The backlands of Brazil’s Northeast fascinated various young Brazilianists in the 1960s, their interests nurtured, perhaps, by Euclides da Cunha’s Rebellion in the Backlands, films such as O Cangaceiro, and the political excitement over Brazil’s “Castro,” Francisco Julião. Like Cunha more than fifty years before, they sought to explain the sertões, lands of banditry, religious sectarianism, and clan rule. Ralph Della Cava’s Miracle at Joaseiro (1970) was one result of this interest in the Northeast; Billy Jaynes Chandler’s work is another. Chandler focuses on the patriarchal family or parentela and uses the Feitosas of the Inhamuns area of Ceará as a case study. The Feitosas are notorious in Brazilian history for a feud fought in the eighteenth century. Chandler extends our knowledge of this clan, beginning with the arrival of its first members in the Inhamuns in the early eighteenth century and carrying the story to 1930.
The history of the Feitosas, according to Chandler, “serves to illustrate the relationship in the Inhamuns between private power and external authority from the colonial period through the Old Republic” (p. 167). During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “private power,” the parentela, was generally superior to the colonial, monarchical, and early republican authorities. By 1930, however, the Feitosas’s strength had declined relative to other families in the Inhamuns, and the resulting fragmentation of power gave state authorities an increasingly important role in the area. In discussing the causes of the Feitosas’s fall, Chandler makes the interesting speculation that one reason may have been that the family clung to cattle raising after others had turned to agriculture, which was better suited to recover from the economic ruin of the periodic droughts which affect the Inhamuns.
The droughts merit a whole chapter in Chandler’s monograph, indicative of their social consequences for the Northeast. Some of Chandler’s most intriguing material is on the social history of the Inhamuns, where the author makes good use of local records. Negro slavery, the status of women, and the nature of crime and justice are all well handled. On slavery, Chandler points out that some twenty percent of the Inhamuns population were slaves in the late colonial period, and that, contrary to statements in general works on slavery in Ceará, local traditions in the Inhamuns record “that it was precisely the work of a vaqueiro to which the Negro was most suited” (p. 148). Another area where Chandler warns against hasty generalization is on the relative importance of agriculture and cattle raising. While cattle were the Inhamuns most important export, Chandler asserts that perhaps as many as ninety percent of the area’s inhabitants earned their livelihood by farming in 1903.
Whether patterns discernible in the Inhamuns hold true for other parts of the Northeastern backlands will hopefully be a topic of further research by Chandler. As the introduction points out, the study “is largely narrative and deals chiefly with the community in its own context” (p.2). Another warning proffered in the introduction is that there will be a “wealth of names and kinship relations.” This being so, the book badly needs an index. Also, the abbreviated footnote style sometimes makes it hard to locate items in the bibliography. These difficulties, however, will not deter students of Northeast Brazilian history from reading Chandler’s study with profit.
