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Bodo Was Never Brazilian:1 Economic Integration and Rural Development among a Contemporary Peasantry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

Joyce F. Riegelhaupt  and
Shepard Forman
Joyce F. Riegelhaupt
Affiliation:
Sarah Lawrence College
Shepard Forman
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Extract

It is indeed a pleasure to be invited to address economists and economic historians regarding the dynamics of peasant economic integration into a national economic system. The particular subject of these meetings, “The Organizational Forms of Economic Life and their Evolution,” is an appropriate one for us since, as anthropologists, we are generally interested in the “Evolution of the Organizational Forms of Life.” Today we will examine the organizational form of peasant economic life in Brazil in an effort to develop a fuller understanding of the socio-economic transactions which take place within this traditional—better, transitional—agrarian society.

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Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , March 1970 , pp. 100 - 116
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1970

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References

2 The field research was conducted in the summer of 1967, supported by grants from the Agricultural Development Council to Professors Riegelhaupt and Forman, and from the International Affairs Center at Indiana University (Ford International II) to Forman. In addition, Forman did anthropological fieldwork in the same region from 1964 to 1965 under an NDEA-Related Fulbright-Hays Award.

3 Unlike the Indians of Mexico and Peru who became the backbone of post-Conquest development in those countries, the pre-Conquest Indians of Brazil, living in tribal societies characterized by slash-and-burn agriculture and a low level of political and economic complexity, proved unsuitable for Portugal's commercial purposes.

4 A variety of community and regional studies attests to this fact. See: Harris, Marvin, Town and Country in Brazil (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956)Google Scholar; Hutchinson, Harry W., Village and Plantation Life in Northeast Brazil (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1957)Google Scholar; Diegues, Manuel Jr., Regiões Culturais do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Centro de Pesquisas Educacionais, I.N.E.P., 1960)Google Scholar; Wagley, Charles, An Introduction to Brazil (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963)Google Scholar; Wagley, Charles, ed., Race and Class in Rural Brazil, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963)Google Scholar; Andrade, Manuel Correia de, Paisagens e Problemas do Brasil (São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1968)Google Scholar. See also: Wagley, Charles and Harris, Marvin, “Typology of Latin American Subcultures,” American Anthropologist, LVII, 3 (June 1955), 428–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 It is not our purpose to discuss the nature of slavery in Brazil. There are numerous descriptions of the slave trade and of the economic and social life of the slave plantation based on sugar in such works as Diegues, Manuel Jr., O Bangüê nas Alagoas (Rio de Janeiro: Edição do Instituto do Açûcar e Alcool, 1949)Google Scholar, and Freyre, Gilberto, The Masters and the Slaves, translated by Putnam, Samuel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946)Google Scholar. Stein, Stanley, Vassouras (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957)Google Scholar gives an excellent account of the nineteenth-century economy of slavery in the coffeelands. The Brazilian slave plantation was a radical ecological adaptation to New World conditions. It was neither based on a previous Portuguese model nor organized along feudal principles; it was from its inception a commercial agricultural establishment. One of the vexing problems in the economic history of Brazil is the question of a labor market. This question is particularly complicated by the issue of slavery. On the one hand, we have the buying and selling of slaves, as capital, used in producing a saleable commodity (sugar) by entrepreneurs who made a profit solely in the commerce of humans, and on the other, the well-documented practice of hiring out slaves for production on other people's plantations. In this way, too, they represented a form of capital and were definitely part of the labor market. This practice appears to have been widespread not only on plantations, but also in the cities. It is also interesting to note that the transition from a slave to a non-slave plantation system between 1888 and 1889 occurred with little, if any, alteration in the structural relationships on the plantation. This would be a further indication that the transition from slave to free labor was well under way before Abolition. Perhaps we should refine our discussion even of slavery in Brazil and discuss instead a system of agricultural production for an external market which utilized an unpaid and highly brutalized labor force and then adapted, rather easily, to wage labor. Such an analysis could help us to understand the nature of the socio-economic relationships between masters and slaves and landlords and peasants as responses to an on-going economic system dominated by the export-oriented latifundia.

6 An example of such between-the-lines presentation can be seen in the works of the historian Prado, Caio Jr. who writes in The Colonial Background of Modern Brazil, translated by Macedo, Suzette (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 419Google Scholar:

“Another essential outcome of the colonization process … was the growing number of people condemned to a marginal existence outside the normal productive activity of colonization. This activity was almost exclusively limited to members of the closed circle of the colony's basic economic and social organization: masters and slaves, the entrepreneurs and administrators of colonization, and their humble tools. As long as there were only masters and slaves, as at the very beginning, everything went well. All the settlers in Brazilian territory had their proper place in the colony's social structure and its activities could develop along normal lines. But gradually other categories began to be formed, composed of people who were not slaves and could not afford'to be masters. There was no room for these categories in the colony's system of production. Despite this their numbers began to grow … ”

In the Brazilian edition, Formãçao do Brasil Contemporâneo (São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1965), pp. 279Google Scholar ff., Prado argues that this large segment of the population lived by “vadiando” (hanging around), and further says that they were an inchoate mass of humanity, lacking in economic and social organization.

7 Diegues, Manuel Jr., População e Propriedade da Terra no Brasil (Washington, D.C.: União Panamericano, 1959), p. 19Google Scholar.

8 Ibid., p. 16. He estimates the size of sesmarias as between 10,000 and 13,000 hectares and the data de terra at 272 hectares.

9 Castro, Josue de, Death in the Northeast (New York: Random House, 1966), p. 98Google Scholar.

10 Diegues, Manuel Jr., “Land Tenure and Use in the Brazilian Plantation System,” in Plantation Systems of the New World (Washington, D.C.: Pan American Union, Social Science Monograph VII, 1959); pp. 106–7.Google Scholar

11 Ibid., p. 107.

12 Ibid.

13 Andrade, Manuel Correia de, A Terra e o Homem no Nordeste, 2d ed. (São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1964), p. 79.Google Scholar

14 Ibid., p. 109.

15 Diegues, Jr., População e Propriedade da Terra no Brasil, p. 21.

16 Castro, Death in the Northeast, p. 103.

17 Diegues, Jr., O Bangüê nas Alagoas.

18 Gardiner, George, Viagens do Brasil, translated by Pinheiro, Alberto from “Travels in Brazil,” London, 1849 (São Paulo: Cia. Editora Nacional, 1942), p. 95.Google Scholar

19 Andrade, Manuel Correia de, Os Rios-do-Açúcar do Nordeste Oriental, Vol. IV (Recife: Institute Joaquim Nabuco de Pesquisas Sociais, 1959), p. 40Google Scholar; and Prado, Almeida, Pernambuco e as Capitanias do Norte do Brasil, 1530–1630, Tomo II (Rio de Janeiro: Brasiliana, 1941), pp. 445–6.Google Scholar

20 Ibid.

21 Vilhena, Luiz Santos, Recopilação de Noticias Soterpolitanas e Brasilicas, 1802 (Bahia: 1921), pp. 804–5Google Scholar.

22 Espindola, Tomas, Geographia Alagoana ou Descripção Physico, Politico, e Historico da Provincia das Alagoas (Maceio: 1871), pp. 236–7Google Scholar.

23 Both Almeida Prado, Pernambuco e as Capitanias, pp. 442–3, and Gardiner, Vtagetvs do Brasil, pp. 97–8, make reference to the feiras and the wholesalers. Henry Koster, Viagem ao Nordeste do Brasil, translated by Luiz da Camara Cascudo, “Travels in Brazil,” London, 1816 (São Paulo: Cia. Editora Nacional, 1942), passim describes weekly markets in Pernambuco's interior towns during his travels in 1816. We believe that further historical research will document the earlier existence of rural market places. Warehouses did exist in urban centers during the Colonial period, and we assume that difficulties of transport and communications between the coastal cities and the widely scattered hinterland suppliers necessitated a multiplicity of market places.

24 Mellor, John W., The Economics of Agricultural Development (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966), p. 341Google Scholar; Dewey, Alice, Peasant Marketing in Java (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1962)Google Scholar; Chayanov, A. V., The Theory of Peasant Economy (Homewood, Ill.: Irwin, 1966; first published in Russian, 1925), p. 258Google Scholar.

25 Freyre, Gilberto, The Mansions and the Shanties, translated from the Portuguese (New York: Knopf, 1963).Google Scholar

26 See the description in Harris, Town and Country in Brazil.

27 A. V. Chayanov, The Theory of Peasant Economy, p. 78 describes the labor consumer balance as the mechanism for on-farm decision-making in Russia and notes that production is regulated by family consumption patterns: “… other things being equal, the peasant worker, stimulated to work by the demands of his family, develops greater energy as the pressure of these demands becomes stronger. The measure of self-exploitation depends to the highest degree on how heavily the worker is burdened by the consumer demands of his family. The force of the influence of consumer demands … is so great that for a whole series of areas the worker, under pressure from a growing consumer demand, develops his output in strict accordance with the growing number of consumers. The volume of the family's activity depends entirely on the number of consumers and not at all on the number of workers.”

28 Forman, Shepard and Riegelhaupt, Joyce F., “Market Place and Marketing System: Toward a Theory of Peasant Economic Integration,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, XII, 2 (April 1970). High middleman profits continue to force the price of foodstuffs up in Brazil, with few of the increases benefiting the peasant producer.Google Scholar

29 Comité Interamericano de Desenvolvimento Agrícola (CIDA), Posso e Uso da Terra e Desenvolvimento Socio-Economico do Setor Agrícola (Washington, D.C.: Pan-American Union, 1966), passim.

30 The crisis in food supply can perhaps be appreciated by examining the food prices in urban areas. According to a study undertaken in the Recife foodshed area by a combined MSU-USAID-SUDENE team, the lower 58 percent of families spent approximately 70 percent of their income on food. The next 24 percent of families spent 57 percent of their income on food, and the overall mean for the entire urban population was 56 percent of income spent on food purchases. Latin American Market Planning Center, Market Processes in the Recife Area of Northeast Brazil: Preliminary Report (Michigan State University, Mimeo., October 1, 1968).

31 CIDA, Posso e Uso da Terra, pp. 106–7, passim.

32 Ibid., p. 24.

33 For a fuller discussion see: Andre Gunder Frank, “The Myth of Feudalism in Brazilian Agriculture,” Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967), pp. 331–77.

34 Caio Prado, Jr., The Colonial Background of Modern Brazil.

35 Wolf, Eric, Peasants (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), pp. 3–4.Google Scholar

36 Ibid., passim.

37 There are of course other distinguishing characteristics including the allegiance of the serf, possibility for mobility, the openness or closedness of the system, etc. On the nature of Medieval peasant life see, among others: Power, “The Peasant Bodo”; Boissonade, P., Life and Work in Medieval Europe (New York: Harper & Row, 1964)Google Scholar; Bloch, Marc, Feudal Society (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964).Google Scholar