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2 Standing in a Line I started to study Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s hobbyhorse and home, because of an argument I had with a Manjaco aristocrat. His name was Louis, and though many people—especially the younger men in the village who were beginning to take on positions of responsibility as household heads and so forth—complained of his haughty manner and belligerent style, he was the de facto leader of the aristocrats in the royal village of Bassarel, where I lived and carried out ethnographic research. One of the questions that guided my research was to find out how the aristocrats exercised and maintained their political power. They were far richer than most Manjaco. So I became preoccupied with finding out how much they had and from where they got their wealth. Aristocrats usually had family members who had worked for the Portuguese in the colonial era as clerks and other petty officials. Small salaries added up over the years, allowing the children of well-placed aristocrats to acquire a higher education and an even better job in the national government, or to invest family capital in small business ventures such as bush-taxi and transport services or small taverns or general stores. Colonial-era patterns continued into the age of national independence. But more important than occupation for giving them access to wealth, aristocrats controlled large valuable wet-rice fields (which were linked to local political titles) that they could divide into parcels and rent out to commoner families. Louis was among the richer of the aristocrats in Bassarel. He owned all three of the village cantinas, renting them to petty merchants. He also controlled the second largest of the erstwhile “titled” fields in Bassarel. Because I wanted to learn about aristocratic privilege and power, I wanted to talk with Louis, but Louis did not wish to talk to me because he did not know what I would do with the information I wanted. He and the other aristocrats were the subjects of often backbiting acrimony. Many, in fact most, were using land that according to local custom was not theirs. They had inherited from their fathers fields that were the property of the Manjaco kingdom—fields 35 Anthropology and Egalitarianism 36 which traditionally had been allocated by the king to chiefs for use only in their lifetimes. According to many of their neighbors, men like Louis were, in effect, usurpers or the sons or grandsons of usurpers. Moreover, most of them were also technically in violation of a national land rights law (written with Manjaco specifically in mind) that forbade individual households to “own” wet-rice fields larger than a few hectares. Louis thought of me as a representative of that government (after all, I had gotten government permission to do my research) and therefore a kind of spy or at least a potential snitch. The king, by contrast, was eager for attention and more than happy to answer any question I might have. He was a pariah who spent his days more or less alone under the eaves of the veranda of his hut. The national government had stripped him of his official title, and, like all previous kings, he had been born and raised elsewhere, so he had no extended kin in the village to act as allies. Indeed, most of the villagers were glad to see the king suffer. During the revolution, according to many, he had made money making shady deals with the Portuguese garrison that had been set up in Bassarel to protect it from the guerrillas. Because the king had a tarnished reputation to refurbish, he was glad to talk with me to get his version of the facts onto paper. Commoners also had their axes to grind, so I learned more or less what I needed to without Louis’s help. But I still liked him and I think he too enjoyed our frequent jousting matches. We developed a relationship based on antagonistic banter. Finding ourselves in the cantina one day, he shouted at me, “White, you’re rich. Buy me a glass.” I countered that I could see the money he had sticking out of his shirt pocket. He had just returned from visiting his sons in Senegal and, wearing a straw hat, glasses he did not really need, and a short-sleeved shirt of translucent cotton, he looked like a gangster out for a stroll on the boardwalk in Havana circa 1953. He reached into his pocket as...

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