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A collective ethnographer: fieldwork experience in the Brazilian

Northeast
Lygia Sigaud
Social Science Information 2008 47: 71
DOI: 10.1177/0539018407085750

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Theory and methods
Théorie et méthodes

Lygia Sigaud

A collective ethnographer: fieldwork

experience in the Brazilian Northeast

Abstract. The article examines a 30-year experience of collective ethnography in the

sugarcane plantations of Brazil’s Northeast. Over this period, the research group has
worked in different temporal and spatial contexts, continually exchanging its findings.
The author draws on her experience as part of the research group in order to focus on the
conditions of entering the field, the seasonal variations and geographic displacements,
the research group’s morphology and the overall implications for anthropological
knowledge. Debates over ethnography have neglected the relationship between the social
conditions in which anthropologists carry out their work and what they are able to
write about the social world. This article sets out to fill this gap.

Key words. Anthropology – Brazilian Northeast – Collective ethnography – Land

occupations – Law – Strikes – Sugarcane plantations

Résumé. L’article analyse une expérience de trente années d´ethnographie collective

dans les plantations sucrières du Nordeste brésilien. Pendant cette période, un groupe de
chercheurs a travaillé dans différents contextes temporels et spatiaux, échangeant
continuellement entre eux leurs découvertes. L´auteur expose son expérience, en tant que
membre du groupe de chercheurs, dans le but d’examiner la façon d’aborder le terrain,
les variations saisonnières et les déplacements géographiques, la morphologie du groupe
de chercheurs et l’ensemble des implications que cela peut avoir sur le savoir
anthropologique. Les débats sur l’ethnographie ont négligé la relation existante entre les
conditions sociales dans lesquelles les anthropologues accomplissent leur travail et ce
qu’ils écrivent à propos du monde social. Cet article tente de combler ce vide.

Social Science Information © SAGE Publications 2008 (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and
Singapore), 0539–0184
DOI: 10.1177/0539018407085750 Vol 47(1), pp.71–97; 085750

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72 Social Science Information 47 – no 1

Mots-clés. Anthropologie Droit – Ethnographie collective – Grèves – Nordeste brésilien –

Occupations de terres – Plantations sucrières

At the start of the 1970s, a group of young anthropologists that included

myself began a research project in Pernambuco, in Brazil’s Northeast.1
Its aim was to study social relations in the sugarcane plantations located
in the coastal zone. Numerous signs indicated that a wide-ranging
process of social transformation was under way: the bosses – both the
large estate owners who produced the cane and the mill owners who pro-
duced the sugar and alcohol, as well as running some of the sugarcane
plantations directly – were abandoning the traditional practice of grant-
ing plots of land to their workers and altering the forms of payment
(Andrade, 1964; Furtado, 1964). In the mid-1950s, a new social move-
ment – the Peasants’ Leagues – had flourished in the region, campaign-
ing to ensure access to land and to put an end to cambão, the days of
unpaid work (Julião, 1968, 1972). In 1963, the recently formed rural
workers unions2 organized mass strikes to force compliance with the
new labour requirements introduced by the Rural Workers’ Statute
(RWS), such as the minimum wage and an extra month’s pay. The RWS
had been ratified by the Brazilian Congress that same year, extending
social rights to all people employed in agriculture, collectively denomi-
nated ‘rural workers’.
Sugarcane plantations had been established in the Brazilian Northeast
by the Portuguese during the early colonial period in the 16th century
and have remained the hegemonic economic activity ever since. The
world of the engenhos – the Portuguese term for the large plantations of
the Northeast – was highly hierarchized. At the top were the senhores de
engenho (plantation masters), who held economic, social and political
power; at the base were the slaves, who provided the manual tasks
involved in sugarcane cultivation and sugar production. In the transition
from the 19th to the 20th century, sugar production, previously carried
out on the plantations, became centralized in usinas (sugar mills). This
altered the make-up of the local elite, with the emergence of the
usineiros (millers) and the relative loss of power among the plantation
bosses (Eisenberg, 1974). Following the abolition of slavery in 1888, the
ex-slaves remained tied to their former masters as moradores (residents),
the term for the freemen who lived and worked on the plantations. Social
relations were highly personalized, and the moradores spent their entire
social life within the plantations. In the mid-20th century, this world
underwent profound transformations.

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Sigaud A collective ethnographer in Brazil 73

Prior to our arrival, the plantations had already been studied by histor-
ians, sociologists, economists and geographers, who had based their
research on historical records, censuses, statistical surveys and occa-
sional fieldwork trips. As the first to approach this world ethnographi-
cally, we were convinced from our training that fieldwork was essential.
Our sources of inspiration were anthropological analyses of Caribbean
plantations (Mintz & Wolf, 1957; Wolf, 1959; 1966; Mintz, 1966) and
Algerian peasantry (Bourdieu, 1963; Bourdieu & Sayad, 1964), while
our guide was Bronislaw Malinowski’s theory on the production of
ethnographic knowledge (Malinowski, 1961).
The plantations had been a recurring theme in left-wing intellectual
debates on social relations in Brazilian agriculture (Palmeira, 1971) and
the emergence of a peasant social movement. Personally I had an enor-
mous curiosity about the rural workers at the forefront of these social
protests. Little or nothing was known about them. In sociological and
historical studies, they figured as a generic and abstract category, while
in the literature describing the outbreak of the large-scale confrontations,
they appeared as a ‘mass movement’. Like any ‘mass’, they were amor-
phous, faceless, nameless, disembodied. Attempting to reverse this ten-
dency, my first research in the region focused on the categories through
which rural plantation workers perceived the social world.
We have worked in this region for over 30 years. The make-up of the
team has obviously changed over time: some of the original group no
longer conduct research in the area, while other, younger researchers
have joined us since. Over the years a wide range of people have been
studied, including rural workers, sugar-plant workers, peasants, bosses,
union leaders,3 market sellers and plantation traders, rural union lawyers
and, more recently, activists from the Landless Rural Workers’
Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra – MST).4
Likewise a wide variety of themes have been covered, such as represen-
tations of the social world, marketplaces, peasant economies, factory
work, migration, social conflicts, unionism, voting, power relations,
legal actions, religion, social movements, land occupations and agrarian
reform. Our primary aim has been to understand the ongoing social
processes. The resulting texts have increased our knowledge about the
plantation world and raised new questions about the subjects we studied
(such as strikes and law). Like earlier scholars, we have made use of sta-
tistics, censuses and historical records; however, the core of our material
has been ethnographic. We conducted fieldwork in summer, the harvest
season, when everyone worked; we returned in the winter off-season, a
period of unemployment. We undertook research both in the dark years

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74 Social Science Information 47 – no 1

of the military dictatorship and during the period of re-democratization.

We were present during the intense moments of social life, such as the
mass strikes of the 1980s and the land occupations of the 1990s; we
observed this world during the expansion of the sugar economy in the
1970s and during the insolvency of the mill owners and large farmers
some 20 years later. We have worked in various locations in Pernambuco
and extended our research to the neighbouring states of Alagoas and
Paraíba. We have conducted classical individual research on precise
themes; we have worked in pairs, each researcher investigating their own
theme; we have worked as a group on the same theme; and we have
researched different themes related to a shared problematic simultane-
ously. We immersed ourselves for long periods in the field and returned
for shorter visits. Our methodology was diverse. Interviews provided a
means of discovering local representations of the social world, the cate-
gories through which people and things are named and ordered, the val-
ues underlying local hierarchizations, and moral judgments and
evaluations. Observation enabled us to see men and women in action and
to record the non-verbalized: gestures, body postures, facial expressions,
outbursts of emotion, moments of elation, displays of pride and sadness,
despondency and demonstrations of symbolic violence. Life histories
supplied the elements for contextualizing the events in a person’s
trajectory and understanding what remained occluded in the interviews.
Discussions with groups of workers revealed how they interpreted
events. And, finally, listening to what was said outside the formal inter-
view situations gave us new insights.
The type of ethnographic research we conducted – long-term, focused
on a precise social world and involving a group of researchers working
on related issues – is unique in the history of anthropology. There have
been collective ventures such as the Torres Strait expedition (Herle &
Rouse, 1998) and the community studies in Puerto Rico (Steward,
1966), but they were relatively short-lived projects. Long-term research
studies exist, involving various periods of fieldwork over time and
enquiring into the same empirical universe, but these have involved
researchers working alone or at most in pairs, such as the studies con-
ducted among the Tikopia (Firth, 1968) and in Sochaux in France
(Beaud & Pialoux, 1999). Some locations have been revisited by other
researchers, as in Melanesia (Weiner, 1988) and Mexico (Lewis, 1951),
but the projects were not related to a shared problematic.
Malinowski (1935, 1955) claimed that the core of ethnographic work
is seeing and listening. Over time we have seen and heard the men
and women of the sugarcane plantations in distinct temporal and spatial

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Sigaud A collective ethnographer in Brazil 75

contexts, exchanging our different findings in the process. In this article,

I draw on my own experience as part of the research group in order to
examine the implications of our singular experience as a ‘collective
ethnographer’. I focus on the conditions of access to the field, the seas-
onal variations, the geographic displacements and, finally, the research
group’s morphology.5

Entering the field

My first research in the Brazilian Northeast was influenced by the theo-

ries of Durkheim & Mauss (1969) and Lévi-Strauss (1962) concerning
the categories through which human groups order the social world. My
intention was to analyze the categories used by the plantation workers6
and the hierarchy of values associated with the same, believing that this
was the first step to any future study. Hence I went into the field with
the idea of taking the engenhos as my basic research unit. At the time, I
was working in partnership with Moacir Palmeira, who was studying
changes in the redistribution of goods in the plantations.
Arriving in the field in the early 1970s, we quickly realized that access
to the plantations was strictly controlled by the bosses. A climate of dis-
trust hung over relationships with outsiders: memories of the confronta-
tions of the 1960s were still very fresh, and we and others were suspected
of being ‘communists’.7 Permission was needed from the bosses to
approach workers. If and when it was granted, the former would send
along one of their right-hand men, an empregado (literally: employee), a
term for members of the plantation management.8 This empregado would
assume the role of researcher and take the lead in asking questions, such
as: ‘They want to know if everything is alright. Everything’s okay, isn’t
it?’ Faced by the empregado, from whom they were used to receiving
orders, the workers felt intimidated: they would reply ‘yes’ or ‘no’, or
simply remain silent. As this mediation heavily impeded our research, we
decided to conduct fieldwork in the small towns instead, primarily in the
headquarters of the rural workers’ unions. There we met workers trying
to resolve work-related problems, including relations with their bosses,
other people seeking medical assistance or passing through, leaving sacks
of goods purchased in town while going off to deal with other matters,
and finally those visiting simply to chat to friends and acquaintances. The
union was the main urban reference point for the workers, their ‘home’ in
town. We also conducted fieldwork in the weekly markets where the
workers came to buy supplies, as well as on the outskirts of the towns,

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76 Social Science Information 47 – no 1

heavily occupied by workers who had left the engenhos but continued to
work daily in the sugarcane fields. In these spaces, workers felt more at
liberty to talk.
For 20 years I was unable to enter the plantations, except during the
mass strikes of the 1980s. These were led by the National Agricultural
Workers’ Confederation (CONTAG), the Pernambuco State Agricultural
Workers’ Federation (FETAPE) and the rural workers’ unions: I discuss
these events later.9 On strike days, the workers, supported by union lead-
ers, took over the territory of the engenho, controlling the circulation of
people, vehicles and merchandise. It was as though the strike produced
a reversal – a magical one – of the balance of forces. I could then go into
the engenhos, attend the meetings, watch the way the strike was run and
talk with the workers. When the strike ended, order was re-established
and the doors to the plantations were closed again to researchers. In the
1990s I was once more able to conduct fieldwork in plantations that
were in crisis due to the changes in Brazilian Federal Government pol-
icy towards the sugar industry.10 The bosses were more concerned with
finding solutions to their insolvency than in controlling the influx of
people from outside. I visited the plantations whose lands had been
occupied. From 1992 onwards, MST activists and union leaders started
to occupy bankrupted plantations and set up encampments with dozens
of rural worker families to demand agrarian reform (Sigaud, 2005). The
physical layout of the occupied plantations remained identical, yet the
social space and the relations between bosses and workers had changed
radically. They were no longer like the plantations of the 1970s where I
had initially wished to conduct my fieldwork: The bosses were failing to
maintain control or had already lost much of their power.
Over the years the relationship with our informants evolved consider-
ably. At first we were regarded with suspicion by union leaders and work-
ers, who identified us with the bosses due to our appearance and speech.
However, they quickly realized that, despite the fact that we occupied a
superior position in terms of Brazil’s social hierarchy, we were different.
We called them senhor (Mr) or senhora (Mrs), said ‘good day’ and ‘thank
you’, visited their houses, shared their meals and displayed an eagerness
to listen. The bosses never acted in this way. Sometimes they took us for
journalists. But our behaviour failed to match: we were always present
and spent hours listening to them. Journalists, by contrast, only appeared
briefly, when there was a big event, such as the floods that devastated the
south of the region in 1970. We always presented ourselves as university
teachers who wanted to write books about their lives. They probably
welcomed us because we provided them with the chance to talk about

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Sigaud A collective ethnographer in Brazil 77

themselves, allowing them to reflect on their life histories in the company

of attentive listeners. We forged friendships with workers and union lead-
ers, reinforced during the mass strikes of the 1980s, when we helped
write press releases and produce documents with data-backed arguments
in support of their demands for wage increases and better working con-
ditions. Since then we have always received solid support for our research
– cooperation extended to all the new group members who came after,
either alone or accompanied by us.
Suspicion also dominated our first encounters with the bosses, who
were unused to researchers. Academics from Recife, the capital of
Pernambuco state, most of them from estate-owning families, did not
carry out fieldwork in the plantations and pursued other research interests.
The bosses suspected us of being there to foment ‘subversion’. This dis-
trust was deepened by the fact we came from the Southeast of Brazil.
Since colonial times, the local elite had harboured strong nationalist and
separatist feelings in relation to the rest of the country. We were perceived
either as ‘communists’, or as agents sent by the Federal Government. As
hospitality was a core value in the plantation world, they nonetheless wel-
comed us into their homes or their mill offices to talk, sometimes at length.
After the initial distrust had been dispelled, they relaxed – perhaps because
they presumed some kind of class collusion – and happily expressed their
contempt for the workers, labelling them as ‘ignorant’, ‘lazy’ and open to
‘manipulation’ by the union leaders. The only time they treated us
with some hostility was during the strikes. Not those who knew us, but
their leaders: for the latter, it was unacceptable that ‘people like them-
selves’ – from the same social background – and moreover from Brazil’s
modern and prosperous Southeast, could collaborate with the rural unions.
Fieldwork in anthropology has always depended on the distribution of
forces. Until the mid-20th century, this distribution favoured the Anglo-
Saxon and French anthropologists backed by the colonial empires and the
national States (L’Estoile, Neiburg & Sigaud, 2005) as well as receiving
occasional support from US foundations, such as Carnegie and Rockefeller.
Since decolonization, British, American and French anthropologists have
experienced difficulties in conducting fieldwork in former colonies due to
the hostility displayed by local people to researchers from the countries
which once ruled them – a fact that has provoked endless discussion over
‘crises’ in anthropology (Clifford, 1988; Stocking, 1983).
Our own field research was enabled by the Brazilian State (which
funded the university) and the Ford Foundation (which funded the
research). However, the key factor in fieldwork terms was the distribution
of forces encountered in the plantations themselves, especially the power

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78 Social Science Information 47 – no 1

ratio between the bosses and the union leadership. In the 1990s, I man-
aged to gain access to some of the plantations, but I was prevented from
visiting those whose bosses had restructured the productive base and
retained control over the territory. During the strikes, I entered plantations
where the union leadership was strong enough to paralyze activities,
but failed to gain entry to the zones where the unions had made little
investment in worker organization. The conditions enabling ethnographic
research have never been dependent simply on the researcher’s wishes:
all research is determined and delimited by the local set of social condi-
tions. We were unable to enter the plantations when we wanted;
Malinowski (1989; Young, 2004) was never able to accompany a Kula
expedition; Evans-Pritchard (1971) rarely talked with the Nuer; Bateson
(1994) observed only five Naven ceremonies. Ethnographic writing
reveals the impact of these vicissitudes of field research. What I have
written about strikes and land occupations is based on my ethnographic
observations and the accounts I obtained; it carries the imprint of the sit-
uation’s context: the liminal nature of the moment of the strike, the loss
of power among the land owners. Everything I have written on social
transformations in the 1970s has been based on the accounts of workers,
union leaders and bosses, rather than on direct observation. However, the
differences between my texts relate to the type of ethnographic descrip-
tion made possible by either the presence or absence of observational
data. In both cases, the questions formulated in shuttling back and forth
between empirical material and theory have heavily influenced my writ-
ing. The issues shaping our descriptions and analyses, whether or not
they are made explicit, are the guiding thread to all anthropological writ-
ing. They mark the text much more, I think, than the literary resources
deployed to construct the supposed ‘ethnographic authority’ that so trou-
bled authors such as Geertz (1988) and Clifford (1988).

Seasonal variations

Social life in the plantation world is strongly affected by the seasonality

of agricultural activities. My first field trip was in summer and I returned
often during this season of sun-drenched days and eternally blue sky.
The sugarcane harvest dominated the landscape. Spectacular bonfires lit
the nocturnal horizon: large areas of the plantation were set alight to
burn the cane straw and make it easier to cut the next morning. During
the day, workers could be seen cutting sugarcane wherever one looked,
their clothes covered in black dust, the remains of the fires from the

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Sigaud A collective ethnographer in Brazil 79

previous evening. On the roads, enormous trucks loaded with sugarcane

trundled past incessantly, taking the harvested cane to the mills to be
transformed into sugar and alcohol. At dawn and dusk, the same trucks
transported the workers to and from work. This was the season when
everyone found work. The flow of cash increased, to the delight of the
merchants in the small towns.
During the summer, I had to wait for the workers to return to their
homes to start my own work. This was the case in 1972, when I began to
study workers who had left the plantations to settle in the small towns.
Following the RWS, the bosses refused to admit new residents onto their
lands as a way of avoiding the new labour requirements. This meant that
workers who left an engenho were unable to find another one to live and
work in: instead they settled on the outskirts of nearby towns from where
they travelled to work daily on the plantations. Late afternoon, I would
join my interlocutors and their network of neighbours and fellow work-
ers. They welcomed me into their small houses lit by kerosene lamps, and
we would spend hours talking. Sugarcane harvesting was a compulsory
topic in our conversations, frequently raised by comments on the quality
of the cut sugarcane (whether the cane was easy to cut and heavy, ensur-
ing a good price) and on the price paid per ton.11 These summer-night
conversations were incomparably valuable in terms of learning about the
evolution in sugarcane-harvesting methods, pay changes introduced by
the bosses, disputes over prices per ton, the refusals to work when the
price was too low. Moreover these talks allowed me to observe the ways
in which the workers defined their qualities as good sugarcane cutters:
they took pride in the courage shown in working to the limit of their
strength, which allowed them to increase their pay and provide extra
income for their families, distinguishing themselves from those who
worked less intensely. Hearing them talk, I perceived how ideas of per-
sonal worth were strongly linked to the willingness to work hard; how the
quantity of harvested cane amounted to public and symbolic proof of this
disposition, identifying them as ‘worthy’ and ‘good’ men; and how the
meaning of their lives lay in ensuring the welfare of their families.12
In the winter off-season, the landscape changed completely. It was the
period of grey skies, heavy rains and muddy roads. The labour market
shrank. The bosses employed few workers living in the towns since there
was only enough work for those still residing on the plantations. My first
systematic research during this period of the year allowed me to learn
about dimensions of local social life that had previously eluded me. First,
I discovered that the workers engaged in other activities beyond the plan-
tations: small-scale trading, fishing and hunting, or crop and livestock

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80 Social Science Information 47 – no 1

farming when they found a plot of land to rent. These activities allowed
them to get through winter. It was during this season that I heard people
reminisce about the time when they still lived on the plantations, the
‘good’ bosses who had allowed them to cultivate the land and supported
them during difficult times (such as illness and death in the family), and
the pleasure they had in cultivating their own plots and feeding their fam-
ilies with the produce. Living in the town, they were forced to work by
day in order to eat at night, since they no longer had the food reserves
provided by the land plots. Working for themselves was a strong ideal.
As soon as I realized the close relationship between seasonal varia-
tions and the possibility for new analytic discoveries, I started to include
this variable in my fieldwork. In 1979, when the process of re-democra-
tization began in Brazil, a new wave of strikes hit the Northeast’s sugar-
cane zone. In September of the same year, right at the start of milling,
workers’ unions from São Lourenço da Mata and Paudalho (municipal-
ities located in the central-west region), supported by CONTAG and
FETAPE, presented the employers’ unions with a demand for wage rises
and a collective work contract. Receiving no reply within the allotted
five-day deadline, twenty thousand workers from the two municipalities
went on strike. In response, the bosses’ representatives agreed to negoti-
ate and signed a collective work contract, which benefited workers
throughout the sugarcane zone (Sigaud, 1980). Over the following years
at the start of milling, strikes were launched involving around two hun-
dred thousand workers from the entire zone, seeking to renew and
extend the collective contract and wage increases.
I was in the field during almost all the strikes held in the 1980s. This
allowed me to observe the build-up to the movement, in particular the
meetings between union leaders and delegates from the plantations, and
the mass rallies held in the towns to vote on the motion to strike. I accom-
panied the negotiations between the workers’ representatives and the
bosses, and I was present at the tribunals when, after impasses at the
negotiating table, the demands were submitted to the courts for arbitra-
tion. I travelled to the engenhos to witness the stoppages and talk with the
people involved, and I saw the strikes come to an end. These periods were
pervaded by the idea of a collective, an us, made up of workers and union
leaders, against them, the bosses. This collective dimension was embod-
ied in the town rallies when everyone voted for the strike, in the campaign
for a new collective contract and during negotiations where each party to
the dispute acted as a unified whole. The language used at these times
also expressed the idea of collective action: workers and union leaders
would say it was the moment to fight for ‘our law’ and ‘our rights’ (the

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Sigaud A collective ethnographer in Brazil 81

employer’s legal obligations) in opposition to the ‘law of the bosses’. The

workers identified themselves as ‘peasants’ in these contexts. Until then,
I had only encountered use of the term ‘peasant’ in their accounts of the
strikes prior to the 1964 military coup. Since they called themselves
workers in everyday situations, using another word indicated their wish
to highlight a difference: I discovered that this was indeed the appropri-
ate term to use during strikes since it forged a link between the strike
actions of the past and those of the present. While for the union leaders,
bosses, media and State, the strike technically amounted to an interrup-
tion of sugarcane harvesting and sugar production, for the workers the
strike meant the suspension of any and all activities undertaken for the
bosses on the plantations. I perceived the force of this view of the strike
during evaluation meetings held at the union premises or on my visits to
the plantations. Many times I heard delegates and workers claim that the
strike was ‘weak’ in their engenho. When I asked whether the sugar-
cane was still being harvested, they replied with an emphatic ‘no’, but
explained that there were still some fellow workers who were rounding
up the bosses’ cattle or that the school was still running. In most strikes,
the workers achieved favourable outcomes and, like the union leaders,
felt they had emerged victorious. Massive outdoor assemblies, held in a
climate of collective euphoria, ritually marked the end of the strikes.
I returned to the field in the interval between the first wave of strikes.
The issue at the time was whether employers would comply with the col-
lective contract. The collective effervescence had dissipated, people no
longer spoke of abstract collectivities, nor us and them, nor peasants;
instead they talked about conflicts on the plantations, the paradeiros, or
walk-outs, a term used to refer to the stoppages conducted outside the
context of the big strikes, the court actions to enforce compliance with
contracts, or the concrete I and us on one particular plantation. When I
asked whether contracts were being honoured, the reply was always:
‘they comply with a few things’ – in other words, some of the contrac-
tual obligations were met. The contract referred to the collective, an arte-
fact created to negotiate with the bosses: its numerous items did not
always match what individual workers on a particular plantation or in a
specific municipality actually wanted. The reality of the contract was
different at this scale, and, while the union leaders focused on the con-
flicts with bosses, the workers fought to ensure compliance with the con-
tract items they deemed to be more important. Here they were frequently
successful. For outside observers, including critics of the union move-
ment, the employer’s failure to comply with the contract was cited as
evidence that the strike had been ‘useless’.

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82 Social Science Information 47 – no 1

Academics studying the strikes tend to focus on the movement’s

initial eruption, its development and the strikers’ ‘gains’ and ‘losses’
(Schorter & Tilly, 1974; Perrot, 1984). My fieldwork during the strikes
(and what I already knew about the world of the engenhos) allowed me
to explore beyond the written sources and to understand what the
strikes meant for the workers themselves (the constitution of ‘our law’)
and the way in which they conceived their action (a total and coercive
paralysis). The research conducted in the seasonal intervals between
strikes enabled me to identify the conditions of possibility underlying
their cyclical reproduction: the conflicts at the local level and the small
gains obtained through legal actions sustained the workers’ references
to ‘our law’ and predisposed them to fight for the latter when rallied by
the union leadership (Sigaud, 1986). Hence, when the strike season
arrived, the mindset of collective thinking re-emerged, and everyone
knew that to avoid ‘succumbing to the boss’s law’ meant taking part in
the collective mise en scène. This experience revealed the value of
ethnographic research during and between strikes as a way of explain-
ing and understanding the phenomena better, while also showing the
limitations of studies that focus only on the spectacle of the strike itself
without comprehending the action as part of the ongoing history of the
groups involved.
Between 1997 and 2000, I was once more able to perceive how these
seasonal variations influence the dynamic of social life. At the time, I was
studying the land occupations. On my first field trip for this research proj-
ect, I noted that the occupations always took place in the winter off-
season between March and August. There were no occupations during
harvesting and milling. Despite the crisis faced by the plantation owners,
the summer was still a time of work for all. The MST activists and union
leadership did not call on the workers to occupy land during this period.
They waited for the end of the harvest and the onset of winter. The prepa-
rations and the act of occupation were observable only by those
researchers who were active in the field during this season. When har-
vesting began once more, many workers left the camps to cut sugarcane,
sometimes staying away for days working in distant municipalities. The
leaders tolerated these absences. The invasions and encampments were a
clear sign of transformation in the plantation world, yet they fitted into
the rhythm of social life I had observed since the 1970s. Those wishing
to foment the ‘land struggle’ had to adjust to this seasonal pace.
Time has been an analytic topic throughout the history of anthropol-
ogy, especially native conceptions of temporality. Little attention has
been paid, though, to relations between native time and ethnographic

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Sigaud A collective ethnographer in Brazil 83

research, apart from a few sporadic references, such as Malinowski’s

comment (1935: 45) on the conversations appropriate to different seas-
onal conditions, and Seeger’s reference (1981) to the new findings he
made among the Suyá (an Amerindian people living in the central-west
of Brazil) when he returned to the field during another time of the year.
If seasonal variations produce effects on social life, as Mauss and
Beuchat (1991) propose in their study of Inuit social morphology, we
can also assume that they affect our fieldwork conditions themselves.
Long-term research conducted in a social world strongly marked by
seasonality has helped us unravel the implications of the alternation
between the sugarcane-harvesting period and the off-season period in
terms of local people’s lives and the possibilities for research. Had I
confined my fieldwork to just one of these seasons, many dimensions
of social life would have remained obscured, and certain recurrences,
such as the yearly cycle of land occupations, would have remained
largely incomprehensible. Such alternations obviously differ in other
ethnographic contexts, but they certainly have repercussions on the pos-
sibilities for describing and interpreting our material.

Geographic variations and changes in scale

My first contact with the plantation world occurred in Palmares, a

municipality in the southwest of the plantation zone with fifty thousand
inhabitants. There were two sugar mills belonging to the same family.
Another three mills were located nearby. About a hundred engenhos pro-
duced sugarcane for the region’s sugar mills. Palmares was an important
commercial centre. Workers, whether living on the plantations them-
selves or in town, went there to purchase staple goods. The Rural
Workers’ Union occupied a three-story building and was located in one
of the town’s main avenues. It was the largest union in Pernambuco
before the Military Coup, with thirty thousand members, and was at the
forefront of the big strikes. In 1970 it was headed by a leader who
worked hard organizing the workers to take on their bosses through legal
actions and day-to-day clashes in the plantations.
My second port of entry into the plantation world was Carpina, a
municipality in the north, with forty thousand inhabitants. No sugar mill
was located in the area, only large estates dedicated to sugarcane culti-
vation. The Rural Workers’ Union was located in one of the town’s side
streets. The union had remained low key in the period prior to 1964. In
1970 the union directors also invested in taking the bosses to court.

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84 Social Science Information 47 – no 1

Until 1971 my involvement in the plantation world was confined to

Palmares and Carpina. From 1972 to 1974 I also did fieldwork in sixteen
municipalities in the sugarcane region, where I studied workers living in
the towns and used a questionnaire to obtain information on how they
had left the plantations. This allowed me to identify differences in the
conditions under which the workers returned to work in the plantations,
data that would have been missed had I confined my research to
Palmares and Carpina. By systematically comparing what I observed
during my geographic displacements, I was able to develop a model of
regional social transformations that included the diversity found on the
ground and avoided generalizations based on the study of a single loca-
tion, a frequent occurrence in anthropological monographs. Studying
various geographic areas also allowed me to perceive commonalities
across the zone, such as the classificatory categories and hierarchies of
values, the meaning of life for workers, their experiences of re-locating
to the towns and the nostalgia for the ‘good’ bosses that I had encoun-
tered in my earlier, longer periods of research (Sigaud, 1979).
In 1984 I returned to conduct fieldwork in other municipalities on the use
of tribunals to settle conflicts between workers and bosses. Ever since my
first fieldwork, I had perceived the importance workers and union leaders
attached to social rights without, however, carrying out any systematic
research. Workers passionately defended their social rights and complained
about the failure of bosses to comply with labour legislation. All the unions
possessed means for taking lawsuits to court, such as staff responsible for the
administrative tasks involved in the cases and lawyers to represent the work-
ers. I therefore conducted ethnographic observation in the unions and inter-
views with workers, union leaders and lawyers, as well as compiling a census
on the legal actions filed in the local courts. The census revealed a key dif-
ference between municipalities in terms of using the legal system. The num-
ber of complainants was higher in the municipalities where the union leaders
stimulated the workers to go to court and supported them during the legal
process. In areas where the unions made less investment, the workers went to
court less and frequently desisted midway. Union backing therefore emerged
as a decisive variable in terms of explaining the use of legal action. However,
this only explained the high number of lawsuits. Other issues were involved.
Each lawsuit contained a small history of events on the plantation. This mini-
history and the workers’ reports showed that more was at stake than the fail-
ure to comply with legislation or the degree of union support. The decision
to go to court was prompted by a boss’s unilateral breach of the ‘implicit
agreement’13 governing relations on the engenho. This agreement combined
respect for the norms that had traditionally determined relations within the

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Sigaud A collective ethnographer in Brazil 85

plantations and compliance with the legal norms imposed by the State and
covered in the formal contract. The content of these agreements varied from
plantation to plantation since it was the product of the history of the relations
between the boss and his workers. Usually, although bosses failed to comply
with all the legal norms, workers were tolerant. In the event of a unilateral
breach of the ‘implicit agreement’, the worker used the legal breach as a way
of obtaining redress through the courts. My data suggested that socio-anthro-
pological theories concerning the uses of the legal system needed to be
refined. Neither access to law, as Nader (1980) argued, nor the perception of
injustice, as Felstiner, Abel & Sarat (1980–1) suggested, explain the decision
to go to court. The workers who failed to go to court and the unions that made
little investment had the same access to the legal system as those who went
to court thanks to the support of other unions. They were just as aware of their
rights and felt just as unfairly treated as the other workers, as I discovered in
talking to those who had never sued their bosses (Sigaud, 1999).
In the 1990s I focused my observations more closely on understand-
ing the dynamics of using the legal system within a precise social set-
ting, conducting my fieldwork in Rio Formoso, a municipality on the
south coast with thirty-three thousand inhabitants, six thousand of whom
worked in the large plantations. Strikes were rampant, and there were a
large number of legal actions, both signs of large-scale union invest-
ment. My theoretical hypothesis was that any explanation of the use of
legal action simultaneously included understanding the lack of legal
action. Two plantations, located about 20 kilometres apart, measuring
roughly the same size (between 800 and 1200 hectares) and employing
the same number of workers (around 100 in each) with a long period of
residency, therefore became the next study focus. In one of them,
Sauezinho (the smallest), 90 percent of the workers had already sued the
boss; in the other, Amaragi, there were no lawsuits. The style of domi-
nation made the difference. In Sauezinho, an engenho owned by a mill,
the domination was impersonal: workers were given orders by the man-
ager, who was subordinated in turn to the field inspector, and the latter
to the sugar-mill manager, who received orders from the mill owner. A
decision taken at the top of the hierarchy had to be followed through by
the manager, even when it meant breaking the ‘implicit agreement’ in
the plantation. The manager lacked the autonomy to stem the discontent
brewing among the workers, and the latter turned to the union, which
advised them to take legal action. The workers accepted this advice since
failure to do so would deprive them of the union’s support and expose
them to the mill management. The Sauezinho workers maintained strong
ties with the union leaders, were grateful for the support they received

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86 Social Science Information 47 – no 1

and led the strikes. In Amaragi, domination was personalized: the boss
lived on the plantation and had been there since the 1950s. He knew each
worker by name and took pride in being a ‘good’ boss: he allowed work-
ers to grow their own crops, provided support when there was illness or
death in the family, and distributed clothing and fresh meat at Christmas
and fish at Easter. He also settled interpersonal conflicts at the request of
the workers themselves, and he had dozens of godchildren on the plan-
tation, a fact he cited as proof of the esteem in which the workers held
him. Such behaviour was appropriate to the ‘tradition’ which had legiti-
mated personalized domination in the plantations before the advent of
the RWS.14 The workers felt indebted to the boss. Although he failed to
comply with all their legal rights, the workers did not take him to court.
The moral debt cancelled out the legal debt. There had been no strikes
in Amaragi prior to 1964, in contrast to other plantations in Rio
Formoso. The boss met some items of the legislation, turning this ges-
ture into another example of his ‘kindness’ – which indeed was how the
workers interpreted it. Soon after the Military Coup, he sheltered a union
leader who was being pursued by the police. This action won over the
union leaders, who respected him and remained tolerant of his minor
legal ‘misdemeanours’ (Sigaud, 2004). The shift in scale in covering
these contrasting cases ethnographically enabled me to deepen my inter-
pretation of the workers’ recourse to legal action: this behaviour could
only be understood in terms of a figuration (Elias, 1991) in which these
individuals (bosses, workers and union leaders) were connected to each
other via mutual dependencies, relations and reciprocal obligations con-
stituted over historical time. At this scale of analysis, I was also able to
study the vocabulary used to describe rights-related behaviour and the
moral judgements associated with the latter, the ‘courage’ attributed to
those who went to court and the ‘fear’ levels of those who did not, the
‘respect’ and ‘consideration’ held for the boss by those who did not
accuse him in court and the ‘shame’ felt in doing so, and the ‘ingrati-
tude’ the boss felt the workers showed when he was taken to trial.
Finally, I was able to learn about the ‘fear’ felt by the distinct personae
of the plantation world concerning the potential ‘betrayals’ which could
be perpetrated in any direction: the boss against the workers, the work-
ers against the boss, the site managers against the workers and vice
versa, and the union leaders against the bosses (Sigaud, 1996).
My ethnographic experience in Rio Formoso made me sharply aware
of the sterile nature of abstract debates that oppose gift and contract (see
e.g. Gregory, 1982). There, and perhaps in many other ethnographic
universes, everything is mixed. As Max Weber (1978) had already

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Sigaud A collective ethnographer in Brazil 87

pointed out, ideal-types are good to think about, but fail to correspond to
what we actually encounter in the social world. Thanks to this fieldwork
experience, I was also able to demonstrate the relative advantages of
ethnographic research when investigating the use of legal mechanisms.
In contrast to historians, who are forced to limit themselves to court
files, written sources and any archived material, the anthropologist has
access to real-life individuals who can explain their decisions to go to
court (or not). His or her analysis includes material not found in any
document: ideas concerning the legal norms, the forms of behaviour
related to these ideas and the contexts in which people go to court.
In the 1980s team colleagues, interested in studying regional varia-
tions in the changes occurring in Northeastern plantations, decided to
conduct fieldwork in the sugarcane areas of Pernambuco’s neighbouring
states, Paraíba (Garcia, Jr, 1990; Novaes, 1997) and Alagoas (Heredia,
1989). Their materials contrasted strongly in some aspects with the
Pernambuco observations. My data showed that, just a few years after
the law’s implementation, the RWS norms were already the object of
representations and a reference point for forms of behaviour in the plan-
tation world. They were valid: individuals took them into account in
their activities, which, as Max Weber argues (1981), evinces the validity
of the norm. Plantation workers were acquainted with the employer obli-
gations established by the RWS, they had a category to name them –
‘rights’ – and they possessed representations concerning their meaning
and their origin. The workers’ interactions with their bosses and man-
agers took these rights into account; they knew that they could sue the
owners in court and they conceived the union to be the guardian of their
rights. At the other pole, the bosses had their own interpretations con-
cerning these rights and reacted accordingly: many had already formal-
ized their labour contracts and met some of their obligations. At the
same time, they closed the doors of the plantations to avoid having to
comply with the new legal demands and developed a series of
subterfuges to reduce their impact, such as making use of third-party
contractors to hire workers. Finally, for their part, the union leaders
developed pedagogical programs to encourage the workers to fight for
their rights. They had already implanted the infrastructure needed to
allow them access to the courts, and they negotiated rights with the
bosses. As well as being valid, the RWS norms were effective – that is,
respected – albeit unevenly. Nothing similar was recorded in Paraíba
or Alagoas, where there was no vocabulary of ‘rights’, nor actions
demanding them in the day-to-day conflicts in the plantations, nor law-
suits, nor employer compliance with the norms of the RWS. The new law

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88 Social Science Information 47 – no 1

applied to all those working in Brazilian agriculture, yet had produced

unequal effects since the changes arising from any new judicial ruling are
not simply the product of the content of its norms. Law does not ‘do
things’ in the social world, as some anthropologists (Latour, 2002) have
recently argued. Its effects are always mediated by human action. In
Pernambuco, the effectiveness of the RWS laws was facilitated by a num-
ber of conditions absent elsewhere, such as the groundwork undertaken
by activists in organizing the unions and campaigning for ‘rights’. The
actions of Pernambuco’s Governor, Miguel Arraes (1963–4), also helped
by allowing the free expression of demands relating to the RWS and by
mediating the relations between bosses and workers (Callado, 1964). A
final factor was the conduct of bosses whose violation of the obligations
imposed by ‘tradition’ (such as the granting of plots of land) became
delegitimized. Workers felt freer to fight for their rights.

The research group’s morphology and dynamic

The first fieldwork in Pernambuco (1969–70) was a moment of ‘primi-

tive accumulation’, to borrow Marx’s expression (1977), in the process
of compiling a capital of knowledge on the plantation world. The vol-
ume and pace assumed by the formation of this capital were an outcome
of the modus operandi in the field.
There were then two of us in the area: Moacir Palmeira and I. We both
had our own research theme, but we acted as a team. Each interview and
each observation of different scenes was later subject to lengthy annota-
tions and discussions. This method helped accelerate the pace with which
we made discoveries in the field.15 We gradually identified the cast of local
figures and discovered some whose existence we had never suspected.
These included the ‘clandestine workers’, people who had left the engen-
hos and who continued to work in agriculture but without a formal work
contract. They worked in the plantations and were hired by the empreit-
eiros (subcontractors), who were also ex-workers or ex-managers from the
plantations. We also discovered the peasants from the zones bordering the
plantations, many of them former plantation workers who had obtained a
plot of land as compensation from the bosses after the latter were unable
to settle their labour debts. The process of social change had led to the
emergence of ex-workers-turned-clandestinos, along with the emergence
of the subcontractors and the ex-workers-turned-peasants. None of these
groups was mentioned in the literature. The unions comprised another
extraordinary discovery. Since the Military Coup, no information had been

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Sigaud A collective ethnographer in Brazil 89

available on the rural unions anywhere in the country: the press made no
reference to them, undoubtedly due to the military government’s censor-
ship of any news relating to the ‘peasant movement’. The word ‘peasant’,
which evoked the Peasant Leagues and the demands for agrarian reform,
featured in the list of censored terms. There was also no literature on the
topic. Had we not conducted fieldwork, we would have undoubtedly con-
tinued to think that ‘everything’ (the unions and the confrontations with
the landowners) had ended in 1964, a belief then widespread among intel-
lectuals from the Southeast of Brazil. The first time I presented my
research findings to a group of sociologists in São Paulo, several col-
leagues accused me of ‘inventing’ the data, claiming it was impossible for
my account to be true. I had recounted what I had seen in Palmares and
Carpina: unions always full of members; workers pursuing legal actions in
the courts against bosses; union leaders going to the plantations to medi-
ate conflicts with managers and bosses. The censorship had func-
tioned extremely well: it explained both our surprise in the field and the
incredulity of our colleagues.
Our understanding of the local categories proceeded through trial and
error. For instance, in one of my first interviews in the market, I ingenu-
ously asked an old gentleman who was selling bananas whether he had
been working there for a long time. Almost indignantly, he said no: he
‘traded’ in the market but he ‘worked’ in farming. The reply suggested that
the concept of ‘work’ referred to agricultural activity only. Systematically
testing this hypothesis, we quickly discovered it was correct. This incident
led us to be extremely careful with the terms used, always asking about
their meaning without assuming they would be identical to what we knew
from our everyday experiences in Rio de Janeiro. We spoke the same
language – Portuguese – but words sometimes had a very different mean-
ing. This caution allowed us, for example, to discover that: empregado
(employee) did not mean just any employed worker, but members of the
administrative hierarchy in the plantations; homens (men) was a term
reserved for the bosses and those in power; média (average) designated the
volume of work corresponding to one paid day; salário (wages) meant the
daily pay received through a formal work contract, a sum therefore regu-
lated by the State, in opposition to ganho (literally: gains), a term used to
designate the system of remuneration before the advent of ‘rights’ when
there were no formal contracts; cativeiro (captivity), a word associated
with slavery, was used to describe insupportable contemporary work
conditions in the plantations; liberto (free), another word from the vocab-
ulary of slavery, was used to describe the worker’s feeling when he re-
located to the town; cativo (captive), another slavery word, designated

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unconditional submission to the boss; rights were a time marker: there

was a time ‘before’ and a time ‘after’ ‘rights’; morador (resident) was used
in contexts where ‘rights’ were not an issue: when ‘rights’ were in ques-
tion, the appropriate term was trabalhador (worker); and finally the clan-
destinos (clandestines) were opposed to the fichados (on file), that is, those
who had a formal work contract. Identifying the meaning of these cate-
gories enabled us to interact better with our interlocutors and understand
what they said. The various pairs of oppositions particularly caught my
attention – such as morador and trabalhador, fichado and clandestino,
salário and ganho, ‘before’ and ‘after’ rights – since the precision of the
vocabulary indicated that the social transformations under way were
keenly perceived. However, the vocabulary also indicated continuities
with the remote past. The use of cativeiro, liberto and cativo showed that
the categories from the slavery era were still appropriate for describing sit-
uations perceived to be analogous to those of a past whose memory had
been preserved and transmitted across generations.
In 1972 we returned to Pernambuco with seven researchers, then grad-
uate students, each one with their own research theme: the peasants from
the periphery of the sugarcane plantations were to be studied by Afranio
Garcia, Jr and Beatriz Heredia; the corumbas (seasonal migrant workers)
were investigated by Roberto Ringuelet; the sugar-mill workers were
studied by José Sérgio Leite Lopes; the market run at a sugar mill in
Palmares was studied by Garcia; and finally the conflicts managed by the
unions were investigated by Vera Echenique, and the unions themselves
by Luiz Gatti. Returning to Marx’s expression, I would say that we
passed from the phase of primitive accumulation of capital to the phase
of expanded reproduction, skipping the phase of simple accumulation.
The expansion of our capital also depended on our modus operandi. We
worked individually, in pairs and in threes. A number of us were based in
Palmares: when one of us had no engagements, he or she would join one
of the others. At night we mulled over the problems and setbacks of field-
work (unproductive interviews, people we had been unable to find, loca-
tions we had failed to reach) but also the high points of the day (an
exceptional interview, new discoveries, hypotheses confirmed). These
moments of catharsis contributed greatly to our support for each other
and to developing our work jointly, without our ever realizing this fact.
The group of nine researchers met periodically to brief each other on
the progress of the different projects and to discuss the developments.
These were also moments of intense collaboration. On returning to Rio,
we started a series of seminars to discuss the texts each of us had produced
on the basis of our field experiences. These texts comprised a new element

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Sigaud A collective ethnographer in Brazil 91

of collective production but with distinctive characteristics. Away from the

turmoil of the field, we had more distance to reflect on our material. We
closely analyzed each text, correcting each other’s work, citing either
shared experiences on which we had diverging interpretations or individ-
ual experiences that pointed in another direction, each of us benefiting
from the others’ findings. Hence my own writings were helped by the dis-
coveries of Garcia, Jr (1983) and Heredia (1979) on family work among
peasants, which guided what I later wrote about the cultivation of plots of
land inside the plantations; Leite Lopes’ analysis (1978) of the conception
of cativeiro (captivity) among the sugar-mill workers provided me with
the key to understanding the use of the same notion among the plantation
workers; the study of the mill market undertaken by Garcia (1993) was
decisive years later in comprehending power relations; Palmeira’s analy-
sis (1977) of the norms regulating social relations in the plantation sup-
plied me with elements for understanding the values that workers
attributed to the plot of land given by the bosses. Our knowledge about
classificatory categories expanded. Thanks to Heredia and Garcia, Jr
(1971), we learnt the meaning of ajuda (help), a category that describes
the work of women and children in family agriculture but which is not
considered trabalho (work), a term reserved for the labour performed by
the head of the family. Likewise their work shed light on the opposition
between the roçado, a tract of land cultivated by the domestic group as a
whole, and the roçadinho, a plot ceded by the father to a son for the lat-
ter’s autonomous use. Each researcher’s findings, as well as the categories
they compiled, became part of a common pool of knowledge. None of us
would have arrived at our eventual conclusions without this shared fund.
The metaphor of the expanded reproduction of intellectual capital helps
describe the product of this experience: we had left a phase of primitive
accumulation where we had compiled the elementary knowledge allowing
us to formulate hypotheses. The new researchers benefited from the initial
capital, and together we accumulated a body of new ethnographic knowl-
edge concerning the plantation world’s different figures, the relations con-
necting them and the social processes underlying them.
The 1972 experience proved to be unique in the group’s history. We
all returned to the field but individually or in pairs. There were trips to
the field involving groups, but not all the members had their own
research theme: for example, in 1974 five students interested in obtain-
ing fieldwork experience went to Pernambuco and collaborated with the
research being conducted by Moacir Palmeira on the barracões (stores)
and with my own research on the migration of workers from the planta-
tions; in 1984 another group of six students, also wishing to gain field-

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92 Social Science Information 47 – no 1

work experience, took part in my research on the uses of law; in 1997

we conducted a survey in Rio Formoso to study the transformations sur-
rounding the land invasions, the crisis among bosses and the changes in
municipal power (L’Estoile & Sigaud, 2001); and in 1999 some mem-
bers of the 1997 group together with new researchers returned to the
field to continue studying the same themes. These new experiences also
allowed for the possibility of collective production since they included
the same daily catharses and systematic discussions both in the field and
beyond. However, the intensity was less marked than in 1972. Even so,
these experiences fitted into the logic of expanded reproduction: we
based our work on the accumulated capital and expanded it.
So far I have highlighted the effects of the group’s morphology and its
modus operandi on the process of forming a capital of knowledge. The
collective dimension of our venture and the accumulation of capital were
not the product of a carefully planned strategy: suggesting so would imply
attributing our actions with a meaning we failed to give them at the time.
At the outset everything was uncertain, including where we would end up.
We had to get on with our work and produce viable results for those fund-
ing us to carry on gaining a living from research. A series of favourable
conditions allowed us to continue our research in Pernambuco: these
included the institutional base provided by the Museu Nacional, funding
from the Ford Foundation and the Brazilian State, and the affective ties
that bonded us as a group. The process of accumulating capital was
unplanned and turbulent, like any historical process (Elias, 1994), and
only really became visible with hindsight.

Conclusion

Since the 1980s, ethnography has become a major theme of debate

among anthropologists. They have focused on ethnographic experience
and writing (Marcus & Cushman, 1982; Clifford & Marcus, 1986;
Marcus & Fischer, 1986), ethnographic authority (Geertz, 1988), ethno-
graphic time (Fabian, 1983), the ethnographer’s magic (Stocking, 1983),
and ethnography as the DNA of our professional practice (Descola,
2005). However, little attention has been given to the relations between
the social conditions in which anthropologists carry out their work and
what they can actually write about the social world. In this article I
sought to fill this lacuna by presenting my intellectual experience as part
of a collective undertaking. This experience reveals the enormous poten-
tial of group-based ethnographic research, undertaken in different social

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Sigaud A collective ethnographer in Brazil 93

and historical conditions, in terms of producing knowledge about a spe-

cific social world. This approach is rooted in the idea that anthropology
is worthwhile so long as it helps us to understand the world we live in.
Had I shared the idea that the essence of our work is to write about our
subjective experience in the field, I would have told another story about
our fairly unorthodox endeavour.
Lygia Sigaud is a professor in the Graduate Course in Social Anthropology of the Museu
Nacional (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro), a senior researcher for CNPQ and a
FAPERJ award holder. She has published books and articles on the world of the large
sugarcane plantations of the Brazilian Northeast, on the history of social anthropology,
and has co-edited a volume with Benoît de L’Estoile and Federico Neiburg, Empires,
nations, and natives: Anthropology and state-making (Duke University Press, 2005).
Author’s address: Museu Nacional, Departamento de Antropologia, Quinta da Boa Vista
s/n, 20940–040 Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brasil. [email: lygia.sigaud@terra.com.br]

Notes
1. This project was part of a larger research programme, the Comparative Regional
Development Project, a collaboration between the Museu Nacional and Harvard
University.
2. Brazilian law stipulated that the rural unions had to have a municipal basis and be
open to all agricultural workers, including employees, small landowners, squatters and ten-
ants. In the plantation zone, the unions were created by activists from the Brazilian
Communist Party and the Catholic left. Plantation workers made up around 99 percent of
the union membership (Maybury-Lewis, 1994).
3. The unions are coordinated by a president, a treasurer and a secretary, most of them
former plantation workers. The term ‘union leaders’ refers to this group.
4. MST promotes land occupations and squatter camps as a means of pressurizing the
Brazilian State to seize private lands and redistribute them among those living in the
encampments. The organization was created in 1984 (Fernandes, 2000).
5. A draft version of this text was presented at Ethnografeast II. La fabrique de l’ethno-
graphie [The manufacturing of ethnography], a symposium held at the Ecole normale
supérieure, in Paris, September 2004. I am grateful for the criticisms and advice of
Florence Weber.
6. Hereafter I use the term ‘worker’ to refer to those who work in the plantations. The
RWS refers to them as rural workers, but they call themselves simply workers. In some
contexts, they still call themselves moradores, as I discuss later.
7. ‘Communist’ was an accusatory label used by the military regime and its supporters
(such as the big landowners) to designate opponents of the regime and those who had par-
ticipated in the social protests prior to 1964.
8. The plantation administrative hierarchy was made up of the manager, who received
orders from the boss and managed the relations with workers, determining the jobs to be
done, and their assistants. In the mills, managers were subordinate to a field inspector and
a mill manager. They were referred to as ‘employees’, and referred to themselves in the
same terms.

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94 Social Science Information 47 – no 1

9. Founded in 1963, CONTAG unites federations across the country, organized by

states. The federations unite the state unions, such as FETAPE, created in 1962.
10. Key items of this policy change included the privatization of exports and the removal
of subsidies.
11. Agricultural tasks were paid on the basis of production: the daily remuneration for
a sugarcane cutter was calculated according to the number of tons harvested; the value of
off-season tasks, such as planting and crop tending, was calculated according to the size
of the area worked.
12. Wives and children listened to the conversations but did not take part. This was seen
as men’s business. I think they accepted me as an interlocutor because of my perceived
hybrid status: I was a woman who travelled around like men and took an interest in male
topics.
13. The idea of an implicit agreement regulating local social relations is grounded in
Weber’s analysis of law (1978).
14. The mode of domination once prevalent in the plantations can be compared to the
ideal-type of ‘traditional domination’ theorized by Max Weber. The norms to which the
different personae of the world of the plantations referred were conventional norms, with-
out legal guarantees, and taken to date back to immemorial times. They conformed to
Weber’s idea of ‘tradition’ (1978).
15. Our work method was similar to that described by Gudeman and Rivera (1994) con-
cerning their fieldwork in Colombia.

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