Monthly Archives: October 2026

State’s madness and crimes. Notes on Rebellion in the Backlands, Os Sertões (1902), Euclides da Cunha, trans. Samuel Putman

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Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões, Rebellion in the Backlands, from 1902, tells the story of the military campaign the government of the young republic of Brazil undertook against the Sertões, a set of rural communities in the Northeastern region of Canudos at the end of the nineteenth century. In an introduction from 1943, the Brazilian homme de lettres Afrânio Peixoto considered da Cunha as Brazil’s “number one-geographer and sociologist” (xxvii). Peixtoto goes as far as to say that if “the Book of Genesis may be said to be, in the symbolism that it holds for the faithful, a biography of earth, Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões is a Genesis which in epic accents tells of the meeting of civilization and barbarism; it is a saga of the first flaming days of the earth and of man and of primal man’s first direct contact with other men known as civilized” (xxix). What, perhaps, Peixoto misses in his laudatory “Preface,” is that the da Cunha’s text is the genesis of the Brazilian modern state.

The conflict between the Brazilian state and the sertões is not directly presented. Da Cunha digresses into observations of the landscape and the people of the Backlands. In an environmental determinism key, da Cunha presents a people that is strongly tied to the geographical conditions of the space they inhabit. That is, since the Canudos is a region of extreme climates, in which the dry season is unbearable because of its lack of “natural resources,” and the rainy season is chaotic due to the constant floods, the dwellers of these areas have, as well, an extremist and fatalistic behaviour. Nature, for da Cunha, has an energy “it shares with man” (37). And the people from the Backlands, the sertanejos, are a very particular type of people, for Cunha. They are mestizos, miscegenated individuals, but contrary to other mestizos in Brazil, for da Cunha, the sertanejo is “above all else a strong individual […] he is ugly, awkward, stooped […] He is the man that is always tired” and by the same token is “an amazingly different being, capable of extraordinary feats of strength and agility” (89-90). Between admiration and contempt, da Cunha paints an ambiguous enemy of the Brazilian state.

If the military campaign against the sertões marks the birth of modern Brazil, then, to some extent, the campaign is not only against a particular group of people, but against nature. Da Cunha empathized with the belief that in Latin American nations, at the end of the nineteenth century, there was a struggle between civilization (European values and traditions) and barbarism (the values of the peripheries). Just like Domingo Sarmiento in Argentina, da Cunha would champion civilization over barbarism. The rebellion in the Backlands ran for almost two years. And the event that triggered it was a dispute over the purchase of lumber between Antonio Conselheiro, a priest, leader of the sertanejos, and founding father of the settlements where the sertanejos dwelled, and Arlindo Leoni, the magistrate of the Joazeiro. Da Cunha states that Conselheiro had purchased “a certain quantity of lumber which the extremely impoverished caatingas of Canudos were unable to furnish him” (178). The purchase was legal and in good faith, but “when the time agreed upon for the delivery of the material, which was to be used in the completion of the new church, came around, there was no lumber in sight” (179). There was a pre-existing beef between Conselheiro and Leoni, so da Cunha tells us, and by not delivering the lumber, the magistrate was “evening the score” (179). So Leoni sent a telegram to the respective authorities informing of the possibility of an imminent attack from the setanejos. With this, several expeditions and four regular expeditions begun against the sertanejos. And while surely, in early October 1897, the dwellers of the Backlands were fully defeated, how did these enterprises of civilization had such a hard time defeating the poor barbarians of the Canudos?

“Nature protects the sertanejo” (195), tells us da Cunha. And it is not only nature that aids the setanejos. After the defeat of Moreira Cesar, a commander who was supposedly undefeatable, may of the soldiers became disappointed. These soldiers were all “mestizos, of the same racial stock as the backwoodsmen; and in their discouragement over the inexplicable defeat which they had suffered […] they fell victim to the power of suggestion and, seeing in it all an element of the marvelous and the supernatural, were filled with an unreasoning terror —a terror that was further increased by the extravagant stories that were going around” (369). As the campaign continued, the warfare increased its affects. During the last days of the struggle, the state forces used dynamite as a way of fully destroying the sertanejo’s labyrinthic settlements. For da Cunha, this was “fitting enough” because “the sertanejos had inverted all psychology of ordinary warfare; their resistance was stiffened by reverses, and they were strengthened by hunger, hardened by defeat” (464). With the bombing of the houses, the violence of dynamite was bringing hell on earth, and as da Cunha puts it the bombing was both “a recognition and a consecration” (463). From this perspective, then, just like the sertanejos had inverted all “psychology of ordinary warfare,” they had also inverted the dichotomy between civilization and barbarism. If civilization reveals to be destructive and annihilating, then on what grounds can it place itself superior to barbarism? And more importantly, how can civilization offer anything appealing to the barbarian? The Canudos, the sertanejos, da Cunha tells us, “did not surrender” (475). At the very end of the conflict when Conselheiro was already dead, “an old man, two other full-grown men, and a child, [were] facing a furiously raging army of five thousand soldiers” (475). While da Cunha tells us that what happened next “we could not describe” (475), the horror is alluded. The campaign against the sertanejos, then, had the “essential outlines of crime and madness,” and as the last two lines of the text suggest, (“The trouble is that we do not have today a Maudsley for acts of madness and crimes on the part of nations…” [476]), how can one determine that a nation-state is insane or has committed a crime when it is the nation-state who seeks civilization, order and progress?

Notes on Emile Durkheim’s Suicide, a Study in Sociology (1897)

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Emile Durkheim’s Suicide, a Study in Sociology, from 1897, is both method and study. That is, the book is not only presenting a sociological approach to the study of suicide, but it is also teaches what is the use of sociology. As Durkheim’s first lines to the book put it, “sociology has been in vogue for some time” (35). The discipline is on a stage of development, at the stage of “system-building and philosophical synthesis” (35). What sociology attempts, then, is to provide a study of society of philosophical consequences, one is tempted to say of ontological consequences.

Divided in three books, Suicide traces the way different sciences have approached suicide; it revises what physicians and other sociologists have written before Durkheim (notably these perspectives will be refuted); it also offers statistics and data to chart the number of individuals who have committed suicide. The chore of the argument is that suicide is socially caused. That is, while there is a form of suicide that is manifested by purely “personal” reasons, i.e. suicides that Durkheim’s attributes to an unstable mental health, suicide, in general, is prefigured by social forces. To determine these social forces, Durkheim begins by comparing the suicide rate of different areas in a country. In the states of Germany, for instance, he notes that there are notable differences between the suicide rates of the provinces of Rhenish Palatinate and Bavaria. While the latter has the lowest number of suicides between 1867 and 1875 (19 in total) in the German states, the former has one of the highest number of suicides (157 in total). For Durkheim, the number of suicides in a state is relative to the number of Catholics and Protestants in each state. So, Catholicism socially cancels suicide, while Protestantism propitiates it, to some extent. For Durkheim it is the values of each of these religions what determines the predisposition of people towards the act of suicide. That is, while for the catholic all form of suicide is “abhorrent,” the Protestant is more convinced that each individual is “the author of [their own] faith” (158). Since Protestantism embraces the “spirit of free inquiry” (158), then, when one starts thinking for themselves, one quickly realizes that life does not make sense. It is not that Protestantism “kills,” but that by the fact that individualism becomes crucial for Protestantism, excessive individualism results in egoistic suicide. As Durkheim would put it “the more the believer doubts, that is, the less he feels himself a real participant in the religious faith to which he belongs, and from which he is freeing himself; the more the family and community become freeing to the individual, so much the more does he become a mystery to himself, unable to escape the exasperating and agonizing question: to what purpose?” (212). The individual becomes less integrated and regulated by society because individuals can integrate and regulate themselves on their own, and by extension, they can decide if life is worth living.

It would seem, then, that behind the sociological inquiry, at least as presented by Durkheim in Suicide, there is a defence of traditional values, or more precisely to Catholicism. But, far from it, Durkheim also charts the existence of suicide within traditional values. That is, if egoistic suicide is tied to Protestant values of individualism, altruistic suicide would be tied to the excessive presence of the social group. While egoistic suicide is a matter of decision, altruistic suicide will be a “duty” (219). In other words, whereas egoistic suicide results from an individual decision, altruistic suicide depends on a collective decision. Egoistic suicide is no sacrifice, but a refusal to keep living within a particular social context; altruistic suicide is, above all, a sacrifice for the greater good. The former is an excessive manifestation of the self, the latter does not question if life is worth living, they simply give their life for the good of the socius, society. In a society where individuals are both highly regulated and integrated there is a “joy of sacrifice,” because, even with no particular reason, renunciation [to life] in itself is considered praiseworthy” (223). Durkheim proposes a possible history of this type of suicide, from ancient societies to modern ones. If in ancient societies religion was tied to altruistic suicide, in martyrdom, in modern society, it is the army the institution that embraces altruistic suicide.

Durkheim proposes that there is a third type of suicide: the anomic suicide. This suicide seems to appear only in periods of acute crisis. But Durkheim would argue that this form of suicide, at least at the end of the nineteenth century, has become normal, especially in people in the fields of trade and industry. “For a whole century, economic progress has mainly consisted in freeing industrial relations from all regulation” (254). And with this, religion “has lost most of its power. And government, instead of regulating economic life, has become its tool and servant” (255). So, if egoistic suicide derives from the maximization of individual doubt and open inquiry, and altruistic suicide is motivated by the duty to sacrifice an individual life for the good of society, anomic suicide combines both individual duty and individual decision. That is, anomic suicide is tied fully to the revolting forces of capitalist accumulation. While Durkheim does never mention the word capitalism, his diagnosis of the late nineteenth century is akin to Marx’s. Since there has been a “liberation of desires” that “has been made worse by the development of industry and the almost infinite extension of the market” (255), anomic suicide is what comes when both egoistic suicide, the informed decision of kill oneself, coexists and antagonizes with altruistic suicide, the self-sacrifice for a bigger good.

To some extent, Durkheim is already challenging Max Weber’s explanation of the rise of capitalism. It is not the protestant ethic, as described by Weber, that is behind the expansion of capitalism (the liberation of desires by the infinite expansion of the market), but the conflict between traditional (Catholic) and modern (Protestant) values. If capitalism, as described by Engels and Marx, is characterized by the revolting and revolutionary forces of the bourgeoisie, mixing the old and the new, then, anomic suicide lies in-between the intelligibility of both traditional and modern values, anomic suicide is the grammar of capitalism (since grammar is the unseen infrastructure of enunciation). It makes sense, then, that Durkheim has a hard time typifying anomic suicide. He relates it to both egoistic suicide and altruistic suicide (258), but he insists on the radical difference between them. While both altruistic and egoistic suicide “draw their chief recruits from the same social environments [army men, for the altruistic; intellectual careers for the egoistic] […] the other [anomic suicide draws from] the industrial commercial world” (258). What is the industrial commercial world, at the end of the nineteenth century, if not a combination of both militarism and highly educated elites? The anomic suicide is the suicide of the soldiers of capital: individuals who are the byproduct of the intellectualization (Protestantism) and sacralization (Catholicism) of capitalist relationships, a society both modern and traditional, and in perpetual change.

In the last section of the book, “Practical Consequences,” Durkheim tries to solve the problem of anomic suicide, and of suicide in general. He stresses that since anomic suicide goes against society, or more precisely against the forces that guarantee the cohesion between individuals (integration and regulation), a form of socialization should restrain the centripetal force of anomic suicide. While religion, the family, and politics have been key in restraining anomic suicide, in the late nineteenth century, for Durkheim, none of these institutions can restrain anymore the anomy. With the emergence of capitalist relationships (though capitalism is a concept alien to the book, as mentioned before) where can one find a restrainer for the anomy? “The only way to resolve this antinomy is to set up a cluster of collective forces outside the State, though subject to its action, whose regulative influence can be exerted with greater variety” (380).

Durkheim’s distrust of the state derives from what he sees as an ambivalent transformation of political power since the French Revolution. That is, Durkheim believes that since the state was the only institution that survived the ancient regime, the state’s own survival and perseverance made of it an institution that “tended to absorb all forms of activity which had a social character,” and no other social institution was able to challenge this because the rubble of the ancient regime was but “an unstable flux of individuals” (389). Modern society, then, is a state society, “Individuals are made aware of society and of their dependence upon it only through the State [sic]” (389). As a consequence, “While the State [sic] becomes inflated and hypertrophied in order to obtain a firm enough grip upon individuals, but without succeeding the latter, without mutual relationships, tumble over one another like so many liquid molecules, encountering no central energy to retain, fix and organize them” (389). If the state cannot make of the individual but “liquid molecules,” what can guarantee grip, solidity, restraint and order in society? Durkheim’s proposal is to provide the restitution of autonomy to local groups, he proposes a “decentralization” of society from the state, a decentralization that would “simultaneously produce a greater concentration of social energies” (389). This decentralization then is meant to not loose “the bonds uniting each apart of society with the State [sic], moral powers must be created with an influence, which the state cannot have, over the multitude of individuals” (390). It would seem, then, that Durkheim is appealing for the emergence of an autonomous multitude of individuals, such multitude is open to building bridges for the sake of taming anomic suicide. Since moral power is the only power that holds people together, for Durkheim, then, it is not by abolishing the state, or the market, or capitalism, that one cancels anomic suicide. If one cannot control the flows of the “luquid molecules,” one can at least try to direct their fluidity, one can bet on hydraulics as sociability. But would this end for good anomic suicide? And more importantly, what would happen if moral power become anomic itself?