The Other End of the Bargain: The Socioeconomics of Marital Dissolution in Rural Northeast Brazil

Abstract

Divorce rates globally are on the rise, and in rural Northeast Brazil increasing rates of marital dissolution index transformations in gender roles, marriage and kinship structures. Socioeconomic changespecifically a transition to an economy based in ecotourism-impacts gender roles and subsequent views on marriage and marriage dissolution. In a context of extreme social inequality and structural vulnerability women's employment combined with men's unemployment decreases women's incentives to stay in an unsatisfactory marriage. However, a women and men's ability or inability to make a financial contribution to the household is not the primary impetus for marital dissolution. Among other factors, marriage dissolution represents the breakdown of an emerging bargain between women and men based in the ideal of a modern companionate marriage. [divorce, gender, marriage, employment, Brazil, ecotourism] In the rural interior of Northeast Brazil, Afro-Brazilian descendants of slaves and plantation workers subsist off of the dry land of the sertão-the semiarid region that spreads across the interior of eight Northeast Brazilian states, including the state of Bahia. i Brogod o 1 is a small town 2 deep in the Bahian sertão, over 400 km from the state capital of Salvador. In the early 20th century, Brogod o, then a prosperous mining town, fell into a deep economic decline with the departure of the mining industry. For decades, its remaining residents subsisted on small-scale farming and income from kin who had migrated to urban areas for employment. Afro-Brazilian descendants of miners lived on land purchased and homes constructed during the mining boom, with little to no opportunity for education, employment, or upward mobilization. This slowly began to change when in 1985 the government declared the area adjacent to Brogod o a national park. As a result, Brogod o's almost nonexistent local economy reemerged with the growing market for ecotourism. Over the last 28 years, employment through ecotourism has enabled formerly impoverished families to maintain relatively stable low-income households. Furthermore, the ecotourism economy offers women formal employment outside the home, which I attribute to dramatic changes in gender roles and marital relations. In this article, I examine how socioeconomic change-specifically a transition to an economy based in ecotourism-impacts gender roles and subsequent views on marriage and marriage dissolution. I describe how employment in the ecotourism industry transforms women's roles in society by removing them from the domestic realm, giving them a public role, and increasing their sense of relative economic independence and autonomy. I argue that these transformations influence women's decision-making process surrounding separation and divorce.In 2012, I met Dona Maria, a 95-year old Afro-Brazilian woman born and raised in Brogod o. She met and married her husband when she was 12 years old and remained married to him until his death 63 years later. Dona Maria described the suffering s...

Outliving love: marital estrangement in an African insurance market

“…Despite the legion historical literature on transformations to gender, sexuality, and kinship under colonialism, there is little ethnographic work on divorce in Africa amid contemporary, changing economies (Stiles 2003, 2005, Dorjahn 1990, Medeiros 2014. Hamilton Sipho Simelane (2011) has moved in this direction in post-colonial Swaziland, describing how some women estrange themselves from abusive marriages by engaging in economic activities like wage labour.…”