Compadresco

Compadresco, a godparent relationship. Compadresco is a form of religious kinship in Luso-Brazilian Catholic society whereby a person acquires one or two godparents at baptism, confirmation, and marriage. By acting as a spiritual sponsor at baptism, the godparents (padrinho and madrinha) become coparents, assuming the responsibility of watching over the child's spiritual life and material well-being. In Brazil, as in other Catholic countries, the godparent relationship is taken very seriously and involves lifelong obligations, including adopting godchildren in case of the death of their parents and awarding dowries. The compadrio ties allow families to strengthen and enlarge kinship links with wealthy individuals of higher social class. The parentela (kinship network) thus created is a vital institution in Brazilian society and politics. Since family counts for everything, a lone individual could be included in family groups by a favorable marriage alliance and godparent relationships. In colonial times the compadrio relationships helped ambitious families to secure favorable political positions and alliances with wealthy landowning and merchant families, thereby strengthening and reinforcing the existing parentelas. Social linkages were vital in colonial times, when the cycles of boom and bust could reduce even the wealthiest families to poverty. Slaves commonly sought godparents for their children from the free population and among their owners to aid in freeing their children.

See alsoCompadrazgo .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sidney W. Mintz and Eric R. Wolf, "An Analysis of Ritual Co-Parenthood (Compadrazgo)," in Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 6, no. 4 (1950): 341-368.

A. J. R. Russell-Wood, Fidalgos and Philanthropists: The Santa Casa da Misericordia of Bahia, 1550–1755 (1968).

Stephen Gudeman, "The Compadrazgo as a Reflection of the Natural and Spiritual Person," in Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1971), pp. 45-71.

Stephen Gudeman and Stuart B. Schwartz, "Baptismal Godparents in Slavery: Cleansing Original Sin in Eighteenth-Century Bahia," in Kinship, Ideology, and Practice in Latin America, edited by Raymond T. Smith (1984), pp. 35-58.

Additional Bibliography

Graham, Sandra Lauderdale. Caetana Says No: Women's Stories from a Brazilian Slave Society. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Higgens, Kathleen J. "Licentious Liberty" in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region: Slavery, Gender, and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Sabaráa, Minas Gerais. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999.

                                          Patricia Mulvey