On the Importance of Being Honorable: Masculinity, Survival, and Conflict in the Backlands of Northeast Brazil, Ceará, 1840s-1890

On the Importance of Being Honorable:

Masculinity, Survival, and Conflict in the Backlands of Northeast Brazil, Ceará, 1840-1890

On the night of June 24, 1874, the illiterate farmer Francisco Angelino de Souza attended a St. John's party in the house of João Pereira, located in the estate Barra do Felipe in the largely rural municipality of Jucás, province (now state) of Ceará in Northeast Brazil. The celebrations unfolded uneventfully, with the guests singing to the rhythms of a viola (small guitar, typical of the Northeastern backlands) and drinking the sugarcane brandy called cachaça until late in the night. However, unexpectedly, a fight erupted between Francisco Angelino and António Rodrigues de Souza. According to eyewitnesses, Francisco Angelino stabbed António's leg with his knife after he had "offended" Francisco Angelino's reputation. In the midst of this commotion, one of the party guests performed an in flagrante arrest, taking an indignant Francisco Angelino to jail, while he clamored at the top of his lungs that he "was not afraid of any man, or even of being jailed, because he had a bull, a horse, lands and money" to defend himself.¹

This court case, part of a larger collection of criminal records that detail brawls, fights, and even murders involving men who violently responded to affronts to their manhood illustrates the preoccupation with the defense of honor among sertanejos (poor free backlanders) who inhabited the drought-stricken sertão or hinterland of Ceará during the second half of the nineteenth century. Foreign travelers, provincial authorities, and other observers of life in the region have also noted the almost "obsessive" concern of poor backlanders with establishing manly reputation and respect. According to these commentators, sertanejos were "revengeful" and more than ready to settle a variety of offenses to their honor, even through the use of violence if necessary.² To be sure, masculine honor was an important value for poor backlanders, one without which life was difficult to conceive. But, what explains the significance of honor for these men? Does this masculine necessity to defend honor constitute merely the sertanejos' enactment of the dictates of a backland culture that placed undue emphasis on personal honor, as folkloric and even scholarly interpretations suggest?³

A large body of scholarly work published since the 1980s has demonstrated that constructions of masculinity in Latin America involved adherence to cultural concepts of honor not only among elites, but also among poor groups, both during the colonial and national periods. Confronting an earlier historiographical trend that emphasized wealthy families' claimed monopoly of honor, this newer scholarship has revealed honor as a notion by which men from poor and middle groups sought to establish prestige and assert social or racial dominance over others whom they saw as inferior.⁴

Some studies have considered how changes in political culture after independence prompted transformations in colonial understandings of honor, in particular, the bolstering of an interpretation of honor as based on merit, rather than on birthright.⁵ Nevertheless, much of the historiography on honor has tended, until recently, to present a normative interpretation of honor codes among men from the lower ranks, and particularly, of their ritualized defense of manly repute. In this perspective, stereotypes of masculine honorable conduct, such as public assertion of reputation, sensitivity to insults, and preoccupation with the sexual control of family women, appear mainly as byproducts of cultural notions of honor to which poor men in various regions and time periods in Latin America subscribed.⁶

These representations derive in part from the adoption of conceptual approaches developed by anthropologists who studied honor in Mediterranean societies during the 1960s and 1970s as theoretical models that explain the functioning of honor.⁷ According to the anthropological literature, honor is a largely masculine concern and is central to male competition...