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Postmodern Ethnographer in the Backlands: An Imperial Bureaucrat's Perceptions of Post-Independence Brazil

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Judy Bieber
Judy Bieber*
Affiliation:
University of New Mexico
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In 1819 José Ignacio do Couto Moreno composed this sentimental poem about his adopted hometown, a small river port in the interior of Minas Gerais. He felt compelled to write it after suffering considerable ribbing by his colleagues during a festive occasion in Rio de Janeiro. Couto Moreno was homesick, and his fellow partygoers could not resist teasing him for demonstrating nostalgia for home and hearth. They challenged him incredulously, “What possible attraction could such distant and brutish backlands hold?”

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , 1998 , pp. 37 - 72
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

∗

I would like to thank the editorial staff of the Latin American Research Review and the anonymous reviewers who critiqued this essay with such care. Thanks also go to Tarcísio Rodrigues Botelho, John Chasteen, Elizabeth Kiddy, Douglas Cole Libby, John Russell-Wood, Suzanne Schadl, and Bill Stanley for their encouragement and insightful comments on various incarnations of this article. Special thanks to the staff and fellow researchers at the Arquivo Público Mineiro in Belo Horizonte for their support and collegiality.

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