child labor in brazil

Learning Courage: Child Labour as MoralPractice in Northeast Brazil

Maya MayblinUniversity of Edinburgh, UK

abstract This article explores the moral dimensions of child labour as cultural prac-tice in Northeast Brazil. It reveals a link between children’s participation in labour andlocal constructions of childhood as a period of ontological uncertainty and impendingtransition. Through detailed ethnographic exegesis, the article reveals the symbolicdimensions surrounding children’s engagement in productive endeavours, and showshow the local opposition between ‘work’ and ‘play’ arises out of an encompassingmoral process. The article critiques the tendency within protectionist influencedanthropological literature to acknowledge the important contribution that childrenmake towards material survival, while denying that contribution any deeper culturalsignificance.

keywords Childhood, Brazil, labour, morality, protectionist discourse, play

Introduction

The historical record suggests that the labour of children has been indis-pensable to the development of human economies, from slavery throughto modern day agro-industry and the urban informal sector. It is signifi-

cant, however, that while much scholarly attention has been paid to the sym-bolic value and deep cultural meanings attached to gendered divisions oflabour in various parts of the world, comparatively little has been writtenabout the meanings attached to the division of labour by age. In NortheastBrazil, patterns and types of child labour in the rural economy vary widely –from the production of charcoal, coffee, cotton, vegetable products, and sugarcane in the fields, to the production of bricks, and the processing of maniocflour in flourmills. Children’s participation in these kinds of labour has beenexplained as a response to poverty and a lack of agricultural mechanisation,

ethnos, vol. 75:1, march 2010 (pp. 23–48)# 2010 Routledge Journals, Taylor and Francisissn 0014-1844 print/issn 1469-588x online. doi: 10.1080/00141840903402476

and it has also been strongly linked to high levels of indebtedness, land fragmen-tation, and the growth of share-cropping (Goodman 1981; Wyer 1986).1 Suchtypes of explanation are important for illuminating the historical patterns ofsocial inequality that lie beneath the surface contours of everyday life forpoor, rural Brazilians. They explain the labour of rural Northeast Brazilian chil-dren in economic terms, revealing it as a response to poverty, and casting it asimportant evidence of the State’s failure to adequately protect the youngest ofits marginalised citizens. In this article, however, I wish to explore the possibilitythat there can be more to children’s labour than simple economic survival, orrather, that simple economic survival can involve more than meets the eye. Inthis context, I shall discuss children’s labour as perceived by adults to begeared as much towards the production of spiritual value as it is towardsvalue of a material nature. Woven into its practice is an encompassing Catholicunderstanding about human nature, its capacity for selfishness and greed, andfurthermore, its capacity to overcome this selfishness and greed throughself-sacrifice. Survival in the world thus necessitates not only that labour isperformed, but that it is performed in a way that effectively addresses thisexistential dilemma (Mayblin 2010).

For a long time in Brazil, civil organisations such as workers’ unions,churches, and NGOs have been lobbying for governmental programs toaddress the problem of child labour. In 1988, the federal constitution of Brazilpronounced children and adolescents to be an ‘absolute priority’, and supportedthe prohibition of nocturnal, dangerous, or unhealthy labour for childrenunder 18 years of age, and any type of labour for children under the age of 14,except in a situation of learning or professional training. In 1990, the Statuteof Children and Adolescents ratified the prohibition of labour for children,which prohibits children under the age of 14 from working, because of theharm to their ‘physical, psychological and moral development’ (Gustafsson-Wright & Pyne 2002).

In 1996, the Program for the Eradication of Child Labour (or PETI, for short)was established by the government to provide cash stipends to low-incomefamilies to keep their children in school. In 1998, PETI became operative inSanta Lucia, a rural village in the Northeastern state of Pernambuco, where Icarried out fieldwork. In Santa Lucia, the project had the specific aim of tacklingchild labour in the artisan flour mills, where poisonous manioc roots arescraped, crushed and baked into an edible flour called farinha, one of thestaple diets of the region. Of the 12 children from seven different village familieswho were then participating in the scheme, only two had continued to work on

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a regular basis in the local mill. The risk of receiving a state fine had led Seu Jo,the owner, to cut down on the numbers of children working directly for him.But, as he himself admitted, there was little he could do to prevent childrenfrom passing the time of day in and around the mill in the company of theirparents, and helping out on an ad hoc basis behind his back. The mothers ofthe PETI children were all women who worked in the mill themselves, andthose whom I interviewed claimed that the cash stipend received made asignificant difference to their lives. Indeed, all seemed actively in favour oftheir children attending school, their hope being that it would lead them tobecome educated, and to achieve a better quality-of-life in the future. Adecent state school education was unanimously perceived as a desirableobject. However, in the same breath that they applauded the PETI scheme,mothers would often go on to express a certain amount of concern at thepossibility that their children would be kept from doing any sort of work, forthe reason that they might never develop the constitution to handle it whenolder. As one mother put it to me:

PETI is good, it is, woman, yes! Nowmy children go to school and the State paymentis a help. But school is only for three hours. After school what do they do? Should itbe they do nothing? The other day my eldest was here in the mill and I said to him,son, just help me scrape this pile of manioc and we can leave here early. Well, it wasonly a small pile left, and he said: ‘I won’t do it, no. It’s boring’ Because Maya, withPETI here in Santa Lucia, he’s lost all his courage for work.

In fact, many of the women I talked to were divided about the benefits of theproject for their children. Their main concern was that by not being allowed towork at all, children could not acquire coragem, a term loosely translatable inEnglish as ‘courage’ – although the connotations are slightly different as Iwill attempt to explain in due course. In the meantime, however, a furtherexample of its use occurs in the words of another friend and informant DonaRosinha. Dona Rosinha was a mother of three and grandmother of six, fourof whom were in receipt of PETI stipends. When I asked her about it shesaid to me the following:

In my day children had to work, and not a little, we worked a lot. Never questioned it.It was just the way. One gave thanks to God simply for having that work. But sincePETI started, how do children learn to endure those hard tasks?. . . Mine know howto work. I trained them from young to scrape manioc, plant a field, fire bricks – evento dig wells. But my grandchildren? They do nothing of the sort. Soon there will be no


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future for them, doing the kinds of work we have around these parts. They will turninto people who lack courage to survive around here and will be forced to leave thevillage for good.

In this article, I seek to understand such a view, in particular, I seek to under-stand why, despite financial remuneration and growing awareness of a protec-tionist discourse within and without Brazil, many Santa Lucian adults worrydeeply about the exclusion of children from the world of work. The expla-nations offered here are part and parcel of a broader local discourse about theplace of children and adolescents in the world, and one that maps onto a specifi-cally moral and ontological conundrum. I shall propose that in order to fullyunderstand attitudes towards child labour in the Santa Lucian context, oneneeds to recognise that late childhood and adolescence is locally constructedas a period of ontological uncertainty and impending transition; one in whichan original state of innocence is ever-diminishing and being replaced with astate of knowledge and a newfound capacity for sin. For the people of SantaLucia, the management of this transition is a delicate question, to whichschooling, alone, provides no answer. Schooling helps children develop theirknowledge, but knowledge does not, in and of itself, make a moral person. Infact, it is precisely children’s acquisition of knowledge that parents seek tobalance via the discipline and humility of physical labour.

About Santa LuciaSanta Lucia is a small, Catholic village numbering some 150 households,

which lies in the semi-arid interior of Pernambuco, in the Northeast of Brazil.Its inhabitants survive through a mixture of semi-subsistence agriculture, live-stock rearing, and itinerant wage-labour in nearby towns and the manioc flour-mills that dot the region. Because of the limited and intermittent nature of landreform in the region’s history, most of the land in Brazil’s Northeast hasremained in the hands of large landowners who are mainly unavailable. Theinfamous inequalities in power, wealth and land distribution this gives rise tois widely noted and commented upon within the political and historicalliterature on the region (de Castro 1969; Fraginals 1975; Forman 1975; Mitchell1979; Goodman 1981; Scheper-Hughes 1992; Carvalho Branco 1997). Equallywell described, however, are the various radical social, political and religiousmovements that arose in this region, in response to social inequity. Of thesevarious movements, Catholic Liberation theology, the Landless People’sMovement, and the Peasant League, have all had a particular influence on the


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social, political and religious culture of the region, and especially among thepeasantry and working class among whom Santa Lucians are included.2

In Santa Lucia, the unpredictable climate, poor soil, and small size of land-holdings, combined with the use of traditional, manual farming methodsmake earning a living from agriculture a difficult task. Nevertheless, beingsmall-holders as opposed to landless share-croppers and sugar plantationworkers, Santa Lucians enjoy a significantly better quality-of-life than manyof their rural counterparts. Reflected in this quality-of-life is a relative level ofequality among village inhabitants who are roughly divided in terms of thesize of their land-holding, but not in the strict sense of class. Now, as in therecent past, the patron–client relation that exists between better-off small-holders and other villagers is one that includes working alongside oneanother in the fields and manioc flour mills, intermarriage and a strong senseof shared identity.

Given the socio-economic climate of the region, it is perhaps unsurprisingthat a great number of songs, poems, and personal narratives producedlocally centre upon the difficult nature of agricultural labour. In such narratives,the physical labour is linked quite explicitly to the religious-philosophicalmaxims of ascetic suffering and moral perfection. Thus, people who consciouslypresent themselves as, or are observed by others to be, hard working sufferers,come to be known and labelled as trabalhadors. The term trabalhador, literallytranslated, means ‘worker’, but when extended to individuals in certain contexts,it denotes an especially hard worker – someone whose capacity to labour andsuffer on behalf of their family is popularly perceived as being beyond the call ofduty. Such persons, no matter what misdeeds and sins they are known to havecommitted, are regarded as pre-eminently moral persons and are accorded aspecial status.

The negotiation of moral personhood is a central and ongoing preoccupa-tion for Santa Lucians. For them, the need to live both morally and productivelyin the world presents something of an existential challenge. This challenge, as itis locally perceived, crystallises around an understanding of knowledge (saber/conhecimento), emerging from the gradual loss of innocence (inocencia) involvedin the process of growing up, and culminating in marriage. Thus, while youngchildren are perceived to occupy an elevated spiritual state due to their lack ofknowledge and concomitant lack of sin, adults – married ones in particular –are perceived in the opposite sense, as being socially productive but spirituallypolluted. Adults must therefore strive, in various different ways, to counteractthe inevitable fact of their spiritual pollution by projecting themselves as


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morally and socially acceptable persons. This is largely achieved through theeveryday performance of songs and narratives of suffering, which reconstructan individual’s actions and misfortunes in terms of heroic self-sacrifices madeon behalf of close kin and community. Ideally, such performances and narrativeswork to establish the subject as an essentially moral, alter-centred person.Whether and to what extent this is achieved, however, depends upon theskill of the performer to convince and move their audience. Thus, not alladults manage to establish reputations as moral persons, and those who doso are accorded a significantly higher respect and social status (Mayblin 2010).

My concern in this article, however, is not about the ways in which adultsestablish and negotiate moral personhood, but about the ways in whichadults prepare children to do this. Thus, my focus will be upon adults’ percep-tions of children’s social development, the particular problems children arebelieved to confront, and the role of child labour in addressing these. Ofcourse, the existence of child labour in different parts of the world not onlyraises the issue of what is produced, but also of what it suggests about ‘child-hood’ as a cultural and historical construct. In Latin America particularly, sur-prisingly few studies of contemporary children consider the possibility thatthere may be multiple forms and concepts of childhood coexisting with oneanother at a single moment. Still less, that the terms and limits of these sociallyconstructed notions are partially set by children themselves (Hecht 2002a,2002b:247).3 In Brazil, the immense social disparity between the upper andlower classes and the qualitative differences this leads to in terms of childhoodexperience makes it impossible to speak of childhood in any singular sense. Inbetween the emblematic problem of Brazil’s street children and the privilegedworlds of Brazil’s rich children, cloistered in gated, air-conditioned apartments,there lies a multitude of other childhoods, ranging from rural to urban, fromfixed to transient, and appearing as anything from ‘privileged’ to ‘harsh’. React-ing to this situation has lead theorists such as Goldstein to state that ‘in Brazil,childhood is a privilege of the rich and practically nonexistent for the poor’(Goldstein 1997:41). The Brazilian writer Campos, commenting upon the lackof separation between ‘work’ and ‘childhood’, laments that poor Brazilian chil-dren are ‘unable to fully live their childhood’ (Campos 1993:151). Yet as scholarssuch as Zelizer (1985) point out, ideas about childhood as a time of freedom fromwork and economic responsibilities are both culturally and historically peculiar.Thus, she observes that it was only from the 1930s onwards that children in theUSA came to be seen as ‘economically worthless but emotionally priceless’(p. 110). Likewise, as Nasaw (1985) writes in his history of American, newly


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urbanised, working-class families: ‘There was nothing new or extraordinaryabout asking children to go to work. Only recently has childhood become –almost by definition – an age of irresponsibility’ (pp. 41–2).

Thus in what follows I shall begin by discussing how Santa Lucian peopleconstruct childhood in a particular way, as a phase of the life-cycle whichposes a unique existential problem. I shall then go on to explore how childlabour practice apparently offers a solution to this problem. Indeed, part ofthe reason why it is so difficult to generalise about child labour stems fromthe diverse forms and contexts in which it occurs. There is little comparisonto be made, for instance, between the more extreme cases of bonded or incar-cerated child labour in brothels, mines, and factories, with the mundane choreschildren perform in around the household as part of daily life. While recognis-ing the serious ethical issues at stake in some more extreme forms of childlabour, my focus here is with the more mundane types of labour that occurwhen children participate alongside kin in agricultural work. During fieldworkI never perceived such labour as forced, nor did it preclude children fromattending school. The peculiarities of this context need to be borne in mindparticularly when, later on, I turn to address some of the dominant assumptionswithin the literature on child labour in the Brazilian context.

The Problem of YouthIn Santa Lucia, the level of knowledge and awareness that marks one out as

an autonomous and fully accountable adult person is not achieved untilmarriage. Nonetheless, older children and adolescents are explicitly recognisedas different from criancas (little children), and are referred to as jovens (youth).Being in the classic turn of phrase, ‘betwixt and between’ innocence and fullknowledge, jovens are a frequent source of adult preoccupation and aresubject to increasing discipline.

The first sign that a child is becoming a jovem occurs around (or slightlybefore) the age of puberty. At this time, brothers and sisters who may haveshared a room and even a bed together will finally be given separate roomsto sleep in. More often than not, due to sizes of families and restrictions ofspace, separate sleeping arrangements, rather than rooms, are found.4

Another change that occurs around this time relates to the expected com-portment of jovens during church services. It is usual for children of all ages,including babies, to accompany their mothers to church. During any churchservice, one can be distracted by the playful kafuffles, bored sighs, andunorthodox observations of children and infants. Little children are highly


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visible in church, not only because of their different comportment within it –running and climbing rather than walking and sitting – but also because ofthe way in which they use the church space. Whereas the place for adults iswithin the seating area of the congregation, facing the crucifix and altar,young children are permitted to sit upon the step of the inner chancel and,like the priest, face the congregation with their back to the altar. In thisarrangement of bodies within the church, a manifest connection is madebetween the spiritual purity of the innocent child, the unmarried (childlike)priest, and that of God embodied in the crucifix. The elevated purity ofthese categories is expressed through their occupation of the most sacredspace within the church, separated from the nave where the spirituallyimpure congregation sits.

As children turn gradually into jovens, they cease to run, climb, and sit on theraised platform of the chancel. Although children as old as 10 and 11 will utilisechurch space differently from adults, the place for children who have had theirfirst communion is firmly within the congregation. Most children appear toadapt their behaviour without ever being told to do so. On occasion,however, a concerned looking mother will pull an older child away from thechancel step. If there is no space left on the pews, the child might sit on thefloor in one of the aisles, but must sit facing the altar and crucifix.

The change in bodily comportment within the church should be mirrored bya new fervour towards attending it. Whereas little children who do not wish togo to mass are allowed to remain at home, older children are not let off so easily.This is particularly the case with girls who, once they start attending catechismclasses, are expected to attend every mass and rosary.5Thus parents who are notparticularly church-going themselves continually reprimand older children formissing church services. On one occasion as I sat with my host family, 14-year-old Katiana announced her intention to miss prayer that eveningbecause ‘it was boring’. ‘Boring!’ roared back her father, who was stretchedout in front of the television, with no intention of attending church himself.‘Things of God are not to be judged by you or anyone else as boring’, and heordered her to leave for church immediately.

The Dangers of Playing and ‘Doing Nothing’In accordance with the spatial and comportmental changes wrought by

puberty, children are expected to manifest a change in attitude towards childishoccupations. As children become older, their play (brincadeira) comes underincreasing scrutiny from adults. Parents are forever trying to prevent older


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children from joining in the games of younger siblings. On any typical after-noon, close kin and neighbours will gather in the shade of one another’s door-steps to sort beans, plait straw for hats, and exchange gossip. As they do so, anassortment of younger and older children will dart from courtyard to courtyard,playing tag, rolling marbles in the dirt, and climbing the skinny guava tree in thecentre of the village. During such times parents call out intermittently to olderchildren, ordering them over to the shade of the doorsteps to lend a hand withwhatever task they are involved in. Women frequently talk about the need toteach their daughters an occupation such as crochet or embroidery in orderto para-las de brincar ‘stop them from playing’. As one woman told me in refer-ence to her 11-year-old son: ‘I got so anxious watching him pass the day playingthat I asked my father-in-law to let the boy look after his horses. Well, thankGod, now he has some proper work’. Play in older children is perceived as pro-blematic for various reasons. The main reason being, however, that older chil-dren are much too sabido (knowledgeable about the world). In Santa Lucia, playis an ambiguous kind of activity indulged in by children and adults alike, anddeemed to be both creative and potentially sinful. The danger of play, it issaid, is that it can lead to malandragem (mischievous immorality).6 Indeed thisconcern over the concept of play maps onto a wider preoccupation with thecreative but dangerous potential inherent in all unstructured, imaginative, andopen-ended forms of social interaction. In the local imagination, play is analo-gous to the ‘trickster eudemonic’ that appears in Jamaican ritual and folklore.According to Austin-Broos (1997), in Jamaican folk tales, the trickster figureof Anansi uses the enigma of play to question the logic of moral disciplineand to resurrect sensuousness and the ‘fallibility of a rational world’ (1997:49).In doing so he ‘inevitably creates an openness in life, a liminal beyond control-ling norm’ (1997:47; see also Pelton 1980:63–7). Thus, while playful games andforms of interaction such as sport, theatre, carnival and traditional forms ofimprovised verbal duelling are indulged in by people of all ages, they carry acertain amount of risk. The risk for younger, more innocent children is con-sidered innocuous, and in full adults, is considered to be easily controllable.However, for jovens who are between innocence and knowledge, play isneither innocuous, nor readily controllable.

However, if parents are anxious about the problems of play, they are equallyas worried by the idea that their jovem ‘does nothing’ ( faz nada). Whereasnobody notices what a younger child is doing, adults maintain a constant suspi-cion that their older charge ‘do nothing’. I became accustomed to askingwomen how they were, only to hear that they were deeply anxious because


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one of their children was ‘doing nothing’. The weight of parental anxiety in thissense often seemed in excess of what jovens actually did or did not do to arouseit. An interesting case in point would be Jeferson, the 15-year-old son ofIvanulda. Whenever I saw Ivanulda, she would complain at length about thefact that her son was fraco (weak), and did nothing all day, not even properlyattending school. Much like other parents I knew, Ivanulda was apt tocompare her son’s general ‘weakness’ with her own forca (strength). ‘Look atme’, she would exclaim, ‘Everyday, even when I am tired, I prepare thedinner, wash the plates, feed the animals, and sweep the house’. Ivanulda’sperception that her son ‘did nothing’ stood in splendid contrast to her ownsense of activity and endurance.

Hard as I tried to understand it, Ivanulda’s anxiety seemed a little excessive.For as far as I could tell, Jeferson was an obedient, polite, and helpful boy whonever caused much trouble – at least not by the standards of trouble I had seenother adolescent boys cause their parents. One day I was present as Ivanulda,her sister, and Otavio (Ivanulda’s brother-in-law), were discussing theproblem of Jeferson. At one point Otavio hinted, jokingly, that he couldresolve the problem by paying for Jeferson to visit a prostitute: ‘The boy is atthat age where he needs to lose his virginity’ he declared.7 Ivanulda laughedand reminded Otavio that Jeferson had already had several girlfriends. Ele ja esabidinho! ‘he is already knowing/cunning’, she proclaimed. Nevertheless, andto my amazement, Ivalnuda was not actually opposed to the idea that herson sleep with a prostitute, her only suggestion was that it was also high timeJeferson started accompanying his father to work in the family field. Everyonenodded. What Jeferson needed most, they all agreed, was to cultivate his ownpatch of crops.

Although the solutions suggested to Jeferson’s problem appeared to strike inopposing directions (i.e. sleeping with a prostitute is, in local terms, an inher-ently selfish and sinful kind of activity, whereas working the land is gearedtowards others and thus virtuous) both kinds of experience are necessary fora person to live successfully and productively in the world. It is thus easy tosee why such opposing ideas arose simultaneously: whatever spiritual pollutionwould accrue to Jeferson through the former activity would be counterbalancedwith the more spiritually productive pursuit of labouring for the household.8

Before going on, however, it is necessary to point out an important differencebetween Santa Lucian conceptions of jovens and Euro-American conceptionsof teenagers. In Santa Lucia, as in many other parts of the world, parents areused to conceptualising youth as a stage of life characterised by difficulty and


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danger. In the West, adolescence is generally perceived as a time of hormonedriven rebellion. Parents worry about teenagers experimenting with sex ordrugs and fear that they will suffer the consequences of immature decisions.In Santa Lucia, by contrast, there is no concept of hormone-driven ‘teenagerebellion’. Interestingly, many Santa Lucian adolescents claim to disapproveof young people known to them who go against their parent’s wishes. Asone adolescent boy I spoke to put it: ‘Why would I go against my fatherwhen it is he who will give me land to work, and to live on?’ In such acontext, young people have a vested interest in not rebelling against theirparents, as parents are a means, rather than an obstacle, to establishingindependence.

As in the example of Ivanulda discussed above, parents are apt to point outthat their jovem is already cunning and knowledgeable at the same time as wor-rying that they are weak and ‘do nothing’. The problem jovens pose for theirparents, I suggest, is not linked to the notion of hot-headedness or rebellion,but to the perception that while jovens are acquiring adult-like knowledgeabout the world, they lack the tools to handle it appropriately. That is, theyhave not yet established full moral personhood. In the following section, Iwill explore how Santa Lucian people deal with this problem through theidiom of labour.

LabourIn Santa Lucia, child labour historically occurred within kin-based contexts,

and was organised tightly around the domestic unit. Thus, children commonlyworked alongside parents and unmarried siblings on the land belonging to theirparents, and sometimes as sharecroppers and wage-labourers on the land ofothers. Aside from the labour of semi-subsistence farming, boys occasionallymigrated with their male kin to participate in seasonal labour in cash-cropagriculture. The most common destination for seasonal migrants from thevillage remain the sugar plantations of the littoral region, as documented byScheper-Hughes (1992) in her monumental Death Without Weeping. Girls also,in addition to semi-subsistence farming, often worked in the local flourmill.Within the last decade, however, children’s labour on sugar plantations andin the flourmills has been singled out by the state for eradication.

Today, as in the past, both boys and girls will remain closely linked to thedomestic sphere from birth until about eight years old. Life until this timeinvolves going to school, playing on the surrounding terrain, and for girlsespecially, performing small domestic chores. As soon as they are able to,


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girls start performing tasks such as watering plants in the horta (garden), helpingto look after younger siblings, lighting the stove, laying the table for meals,drying plates, helping to wash clothes, mincing corn, feeding poultry, and fetch-ing items such as bread and cooking oil from the village store. From 8 to 10 yearsonwards, a girl will perform additional tasks such as fetching water, killing andplucking chickens, cooking food, and sweeping the house. Up until about 8years of age, boys are relatively free of chores. Their only tasks are to helpout watering plants, feeding poultry, and running to the local store for goods.From 8 to 10 years upwards they take on tasks such as grooming horses,taking cattle to and from pasture, bathing and milking cows, feeding swine,and taking lunch out to older kin working in the rocado (cultivated fields).

Between the ages of 8– 10, boys and girls undergo a change, both in terms ofincreased responsibilities and in accompanying status. Coincidentally or not, itis precisely at this stage that older kin start to take note of whether or not a childis showing signs of becoming a trabalhador (hard worker). Boys and girls whoare good at performing their tasks and, most importantly, who appear to enjoythem, will be singled out for praise. When talking among themselves, adults willoften draw attention to the quantity and quality of the help received from chil-dren in the 8– 10 age bracket. They will comment that a particular girl is muitotrabalhadeira ‘very hardworking’, already able to do all the things her motherdoes, or that a particular boy is muito trabalhador as he never fails to get outof bed to feed the animals, even on the coldest mornings. Children who registerlittle interest or aptitude for household tasks are just as likely to be singled out,but for teasing and criticism. As a friend of mine regularly commented of her10-year-old daughter in the presence of friends and neighbours ‘This one hereis terrible for work’.

Such singling out for praise and criticism is linked to a significant event thatoccurs around this age: the participation in labour away from the domesticsphere. From 8 to 10 years of age, both boys and girls are encouraged to accom-pany their parents to the fields, and/or up until recently, the Casa de Farinha.Only a generation ago, a child, upon reaching the age of eight, would receivethe present of a hoe (enxada) from his father. The hoe given to a child of thisage was special for being smaller and lighter than one used by an adult. Suchhoes were not fashioned specially for children, they were simply old onesworn down from years of use by adults. If the handle was too long for theheight of the child, the father would cut it down to the correct size. The receiv-ing of one’s first hoe in this way used to be, I was told, something of a rite ofpassage. Various older people I talked to remembered clearly when they had


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been given their first hoe. The day following its presentation, the child would beexpected to leave for the field along with all the other working members offamily.9 Although these days children do not receive hoes specifically fortheir birthdays, from the day they decide to follow their parents into thefields para trabalhar mesmo ‘to really work’ as people to say, an appropriatelysized instrument will be found. The traditional age for starting to work is nolonger 8 years, as it was in the past, and varies somewhat among individuals.The factors that effect whether at all and how much a child labours will alsovary. What is generally true, however, is that children are encouraged, butnever forced, to labour. Parents say that the decision has to be the child’sown, and my data from children themselves appears to support this claim.Whereas some children I knew had begun working from the age of eight,others had not started until they were fifteen or even older.

Children thus begin their agricultural careers by watching and imitating theirelder siblings and parents. With minimal verbal instruction, the child observesher more experienced relatives and learns to move her body and arms in themost effective way. When she becomes tired or bored, she will abandon herimplement (whether it be a hoe or a manioc peeler) and go off to play, andthis is considered acceptable. Only very gradually, as a child becomes olderand starts to acquire the height and physique of an adolescent, will he beexpected to work more consistently.

During this initial phase, children are still considered by adults to be pequenos,(little ones). Therefore they work alongside their parents, and the work theyperform is under their father or mother’s direction. The product of their workdoes not belong to them but to the parent, it is destined, as are all earningsfrom the casa da farinha or produce from the main rocado for household con-sumption. In the case of field work, however, children are closely watched fortheir enthusiasm and aptitude, and may eventually be given a piece of thefamily rocado. This little quarter, belonging to the child is known as a rocadinho(little field). In the majority of cases, this stage will only be realised if the childhas been working in the main family rocado for some time, and has provedhimself willing and capable of working independently.

The planting of a rocadinho happens in two stages. The first involves a periodof continued apprenticeship. During this initial period or learning, the work oftilling, sowing, and weeding is effected under the direction of – usually – thefather. The money for fertiliser and seeds are also provided by the father whowill work the rocadinho with the child, helping him to plant, tend, and harvestit for the initial seasons.10 In this initial phase, the produce of the rocadinho


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belongs in theory to the child, but in practice tends to get appropriated forhousehold consumption. If the harvest is a good one, part of the credit willgo to the child, and a token amount of the money earned will be turned overto him to do with as he pleases.

Once the initial period of learning is over, children become the sole labourersof their rocadinhos, and the actual owners of its produce. They plant the samecrops that their parents plant in the main rocado: manioc, beans, and corn; or ifirrigation is possible, cabbage, coriander, and peppers. However, rather thanbeing destined for household consumption, rocadinho crops are destined forsale in the market.11 From this period up until marriage, children may worktheir individual rocadinhos and raise their own animals, as well as continuingto work a certain number of days each week on the family rocado. Theamount of time a child has to spend working his own rocadinho will varygreatly depending upon his father’s capacity to pay for additional workers,how big the parcel of land is, and how many siblings there are to divide upthe labour. In times of emergency, a father has the right to appropriate theproduce or cash earned from his child’s rocadinho for his own or the house-hold’s needs. At some point in the future, however, the father is obliged tomake a token repayment to the child he has borrowed from as a way tosever the debt.

Although I have focused on children’s labour in the rocado and rocadinho, itis important to stress that this type and structure of work only applies to chil-dren whose parents are proprietors of an adequately sized plot of land. Forthose whose parents are landless, wage labour is sought on the land ofothers, or in the manioc flourmill. In all cases, work is in addition to, not inplace of schooling. Wage work in these other settings assumes much thesame structure, involving an initial phase of apprenticeship under the aegis ofan employed parent or older sibling, and a later one in which the youngperson lays claim to part of the earnings him/herself.

The practice of allocating land for rocadinhos has been discussed by theBrazilian anthropologists Heredia (1979) and Moura (1977) and is commonamong small holders throughout the Northeast. Heredia explains the practiceas a means of conferring individual status and independence on youngpeople, but also as a way of preserving the authority of the patriarch. Sheexplains this in two ways; first, by identifying the ongoing relation of debtand dependency it creates between the child and the father who invests hismoney in the initial phases of production, and continues to maintain ownershipof the land; second, by pointing to the potential threat to the father’s authority


36 maya mayblin

embedded in the work that children contribute to the household rocado.Heredia notes that as children grow older and require money of their own, con-flict may arise over how to spend the income earned from the main rocado.Allocating parcels of land for independent labour avoids such conflict andany potential challenge to a father’s authority (Heredia 1979).

While I do not disagree with Heredia’s theory, I do not believe that the pres-ervation of a father’s authority is the dominant cause or motivation for such apractice. Far more significant, I suggest, is its educative element. Indeed,Heredia (1979) hints at this when she writes: ‘Individual rocados have an impor-tant meaning in the socialisation process of members of the unit . . . They con-stitute . . . a fundamental preparation for the unit which each [child] willconstruct in the future’ (pp. 107–8). In addition to being a means of preservingpatriarchal authority, Heredia notes that a rocadinho provides young peoplewith essential knowledge of how the business of planting a field is done.However, she does not pursue this interpretation any further and is unspecificabout what exactly is taught or passed on. Pursuing this idea, I want to suggestthat in addition to its economic and material functions, the rocadinho, as withother forms of labour such as scraping manioc in the casas da Farinha, offers amoral counter to the problems of playing and ‘doing nothing’. In other words,we need to think about the practice as part of an overall strategy for dealing withthe spiritually problematic nature of being-in-the-world. Viewed in relation tothe songs and narratives produced by adults, which constitute most types ofphysical labour as the supreme expression of moral consideration for others,children’s labour becomes meaningful, not merely because of its financialpotential, but for its role in developing an essential characteristic of moralpersonhood: that of coragem.

CoragemAll kinds of purposeful activity, especially that associated with agriculture,

that which is considered pesado (heavy), is thought to require one essentialhuman quality: coragem. The word coragem is translated literally as‘courage’. But this literal substitution of one term for its English cognate fails,as translations often do, to convey the richness of what it signified in thelocal context. Coragem, in Santa Lucia, is not simply the ability to disregardfear, it is physical strength – a bodily state of being that enables one to dothings that are either fearful, boring, uncomfortable, or difficult.12

In practice, coragem can be used in a variety of linguistic contexts, some ofwhich appear to emphasise its physiological properties, others which describe


Learning Courage 37

it more as an emotional or psychological state. The former sense arises whenthe word is used to allude to a bodily technique or particular muscle develop-ment needed for a certain kind of activity. An example would be when I wasdiscovered by my host mother, trying in vain to wring large amounts of waterout of a heavy, sodden blanket. ‘Do you not have the coragem for this task?’she asked me. She then placed her broad, sturdy hands, muscular fromdomestic work, next to mine and began to wring with me, demonstratingthe right force required. ‘You have to squeeze with strength’, she saidthrough gritted teeth, wringing a gallon of water out of the material. Thelatter sense of the term occurs in reference to the psychological willpowerand motivation one needs to confront a difficult, tedious, or uncomfortabletask. This becomes evident when people say they lack the coragem to movefar from their families, or simply to leave the warmth of their bed in thechill of the early morning.

The highly differential contexts in which the term is used suggest, onceagain, its flexible application. However, in relation to its application to anypurposeful activity described as labour or trabalho, a continuity of meaningoccurs. One man explained it as follows:

Why does one need coragem to work? Because if you leave the house early when it isstill dark, lift a heavy enxada (hoe) all day, work alone, sun hot on your head, you needto have coragem. My work is finished for the day. But if I had lacked coragem thismorning, I never would have gone to the rocado at all.

In this context, it becomes clear that coragem is an attitude that allows aperson to perform work that is, in some way, mentally, emotionally and phys-ically challenging. This attitude could be further defined as an embodied statecombining both the ability to endure mental tedium and lack of financialreward with the ability to endure physical discomfort and pain. Althoughcoragem in this sense is most commonly associated with work in the fields, itis also commonly spoken of in relation to the flourmill and domestic work.Indeed, coragem is thought essential for enduring the tedio (monotony), of pre-dominantly female tasks such as washing clothes, washing dishes, sweeping thefloor, and the like. The practical aspect of the concept was impressed upon meseveral times during my fieldwork through my own labour experiences. In par-ticular, I was often struck by my own inability to endure simply the tedium andmonotony of women’s work. Especially tiresome is that which pertains to theflourmill, which involves squatting for hours on low stools in semi-darkness,often in silence, while peeling manioc after manioc and tossing the peeled


38 maya mayblin

roots into baskets. Although they clearly did not relish such work, the women Iworked alongside in the mill did not seem to mind the tedium, and would attri-bute their tolerance to the fact that they had started when young and so ‘learnt’to endure it.

The presence or absence of coragem is there at birth. Most people are bornwith it, but a few are born without it. However, even if a person is born with it,this is not enough for it to develop; it needs to be nurtured by parents byaccustoming their children to labour. Speaking to my friend Dimas one dayabout why he had started milking cows at the age of eight, he told me thatit was partly because he wanted to and partly at other people’s urging thathe did it, in order to develop the right muscles in his forearms. He pointedout some of the muscles on the underside of his forearm and told me thathis had developed differently from mine as I had never milked cows as achild. He added that it was impossible to learn this skill properly as an adultbecause it was too painful. His father, I was told, had initially been reluctantto let him milk the cows because, as a learner wastes a lot of milk, they riskallowing the milk dry up. His father had conceded, however, knowing thatif his son did not start young, he would not have the coragem to do itwhen older.

Santa Lucian people often reiterated to me the belief that if a person is todevelop the right level of coragem necessary to confront life successfullywhen older, they need to have started working by the age of 14 at the latest.If pushed, people accept that not working in childhood will not prevent aperson from working in adulthood, but they claim that such a person willnever have the attitude needed to stick with difficult work for very long, andwill be likely to give up at the first hurdle. This, I suggest, is because coragemis perceived locally as a skill, like reading and writing, that requires a longperiod of time to develop. A common phrase uttered by older people whenasked whether or not they attended school is minha educacao era na enxada‘the hoe was my educator’. Such a phrase is uttered with pride, for older resi-dents in particular are unequivocal about the nature of their work. It is true,they say, that a person can learn, in theory, the right way to plant a field orraise an animal. Equally true, they admit when pushed, that with a few days’practice anyone can learn how to milk a cow or swing a hoe. But what theymaintain that a person cannot learn – either in theory or with a few days ofpractice – is how to endure the conditions of work: the climate, the rhythm,the discomfort, and the solitude; how to take all the difficulties and stillreturn the next day, and the next.


Learning Courage 39

The Purpose of CoragemWhy does a person return to a difficult or uncomfortable task, granted that

they have the choice? If you ask a Santa Lucian person why a man returns to ahot field the next day and the next, he or she is likely to answer, somewhat tau-tologically, that it is because the man is a trabalhador. Ask the trabalhadorhimself and he is likely to explain his behaviour in terms of the fact that hehas children to feed. Essentially, he explains his return out of a combinationof love and respect. There may be other reasons, but this is the one you aremost likely to be given. Ultimately, then, the importance of coragem lies inits potential to create trabalhadores (hard workers). The trabalhador is ableto counteract the inevitable sin and pollution of life by demonstrating hiscapacity to suffer on behalf of others (Mayblin 2010). Trabalhadores aregenerally contrasted with preguicosos (lazy ones). Whether laziness is blamedupon the individual himself or upon the individual’s parents depends verymuch on the context, but becoming a trabalhador is seen as ultimately thejoint responsibility of both the individual and their parents. It is assumed thatfor the majority of people, coragem is potentially present from birth andparents are needed to provide a context for its development. Once thiscontext has been provided, however, the child is meant to make the most outof it. The idea that coragem may be absent from birth conveniently explainsthose individuals who fail to develop it despite their parents’ best efforts, aswell as those individuals with lazy parents who succeed in becoming trabalha-dores. The following three examples demonstrate how far coragem isimplicated in the moral formation of a person.

Certain young people who had failed to develop into trabalhadores were fre-quently the target of criticism. Edison was one such man: landless and unmar-ried, his only source of income was helping out on his brother’s poultryenclosure. It took a great amount of provocation for Edison’s brother todismiss him – so strong is the injunction to help out and work closely withkin – but eventually he did due to Edison’s unwillingness to wake up early inthe morning or to return to work after lunch. Edison’s falta de coragem para tra-balhar ‘lack of courage to work’, was roundly disapproved of but it was also per-ceived as just one of those things. Edison’s parents were known to be incrediblyhard workers. His own mother maintained that she did not know where hislaziness came from as she had packed him off to work from the age of 12.

At the other end of the spectrum was 20-year-old Mauro whose lack ofcoragem was covertly blamed on his parents. Mauro’s aunt was a close friendof mine and would often lament the fact that her nephew had never done


40 maya mayblin

a day’s work in his life because her brother had never encouraged him go to therocado when he was young. Mauro neither studied nor worked, but spent themajority of his time riding about on his motorbike. Nothing was ever harvestedfrom the land his father had allotted him, because, it was said, he lacked thecoragem to work it. It was thought scandalous that, as a result, he dependedupon his father to fund his bachelor lifestyle of motorbikes and drinkingsprees. Worse still was the money, it was rumoured, that he regularly stoleoff his grandmother. ‘Do you see the result of not accustoming children withhard work?’ Mauro’s aunt asked me. ‘It is those who lack coragem to workwho steal’.

In addition to people like Edison and Mauro, however, are people who wereproperly ‘trained’ in childhood and turned into adults with coragem only fornon-agricultural types of work. In such cases, it is recognised that somepeople simply are not cut out for certain kinds of work and there is nothingone can do to change that. Various people I knew had a story about abrother or a cousin who had been raised in a rocado with a miniature hoe,but who had never become accustomed to the toil. One such person wasDavi. Davi was a tall, muscular man in his late thirties. His sheer size washeld to attest to his physical strength, but it was well known that Davi hatedto work at the rocado. People said Davi had laboured as a boy and that then,as now, had possessed the physique to perform such labour – even toperform it better than most. However, it was said that he lacked coragem forthat type of work. Davi’s younger brother Dimas, admitted that he had lessphysical strength than his brother but the important difference between themwas that he had coragem to work in the rocado whereas Davi did not. Dimastold me that as boys, their father had taken them to the rocado every day.Each was given a stretch of land to clear by lunch time, but Davi, unlike hisyounger brother, would lose interest after an hour or so and throw down hishoe. When Davi married, instead of taking up his right to independentlywork a portion of his father’s land, he moved to Recife and found work as amechanic.

In Santa Lucia, then, it is recognised that there will always be a certainnumber of people like Davi who are born into a life of agriculture, but forwhom agriculture is not their vocation.13 But for others, a lack of coragem isa serious moral problem. Tales abound about people who left the villagebecause they did not have adequate coragem for agricultural work. A keypoint, however, is that although lacking coragem to work is generally seen ina very negative light, no one disparages individuals for having given up on


Learning Courage 41

agricultural work, provided they had a chance to learn how to do so in child-hood. As my friend and informant Dida would often say, people who leavethe village and do well in the city are those who worked hard when young.14

Using an idiom of kinship, she once explained it thus:

That is why we say the rocado is like a parent. It feeds and educates the young. Whenchildren work there, they have the coragem to do any kind of work when they aregrown. See how some of the young people who left here, left without ever havingdone a day’s work in their life . . . how can they work in the city? They can’t.These are the ones who will end up abandoning their own children and robbingto survive.

In this sense the rocado, like a ‘parent’, is credited as helping to form morallyresponsible persons regardless of whether or not they continue, in adulthood, towork the land. The question is partly an issue of choice. Santa Lucian peopleclaim that young people must acquire coragem in order to make an informeddecision about staying or leaving the village. Everyone should be given theskills to be able to stay in the village if they want to. It is no good to beforced far from home simply because one never learnt to endure the hard, phys-ical graft of rural life.

The danger associated with ‘doing nothing’ during the youthful phase of lifethus becomes clearer when we consider the importance of coragem in local dis-course. When adults say that young people ‘do nothing’, they do not mean thatthey literally do nothing all day, but that they do not do the sorts of things thatwill lead to the development of coragem. This is because coragem is the basis ofalter-centred behaviour which, for the average person, emerges through therespect one shows for one’s kin, entering into a marriage and working to feedone’s family despite the difficulties and travails.

Conclusion: Responding to Poverty or ‘Part of the Culture?’In a political climate driven by the emergence of the Children’s Rights dis-

course of the 1980s, it can be difficult to write about child-labour from a perspec-tive that challenges the focus of ‘protectionist’ oriented studies on this subject.Theorists who do so lay themselves open to charges of moral bankruptcy wherechildren are concerned (Scheper-Hughes & Sargent 1998). Nevertheless, socialscientists have long recognised that a middle class protectionist morality isnot the only morality at work in contexts relating to labour and children, andrecognising the logic of divergent moralities when and where they occur


42 maya mayblin

remains an important task.15 At the very least, such an approach enables us todistinguish between different types of value, and the contexts in which theyapply, even where exploitative processes may be discerned. As Scheper-Hughes and Sargent (1998) comment, ‘[I]n gaining their “rights” in the formof protection from family work, apprenticeship, and wage labour, modern chil-dren may have gained their childhoods but lost considerable power and status’(p. 11). The implications of this form a part of what I have sought to explore inthis article.

In conclusion, I wish to reflect briefly on how the data I have presented herechallenges the overwhelmingly protectionist focus of child-labour studies inBrazil. Tobias Hecht’s (1998) distinction between rich ‘nurtured’ and poor‘nurturing’ children has drawn out one of the key aspects of current debateson children and childhood in contemporary Brazil: that is, the need for manychildren to contribute towards the household income through labour. In thewider literature dealing with this topic, child labour is predominantly analysedas a consequence of global economic markets and neo-liberal policies aimed atminimising the costs of commercial production (Rodgers and Standing 1981;Lavalette 1994; Nieuwenhuys 1994; Correa & Gomes 2003). Indeed, in thedominant protectionist perspective of this literature, children’s labour tends tobe framed solely in terms of its material contribution either to the immediatehousehold or to global Capitalist structures. Accordingly children are arguedto work out of poverty, not choice, and their participation in a wide range ofactivities, from minding other children to tending farm animals is herein castas a form of aberration (Bequele & Boyden 1988; Vittachi 1989; Myers 1991;Kenny 1999, 2007; Correa & Gomes 2003).16 A paradox remains, however:while children’s labour is admitted by theorists as making a crucial contributiontowards basic, material survival, casting it as a form of aberration in turn deniesit any cultural significance or symbolic value. In her ethnographic study ofchild-labour in the Northeast-Brazilian city of Olinda, Kenny attempts toaddress this complex issue by arguing that as long as children’s labour is anextreme adaptation to poverty, it should remain beyond the margins of culturalcomprehension. Railing against analysts who see child-labour as ‘part andparcel of the cultural repertoire of the lower classes’ Kenny (1999) states that:‘The persons of this study do not have a cultural preference for child labour orsee it as more valuable than education, any more than they have a culturalpreference for crowded conditions, unemployment or malnutrition’ (p. 382).

While the liberal tenor of Kenny’s argument is perhaps laudable, the logicemployed nevertheless reduces the complexity of others’ lived-worlds to


Learning Courage 43

a worrying degree. Particularly problematic is Kenny’s use of the term ‘culturalpreference’ which misguidedly implies that ‘culture’ constitutes no more than aconscious set of values neatly adhered to. That a practice has cultural signifi-cance does not by definition make it one of ‘choice’ or ‘preference’. Thiswould imply that a range of viable alternatives were readily on offer. In SantaLucia, children’s labour is geared as much towards the production of moralvalue as it is towards the production of monetary value. Morality, in thiscontext, is perceived much like other human necessities such as food andwater: it is both a requirement and a desire. What Santa Lucian parentsdesire is that their children acquire a gamut of skills for future survival, skillsthat will enable them to negotiate both a competitive work market and themoral and spiritual dangers of the adult life-world. For them, morality is aquality that needs a context in which to be nurtured and taught. Adults mustteach the young not only how to labour, but how to offer that labour as aform of spiritual atonement. Children must learn that labour is, in ideal terms,a sacrifice on behalf of others. Performing labour like this requires coragem –a learned mixture of bodily techniques and psychological states. Thus, it isonly with coragem under his or her belt, a coragem planted in childhood andtended in adolescence, that the adult may yield a productive life and a returnto spiritual grace.

AcknowledgementsThe fieldwork upon which this article is based was carried out between September2001 and May 2003, and was supported by an ESRC studentship. Versions of thispaper were presented at anthropology seminars at Brunel University, the Universityof St Andrews, and the London School of Economics, and I am grateful to thevarious and respective participants on these occasions for their helpful challengesand comments. A special thanks to the anonymous reviewer at Ethnos for sensitiveguidance, and to Rita Astuti, Michael Scott, Peter Gow, andMagnus Course, for theirindelible contributions.

Notes1. In many areas, soil erosion and environmental degradation have also played a part.See, for example, Bunker (1980).

2. Jesuit missionaries began to missionise the region in the seventeenth century, only tobe expelled by the Portuguese Crown both from Brazil and Portugal in 1759. For moreon the history of the Catholic Church in Brazil see Levine (1979:252–9) and Bruneau(1982).

3. In his child-centred study of Brazilian street children, Hecht (1998) points out thatrather than remaining dependent upon their parents, poor children actively seekwork, and are likely to take pride in working and bringing in resources for thehousehold.


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4. A common practice is to allow teenage boys to take all meals at home, but to sleep inthe house of an elderly neighbour whose own children have moved away. In returnfor a place to sleep, the teenager provides company for the elderly person, and‘protects’ them in the night from possible intruders.

5. In theory, older boys should attend church as regularly as girls do. But as men tend toparticipate far less in official church activities than women, in practice, boys face lesspressure.

6. In Brazilian culture more widely, play is an elaborated form of expression andfeatures in many Brazilian rituals, the most famous of which is carnival. See, forexample, DaMatta (1985), who has interpreted the Brazilian carnival as rite of‘disorder’ which functions to challenge and invert social hierarchy.

7. The practice among older males, of paying for a teenage boy’s first sexual experiencewith a prostitute is common throughout the region. In the recent past as Woortmanand Woortman observed for peasants in Sergipe, a boy upon reaching the age of 14undergoes sexual initiation with a prostitute paid for by his father. This kind ofinitiation rite may also take place in group form via the holding of a special festa(Woortman & Woortman 1997:140).

8. While I have drawn out the elaborated distinction Santa Lucian adults makebetween work and play, it is important to recognise that this distinction serves a par-ticular moral purpose. In short, when Santa Lucian people make this distinction, theydo so strategically, and usually in a context of moral reasoning. The distinction helpsto clarify that course of action, which must be taken by parents wishing to fashiontheir teenagers into ‘proper’ moral persons. As such it does not capture theoccasional indistinction between forms of play and forms of work in actual, embo-died practice. Indeed there is much about work in Santa Lucian context which isplayful, such as the practical joking and banter that goes on in work parties, andthe gossip, the reminiscing, and singing that occurs among women in the casa defarinha.

9. Woortmann and Woortmann (1997) note a similar practice for peasants in theNortheastern state of Sergipe. They argue that the age and condition of the agricul-tural implement used by a person symbolises their level of productive contribution tothe household and, hence, their place within the family hierarchy. Thus, the newestimplements are the most ‘productive’ and belong to the father whose activity consti-tutes work (trabalho). Once they become more worn and less productive, they arepassed on to the wife whose use of it constitutes help (ajuda). Finally, when veryworn out, they will be passed on to children whose use of the implement constitutesleisure (lazer) (Woortmand & Woortman 1997:137–8). While the connection madebetween the age and utility of the implement and the material productivity of theperson is interesting it overlooks the question of moral production tied to labour,which is the focus of my own discussion.

10. This, as Heredia (1979) observes, incurs a debt that will never be, nor is ever meant tobe repaid. Instead it bonds the child to his father in a perpetual relationship ofsubmission to his patriarchal authority (p. 111).

11. The crops, once harvested, are turned over to the member of the household (usuallythe father or the eldest son) that normally deals with wholesale produce buyers. Ifthe family sell their own produce directly in the market, the child turns the


Learning Courage 45

produce over to the person who runs the stall. With time, male children will beinitiated into handling this process themselves. The skill, as already discussed inChapter 2, is to negociar (do business) and is considered an important one forboth sexes to muster. Being a predominantly male activity, however, it is morecommon to see boys helping to sell produce in the market.

12. In this sense, the term coragem is more akin to the French term, to mean having the‘heart’ for something, where heart combines strength, commitment and love.

13. Although local discourse emphasises the regretful nature of permanent migration tothe cities due to the migrant’s separation from close kin, and their giving up of acommon lifestyle and identity, there is some implicit recognition of the advantagesto those who remain behind. Permanent migrants usually ‘lend’ on an indefinitebasis or sell their share of land to their siblings, thus allowing the productivecapacities of household units to remain relatively stable over time see, Moura (1977).

14. Upon further questioning, she clarified that rocado work was not the only type tohave this positive effect, other kinds, including housework and waged work inthe casa de farinha would serve the same ends.

15. For important works within this tradition of scholarship, see for example (Hoggart1957; Willis 1980; Reynolds 1991).

16. The protectionist perspective, as I have termed it, is strongly aligned with thepoliticised view of childhood as a period of freedom from social and economicresponsibility. Common to this perspective is the notion that children should be‘protected’, at all costs, from the physical and emotional stresses of adult labour.

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New York: Basic Books.


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