IN DEFENSE OF HONOR: SEXUAL MORALITY, MODERNITY, AND NATION IN EARLY- TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRAZIL by Sueann Caulfield. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. 311 pp. Cloth $59.95. ISBN 0-8223-2377-X. Paper $19.95. ISBN 0-8223- 2398-2.

Reviewed by John Michael Norvell, Department of Anthropology, University of Montana.

The 1920s and 1930s in Brazil were crucial decades in the formation of the nation. The political and intellectual ,lites of this period were extraordinarily concerned with presenting a modern face to the world, especially to Europe. Increasing urbanization had produced cities, like Rio de Janeiro, that diverged markedly from the rural, patriarchal Brazilian social landscape famously described by sociologist Gilberto Freyre as the roots of Brazilian civilization. World War I had showed the deep problems of liberal democracy in Europe, and the United States was still struggling with the aftermath of slavery half a century after the Civil War. For Brazilians, these decades offered a chance to show off the promise of Brazil's unique social formation to countries they had strived to imitate since before the declaration of the Republic in 1889. They also had to engineer a society that conformed to this export image. The political consolidation of Getœlio Vargas's Estado Novo dictatorship, declared in 1937, would harden the new social discourses and carry them through the Second World War period and into fully modern Brazil.

Sueann Caulfield's detailed social and legal history illuminates the many ideological strands that shaped the legal and academic debates of this period by linking them to discourses on nation, family, gender, sexuality, class, and race, all tied together through the idiom of "honor." Her book does an admirable job of orienting the reader quickly and smoothly to the scene in Rio de Janeiro right after World War I, concisely summarizing the development of positivist legal philosophy and judicial practices from colonial governments, through the independent "Empire," and into the rocky early years of the Republic. Previous scholarly attention has been paid to the questions of honor and female virginity at the turn of the century, and Caulfield deftly and appreciatively guides her own research interests past this work and into the next period. Social concerns at the end of the twentieth century are evident both between the lines and sometimes in them. Her history of this period has great relevance for contemporary issues of gender, race, and class and the legal contexts that help shape them.

The book is centered around accounts of two very dissimilar events: the royal visit of the King and Queen of Belgium to Rio in 1920 and the constant parade of plaintiffs legally accusing carioca (as Rio's residents are known) men of "deflowering" their minor daughters, sisters, etc. The way these cases were constructed by all the participants changed in subtle but important ways, over the long term (they started under rule by the Portuguese Crown and continued to be brought to court up into the 1970s) and also during the two decades under scrutiny in the book. Mining such

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slippery terrain for the ideological underpinnings of the emerging nation is difficult. The explicit pronouncements, policies, and public projects in the planning and aftermath of the royal visit crystallized the both the discursive fractures and the commonalities of the Brazilian population.

Caulfield's description of the royal visit is fascinating reading in its own right. The architectural, legal, medical, and educational reforms begun at the turn of the century were given focus and urgency by the impending visit. Rio's ,lites tried to prepare the city for international scrutiny and use the occasion to advance their views on the ideal society. Blocks were razed, buildings refurbished or newly constructed, prostitutes and other marginal types relocated, routes carefully planned to allow the royals to appreciate the promises of tropical modernity without seeing the substantial symptoms of a clinging backwardness. As it turned out, the royal couple had a grand time, charmed everyone, were suitably impressed, and even managed to see and admire such views of the popular classes as their guides allowed.

In classic Foucauldian style, Caulfield shows how diverse disciplines called out by the planning for the visit - urban planning, sanitation, biomedicine, the social sciences, and law - merged around a gendered notion of honor whereby good, "honest" families, living in and frequenting the right kinds of neighborhoods and establishments, marrying the right kinds of people, and keeping their daughters virginally intact were consistently defended against their counterparts living out the negative stereotypes of the popular classes. She notes that "hymenolatry" prevailed until the late 1930s despite strong protests from some jurists who felt that the legal- medical examination was excessive, backward, and scientifically suspect. Although both medical opinion about the significance of the holy membrane and confident assertions about its physical state and moral meaning by the young men standing accused of rupturing it loom large in the testimony, the varied insinuations drawn from less morphological criteria are equally important for understanding the role of the maiden in anchoring the morality of the nation.

Factors such as the girl's appearance, habits of dress and movement about the city, economic status, residence, family structure, and police record were all valid parts of a defense which boiled down to "she can't have been a virgin." Families that seemed to be conforming to the expectations of modern Brazil on all these points were more likely to make stick their assertions of their daughters' virginity and the marriage agreement they ultimately sought from such proceedings. The statistical tendency for accusations against men who were somewhat lighter in skin color and somewhat better off shows that those who sought legal recourse were close enough to the norm to insist on their honor and its judicial restoration but not close enough to be able to command it on their own, privately.

Lengthy summaries and quotations from the legal records of deflowering cases are more or less limited to Chapter Four, and I found myself wishing for more. As the authors admits, the demographic value of the legal records is diminished by sometimes inconsistent or missing information, the maddeningly ambiguous nature of some of the categories, "racial" ones especially, and the often rehearsed and formulaic nature of the complainants' statements. So, the more spontaneous elements of testimony are important. Caulfield obviously has an anthropologist's ear for the nuances of speech. Perhaps the genre constrained the

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use she could make of it in this book. This chapter could have held my interest through far longer and more numerous excerpts from the police and trial records.

Comparative legal scholars may find the descriptions of legal doctrine inadequate. Brazil's judicial and police system is complicated and rather unique, and the book doesn't provide much background here. On the other hand, the fact that legal theory is explained only to the extent necessary to understand debates over the definitions of "honor" and its attendant concepts helps to streamline the account and more persuasively highlight the relation between evolving legal and political discourses on honor and the nationalist ideologies of the era. The Catholic Church also receives less attention that it would deserve (in a book of twice the size and half the readablility); references tend to be to a rather monolithic "Church" weighing in on social issues.

The body of the text concludes with a chapter - the longest of the book - on the "importance of color in sex and marriage," and it is here that I find some room to quibble. Despite the nuanced account of this particular "factor" in the construction of Brazilian honor, Caulfield falls into trap a very common in scholarly work on Latin American "race" over the last twenty years. In a nation, which defines itself in large part on its racial mixture and supposed corollary lack of racial prejudice, the crucial role played by sex and marriage is obvious. In a culture where "racial" or "color" terminology is notoriously fluid and ambiguous, defining this role precisely - whether historically or ethnographically - is impossible. Caulfield admits that the categories of the census (largely, although not entirely, those of the police and court records as well) are nearly useless on the subject of race. Still, as in most historical and social science work on "race" in Brazil, the terms are assumed to mean something despite the classificatory difficulties, and conclusions are drawn about the way the social realities of "race" are expressed in discursive sites such as legal proceedings. The occasional use of the term "Afro-Brazilian" in this book marks the insistence that despite the dazzlingly long and often contradictory list of native Brazilian "color" terms and the absence of "Afro-Brazilian" from this list, that "race" means "descent" in some irreducible way.

Caulfield seems to take a constructivist position on gender - gender categories are produced by convergent discourses that give them meaning partly in and through institutions like the police and the courts-and this perspective should be fully extended to race as well. "Race" is produced as one kind of a thing through the officializing practices of census, birth certificate, and court records, and as another kind of thing through social interaction in the Bohemian spaces of Rio's complex urban geography, and as yet another in the bedroom. Caulfield, following the sociologist Roger Bastide, says that "race" is brought into the sexual embrace. Rather, I would say, "race" is produced there. As a result of such openings for a subtly re-essentialized "race," critics of Brazil's "racial democracy" mythology are reduced to two options: either sexual and marital preferences are shaped by racism or in spite of it. The third possibility, that "racial" difference is a positive source of sexual desire (or, rather, a marker of a certain kind of sexual desire), is admitted and then immediately dismissed because it too often fits the stereotype of the white man who seeks a "white woman for marriage, a mulata for sex, and a black women for housework." The male choice implied in this construction is the result of a discourse

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significantly more to do with gender than with "race." Moreover, in many of the court records Caulfield cites, we see men and women being identified as variably "white" or "brown" and "brown" or "black" according to the strategic motives of the identifier. The "race" being produced in this setting is as much "about" social class as phenotype, probably more.

The clearest indication that race as an irreducible category is being deployed is the note of surprise or irony with which an author notes the "silence" or "reluctance to mention" race in a particular discursive setting.

Caulfield says that in all the cases she looked at, no testimony included references to color, except once when the intent was apparently merely to distinguish one, lighter person from another, darker one. "The silence on color," she writes, "might be explained by a tacit recognition among deponents that color difference was not a legitimate impediment to courtship or marriage, even if it was a de facto one." This is a strain, the kind produced by peering too intently into the dark waiting for something to appear.

Brazil's national "racial democracy" is neither "racial" nor democratic. Complex social hierarchies of gender, class, and color persist despite more than a century of modernization and democratization. The notion of family honor that Sueann Caulfield expertly teases out of the Rio judicial archives is plausibly one of the major sources of their perpetuation.