Power webs

families and political food structures (Belém, 1917-1925)

Abstract

The article is located in the city of Belém between 1917 and 1925. Its documentary base was a set of correspondences (13 in total) attached to 12 contentious lawsuits filed by spouses unhappy with the referrals given to their marriages. That said, the object of study was focused on the interpretation of food (beans, rice, fish, meat, flour, butter) through the prism of power-making within the family. In other words, whoever bought them (worked for them) and made them available to members of the lineage, discovered them as tools capable of subjecting in-laws, brothers-in-law, husbands and wives to subordinate conditions, because, inevitably, these dependents - according to some letters added to the file - had their honor, honor, dignity "submitted" to the maintainer. Therefore, the issue to be addressed in this study was never concerned with understanding the provisions in nutritional quality, neither in scarcity, nor in supply, nor in price variation, nor in the aspect of food diversity. The center of these interventions, stopped to investigate food, essentially, as an instrument from which power relations, within the family, sparkled and were made. In view of this, the methodology used to develop these interpretations focused on observing and interconnecting stories, as well as establishing systematic comparisons involving the narratives contained in the epistles aggregated in the separation of bodies and goods.