Bonds of Visitation: Henry Koster and the Social Life of Brazilians, 1809–15

When in 1808 the Portuguese King D. João VI opened the Brazilian ports to allied nations, visits to Brazil intensified. Travelers surveyed the country’s natural resources and cultural practices. Henry Koster (1793-1820) in particular is known as one of the most candid observers of the negotiations between the competing honor codes that coexisted in pre-independent Brazil. For eleven years he planted sugar and traveled, meeting other planters and documenting his interaction with the non-elite classes. At twenty-seven he died in Brazil supposedly known as Henrique Costa. Koster’s visits are a probe into a new modern culture in the making. In Marxist and World-System theories (Alencastro; Novais; Wallerstein) as well as in postcolonial studies (Bhabha; Said; Pratt) contact, exoticization, and estrangement are viewed as relationships among large groups; or as power of one nation or class over another. Though this is certainly the case, interpersonal ties (Tilly), group networks (Collins), and gift-giving strategies for engaging dominant codes (Godelier; Mauss) provide the immediate context within which decisions and motives can be understood against the background of cultural exchanges. As Ann Swidler has recently put it, culture influences action not by providing the ultimate values toward which action is oriented, but by shaping a repertoire or “tool kit” of habits, skills, and styles from which people construct “strategies of action.” In this paper I will argue that “visiting” is one of such strategies, and that it provides an original framework to better understand the way agents handle contact and narrate the changes in their perception of social identity. As Koster seems to indicate, visiting displays and rehearses the status of agents at the summit of their conception of self and society, at the same time as it also allows for the possibility of cautious metamorphoses.