Gilberto Freyre was one of the most important sociologists in Brazil, having built a work entirely dedicated to the analysis of social relations in the Brazilian colonial period and how these relations contributed to the formation of the Brazilian people in the 20th century. Its prominence came from defending a theory that miscegenation would form a better and stronger population, contrary to what the ethnocentric , hygienist and eugenic theories of anthropologists and intellectuals of the 19th and 20th century thought .
While it was common at the time to think that there should be a racial purity, Freyre goes against that saying that miscegenation is positive. However, his work, despite having an anti-racist base, contributed to the criticisms of anti-racist movements for having formulated a kind of myth of racial democracy in colonial Brazil and in republican Brazil, pointing to miscegenation as the basis for this ideology.
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Biography of Gilberto Freyre
Gilberto Freyre, the Brazilian anthropologist, sociologist, writer and politician who wrote Casa-Grande and Senzala .
Brazilian anthropologist and sociologist Gilberto Freyre was born in the city of Recife, Pernambuco, on March 15, 1900 . From a traditional family in Recife society, his father, Alfredo Freyre, was a teacher, lawyer and judge. Freyre studied at the former Colégio Americano Gilreath, now Colégio Americano Batista, a traditional teaching institution run for some time by his father. Freyre emerged from an early age as a talent for literature and the humanities. While at school, the sociologist participated as editor and editor of the newspaper O Lábaro, produced by Colégio Americano Gilreath.
Freyre studied sociology , but not in Brazil, as the first sociology course in the country had not yet been founded, which only happened in 1933. In 1918 the intellectual left for the United States , where he studied, at Baylor University, bachelor’s degree in liberal arts and specialization in political and social sciences. At Columbia University, Freyre attended a master’s and doctorate in political, legal and social sciences, defending the doctoral thesis entitled Social life in Brazil in the mid-19th century .
In the 1920s, he returned to Brazil after his studies in the United States and several trips through Europe, also returning to reside in Recife. In 1926 he participated in the formulation of the Regionalist Manifesto , a group opposed to the 1922 Modern Art Week , of a nationalist character. The regionalists were against the “swallowing” of European culture to formulate a Brazilian culture , defended by modernists, valuing only what was originally Brazilian.
Between 1927 and 1930, Freyre was chief of staff to the governor of Pernambuco , Estácio Coimbra, and in 1933, in the political exile provoked by the Revolution of 1930 and with the arrival of Getúlio Vargas to power, he published his most famous book: Casa- great and Senzala . In 1946 he was elected constituent federal deputy. Freyre received several awards and honorary doctorates and was awarded the title of Knight of the British Empire , granted by Queen Elizabeth II, of England.
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What did Gilberto Freyre defend?
Freyre went against almost all anthropological theories that arose in the 19th century through intellectuals like Herbert Spencer. Classical anthropological theories were ethnocentric and defended the supremacy of the white “race” over others. Brazilian politicians and intellectuals brought such ideas of “racial purity” to Brazil and tried, in the beginning of the 20th century, to “whiten” the Brazilian population as a proposal for the improvement of society.
For Gilberto Freyre, miscegenation was positive . As a scholar of anthropology , Freyre was a fan of the theories of the German anthropologist, based in the United States, Franz Boas. Boas argued that the culture of a people should be studied not in comparison to the anthropologist’s own culture, but with an immersion of that professional in that culture as if he were part of it. This would allow the scholar to look at it closely and without prejudice.
For Freyre, colonial Brazil presented a society that miscegenated and integrated Africans, Indians and whites, and that was what would have formed a stronger race, more intellectually capable and with a more elaborate culture.
Gilberto Freyre still receives harsh criticism due to the concept of racial democracy. [1]
· Theories of Gilberto Freyre
Gilberto Freyre’s most widespread theory permeated his entire work. In Casa grande e senzala, it began to be discussed, although it has not yet been spelled out. It was the theory of racial democracy , criticized by defenders of the fight against racism for presenting itself as a myth that there was democracy in the relations between masters and slaves in the colonial period. For Freyre, miscegenation was a corroborative factor in thinking about a democratic relationship between masters and slaves , despite the relationship of slavery impregnated between the two.
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Casa-Grande and Senzala
The work Casa-Gande e Senzala was the most widespread by Gilberto Freyre , being translated into more than 10 languages. The writing of the book began at a time when the author went into exile in Portugal, due to the political divergence with the new government of Getúlio Vargas, which came to power with a coup in 1930.
In Casa-Gande and Senzala , Freyre tried to leave the obvious in social analyzes : politics, economics, society in general. He preferred to delve into other topics: domestic life, family constitution, formation of big houses (where white lords lived) and slave quarters (where blacks lived), to understand the sugar mill and rural property as the centers of the Colonial Brazil.
One mystification that Freyre helped to promote, perhaps under the influence of his professor of anthropology in Columbia, was that miscegenation and the geographical location of Brazil (on the tropical line) were negative factors that placed the country in a position inferior to Europe . The theory of racial democracy is an ideological mystification that Freyre, unfortunately, helped to build based on the erroneous idea that the relationship between masters and slaves was peaceful, that the Indians accepted colonization in a peaceful manner and that it promoted a relationship democracy and miscegenation.
This Freyrean vision, despite having some value for the understanding of colonial life in Brazil, does not materialize. Current analyzes of social inequality , in fact, truly associate inequality and exclusion with the social issue. Perhaps Freyre’s starting point that led him to formulate the theory of racial democracy (and that was the explicitly segregated racial relationship in the United States) led him to perceive a racial democracy in Brazil because there was a more lenient relationship between blacks and whites.
However, veiled and structural racism has never ceased to exist here, and social inequality is shown to be a factor strongly caused by slavery and the submissive relationship to which blacks and Indians were forced by white men. Therefore, Casa-Gande and Senzala’s main thesis does not seem to be supported, whereas the book is an interesting tool for understanding the daily life of colonial society.
The writers Adonias Filho, Rachel de Queiroz and Gilberto Freyre.
Gilberto Freyre quotes
“Knowledge must be like a river, whose fresh, thick, copious waters overflow from the individual, and spread, filling the thirst of others. Without a social purpose, knowledge will be the greatest futility. ”
“Nowhere in Brazil did the formation of the family take place as aristocratically as between cane fields.”
“Cooking is one of the greatest expressions of human behavior, human knowledge, human creativity, a lot of human knowledge is in what you eat.”
