Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-43723-3 - Rebellion on the Amazon: The Cabanagem, Race, and Popular Culture in the North of Brazil, 1798-1840 Mark Harris Excerpt More information INTRODUCTION Divergent Amazonia At a major traffic intersection on the outskirts of Belém, one of the largest cities in the Amazon region, a striking monument can be seen. Slabs of concrete emerge from the ground in a diagonal fashion with a single break, like a hand rising from the earth, or perhaps a hand descending into water (what comes to my mind is Stevie Smith’spoem,“Not waving but drown- ing”). Commissioned in 1985 by the state government and designed by Brazil’s leading architect, Oscar Niemeyer, it is a memorial to the Cabanagem, the rebellion 150 years earlier by people of the Brazilian Amazon. Even a backpacker could not mistake the modern regional government’s appropriation of the rebellion. Yet the monument may be read in various ways. To some local residents it is an inconsequential piece of public art, while others gather there every year to mark the anniversary of the great assault on Belém on January 7. To the historian, it may represent the power of the masses to challenge how they are ruled, yet also the success of Brazil as a nation in quashing dissent and preventing its fragmentation shortly after independence from Portugal. The Cabanagem rebellion of 1835–1840 was not only a struggle by oppressed people analogous to many other such struggles around the world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was also potentially separatist. It might have proved the turning point at which the Brazilian Amazon diverged from the rest of Portuguese-speaking America. Instead, the rebellion’s ultimate failure forced the region back into convergence, subordinating its sociological and historical distinctness to a larger entity. An internal colonialism was achieved whose legacy lasts to this day. Ever since, the rulers of Pará (the name of the state in the eastern Amazon encompassing most of the rebellion) and Brazil have had to contend with the region’s ambiguous identity; and the significance of the Cabanagem is as contested today as ever. The present study goes back to the contemporary documents, though few of those that survived were written by the rebels. This book can be described as an historical ethnography written by an anthropologist. I hope that nothing intrinsically separates my methodology from that of someone trained in “history,” but also that my anthropological fieldwork in Pará gives this study a distinctive strength. Since 1992 I have conducted fieldwork with 1 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-43723-3 - Rebellion on the Amazon: The Cabanagem, Race, and Popular Culture in the North of Brazil, 1798-1840 Mark Harris Excerpt More information 2 Divergent Amazonia peasant riverine dwellers in Pará (in a place upriver of Belém), and their oral histories are rich with references to the Cabanagem. They tell, for example, of the way the Portuguese hid their money and gold inside saints’ icons, or buried it under the ground as they fled quickly to avoid the rebels. My experience of life in and on the Amazon gave me privileged access to the riverine world of these people and their bosses, and has allowed me to marry an ethnographically sharpened sensibility with R. G. Collingwood’s method of imaginative reenactment of the ‘inside’ of human actions – people’s 1 thoughts and purposes. I aim to paint an overall picture of the social and political conditions of life in the Amazon in the early nineteenth century: a shaped form in which to place rebel motivations. This approach is like creating a face from a mask. The sources certainly exist for such an approach. Many have already been used by other scholars of the Cabanagem. Since the 1840s the rebellion has been the object of diverse examinations and commentaries. These examiners include visitors who came in the aftermath and heard anecdotes from those who had witnessed terrible scenes, military officials who wrote memoirs and a 2 priest who collected stories. Around the centenary of the Cabanagem, a series of books appeared that were based on a close reading of some of the extensive 3 documentation in the archive in Belém. The men who wrote these works were the first to address systematically such core problems as the conflict 1 My understanding of Collingwood and the method of reenactment has been coached by Tristan Platt. See, for example his “Knowing Silence and Merging Horizons: The Case of the Great Potosí Cover- Up” (with Pablo Quisbert), in Mark Harris (ed.), Ways of Knowing, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007. For Collingwood’s statement on reenactment, see his Epilegomena in The Idea of History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, 282–302. 2 The visitors included the Protestant missionary Daniel Kidder (James Cooley Fletcher and Daniel Parish Kidder, Brazil and the Brazilians: Portrayed in Historical and Descriptive Sketches. Boston: Little, Brown, 1879), the Victorian naturalist Henry Walter Bates (The Naturalist on the River Amazons, 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1863), and the Prussian Prince Adalbert (Prince H. W. Adalbert, Travels in the South of Europe and in Brazil with a Voyage up the Amazon and the Xingu. London: 1849). The military officers were Felipe Leal (F. J. P. Leal, Correções e Ampliações ao que Sobre a Revolução que Arrebantou na Cidade do Pará em Janeiro de 1835 publicou o Conselheiro João Manoel Pereira da Silva. Bahia, 1879) and José Bettancourt (author of unpublished documents). The priest was Francisco Bernardino de Souza (F. de Bernardino de Souza, Lembranças e Curiosidades do Valle do Amazonas. Pará, Typografia do Futuro, 1873). 3 These main authors here are Jorge Hurley (A Cabanagem, Belém: Livraria Classica, 1936; and Traços Cabanos, Belém: Oficina Gráfica, 1936), João de Palma Muniz (Adesão do Grão-Pará a Independência, Belém: Conselho Estadual da Cultura, 1973, though strictly speaking this work is not on the Cabanagem it nevertheless is a substantial study of the independence period leading up to it), and Ernesto Cruz (“A Cabanagem,” in História do Pará, vol. 1, Belém: Universidade Federal do Pará, 1963). Connected to this group but slightly later was Arthur Cesar Ferreira Reis, whose broad body of work covers all periods of Amazonian history, though he never wrote a study specifically on the Cabanagem. See especially his História do Amazonas, Belo Horizonte: Editora Itatiaia; and A Política de Portugal no Valle Amazônico, Belém: Secult, 1993. © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-43723-3 - Rebellion on the Amazon: The Cabanagem, Race, and Popular Culture in the North of Brazil, 1798-1840 Mark Harris Excerpt More information Divergent Amazonia 3 4 between regional and national élites. Subsequent analyses developed related themes, including the role of Afro-Brazilian slaves and Indians, the ideological 5 bases of the rebellion and Pará’s social networks with the transatlantic world. Along with contemporary historians of Pará, I begin from the view that the insurrection cannot be portrayed as a conflict between two clearly marked 6 enemies and that its origins are to be found in the colonial period. Consistent with recent scholarship on most rebellions in post-independence Brazil, I also argue cabanos were not separatists. Rather, they were defenders of their way of life and motivated by their interpretation of liberalism. At the time, the rebels used the term patria, or homeland, to refer to the place they wanted to protect, which signified, according to Roderick Barman, “the visible, physical community in which an individual was born, brought up, married and 7 pursued a living and raised a family’” 4 However, the first examination of the Cabanagem was Motins Políticos, ou Historia dos Principais Acontecimentos Políticos da Província do Pará, desde o ano de 1821 até 1835 (or literally “Political Revolts” for short, 3 vols, Belém: Universidade Federal do Pará, 1970) by Domingos Raiol. Originally comprising five volumes and published between 1865 and 1890, it remains foundational to under- standing the turbulent period from independence to the Cabanagem. Raiol’s father was murdered by rebels in a town in the interior; this fact seems to have committed him to a life of collecting material and then completing his study (while also serving in important political offices). Raiol, like anyone, has his prejudices; for example, the lack of interest in popular politics, but he treats the primary documents with respect. Given that documentary sources on the rebellion are extensive – difficult for any one researcher to command – the work of others becomes critically important. Whatever the biases of previous studies, I have found particularly useful those that have dealt reasonably with the documen- tation and permit new questions to be asked of it. 5 In the following chapter I review the secondary literature more fully. Some of the most recent authors who have written on those topics are Vicente Salles, for example, Memorial da Cabanagem, and “A Cabanagem, os Escravos, os Engenhos,” 33–49; in his O Negro na Formação da Sociedade Paraense, Belém: Editora Paka-Tatu, 2004; Miguel Menendez, “A Área Madeira-Tapajós: Situação de Contato e Relações entre o Colonizador e Indígena,” in Manuela Carneiro da Cunha (ed.), História dos Índios do Brasil. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992; Magda Ricci, “O Fim do Grão-Pará e o Nascimento do Brasil: Movimentos Sociais, Levantes e Deserções no Alvorecer do Novo Império, 1808–1840,” in Mary Del Priore and Flávio dos Santos Gomes (eds,), Os Senhores dos Rios: Amazônia, Margens e Histórias, Rio de Janeiro: Elsevier, 2003; and “Cabanagem, Cidadania e Identidade Revolucionária: O Problema do Patriotismo na Amazônia entre 1835 e 1840,” Tempo (Niterói), 2007, 11, 22, 5–30; John Chasteen, “Cautionary Tale: A Radical Priest, Nativist Agitation, and the Origin of Brazilian Civil Wars,” in Rebecca Earle (ed.), Rumours of Wars: Civil Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Latin America.