Nos meandros da família: casamentos, transgressões e sobrevivência cotidiana no Grão-Pará (1750-1798)

Abstract

In recent years, Family History has increasingly attracted the interest of new researchers. We locate ourselves in this field of study when we approach the intricacies of the families of Grão-Pará in the second half of the 18th century, when the Amazon underwent a series of administrative changes(known as “pombaline reforms”), which caused impacts of a social, political and economic impacts in this part of Portuguese America. In this way, this work intends to advance this historiographical field through the investigation of practices concerning the formation and dissolution of “other families” or of the multiple family arrangements established outside the official model proposed (imposed) to this society by the dominant institutions (the State and the Catholic Church). This study also examines the customs and daily struggles that families faced for their survival or social ascension and that escaped the control of these same institutions. In the wake of this, we aim to analyze how the families of the popular classes and some indigenous groups (re)acted and organized themselves in the face of the disciplinary measures of marriage, housing, clothing, work, among others that marked the period covered. In this way, we focused our attention on themes such as: indigenous family work, matrimonial alliances (such as intermarriages), marital transgressions (bigamy, sodomy, concubinage, deflowering and adultery), illegitimacy (illegitimate children) and widowhood. For this, as an empirical basis, we gathered and examined a wide and diverse series of documents, manuscripts and printed matter, which are mostly composed of official correspondence (letters, offices, solicitations and requests) exchanged between different colonial authorities and with the settlers, as well as inquisitorial processes, travellers’ reports, chronicles, legislative sets, regulations and ecclesiastical writings taken from national (APEP, BN, IHGB) and international archives (AHU and ANTT). We crossed in a cross-section through thematic axes and confronted, therefore, between the data obtained by the documentation, together with a vast and varied specialized bibliography, in order to elucidate the studied phenomena and build our own inferences