It has been a few weeks since I got back from attending the 10th Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA) meeting in Brasília, and it is nice to have a bit more time to reflect on everything I saw and heard. I should have kept up with my intention to tweet during panel sessions, but once on the scene I felt self-conscious that twitter is not yet part of Brazilianist conference culture. Maybe Brazilianists are all about Orkut. Plus the #BRASA tag is in frequent use already on Twitter, apparently with connotations I don’t quite get. What else could it mean? Wait, don’t answer that.
Even though I know it is contrary to the very nature of conference blogging to reflect on the panels from such a distance, I want to share some of my thoughts. In self-promoting mode, I’m going to start with the panel I organized on Digital History: Challenges and Promises of New Methodologies. My goal with the panel was to bring together Brazilianists working in Brazil and the U.S. to discuss the possibilities and pitfalls of digital history, and to share our digital projects on Brazilian history. While we employed digital tools in different ways, taken together we made a compelling argument for the appeal of digital history for diffusing primary sources, making research into Brazilian history more accessible to students and non-Portuguese speaking researchers, and mapping data in new ways to make spatial arguments about historical change.
As I said at the conference, I could not have done it without the help and friendly encouragement of Ian Read, and Jane Landers’ generous participation as our commentator. Jane’s work as Director of the NEH-funded project Ecclesiastical Sources and Historical Research on the African Diaspora in Brazil and Cuba is a testament to the importance of digital projects for preserving and diffusing historical records.
Ian Read “Geospatial Approaches to Brazil’s “Era of Epidemics”
Before the 1850s, Brazilian port cities were free from the epidemics of communicable diseases that plagued other Atlantic ports. Ian’s research demonstrates how advances in transportation technology coupled with Brazil’s greater participation in Atlantic shipping routes linking North America, Europe, and the Brazilian coast after 1849 inserted Brazil into an epidemiological web that wreaked havoc on a Brazilian populace and economy. His larger project considers how the devastating epidemics Brazil suffered during the second half of the nineteenth century, including yellow fever (1849), cholera (1855), and bubonic plague (1899) impacted Brazilian economic development.
For this presentation, Ian used digital mapping to examine the emergence and diffusion of yellow fever in the 19th century Americas. You can see the video of his dynamic map here on his blog. His incorporation of geospatial evidence – from Brazil’s isolation from the yellow fever cases in the rest of the Americas before 1849, to his work linking the spread of yellow fever upriver in Louisiana and Brazil with the introduction of steamship technology – is a wonderful example of how to employ digital methodologies to make new historical connections. He persuasively argues that the immense boom in travelers lured from Europe and the east coast of the U.S to take the sea route to San Francisco after the discovery of gold in 1849 – a voyage that by necessity involved a dramatic increase in the traffic to Brazilian ports – was crucial in the spread of the aedis aegypti mosquito, the vector for yellow fever.
Mario Marcos Sampaio Rodarte “Publicação crítica de censo sócio-demográfico e econômico para a província de Minas Gerais”
Mario represented a team including Clotilde Andrade Paiva and Marcelo Magalhães Godoy from the Centro de Desenvolvimento e Planejamento Regional (CEDEPLAR) at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.
More than a decade ago, a research group headed by Clotilde began working on the painstaking task of creating a database of the 1830s Listas Nominativas (Household Census lists) for Minas Gerais. The team has always been generous about sharing this work with outside researchers. I first met Marcelo at the Arquivo Público Mineiro in 2002 when he saw me transcribing the manuscript census for Sabará and offered me a text file of their dataset. This act of kindness saved me months of tedious work.
The Household Censuses are a goldmine for scholars interested in any aspect of 19th century Mineiro social or economic history. Parish by parish, the census lists the inhabitants divided into households. Each individual is identified by name, age, color, marital status, free/freed status, occupation, and relationship to the household head. The level of detail included reflects the priorities and knowledge of the local census taker; for example, some parishes divide slaves into family groups and provide information about African ethnicities, while others simply list slaves in order by sex and age.
For the panel, Marcos presented the CEDEPLAR team’s new website providing access to the full set of Household Census files, which includes data for more than half a million individuals (about 10% of the Brazilian population, and about 60-65% of the population of Minas Gerais at the time). The website allows anyone who registers (free) to run queries on any of the variables recorded in the census, as well as to subdivide their research by region. The site also provides filters that allow searches that focus on the head of household: to name just a few examples, the age differences between spouses, the free/slave status of spouses, household head’s occupational status, the presence of slaves, and classification according to Laslett’s household type.
These sources have already inspired groundbreaking historical investigation like Laird W. Bergad’s excellent Slavery and the Demographic and Economic History of Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1720-1888; greater accessibility can only increase the historical debates over Minas after the mining boom.
Katie Holt “Imagining Bahian History: The 1835 Santiago do Iguape Household Census Database”
My own work in digitizing one the 1831 Household Census for Santiago do Iguape, Bahia has similar goals, albeit on a smaller scale than CEDEPLAR’s comprehensive project. In contrast to the nearly-complete coverage for Minas Gerais, only four 1830s Bahian censuses survive. Located in the township of Cachoeira, Santiago do Iguape was home to many of the Recôncavo’s most extensive sugar plantations. The best know historian who has worked with this source, and published many insightful analyses of seigniorial family structures, slave ownership by free people of color, codification of notions of race and identity, is Burt Barickman.
The Mapping Bahia website is a research project that makes use of two key strengths of digital history: first, the opportunity to make primary sources more widely available, allowing students and scholars interested in the history of Atlantic slavery and the African Diaspora to learn more about sugar plantations in Brazil; and second, the ability to collect, evaluate, and analyze sources in dynamic ways using digital tools as a historical methodology to create a more nuanced understanding of domestic life in a plantation setting. By bringing together quantitative evidence, travel accounts, and images, what new insights can we gain about the construction of social networks in Bahia? A website has the potential to create a collaborative space for historical investigation, an open ended scholarly commons.
Pat Seed “The Cartographic Invention of America began with Mapping Brazil”
Pat Seed, despite heroic efforts, was not able to attend BRASA in person. She volunteered to create a digital version of her research presentation for us to show, but a technical glitch kept us from viewing it during the panel. I am thrilled to be able to show it here so that the many attendees who wanted to see her presentation now have the opportunity. She narrates her video in English, and the text is in Portuguese to reach a broader audience.
Pat’s work interrogates the European imagination of the world as reflected in maps, using early Portuguese maps to argue for Africa’s central place in the Portuguese worldview even after 1500. As she reminds us, Columbus’ voyages forced Europeans to move away from their previous tripartite conception of the world. Pat argues that even after 1492, European writers clung to this tripartite vision by continuing to depict the Caribbean as a chain of peripheral Atlantic islands. Only Cabral’s voyage to Brazil prompted the Portuguese to adopt to a vision of the world with four distinct regions.
Through a careful analysis of five of the seven maps depicting Brazil in the first decade after Cabral’s journey, Pat asks us to reconsider the worldview and accomplishments of Early Modern Portuguese cartographers. Pat marshals visual evidence to show that these Portuguese representations of Brazil were born from the tradition and experience of nautical cartography honed in Africa. This is visible both in cartographers’ remarkable technical accomplishments in creating maps of Brazil in the first two years after contact, and in their spatial representations of the Americas that continued to place Africa directly in the center of the world map. At the time when the maps were created, Portuguese cartographers were understandably focused on Africa and African routes to the spices of the East. The graphic design of these early maps reflects contemporary Portuguese priorities.
In many ways, Pat’s analysis of these early maps of Brazil build on her larger digital project exploring the history of Portuguese mapping of the African coast in the late 15th century. Her website Portuguese Mapping the African Coast employs geospatial visualizations show the progress of Portuguese expeditions as they mapped coastal Africa.
