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Family, Patriarchalism, and Social Change in Brazil

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THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE DOWRY: WOMEN, FAMILIES, AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN SÃO PAULO, 1600–1900. By NazzariMuriel. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991. Pp. 243. $35.00 cloth.)

FAMILY AND FRONTIER IN COLONIAL BRAZIL: SANTANA DE PARNAIBA, 1580–1822. By MetcalfAlida C. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press, 1992. Pp. 279. $40.00 cloth.)

THE FAMILY IN BAHIA, BRAZIL, 1870–1945. By BorgesDain. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992. Pp. 422. $52.50 cloth.)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Eni de Mesquita Samara
Affiliation:
Universidade de São Paulo
Dora Isabel Paiva da Costa
Affiliation:
Universidade de São Paulo
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Abstract

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Type
Review Essays
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

Translated from the Portuguese by Sharon Kellum.

References

Notes

1. Gilberto Freyre, Casa grande e senzala, 17th ed. (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1975); Oliveira Vianna, Populações meridionais do Brasil (São Paulo: Monteiro Lobato, 1920); Luis de Aguiar Costa Pinto, Lutas de famílias no Brasil, era colonial (São Paulo and Brasília: Nacional and Instituto Nacional do Livro, 1980); Alcântara Machado, Vida e morte do bandeirante, 3d ed. (São Paulo and Belo Horizonte: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo and Itatiaia, 1980).

2. Antonio Cândido de Mello e Souza, “The Brazilian Family,” in Brazil: Portrait of Half a Continent, edited by T. Lynn Smith and A. Marchant (New York: Dryden, 1951), 291–312; Emílio Willems, “The Structure of Brazilian Family,” Social Forces, no. 31 (May 1953):339–45; Donald Pierson, “The Family in Brazil,” Marriage and Family Living 16, no. 4 (1954):308–14; Oracy Nogueira, Família e comunidade: Um estudo sociológico de Itapetininga (Rio de Janeiro: Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Educacionais, Instituto Nacional de Estudos Pedagógicos, and Ministério da Educação e Cultura, 1962); and Thales de Azevedo, “Family, Marriage, and Divorce in Brazil,” in Contemporary Cultures and Societies of Latin America, edited by D. Heath and R. Adams (New York: Random House, 1965), 288–311; Charles Wagley, “Luso-Brazilian Kinship Patterns: The Persistence of a Cultural Tradition,” in Wagley, Latin American Tradition: Essays on the Unity and Diversity of Latin American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 175–93; John Lobo, “Family Life in Brazil,” Marriage and Family Living, no. 10 (1954):8–10; Hiroshi Saito, “A família do imigrante japonês para o Brasil,” Sociologia 22, no. 1:12–28; Licurgo dos Santos Filho, Uma comunidade rural do Brasil antigo: Aspectos da vida patriarcal no sertão da Bahia nos séculos XVIII e XIX (São Paulo: Nacional, 1956); Carmelita Hutchinson, “Notas preliminares ao estudo da family no Brasil,” Anais da II Reunião Brasileira de Antropologia (Bahia: Centro de Estudos Baihanos, 1957); Maria Isaura Pereira de Queiroz, “Assimilação de três famílias em São Paulo,” Sociologia 12, no. 1 (1950): 20–44; and Lena Ferreira Costa, Uma família na história: Monografia sobre a família de Castelo Branco (Goiana: Imprensa da Universidade Federal de Goiás, 1967).

3. Darrel Levi, A família Prado (São Paulo: Cultura, 1977); Iraci del Nero da Costa, “A estrutura familiar e domicilária em Vila Rica no alvorecer do século XIX,” Revista do Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros, no. 19 (1977):17–34; Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva, “Sistema de casamento no Brasil colonial,” Ciência e Cultura 28, no. 11 (1976):1250–63; Donald Ramos, “Marriage and Family in Colonial Vila Rica,” Hispanic American Historical Review 55, no. 2 (May 1975):200–225; Maria Luíza Marcílio, A cidade de São Paulo (São Paulo: Pioneira, 1974); Eni de Mesquita Samara, “A família na sociedade paulista no século XIX,” Ph.D. diss, Universidade de São Paulo, 1979; Alida Metcalf, Household and Family Structure in Late-Eighteenth-Century Ubatuba (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978); and Eni de Mesquita Samara, “Uma contribuição ao estudo da estrutura familiar em São Paulo durante o período colonial: A família agregada em Itu, 1780–1830,” Revista de História 53, no. 105 (1976):33–45.

4. See for example Elizabeth Kuznesof, “The Role of Female-Headed Households in Brazilian Modernization, 1765–1836,” Journal of Social History 13, no. 4 (Summer 1980):589–613. She identified other forms of family organization and investigated their functionality during urbanization. See also Angela Mendes de Almeida, “Notas sobre a família no Brasil,” in Pensando a família no Brasil, edited by Carneiro Almeida and Paula Gonçalves (Rio de Janeiro: Espaço e Tempo and Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro, 1987), 53–66; Roberto Da Matta, “A família como valor: Considerações não-familiares sobre a família à brasileira,” also in Pensando a família no Brasil, 115–36; and Kátia Mattoso, Família e sociedade na Bahia do século XIX (São Paulo: Corrupio, 1988). All three of these authors start with the patriarchal model and affirm it regarding ethical support for other forms of family organization. In contrast, other scholars have questioned this notion. See Eni de Mesquita Samara, A família brasileira (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1984); Samara, “Tendências atuais da história da família no Brasil,” in Pensando a família no Brasil, 25–36; and Mariza Correa, “Repensando a Família Patriarcal Brasileira,” in Colcha de retalhos, edited by Antonio Augusto Arantes et al. (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1982), 13–38.

5. Paulista refers here to the region of the capitania de São Vicente.

6. Brazil at the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth experienced a boom in gold mining in the region that today is the state of Minas Gerais.

7. Darrel Levi, A família Prado.

8. Carlos de A. P. Bacellar, Família, herança e poder em São Paulo, 1765–1855, Estudos CEDHAL no. 7 (São Paulo: Centro de Demografia Histórica da América Latina, 1991), 74.

9. See also Metcalf's article, “Fathers and Sons: The Politics of Inheritance in a Colonial Brazilian Township,” Hispanic American Historical Review 66, no. 3 (Aug. 1986):455–84; and comments by Daniel Scott Smith in “Family Strategy: More than a Metaphor?” Historical Methods 20, no. 3 (1987):113–25, 119.

10. On the complexity of family structures in Europe, see Richard Wall, J. Robin, and P. Laslett, Family Forms in Historic Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Compare with the commentary of Laurel L. Cornell, “Household Studies: A Review Essay,” Historical Methods 19, no. 3 (1986):129–34. See also the earlier study by P. Laslett and Richard Wall, Household and Family in the Past Time: Comparative Studies in the Size and Structure of the Domestic Group over the Last Three Centuries in England, France, Serbia, Japan, and Colonial North America with Further Materials from Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); and Iraci del Nero da Costa, “Revisitando o domicílio complexo,” Estudos Econômicos 21, no. 3 (1991):401–7.

11. See also Alida Metcalf, “Recursos e estruturas familiares no século XVIII, em Ubatuba, Brasil,” Estudos Econômicos 13, special issue (1983):771–85; Maria Luiza Marcílio, “A fecundidade camponesa no Brasil antigo: O caso de Ubatuba,” Estudos Econômicos 15, special issue (1985):111–26; and Marcílio, Caiçara: Terra e população (São Paulo: Paulinas and Centro de Demografia Histórica da América Latina, 1986).

12. Maria Odila Leite da Silva Dias, Quotidiano e poder em São Paulo no século XIX: Ana Gertrudes de Jesus (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1984); Kuznesof, “Role of Female-Headed Households”; and Samara, “A família na sociedade paulista no século XIX.”

13. For example, Dr. Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, who practiced in Bahia around the turn of the twentieth century, described the religious practices of blacks as symptoms of a degenerate social psychology.

14. Kátia Mattoso, “Un nouveau monde: Une province d' un nouvel empire, Bahia au XIXe siècle,” Doctorat d'Etat, Université de Paris IV, 1986, 241–42.

15. Silva Dias, Quotidiano e poder em São Paulo, 71.

16. Silva Dias, Quotidiano e poder em São Paulo, 74. See also Antonio Cândido de Mello e Souza, who also stresses this idea in “The Brazilian Family,” Brazil: Portrait of Half a Continent, 296.

17. See the monolithic use that Almeida makes of the concept of patriarchalism on comparing seventeenth-century Portuguese behaviors with those of nineteenth-century Paulista society (pp. 119–20).

18. Angela Mendes de Almeida, “Notas sobre a família no Brasil,” in Pensando a família no Brasil, 55.

19. Samara came to the same conclusion in her book on the Brazilian family, which focuses on families in São Paulo in the nineteenth century. See A família brasileira, 44, 55, 80.

20. G. Duby, Idade média, idade dos homens: Do amor e outros ensaios (São Paulo: Letras, 1989), 13, as cited by Almeida (p. 10).

21. Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A Caribbean Perspective (Philadelphia, Pa.: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1976), as cited by Borges (pp. 82–83).

22. Gilberto Freyre, Casa grande e senzala; and Souza, “The Brazilian Family,” Brazil: Portrait of Half a Continent.

23. Samara, A família brasileira, 44, 55, 80.