conscious decision to suffer, he
wields a certain creative agency in his own salvation that the humble
petitioner does not. By emulating Christ’s physical death and bodily
suffering, Santa Lucians lay emphasis on the “fallen” side of God. In
doing so, they contract the ontological gap between God and man.
Plumbing the Flesh

As Jonathan Parry observes, in the Judeo-Christian tradition “the gates
of heaven have in theory always been open to those who remained in
the world” (1994: 271). Since salvation is to be obtained within it, the
world is less-radically devalued in Christianity than it is in other major
world religions, as for example in orthodox Theravada Buddhism, where
only those who renounce the world can aspire to salvation, and the laity
are left with the lesser religious goal of achieving a better rebirth (Parry
1994). Nevertheless, as Christian (1972) aptly points out, the sym-
bolism and structure of the Roman Catholic Church manifest a clear
ambivalence toward the social order. Such doctrinal ambivalence toward
the world is arguably the product of a dualistic epistemology that values
spirit more highly than matter. The Cathars of the thirteenth century
were among the first of various extreme Christian and quasi-Christian
positions to denounce flesh and matter. Starting from the premise of a
cosmic dichotomy between spirit and matter, the Cathars rejected the
doctrine of the Incarnation and argued that the holy or “perfect” must
flee the flesh in this life (Bynum 1987: 252). Thus, historians have often
seen the extravagant penitential practices of past eras as the manifesta-
tion of a world-denying and flesh-hating Cathar-religious philosophy.
Fenella Cannell (1999; 2006) demonstrates how early Christian

debates about the nature of flesh versus spirit have contributed to
the scholastic notion of Christianity as the “impossible religion.” She
writes,
Discussions of the problems which Christianity poses for people in

ordinary life have a long pedigree which (although few anthropologists
seem inclined to make the connection) was probably first articulated
by Hegel as the “unhappy consciousness” which is the fate of human-
ity when power is seen to withdraw from immanence in the mate-
rial world to a transcendent world beyond, leaving mortals, as it were,
orphaned . . . The same problem was rephrased in more familiar works
by Durkheim . . . who claimed that “. . . it is only with Christianity that
God goes beyond space: his kingdom is no longer of this world. The
dissociation of nature and the divine becomes so complete that it even
generates into hostility,’ and again with Leach . . . who emphasized the
need for mediation in Christianity. (1999: 197)
Cannell’s (2004) recent study of American Mormon culture has shown,

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

are ideas that the divine is embodied in, and that spiritual relationships
are founded through, the human body. (1991: 47)
A concern with matter and corporeality has long been at the forefront
of Christian, and particularly Catholic expression. As Bynum (1987)
demonstrates, the humanity of Christ, understood as including his

full participation in bodiliness, was a central and characteristic theme
in the religiosity of the late medieval period. The sense of identifica-
tion with Christ lay in the background of Eucharistic devotion but
came out in various other ascetical practices. For female ascetics in
particular, the often-excruciating pain of fasting, self-flagellation, and
abstinence was not a flight from but into physicality. Religious women
in the middle ages saw in their own bodies not only a symbol of the
humanness of both genders but also a means of approach to God
himself:
The goal of religious women was thus to realize the opportunity of

physicality. They strove not to eradicate body but to merge their own
humiliating and painful flesh with that flesh whose agony, espoused by
choice, was salvation. Luxuriating in Christ’s physicality, they found
there the lifting up—the redemption—of their own. (Bynum 1987:
246, original italics)
Thus Bynum argues that late medieval asceticism cannot be inter-

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

by matching inward desire. Therefore one might say that because of
its very weakness and resultant capacity to conduct suffering, flesh is
an ideal mediator between two states of being-in-the-world: the fallen
and the redeemed. In the labor context, it is because flesh is sepa-
rate from and not merged with spirit that it can mediate in this way.
In other words, Santa Lucian religiosity does not do away with the
spirit/matter distinction, but neither is it rooted in an irreconcilable
dichotomy—in a radical sense of spirit entrapped by body. Rather it
appears to negotiate a subtler dialectic between these two poles.
Conclusion
In concluding this chapter I return once again to my description at
the beginning of it, of the manner in which Santa Lucians would
recite for me their tasks. Such sharing of everyday experiences has
a certain purpose: to construct the person as a trabalhador whose
embodied capacity for work says something significant about their
spiritual, moral worth. Spontaneous listings of chores accomplished
are, on this level, no different from the lengthier narratives produced
by men on the toughness of agricultural labor, no different from the
teacher who talks of the difficulty of working with children, or the
cigarette seller who was robbed. In this chapter, we have seen how
Santa Lucians construct their labor as an embodiment of Christian
love and thus as the basis of all sociality. As the discourse on lov-
ing fathers in particular attests, sacrifice and hence love is recognized
when labor can be said to involve physical pain or mental tribulation
in some form, whether this be the sheer difficulty of covering one’s
costs in an uncertain market, the travails of long-distance travel, or
the physical effort of swinging a hoe. One striking feature of this
particular labor discourse, however, is its capacity for assimilating and
attenuating the moral discord that arises in cases of serious and vio-
lent transgression. Via this particular type of labor discourse, extreme
sins may be retold and reworked until they appear to dissolve into
the very fabric of the moral person-in-the-community. In the follow-
ing chapter we shall continue exploring this theme, by looking more
closely at the case of Seu Roberto.
Chapter 5
Virtuous Husbands, Powerful Wives:

Marriage and the Dangers of Power
Lucia’s brick hut stood at the end of the dirt track. As I approached
it in the thick afternoon heat I felt strangely apprehensive. Perhaps,
I sensed why Lucia had asked me to come to her. As I got closer I
could see her leaning against her doorframe in an oversize T-shirt,
emblazoned with the name of some past political candidate. She was
smoking a cigarette and squinting into the distance, through the dust
and heat. As soon as she spotted me, she stubbed out her cigarette,
smiled warmly, and invited me into the house. Entering the front
room, I noticed that Lucia had framed the photograph I had taken of
the two of us and placed it on top of her television. Her front room,
painted blue, was always neat. A calendar bearing a picture of the
Virgin adorned one wall, and on the table in the middle of the room,
was a crisply ironed tablecloth. “Maya,” she said to me as I sat down
at the table, “I am going to tell you about my mother’s death and I
want you to write it down. When you understand about this terrible
thing that happened, you will understand my life.” Without much
preliminary talk, Lucia then began to narrate to me her version of
how her father, Seu Roberto, had murdered her mother, Dona Beta,
with a scythe, fifteen years ago:
I was young, only thirteen, my life was dedicated to playing. I never

dreamed, never thought, you know, about marriage, nothing like
that. But Maya, on that day at that hour I had become so anxious.
I was at home with my mother washing dishes under a cashew tree.
And there I was crying. So anxious was I that she sent me off with
the neighbour’s daughter, Velta. I said “Mama I have this bad feel-
ing in my heart.” She said “Go with Velta now, disappear, go and
play.” So I left her and went. Then, at Lulu’s house where we went,
they arrived. Me already with that terrible feeling. They arrived and
said “Lucia, your mother has been killed. Your father killed your
mother just now.” Ave Maria! At that moment I went crazy. I ran,
crawled under the barbed wire, scratched myself all over to reach her.
Madrinha Quiterinha caught up with me—they did not want me to
go back to the house—but I pulled away from her. When I arrived
at my house, there was already a mass of people, and there she was,
fallen on Jecinda’s front terrain. She had fallen, Maya, I held her. I
saw that a load of men were already with my father, restraining him,
and the women were all crying . . . They said it happened like this:
that when he went after her, Jecinda yelled “Run, Beta, run, the
door is open for you to enter, he’s going to kill you, run!” She left
the house running but could not run very fast because she was weak
from an operation. Then, when she was nearly there, she tripped
up almost at Jecinda’s door and that was the moment he got her.
They say Jecinda screamed for her to run but it was too late. He got
her with three swings of a scythe. If it had not been for Décio who
arrived at that second, he would have finished her off instantly. Well,
no one could stop me going to her. I held her in my arms, I rolled on
the ground there sobbing. When I lifted her arm I could see her bone
sticking out and her head soaked with blood. Her hair was already
becoming hard with blood. The last thing she said to me was “Lucia,
your father has killed me. Why has he done this?”
* * *
Lucia’s story was one I had heard before. That Seu Roberto had
murdered his wife because of her supposed unfaithfulness was
common knowledge. But strangely, to me at least, no one I knew
seemed to hold it against the old man who was in his seventies
and still lived in the house where the event had taken place. To
understand why this was, it is important to first make a number of
observations regarding conceptions of power and violence within
the conjugal context. In this chapter, I seek to comprehend how
intraconjugal violence is conceptualized and understood by Santa
Lucian people themselves. In doing so, I aim to take a critical look
at how concepts of morality and gender identity fit together and
to forward an alternative perspective to that which has been pro-
posed in some of the related literature. One of my aims is to ques-
tion whether there can be any such thing as a “gendered morality”
(Melhuus 1996) in Santa Lucia, a morality in which “powerful”
husbands are exempt from moral encompassment, and “virtuous”
wives, by contrast, are not.
VIRT UOUS HUSBANDS, POW ERFUL W IV ES 123
Husbands, Wives, Violence, and Gender

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

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

shall expand upon local understandings of power relations in a vari-
ety of different contexts. In doing so I focus on the moral discourse
surrounding such relations; a moral discourse that turns about the
dichotomy of love and pride. I shall go on to examine how Santa
Lucian people apprehend the power relation between husbands and
wives. This will lead me back to an analysis of the account of Dona
Beta’s murder given earlier.
In the second half of the chapter, I shall contrast my own theoreti-
cal position with the theoretical model of power and gender advanced
by Melhuus (1992, 1996) and Melhuus and Stølen (1996). I argue
that the concept of power elucidated by these theorists is too abstract
and analytical for understanding intraconjugal violence in the Santa
Lucian context, because it fails to capture the complexity of the moral
discourse that surrounds the exercise and abuse of power in local
terms. As Michael Lambek observes, to argue that people are political
or desirous subjects does not preclude them from being moral sub-
jects (2000:11). Recognizing this possibility, I suggest that to under-
stand what makes powerful people subject to morality, we should at
least start by examining what “power” means locally, and how it is
conceptualized and problematized by people themselves.
Concepts of Power in Santa Lucia

In Santa Lucia, poder (power) is a rather nebulous concept that can
be recognized as anything from a given structure of relationships,
or a quality that can be possessed, to a situationally relative effect
that one person can have on another. A frequent way of alluding to
persons in a position of power is to speak about them as pessoas que
têm, persons (that have). To “have” in this sense, can mean money,
property, mobility, strength, position, education, social connections,
charm, or sexual allure—virtually anything that a person could use
to claim an advantage in their relations with others. This is taken as
a fact that one cannot escape, and society is seen as being made up of
a series of subtly asymmetrical relations to be successfully negotiated;
as much from the perspective of “the haves” as from the “have-nots.”
The point to be emphasized, however, is that asymmetrical relations
between persons or groups are problematic for Santa Lucians, not
because they believe, deep down, that they should not exist, but
because they must follow a morally correct form.
In what follows, I shall focus on the moral discourse about the
exercise of power, rather than on local understandings of what power
is. In doing so I am partly motivated by an observation put forward

by Lambek who writes that “if the study of religion draws, from social
theory, a serious concern with the ubiquitous workings of power, per-
haps it can contribute the pervasive significance of morality. It can
serve to remind us, as the saying goes, that while everything may
be political, politics isn’t everything.” (2000: 312). Lambek proposes
that morality is a significant third domain alongside power and desire,
one that is neither reducible either to power or desire nor to refereeing
the struggles between them. His suggestion that power is never exer-
cised without a space for reflection is supported by my own research.
As we shall see in what follows, the exercise and discussion of power
in Santa Lucia is saturated by a moral-theological discourse, which
turns upon the opposition between amor (love) and orgulho (pride).
Where love for others and, more to the point, a lack of pride is what
makes the power that an individual wields legitimate and acceptable,
pride and lack of love is what makes it potentially dangerous.
Power and Love

“What is love?” This was the question that young people in Santa
Lucia, having got to know me a bit better, were always curious to
ask. My answers were never very satisfactory either to me or to them,
perhaps because the question continually caught me off guard. In
retrospect it should not have done, as amor is a central moral princi-
ple to Brazilians and a well-elaborated concept in Christian tradition
and theology—one which reaches beyond the sphere of religion and
extends into almost every area of life. When Catholic Santa Lucians
speak about God’s love, they are referring to the Christian concept
of love or agape, as distinct from eros (erotic love) or philia (brotherly
love). Agape is the ideal being referred to and the general model of
love expected to be practiced by ordinary people in relation to those
they occupy some form of power over, whether their role is as land-
owner, politician, spouse, or parent.
Thus, Santa Lucian people tend to have no problem with power,
provided that it is wielded with—and thus constitutes an expression
of—amor. After all, as friends were always reminding me, it was God
who had originally loved man so much that he sacrificed his only
son. In one particular sermon, Padre Augosto reflected on this point,
dwelling upon the love that a father has for a son and extending the
metaphor not only to the relation between God and man but also
to that between the laity and the Catholic hierarchy. In this way, he
attempted to justify the structure and power of the Catholic Church
to a congregation increasingly attracted to more egalitarian evangeli-

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

Any progress made would not be conceptualized as gaining one’s
well-earned civil right, but as being down to the fact that someone in
the administration was uma pessoa decente, de amor (a decent person,
a person with love), good enough to have “helped.” Conversely, peo-
ple would often describe the failure of local politicians and adminis-
trators to help them as being down to the fact that they were persons
who não tem amor para os outros (have no love for others).1
Power and Pride

To be in a position of power is, nevertheless, perceived as somewhat
dangerous. The reason that power and advantage are thought to be
dangerous for humans is that they are said to induce a state of height-
ened self-awareness; a mixture of vanity and egotism, often glossed
locally as orgulho. In Santa Lucia, people were quick to remind one
that the other side of sacred amor was worldly orgulho, and it was gen-
erally stressed that only God could embody power in a totally pure,
controlled, and benevolent way. One person with whom I was apt to
discuss such things was my friend Seu Mané. Seu Mané was typical
of most men in that he hardly ever went to church; however, this did
not mean that he was theologically disinterested. In fact, Seu Mané
was one of the most theologically reflective people I knew, and one
of his favorite topics was pride. He once explained to me that during
his incarnation, Jesus had been “King on earth,” but a king who had
“slept and eaten in the houses of the poor because he had no pride.”
Stressing the point he iterated that God was a being with feelings,
a being who could feel many, many emotions, but the one emotion
God would never feel was orgulho.
The concept of pride was often alluded to when talking to or about
wealthy people. The greatest compliment that could be paid to such a
person was that they were “uma pessoa sem orgulho” (a person without
pride). As a “wealthy” foreigner I would occasionally receive such
praise myself. And the same treatment would often be given to visit-
ing dignitaries or the local doctor, whenever he decided to make a
home visit or take his lunch in a villager’s house.
By contrast, unpopular people of wealth and standing were con-
stantly derided for being orgulhoso demais (too proud). It was widely
rumored that the last village doctor had only lasted two months in
his post because he had been “too proud” to leave his nice health
post to make home visits to the elderly and infirm who could not
leave their homes. Various local politicians came under the same fire.
Seu Julio, the last local prefect, was one who had left people feeling
particularly embittered. It was said that once he realized he was not
going to win the next election, he stopped paying salaries to the func-
tionaries to extract the money for himself. The last four months of
his office were, according to accounts, chaotic. Families went hungry,
and angry mobs gathered to shout outside his house. According to
Dida, Seu Julio had originally been a simple, honest man: owner of
the local pharmacy and popular with everyone who knew him. When
he became town prefect he changed. The change was attributed to
the new found power that had made him proud. He became a man,
in the words of Dida, sem amor (without love), he no longer ate food
in the houses of the poor, no longer had time for people. In short, it
was said, he became orgulhoso demais.
It should be noted that theologically oriented discourses that
embed power in an overarching semiology of “love” versus “pride”
can be mapped onto broader Brazilian discourses that derive their
logic from the vestiges of a feudal society of “masters and slaves.” In
the paternalistic culture of the rural northeast, asymmetrical relations
are negotiated via a language of “harmonious patronage” based on
the ideal of the “good patron” (O bom patrão). For all the problems
this assumes, however, what seems to concern Santa Lucians most is
not the asymmetry itself but the creative potential within its fold. This
is a potential most aptly summarized by Fenella Cannell (1999) in her
description of a similar power dynamic between Catholic Bicolo peas-
ants and their wealthy landlords:
If power is to be distributed unequally, lowlanders seem to be say-

ing, let us constrain the power-holders within a relationship with their
dependents which they cannot entirely ignore. Similarly, if the poor
are to be poor, let it at least not be forgotten that human value is not
entirely measurable by wealth. (1999: 24)
As for Bicolo peasants, the construction of power as necessarily inter-

subjective is central to Santa Lucian discourses on the relationship
between power and knowledge, as I seek to demonstrate in the fol-
lowing section.
Power as a Reflection of Knowledge

It took me a while to grasp the moral complexity of the power relation
in local thought. For a long time I simply assumed that the disparag-
ing narratives I had heard about bad patrons and corrupt politicians
signified a generalized antagonism between richer and poorer classes.

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

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

are viewed as containing advantages for the less powerful because
they allow them to remain in a somewhat safer position whilst deriv-
ing some of the benefits of another person’s knowledge, strength,
ability, and influence. Persons with more power are in an inherently
more dangerous position vis-à-vis moral personhood. The responsi-
bility they shoulder is greater and, therefore, so are the potentially
negative consequences of their consciência (self-awareness) and con-
hecimento (knowledge). As such, a less powerful person has the advan-
tage of trying to derive benefits from the relationship without the
dangers of the self-awareness and pride that such benefits entail.
Having described the moral discourse that surrounds asymmetri-
cal relationships, I will now turn to look at how Santa Lucian peo-
ple articulate the power relation between husbands and wives. The
moral dichotomy upon which power turns, that of love versus pride, is
thought to apply as much to the conjugal relationship as to any other.
There is a difference, however, because rather than playing upon the
asymmetrical nature of the power that either sex has over the other,
people tend to stress the symmetry and complementarity of the rela-
tion. This is because marriage is strongly viewed as a partnership in
which each member has as strong a purchase on what the other has
to offer—something that cannot always be said of the relationship
between patrons and clients.
Gender Roles and the Division of Labor in Santa Lucia

In the day-to-day running of a household all members are expected to
collaborate. The conjugal relationship is viewed, on a practical level,
very much like a business partnership in which both husband and
wife have equal stakes. Each sex may strive to argue that they work
harder than the other: wives often disparage their husbands for the
hours they spend stretched out in the shade, while they keep going
throughout the day, sweeping the terrain, cooking, and washing up
after meals. Husbands, however, will retaliate that their work requires
more skill and practice than women’s work. They point out that while
anyone can wash a plate, not everyone has the skill to negotiate a
good price at market. Women will agree that negotiation requires
skill, but they frequently chide their men for the bad financial deals
they do outside the house or accuse them of being good at making
money but even better at drinking it all before they reach home.
The roles that men and women assume in the running of the
household, however, are characterized by mutual need. And this,
ultimately, is what my informants stressed to me when I asked them

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

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

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

A wife’s power over her husband is equally mixed an advantage because
of the pressures and responsibilities it comes with. When Fabiana was
about to get married to Andre, visiting female kin and neighbors

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

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

I turn now to briefly consider the ideal model of relations between
husband and wife. In local terms, a good marriage is based on amor
e respeito (love and respect). Consideration (consideração) is the con-
tinuous demonstration of that love and respect in deed, gesture, and
intention. The ultimate expression of considerate love in a marriage,
people would tell me, is being willing to suffer on behalf of one’s
partner. The concept of consideração crops up in connection with
concepts of love in much of the Brazilian literature. Both Antonius
Robben (1989) and Linda-Anne Rebhun (1999) make mention of
it in their respective discussions of Brazilian conjugality. Robben
describes consideração as “the anticipation of another person’s needs
without, however, experiencing their fulfilment as a duty or obliga-
tion” (1989: 183). Thus a woman would describe cooking for her
husband as obrigação (obligation), but cooking his favorite meals as
an act of consideration.
Santa Lucian people are familiar with such concepts although
there is often considerable disagreement between couples over which
terms describe their relationship best. Both men and women describe
a good marriage as one in which “both have love and consideration
for the other.” However, men tend to see a wife’s cooking of a favorite
meal as an act of obligation rather than consideration. Men describe
providing food for the house as their obligation, and acts such as tak-
ing one’s wife on outings as consideration. On certain occasions it
was plain that couples could use such concepts to make the other feel
guilty. Women were to be frequently overheard complaining in the
presence of husbands, that they lacked consideration, that they spent
too much money on drink and not enough on meat for the table, that
they never took them to festas, or back to their natal villages to visit
relatives, and so forth.
Indeed, the concepts of consideração and obrigação are usefully
broad and interchangeable, reflecting the constantly shifting empha-
sis of marital power relations, so that in certain contexts, the husband
has the advantage over his wife, and in other contexts, the wife wields
power over her husband. Couples tend to deal with this constantly
shifting balance of power over one another by eliciting the potential
virtue in the way power is exercised. Thus men and women make
constant reference to notions of love, respect, obligation, and con-
sideration when talking to and about their spouse. A spouse’s power,
when exerted with their partner’s benefit at heart, ideally through
the visceral offices of love, becomes an act of virtue. Any potential
pride in the social advantage they possess is thus rendered less damag-
ing. However, it is also widely recognized that, like politicians, both
husbands and wives can be corrupted by the power they have, as evi-
denced through the discourses on ignorant husbands and adulterous
wives. Such pathologies, as Santa Lucians see them, may manifest
themselves differently but are the same in kind. Both derive from a
level of awareness that has surpassed some unspecified limit. A man’s
consciousness of his physical strength over a woman, and a woman’s
consciousness of her sexual power over a man, is legitimate knowl-
edge so long as it is not infected with pride.
If the major immanent danger for men in marrying is—in its most
extreme form— social death, the major immanent danger for married
women is physical death. However, at this point it is important to
stress that both men’s and women’s violence, even as a form of ret-
ribution, is in no sense prescribed. It does not amount to an accept-
able code of behavior in connection with notions of honor. In the
Santa Lucian context, intraconjugal violence is highly transgressive
and is always treated as a breakdown of moral order. Thus, although
violence and death within marriage does occur, it is thought to be
avoidable.
In this context, ideas about morality clearly exist prior to ideas
about gendered difference, and it is with this in mind that I shall, in
due course, return to the case of Seu Roberto, who murdered his wife
with a scythe. In the following sections, my concern is not with the
truth or accuracy of the events that took place that fateful day, but
with the manner in which it was recounted to me at this particular
point and place in time. Whether Dona Beta did have an affair remains
unknown along with various other key events that may have led up to
the killing. However, what I wish to draw attention to here is one of
the ways in which this tragic event was rendered, long after the event
itself, as a parable about marital relations and the danger that awaits if
the balance of power and awareness is disturbed on either side.
A Question of Honor or a Problem of Pride?

Until recently, wife-murderers in Brazil could be acquitted by the
jury on the basis of the “honor defence” argument—a throwback
to Portuguese colonial law that allowed a man to kill his adulter-
ous wife and her lover (Caulfield 2000). In 1991 the Brazilian
Superior Tribunal of Justice outlawed this argument (Caulfield 2000;
Macaulay 2002; Santos 2005).4 Seu Roberto’s story is thus a familiar
one. Indeed I learnt of three similar cases that had occurred in the
locality over the past twenty years. I curiously noted that the concept
of honra (honor) was never once alluded to.
In anthropological literature, honor, defined as both a personal
virtue and a high status, often preoccupies Mediterranean—and
by extension—Latin American men (Melhuus 1992, 1996, 1997;
Rebhun 1999; Stølen 1996). As described, the Mediterranean honor
complex centers upon the relationship of each gender to sexual inter-
course and its proprieties. Important attributes include the protection
of legitimate wives and daughters from any contact with other men’s
sexuality, and a readiness to use deadly force to avenge any implica-
tion about the honor of any member of the household (Miller 1993;
Schneider 1971; Stewart 1994).
In an article entitled “The troubles of virtue,” Melhuus (1997),
who carried out research among rural Mexican mestizos, tackles gen-
der through the relation of two killings spurred by the defense of
male honor. Both cases constitute women as focal objects in a strug-
gle between men. According to Melhuus, these types of stories reveal
that some particular aspect of femininity is intrinsic to the construc-
tion of masculinity, and also indicate that men’s honor is something
that has to be defended to be upheld. Embedded in this construction,
Melhuus identifies a tension present in the discrete categorization of
women as either “Madonnas” or “whores.” In using the wider litera-
ture on honor and shame to understand such killings, she homes in
on an “inherent ambiguity” to configurations of Mexican gender,
and hence elucidates on what she describes as the “enigma” of Latin
American gender imagery in general: “a male dominant society which
nevertheless places its highest value on the feminine, indicating a split
between power and value” (1996: 230).
According to Melhuus, the “enigma” of Latin American gender
imagery resides in the different forms of evaluation used for think-
ing about men and women. Where men are evaluated according to
their power over women as well as over other men, women are evalu-
ated according to their virtue. Following authors such as Octavio Paz
(1988), Melhuus defines feminine and masculine in terms of “open-
ness” and “closedness” respectively—where being closed is the active,
desirable state because “it serves as a protection against the world,
a defence of one’s own intimacy as well as of others” (1996: 233).
Conversely, openness is seen as a weakness and a “disgrace,” symbol-
izing “the inert, passive one who is open and opened” (1996: 233).5
Thus whereas men are evaluated as men according to the power and
control they have, women are evaluated as good or bad according to
their sexual state. Women, she asserts, must be the moral anchors
of men, although men themselves seem to be given “more leeway”

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

Lucia, did not appear salient in current understandings of this event.
The word honra, I was told by several people, was the same as res-
peito (respect), in that only a person who acts with respect has honor.
When I asked whether a husband who used violence against an adul-
terous wife did so to restore his honor, I was told that violence, being
opposed to respeito (respect), could never restore honor.6 Herein it
might be noted that while certain vestiges of an honor/shame com-
plex may be read into the fact that Seu Roberto saw fit to answer his
wife’s purported infidelity with violence, it was a distinctly different
logic that was used to condemn that action as ultimately honorless,
selfish, and proud. To class this event as an “honor killing,” then,
would be to impart the killing with exactly the kind of rationale that
people sought, in their retelling, to dismiss.
Rather than embedding the story of Seu Roberto and Dona Beta
in discourses about masculine honor or female virtue, thus reserving
moral judgment to the female end, both men and women reflected
upon it in a strikingly undivided way. The story was generally nar-
rated in two parts: from the position of the woman and the position
of the man. In all such narrations, the point was not to draw out the
intrinsic differences between them, but to underscore the sense that
despite their obvious differences, they were, in moral terms, made of
the same stuff. Both were cast as essentially good people who had
fallen victim to the complexities of power within the conjugal rela-
tionship. Lucia herself spoke highly of both parents. Her mother had
been, in her own words, “A good, good person.” Her father, too, she
cast as the archetypal hard worker who expressed his love for his fam-
ily by sweating in the field and making weekly trips to market.
Just as other people confirmed that Seu Roberto’s downfall had
been an egotistical desire for extreme control, Dona Beta’s downfall,
it was speculated, had been her pride. It was often remarked of Dona
Beta, for example, that she had been beautiful and aware of the power
this gave her in relation to men. If Dona Beta had indeed cheated on
her husband, it was believed that she would have known, without
doubt, the destruction this could bring to her husband’s life. Indeed,
it was in relation to this that Seu Mané, himself of Seu Roberto’s
generation, emphasized to me the suffering of the cuckolded man.
Talking about Seu Roberto’s discovery of the situation he said, “Now
after he knew about this business, time passed and his condition was
such, Avé Maria! He lived as if he were asleep, lost all taste for life.”
In all the accounts I recorded, an overwhelming emphasis was
placed on the redemptive suffering of both involved. Dona Beta’s
suffering was made explicit for me, countless times, not only through
descriptions of her death, but also in reports about the violence she
was subjected to by Seu Roberto in the years beforehand—violence
for which he was roundly condemned. Seu Roberto’s suffering was
attributed to his belief that he was a cuckold coupled with the con-
sequences of his own action. This, I later realized, helped to explain
the remarkable level of forgiveness I had noted in people toward Seu
Roberto who still lives in the community in the house where the
event took place. His daughter Lucia’s forgiveness was something I
struggled particularly hard to understand. In the end it appeared to
come down to the fact that Lucia believed her father to be someone
who had, himself, suffered greatly and who was, in this way, a peni-
tent man.
The suffering of Seu Roberto was often cast as the effect of a vir-
tual death; a feeling that he did not live but existed moribund, in
a perpetual state of loss and regret. His home and marriage—the
enduring symbols of a proper life—destroyed. As Seu Mané said,
“Look, I know he acted without limits, but today he doesn’t live! He
is someone for whom the world ended. In the same house that he
lived in with her, he now lives alone. That house is finished! Isolated!
Today nobody goes there. He won’t even look for another woman.
Well, they don’t want him.”
Since killing his wife, Seu Roberto had stopped frequenting the
local bars and snooker room and had become withdrawn from the
masculine world of networking and prestige. However, he had also
become unable to serve as an example of virtue to his own children.
Hence I was told about a time when a small crowd looked awkwardly
on as Seu Roberto had tried to intervene in the drunken fight of
Geraldo, his eldest son. Geraldo, it was said, did the unspeakable
thing of pushing his father to the ground. “Who are you to tell me
what to do!” he shouted out repeatedly until he was hoarse. Seu
Roberto, who could martial no adequate response to this, got up
wordlessly and retreated into the crowd. Upon recounting this epi-
sode to me, Seu Mané remarked that to be a father and yet unable to
console or advise one’s own son was akin to being dead. The fact that
Seu Roberto had remained inside the community was thus invariably
contrasted with the new life he might have enjoyed had he left the
village and gone to live somewhere else.7 His staying was conceptual-
ized as a chosen form of penitence, for it actively perpetuated his state
of death-within-life or life-within-death.
By the time I arrived to carry out fieldwork, the case of Seu Roberto
and Dona Beta had come to be remembered and talked about as a
parable of marital relations. Seu Roberto’s act was never once hinted
at as legitimate, but tended to be cast as a supremely terrible act of
pride. By losing his sense of humility and allowing consciousness of
his physical advantage over Dona Beta to overcome him, he took her
life. Indeed, people used the story to highlight to me the dangers of
pride and the misuse of power. The meaning that people bestowed on
this painful event in their retelling of it was the mortally dangerous
commitment that marriage involves, both for husbands and for wives.
The ways in which the killing might illuminate actual imbalances of
power are thus complicated by local understandings that downplay
the difference between men and women and foreground the similar-
ity of their moral plight.
The politicization and criminalization of violence against women
in Brazilian society gained momentum in the 1980s through the
efforts of local and international organizations and expansion of a
mass-based women’s movement (Santos 2005: 33).8 From an analyti-
cal viewpoint, Santa Lucian claims about the complementary powers
of men and women need to be weighed against certain systematic
political, economic, and legal advantages in Brazil that do indeed
privilege men. A prime example is the fact that Brazilian law defines
infidelity in men and women differently. For men, infidelity is an
economic crime—an adulterous man is one who keeps what the law
calls a concubina (concubine) in a house that he buys and maintains.
For women, infidelity is a sexual crime—an adulterous wife has sex
with a man not her husband. It is thus important to bear in mind the
complexity surrounding local people’s claims that there is an equiva-
lency between expectations for wives and husbands.
Matters of legal definition aside, one might also point to the fact
that the woman of this unfortunate couple ended up dead, whereas
the man, whatever ostracism he may have suffered, did not. All this is
true enough; however, one need not take what Santa Lucian people
say about male-female equivalence at face value to find it significant.
What I wish to draw attention to here are not the extensive and hid-
den structural relationships that constitute and complicate analyti-
cal understandings of power, but the way in which my informants
sought to understand it for themselves. The point to be made is that
there are different ways in which painful and inchoate events can be
recalled and made sense of. The case of Seu Roberto and Dona Beta
can be reworked analytically as a tangible example of men’s oppres-
sion of women or cast as evidence of the Brazilian state’s failure to
protect women as a “class,” but it might just as easily be turned into
a statement about the interpersonal dangers of marriage and moral
personhood—something which Santa Lucian people, in the context

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

significantly different positions in the sexual division of labor, and
difference between the sexes is continually constructed out of every-
day forms of practice and expression. It is also true that in certain
contexts, Santa Lucian men and women choose to evoke gender in
terms of differing camps of competing values. However, the binary
distinction between “male” and “female” that structures social life
in certain contexts should not blind us to the presence of a logic that
emphasizes the universality of moral concerns in others.
In saying this, my intention is not to simply restate what has been
stated many times before, that gender difference is not necessarily
indicative of gender hierarchy. Rather, it is to draw attention to the
similarity in the predicament of men and women vis-à-vis one another.
In as much as marriage makes explicit the process of a person’s loss of
innocence and acquisition of power, both husbands and wives must
live with the fact that each represents the other’s “Fall from grace.”
More relevant than the articulation of gendered identity, here, is the
production of a gender-neutral discourse about social conduct and
moral personhood. For though men and women’s sources of power
may be different, what regulates it is said to be the same. Thus in local
perception, intraconjugal violence and murder such as that which I
described earlier are paradigmatic manifestations, not of difference
surpassing identity, but of pride surpassing love.
The problem, following Strathern (1988), lies in analyses that take
the relationship between the sexes as axiomatic; as one where the
tenor of the relationship is seen as arising from the need of each sex
to carve out an antithetical definition to the other. Rather than carv-
ing out antithetical definitions, what Santa Lucian people strived to
get across was that what legitimized or delegitimized power was the
same for all categories of person concerned. In the presence of love,
marriage is fulfillment. In the presence of pride, it delivers death. And
when it strikes, love or pride—be it male or female—is commensu-
rable. As Dona Lourdes opined in reference to Seu Roberto and his
wife: ‘ela morreu, ele não morreu, mas foi mesmo que tivessem falecido
os dois’ (She died, he didn’t die, but it is as if both passed away).
Chapter 6
From Innocence to Knowledge
It was not yet eight in the morning but already the market was hot
and crowded. Seven-year-old Ignacio was leading me through the
clatter of trade to his father’s stall. It was difficult keeping sight of him
as he zigzagged ahead, leaping nimbly over corners of outstretched
tarpaulin piled high with brightly colored lycra garments and various
plastic items. “And how do you help your father?” I asked, catching
up. “I do everything father does,” he replied. “And at the end of the
day, if there are lots of bananas left, he puts half in the wheelbarrow
and I go and sell them on the other side of the market where the
trade is better.” We had stopped before a wooden trestle piled high
with fruit belonging to Josa, Ignacio’s father. Josa was a young man,
but liked to dress rather unusually in the traditional checked shirt
and smart trilby hat of the older generation. He nodded me a greet-
ing. He was in the middle of shoveling produce into a blue polythene
bag for a customer. When he finished he turned to me and said, “So
Ignacio has been telling you everything about the trade? I tell you the
boy is innocent no more, he is sabido [knowing/cunning], already,
like his father.”
* * *
At different times and in differing cultural contexts, there has been a

selective slant on the Brazilian trope relating to childhood. Whether
viewed as naturally innocent, or naturally “knowing/cunning,” con-
ceptions of the child have tended to reflect and reproduce moral anxi-
eties that have been dominant in a variety of times and places. In an
article dealing with the history of child policy in Brazil, Irene Rizzini
(2002) examines the emergence of the idea that childhood was key to
the future and to the overarching goal of “civilizing” the country. She
focuses on how poor children came to be represented as a social prob-

lem for the larger project of nation building and were thus subjected
to increasing control and institutionalization to defend the country
from crime, disorder, and anarchy. In the first years after the republic
was established in 1889, the state’s role on behalf of such children was
defended as part of a larger “patriotic and civilizing mission of heal-
ing” (2002: 168). The child-saving movement of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries was, writes Rizzini, based on the belief
that “a harmful environment coupled with certain innate proclivities
made monsters of children, a situation that could have devastating
consequences for society as a whole” (2002: 108).1
In Brazil today, as in much of Latin America, awareness is growing
of global movements and discourses that seek to protect the rights of
children in relation to their participation in the sexual, laborious, and
commercial worlds of adults. Within such movements, children are
defined as natural innocents, and childhood as a phase of exclusion
from all economic responsibility. Notable differences between this
ideal and the lived-reality of thousands of children throughout the
country have lead commentators to argue that in Brazil, “childhood
is a privilege of the rich and practically nonexistent for the poor”
(Goldstein 1998: 41; see also Campos 1993 and Hecht 1998). In the
elaboration of such arguments, commentators seek both to critique
current trends in the socioeconomic order and to reinscribe what may
be acceptable in the definition and experience of childhood. Context-
specific as they might seem, such commentaries might be viewed as
part and parcel of an overarching human concern with moral evalu-
ation. One that cuts through time, and across class and culture, and
in which adults are forced to recognize and reconcile certain funda-
mental differences in values between themselves and other adults, and
also between themselves as adults, and children as children (see Law
2006).
As Joel Robbins (2007) argues, it is during times of change (when
new values are introduced, or the hierarchical relations that hold
between traditional values are transformed) that people’s sense of the
moral weight of their actions is likely to be at its strongest, and that
anthropologists are most likely to see how morality shapes culture
and experience. Robbins develops this argument in relation to the
sociohistorical and cultural changes experienced by the Urapmin of
Papua New Guinea as a result of their rapid conversion to charismatic
Christianity. In doing so he is careful to make a typological distinc-
tion between “stable conflicts that are an enduring part of a cul-
ture and those conflicts that arise as a result of change” (2007: 300).
FROM INNOC ENC E TO K NOW LEDGE 149
But what if change was, in Robbins’s own terms, “enduring”? What

if change was a challenge to be negotiated with each new generation?
Something that was present in the very process of growing-up-in-
the-world? Child-care practices may vary widely across cultures, but
certain interrelational dynamics between human adults and infants
remain constant. Wherever it is performed, caring for children is an
essentially open-ended and continuous kind of activity, one that,
while it encompasses an unquestioned and nonconscious aspect, veers
also toward moments of conscious questioning and to an awareness
of a range of decision-making possibilities. Practices and discourses
that relate to children and childhood are, in this sense, preeminently
moral in character and offer opportunities for ethical reflection.
In this way, children present an interesting case study for the
anthropology of morality. By virtue of the fact that they must grow
up in the world, children are fast learners and expert negotiators of
changing contexts, cognitive perspectives, and spheres of moral value.
As persons in a constant and heightened state of becoming, children
demand the moral attention of adults. Adult caregivers, whose role is
to guide the child’s growth process, are engaged in a social act that
constantly reveals the conscious mechanics of prescribed dominant
values. In praising and disciplining children, in allowing or restrain-
ing their actions, guiding or prescribing their behavior in the world,
adults invariably lay bare their own value judgments.
In Santa Lucia, the fact that children grow up physically and alter
cognitively casts them firmly, in the local imagination, as paradig-
matic embodiers of change. Children are about change, they change
from one year to the next, and as they grow and alter they literally
instigate change within households: demanding more space, necessi-
tating shifts within work and sleeping arrangements, and introducing
new kinds of knowledge and skill in relation to modern forms, and
most importantly, modern technology. Parents are fond of comment-
ing on how fast young children grow, and they will often ask for
one another’s opinions on whether or not a child has grown taller.
Older people are fond of pointing out differences between their own
perceptions and those pertaining to the youth (jovems) of nowadays
(hoje em dia). For example, grandparents often claim to be fearful
(medroso) of the violence endemic in big cities and contrast them-
selves with their grandchildren, who appear to them as fearless, rou-
tinely traveling long distances to holiday and work in the cities of the
south. However, it is also this very mundane, ongoing, and embodied
change, which presents Santa Lucian parents and grandparents with a
sense of the moral weight of their own actions. The aspect of change
that is most morally fraught is, in this context, the passage from inno-
cence (inocência) to knowledge (conhecimento). It is fraught because
innocence—a spiritually elevated state—must be relinquished in favor
of knowledge, a state that not only allows people to live productively,
but also allows them to commit sin, thus taking them away from
God. At key moments of their children’s lives, therefore, adult care-
givers find themselves in a moral dilemma: whether to act to preserve
childish innocence or whether to destroy it.
In this chapter, I examine two types of cultural interaction that
appear to be largely about this existential and moral dilemma. The
first of these is a common speech game played with young chil-
dren, and the second is a yearly ritual called casamento de matuto.
My reason for considering these two forms of interaction together
is that both position children as interlocutors in morally ambigu-
ous scenarios and deal with the possibility of children’s transition
from a state of innocence to a state of knowledge. In what follows I
shall begin by elaborating upon the perceived problem of innocence
versus knowledge, outlining through various ethnographic exam-
ples, the implications of this existential problem for Santa Lucians
in their everyday lives. I shall then go on to explore the concept of
the child (criança) and adolescent (jovem), and the relationship of
each of these to various types of good and bad knowledge. Finally,
I shall turn to describe the two forms of child-adult interaction,
which form the focus of this chapter. Such types of interaction, I
will argue, serve as an important context in which adults exercise
certain moral choices in response to their experience of this specific
dilemma.
Knowledge and Innocence

To Santa Lucian people, innocence—that state of being free from
compromising knowledge—has a divine origin. It is, my informants
told me, the human state that most mirrors that of Adam and Eve
before the Fall. During a Bible study class that I attended, where the
Genesis myth was debated, a young woman from a neighboring vil-
lage offered the following interpretation:
As I read it, before they [Adam and Eve] disobeyed God they lived
well, because they didn’t have knowledge. They lived freely like birds,
with the simplicity of animals, like that. The problem with Man today
is he has to know about everything—Man wants to be like God, know-
ing everything there is, and this is wrong.
The opposite of innocence (inocência) is a state of knowledge char-

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

had recently gone to prison for the purported theft of a car. Many
people were of the belief that the man was innocent, but Seu Mané
did not agree. In explaining his position he said to me “nunca se vê
uma vaca presa” (“one never sees a cow in prison”). The absurd image
of the cow behind bars was used to allude to the widespread notion
that evil (maldade) resides in self-awareness. However, for all that
self-awareness is said to lead people to sin, Santa Lucians recognize
a complex relationship of knowledge and innocence to freedom and
domination, particularly in relation to humans and domestic animals.
As Andre once commented to me of his two oxen that were pulling
the cart we were riding on: “These oxen are strong! If they only knew
how strong they were, there wouldn’t be a man in the world who
could control them.”
Thus, although self-awareness bestows on people a valuable capac-
ity for freedom, people who take overt advantage of this capacity,
people labeled sabido demais (too knowing), are frowned upon. When
I refused to sell a bicycle to Amauri’s brother for ten reals instead of
the forty it was worth, he loudly accused me of being sabida demais.
When a somewhat unpopular woman called Dona Dada decided to
take in the mentally ill widow of a neighbor who had died, people
thought she was doing it to get her hands on the deceased man’s
pension that had passed to his wife. Aquela Dona Dada é sabida!
(that Dona Dada is cunning), they would declare, every time the sub-
ject arose. Another man in the village who made a living exclusively
through business and trade had a reputation for being brutally sabido
and was, I was warned, to be avoided at all costs. It would often be
said of this man’s wife, by way of absolving her of blame for her hus-
band’s nefarious activities: ela não sabe o homen com quem se casou (she
does not know the man she married), thus contrasting her relative
innocence against her husband’s level of knowledge.
The Problem with Innocence

In Santa Lucian discourse, humans differ fundamentally from ani-
mals not only in terms of their possession of self-awareness but also
in their tendency to plan for the future, and thus by their posses-
sion of a concept of time. A recurrent theme in local theological dis-
cussions is the biblical injunction to give up selfish preoccupation
and planning for the future to devote oneself entirely to God in the
here and now. During such discussions people often refer, by way of
example, to birds and other creatures that live without storing food in
anticipation of future need. This ideal, however, is generally perceived

as an exceptionally difficult one to emulate. As Dida and Amauri once
expressed, such an idealized level of innocence is totally unrealistic:
Dida: God requests of us that we do not worry about tomorrow. But

look here Maya, life is a thorn; it’s hard! If I wasn’t to worry about
tomorrow, if I wasn’t to work today to eat tomorrow, what would I
eat? If I eat everything I have today, what will I eat tomorrow? How
can I not worry about the future? I myself do not understand how
a person can live that way.
Amauri: That is right, woman. This business of not worrying about
tomorrow, well, I worry about tomorrow, and a lot. This business of
not planning ahead, it can’t be right. When I wake up in the morn-
ing, I wake up with a head hot with worry, hot, hot as a match. For
the poor like us, seems there is no other way.
In other words, although innocence may allow certain closeness to

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

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

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

Growing up in the World
From Birth to First Communion
In Santa Lucia, as in the rest of Brazil, a concept of the child (criança)
as distinct from the adult (adulto) exists. Indeed, Santa Lucian ideas
about the child are strongly resonant with Christian notions con-
cerning the state of the soul. People believe that all children come
from God and are born with a soul (alma). A baby’s soul, however, is
different from an adult’s. Rather than being a fully developed entity
imprinted with an individual history of good or bad deeds, it is noth-
ing more than a capacity for thought and emotion. A baby’s soul does
not automatically confer moral personhood, and the young, unsocial-
ized infant is often regarded as more animal-like than human. This is
suggested by frequent use of the term bicho (animal/creature) when
referring to babies and infants up to the age of two to three years.
Through baptism, which can occur anytime up to the age of
three or four, parents proclaim their respeito (respect) for a child.
Henceforth, the child is enabled to grow into a moral human being
capable of returning the respeito it has been shown. In confluence
with ideas about baptism providing the child with a point of entry to
the Christian faith, people regard baptism as setting the child’s soul
on the correct path—toward God as opposed to away from Him. It
is then the job of the child’s parents and godparents to keep the child
on this path, through raising and educating it properly, and ensur-
ing that it attends catechism classes in preparation for first commu-
nion around the age of ten or eleven. In this precommunion stage of
childhood, children are believed to possess a basic level of innocence
and hence spiritual purity derived from their having arrived only
recently in the world. Adults, correlatively, are less pure, and further
away from God. The essential innocence of precommunion children
has been noted before, particularly in reference to the widespread
Catholic belief that young children and infants who die are without
sin, and so destined to become “little angels” (Nations and Rebhun
1988, Scheper-Hughes 1992). The value ascribed to children’s inno-
cence is in evidence in the village school room, where a handmade
poster proclaiming the biblical saying, “Except ye be converted and
become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of
heaven” (Matthew, 28.1) decorates the main wall. In a similar vein,
Padre Augusto once began a sermon by exhorting the congregation
to make themselves open and receptive como crianças (like children).
He proceeded to explain this exhortation by elaborating upon the
recognized innocence of children, and on the way in which innocence
heightens the ability to trust. The quality of trust that a small child
displays toward his mother, he argued, is the ideal model of the trust
that an adult should display toward God. A child’s trust, he contin-
ued, is such that a child would not hesitate to jump off a ledge and
into total darkness if he heard his mother’s voice calling. Adults too,
he declared, should be able to make such a jump if they hear God’s
call.
Ideas that link children to innocence thus map onto a general con-
ception of childhood as something divisible into two distinct periods:
an earlier period that lasts until first communion (around the age of
ten), and a later period that lasts up until marriage. First communion
is the marker of the child as a full participant in the life of the church.
Furthermore, first communion confers moral personhood because
it marks the end of catechism classes and the commencement of the
child’s ability to recognize good from bad and right from wrong.
Precommunion children are therefore perceived as less accountable
for misdeeds than those who have been fully catechized to partake in
the Eucharist and as such tend to be treated more liberally by adults.
Thus when precommunion children misbehave they are scolded, but
not as severely as their catechized age-mates. Precommunion children
are also allowed a good deal more freedom than older children to play
(brincar) as they wish—a point we shall return to a bit further on.
The essential differentiation between the earlier stage and the later
one is the relationship of the individual toward knowledge. While
children are perceived to be constantly learning about the world, life
in the precommunion stage is accepted as constituting the period par
excellence for the acquisition of knowledge, simply because it is the
least restricted phase for doing so. Several factors point to this: for
most children, childhood will be the only time of their life that they
attend school. It is also the time during which they are expected to
acquire their basic knowledge of the Bible and of Christian practice
through catechism. Also, it is the only period of life when relative

freedom of expression and explorative play is allowed. In all these
senses, children are perceived as inhabiting a stage in which their pre-
rogative is to learn. And to learn, not just about good (via school,
home disciplining, and catechism) but about bad as well.
From First Communion Onward

In Santa Lucia, the level of knowledge and awareness that marks
one out as an autonomous and fully accountable adult person is not
achieved until marriage. Nonetheless, older children and adolescents
are explicitly recognized as different from crianças (little children),
and they are referred to as jovems (youth). Being in the classic turn of
phrase, “betwixt and between” innocence and full knowledge, jovems
are a frequent source of adult preoccupation and are subject to increas-
ing discipline. The first sign that a child is becoming a jovem occurs
around or slightly before the age of puberty. At this time, brothers
and sisters who may have shared a room and even a bed together will
finally be given separate rooms to sleep in. More often than not, due
to sizes of families and restrictions of space, separate beds, rather than
rooms, are arranged.
Another change that occurs around this time relates to the expected
comportment of jovems during church services. It is usual for children
of all ages, including babies, to accompany their mothers to church.
During any church service, one can be distracted by the playful ker-
fuffles, bored sighs, and unorthodox observations of children and
infants. Little children are highly visible in church, not only because
of their different comportment within it—running instead of walk-
ing, and climbing instead of sitting quietly—but also because of the
way in which they use the church space. Whereas the place for adults
is within the seating area of the congregation, facing the crucifix and
altar, young children are permitted to sit upon the step of the inner
chancel and, like the priest, face the congregation with their back to
the altar. In this arrangement of bodies within the church, a manifest
connection is made between the spiritual purity of the innocent child,
the unmarried (childlike) priest and that of God embodied in the
crucifix. The elevated purity of these categories is expressed through
their occupation of the most sacred space within the church, sepa-
rated from the nave where sit the spiritually impure congregation.
As children turn gradually into jovems, they cease to run, climb,
and sit on the raised platform of the chancel. Although children as
old as ten and eleven will utilize church space differently from adults,
the place for children who have had their first communion is firmly
within the congregation. Most children appear to adapt their behavior
without ever being told to do so. On occasion, however, a concerned
looking mother will pull an older child away from the chancel step. If
there is no space left on the pews, the child might sit on the floor in
one of the aisles but must sit facing the altar and crucifix.
The change in bodily comportment within the church should be
mirrored by a new fervor toward attending it. Whereas little children
who do not wish to go to mass are allowed to remain at home, older
children are not let off so easily. This is particularly the case with girls
who, once they start attending catechism classes, are expected to attend
every mass and rosary.2 Thus parents who are not particularly church-
going themselves continually reprimand older children for missing
church services. An example of this occurred when fourteen-year-old
Katiana announced, one evening, her intention to miss prayer. When
asked why by her father, she replied that it was because she found it
boring. “Boring!” roared back her father, who was stretched out in
front of the television, with no intention of attending church himself,
“things of God are not to be judged by you or anyone else as boring,”
and he ordered her to leave for church immediately.
For ordinary Santa Lucians, however, the value placed on chil-
dren’s innocence is tempered by the fact that such a value is essentially
a hollow one. Like the philosopher David Archard who writes that
the child, in this conception “does not fear power because it does not
see what power is” (1993:40), local conceptions of the child recog-
nize that a child is a being that does no evil only because it knows
none. Santa Lucian concepts of the child, then, do not extend to
incorporate romanticist notions about child-like wisdom. Whereas,
in the tradition of writers such as Rousseau, Blake, and Wordsworth
a child’s innocence allows it to possess a preternatural wisdom uncor-
rupted and blinded by formal education, Santa Lucian people insist
that children are not wise (sábio) because they do not know right
from wrong. This is the primary reason for catechism classes, school-
ing, and disciplining children at home. The concept of the child is
thus based as much upon an inner state of ignorance (ignorância) as
it is upon one of innocence. Whereas innocence is positive because it
suggests a lack of morally dangerous knowledge (such as knowledge
about gente, and carnal knowledge), ignorance is the inverse, imply-
ing a lack of the kind of knowledge that makes one into a proper
moral person (such as knowledge about God and the Bible, good
manners, etc.). The dilemma for Santa Lucian caregivers lies in the
fact that all desirable knowledge implies its undesirable inverse. Thus,
while efforts must be made to rid children of ignorance, it is impos-

sible to do this without also ridding them of their innocence.
Knowledge through Play: Its Pleasures and Dangers

In accordance with the spatial and comportmental changes wrought
by puberty, children are expected to manifest a change in attitude
toward childish occupations. As children become older, their play
(brincadeira) comes under increasing scrutiny from adults. Parents
are forever trying to prevent older children from joining in the games
of younger siblings. On any typical afternoon, close kin and neigh-
bors will gather in the shade of one another’s doorsteps to sort beans,
plait straw for hats, and exchange news and gossip. At such times
gaggles of children are always present, playing tag, rolling marbles in
the dirt, and climbing the guava trees that line the center of the vil-
lage street. Such play is generally tolerated by the congregated adults
engaged in various activities, but every so often a mother will call
out to an older child, requesting that he or she stops playing in “that
manner” (d’aquele jeito). At such times conversation often turns to
the perceived problem of older children’s play, with adults waxing
anxious about the fact that their older children play “too much.”
Adults worry a lot about this problem, claiming that too much play
distracts older children from schoolwork and household chores, thus
preventing them from eventual participation in the adult sphere of
economic and moral productivity. Older women remind themselves
of their intention to teach young adolescent girls how to crotchet to
“parar las de brincar” (“stop them playing”). Men discuss their inten-
tions of providing older boys with pigs or goats of their own to raise,
with much the same desire. However, too much play in older children
is worrying for another, more fundamental reason: older children are
much too sabido for their play to be wholly innocent. In short, they
are already in possession of too much knowledge about the world,
knowledge that has the power to transform play into a morally ambig-
uous form of malandragem (mischievousness).
Unlike Freudian theoretical frameworks that interpret play literally
or analogously and regard play as a distinctive type of activity set off
from others, Santa Lucians regard play as something of a mode, or an
attitude that can be shown toward any kind of activity at all (Edmiston
2008; Schechner 1988). Adults frequently ask one another to stop
“playing” with them in moments of jest or sarcasm. In haggling over
the price of something in the market, a person might accuse a trader
of “playing,” if the price they ask for is too high. Another example is
carnival, which linguistically speaking individuals are said to “play,”

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

tion of undesirable knowledge.
Acquiring Knowledge through Speech Games and

Ritual Speech Games
We return at this point to the young child, who is not yet cunning
or knowledgeable enough to survive well in the world without adult
guidance and to examine their role in a very common type of speech
game in which small children are used between adults, as messengers
for insults. I use the word “game” here, in a loose sense to denote
what is actually a form of playful interaction. Such interactions are not
formally articulated games such as cards or football; they do not have
“winning” or “losing” as their objective, and they are not initiated
with the words “vamos brincar” (let’s play). Such interactions consti-
tute more of a “covert category” (Whorf 1956), one that people act in
terms of while unable to define it in words (see also Briggs 1998: 9).
Such speech games are always played among kin and tend to occur
spontaneously whenever people are grouped together. As with any
type of game or performance, however, much depends upon the per-
sonalities of those involved. For example, the aptitude and willing-
ness of individual children to be drawn into these kinds of exchange
vary greatly, and not every one is a willing candidate. Similarly, while
some Santa Lucian adults will never pass up the opportunity for a
joke or jibe at another’s expense, others of a more serious disposi-
tion will routinely steer clear of such forms of interaction. However,
most people, regardless of their level of willingness to instigate these
little games, find the banter being channeled through the child
greatly amusing. The more outrageous the insults that are channeled
through the child, the greater the amusement value to the onlookers.
Following are three such examples:
One morning I returned with Amauri from the local town where
we had been to buy medicine for his goats. On our way, we stopped
by at his brother-in-law Gileno’s house. Gileno was at home with his
three-year-old son Luciano, and two older daughters, Chrislane and
Sofia. Amauri and I sat down with them to converse. The following
interaction occurred between the two men and Luciano, the boy:
Amauri: Hey, Luciano, aren’t you going to ask for your favorite
uncle’s blessing?
[Luciano looks shyly away and climbs onto Gilberto’s lap]
Amauri: Hey, moleque (rascal), I’m talking to you. Aren’t you going
to ask for my blessing?
Gileno: [to Luciano] Say “You are not really my uncle,” say it.
Luciano: You are not really my uncle.
Amauri: What sort of disrespect is this?!
Gileno: [to Luciano] Say “You are not really my uncle, you are too
poor to be my uncle!” Say it.
Luciano: You are not really my uncle, you are too poor to be my
uncle!
Gileno: [to Luciano] Say “If you were a rich man, I would call you
uncle,” Say it.
Luciano: If you were a rich man, I would call you uncle.
Amauri: Is that so? Then you won’t find many uncles around here.
Later on that same day, after several hours had passed, the family and
I were having supper together. Luciano ran into the house, as often
he did after he had finished supper at his own house, and climbed
onto Dida’s lap. Regarding the young boy with unabashed affection,
Amauri repeated his question of earlier that day: “Aren’t you going
to ask your uncle for his blessing?” to which Luciano replied, “You
are not really my uncle, you are too poor to be my uncle.” At this
Dida and her two daughters, who had not witnessed the afternoon
exchange, gasped with amazement at how one so young could have
come up with such a line. Amauri did not qualify where this phrase
had come from. “You see how clever the boy is?” he said, beaming
with pleasure, “Ave Maria, he is clever indeed!”
Another example of this speech game occurred in the house of an
elderly couple called Dona Maria and Seu Adalberto on an occasion
when I had been invited for lunch. Their daughter Roseli, and four-
year-old granddaughter, Cassia were also present. After we had fin-
ished eating, Seu Adalberto got up from the table and announced that
he was going down to the barraca. Cassia sprang to the old man’s side
and asked to go with him, to which Seu Adalberto replied quietly that
where he was going was no place for her. Dona Maria cast her hus-
band a withering look and started to busy herself with dirty dishes.
It was clear that she did not approve of her husband’s sudden leave-
taking for the barraca. The following interaction occurred between
the old couple and their granddaughter:
Dona Maria: [To Cassia, while backward and forward, clearing table]
Say “But where you are going is no place for an old man like you,”
say it.
Cassia: But where you are going is no place for an old man like you.
Seu Adalberto: [To Dona Maria] Ah, I won’t be gone long woman.
Dona Maria: [To Cassia] Say, “no, just long enough to come back
smelling of liquor,” say it.
Cassia: No, just long enough to come back smelling of liquor.
With an embarrassed smile, Seu Adalberto stuffed his hat under his
arm and shook my hand goodbye. He stepped out of the back door
and made down the path. Dona Maria, without a glance at her depart-
ing husband, addressed Cassia: “Run after him and tell him, ‘if you
have too much you can spend the night in the cattle pen.’ ” Roseli,
myself, and Dona Maria laughed as Cassia raced after her grandfather
to deliver the last line.
In yet another exchange Deia, a young woman who worked in the
casa de farinha was passing by the house of her wealthier sister-in-
law who was standing outside it on her front porch. The sister-in-law
called out a greeting to Deia and her young daughter as they passed.
Deia called back and then said to her daughter, “Say ‘O tia, give us
some money so we can also live in a beautiful house.’ ”
Speech Games as Meaningful Actions

Two important points need to be made about this kind of interac-
tion overall. The first point concerns the age of the participants. The
game is always initiated by adults and with children roughly between
the ages of three and five years. Although slightly older children will
sometimes be roped into acting as messengers, younger children tend
to be favored over older ones because, while they are linguistically
able, and basically old enough to grasp the “rules,” they are unam-
biguously still young enough to be innocents.
The second point I wish to make concerns the relationships of
those directly involved in such interactions. The child messenger will
always be a close relation of one or both of the adults involved—
usually a son/daughter, nephew/niece, or grandchild. To co-opt a
child one does not know into such a game would be unthinkable.
While the relationship of the child messenger to the adults involved
appears relatively flexible (the child may be almost any categorical rela-
tion to those adults so long as there exists familiarity between them),
adults who engage in an exchange of insults via a child messenger
tend to be in affinal relationships, and the tensions inherent within
each scenario appear, repeatedly, to focus upon the moral problematic
that marriage and affinity generates. A couple of further restrictions
are also in evidence. For example, it is significant that not one of the
many instances I witnessed involved husbands or wives channeling

insults to one another directly through their own offspring, a pattern
that seems in keeping with the strong level of deference and respect
that children are brought up to show toward their immediate parents.
Utmost levels of respect must also be shown by adults toward any
person of an older generation. Thus all insult exchanges of this form
tend to be initiated between adults of the same generation.
Children as Initiates and Purifiers of Knowledge

Previously, we have seen that although children’s innocence is per-
ceived as a spiritually elevated state, it limits them in worldly terms,
and they are therefore obliged to escape from it. This leads to a situ-
ation in which adults struggle hard to negate the moral ambiguity
and sin of worldly life (marriage, commerce, sex, etc.), whilst having
to bring their children up to embrace it. Given these facts, we might
understand the speech play of the sort described as one that enables
adults to negotiate some of the moral anxiety that raising children pro-
duces. It is significant, for example, that affines would never address
one another so disrespectfully under such ordinary circumstances.
However, as we have seen, children may become safe channels for the
expression of such immoral hostility. A child’s perceived innocence
takes the immoral edge off an adult’s words without stripping those
words of their message. In understanding how this might be possible,
it helps to reflect, for a moment, upon local notions of spiritual heal-
ing that I discussed in detail in chapter 2. In Santa Lucia, religious
healers known as rezadeiras are considered to be closer to God than
the average adult person. The rezadeira’s spiritual power is talked
about as a kind of capacity to bear and absorb the negative forces that
afflict other people. Therefore, when a person is being healed of the
evil eye, the rezadeira yawns widely to take in the evil, and weeps
tears as she absorbs it. Powerful rezadeiras are said to have a great
capacity to bear suffering, just as ordinary women, through marriage
and childbirth, become metaphorical containers of suffering. The
significant point here is that a rezadeira cures by absorbing the evil
afflicting others and “bearing” it herself. Once inside her body, evil
loses its force.4 In a similar way, then, children act as absorbers for the
evil embedded in words. By acting as vessels for what is, essentially,
morally dangerous knowledge, they make its existence less dangerous
in the world. This is borne out by the fact that two adults passing
such comments directly to one another, even jokingly, run a signifi-
cantly higher risk of rupturing their relationship irrevocably.
Speech games work, in this sense, to render the difficulty of certain

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

During the June festival of São João, children and young, unmar-
ried people perform a theatrical dance called casamento de matuto
(wedding of the country bumpkin). The dance itself, called a

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

stories about themselves in relation to modern technology, at the same
time as offering a resource for reflection upon the structural relations
that deny them access to it.5 In practice, the matuto is actually a highly
adaptable category with complex symbolic associations. He may be
rendered either as an ignorant buffoon, imprisoned by his simple life
and rural environment, or as a type of anti-intellectual hero, spiritu-
ally cloistered from the complex sinful world by his rural existence.
In everyday speech, Santa Lucian people are as apt as urbanites any-
where else in Brazil, to speak pejoratively of the matuto, and will tease
and deride one another for being matutos at the slightest of provoca-
tions. When it comes to situating themselves as rural Northeasterners
within the wider national panorama, however, Santa Lucians tend to
recognize themselves as matutos. As one woman exclaimed when I
asked her what a matuto was: “What is a matuto? It’s us! People who
live simply, the way we do!”
Every year, school children perform the casamento de matuto with
their class. For the entire week of São João, afternoons are filled with
staged performances by classes of school children, to which parents
are invited to attend. It is important to note, however, that perfor-
mances by younger children often involve only the minimum number
of characters, such as a bride, groom, and priest. Dialogue before the
dance commences is also pared down, and the performance really
consists of nothing more than the quadrilha. Performances by older

groups of children are likely to involve more characters and dialogue
but revolve primarily around the dance itself. It is only performances
by teenagers and young, unmarried adults that include the full dia-
logue and all characters. It is therefore this performance that makes
the moral content of the story most explicit.
In school performances, an accordionist and a drummer provide
the live music for the dancing. Following the performance, drinks
and traditional specialties such as cassava cakes, sweet tapioca pan-
cakes, and cornmeal puddings are served. Among young girls, there
is always some competition to be the bride. For boys, being chosen
to be the groom is not as competitive an event, although it is still
considered a special part.
With the exception of some of the boys in their early teens, chil-
dren revel in the opportunity to dress up like adults. Weeks before
the casamento de matuto takes place, children start nagging their
parents to help them put together an outfit. On the day of the per-
formance, they strut proudly around the village showing these off.
Many ordinarily shy children find their confidence bolstered by their
adult disguises, and they use it to initiate conversations with children
and adults they do not know or have never properly talked to before.
Adults clearly enjoy helping children prepare for the day. Mothers take
time out of their normal routines to dress their brides and grooms,
sew patches on trousers, and hunt desperately around for the right
kind of hat. When the children are ready, they wander through the
village in groups, turning up at the houses of adult relatives, whose
duty it is to closely inspect and laugh appreciatively at their costumes.
Men try on the boys’ hats and, tongue-in-cheek, offer them cigarettes
and alcoholic drinks. Sometimes a boy will be asked “Cadé a mulher
sofrida?” (“Where is your suffered wife?”) producing much amuse-
ment. The “groom” is often singled out for special attention by adult
women and men. When they see him walking past, women will say
loudly, in mock disapproval “Lá vai o safado” (“There goes the ras-
cal”). Men tease the groom for his safadeza (cunning naughtiness),
they ruffle his hair and say things such as “Veja o condenado!” (“see
the condemned one!”). Boys derive much enjoyment from this kind
of interaction and some will brag to adults about invented escapades
and amorous conquests. A favorite game that small boys play among
themselves on this day is the game of “being drunk,” which involves
pretending to be drunk and falling over in humorous fashion.
Girls wander around the village seeking attention in much the
same way as the boys. Rather than make fun of them, however,
adults concentrate on admiring their clothes. The bride will be gently

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

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

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

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

193). In casamento de matuto, “co-authoring spaces” become avail-
able as children and adults dialogue playfully in relation to topics
of sex, sin, marriage, and redemption. With each passing year, the
“ethical identities” formed within the coauthored space provided by
casamento de matuto are bound to shift and to become overlaid with
alternative associations and values. As such, the meaning of casamento
de matuto that I have put forward here remains at best a potential: a
potential to achieve a loss of innocence as well as to address what such
a loss would mean.
Making Sinners, Making Saints

In a historical study of the concept of childhood in the West, Hugh
Cunningham (1995) cites a German sermon delivered in 1520,
which claimed that “Just as a cat craves mice, a fox chickens, and
a wolf cub sheep, so infant humans are inclined in their hearts to
adultery, fornication, impure desires, lewdness, idol worship, belief
in magic, hostility, quarrelling, passion, anger, strife, dissention,
factiousness, hatred, murder, drunkenness, gluttony, and more”
(1995: 49). Following the advice of Proverbs, 29.15, “The rod and
the reproof gives wisdom; but a child left to himself bringeth his
mother to shame,” the puritan parent thus sought to produce a
civilized and educated Christian (Archard 1993: 37). In this under-
standing of children, little weight is given to the notion of inno-
cence and far more is placed on the Augustinian and Calvinist tenets
of Original Sin. Rather than pure and cherubic, children are cast
as recalcitrant devils in need of rigid forms of discipline to instill a
moral disposition.
Alongside the notion of the child as inherently evil, however, one
also encounters that of the adult who, in order to be saved, must redis-
cover the state of childhood. In this more secular view of childhood,
which emerged in connection with humanist notions of childhood in
Renaissance Europe, children possess a purity that derives from their
having arrived only recently in the world. They are, as Archard writes,
“nature which society corrupts. Growing up is an inevitable degen-
eration, a growing away from original perfection” (1993: 38). In this
perspective, which has come to underwrite liberal protectionist con-
cepts of the child, children are considered as vulnerable and innocent,
and their innocence is to be protected for as long as possible by their
separation from the corrupting productive, political, economic, and
recreational world of adults.
Cultural conceptions of the child have historically encompassed

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

and innocence prevail in the Santa Lucian imagination as a set of
competing value spheres, and how the competition between these
spheres is part and parcel of a broader local discourse about the place
of children and adolescents in the world. In particular, we have seen
how for adults, the innocence of young children is at once a cause of
anxiety, a moral and practical challenge, and a resource to be mined.
In the latter case, the fact that children lack knowledge about the
world makes them ideal interlocutors in morally ambiguous situations
between knowing adults. However, children’s innocence is constantly
under subtle surveillance, as adults perceive the process of growing
up in the world as one requiring careful management. This process
of management receives heightened elaboration in the practice of
certain speech games and ritual events wherein children are encour-
aged to perform the immoral behaviors and predicaments inherent in
adult relationships. Such mutually creative and playful processes are
important, for they mediate and diffuse, to some extent, the morally
problematic nature of the rapidly changing child. Within such prac-
tices children are encouraged to acquire immoral knowledge, knowl-
edge that paradoxically is necessary if one is to live successfully in the
world, extracting via self-sacrifice, all that is good from it.
Conclusion
For the Catholic people of Santa Lucia, the need to live both mor-
ally and productively in the world constitutes something of a paradox.
This paradox, as it is locally perceived, crystallizes around an under-
standing of knowledge (saber/conhecimento), which comes about most
explicitly through the loss of innocence (inocência) at marriage. For
Santa Lucian people, it is knowledge that simultaneously defines the
nature of human beings in the world, makes socially productive rela-
tionships possible, causes persons to sin, and provides a unique chal-
lenge to the attainment of spiritual salvation. In this book, I have
tried to address the ways in which people strive to meet this chal-
lenge. Thus I have investigated how, from childhood and through
marriage, concepts of spiritual and moral accountability develop and
change, and how people negotiate such changes through specific dis-
courses on labor and suffering.
The focus for this exploration has been the social and affective
space of marriage; not only in a positive sense, but also as a mortally
dangerous commitment for men and women alike. It is here in this
negative manifestation that local understandings of power, morality,
sin, and transgression intersect. It is here, in the emotionally charged
and often violent relationship between husbands and wives, that the
existential challenge of living morally and living productively comes
most tangibly to the fore.
What is remarkable, however, is how extreme transgressions are
potentially assimilated and dealt with via specific discourses that cen-
ter on labor and suffering. Such discourses eschew facts of power and
difference among individuals and emphasize the universality of moral-
ity and its pitfalls. Thus, the same symbolic tropes that surround the
practice and discourses of women also surround those of men. While
male discourses predominantly utilize a language of “labor” and
female discourses a language of “suffering,” both portray self-sacrifice
as redemptive, and both generate the same rewards. Self-sacrifice has
an expiatory value, working to emphasize the highest Christian value

that can inhere in people: that of selflessness. Through the perfor-
mance of being willing to suffer on behalf of others, a married man
or woman’s sins are attenuated, and their social and spiritual position
is in some way redeemed.
A Model of Suffering as Sacrifice

Speaking about suffering is an event, one which is consciously per-
formed for a listening audience. During the production of such nar-
ratives, labor and other forms of personal suffering are constituted as
gifts, as sacrifices, for the benefit of others. Paradoxically, events that
cause suffering mostly derive from spiritually polluting processes:
labor, commerce, childbirth, and marriage. Thus what is striking
about the construction of suffering as sacrifice in the Santa Lucian
context is that what persons sacrifice is not merely the body (through
physical hardships of labor and childbirth), but the purity of the
Christian soul, via the choice to marry and labor at all.
The declaration of suffering described earlier effects a transforma-
tion of worldly pollution into something divinely oriented: sacrifice,
an act that, “through the consecration of a victim, modifies the condi-
tion of the moral person who accomplishes it or that of certain objects with
which he is concerned” (Hubert and Mauss 1964: 13 original italics).
Let us look briefly at the model of sacrifice that has underpinned the
discourses of labor and suffering described throughout, and remind
ourselves of what this sacrifice achieves.
Using the schema originally delineated by Henry Hubert and
Marcel Mauss (1964) for rituals of sacrifice, the model of sacrifice
I have identified is a type of self-sacrifice characterized by a com-
pression of ritual roles into the single person. Thus the sufferer is
simultaneously victim (one who is sacrificed), sacrificer (one who per-
forms the sacrifice), and sacrifier (one who benefits from the ritual).1
However, for this kind of sacrifice to be effective within Christian
cosmological terms, there have to be two categories of sacrifier: the
“suffering one” plus his or her audience/community. In the context
of the ethnography presented here, the first category is made up of
individual men and women who, through discourses and perfor-
mances of suffering, consciously cast themselves as sacrificial victims.
The second category comprises the wider group of their friends and
kinsmen: all those who make up the social world of the sufferer, and
who benefit either consciously or unconsciously from the sacrifices
made on their behalf by the suffering person. Archetypal people to
CONCLUSION 179
fall into this second category are the children of celebrated sofredoras
and trabalhadores and the patients of rezadeiras. When people from
this second category of sacrifier actively present other people as sofre-
doras and trabalhadores, they turn them into sacrificial victims, thus
also performing the function of sacrificers.
For the sufferer, self-sacrifice is an act of simultaneous commemo-
ration, communion, and expiation; a process of drawing together the
sacred and profane. Rather than constituting a sacrifice to God, it
constitutes a sacrifice of God. This is because at its most basic level,
it is an emulation and commemoration of the Passion, of the original
sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross. Indeed, as Hubert and Mauss long ago
noted, sacrifice is one of the fundamental themes of divine legend.
It is in the sacrifice of a divine personage, that sacrifice attains “its
highest expression” (1964: 77). This form of emulative commemora-
tion, I have argued, constitutes a form of religious practice in itself,
one which potentially effects a transformation in both the sacrifier
and the God.
For the sacrifier, the transformation occurs via a process of sacral-
ization, turning the sacrifier into a spiritual mediator between the
divine and profane worlds. This was illustrated most clearly in the
case of the rezadeira Celestina, whose sacrificial identification with
God was great enough to transform her into a vessel for the channel-
ing of divine healing. In such a case, it is not merely that the reza-
deira is able to commune effectively with the divine, but her own
divine nature is emphasized. At its most extreme level, seen locally
in the case of suffering rezadeiras (or more generally, in the suffering
and martyrdom of certain canonized saints), identification with the
Passion is complete. The sacrifier does not merely emulate God, but
she herself becomes in part divine. Her supernatural healing powers
are testament to this.
As the ethnographic examples I have provided reveal, the sacrificial
discourse depends for its functioning upon the role of the audience or
group. As Valerio Valeri argues of Hawaiian sacrifice, the “symbolic
action” that effects transformations of the relationships of sacrifier,
god, and group happens “by representing them in public” (1985: 71).
For Valeri, a failing of Hubert and Mauss’s sacrificial theory lies in
the way it treats sacrifice as a bilateral relationship between the sacri-
fier and god and fails to stress that the collective judgment of the
audience always mediates that relationship. In the Santa Lucian con-
text, as I have shown, it is the listening audience who consummates
the sacrifice by accepting the gift of suffering that is proffered by
the sufferer for their benefit. This, in turn, establishes the sacrificial
nature of the narrative produced. The listening audience also plays

an important role in reinforcing the message and product of sacrifice
by reproducing suffering narratives, when necessary, on the sufferer’s
behalf; the ultimate reinforcement being the bestowal of titles such as
sofredora and trabalhador to certain individuals.
Valeri’s explicit recognition that it is the judgment of the collec-
tive audience that lends the sacrificial process much of its efficacy
is an important one. But it might well be argued that the “audi-
ence,” although oblique, has never been entirely absent from the
Durkheimian paradigm put forward by Hubert and Mauss. Indeed,
as they themselves argue, sacrifice works to redeem individuals from
“social obloquy,” thus enabling them to “re-enter the community”
(1964: 103). Such an assessment certainly seems to be true in the
context of those individuals who had committed serious offences.
Had the man who murdered his wife with a scythe not carried the
moral title of trabalhador, one wonders whether he would have been
able to remain living within the community at all.
Within the different life stages I have discussed in this book, the
direction in which sacrifice can be said to occur varies. Thus, the
sacrificial narratives of married men and women might be read as
producing a movement from a state of relative profanity to a state
of increased divinity. However, according to my analysis of the
casamento de matuto ritual, a sacrificial movement might also be seen
in the opposite direction. In the performance of casamento de matuto,
children’s innocence (and concomitant spiritual purity) is sacrificed in
order that they acquire important knowledge about the world. The
movement in this ritual is not, then, to increase divinity but rather to
expel it. Children are too pure, too close to God, and must be actively
distanced from this state in order to live productively in the world.
A common language within the anthropological literature on
Catholicism is that of purity and pollution. This maps onto a well-
elaborated tension, supposedly inherent within salvationist religions,
between the immanent and the transcendental. The sacred realm is,
by definition, pure; the profane realm, by definition, polluted. Such
a tension is particularly marked within the work of William Christian
who argues that Catholicism is a purity centered religion:
In a religion that centres early and often on purity, young children are
made living ideals of the way to be, as if to prove purity possible and
remind adults that while they are no longer pure they hold the poten-
tial germ of purity. . . . Over half of the images in the parish churches of
the valley include a representation of the infant Jesus. The day-to-day
CONCLUSION 181
life in these villages could be called child-centered because it is purity

centered. (1972: 156)
For the Spanish peasants of Christian’s study, devotional activities

and visits to shrines dotted about the landscape form part of an ongo-
ing quest for purity. Such shrines are spatially removed from sites of
profane activities such as villages and cultivated fields; their purpose,
in part, being to “cleanse” individuals of the pollution they incur at
these sites. Devotees leave the shrines feeling spiritually “cleansed”
and restored to a state of spiritual purity. Purity, as defined by the
Oxford English Dictionary is “freedom from physical contamination
or moral pollution.” A quest for purity suggests, ipso facto, an incom-
mensurable division between sacred and profane, an “abyss” between
God and Man that is, by Marshall Sahlin’s definition, “doleful” in
nature because it is impossible to bridge (Sahlins 1996).2
For Catholic Santa Lucian’s, however, spiritual vitality can and
must be sought within the abyss. Rather than emphasizing purity,
we have seen that Santa Lucian people elevate certain categorically
impure types of people to spiritual prominence. Moreover, we have
observed how the practice of educating children about the ways of
married adults via playfully ritualized games constitutes a way of rid-
ding children of their innocence—of doing away with their spiritual
purity. Given local understandings about the worldly impracticality
of purity in general, it is in fact questionable whether “purity,” in
the Santa Lucian context, is a religious goal at all. Indeed, rather
than cleansing themselves of sin Santa Lucian people seek merely to
contextualize their acts of sin in relation to acts of self-sacrifice. In
everyday life Santa Lucian Catholics strive to unite two spheres: to
sin virtuously, to be close to God, not despite the central Christian
paradox, but in some sense because of it. Spiritual perfection can and
must be sought, within the “doleful abyss.”
A Parting Gift
It was my last week in the village, and I was sitting on my own in
the back courtyard of the chapel. It was nearing the end of my stay,
and I was feeling tired and a bit glum. Suddenly, the chapel door
banged open in the breeze, disturbing my quiet solitude, and mental
cataloguing of everything that was wrong with the world. Listening
intently I could make out the sound of a broom being swept across
the floor and, rising above it, a high warbling voice, singing some
sort of hymn, or perhaps just an old song. It was Dida preparing the
chapel for mass the next day. I froze to the spot, listening and hoping
that she would not come out and catch me there, alone and morose.
Did she know I was there, I wondered, or was she unaware? Should
I stay put, or make my presence known? Suddenly there was another
voice. Another woman had entered the chapel:
Woman: Oh Dida woman, I brought these flowers for the altar. The
Padre likes the place to look nice. How is the English girl?
Dida: Maya? She goes back to her country next week you know.
Woman: Already? Virgin Maria! But it seems like yesterday she arrived.
Why is she going already woman?
Dida: She finished that work that she came here to do.
Woman: Ah what work, eh, Dida? Work that takes you so far from
home!
Dida: I know, woman. That girl has suffered for her work. To spend
so long away from her parents, to come here without knowing any-
one, not even the language, Ave Maria! She has suffered, yes.
Woman: What suffering! Poor creature must be glad to be going home.
Notes
Introduction
1. Scott offers this term in contribution to wider debates within the
anthropology of Christianity over what Christianity means in diverse
cultural contexts, and how Christianity as a particular ideological sys-
tem shapes people’s understanding of it, and their attempts to live out
Christian beliefs (Barker 2003; Garriott and O’Neill 2008; Robbins
2004; Scott 2005). Working toward a rapprochement between the
views of anti-essentialists and culture theorists, Scott argues for a
nonmonolithic view of Christianity in which Christians engage simul-
taneously with multiple interlocking macro and micro Christian log-
ics. A nonmonolithic view in which “whatever points of entrée people
engage and re-engage with Christianity, they aspire to systematicity
by following through the implications of Christian language, truth
claims, and values” (2005: 102).
2. However, Cannell questions the notion that Christianity is exclusively
a religion of transcendence, arguing that historically, theologically,
and cross-culturally “transcendent” Christianity “was never unam-
biguously ‘other worldly,’ and even orthodox Christianity contained
within it the shadows of its own alternative ways of thinking” (2006).
3. Recent ethnographic investigations explore in-depth the ways lan-
guage ideologies shape different forms of Christian practice. See for
example Robbins (2001), Coleman (1996), Harding (2000), and
Placido (2001) on the theme of Christianity as a “religion of talk”
(Robbins 2001). See Knauft (2002), and Engelke (2007) for discus-
sion of the semantics and pragmatics of Bible use.
4. For paradox resulting from two opposing cultural traditions see, for
example, Robbins (2004). Another interesting example is to be found
in the work of Harris (2006) and Orta (2000, 2004). Where Harris
depicts Bolivian Aymara as having to “hide” remnants of traditional
culture from the Catholic institution, Orta explores the more recent
adherence to an ideology of “inculturation,” in which the Aymara, to
be true Christians, must strive to be more Indian.
184 NOTES
5. A similar trajectory has unfolded in the Mediterranean literature. In

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

1. 2000 census (www.world-gazetteer.com.)
2. In a detailed historical tracing of the concept of the Brazilian Northeast,
Albuquerque (1999) has pointed out that it was only through certain
specific historical developments that the concept of a “Northeast”
became salient at all. During the nineteenth century, Northeastern
regionalism began to take hold and the concept of the Northeast
began to be romanticized in literature, defined by geographers, and
intellectually objectified as having a particular history and character.
See also Oliveira de Andrade (2000) for essays on the cultural and
intellectual tradition of the region.
3. See, for example, Mitchell (1981).
4. For detail on the sociopolitical causes and consequences of drought in
the Northeast, see Andrade (1980); Hall (1981); and Reis (1981). For
an anthropological discussion of drought and its link to modern day
sugar plantations see Scheper-Hughes (1992). For an account of how
drought has impacted upon the region’s culture and become embed-
ded in Northeastern identity see Arons (2004).
5. De Castro (1969: 220); Galeano (1975: 75); Scheper-Hughes
(1992: 31).
6. Some of the most classic and oft-televised novels of Jorge Amado
(Gabriela, Cravo e Canela; Tieta do Nordeste; Dona Flor e Seus Dois
Maridos) are set in the Brazilian Northeast, and play heavily upon the
traditional “backwater” image of the region.
7. For more on the history of the Catholic Church in Brazil see Levine
(1980), and Bruneau (1982). On historical and other aspects of folk
and popular Catholicism within Brazil, see Azzi (1978) and Brun
(1989).
8. For examples of popular works of literature, see the novel Cangaceiros
by José Lins do Rego, and the various cordel poems dedicated to the
lives and exploits of the famous sertanejo bandit Lampião and the mys-
tic leader Padre Cícero. For examples of scholarly works on religious
NOTES 185
mystics and messianic cults in the Northeast see da Cunha (1944);

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

1. Related would include nieces and first cousins from either the
mother’s or father’s side.
2. A similar finding is reported by Fukui among peasants of the Sertão
(1979: 132).
3. The same practice is noted by Rebhun (1999).
4. With a motorbike a man is also thought to be freer to have sexual
encounters with women other than his wife or girlfriend. Therefore
wives in particular take a ubiquitously ambivalent attitude toward
their husbands’ motorbikes: they appear to appreciate taking lifts on
the back of them when in need of transport, but are constantly trying
to persuade their husbands to sell them.
5. For anthropological discussions of the Christian problematization of
sex and sexuality, see Christian (1972); du Boulay (1974); and Pina-
Cabral (1986). For general discussions of sex and sexuality in
Christian theology and discourse, see Pagels (1988) and Warner
(2000).
6. St Augustine’s doctrine of original sin fused sexuality and sin indis-
solubly in the imagination of the Christian West. He taught that in
186 NOTES
the garden of Eden, married sex had been good—a part of God’s plan.
After the Fall, sexuality became a sign of humanity’s inherent sinful-
ness and disobedience to God.
7. The contraceptive pill is readily available at the village health post, and
sterilization operations are widely encouraged for women who already
have two or three children.
8. The huge popular devotion within the Northeast of Brazil to the friar
Freire Damião is a notable example.
9. For an interesting discussion of humorous genital symbolism in popu-
lar Portuguese culture, see Pina-Cabral (1993).
3 The Bearing of Burdens: Suffering, Containment,

and Healing
1. For interesting explorations of suffering that do not have gender as
an overarching concern, see Asad (1983), Taussig (1987), and Scarry
(1985) who, following Foucault (1975), have all observed a relation
between pain and confessional discourse in the construction of the
truth claims of a dominant institution. In so doing they remind us of
the fact that pain as an institutional, juridical, and political idiom is a
central social construct in many political cultures. While the focus of
these theorists has been upon the painful domination and manipula-
tion of the subject by institutions, others have revealed the subject’s
use of pain in order to challenge and resist institutions (Bynum 1987;
Caraveli 1986; Dubisch 1995; Seremetakis 1991). In this context, the
techniques of domination and the techniques of resistance are charac-
terized by the same problematic: the relationship between the force of
suffering and the establishment of truth claims.
2. As Lutz and White point out, the social impact of emotional commu-
nication is based on moral inferences shared by social actors. Situated
emotional expression can therefore be seen as a “language of the self”
that generates and actively reproduces specific social structures and
ideational configurations (1986: 417).
3. Following Bakhtin, a speech genre is not a form of language, but a
typical form of utterance that corresponds to typical situations of
speech communication, typical themes and also to “particular con-
tacts between the meanings of words and actual concrete reality under
certain typical circumstances” (1986: 87).
4. Such titles can also apply to men, a topic I discuss further in chapter
four.
5. Evil eye is a folk affliction where people are made ill as a result of
another’s envy (enveja). Symptoms include general weakness and loss
of appetite. It is commonly cured through the prayer of a faith healer
(rezador).
6. Of the eleven rezadores that I came to know, only two were men.
NOTES 187
7. Certain contextual and sociohistorical differences deserve mention,

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

In Christian usage, the term “Passion” encompasses suffering, love,
refusal to retaliate, and endurance (Hammond 2007: vii).
14. Américo Falcão. Cited in Almeida (1947).
4 Working to Sweat: Labor, Narrative, and

Redemption
1. For a wider historical overview of the concept of work in Europe, see
Anthony (1977), Applebaum (1992), Beder (2000), and Bernstein
(1997). For anthropological discussions on work, see for example the
collection of essays contained in Wallman (1979). For an ethno-
graphic discussion of work relating to Brazil, see Robben (1989).
2. It needs to be borne in mind that historically and up until the present
day, peasants in many parts of the Northeastern interior favor a
seminomadic existence based on itinerant agriculture, supplemented
by hunting, gathering, and fishing. The mobility and inherent flexi-
bility of this way of life enables a type of resistance to the imposition
of wage labor and the low salaries and exploitative conditions that
accompany it (Carvalho-Branco 1997: 31–32).
3. For a detailed description of this kind of agricultural cycle and of the
types of labor it involves, see Woortman and Woortman (1997).
4. For an elaboration of Liberation theology, see Boff, C. (1978); and
Boff, L. and Boff, C. (1986).
5. For an evocative description of Liberationist practice in Northeast
Brazil during the early 1980s, see Scheper-Hughes (1992: 517–527).
For a discussion of Catholic Liberationist base communities, and an
analysis of the demise of Liberationist style worship in Brazil, see
Burdick (1993).
6. Authors of all songs cited are anonymous.
7. Woortman and Woortman (1997: 138–140) make a similar connec-
tion between the sexual reproductive life of couples and the repro-
ductive life of crops. There is a symbolic connection made between
the flowering crop in its “hottest” phase and the “hot” sexual appe-
tite of women. It is observed that the roçado is analogous to the
vagina. When a woman marries, she shaves her pubic hair, a process
idiomatically described as “clearing forest” for her husband to
“plant” in.
8. For an overview on moral attitudes to commerce in early Christian,
Hebrew, Roman, and Greek philosophy, see Hengle (1974) and
Beder (2000).
9. In the run up to the 2002 general election, Lula was a popular can-
didate among villagers because it was well known that he had lost a
finger during his time as a metalworker in São Paulo. This, along
with the fact that he was also known to have experienced hunger in
NOTES 189
childhood, was taken as “proof” that he was a suffered trabalhador

and would therefore make a caring and hard working president.
10. For more on the socioeconomic background affecting forms of rural
labor in Brazil, see Correia de Andrade (1998); Garcia (1990); and
Velho (1982).
11. All names and some details in the following accounts have been
changed.
12. The doctrine of predestination is based upon the notion that God’s
grace is a gift, not a reward. This means that God has selected some
from the mass of fallen humanity who are predestined for salvation.
For a fuller discussion, see McGrath (1997 [1994]: 449–451).
13. It is important to note, however, that although the attainment of
wealth as a fruit of labor in a calling was a sign of God’s blessing, the
pursuit of wealth as an end in itself was highly reprehensible.
According to Weber, the Protestant-capitalist ethic involved the pur-
suit of profit for an end other than the goods, pleasure, and position
it could buy. It stressed “worldly asceticism” through “restless, con-
tinuous, systematic work,” and the reinvestment of profits into busi-
ness (Weber 1967: 157).
14. The debate can be traced back to the Pelagian controversy that drew
attention to the question of whether salvation was a reward for good
behavior, or a gift from God. Grace according to Augustine was
God’s freely given and unmerited gift to humanity’s frail condition.
In this view, sinners could not earn salvation, in that there was noth-
ing that they could achieve or perform that would oblige God to
reward them. For Pelagius, grace was understood as inhering in
human faculties, thus supporting the view that humans could earn
their salvation through their own achievements. In the late medieval
period, the debate continued under the growing influence of volun-
tarism. Whereas for Aquinas, writes McGrath: “the divine intellect
recognizes the inherent value of an action and rewards it accord-
ingly,” the voluntarist approach placed the emphasis upon the divine
will, such that “there was thus no direct link between the moral and
meritous value of a human action” (1997 [1994]: 436).
15. On Good Friday, drinking is theoretically prohibited. In reality, men
continue to drink, but substitute beer and cane spirit for red wine.
16. See also Seremetakis (1991: 201–206), who observes that rural Greek
women make an explicit connection between the pain of agricultural
labor and the pain of loss through death.
5 Virtuous Husbands, Powerful Wives:

Marriage and the Dangers of Power
1. Rebhun describes something similar when she posed the question to
Northeast Brazilians “What does the word amor mean?” and received
190 NOTES
answers that focused more on honest business practices, interper-

sonal respect, public obligations to support and protect the weak and
courtesy in general, rather than on deep personal affection, intimate
acquaintance, or sexual attraction (1996: 65–66).
2. The sítio denotes the land surrounding any one household on which
animals are kept and fruits or garden produce grown. It does not
include the roçado—land which is usually farther a field from the
house, used for agriculture or pasture.
3. As parental obligation lies strictly with one’s children, parents habitu-
ally welcome their married daughters (and sons) back into their house-
hold when they are experiencing marital problems. In such situations,
the young husband or wife’s affines have little power of persuasion to
make them return. As such, it commonly falls to someone like a par-
ent but slightly more removed such as a maternal aunt, to urge them
back to their own house. Sinara, a young woman who had married two
years before, was famous for the number of times she had returned.
She had reportedly gone back to her parent’s house three times in the
first year of her marriage, and in the end it was her maternal aunt who
told her off for doing so.
4. For a detailed exploration of the sociopolitical history of the “honor
defence” argument in Brazil, see Caulfied (2000).
5. In his critical reflections on the Mexican myths of La Malinche and
the Virgin of Guadalupe, Paz (1988) links the devalued “openness”
of women to a dominant “master narrative” of the Conquest. In this,
it is women, through their openness to rape and marriage, who lay
themselves bare to the power and force of European conquistadors. La
Malinche was the Indian woman who was given to Hernán Cortés in
tribute after he had defeated Indians on the coast of Tabasco in 1519.
According to various authors on the topic (Paz 1988), Malinche has
come to symbolize the Conquest and the form of the “encounter”
between the Spanish invaders and the subjugated native populations.
The Virgin of Guadalupe appeared to Juan Diego (a converted Indian)
in 1531. In the myth, she leads her people, through her suffering and
sacrifice, to victory. Hence taken together, both myths attempt to
come to terms with the past and the future through the idioms of
sexuality, loyalty, and betrayal.
6. Respeito is a much used concept in Santa Lucia, the consensus being
that one must treat with respeito even people who do not have respeito
for you. For an interesting and resonant exploration of this concept
in relation to religious practice and political process among Quichua
speakers in highland Ecuador see Lyons (2001; 2005).
7. Although wife murder is relatively infrequent, husbands who desert
their families to start up a new life elsewhere are quite common.
8. In 1985 the Conselho Nacional dos Direitos da Mulher (National
Council on Women’s Rights) was established in Brazil and a system
of “integrated services” was put in place that included the creation of
NOTES 191
shelters and new institutions to provide legal and psychological ser-

vices to victims of domestic and sexual violence (Alvarez 1990).
6 From Innocence to Knowledge

1. On the historical link between children and larger sociopolitical
orders, see Szuchman (1988), who argues that children have been vital
to Argentinian notions of authority and nationhood, and Del Priori
(1999) for treatment of Latin American children in relation to labor,
crime, maritime history, and other topics.
2. In theory, older boys should attend church as regularly as girls do.
But as men tend to participate far less in official church activities than
women, in practice, boys face less pressure.
3. See, for example, DaMatta (1985), who has interpreted the Brazilian
carnival as a rite of “disorder” that functions to challenge and invert
social hierarchy.
4. The rezadeira has absorbed the evil. Her purity cancels it out which is
why it will not, in turn, afflict her. It is important to note, however,
that people always stress that theoretically she might become afflicted.
In a way, this contributes toward the sense of danger healing holds,
and the sacrifice healing involves of the self, on behalf of others. This
is how such healers earn their respect.
5. There were various stories of this type. For example, one revolved
around the first time a car arrived in the village and how the men,
thinking it was some sort of strange beast, started beating it with
sticks. Another common version concerned misunderstandings over
first sightings of airplanes, in which husbands and wives, thinking the
end of the world is nigh, run home to confess to one another their
adulterous affairs and other misdemeanors. All such stories suggest, in
different ways, a moment of loss of innocence.
6. For a comprehensive summary of practice and performance based the-
ories of ritual, see Bell (1997: 72–79).
Conclusion
1. This challenges the argument put forward by Hubert and Mauss
that sacrificial practices are dependent on the presence of an inter-
mediary: “we know that with no intermediary, there is no sacrifice”
(1964: 100). According to this line of reasoning, the fact that in most
ritual sacrifices the victim is distinct from the sacrifier and the god is
important because it separates while uniting them: “they draw close to
each other, without giving themselves to each other entirely” (1964:
100). The exception to this, they argue, is the sacrifice of the god, who
is at the same time the sacrifier, is one with the victim and sometimes
even with the sacrificer. Such mixing is possible, they state, “only for
mythical, that is, ideal beings” (1964: 101).
192 NOTES
2. I do not utilize Durkheim’s distinction between impurity and profan-

ity as this is not a feature of local thought. Santa Lucian people do
not make a clear distinction between impurity as an active violation of
the sacred as opposed to profanity as being merely outside the sacred
system or beyond it.
Bibliography
Albuquerque, Durval Muniz. 1999. A Invenção do Nordeste e Outras Artes.

Recife: Cortez Editora.
Allen, Catherine J. 1988. The Hold Life Has: Coca and Cultural Identity in
an Andean Community. Washington: Smithsonian Press.
Almeida, Ruy. 1947. A Poesia e os Cantadores do Nordeste. Rio de Janeiro:
Imprensa Nacional.
Alonso, Ana María. 2002. “What the Strong Owe to the Weak”: Rationality,
Domestic Violence, and Governmentality in Nineteenth-century Mexico.
In Gender’s place: Feminist Anthropologies of Latin-America, edited by
Janise Frazier, Jo Hurtig, and Rosario Montoya, pp. 115–134. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Alvarez, Sonia E. 1990. Engendering Democracy in Brazil: Women’s
Movements in Transition Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Andrade, Manuel Correia. 1980. Land and People of Northeast Brazil.
Translated by D. V. Johnson. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico.
Anthony, P. D. 1977. The Ideology of Work. London: Tavistock Press.
Applebaum, Herbert. 1992. The Concept of Work: Ancient, Medieval, and
Modern. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Archard, David. 1993. Children: Rights and Childhood. London:
Routledge.
Archetti, Eduardo. 1996. Playing Styles and Masculine Virtues in Argentine
Football. In Machos, Mistresses, Madonnas: Contesting the Power of Latin
American Gender Imagery, edited by M. Melhuss and K. Stølen,
pp. 34–55. London: Verso.
Ardener, Edwin. 1975. The Problem Revisited. In Perceiving Women, edited
by Shirley Ardener, pp. 1–27. London: Dent.
Arons, Nicholas Gabriel. 2004. Waiting for Rain: The Politics and Poetry of
Drought in Northeast Brazil. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Asad, Talal. 1983. Notes on the Body, Pain and Truth in Medieval
Christianity. Economy and Society 12 (1): 287–327.
Austin, John. 1975. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
194 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Austin-Broos, Diane. J. 1997. Jamaica Genesis: Religion and the Politics of

Moral Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Azzi, Riolando. O. 1978. O Catolicismo Popular no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro:
Ministério de Educação e Cultura.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. M. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Translated
by Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bargatzky, Thomas. 1996. Comments. Current Anthropology 37 (3):
416–417.
Barker, John. 2003. Christian Bodies: Dialectics of Sickness and Salvation
among the Maisin of Papua New Guinea. Journal of Religious History
27 (3): 272–292.
Bastide, Roger. 1964. Brasil, Terra de Contrastes. São Paulo: Difusão
Européia do Livro.
Beder, Sharon. 2000. Selling the Work Ethic: From Puritan Pulpit to Corporate
PR. London: Zed Books.
Behar, Ruth. 1993. Translated Woman. Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s
Story. Boston: Beacon Press.
Bell, Catherine. 1997. Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Bernstein, Paul. 1997. American Work Values: Their Origin and Development.
Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Bloch, Maurice, and S. Guggenheim. 1981. Compadrazgo, Baptism and the
Symbolism of the Second Birth. Man (n.s.) 16. 376–386.
Bloch, Maurice, and Jonathan Parry. 1982. Introduction: Death and the
Regeneration of Life. In Death and the Regeneration of Life, edited by
Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry, pp. 1–44. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Boff, Clodovis. 1978. Teologia Pé-no-chão. Petropolis: Vozes.
Boff, Clodovis, and Leonardo Boff. 1986. Como Fazer Teologia da Libertação.
Petropolis: Vozes.
Briggs, Jean. 1998. Inuit Morality Play: The Emotional Education of a Three-
year-old. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Brun, Andre. 1989. Les Dieux Catholiques au Bresil: Anthropologie Religieuse
de la Société Rural du Nordeste. Paris: L’Harmattam.
Bruneau, Thomas, C. 1982. The Church in Brazil: The Politics of Religion.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
Burdick, John. 1993. Looking for God in Brazil. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
———. 1998. Blessed Anastacia: Women, Race, and Christianity in Brazil.
London: Routledge.
———. 1999. Book Review. American Anthropologist 101 (2): 420.
———. 2004. Legacies of Liberation: The Progressive Church in Brazil at the
Start of a New Millennium. Hampshire: Ashgate.
Burke, Peter. 1987. The Repudiation of Ritual in Early Modern Europe. In
The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on Perception
and Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 195
Bynum, Carol Walker. 1987. Holy Feast, Holy Fast. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Campbell, John, K. 1964. Honour, Family and Patronage: A Study of
Institutions and Moral Values in a Greek Mountain Community. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
———. 1966. Honour and the Devil. In Honour and Shame: The Values of
Mediterranean Society, edited by J. G. Peristany, pp. 139–170. London:
Weidenfield and Nicholson.
Campos, Maria Machado Malta. 1993. Infância Abandonada: O Piedoso
Disfarce do Trabalho Precoce. In O Massacre dos Innocents: As Crianças
sem Infância no Brasil, edited by J. de Souza Martins, pp. 117–153. São
Paulo: Hucitec.
Cannell, Fenella. 1999. Power and Intimacy in the Christian Philippines.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2004. The Christianity of Anthropology. Unpublished Malinowski
Lecture given at London School of Economics.
———. 2006. The Anthropology of Christianity. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Caraveli, Anna. 1980. Bridge between Worlds: The Greek Woman’s Lament
as Communicative Event. Journal of American Folklore 368 (93):
129–157.
———. 1986. The Bitter Wounding: The Lament as Social Process in Rural
Greece. In Gender and Power in Rural Greece, edited by Jill Dubisch,
pp. 169–194. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Carr, David. 1986. Narrative and the Real World: An Argument for
Continuity. History and Theory 25 (85): 117–131.
Carvalho-Branco, Maria Sylvia. 1997. Homens livres na ordem escravocrata.
São Paulo: Editora UNESPE.
Caulfield, Sueann. 2000. In Defense of Honor: Sexual Morality, and Nation
in Early-Twentieth Century Brazil. Durham, NC and London: Duke
University Press.
Christian, William. 1972. Person and God in a Spanish Valley. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Coleman, Simon. 1996. Words as Things: Language, Aesthetics and the
Objectification of Protestant Evangelicalism. Journal of Material Culture
1 (1): 107–128.
Comerford, John. 1999. Fazendo a Luta: Sociabilidade, Falas, e Rituais na
Construção de Organizaões Camponesas. Rio de Janeiro: Relume
Dumará.
Correia de Andrade, Manuel. 1998. A Terra o Homem no Nordeste. Recife:
Editora Universitária UFPE.
Cousineau Adriance, Madeleine. 1995. Promised Land: Base Christian
Communities and the Struggle for the Amazon. Albany: State University of
New York Press.
Cowan, Jane. 1990. Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
196 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cunha, Euclides. 1944. Rebellion in the Backlands. Translated by Samuel

Putnam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Cunningham, Hugh. 1995. Children and Childhood in Western Society since
1500. London: Longman.
Dahlberg, Andrea L. G. 1987. Transcendence of Bodily Suffering: An
Anthropological Study of English Catholics at Lourdes. PhD dissertation,
London School of Economics.
———. 1991 The body as a Principle of Holism: Three Pilgrimages to
Lourdes. In Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian
Pilgrimage, edited by Michael Sallnow and John Eade, pp. 30–50. New
York: Routledge.
DaMatta, Roberto. 1985. Carnavais, Malandros, e Heróis: Para Uma
Sociologia do Dilema Brasileiro. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Rocco.
Danforth, Loring, M. 1982. The Death Rituals of Rural Greece. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
De Castro, Josué. 1969. Death in the Northeast. New York: Vintage
Books.
Delaney, Carol. 1987. Seeds of Honour, Fields of Shame. In Honour and
Shame and the Unity of the Mediterranean, edited by David Gilmore,
pp. 35–48. Washington DC: American Anthropological Association
(Special Publication 22).
Del Priori, Mary. 1999. Apresentação. In História das Crianças no Brasil,
edited by M. Del Priori, pp. 8–17. São Paulo: Contexto.
Di Leonardo, Micaela. 1984. The Varieties of Ethnic Experience: Kinship,
Class, and Gender among Californian Italian-Americans. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
Drogus, Carol Ann. 1997. Women, Religion, and Social Change in Brazil’s
Popular Church. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
Dubisch, Jill. 1995. In a Different Place: Pilgrimage, Gender and Politics at
a Greek Island Shrine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Du Boulay, Juliet. 1974. Portrait of Greek Mountain Village. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
———. 1991. Cosmos and Gender in a Greek village. In Contested Identities:
Gender and Kinship in Modern Greece, edited by Peter Loizos and
Evthymios Papataxiarchis, pp. 47–78. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Eade, John. 1991. Order and Power at Lourdes: Lay Helpers and the
Organization of a Pilgrimage Shrine. In Contesting the Sacred: The
Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage, edited by John Eade and Michael
Sallnow, pp. 51–76. New York: Routledge.
Eade, John, and Micahel Sallnow. 1991. Introduction. In Contesting the
Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage, edited by J. Eade and
M. Sallnow, pp. 1–29. New York: Routledge.
Edmiston, Brian. 2008. Forming Ethical Identities in Early Childhood Play.
New York: Routledge.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 197
Elisha, Omri. 2008. Moral Ambitions of Grace: The Paradox of Compassion

and Accountability in Evangelical Faith-Based Activism. Cultural
Anthropology 23 (1): 154–189.
Engelke, Matthew. 2007. A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an
African Church. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Engelke, Matthew, and Matt Tomlinson. 2006. The Limits of Meaning:
Case Studies in the Anthropology of Christianity. New York: Berghahn
Books.
Foucault, Michel. 1995 [1975]. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
London: Peregrine Books.
Fraginals, Manuel Moreno. 1976. The Sugar Mill: The Socio-Economic
Complex of Sugar in Cuba, 1879–1960. New York: Monthly Review
Press.
Frazier, Jo, Janise Hurtig, and Rosario Montoya. 2002. Introduction. A
Desalambrar: Unfencing Gender’s Place in Research on Latin America.
In Gender’s Place: Feminist Anthropologies of Latin-America, edited by Jo
Frazier, Janise Hurtig, and Rosario Montoya, pp. 1–18. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Freixinho, Nilton. 2003. O Sertão Arcaico do Nordeste do Brasil: Uma
Releitura. Rio de Janeiro: IMAGO.
Freyre, Gilberto. 1986. The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the
Development of Brazilian Civilisation. Berkeley: University of California
Press. (Trans. of 1933. Casa-grande e senzala. Rio de Janeiro: Maia e
Schmidt).
Fukui, Lia Freitas Garcia. 1979. Sertão e Bairro Rural: Parentesco e Família
entre Sitiantes Tradicionais. São Paulo: Editora Ática.
Galeano, Eduardo. 1975. Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the
Pillage of a Continent. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Galloway, J. H. 1968. The Sugar Industry of Pernambuco during the
Nineteenth Century. Annals of the Association of American Geographers
58 (3): 285–303.
Garcia, A. R. 1990. O Sul: Caminho do Roçado. Estratégias de Reprodução
Camponesa é Transformação Social. Brasilia: Editora Marco Zero.
Garriott, William, and Kevin O’Neill. 2008. Who Is a Christian? Toward a
Dialogic Approach in the Anthropology of Christianity. Anthropological
Theory 8 (4): 381–398.
Genovese, Eugene, D. 1971. The World the Slaveholders Made. New York:
Vintage.
Gilmore, David. 1983. Sexual Ideology in Andalusian Oral Literature: A
Comparative View of a Mediterranean Complex. Ethnology 22:
241–252.
———. 1987. Introduction. The Shame of Dishonor. In Honor and Shame
and the Unity of the Mediterranean, edited by David Gilmore, pp. 2–21.
Washington DC: American Anthropological Association (Special
Publication 22).
198 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of

Experience. New York: Harper and Row.
Goldstein, Donna. M. 1998. Nothing Bad Intended: Child Discipline,
Punishment, and Survival in a Shantytown in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In
Small Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood, edited by Nancy Scheper-
Hughes and Caroline Sargent, pp. 389–415. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Goodman, D. E. 1981. Rural Structure, Surplus Mobilisation and Modes of
Production in a Peripheral Region: The Brazilian Northeast. In The Logic
of Poverty: The Case of the Brazilian Northeast, edited by Simon Mitchell,
pp. 10–40. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Gow, Peter. 1991. Of Mixed Blood: Kinship, and History in Peruvian
Amazonia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2006. Forgetting Conversion: The Summer Institute of Linguistics
Mission in the Piro Lived World. In The Anthropology of Christianity,
edited by Fenella Cannell, pp. 211–239. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Gregory, C. A. 2009. Afterword. In Ethnographies of Moral Reasoning:
Living Paradoxes of Global Age, edited by Karen Sykes, pp. 189–202. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hall, Anthony. 1981. Irrigation in the Brazilian Northeast: Anti-Drought or
Anti-Peasant? In The Logic of Poverty: The Case of the Brazilian Northeast,
edited by Simon Mitchell, pp. 157–169. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul.
Hammington, Maurice. 1995. Hail Mary? The Struggle for Ultimate
Womanhood in Catholicism. New York: Routledge.
Hammond, Cally. 2007. A Journey to the Cross: Passionate Christianity.
London: Ashford Color Press.
Harding, Susan Friend. 2000. The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist
Language and Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Harris, Mark. 2000. Life on the Amazon: The Anthropology of a Brazilian
Peasant Village. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harris, Olivia. 1994. Condor and Bull: The Ambiguities of Masculinity in
Northern Potosí. In Sex and Violence: Issues in Representation and
Experience, edited by Peter Gow and Penny Harvey, pp. 40–65. London:
Routledge.
———. 2006. The Eternal Return of Conversion: Christianity as Contested
Domain in Highland Bolivia. In The Anthropology of Christianity, edited
by Fenella Cannell, pp. 51–76. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Harvey, Penny. 1994. Domestic Violence in the Peruvian Andes. In Sex and
violence: Issues in Representation and Experience, edited by Peter Gow and
Penny Harvey, pp. 66–89. London: Routledge.
Hecht, Tobias. 1998. At Home in the Street: Street Children of Northeast
Brazil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hengle, Martin. 1974. Property and Riches in the Early Church: Aspects of a
Social History of Early Christianity. London: SNM Press.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 199
Herzfeld, Michael. 1985. The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a

Cretan Mountain Village. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
———. 1986. Within and Without: The Category of “Female” in the
Ethnography of Modern Greece. In Gender and Power in Rural Greece,
edited by Jill Dubisch, pp. 215–233. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
———. 1991. Silence, Submission, and Subversion: Towards a Poetics of
Womanhood. In Contested Identities: Gender and Kinship in Modern
Greece, edited by Peter Loizos and Evthymios Papataxiarchis, pp. 79–97.
Princeton, NJ: University of Princeton Press.
Howell, Signe. 1997. The Anthropology of Moralities. London: Routledge.
Hubert, Henry, and Marcel Mauss. 1964. Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function.
Translated by W. D. Halls. London: Cohen and West.
Keane, Webb. 2007. Christian Moderns. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Kelsey, Vera. 1940. Seven Keys to Brazil. London: Funk and Wagnalls.
Knauft, Bruce M. 2002. Exchanging the Past: A Rainforest World of Before
and After. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Laidlaw, James. 2002. For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Journal
of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8: 311–332.
Lambek, Michael. 2000. The Anthropology of Religion and the Quarrel
between Poetry and Philosophy. Current Anthropology 41 (3):
309–320.
Lancaster, Roger N. 1988. Thanks to God and the Revolution. New York:
Columbia University Press.
———. 1992. Life Is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in
Nicaragua. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Law, Stephen. 2006. The War for Children’s Minds. New York:
Routledge.
Leibovich, Anna. 1995. The Russian Concept of Work: Suffering, Drama,
and Tradition in Pre- and Post-Revolutionary Russia. London:
Praeger.
Levine, Robert M. 1980. Brazil: An Annotated Bibliography for Social
Historians. Garland Reference Library of Social Science 59. New York:
Garland.
———. 1992. Vale of Tears: Revisiting Canudos Massacre in Northeastern
Brazil, 1893–1897. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Loizos, Peter. 1991. Gender Sexuality and the Person in Greek Culture. In
Contested Identities: Gender and Kinship in Modern Greece, edited by
Peter Loizos and Evthymios Papataxiarchis, pp. 221–234. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Lutz, Catherine. 1988. Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a
Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory. Chicago:
Chicago University Press.
Lutz, Catherine, and Lila Abu-Lughod. 1990. Language and the Politics of
Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
200 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lutz, Catherine, and Geoffrey White. 1986. The Anthropology of Emotions.

Annual Review of Anthropology 15: 405–436.
Lyons, Barry J. 2001. Religion, Authority, and Identity: Intergenerational
Politics, Ethnic Resurgence, and Respect in Chimborazo, Ecuador. Latin
American Research Review 36 (1): 7–48.
———. 2002. “To Act Like a Man”: Masculinity, Resistance, and Authority
in the Ecuadorian Andes. In Gender’s Place: Feminist Anthropologies of
Latin America, edited by Janise Frazier, Jo Hurtig, and Rosario Montoya,
pp. 45–64. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
———. 2005. Discipline and the Arts of Domination: Rituals of Respect in
Chimborazo, Ecuador. Cultural Anthropology 20 (1): 97–127.
Macaulay, Fiona. 2002. Taking the Law into Their Own Hands: Women,
Legal Reform and Legal Literacy in Brazil. In Gender and the Politics of
Rights and Democracy in Latin America, edited by Nikki Craske and
Maxine Molyneux, pp. 79–101. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
MacDowell Santos, Cecilia. 2005. En-Gendering the Police: Women’s Police
Stations and Feminism in Sao Paulo. Latin American Research Review
39 (3): 29–55.
Magrini, Tullia. 1998. Women’s “Work of Pain” in Christian Mediterranean
Europe. Music and Anthropology 3. http://www.muspe.unibo.it/period/ma/
Marques, Ana Claudia. 2002. Intrigas e Questões: Vingança de Família e
Tramas Sociais no Sertão de Pernambuco. Rio de Janeiro: Relume
Dumará.
Marshall, Gordon. 1982. In Search of the Spirit of Capitalism: An Essay on
Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic Thesis. London: Hutchinson.
Mayblin, Maya (forthcoming). Learning Courage: child labor as moral prac-
tice in Northeast Brazil. Ethnos.
McCallum, Cecilia. 2001. Gender and Sociality in Amazonia: How Real
People Are Made. Oxford: Berg.
McGrath, Alistair E. 1997 [1994]. Christian Theology: An Introduction.
Oxford: Blackwell.
McKevitt, Christopher. 1991. San Giovani Rotondo and the Shrine of Padre
Pio. In Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage,
edited by John Eade and Michael Sallnow, pp. 77–97. New York:
Routledge.
Melhuus, Marit. 1992. “Todos tenemos madre, Dios tambien”: Morality, Meaning
and Change in a Mexican Context. PhD thesis, University of Oslo.
———. 1996. Power, Value and the Ambiguous Meanings of Gender. In
Machos, Mistresses, Madonnas: Contesting the Power of Latin American
Gender Imagery, edited by Marit Melhuus and Kristi Anne Stølen,
pp. 230–259. London: Verso.
———. 1997. The troubles of virtue: Values of violence and suffering in a
Mexican context. In The ethnography of moralities, edited by Howell,
Signe, pp. 178-202. London: Routledge,
Melhuus, Marit, and Kristi Anne Stølen. 1996. Introduction. In Machos,
Mistresses, Madonnas: Contesting the Power of Latin American Gender
BIBLIOGRAPHY 201
Imagery, edited by Marit Melhuus and Kristi Anne Stølen, pp. 1–33.
London: Verso.
Mello, Frederico Pernambucano. 2004. Guerreiros do Sol. São Paulo: A
Girafa Editora.
Miller, William I. 1993. Humiliation and Other Essays on Honour, Social
Discomfort, and Violence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Mitchell, Simon. 1981. Introduction. In The Logic of Poverty: The Case of the
Brazilian Northeast, edited by Simon Mitchell, pp. 1–9. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Montoya, Rosario. 2002. Women’s Sexuality, Knowledge, and Agency in
Rural Nicaragua. In Gender’s Place: Feminist Anthropologies of Latin-
America, edited by Janise Frazier, Jo Hurtig, and Rosario Montoya,
pp. 65–88. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Moore, Henrietta L. 1988. Feminism and Anthropology. Cambridge, MA:
Polity Press.
———. 1993. The Differences within and the Differences Between. In
Gendered Anthropology, edited by Teresa del Valle, pp. 193–204. London:
Routledge.
———. 1994. A Passion for Difference: Essays in Anthropology and Gender.
Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.
Nagle, Robin. 1997. Claiming the Virgin: The Broken Promise of Liberation
Theology in Brazil. London: Routledge.
Nash, June. 1989. Gender Studies in Latin America. In Gender and
Anthropology: Critical Reviews for Research and Teaching, edited by
Sandra Morgan, pp. 1–20. Washington DC: American Anthropological
Association.
Nations, Marilyn, and Linda-Anne Rebhun. 1988. Angels with Wet Wings
Won’t Fly: Maternal Sentiment and the Image of Neglect. Culture,
Medicine, and Psychiatry 12: 141–200.
Navarro, Marysa. 2002. Against Marianismo. In Gender’s Place: Feminist
Anthropologies of Latin America, edited by Janise Hurtig, Jo Frazier, and
Rosario Montoya, pp. 257–272. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Nencel, Lorraine. 1996. Pacharas, Putas, and Chicas de Su Casa: Labelling,
Femininity and Men’s Sexual Selves in Lima, Peru. In Machos, Mistresses,
Madonnas: Contesting the Power of Latin American Gender Imagery, edited
by Marit Melhuus and Kristi Anne Stølen, pp. 56–82. London: Verso.
Oliveira de Andrade, Maristela. 2000. Cultura e Tradição Nordestina: Ensaios
de História Cultural e Intelectual. João Pessoa: Editora Manufatura.
Orsi, Robert, A. 2005. Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds
People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Orta, Andrew. 2000. Syncretic Subjects and Body Politics: Doubleness,
Personhood, and Aymara Catechists. American Ethnologist 26 (4):
864–889.
———. 2004. Catechizing Culture: Missionaries, Aymara, and the “New
Evangelization.” New York: Columbia University Press.
202 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Pagels, Elaine. 1988. Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. New York: Vintage
Books.
Pandolfi, M. 1991. Itineri Delle Emozioni: Corpo e Identita Femminile nel
Sannio. Milan: Angeli.
Paptaxiarchis, Evthymios. 1991. Friends of the Heart: Male Commensal
Solidarity, Gender and Kinship in Aegean Greece. In Contested Identities:
Gender and Kinship in Modern Greece, edited by Peter Loizos and Evthymios
Papataxiarchis, pp. 156–179. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
Parry, Jonathan. 1986. The Gift, the Indian Gift and the “Indian Gift.”
Man (n.s.) 21: 453–473.
———. 1994. Death in Banaras. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Paz, Octavio. 1988. El Laberinto de la Soledad. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura
Económico.
Pelton, Robert D. 1980. The Trickster in West Africa: A Study of Mythic Irony
and Sacred Delight. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Pereira, Anthony W. 1997. The End of the Peasantry: The Rural Labor
Movement in Northeast Brazil. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh
Press.
Peristiany, John G. 1966. Honour and Shame: The Values of the Mediterranean
Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pessar, Patricia R. 2004. From Fanatics to Folk: Brazilian Millenarianism
and Popular Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Peterson, Anna L. 1996. Religious Narratives and Political Protest. Journal
of the Academy of Religion 64 (1): 27–44.
Pina-Cabral, João 1986. Sons of Adam Daughters of Eve: The Peasant World
View of the Alto Minho. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
———. 1993. Tamed Violence: Genital Symbolism in Portuguese Popular
Culture. Man (n.s.) 28: 101–120.
Placido, Barbara. 2001. “It’s All to Do with Words”: An Analysis of Spirit
Possession in the Venezuelan Cult of Maria Lionza. Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute (n.s.) 7: 207–224.
Pordeus, Ismael. 2000. Magia e Trabalho: A Representação do Trabalho na
Macumba São Paulo: Editora Didática Ltda.
Prieur, Annick. 1996. Domination and Desire: Male Homosexuality and the
Construction of Masculinity in Mexico. In Machos, Mistresses, Madonnas:
Contesting the Power of Latin American Gender Imagery, edited by Marit
Melhuus and Kristi Anne Stølen, pp. 83–107. London: Verso.
Rebhun, Linda-Anne. 1994. Swallowing Frogs: Anger and Illness in
Northeast Brazil. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 8 (4): 360–382.
———. 1999. The Heart Is Unknown Country: Love in the Changing Economy
of Northeast Brazil. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Reis, Jaime. 1981. Hunger in the Northeast: Some Historical Aspects. In
The Logic of Poverty: The Case of the Brazilian Northeast, edited by Simon
Mitchell, pp. 41–57. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Rizzini, Irene. 2002. The Child-Saving Movement in Brazil: Ideology in the
late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. In Minor Omissions:
BIBLIOGRAPHY 203
Children in Latin American History and Society, edited by Tobias Hecht,

pp. 165–180. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press.
Robben, Antonius. 1989. Sons of the Sea Goddess: Economic Practice and
Discursive Conflict in Brazil. New York: Columbia University Press.
Robbins, Joel. 2001. “God Is Nothing but Talk”: Modernity, Language, and
Prayer in a Papua New Guinea Society. American Anthropologist 103 (4):
901–912.
———. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua
New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 2007. Between Reproduction and Freedom: Morality, Value, and
Radical Cultural Change. Ethnos 72 (3): 293–314.
Rosaldo, Michelle. 1984. Toward an Anthropology of Self and Feeling. In
Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self and Emotion, edited by Richard
Schweder and Robert LeVine, pp. 137–157. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Sahlins, Marshall. 1996. The Sadness of Sweetness: The Native Anthropology
of Western Cosmology. Current Anthropology 37 (3): 395–415.
Sallnow, Michael. 1991. Pilgrimage and Cultural Fracture in the Andes. In
Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage, edited
by John Eade and Michael Sallnow, pp. 137–153. New York:
Routledge.
Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the
World. New York: Oxford University Press.
Schechner, Richard. 1988. Playing. Play and Culture 1: 3–10.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1992. Death without Weeping: The Violence of
Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Schneider, Jane. 1971. Of Vigilance and Virgins: Honour, Shame and Access
to Resources in Mediterranean Society. Ethnology 10: 1–24.
Scott, Michael. 2005. “I Was like Abraham”: Notes on the Anthropology of
Christianity from the Solomon Islands. Ethnos 70 (1): 101–125.
Seremetakis, C. Nadia. 1991. The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination
in Inner Mani. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Silva Diniz, Ariosvaldo. 1991. O Trabalhador Pobre no Imaginário das Elites
Nordestinas (1850–1920). In Brasil Norte e Nordeste: Estudos em Ciências
Sociais, edited by A. R Garcia, pp. 49–63. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Brasil
America.
Slater, Candace. 1986. Trail of Miracles: Stories from a Pilgrimage in
Northeast Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Steinmetz, George. 1992. Reflections on the Role of Social Narratives in
Working-Class Formation: Narrative Theory in the Social Sciences. Social
Science History 16 (4): 489–516.
Stevens, Evelyn P. 1973. Marianismo: The Other Side of Machismo. In
Female and Male in Latin America, edited by Ann Pescatelo, pp. 90–101.
Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Stewart, Frank Henderson. 1994. Honour. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
204 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Stølen, Kristi Anne. 1996a. The Power of Gender Discourses in a Multi-

Ethnic Community in Rural Argentina. In Machos, Mistresses, Madonnas:
Contesting the Power of Latin American Gender Imagery, edited by Marit
Melhuus and Kristi Anne Stølen, pp. 159–183. London: Verso.
Stølen, Kristi Anne. 1996b. The Decency of Inequality: Gender, Power and
Social Change on the Argentine Prairie. Oslo: Scandinavian University
Press.
Strathern, Marilyn. 1981. Self Interest and the Social Good: Some
Implications of Hagen Gender Imagery. In Sexual Meanings: The Cultural
Construction of Gender and Sexuality, edited by Sherry Ortner and
Harriet Whitehead, pp. 166–191. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
———. 1988. The Gender of the Gift. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Sykes, Karen. 2009. Residence: Moral Reasoning in a Common Place—
Paradoxes of a Global Age. In Ethnographies of Moral Reasoning: Living
Paradoxes of a Global Age, edited by Karen Sykes, pp. 3–42. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Szuchman, Mark. 1988. Order, family, and Community in Buenos Aires,
1810–1860. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Taussig, Michael. 1987. Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study
in Terror and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Torren, Christina. 1994. Transforming Love: Representing Fijian Hierarchy.
In Sex and Violence: Issues in Representation and Experience, edited by
Peter Gow and Penny Harvey, pp. 18–39. London: Routledge.
Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
———. 1974. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human
Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Valeri, Valerio. 1985. Kingship and Sacrifice: Ritual and Society in Ancient
Hawaii. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Van Vleet, Krista E. 2008. Performing Kinship: Narrative, Gender, and the
Intimacies of Power in the Andes. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Vásquez, Manuel. 1998. The Brazilian Popular Church and the Crisis of
Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Velho, Otávio G. 1982. Sociedade e Agricultura. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar
Editores.
Villareal, Magdalena. 1996. Power and Self-identity: The Beekeepers of
Ayuquila. In Machos, Mistresses, Madonnas: Contesting the Power of Latin
American Gender Imagery, edited by Marit Melhuus and Kristi Anne
Stølen, pp. 184–206. London: Verso.
Wade, Peter. 1994. Man the Hunter: Gender and Violence in Music and
Drinking Contexts in Colombia. In Sex and Violence: Issues in
Representation and Experience, edited by Peter Gow and Penny Harvey,
pp. 115–137. London: Routledge.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 205
Wallman, Sandra. 1979. Introduction. In Social Anthropology of Work, edited

by Sandra Wallman, pp. 1–20. London: Academic Press.
Warner, Marina. 2000 [1985]. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the
Virgin Mary. London: Picador.
Weber, Max. 1967. The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
Translated by Talcott Parsons. London: George Allen Unwin.
Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1956. Language, Thought, and Reality. Boston: MIT
Press.
Woortman, Ellen F., and Klass Woortman. 1997. O Trabalho da Terra: A
Lógica e a Simbólica da Lavoura Camponesa. Brasilia: Editora UNB.
Zigon, Jarrett. 2009. Within a Range of Possibilities: Morality and Ethics in
Social Life. Ethnos 74 (2): 251–276.
Index
Adam and Eve, biblical story of, see ritual closing of, 76, 78, see also
Genesis reza de parto
adultery, 112, 137 bricks, see house
affinity, 61–62 Briggs, Jean, 165
in cases of ‘speech games’, 163 Burdick, John, 103
agreste, 17, 23, 24 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 114, 116,
alcoholism, 111–112 117, 118
amor, see love
andocentric, bias in ethnographic Cannell, Fenella, 3, 117, 129,
literature, 9, 86 183 n 2
anti-clericalism, 9, 31, 62 carnival, 31
Antonio Conselheiro, 24 casa de farinha, 19, 25, 26–27, 28,
asceticism 36, 54, 134
as alternative to marriage, casamento de matuto, 30, 165–172
62–64 catechism, 29
as Christian stereotype, 5 cattle
medieval, 118, see also Bynum, cattlemen, 20, 23
Caroline Walker cattle rearing, 20, 23
popular mistrust of, 63 ranches, 20
techniques-of-the-self, celebração da palavra, 30
89, 90, 116 chá de cozinha, 51
chapel, local, 29, 157–158
backlands, the, 23–25 child
bachelor, 62 in Christian discourses, 173
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 90 local concept of, 155–159
bandits, 24 childbirth, 76–78
barraca, 25, see also alcoholism childhood
Behar, Ruth, 69 problematization of, 173–174
Bible, 32 in protectionist discourse, 173
body, the in Santa Lucia, 147
bodiliness of Christ, 117 Christ
closed body, 74 depiction of, 35, 88
as container, 74–84 emulation of, 32, 34, 72,
open body, 74, 78, see also peito 114–115, 118
aberto physicality of, 115–119
208 INDEX
Christian, William, 57, 65, 79, 104, drought, 7, 21, 22, 28, 68, 71
116, 180–181 Dubisch, Jill, 187 nn 8, 10
Christianity Durkheim
anthropology of, 3–5 ‘Durkheimian problematic’, 5
and conversion, 4, 5
language of, 2–5, 183 n 3 Eade, John and Michael Sallnow,
mythology of, 33 91–92
Christmas, 30 Easter, 30, 31
churching of women, 79 elaborated suffering
colonisation definition of, 68
of Brazilian Northeast, 21, 23 discussion of within literature,
see also land 68–69, 85–87, 187 n 8
commerce, see negócio see also suffering
confession, 29, 58, 59 emotions
contraception, 45–46, 59, 186 n 7 cultural nature of, 69–70
cosmology, western, 2 as spiritual challenge, 60
courtship, 43–51 Engelke, Matthew, 4, 7
crente, see Pentecostalism equivalence, see unity
evil, 33
dancing, 46–47 evil eye, see mau olhado
dating, see courtship
death, 7, 59 Fall, biblical notion of,
as social, 137, 143–144 2, 33, 131
suicide, 75 farinha, 19, 27
see also Violence fatherhood, 112–114
dependency in definition of a ‘family’, 136
peasant resistance to, 25 see also love
see also patron-client relations fazenda, 17, 21, 24
devil, the, 33 fazendeiro, 24, 28
see also evil see also cattle
dichotomy femininity, concept of, 8, 9
‘dichotomous women’ and feminist
‘continuous men’, 141 theories in anthropology of
of spirit – flesh, 5, 116–119 Latin America, 8, 9, 69,
difference 144, 145–146
as gender trope, 9–12 festas, 30, 46
disjuncture see also saint’s days of São Pedro
of moral values, see moral: and São João 30, 46, 165, 167
paradox festivals, religious, see festas
worldly, 7 first communion, 156
distance forró, see dancing
between human and divine, 32, 116 freedom, of moral choice, 5, 7
and direction of movement toward/ Freyre, Gilberto, 22
away from divine, 180–181
see also ‘problem of presence’ gender
‘doleful abyss’, 2, 6, 7, 14, 36, 181 antagonism, 8, 9, 11, 69,123,
see also theology 140–141, 145
INDEX 209
of anthropologist and effect on innocence, 3, 152–155, 191 n 5

fieldwork, 37–38 and ignorance, 158–159
as difference, 8, 114, 145–146 see also matuto
in ethnography of Catholic
societies, 8–9, 187 n 10 Jesuit Missionaries, 23
in ethnography of Latin Juazeiro do Norte, see pilgrimage,
American societies, 8–11, local forms of
68–69 Judeo-Christian
as symbolic construct, 10, 11, models within Western
34, 146 anthropology, 3
gendered
division of labor, 8, 132 knowledge
morality, 10, 139–141 in a ‘productive life’, 5, 131
Genesis, 33, 34, 114, 150 types of, 150–151
gift, 9, 90–92
Gow, Peter, 4, 81 labor, see work
and ideology, 96–97
Holy Communion, 30 Laidlaw, James, 89
Holy Week, 31 Lambek, Michael, 125, 126
see also Easter Lampeão, see bandits
honor land
honor killings in Latin American average size of holdings in Santa
societies, 139–141 Lucia, 28–29
honor-shame complex in Santa colonisation of backlands, 23
Lucia, 142 and latifúndio system, 21, 24
house unequal distribution of, 21
building, 47–50 Leibovich, Anna, 115
ownership, 137 liberation theology, 12, 101–103
household “logical trajectory,” 3
kinship structure of, 44 love
percentage data for Santa Lucia, agape, 126
25–27 and fathers, 112–113
Hubert and Mauss, 91, 178, 179, in marriage, 138, see also respect
191 n 1 and power, 126–127
iconoclasm, in Protestant tradition, machismo, 13, see also masculinity

3–4 Madonna, see Virgin Mary
identity, social ‘& whore complex’, 140
of Santa Lucian people, 19–20, malandragem, 159, 160
27, 185 n 11 manioc, 26, see also
sofredor as label of, 73 casa de farinha
trabalhador as label of, Marianismo, 68–69
104–105 Marriage, 7
see also matuto advice and spiritual preparation
indigenous peoples, of Northeast for, 39, 52, 134, 136
Brazil, see Tupinamba pitfalls of, 53–62, 139
infidelity, see adultery pleasures of, 41, 59
210 INDEX
Marriage—Continued orgulho, see pride

politics of being ‘unmarried Original Sin, 173, 174
anthropologist’, 39, 41 other worldly, see transcendence
preferences, 45
sacred character of, 42 Padre Cicero, 24, 31
masculinity, 8, 9, 50, 55, 111 parable
in theoretical approach of biblical, of the camel and the eye
Melhuus, 140 of a needle, 130
mass, 30, 31 of loaves and fishes, 35
Mater Dolorosa, 85, see also knowledge of, 32, 34, 35, 130
elaborated suffering moral, of marital relations, 144
matuto, 20, 166–167 paradox, moral
mau olhado, 74, 78, 81, 186 n 5 in anthropology of religion, 2–5
Melhuus, Marit, 10, 123, in lives of Santa Lucians, 7–8, 14, 15
140–141 Parry, Jonathan, 91, 116
messianic movements, 23 Passion, the, 33, 187 n 13
migration as template for human existence,
drought, 22, 28 34
labor, 25, 28, 61–62 patriarchy
moral as analytical term, 13
accountability, 58 in social structure, 12–14
paradox, 2, 6, 7, 183 n 4; and patron-client relations, 22, 28–29,
paradox of affinity, 61 127–128, 129
personhood, 8, 58 peasant
transgression, 2, 8, 13, 64–65, farmers of Northeast, 25–28
109–112, 119, 139 ‘peasantariat’, 25
morality peito aberto, 75–76
anthropological theories of, 5–6 Pentecostalism, 29, 32, 34
and children, 148–149 personhood, 8
‘of freedom’, 6, 88–90 pilgrimage, local forms of, 31
physical embodiment of, 115–119 Pina Cabral, João de, 5, 42
‘of reproduction’, 5–6 plantation system, see sugarcane
as type of play, 165 play, 159–161
motherhood, 76–80, 136 in casamento de matuto, 168–171
see also suffering as creation of ‘ethical identities’,
motorbikes, see transport 172–173
mutirão, 50–51 and potential for sin, 159, 160
post-partum prayer ritual see reza
narrative, 88 de parto
see also suffering and labor poverty
negócio, 60–61, 154 in Northeast Brazil, 7, 21
Northeast, the power, 12–14
concept of, 20, 184 n 2 analytical concept of, 141
division from south, 21 and ‘knowledge’, 129–132,
structural subordination of, 12, 22 142–143
novena, 29 in legal structure, 144
INDEX 211
local concept of, 125–132 see also suffering, and sacrificial

and love, 126–128 discourse
men’s over women, 13, 123–125 Sahlins, Marshall, 2–3, 181
and pride, 128–129 saint
prefeitura, 28, 152, 169 saint’s days of São Pedro and São
pregnancy, 76 João, 30, 46, 165, 167
pride, 126, 128–129, 134, 151 sameness
priest, 29, 126 as cultural value and moral-
sermons by, 31, 33, 100, 156 ontological concept, 11
priesthood of moral outlook, see unity
as alternative to marriage, 62 Satan, see devil, the
see also asceticism Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 22
‘problem of presence’, 4 Scott, Michael, 3, 5, 183 n 1
promessa, see votive offerings seca, see drought
Protestantism self-awareness
anthropology of, 3–4, 7 local concept of, 131
in contrast to Catholicism, 7 relation to evil, 152
see also Christianity, the relation to knowledge, 131, 132,
anthropology of; 151, see also knowledge
Pentecostalism seminomadic lifestyle, 25, 188 n 2
semisubsistence agriculture, 25
Ranch Owners, 24, 28 Seremetakis, Nadia, 86, 189 n 16
representation, anthropological sertão, 20, 23–24
politics of, 39 literature on, 184–185 n 8
respect, 190 n 6 and sertanejo, 24, 184–185 n 8
between generations, 164 sex
in marriage, 138 and agricultural work, 103–104,
between parents and children, 188 n 7
44, 155 before marriage, 45–46
responsibility differences in sexual
absence of for young, 43–45 appetite, 137
financial, in marriage, 55–56 as knowledge, 151
moral, see morality within marriage, 59–60, 185 n 4
social, in marriage, 53 sharecropping, 17, 22, 24, 25, 62
retirantes, see migration and shared livestock rearing, 26
reza de parto, 78–79 sin, 59, 77, 103–104
rezador/rezadeira, 76, 81–84, 164, see also moral: paradox; sex;
165, 179, 191 n 4 transgression; Violence
risk, in relation to marriage, 41, slavery, 22, 23
52–53, 58 and labor ideology, 96–97
Robbins, Joel, 5, 6, 148–149 social inequality, 7
rosary, 29, 30, 31 sofredor/sofredora, see suffering as
identity label
sacred geography, 5 ‘speech games’, 161–165
sacrifice, 90, 115, 119, 178–181, speech genre, 71, 72
191 n 1 spinster, 62
212 INDEX
spirit-flesh dichotomy, see dichotomy transgression, see moral

spiritual transport, 49–50, 56
challenge, 7, 14 Tree of Knowledge of Good and
conflict, 14 Evil, see Genesis
healer/healing, see rezador/ trousseau, 51
rezadeira Tupinamba, 23
vitality, 14
‘stable conflict’, 6, 148 unity
status, social essential nature of all persons,
change in after marriage, 55 11–12
spiritual, change in after of moral concerns, 142, 145–146
marriage, 58
Stølen, Kristi Anne, 10, 123 Valeri, Valerio, 179, 180
Strathern, Marilyn, 11, 124, 146 Via Sacra procession, 31
suffering Violence
as age related, 87 husbands toward wives,
in daily conversation, 71–72 11, 121–125, 134, 135,
in Dona Lourdes’ narrative, 70–71 190 n 8
effects on the body, 74, 75 men toward families, 109
as identity label, 73–74 socio-economic and structural,
as idiom of containment, 74–84 12, see also Northeast
and labor, 115-116 of wives toward husbands, 137
of the Northeast, 22 virginity, 45–46, 62, 78
and sacrificial discourse, 84, Virgin Mary, 9, 79–80, 85, 91
88–92, 117 votive offerings, 30
as skill, 74–75
in Tia Ana’s life, 67–68 wage labor, 25–26
as type of exchange, 90, 92, 189 Warner, Marina, 79
n 14, see also gift Weber, Max, 110, 189 n 13
voluntaristic character of, 90, see wedding
also morality, ‘of freedom’ feast and preparation, 51–52
sugarcane, 22 ‘shotgun wedding’, see casamento
suicide, see death de matuto
work
tenant farming, 23, 24 gendered division of, see gender
theology historical associations of, 96–97
Calvinist, 110 local definitions of, 98–100
Catholic, 11 narratives of, 104–109
legacy of in human sciences, 2–3 and religious discourse, 100–103,
local discussions and versions of, see also liberation theology
31–36, 152–153 and sin, 103–104
trabalhador/eira types of within Santa Lucia,
as identity title, 104–105, 188– 25–28
189 n 9 youth, 43–45
trabalho, see work moral status of, 157–159
transcendence, 3, 183 n 2 zona da mata, 17, 20, 21, 22, 23

Mayblin - Gender, Catholicism and Morality in Brazil

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Mayblin - Gender, Catholicism and Morality in Brazil

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

CONTEMPOR ARY A NTHROPOLOGY OF R ELIGION

A series published with the Society for the

Robert Hefner, Series Editor

1.1 Map of region 18

anonymous reviewers, including Peter Gow, the late Olivia Harris,

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

This book is an attempt to understand such discourses. It is about

Christianity and the “Doleful Abyss”

(Bargatzky 1996: 416). True, Sahlins’ argument is perhaps directed

things (Keane 2007; Engelke and Tomlinson 2006). For Christians

Ethics and Morality: Choice and Reproduction

of reproduction,” in which morality is nonconsciously reproduced as

the young in a region historically given to extreme manifestations of

Conjugal Relations: A Widening of the Abyss

wedding ceremony is quite different. Marriage, I was told, is where

Gender in Latin America

men indulging in “flamboyant anti-clericalism” (Cannell 2006: 9).

Throughout Latin America, women bear the burden of advancing

women’s sphere of interests and competence despite their lack of formal

Building on this academic tradition, gender theorists Marit Melhuus

which people live their everyday lives. Marilyn Strathern’s recogni-

Catholic theology has been strongly influenced by Liberation theol-

have come to believe that in foregrounding the analytical term “patri-

Outline of the Book

The Land and the People

1.1 Map of region

Catholic church, and a gleaming new palace of Pentecostal worship.

by motorbike taxi, then you will require an experienced rider, one

matutos (hillbillies), and most often as Nordestinos (Northeasterners).

the South boasts the major universities, museums, and cultural

Present-day poverty in the Northeast is the result of a multitude of

(hunger) and sede (thirst) remains dominant themes in the collective

economic social formation if ever there was one” (Scheper-Hughes

Bandits and Cattlemen: A Brief History of

Northeastern interior leaves one with a picture of a wild frontier land

About Santa Lucia

1.2 Trabalhador lifting hay

will grow any combination of the staple crops of manioc (mandioca),

environment. Agricultural work is contingent not only upon the

Land, Power, and Hierarchy

to thirty hectares of land as opposed to the norm of two to three

known as celebração da palavra (celebration of the word). Celebração

is less important than Easter. Whereas the famous Brazilian carnival

up appearances.” Villagers who go to church obsessively are often

not an integral aspect of daily worship and practice, it is nonetheless

of some actively diabolical principle than the result of a natural state

My sister-in-law who is a crente [Pentecostal] told me that Paradise

Nonetheless, speculation over theological matters never fails to

The Santa Lucian People and Me

My eventual acceptance as an antropologa here to study nossos

the female bias of my data collection although I cannot claim to

1.3 Santa Lucian woman

knowledge of peoples who are made part other by the observer’s

Marriage in Santa Lucia

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

Santa Lucian people. However, as Catholics, Santa Lucians place par-

Marriage and the household assume a sacred character precisely

The legitimizing nature of marriage for women especially is in evidence

The Marriage Process

difference in the lives of married and single adults: a young, unmar-

Festas and Courtship

dancer, that is someone who possesses ritmo (rhythm) and having

Bikes versus Bricks: The Process of Building a House