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This book traces the history of early seventeenth-century Portuguese Sephardic traders who settled in two communities on Senegal's Petite Côte. There, they lived as public Jews, under the spiritual guidance of a rabbi sent to them by the newly established Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam. In Senegal, the Jews were protected from agents of the Inquisition by local Muslim rulers. The Petite Côte communities included several Jews of mixed Portuguese-African heritage as well as African wives, offspring, and servants. The blade weapons trade was an important part of their commercial activities. These merchants participated marginally in the slave trade but fully in the arms trade, illeg...
This innovative study considers how approximately seven thousand male graduates of law came to understand themselves as having a legitimate claim to authority over nineteenth-century Brazilian society during their transition from boyhood to manhood. While pursuing their traditional studies at Brazil's two law schools, the students devoted much of their energies to theater and literature in an effort to improve their powers of public speaking and written persuasion. These newly minted lawyers quickly became the magistrates, bureaucrats, local and national politicians, diplomats, and cabinet members who would rule Brazil until the fall of the monarchy in 1889. Andrew J. Kirkendall examines the meaning of liberalism for a slave society, the tension between systems of patriarchy and patronage, and the link between language and power in a largely illiterate society. In the interplay between identity and state formation, he explores the processes of socialization that helped Brazil achieve a greater measure of political stability than any other Latin American country.
This history of the Brazilian family in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries studies the relationship between the informal institution of the family and such formal social institutions as medicine, the law, organized politics, and the church. The author focuses primarily on middle- and upper-class families (for whom adequate documentation is available) and shows the change from a patriarchal model of the family to one that was more conjugal and nuclear, a change necessitated by an insecure and urbanizing economy. Nevertheless, Bahian families maintained many traditional values and traditional kin networks. The author examines the daily life and dynamics of households, including what is kno...
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The book discusses the representation of Amazonian indigenous cultures in art and anthropological exhibitions through the analysis of a series of case studies of temporary exhibitions taking place in museums and biennials in Brazil, Europe and the United States spanning a period of 25 years from the mid-1980s. The book puts forward the concept of ‘minor curating’ as a strategy to amplify access to collections of historical relevance for indigenous peoples and to enable them to develop projects that are politically, historically and culturally meaningful for their own societies through curatorial authorship.
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Warren Dean chronicles the chaotic path to what could be one of the greatest natural disasters of modern times: the disappearance of the Atlantic Forest. A quarter the size of the Amazon Forest, and the most densely populated region in Brazil, the Atlantic Forest is now the most endangered in the world. It contains a great diversity of life forms, some of them found nowhere else, as well as the country's largest cities, plantations, mines, and industries. Continual clearing is ravaging most of the forested remnants. Dean opens his story with the hunter-gatherers of twelve thousand years ago and takes it up to the 1990s—through the invasion of Europeans in the sixteenth century; the ensuing...
Around the year 1800, independent Native groups still effectively controlled about half the territory of the Americas. How did they maintain their political autonomy and territorial sovereignty, hundreds of years after the arrival of Europeans? In a study that spans the eighteenth to twentieth centuries and ranges across the vast interior of South America, Heather F. Roller examines this history of power and persistence from the vantage point of autonomous Native peoples in Brazil. The central argument of the book is that Indigenous groups took the initiative in their contacts with Brazilian society. Rather than fleeing or evading contact, Native peoples actively sought to appropriate what w...