Book Review

Caribbean and Latin America

The connections among military service, heroism, and masculine honor are so deeply embedded in popular consciousness that it is difficult to imagine a time and place where military service was regarded as patently dishonorable and unmanly. Yet that revelation is the starting point for Peter M. Beattie's fascinating and very fine study of military recruitment in Brazil. Opening with the era of the Paraguayan War and ending with the return of the Brazilian expeditionary force from Europe at the end of World War II, Beattie traces the shifting elite and popular attitudes toward military service, and in the process, illuminates changing definitions of masculinity and national identity in Brazil.	1
Historians of Brazil (and many other nations) would not be particularly amazed to learn that the Brazilian free poor avoided military service like the plague in the nineteenth century, but previous works have tended to explain this aversion to military service in terms of the deplorable material conditions and abusive treatment. Beattie acknowledges these factors but points out that many of the members of Brazil's poorest classes "lived under still harsher conditions" (p. 5), rendering this an inadequate explanation for why Brazilians deemed military service not only undesirable but dishonorable. Drawing on anthropologist Roberto da Matta's conception of Brazilian society as divided into the realms of "the house and the street," with the house the place of honor and order and the street the realm of potential danger and dishonor, Beattie observes that the "public" nature of military service, and the distance (social as well as geographic) between the barracks and the house, made recruitment into the army incompatible with poor men's struggles to maintain their honor, and the honor of their families. Physical distance left them unable to protect the women of their household and removed them from webs of patronage and protection. The very term popularly used for soldiers—praças (praça being the Portuguese equivalent of plaza)—indicates their social distance from the house. Even worse, military service exposed them to corporal punishment, especially humiliating in a slave society, and to insinuations of male-on-male sexual relations.	2
In the first section of the book, Beattie examines the repeated failure of the state's efforts to develop the army as a "disciplining institution" for Brazil's poor and as a means to promote a stronger sense of national identity among the popular classes. Such elite aspirations continually foundered on both popular resistance to recruitment and the common sense among all social strata that military service was not honorable. Attempts to remedy this situation following Brazil's less than glorious victory over tiny Paraguay culminated in a patchwork of reforms that stopped far short of producing a system of universal male conscription and did little to erase the notion that "recruitment degraded the status of 'men and sons of families'" (p. 74). A major part of the problem, according to Beattie, was that government officials tended to be oblivious to the free poor's own concerns with honor, especially the fact that for the poor, honor "meant protection from impersonal state power" (p. 76). Here Beattie is affirming a broader historiographical interpretation of politics and citizenship in nineteenth-century Brazil that presumes that the popular classes maintained an almost exclusively hostile relationship with the emerging national state and relied, instead, on relations of patronage and clientele as a source of honor, security, and subsistence. Yet much recent research on postcolonial Latin America has argued for rethinking the relationship between the state and the popular classes, noting broader popular participation in the public sphere than previously acknowledged, unearthing a tradition of popular liberalism in nations as diverse as Colombia and Mexico, and citing cases where men of the poorer classes used military service to reinforce their claims to expanded citizenship rights. It may well be that specific historical circumstances in Brazil—including the persistence of slavery into the late nineteenth century–gave questions of honor, rights, and the state a very different set of meanings, but such a conclusion would require at least some comparative consideration of the politics of military service.	. . .