His father, a college professor, was a great admirer of Anglo-Saxon traditions and, after teaching English to his son, enrolled him in a Baptist missionary school run by Americans.
Freyre's intelligence and conversion to Protestantism led his teachers to arrange a scholarship for in him at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Upon graduation Freyre headed for Columbia University, where he lost his religion but acquired a new enthusiasm: cultural anthropology.
Professor Franz Boas had an especially deep influence upon him, and as his disciple Freyre learned that race mixture, rather than being the cause of Brazil's lack of development as taught by then-prominent social Darwinists was probably its highest achievement, whereas social and cultural factors, especially slavery, could account for the country's retardation. Freyre also became enthralled at this time by the possibility of interpreting Brazil by looking at its past.
His master's thesis on social life in Brazil in the mid nineteenth century was published in English immediately upon completion. After a year of traveling in Europe, Freyre returned to Brazil full of new ideas. One of them was the importance of regional differentiation within a country as large as Brazil. Then there is the issue of race. He certainly challenged some of the basic premises of scientific racism, but did so without ever relinquishing underlying notions of biological difference Celarent It is interesting as an account of racial and cultural mixing around which a narrative of national identity would be constructed, prompting questions about the role of mixedness in the national imaginary which are as important as ever.
But, as shown above, Freyre and his thinking were shaped by this system and its legacies. Essential Reading Anderson, W.
Freyre, G. He was gracious, as always. Freyre, Gilberto. New York: Knopf, Order and Progress; Brazil from Monarchy to Republic. Gilberto Freyre was born in Recife, Pernambuco.
In , he published The Masters and the Slaves, a groundbreaking book that positively analyzed the history of race relations in Brazil and encouraged cultural nationalism. Freyre pursued an interest in politics as well, serving as a member of Congress in and later supporting the military dictatorship in In later writings, he continues to affirm the intellectual convictions he had since this time, as in the famous passage from the preface to the first edition of The Masters and the Slaves.
Our way of solving secular issues. And in fact, the racial question in Brazil was at the center of the debate of its generation and of the previous ones, being one of the axes conducting the discussion over the question of the whitening. Oliveira Viana , author of Southern Populations of Brazil book published in , was certainly one of the bastions of eugenic ideas in Brazil, theses to which Freyre diametrically opposed his work.
Oliveira Viana was, like almost every intellectual who boasts, vain and, besides vain, intolerant of criticism. We are, in fact, almost all authors of books: vain and intolerant of criticism.
Viana reacted to my, respectfully, novice criticisms of his master theories, ostensibly returning the publisher Augusto Frederico Schmidt — the first publisher of The Masters and the Slaves — the copy of the book that Schmidt had kindly sent him.
More: he kept to the end of his life the most complete silence in relation to the book and the daring author However, he never published — after the appearance of The Masters and the Slaves — his announced The Aryans in Brazil Freyre, What I want to emphasize at this moment is that his ideas are inserted in a broader debate about the binomial race and nation, of which no author of his time manages to escape, although this contextualism does not completely redefine certain questions elaborated by him.
In the s, Freyre held a series of six conferences in the United States, which were originally published in under the title of Brazil: An Interpretation , which merges with his efforts not only to interpret Brazil but also to disseminate this interpretation and to present Brazil as a possible model for the world. In , he published a new book titled New World in Tropics , in which the six conferences held in the s were republished and four more chapters were added.
It is interesting to note that these works were originally published in English, and only later in Portuguese, which indicates that they are works that seek to synthesize their main interpretive ideas about Brazil. There is a line that Freyre shares with his contemporaries that certainly marks his work: he recognizes the weight of the past over the present and the future of Brazil. What differentiates the authors of his generation becomes, on the one hand, the interpretation of this past and on the other, the weight that it would have in the current reality.
Living aside a sequence in his Introduction to Patriarchal History in Brazil , formed by The Masters and the Slaves , , Mansions and the Shanties , , and Order and Progress of , it is no wonder his books do not internally follow a chronological order, since, as he himself says referring to The Masters and the Slaves , but can be extended to other books, it is not the things that are relevant, but the connections between them Freyre, Looking at the past Freyre sees something singular in the Portuguese people, recognizing their dual character that would put them in a middle of the way between Europe and Africa, and between East and West Oliveira, If, on the one hand, Holanda in his also classic Roots of Brazil , published in , gives great emphasis to the adventurous spirit of Portuguese, and how this element was fundamental to the process of colonization of Brazil, then Freyre, on the other hand, will give greater emphasis to the predisposition towards miscegenation that they would have based on previous social experiences, such as the Moorish presence in the Iberian Peninsula.
Because of this, these people would possess a set of characteristics, among them the miscibility, the mobility and the acclimatization. And this resulted in:. An agrarian society in structure was formed in tropical America, enslaved in the technique of economic exploitation, hybrid of Indian — and later of black — in the composition. Society that would be defended less by the conscience of race, almost none in the cosmopolitan and plastic Portuguese, than by the religious exclusivism unfolded in a system of social and political prophylaxis.
Less by official action than by the arm and sword of the individual Freyre, It goes so far as to say that it is due to the singular characteristics of the Portuguese that they triumphed where other Europeans failed, and they were the first modern society in the tropics.
The plasticity of the Portuguese would allow the emergence of a mixed society, not only in racial terms, but also in cultural terms. For Freyre, the characteristics of the race were shaped by the environment, by the social, cultural, economic and ecological constraints. For Souza , Freyre thinks about the issue of miscegenation also as a strategy of domination that made possible the settlement of large territorial masses.
This strategy of domination, if at the negative pole implies subordination and systematic social reproduction of low self-esteem in the dominated groups, at the positive pole opens an effective and real possibility of social differentiation and social mobility. This construction, by subordinating the element of oppression and systematic subordination, is ideological and conservative in the bad sense of the term Souza, The set of research about racial relations in Brazil in the following decades, especially from the s, pointed in a different direction, indicating that miscegenation did not amalgamate race relations in Brazil as Freyre had understood.
Of course, this is not the same as saying that Freyre did not notice the existing inequalities in Brazil, but he perceived peculiarities in the way they were here. In his words:. The ethnic difference does not impose itself in Brazil in a violent way.
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