Go-betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500–1600 (review)

After making his landfall in Brazil in 1500, Pedro Alvares Cabral tried to leave behind two convicts brought to live among the Indians and learn their language. The Indians immediately returned them to the ships. They perhaps understood instinctively that such men were dangerous potential agents of change. Cultural-boundary crossers of this sort are the focus of Metcalf's provocative and innovative reconsideration of Brazil's first century.

Cultural brokers, intermediaries, transfrontiersmen, beachcombers, castaways and go-betweens have often played a pivotal role in the process of cross-cultural contact in various parts of the world. The early history of Brazil offers a particularly good example. First reports by French and Portuguese observers and by the Jesuit missionaries, all of whom both needed and feared these freelance competitors to their own cross-cultural activities, provided a firm record of contact between Europeans and Native Americans that allows us to recreate, in some detail, the nature of early cross-cultural contact. Metcalf makes these go-betweens and other intermediaries the protagonists of her study of the early Portuguese and French contact with Brazil between 1500 and 1600, as the colony took shape. Rather than study the settlement and colonization from an imperial perspective, she focuses on informal relations while demonstrating that since the fifteenth century at least, Portuguese official expeditions and policies recognized the utility of such brokers and often used them instrumentally to facilitate imperial expansion.

Metcalf retraces the early history of Brazil as it moved from occasional contacts between dyewood cutters and Native Americans through colonial settlement, Jesuit missionary activity, and eventually the creation of a plantation economy based on slavery, always from the perspective of cultural contact and exchange. This approach provides fresh insights and connections to a well-known story. Her account is innovative in a number of ways. She has, for example, integrated the cartographical representations of Brazil into the story, drawing evidence of contact from the early maps and demonstrating how these maps formed an impression of the new land and its people in Europe. Well-written, this account will be a welcome addition to the small number of studies available on colonial Brazil.

There are, however, some problems. In her attempt to sharpen the definition of "go-between," Metcalf overtheorizes the concept and makes it too inclusive. The castaways and transfrontiersmen constitute only one category in her typology of physical, transactional, and representational go-betweens. The first are the men and women actually involved in the contact—the bearers of disease and the producers of children. The transactional intermediaries are the translators, negotiators, and cultural brokers, and the representational go-betweens are those who by words and image "represent" another culture. This typology, which organizes the book, is not particularly helpful. Not much separates the first two categories except circumstance and chronology. The castaway incorporated into an indigenous group as a "physical" go-between often became a "transactional" figure once he learned the language. These are not really distinct types.

Metcalf even suggests that captives who were eaten by the Tupi are another kind of physical, or "culinary," go-between (133). In effect, anyone who ever came into contact with a native of Brazil or carried a germ there is a go-between. This definition is too inclusive. Metcalf uses the category of representational go-between indiscriminately to describe an inquisitor who mediated between people and God, Indian leaders of a syncretic cult, and authors and cartographers who never left Europe (236, 224). To call anyone who wrote or drew about the new land and its people without ever encountering them a "go-between" stretches the point too far. Usually the role of such people was to serve as brokers of the exotic to their own culture not as intermediates between cultures. Thus is the interpretive strength of Metcalf's definition weakened.

Nonetheless, Metcalf's volume makes an important contribution by offering a different vantage point from which to view...