Cleansing Honor with Blood: Masculinity, Violence, and Power in the Backlands of Northeast Brazil, 1845-1889 by Martha S. Santos (review)

This volume examines the ways in which the social and economic status of the poor and working classes gave rise to distinct understandings of gender and honor in the interior of the northeastern Brazilian state of Ceará in the nineteenth century. Santos focuses on masculine identity and honor, and questions "the oft repeated stereotype of Latin American machismo—the depiction of Latin American men, especially from the lower classes, as essentially intransigent, misogynist, homophobic, and violent—that still abounds in popular culture and even in some scholarly work" (p. 11). Instead, Santos argues that the use of violence among the free rural poor to defend individual and family honor stemmed from profound economic and social changes that reshaped landholding patterns, economic production, patronage, marriage patterns, and the family. Specific changes include the economic effects of partible inheritance, the rise and decline of cotton production, the Land Law of 1850, the Paraguayan War, the Great Drought, and the abolition of slavery. Santos builds on R. W. Connell's theory of "hegemonic masculinities," understood to be "those strategies, norms, and practices that serve to guarantee men's authority over women and over subordinated masculinities" (p. 8), to argue that the understanding of masculine identity and honor among the free rural poor "not only allowed them to uphold citizenship rights and defend access to resources but also helped them maintain—even if momentarily—positions of authority over women and categories of men that they deemed inferior" (p. 9).

Santos examines how some free poor "enjoyed a degree of prosperity" through land ownership, albeit temporarily. She effectively shows how Brazil's legal tradition of partible inheritance led to a fragmentation of landholdings and a decline in individual and family property. Nonetheless, Santos argues that "the documents clearly reveal that free poor smallholders enjoyed a small degree of stability in their occupation and usufruct of those lands" (p. 32). Santos posits that economic conditions, the decline of traditional patronage networks, and a weak and ineffective centralized state led poor male Cearenses to use violence to construct and assert a masculine identity. Claims to citizenship and defense of honor were based on land ownership as the cornerstone of an honorable masculine identity, and poor Cearenses regularly defended their economic status and honor through the use of violence. Santos shows that disputes among joint landowners were common in the northeastern interior, and that claims to precedence and honor rested on assertions of status as "senhor e possuidor" of land. Some "unattached" women who owned land, and were free from the traditional obligations of marriage, could also assert these rights. Thus, Santos argues, the emphasis on honor "did not amount to the simple enactment of cultural prescriptions. Instead, it constituted a strategic resource that smallholders used to contend with the intense and sustained conflict for productive resources" (p. 120). Santos then documents the social and economic effects of the Paraguayan War and the Great Drought, arguing that changing social and economic patterns resulted in increased aggression and violence toward unprotected women who turned to the courts for protection and defense of their honor, but seldom found recourse. Santos concludes by examining violence and aggression among young men, arguing that "Instead of being frozen in time, the masculinities of free poor men from Ceará . . . were elaborated and reinforced in social practice, including the use of aggression for symbolic and material ends" (p. 216).

Santos's work will serve especially well in advanced undergraduate courses and graduate seminars and will be of interest to scholars concerned with the economic, social, and cultural history of northeastern Brazil as well as the history of gender. Santos effectively grounds her discussion of gender and honor in the economic and social fabric of nineteenth-century Ceará and in doing so contributes to ongoing debates...