Review of: Coffee Planters, Workers and Wives: Class Conflict and Gender Relations on São Paulo Plantations, 1850-1980

7/feLATIN AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW 4(1) 23 Antonio Conselheiro and the religious movement he led can supercede class and racial factors and whether politics among the local poor. In the same way that Andrews points are structurally male oriented, thus providing an inherently the finger at the planters and the state for marginalizing Afro- unfairarena in which to resolve genderstruggles. By focusing Brazilians in the south, Levine argues that an alliance of local on conflicts within the women's movement, Alvarez suggests landowners and the Catholic Church hierarchy pushed the that the concept of "women's interests" is not in and of itself Brazilian government into destroying Canudos and the strong enough to forge immutable coalitions. Indeed, as the movement it encompassed. author points out, the logical result of a growth in the organized political power of women was the "male-dominant opposition's The Abolition of Sla very and the Aftermath of Emancipation in Brazil'is a uniformly superb collection for anyone interested determination to garner the political capital respresented by in race relations in the Americas. The articles are expansive female constituencies" (p. 111). Thus, between 1979 and in method and provide scholars with both new questions and 1981 attempts to create a single "Women's Movement" were new ways of asking old questions about slavery, abolition, and unsuccessful because class and ideological divisions led many politicized women to take sides within the already the relationship between rich and poor. organized opposition. Sonia Alvarez argues convincingly that the Brazilian civil Engendering Democracy in Brazil: Women's state "has been far 'friendlier' to Brazilian women" than the Movements in Transition Politics. SONIA E. military / authoritarian one and argues strongly that "the State is not monolithically masculine or antifeminist" (emphasis in ALVAREZ. Princeton: Princeton University Press, original, p.272). This conclusion, like Alvarez's distinction 1990. 304 pp. $14.95 (paper). ISBN 0-691-02325-5. between gender oppression and class / racial oppression, are controversial ones and will widen the debate among scholars JEFF H, LESSER over the role of women in modern politics and over the Connecticut College strategies that women use in gaining formal political power. Alvarez's provocative style, and her well-supported Sonia Alverez's excellent Engendering Democracy in Brazil conclusions, make Engendering Democracy in Brazil extremely provides an example of how studies that are often ghettoized useful for scholars and students. by the academy (Women's Studies, Black Studies, Jewish Studies) are indeed critical in understanding broad issues. Alvarez's main focus is a fascinating one: why did the transition Coffee Planters, Workers and Wives: Class Conflict from military to democratic rule in Brazil in the late 1970s and and Gender Relations on Sao Paulo Plantations, early 1980s lead not on ly to the personal politicization of large 1850-1980. VERENA STOLCKE. New York: St. numbers of women, but to their entrance into the formal Martin's Press, 1988. 256 pp. $55.00 (cloth). ISBN political sector as well? 0-312-01693-X. Alvarez takes a short-term historical approach to answering this question, looking back to the origins of the Brazilian CLIFF WELCH women's movement following the so-called Revolution of 1964, when the military seized power from the populist Grand Valley State University government of Joao Goulart. This change in regime had wideranging effects on the social and economic position of Brazilian In this revised translation of Cafeicultura: Homens, Mulheres women. On the one hand the new military dictators focused e Capital (1850-1980), the anthropologist Verena Stolcke their rhetoric on "Family, God and Liberty," implying that attempts to show how class struggle influenced the formation, traditional models of gender and family relations were persistence, and decline of the colonato labor system on necessary for national economic and social progress. On the coffee plantations in the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil. As Stolcke other hand, the miltary program of massive economic growth relates, the colonato "combined work in coffee with selffurther concentrated wealth in the hands of a few and thus provisioning," compensating the majority of workers for clearing forced growing numbers of poor women to work. This, virgin land, planting, cultivating and harvesting the coffee according to Alvarez, created "militant mothers and insurgent trees through both task and piece-rate wages, and the provision daughters" whose anger led them to re-evaluate both the of residential and land-use privileges (p.xiii). This labor roles and their means of political interaction (p.57). At the regime holds special interest for the study of capitalist same time the change in economic structure afforded middle- development in agriculture, and the book is most successful class women, exactly those who would eventually lead the in describing the regime and its transformation from 1850 to feminist movements of the 1970s and 1980s, new opportunities 1980. in both eductation and occupation. While recognizing that Until the 1880s, slaves performed most tasks on coffee class played an important role in the way in which women plantations in Brazil. With abolition on the horizon, however, were able to gain power, Alvarez does not really explain why planters in Sao Paulo began to experiment with free labor as the middle and upper-middle class women who eventually early as the 1840s and 1850s. The first chapter of the book became political party stalwarts and leaders never formed treats this subject by recounting the trials and tribulations that strong coalitions with the poor women for whom organized turned planters away from the alternatives of straight wage party activism was an unaffordable luxury. labor, sharecropping, tenantry, and towards the innovative One of the most fascinating aspects of Engendering colonato. Following abolition and consequent to the increasing Democracy is its attempt to link broad questions surrounding demand for coffee in the industrializing nations, Sao Paulo regime change to specific theoretical questions. Alvarez, for planters perfected the colonato in the 1890s and early 1900s, example, properly asks whether notions of "women's interests" subsidizing the immigration of families from Europe and 24 7-^LATIN AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW 4(1) installing them as colonos on the state's expanding coffee farms. Stolcke portrays this process vividly, carefully detailing the complex labor relations uniting planter, colono, his family, and changes in the international coffee market. The book's analysis of the relationship between peaks in the coffee market and restrictions on the colono's land-usage benefits is thought provoking. During periods of high coffee demand, planters often prohibited colonos from planting food crops between rows of coffee trees, thus limiting the colono's income. In this and other discussions, Stolcke confronts analysts such as Thomas Holloway and Maurfcio Font who emphasize the benefits of the colonato for colono social mobility. For Stolcke, the colonato offered minimal opportunities for co/onofamilies, changing shape in response to planter needs and generating the main chance only for the largest and most opportunistic families (chapter 2). For labor analysts, the most interesting argument of the book is that regarding the determining influence of class struggle on the development of the Brazilian coffee economy. As Stolcke states, "the confrontation between the power of Sao Paulo coffee growers and the different modes of worker resistance to exploitation-at times individual, attimes collective and organized-provided the force that transformed productive relations on Sao Paulo plantations" (p.xv). For the period charting the rise of the colonato, Stolcke documents her thesis convincingly (curiously ignoring, however, relevant questions such as the influence of slave resistance on the transition to free labor) but the evidence grows quite thin in her examination of the decline of the colonato. Although coffee planters vigorously defended the colonato throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the system disappeared by 1970. As Stolcke explains, the unusual flexibility of the labor regime offered them a perfect articulation between their traditional status as planters and their vocation as agricultural capitalists. Thus, in the years leading up to the colonato's demise, the number of colonos on Sao Paulo estates actually increased. But despite Stolcke's preoccupation with the theme of class struggle, the bulk of her discussion of the post World War II epic centers on the politics behind the contemporary debates of the agrarian sector's contribution to economic development. In brief discussions of life on the coffee plantations, technological innovations seeking to modernize production methods receive attention for forcing changes in labor relations (pp.87-97). After 1960, Stolcke attributes the obsolescence of the colonato partially to the government-subsidized eradication of millions of coffee trees (pp.97-100). Passage of the Rural Labor Statute in 1963 carries the most weight for Stolcke. The new labor law confronted planters "with a direct challenge of the very basis of their economic and political power, namely their unrestricted control over labour" (p.110). The law made the colonato less flexible and advantageous for planters by demanding them to pay wages to other working members of the colono's family and by prohibiting them from deducting the value of the food produced by colonos on the plantation from salaries (p. 120). Given these circumstances, planters abandoned the colonato and contracted middle men to hire daily wage workers in order to evade the labor law. While Stolcke credits "a context of political radicalisation in the countryside" for forcing a conservative congress to pass the labor statute, the class conflict represented by this radicalization merely shadows the main focus of her account (p. 109). It is a "context" rather than a reality; the real forces at work are powerful politicians and planters. When discussing class relations, the focus inexplicably shifts to the state of Pemambuco and the peasant leagues of Francisco Juliao, returning to Sao Paulo only to recount a few sugar mill strikes. Thus, the central thesis regarding class struggle on coffee estates in Sao Paulo remains fully undocumented during this crucial moment. Stolcke may be partly excused, for her silence reflects gaps in the literature on rural social relations in Brazil that have only recently begun to be filled. In the last three chapters of the book, Stolcke exercises her skills as an anthropologist in search of coffee worker consciousness to shed light on the class tensions that weakened the colonato. But these chapters seem an awkward appendage to an ambitious and suggestive political history of the rise and fall of the colonato on Sao Paulo's great coffee plantations. Understanding Central America. JOHN A. BOOTH and THOMAS W. WALKER. Boulder: Westview Press, 1989. xvi + 208 pp. $34.50 (cloth), $13.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8133-0002-9, ISBN 0-8133-0003-7. GORDON URQUHART Cornell College This examination of the root causes of political crisis in Central America sets out to challenge the findings of the 1984 Kissinger Commission. The Commission's report, although recognizing that both internal and external factors could be blamed, found intervention by the USSR and Cuba to be the primary source of the unrest. The authors of this book attack both the methodology and the findings of the report. Their intention isto replacethe"ideological, partisan and analytically biased" findings of the Commission with a more robust and well-supported theory of their own. They begin by examining the most popular alternative theory which states that the popular revolutionary movements in the region are the products of wealth inequality and the extreme poverty of the proletariat. This theory is held suspect on the grounds that similar levels of poverty and similar wealth inequality in other parts of the world have not produced the levels of unrest and action found in Central America. The authors offer as a substitute a proposition that outbursts of such revolutionary activity are created, not by the statics of poverty level and wealth distribution, but by the dynamics of falling real income levels among the poor and widening wealth differentials. Booth and Walker, while certainly not apologists for United States policy in Central America, do not deny that this country has legitimate interests in preserving peace in the region, and in keeping hostile interests from establishing bases there. They argue that United States leaders have, in fact, made the likelihood of the entry of adverse interests to the region much greater through policies that have contributed to growing inequality and, therefore, to revolution. One of the strengths of the proffered theory is that it appears to explain differences between levels of violent activity in various countries. The more static theory mentioned above fails to do this. The defense of the primary thesis could well have been made in a fairly brief journal article. The statistical material