Antonio Conselheiro Research Articles

RETRATOS EM PAPEL E MADEIRA: ANTONIO CONSELHEIRO NA XILOGRAVURA E NO CORDEL

Antonio Conselheiro, the political and religious leader of the Belo Monte community, where the Canudos War took place between 1896 and 1897, is a notorious figure. Appearing in the popular imaginary as well as in several artistic productions, Conselheiro has been portrayed in countless ways in the most diverse textual genres. The present paper adresses verbal and nonverbal portraits of Conselheiro, making use of the semiotic analysis concepts of figurativization and thematization. pipipi analysis of two chapbooks of Cordel literature, Guerra de Canudos, by Raimundo Santa Helena, and Antonio Conselheiro, o Santo Guerreiro de Canudos, by Rodolfo Coelho Cavalcante, and of the woodcuts on the covers of the same two chapbooks.

Rever o passado para estigmatizar um presente incômodo: Montano e outros “heresiarcas” do século II no olhar de Euclides da Cunha sobre Antonio Conselheiro

This article addresses how Euclides da Cunha, in Os sertões, approaches Christian leaders of the 2nd century, viewed as heretics, in order to stigmatize the figure of Antonio Conselheiro. Particularly, the millenarian tenor of Montano’s announcement, applied without further ado as an interpretative key to the Conselheiro’s preaching, serves to affirm the historical infeasibility of what Belo Monte (better known as Canudos) represented for the backlands’ men and women who bet their lives on it. It is highlighted how the author's mistake is also due to prejudice with religion and with the central place it occupied in the Conselheiro’s project.

Europa, ¿una ventana o un espejo? La intelectualidad autoritaria de Brasil ante los encantos del Viejo Mundo (1902-1937)

Cuando en 1888 se abolió la esclavitud y en 1889 la República sustituyó al Imperio, parte de la intelectualidad del litoral meridional del Brasil creyó imaginar que estos cambios sólo eran el comienzo de un proceso de modernización que equipararía el Nuevo y el Viejo Mundos. Pero menos de una década después, la guerra entre el Estado y los fanáticos milenaristas de Antônio Conselheiro dejaron patente una vez más la distancia entre el país legal y el país real. Ello reavivó el debate en las filas de una intelectualidad reaccionaria –de la que se analizan casos como el de Oliveira Viana y Plínio Salgado, que siguió mirando a Europa. Todo ello bien en busca de soluciones tales como el autoritarismo y el fascismo, bien para denunciar la reproducción de modelos exóticos que, como supuestamente ocurría con el liberalismo, la democracia o el socialismo, desconocían las particularidades brasileñas.

O conflito entre os “fanáticos” e a “polícia heroica”: memórias de Canudos nos jornais e em versos de cordel no Pará (1897-1940)

Este trabalho propõe uma análise das memórias da Guerra de Canudos veiculadas nos jornais paraenses A Província do Pará e Folha do Norte no ano de 1897, e o folheto de cordel História de Antônio Conselheiro (Campanha de Canudos, narração completa) de Arinos de Belém. Analisa-se o discurso dos periódicos e do cordel a respeito de Antônio Conselheiro e seus seguidores e sobre a participação da Polícia Militar do Pará no conflito, observando as permanências e mudanças em relação à imagem construída sobre esses sujeitos. Percebe-se por meio da pesquisa que esses veículos de mídia reproduziam uma visão pejorativa do beato e dos canudenses e retratavam as tropas como heroicas, sustentando o mesmo discurso de que era necessário combater Canudos.

Fotografia e Guerra: encenação e punctum no século XIX

Esse texto busca aproximar a produção de imagens às guerras, analisando mais detidamente algumas fotos de Timothy O’Sullivan, realizadas durante a Guerra de Secessão dos Estados Unidos, e de Flávio de Barros, durante a última campanha do Exército contra os jagunços de Antonio Conselheiro, em Canudos. A partir das teorias de Benjamin, Agamben e Barthes, a intenção é trabalhar com algo, um efeito, que escapa ao destino de documento das imagens.

Between Exodus and the Final Judgment: “Sertaneja” Worldview and the Trajectory of Antonio Conselheiro’s Belo Monte (Brazil, 1893–1897)

Abstract The present paper presupposes (developed under the scope of Semiotics and Cultural Studies) that texts in culture are endowed not only with their capacity to produce images but mainly to create new messages. As texts are transmitted to receivers in different times, places and repertoires, they undergo processes of recodification and become new texts by inserting dynamism in cultural processes. Furthermore, it must be taken into account that texts do not exist isolated, without relation with other texts. On the contrary, the possible combinations among them are potentially the most unexpected. Those references allow us to think about the creative role of the reception of biblical elements in the articulation of identities and narratives in history. And a special challenge is imposed: considering the Bible’s popular reception. It is necessary to take into consideration specific scenarios and, simultaneously, the dynamic scenarios of the same reception. It is important to overcome prejudice regarding the sources that lead us to that reception. At the Belo Monte of Antonio Conselheiro, stage of one of the most significant social and religious experiences, and, at the end, one of the bloodiest experiences of Brazilian history, the Bible’s new readings link many of its themes to references coming from other mythological worlds of African origin and (mainly) of indigenous matrix. The myth of the flight into Egypt and the conquest of the Promised Land were linked to others connected with abundance and freedom. The biblical concept of the Antichrist played a significant role in the sertanejo’s understanding about the social and the political environment: Belo Monte was the place where salvation could be perceived and the body could be fed and healed. And the perspective of the imminent end of the world became more intense when military operations, through a brutal war, acted in order to destroy the holy village: biblical references supported ideas that encouraged resistance movement and prepared the “death in the Lord,” martyrdom, under Judgment Day expectation.

AGRARIAN REFORM AND THE PRODUCTION OF LOCALITY: RESETTLEMENT AND COMMUNITY BUILDING IN MATO GROSSO, BRAZIL

This paper investigates processes of place-making and community formation following agrarian reform resettlement in Brazil. Based on case studies conducted between 2002 and 2004 in several settlements organized by the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, I argue that resettlement through agrarian reform in Brazil is a process of intentional community-building through resettlement and emplacement. Ethnographic data from one settlement, Antonio Conselheiro, shows that land recipients passed through a series of physical movements [displacement, occupation, encampment, settlement] that shape the production of locality, or what I refer to here as emplacement. I discuss key social processes that contribute to emplacement: the transition from individual to imagined community, from imagined community to collectivity, and from collectivity to place-based community.

Levantamento fitossociológico em pastagens

O objetivo do presente trabalho foi identificar a comunidade daninha presente em áreas de pastagens. O levantamento fitossociológico foi realizado nos meses de novembro e dezembro de 2009 em três regiões: duas localizadas no município de Tangará da Serra-MT (região A = áreas próximas à cidade; e região B = áreas presentes no Assentamento Antonio Conselheiro) e uma no município de Barra do Bugres-MT (região C). Em cada região foram analisadas cinco propriedades, tendo cada uma 10 parcelas de 25 m². Nas parcelas, foram realizadas a contagem e identificação das espécies daninhas. Os dados foram analisados por meio de cálculos de densidade, frequência, abundância, densidade relativa, frequência relativa, abundância relativa, índice de valor de importância (IVI) e índice de similaridade. Foram identificadas 38 espécies daninhas, distribuídas em 18 famílias, sendo Asteraceae (7), Fabaceae (6), Arecaceae (3), Euforbiaceae (3) e Poaceae (3) as mais representativas em número de espécies. As espécies que mais ocorreram na área foram: região A - Sida spp. (IVI 127,93) e Eragrostis plana (IVI: 42,18); região B - Eragrostis plana (IVI: 54,78), Mimosa wedelliana (IVI:52,39) e Sida spp. (IVI: 50,30); e região C - Sida spp. (IVI: 73,92) e Mimosa wedelliana (IVI: 26,55). Houve similaridade expressiva entre as regiões A e B (52,63%) e entre as regiões B e C (50,98%).

Provincializing World Geography: Land and Letters in Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões

case, as we have already seen, is a good deal more complex and interesting than that. It involves a set of facts with which those somnambulists who go about immersed in the dream of imperialist restoration have nothing to do. An ignorance of such facts leads to disasters worse than the wiping out of these three expeditions. It shows that we ourselves are but little in advance of our rude and backward fellow-countrymen. latter, at least, were logical. Isolated in space and time, the jagunco, being an ethnic anachronism, could do only what he did do--that is, combat, and combat in a terrible fashion, the nation which, after having cast him off for three centuries almost, suddenly sought to raise him to our own state of enlightenment at the point of a bayonet, revealing to him the brilliancy of our civilization in the blinding flash of cannons. Euclides da Cunha In the short span of an epigraph we can unearth the argument of Euclides da Cunha's Os Sertoes (1902), a multi-genre masterpiece of some five hundred pages. As the remarkable Brazilian incarnation of the civilization/barbarism dialectic, da Cunha's narrative depicts the conflict between the allegedly civilized Republican troops and their fellow countrymen, the millenarian Catholic folk community of the Brazilian sertao. writer paints a tragic portrait of his national sphere, which is divided such that a third of the country is left to wallow in what he describes as centuries-old semidarkness (Rebellion in the Eacklands 161). (1) Perhaps inevitably, this third of Brazil--referred to equally as sertanejos or as jaguncos--unites under the auspices of the enigmatic Antonio Conselheiro in the backlands settlement of Canudos. Here, the events of the bloody account unfold between October 1896 and October 1897. As he details the four government attempts to crush this supposed threat to the nation, da Cunha weaves together a tale of battles and insurgencies, of heroes and antiheroes, of climactic ups and downs that dizzy readers to exhaustion with their repetition. dramatic series boasts a recurring lead actor (Antonio Conselheiro) and setting (Canudos). Da Cunha casts Conselheiro and Canudos to one side, however. His primary focus is neither actor nor setting but rather the very physical space of the sertao--in other words, the land. Brazilian author divides the narrative into three sections that allude to a hierarchy of importance; this hierarchy, in turn, points to the central protagonist: first, The Land, then, The Man, and finally The Rebellion. Da Cunha opts to present first the national landscape and then the national man. This chronology brings to mind Alexander von Humboldt's 1845 Cosmos, in which the Baron systematically outlines physical geography but concludes his study with a section on man. similarities do not end there, which leads critics--namely Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria (1990) and Luiz Costa Lima (1997)--to locate da Cunha's source of authorization in the hegemonic discourse of science. I believe, however, that we can expound upon and complicate such readings by moving from the generality of science to the particularity of geography. Da Cunha, I will illustrate, reproduces Humboldt's aestheticized geographical discourse, albeit with a Brazilian twist, in order to translate writing the earth to writing the nation. Like Humboldt--the primordial Eurocentric man--da Cunha views America as materia prima. project for the local Eurocentric, however, is to theorize that materia prima from his local Brazilian sphere to the universal. Da Cunha attempts to localize--that is, nationalize--Humboldt, thereby provincializing universal philosophy. This attempt appears explicitly in his comments on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel as well as implicitly in his poetic register. Form and content coalesce in da Cunha to literarily write the Brazilian land, this time from the perspective of a Brazilian. …

Sentencing Canudos: subalternity in the backlands of Brazil

In the late nineteenth century, the Brazilian army staged several campaigns against the settlement of Canudos in northeastern Brazil. The colony s residents, primarily disenfranchised former slaves, mestizos, landless farmers, and uprooted Indians, followed a man known as Antonio Conselheiro ( The Counselor ), who promoted a communal existence, free of taxes and oppression. To the fledgling republic of Brazil, the settlement represented a threat to their system of government, which had only recently been freed from monarchy. Estimates of the death toll at Canudos range from fifteen thousand to thirty thousand.Sentencing Canudos offers an original perspective on the hegemonic intellectual discourse surrounding this monumental event in Brazilian history. In her study, Adriana Michele Campos Johnson offers a close examination of nation building and the silencing of other voices through the reinvisioning of history. Looking primarily to Euclides da Cunha s Os Sertoes, which has become the defining and nearly exclusive account of the conflict, she maintains that the events and people of Canudos have been sentenced to history by this work. Johnson investigates other accounts of Canudos such as local oral histories, letters, newspaper articles, and the writings of Cunha s contemporaries, Afonso Arinos and Manoel Benicio, in order to strip away political agendas. She also seeks to place the inhabitants and events of Canudos within the realm of everydayness by recalling aspects of daily life that have been left out of official histories.Johnson analyzes the role of intellectuals in the process of culture and state formation and the ensuing sublimation of subaltern histories and populations. She echoes recent scholarship that posits subalternity as the product of discourse that must be disputed in order to recover cultural identities and offers a view of Canudos and postcolonial Latin America as a place to think from, not about.

Backlands: the Canudos Campaign

Backlands is a translation of Euclide da Cunha's work Os Sertoes, a non-fictional account of the War of Canudos in Brazil during the 1890s. The deadliest civil war in Brazilian history, the conflict was between the Brazilian government and a rebellious village of 30,000 Canudos living in the northeastern state of Bahia, led by Antonio Conselheiro, a religious zealot. Far from being simply an objective journalistic account, Da Cunha's story shows both the significance of this event and the complexities of Brazilian society.

Das Entranhas d'Os Sertões, o Oficina: Uma viagem pela encenação de Os Sertões, pelo Teatro Oficina, de São Paulo

Between 2002 and 2006, José Celso Martinez Correia, the extraordinary director of São Paulo's Teatro Oficina, produced a five part version of Os Sertões , based on the Brazilian literary masterpiece from the beginning of the twentieth century. The author, Euclides da Cunha, compiled the work after witnessing first hand, as a journalist, the destruction of the town of Canudos, which was blamed on an army brigade. The village of Canudos is situated in the far west of Bahia and was once inhabited by the pious leader Antonio Conselheiro and his followers. Mistaken for anti-republican guerrilla fighters, Conselheiro and his followers were victims of a vicious massacre, despite their long and valiant resistance. In Martinez Correa's Os Sertões , this saga is narrated in great style, with a revolutionary spirit that characterizes the struggle that he and his troupe have been fighting against a major capitalist entrepreneur who would like to construct a mall in the same neighborhood that is home to Teatro Oficina. The exuberant performances of these plays are faithful to Oficina's tradition, one of irreverence, daring aesthetic experimentation, and Dionysian communion between actors and audience. Adding up to 36 hours of performance, this version of Os Sertões by Teatro Oficina was one of the most important theatrical events of this decade.

Canudos: organização, poder e o processo de institucionalização de um modelo de governança comunitária

Antônio Conselheiro e seus seguidores protagonizaram no semi-árido sertanejo do Bello Monte (Bahia, 1893-97) um curioso empreendimento comunitário que alcançou o expressivo crescimento populacional de 10 335% em apenas quatro anos de existência e que resistiu, por quase 10 meses, às investidas de cerca da metade do efetivo da força terrestre brasileira de então. Não é razoável imaginar que semelhante feito tenha prescindido de um sistema de organização e governo minimamente eficaz, malgrado seu trágico destino. Neste artigo, esse sistema organizacional é analisado com base em três dimensões - a econômica, a política e a religiosa - e no processo de institucionalização das formas de organização e governança locais que as mesmas inspiraram. A partir de uma leitura semiológica dos referentes organizacionais do universo conselheirista e do cotejo das três fontes utilizadas na pesquisa - os depoimentos dos descendentes dos sobreviventes do episódio, os relatos dos cronistas-testemunhas do fato e a historiografia sobre a temática -, as conclusões da pesquisa apontam no sentido de que Canudos teria sido um grande mutirão, cuja liderança assumiu uma forma a qual identificamos como a do "coronel com o sinal trocado" ou de um "coronel pelo avesso", parodiando a imagem euclidiana de Antônio Conselheiro.

Brazilian Legacies

Robert Levine’s Brazilian Legacies is an interpretive essay for the non-specialist; it explores the legacies of history for contemporary Brazilian society. This is one of the first in a new series by M.E. Sharpe, aimed at an undergraduate or general audience. In it, one of the United States’s most prolific and well-known Brazilianists brings his forty years of research and observation of Brazilian society to bear on the promise and the problems of modern Brazil.In chapter 1 Levine examines the impact of slavery on modern Brazil, arguing that questions of color and race have been and are central to Brazilian society and culture. In chapter 2 he discusses class divisions, and how they emerged and have been maintained over time. In chapter 3 he explores a theme of “insiders” and “outsiders,” and roots that trend in Portuguese colonial policy. Chapter 4, “The Brazilian Way,” looks at patron-client relations and political corruption, linking them to a Brazilian political and cultural history that has reduced the role and status of the citizen in politics, and to weak national institutions that allowed the development of informal local powers. Chapters 5 through 7 examine the strategies that Brazilians have developed for coping with and resisting this system, from religious beliefs to carnival to crime. The book concludes with an essay, “Towards a New Civil Society,” in which the author outlines some of his thoughts on the Cardoso presidency and the way that Brazil has been changing in the last ten years.Brazilian Legacies is in many ways a rewarding book. It is filled with the stories and insights of its author, who has broad familiarity with the Brazilian northeast and the center-south alike. The author has a sympathy for Brazilians and their daily struggle to survive (whatever their social class), and an enthusiasm about his subject that makes reading this book quite enjoyable. Many of the passages, including those on the Collor impeachment, are gripping, especially for one who lived through the dramatic economic reforms of the first days of his presidency. Those alone make the book worth reading.Nevertheless, the book is frustrating: there is no clear framework here, nor any clear argument. Instead this is a jumble of fascinating stories, anecdotes, and observations mixed with some of the historiography on Brazil written since World War II. Much of the newer historiography does not seem well integrated with that of the older tradition. For example, chapter 3, “Outsiders,” contains a great deal of new material on women, children, gays, indigenous people, and rural migrants, yet the central organizing theme “outsiders” seems dated. Arguably, many of the people whom Levine terms “outsiders” are subordinates in Brazilian society, but that is not the same as being an outsider. Scholars have long shown that race, ethnicity, class, and gender intersect in complex ways, but those intersections do not emerge here. Similarly, religious belief is treated in a ways that seem contradictory: the religious movement of Antonio Conselheiro and his followers at Canudos is treated an example of resistance against oppression, while the Afro-Brazilian religion and liberation theology are simply coping mechanisms which the poor use to make their daily struggle manageable. Moreover, use of the patron-client system by the poor counts as “part of the system,” but not as a coping strategy.These comments should not be taken to mean that Brazilian Legacies is without merits. It is engagingly written and full of information about contemporary Brazil as well as Brazilian history. It would work reasonably well as the last book in a Brazilian history class, allowing students to learn about the contemporary scene and debate the merits of the arguments. It would also be a good book for non-specialist and Brazilianists alike to read for an update on events in Brazil in the 1990s.

The Dream of the Millennium

The Dream of the Millennium

<b>Guerra de Canudos</b>, o filme

The article deals with Sergio Rezende's film Guerra de Canudos (Canudos War), which has as its main protagonists Jose Wilker (Antonio Conselheiro), Paulo Betti (Ze Lucena), Marieta Severo (Penha) and Claudia Abreu (Luisa). It emphasizes the importance of a great production for national cinema, most especially dealing with a historical theme of the complexity of Canudos. It criticizes the fragility of the narrative plan dedicated to the love triangle that is lived, in the battlefield, by Luisa, private Arimateia (Tuca Andrada) and the lieutenant (Selton Mello). But, the author stresses the film as an opportunity to think about Brazilian history and culture.

Sources on the History of Favelas in Rio de Janeiro

The favelas of Rio de Janeiro, with their teeming masses trapped in misery, constitute the perfect site for investigating how social inequality is reproduced in Brazil. The latest survey of the shantytowns, conducted by the Instituto de Planejamento in Rio de Janeiro (IPLAN-Rio) reported that as of 1991, the city contained 661 favelas housing 962,793 persons in 239,678 shacks. The squatter settlements recreate in miniature but distorted form the entire history of modern Rio de Janeiro. The first squatter settlement was built in 1898 in Rio by Bahian veterans of the military campaign against mystic rebel Antonio Conselheiro. Yet only when the housing crisis of the 1940s forced the urban poor to erect hundreds of shantytowns in the suburbs did favelas replace tenements as the main type of residence for destitute Cariocas (residents of Rio). The explosive era of favela growth dates from 1940, when Getúlio Vargas's industrialization drive pulled hundreds of thousands of migrants into the Federal District, until 1970, when shantytowns expanded beyond urban Rio and into the metropolitan periphery. Even today, the favelas remain an officially unrecognized and illegal part of city. For this reason, many researchers assume that the shantytowns have no written history and that historians must rely on anecdotal evidence from residents for information on squatter life.

<![CDATA[<B>Canudos como cidade iletrada</B>: <B>Euclides da Cunha na <I>urbs</I> monstruosa</B>]]>

Euclides da Cunha interpreted the Canudos war (1896-7) on the basis of oral sources to establish the messianic character of the movement. He relied on folk poems and apocalyptic prophecies, that he attributed to Antonio Conselheiro, in order to create, in Os sertoes (Rebellion in the backlands), a gloomy portrait of the leader of the community. Conselheiro's sermons, collected in two manuscript volumes to which Euclides da Cunha did not have access, reveal a religious leader very different from the mystical fanatic presented in Os sertoes. These sermons indicate that the leader of Canudos was a learned backlander, capable of expressing his political and religious views, that were related to a traditional Catholicism common among the clergymen of the 19th-century.

Dialectics in Vargas Llosa's "La guerra del fin del mundo"

Mario Vargas Llosa's La guerra delf?n del mundo is known to derive many elements from Euclides da Cunha's Os Sert?es. We show that its imagery, characterization and plot reflect the dialectical thinking at the center of Cunha's epic. Dialectics represents the nineteenth-century culture that Cunha predicted will transform the nearly medieval culture of the backlands, itself expressed through a Christian Neoplatonism. On an initial view, Mario Vargas Llosa's La guerra delf?n del mundo is about the events surrounding the rise and fall of the Christian community at Canudos, Bahia, Brazil, under the spiritual leadership of the Christian prophet, Antonio Conselheiro, the final decade of the nineteenth century.1 The classical account of these events is Os Sert?es by Euclides da Cunha, to whom Vargas Llosa dedicates the novel in the next life.2 As 1 La guerra del fin del mundo, Barcelona: Seix Barrai, 1981, hereafter LG notes and La guerra the text, trans, as The War of The End of The World, trans. Helen R. Lane, New York: Farrar, 1984, hereafter W notes. We would like to thank Robert D. Newman, William B. Clark, John A. Fossa, and Stephen J. Miller, as well as three anonymous readers, for comments on phases of this research. 2 Os Sert?es, Critical ed., cd. Walnice Nogueira Galv?o, S?o Paulo: Brasiliense, 1985; hereafter, OS; trans, as Rebellion the Backlands, trans. Samuel Putnam, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1944; hereafter RB.

“Mud-Hut Jerusalem”: Canudos Revisited

HE rise and fall of the holy city of Belo Monte, at Canudos in the northeastern Brazilian backlands (1893-97), traumatized the new republic and shattered its facade of harmonious national progress. The settlement was founded on the site of an abandoned ranch in the remote Bahian sertao as a holy refuge by Antonio Conselheiro, a charismatic lay preacher and rebuilder of churches and cemeteries. It grew virtually overnight to num-ber more than five thousand clay-roofed huts scattered below a ring of hills and low mountains. By 1896, its swollen population made it the largest urban nucleus in the state after Salvador, the capital, seven hundred kilometers distant. In late 1897, Canudos was crushed after a year-long war waged by the Brazilian government to destroy the settlement and its fearsome leader.' Popular movements are often seen as collective expressions demanding social change, or as collective struggles to resist change which has already taken place. In some ways both modes of analysis are useful in Canudos's case. I propose, however, that understanding of the events at Canudos is best accomplished by situating Canudos within the cultural context of the rural population.2 Such an approach emphasizes the composition of the lower-class actors at Canudos and the role of its leader, seen less as