In this study, Todd Diacon expertly analyzes how the alliance among industrial capitalists, state power, and local bosses transformed the backwater that was the Contestado region, leaving in its wake a land-tenure revolution that severely threatened the subsistence way of life of most of the region’s rural dwellers.
To address the thorny problem of why the dispossessed chose a millenarian response to their plight, Diacon draws on the theoretical work of Clifford Geertz. He proposes that a spiritual response was most appropriate in light of the precipitous and dramatic split between the peasants’ moral system and their everyday life as perceived and experienced. At the heart of this rift, he argues convincingly, was the transformation of a sociocultural system based on patron-clientelism to one based on brokerage and pure wage relationships.
Diacon also provides a needed corrective to those analyses that either emphasize the elite-based motives for Brazilian millenarian movements, or attribute such protest to the class-based interest of primitive rebels who purportedly mask class conflict with a religious guise. He skillfully explores both the motives for elite participation and the reasons why peasant rebels accepted elite leadership.
Given its laudably ambitious agenda, the book accomplishes some of its goals better than others. While Diacon claims to provide a balanced account in which the lives and objectives of both the elite and the poor are examined, his analysis is uneven. We learn much more about the options, strategies, and, to a lesser extent, world view of the region’s elite, who promoted and responded to capitalist transformations, than we do about the folk who were, for the most part, victims of those changes. While Diacon rightly contends that such information rarely makes its way to official documents, one would have wished for more oral testimonies from elderly posseiros and agregados who experienced the crisis.
Moreover, while Diacon makes good use of some of Geertz’s theory, one wishes he could have followed Geertz’s lead in insisting that religion is a symbolic system whose meanings must be “read.” As presented here, Diacon’s argument that millenarian protest emerged out of the disjuncture between life as experienced and life as idealized is overly formulaic. Missing is an appreciation of the range of meanings contained in Brazilian folk Catholicism in general and millenarian ideology in particular. As I have argued in my own work, these meanings provided models by which rural people were able to interpret the violence, material deprivation, and crisis of authority and to create redressive actions. These meanings also contain the notion of resentment, which, in my opinion, legitimated and guided protest against the elite who reneged on their responsibilities to provide for their clients subsistence needs. Greater emphasis on meanings, furthermore, permits an understanding of why millenarian beliefs and actions have persisted in Brazil long past the period of major social transformation described in this study.
Yet another facet of meaning is hinted at here, but it merits greater treatment. That is the competing discourses developed by the multiple actors in the Contestado region and in the Contestado struggle. For example, why and how was it that some persons were labeled “fanatics” and “bandits”? In what way were these labels emblematic of the project of a centralizing state and its “progressive” elite? And to what extent did the discourse and actions of the millenarianists represent a profound challenge to the vision and goals of a nascent Brazilian state and bourgeoisie?
Despite these questions, Diacon should be commended for providing a lively account of capitalist transformation and millenarian response in the Brazilian countryside. Not only should his book be required reading for Brazilianists and experts on rural protest, but I would highly recommend it for classroom use.
