This history of the political oligarchy of Paraíba contributes an exhaustive study of the familial dimension of politics to the growing field of regional studies of the Brazilian Old Republic (1889-1930). It comprises three fairly independent parts. The first introduces Paraiban society and its cotton boom economy. During the Old Republic, "in most municipios rival blocs competed along identical lines of economic interest” (p. 121), but the new value of cotton and the new importance of public infrastructure (rails, roads, dams, cotton gins) raised the stakes in political competition. The second part analyzes kinship organization as it complemented this “segmented” economic organization, and as it underlay political tactions. The third part chronicles the factional political maneuverings of Paraibans, telling the story of the rise and fall of Epitácio Pessoa and his oligarchy. The focus is at the level of state and national politics, where leaders relied on circles of friends and clients more than on the family, but it keeps in the background the chaotic level of local politics, where bosses relied almost exclusively on family networks.
This thick narrative provides a sophisticated regional perspective on the intricate federal counterbalances of the Old Republic. A state that was essentially “small and poor, without political influence” (p. 390), briefly became central when the deadlocked big states selected Epitácio as a compromise president in 1919; in turn, it was transformed by that moment of power. The book’s most important contribution is its second part, which opens original approaches to the functions of marriage and kinship for Latin American elites. Lewin argues that nineteenth-century Brazilians relied heavily on cousin marriage because it helped to define who should or should not belong in extended kin networks, parentelas. The most common type of cousin marriage, marriage of the children of brothers, bound men together “and meant that the family core approximated a segmented patrilineage” (p. 154). By the twentieth century, the generation of Epitácio Pessoa “revolted ideologically against patriarchy and parentally imposed marriage” (p. 173), and through exogamous marriage often defined networks as groups of brothers-in-law: “the principal plane of political coordination had become an extended sibling axis” (p. 201).
This tautly argued, pioneering essay will stimulate fruitful debate. It suggests lines for further research, as the keystone of the evidence for its complex theory of marriage is a statistical analysis of a single, incomplete genealogy. And it invites controversy over the roles of women, as it interprets marriage patterns almost entirely from the point of view of men’s strategies and interests. Its theoretical rigor sets a new standard for debate on the upper-class family; not the least of its contributions is to propose a uniform scholarly vocabulary for Brazilian kinship.
