Sociabilidad en Buenos Aires: Hombres, honor y cafes, 1862-1910 (review)

Sociabilidad en Buenos Aires: Hombres, honor y cafés, 1862-1910. By Sandra Gayol. Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Signo, 2000. Illustrations. Maps. Bibliography. 284 pp. Paper.

A round of drinks, an angry challenge, a flash of steel: these are the central motifs of this pioneering study of male sociability in modernizing Buenos Aires. Waxing nostalgia for a vanished "mythology of knives" and duels, Jorge Luis Borges once wrote, "a song of heroism has been lost in sordid police reports." Digging deep into those very police reports--the first research to do so--Sandra Gayol has produced a theoretically astute and empirically grounded account of the emergence of an urban café world. In contrast to a poetic tradition that has tied male violence almost exclusively to a criollo past, Gayol stresses the importance of immigrants and modernity, tracing the broader patterns and rituals of conviviality in a rapidly changing city. One tantalizing strand of her analysis traces how women, who had held an important place in the earlier pulperías, were gradually driven out of the space of the new cafés. Gayol tells of male friendships forged and broken in these new spaces, in the sharing of drinks, the strumming of guitars, the playing of cards and--at times--the baring of knives.

Writing with playful verve, Gayol pays close attention to language and makes productive use of theorists ranging from Erving Goffman to Pierre Bourdieu. Extensive and well-chosen source quotes add depth and flavor to Gayol's account, and she puts those quotes to good analytical purposes, drawing insights and methods from the "discursive turn" of recent cultural history. Yet the roots of her project lie more in traditional social history. Gayol mined police records to assemble a data set of 1114 incidents over 50 years. This data enables her to speak of patterns, adding quantitative depth to the qualitative richness of her analysis. It allows her to make some striking observations--for instance, that hardly any fights (4 percent) were over women (p. 205). Yet this approach also has its limits: we learn little about these men before or after the incidents, save their age, nationality and profession--and the arguments they offered in their defense. Gayol rightly critiques earlier studies of class and ethnicity for neglecting the specificity of social interactions in cafés. But the richness of her analysis repeatedly leads back out into the street, towards broader questions which require examining other types of sources.

This is not a flaw of her work, but a sign of how answering the questions she has posed will require further research. Consider her treatment of honor: towards the end of the book, Gayol makes the argument that fights for honor served more to flatten than to reinforce hierarchy (among men) in the rapidly changing city. The point is intriguing, and seems reasonable on its face, but it is only weakly supported by the evidence presented in this book. A more comprehensive account would demand looking more fully at interactions between popular and elite sociability. It would draw not only on European and U.S. studies, as Gayol does, but also on the recent boom of work on gender and honor elsewhere in Latin America. But it would also build on the fundamental advances made by Gayol here, and by anthropologist Eduardo Archetti in his recent work, in turning masculine identity into a key area of inquiry in Latin American cultural history.