The Sociological Invention of Brazil: Essays and the Social Sciences
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The Sociological Invention of Brazil: Essays and the Social Sciences André Botelho 1 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract This article aims to problematize the vision of Brazilian essayism from the 1920s to 40s crystallized by the social sciences and the uniformizing tendency of the different interpretations of Brazil developed through this form of sociological imagination. This analytical procedure is understood as a prerequisite for rethinking the status of the essay and its interrogatory capacity contemporaneous with the Brazilian social sciences and society. Keywords Brazil . Brazillian Sociology . Sociological imagination . Essay . Brazillian
culture During the period between the 1920s and 1940s the most iconic studies on the formation of Brazilian society were published. In spite of the ambiguous relationship maintained by the social sciences with these non- institutionalized works, they still pose questions for us in many ways. The intellectual legacy of these studies is massive, once they are continually mobilized either by authors who still reject them and by authors who return to them in order to update some assumptions. Their impact extended far beyond academia, reflexively contributing to shaping ways of thinking, experiencing and acting in Brazil up today. These books, as the first ones that discussed the formation of the countries, are deemed as “the books that invented Brazil” (Cardoso 1993).
* André Botelho [email protected]
1
Department of Sociology, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
The American Sociologist
Published in 1920, “Populações Meridionais do Brasil”/ Southern Populations of Brazil by Francisco José Oliveira Vianna1 inaugurates the outset of this period, followed by “Retrato do Brasil”/ Portrait of Brazil by Paulo Prado,2 and Macunaíma by Mário de Andrade,3 in 1928. In 1933 were published “Casa-Grande & Senzala”/ The Masters and the Slaves by Gilberto Freyre4 and “Evolução Política do Brasil” / Political Evolution of Brazil by Caio Prado Jr.5 Three years later by “Sobrados & Mucambos”/ The Mansions and the Shanties also by Gilberto Freyre, and “Raízes do Brasil”/ Roots of Brazil by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda.6 In the following decade, Caio Prado and Oliveira Vianna were publishing again, the former “Formação do Brasil Contemporâneo”/ Formation of Contemporary Brazil in 1942, and the latter
1 Francisco José de Oliveira Vianna (b. 1883, Saquarema, Rio de Janeiro; d. 1951, Rio de Janeiro). Trained in 1906 at the Rio de Janeiro Faculty of Law, he engaged in diverse activities in political and intellectual circles, and he became Professor at Judicial and Penal Law and Industrial Law at the Faculty of Legal and Social Sciences of Niterói, and Legal Consultant at the Ministry of Labour. In 1933 he partook the Special Commission that set up the Constitution. In 1940, as well as being elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters, he became a minister of the Court of Auditors of the Republic. Among his books we
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