Honor, Status, And Law In Modern Latin America

by Caulfield, Sueann; Chambers, Sarah C.; Putnam, Lara

• ISBN13: 9780822335870
• ISBN10: 0822335875
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-07-01
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

This collection brings together recent scholarship that examines how understandings of honor changed in Latin America between political independence in the early nineteenth century and the rise of nationalist challenges to liberalism in the 1930s. These rich historical case studies reveal the uneven processes through which ideas of honor and status came to depend more on achievements such as education and employment and less on the birthright privileges that were the mainstays of honor during the colonial period. Whether considering court battles over lost virginity or police conflicts with prostitutes, vagrants, and the poor over public decorum, the contributors illuminate shifting ideas about public and private spheres, the growing intervention of the state in defining and arbitrating individual reputations, and the enduring role of patriarchy in apportioning both honor and legal rights.Each essay examines honor in the context of specific historical processes, including early republican nation-building in Peru; the transformation in Mexican villages of the cargo system, by which men rose in rank through service to the community; the abolition of slavery in Rio de Janeiro; the growth of local commerce and shifts in women's status in highland Bolivia; the formation of a multiethnic society on Costa Rica's Caribbean coast; and the development of nationalist cultural responses to U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico. By connecting liberal projects that aimed to modernize law and society with popular understandings of honor and status, this volume sheds new light on broad changes and continuities in Latin America over the course of the "long nineteenth century."ContributorsJosé AmadorRossana BarragánSueann CaulfieldSidney ChalhoubSarah ChambersOlivia Gomes da CunhaEileen FindleyBrodwyn FischerLaura GotkowitzKeila GrinbergPeter GuardinoCristina Schetti PereivaLara Putnam

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Introduction: Transformations in Honor, Status, and Law over the Long Nineteenth Century
Lara Putnam, Sarah C. Chambers, and Sueann Caulfield	1	(26)
I LIBERALISM, STATUS, AND CITIZENSHIP
Private crimes, public order: honor, gender, and the law in early republican Peru
Sarah C. Chambers	27	(23)
Community service, liberal law, and local custom in indigenous villages: Oaxaca, 1750-1850
Peter Guardino	50	(16)
The "spirit" of Bolivian laws: citizenship, patriarchy, and infamy
Rossana Barragán	66	(21)
Interpreting Machado de Assis: paternalism, slavery, and the free womb law
Sidney Chalhoub	87	(22)
Slavery, liberalism, and civil law: definitions of status and citizenship in the elaboration of the Brazilian civil code (1855-1916)
Keila Grinberg	109	(22)
II POPULAR USES OF THE LAW
Trading insults: honor, violence, and the gendered culture of commerce in Cochabamba, Bolivia, 1870's-1950's
Laura Gotkowitz	131	(24)
Sex and standing in the streets of Port Limon, Costa Rica, 1890-1910
Lara Putnam	155	(21)
Slandering citizens: insults, class, and social legitimacy in Rio de Janeiro's criminal courts
Brodwyn Fischer	176	(25)
Courtroom tales of sex and honor: rapto and rape in late nineteenth-century Puerto Rico
Eileen J. Findlay	201	(22)
The changing politics of freedom and virginity in Rio de Janeiro, 1920-1940
Sueann Caulfield	223	(26)
III THE POLICING OF PUBLIC SPACE
The plena's dissonant melodies: leisure, racial policing, and nation in Puerto Rico, 1900-1930's
José Arnador de Jesús	249	(24)
Prostitutes and the law: the uses of court cases over pandering in Rio de Janeiro at the beginning of the twentieth century
Cristiana Schettini Pereira	273	(22)
The stigmas of dishonor: criminal records, civil rights, and forensic identification in Rio de Janeiro, 1903-1940
Olívia Maria Govnes da Cunha	295	(22)
Contributors	317	(4)
Index	321