Slaves Who Owned Slaves in Nineteenth-Century Bahia, Brazil

Abstract

It was not uncommon in Brazil for slaves to own slaves. Slaves as masters of slaves existed in many slave societies and societies with slaves, but considering modern, chattel slavery in the Americas, Brazil seems to have been a special case where this phenomenon thrived, especially in nineteenth-century urban Bahia. The investigation is based on more than five hundred cases of enslaved slaveowners registered in ecclesiastical and manumission records in the provincial capital city of Salvador. The paper discusses the positive legal basis and common law rights that made possible this peculiar form of slave ownership. The paper relates slave ownership by slaves with the direction and volume of the slave trade, the specific contours of urban slavery, access by slaves to slave trade networks, and slave/master relations. It also discusses the web of convivial relations that involved the slaves of slaves, focusing on the ethnic and gender profiles of the enslaved master and their slaves.

Interspecific Contact Scenes: Humans and Street Dogs in the Margins of the City

“…At first sight, a biopolitical take on animals might seem to reinforce the nature-culture divide. Against such an assumption, one can consider with Giorgio Agamben (Agamben 2004(Agamben [2002: [33][34][35][36][37][38] that the "bare life" of animals is nothing natural but a political act of dividing life into two seemingly separate spheres: social life (bios) on the one hand and the "bare" life (zoé)…”

“…At the beginning of the film, such a game is played between humans and dogs with a football. 36 After this initial scene and after the football the dogs play with has run out of air, the game continues with different tennis balls. 37 In the game of the two dogs, the use of these tennis balls grows increasingly independent from human coplayers, and the two dogs end up playing for themselves, appropriating human tools and human infrastructure for their own purpose.…”

Inequidades y convivialidades en movimiento La familia y los inicios de la migración del Triángulo Norte de Centroamérica hacia los Estados Unidos

“…En otro sentido, inequidades sociales y de género se expresaban en la maternidad temprana y la recurrencia de las uniones consensuales (no matrimoniales), sobre todo en los grupos menos favorecidos. El crecimiento demográfico, que colocó a América Latina en el primer lugar del mundo con relación a la tasa de crecimiento promedio anual (hasta siete hijos por mujer), se contuvo durante la segunda mitad de la década de 1960 (Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe 1993: [35][36]. Sin embargo, el número de nacimientos había aumentado debido a que el incremento poblacional que rondó la década de 1950 amplió las fronteras de la joven estructura de edades de la población.…”

“…En Centroamérica, en las décadas de 1950 y 1960, la edad promedio de las madres registró el extremo más bajo (18 a 21 años). Pero en 1993, entre las mujeres de 15 a 19 años se observaron tasas alarmantes de fecundidad superiores a 100 por 1,000 en Honduras, El Salvador y Guatemala (Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe 1993: [28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39].…”