Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Maya Mayblin
GENDER, CATHOLICISM, AND MORALITY IN BRAZIL
Copyright © Maya Mayblin, 2010.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2010 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
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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
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Figures
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
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).
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
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.
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.
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Chapter 1
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
18 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
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),
20 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
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,
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
THE L AND AND THE PEOPLE 23
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
THE L AND AND THE PEOPLE 25
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.
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
26 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
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
28 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
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
30 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
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.
36 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
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 L AND AND THE PEOPLE 39
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.
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
M A R R I AG E I N S A N TA L U C I A 45
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
M A R R I AG E I N S A N TA L U C I A 47
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
50 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
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.
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.
M A R R I AG E I N S A N TA L U C I A 55
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.”
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
M A R R I AG E I N S A N TA L U C I A 57
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)
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.
M A R R I AG E I N S A N TA L U C I A 59
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
60 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
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
62 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
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.
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.”
64 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
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
M A R R I AG E I N S A N TA L U C I A 65
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.
T H E B E A R I N G O F B U R D EN S 75
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.
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.
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 biblical images that the Fathers applied to the birth of Christ
reveal that they conceived of a virgin’s body as seamless, unbroken,
80 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
Maya: Why would you say people seek you out more than any other
rezadeira?
84 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
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.”
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)
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.
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:
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
92 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
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.
T H E B E A R I N G O F B U R D EN S 93
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.
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Chapter 4
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
W O R K I N G T O S W E AT 101
are some excerpts of religious songs that imbue the act of labor with
Christological significance:
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.
W O R K I N G T O S W E AT 105
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
106 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
108 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
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
110 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
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
W O R K I N G T O S W E AT 111
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
W O R K I N G T O S W E AT 113
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.
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.
A concern with matter and corporeality has long been at the forefront
of Christian, and particularly Catholic expression. As Bynum (1987)
118 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
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.
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Chapter 5
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:
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
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:
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.
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.
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
VIRT UOUS HUSBANDS, POW ERFUL W IV ES 141
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
144 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
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
VIRT UOUS HUSBANDS, POW ERFUL W IV ES 145
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.
146 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
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.”
* * *
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.
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.
FROM INNOC ENC E TO K NOW LEDGE 151
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
154 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
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.
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
FROM INNOC ENC E TO K NOW LEDGE 157
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,
FROM INNOC ENC E TO K NOW LEDGE 159
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]
162 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
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.
FROM INNOC ENC E TO K NOW LEDGE 163
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.’ ”
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.
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,
FROM INNOC ENC E TO K NOW LEDGE 175
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
178 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
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
180 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
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
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
182 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
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
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).
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).
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BIBLIOGRAPHY 203
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