Blinded Like a State: The Revolt against Civil Registration in Nineteenth-Century Brazil

Abstract

The first reports of popular disturbances in connection with Decree 798, calling for obligatory civil registration of births and deaths in the Brazilian empire, surfaced in the early days of January 1852. In the ensuing weeks, men, women, and children from across the impoverished northeastern Brazilian backlands convened in small settlements and towns to protest the decree. Local authorities reported being forced to abandon their posts, fleeing from the “mass of ignorants,” who, armed with knives and stones, threatened violence against those who would implement the law. Disturbances were reported in at least thirty-one localities, with crowds estimated at one hundred to several thousand people.

Race, Nation, and Resistance to State Symbolic Power in Rwanda since the 1994 Genocide

“…These findings demonstrate the significance of studying state categorization and classification projects from below. Theories of symbolic power founded largely on top-down analyses propose that states succeed when they co-opt traditional practices (Loveman, 2007(Loveman, , pp. 1662, when these practices require civilians to think using the state's categories (Anderson, 1991;Bailey, 2008;Francis-Tan & Tannuri-Pianto, 2015;Goldberg, 1997, pp.…”

“…Moreover, although examples of resistance can be found in numerous studies (e.g., Carroll, 2006;Cohn, 1987;Curtis, 2001;Mora, 2014;Rodríguez-Muñiz, 2017), the analysis still tends to privilege the state's perspective -that is, frustrated efforts by state authorities to implement new categories of "vision and division." Loveman's (2007) study of the "war of the wasps" in nineteenth-century Brazil, when the rural poor refused to cooperate with civil registration practices, and Diamant's (2001) analysis of unsuccessful attempts to implement civil marriage registration in Maoist China, present rare exceptions. Meanwhile, Malkki's (1995) comparison of Burundian Hutu refugees in Tanzania presents a unique example of the construction of a new national category outside the boundaries of the state.…”

Turning Big Brother upside down: Revisiting surveillance from Latin America

“…Researchers have documented these strategies, revealing a rich repertoire of counteractions that range from avoiding census‐takers to embracing direct confrontation. In doing so, scholars working on this venue should avoid simplistic characterizations of technophobia to determine the attitudes of unruly people toward identification and surveillance technologies (García‐Ferrari, 2007; Godoy Sepúlveda, 2014; Loveman, 2007; Ragas, 2020a). Unearthing these episodes of resistance provides a counter‐narrative against the rampant triumphalism of post 9/11 surveillance systems and offers a more nuanced perspective on how populations actively participated in establishing the limits of past identification technologies.…”

Establishing Identity: Documents, Performance, and Biometric Information in Immigration Proceedings

“…Classification systems were created to render the opaque masses legible and intelligible to the state (Scott 1998). Various forms of sabotage and resistance were repressed and overcome (Noiriel 2001; Loveman 2007). More proactively, voluntary cooperation was solicited by rewarding certain status holders officially recognized by the state (Diamant 2001; Scott, Tehranian, and Mathias 2002).…”