Essayism and Sociology in Brazil: Notes on Colonization, Slavery and Nation
- PDF / 298,774 Bytes
- 12 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 26 Downloads / 176 Views
Essayism and Sociology in Brazil: Notes on Colonization, Slavery and Nation Mariana Miggiolaro Chaguri 1
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract This paper discusses the Brazilian essayism of the first decades of the twentieth Century by identifying the key topics, and issues around which an authentically sociological imaginative horizon gradually has been built in Brazil. We argue that the issue of colonization, slavery, and the large-scale rural ownership constituted the ways which Sociology systematicity in Brazil by defining a common repertoire of concepts, categories and, methods. The arguments are developed in the following sequence: a) the analytic place of essayism in Brazilian social thought; b) the analysis of the theoretical proposals and, interpretative results achieved by three emblematic authors of the period – Gilberto Freyre (1900–1987), SergioBuarque de Holanda (1902–1982) and, Caio Prado Júnior (1907–1990). More than that, we draw the historicity of their ideas and, highlight some theoretical convergences and, divergences among them; c) the reach and, limits of these interpretations on Brazil considering their present-day relevance. Keywords Brazilian social thought . Sociology in Brazil . Colonization and slavery in
Brazil . Nation
Introduction Some books written and published in Brazil mostly between the 1920s and 1940s were, over time, considered by different generations of readers – sociologists or not – as classics of Brazilian social thought.1 These writings are, in general, dedicated to the interpretation of the colonial period, and aim to establish long-range interpretations of the formation of Brazilian society. One of the first references to ‘Brazilian thought’ can be found in Djacir de Menezes’s “O Brasil no Pensamento Brasileiro”/ Brazil in Brazilian Thought (1957). 1
* Mariana Miggiolaro Chaguri [email protected]
1
Department of Sociology, State University of Campinas, Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil
The American Sociologist
Some of the most emblematic authors and their works are, for example, “Populações Meridionais do Brasil”/ Meridional Populations of Brazil (1920) by Francisco José Oliveira Vianna; “Retrato do Brasil”/ Brazil’s Portrait (1928) by Paulo Prado; “CasaGrande & Senzala”/Masters and the Slaves (1933), and “Sobrados e Mucambos”/ The Mansions and the Shanties (1936) by Gilberto Freyre; Evolução Política do Brasil/ Political Evolution of Brazil (1933), and “Formação do Brasil Contemporâneo”/The Formation of Contemporary Brazil (1942), and Raízes do Brasil”/ Roots of Brazil (1936) by Sergio Buarque de Holanda. The texts named above have been portrayed by the history of the discipline as the interpreters of Brazil, in which their very form of writing was the subject of academic controversies that ended up characterizing their work mainly as essayism. Despite analytical differences and empirical backgrounds, these books and authors are responsible for the production of a theoretical set that is, until today, part of the imaginative
Data Loading...
