Anne S. Macpherson, From Colony to Nation: Women Activists and the Gendering of Politics in Belize, 1912–1982 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), pp. xviii+385, £30.00, hb.
seigneurial, plantation civilisation he created and whose decline he lamented. Moreover, as the authors show, his concern with foreign models, whether Left or Right, as potential pathogens for ‘his ’ Brazil was an abiding fear. While he himself boldly adapted such things as he saw fit, he dreaded their embrace by others as potentially deracinating. The contribution of this study is clear. Serious Brazilian intellectual history and explication, thriving in Brazil itself, remain embarrassingly neglected in the Anglophone world. The authors have brought Freyre to the English reader, with all of his enormous appetite for cultural, social and historical comparisons. Importantly, they have done so at the level at which he wrote, in which references to the advancing social sciences were as natural as the citation of novelists, critics and historians. Furthermore, the contribution made is not to the laity alone. As graduate students and as mature scholars, many of us read and return to Freyre because we must ; however, that does not always mean that we understand his intentions, his ambitions or all of his achievements. In accompanying the authors, one suspects many of us will learn a great deal about Freyre that we did not know (for instance, his debt to Spencer and its relationship to his embrace of ambivalence as an intellectual method). Moreover, we may learn how much we have missed in the work itself. The authors help us to read Freyre afresh – for example, his preoccupation with material culture and his fastening upon the ‘significant detail ’ are matters one can sense without understanding. Many of us have enjoyed the nearly tactile impressions one finds in Freyre, but have not thought about them as a careful artifice, the ‘ intimate history ’ Freyre knew might help in the recovery of the past. For the book’s examination of this, and for much more, the reader will be grateful.