“Conduta de pais, caminhos de filhos”: conflitos familiares na cidade da Bahia (1779-1799)

Abstract

The city of Bahia (present day, Salvador) was the scene of family conflicts that overcame the barriers of the domestic space, as well as the barriers of time, and such facts have reached us through official documents found at the Overseas Historical Archive. In this scenario, parents and children are the main characters in a dispute full of mutual accusations and ambiguous attitudes mediated by a legal-moral apparatus and by administrative authorities from Portugal. The formality that is usually part of official manuscripts did not avert the presence of genuinely human predicaments and feelings, such as fear, anger, loneliness, hope and affection. The complexity surrounding the emotions and acts of these historical protagonists is part of the entire analysis and narrative structure of this paper, since the families in their inner struggles for power, would reveal a political, social, and cultural complexity, on a large scale, as na assumption, that is, Portuguese America. This paper is, for that matter, a research on Family History. From a micro-historical approach to Ginzburg, analyzing the drama of two families, Almeida e Queirós, living in the City of Bahia, in order to understand the sociocultural dynamics of Portuguese America after the ordinance of D. José I e D. Maria I (1775 and 1784, respectively) which dealt with the abuse of parenthal authority and the freedom of the children. For doing so, we went through the concepts of figuration, interdependency and balance of Norbert Elias and his sociology, too, since we are facing autonomy/freedom of our characters in a network of interdependency and according to the possibilities, needs and social condition in which they lived.