The Brazilian People: The Formation and Meaning of Brazil (review)

Darcy Ribeiro (1922-97) was one of the intellectual giants of twentieth-century Brazil. If Brazilians someday vote for a national team of intellectuals for the twentieth century, Ribeiro will most certainly be on it alongside such luminaries as Gilberto Freyre and Sérgio Buarque de Holanda. This mineiro from Montes Claros trained as an anthropologist and as early as the 1940s and 1950s produced some of the fundamental ethnographic studies of Amazonian peoples. In the nineteen-sixties, he was a key advisor to the ill-fated presidency of João Goulart. Ribeiro helped push the nation into the devastating confrontation with the military in 1964, and then paid for it with years in exile. The author of best-selling novels and interpretive essays, his The Civilizational Process (first published in 1968) and The Americas and Civilization (first published in 1970) have been widely translated and read on several continents. Despite losing one lung to cancer, he forged a new political career with the return to democratic politics serving as lieutenant governor of Rio de Janeiro in the early nineties. Intellectual, writer, political activist, Ribeiro was in the words of one of his admirers, "entertaining, brilliant, irresponsible."

The Brazilian People was published in 1995, not long before his death, and represents something of a synthesis and valedictory address for a long and brilliant career as a public intellectual. Ribeiro tried to write this book several times beginning as early as the 1950s. This fluid translation by the brilliant Gregory Rabassa conveys the feel of the original Brazilian edition, and the flow of the text has been smoothed out with the elimination of the charts and figures in the original. The book is both fascinating and frustrating. In many ways, this long essay is a lyrical synthesis of Ribeiro's longstanding arguments about the formation and development of the Brazilian people, a process of the collision and fusion of three races. In this respect, it is in a long line of classic interpretive syntheses going back to Euclides da Cunha's Os sertões (1902) and Freyre's Casa grande e senzala (1933). Its tone harkens back to da Cunha and Freyre's own personal intellectual struggles with oscillating optimism and pessimism about the Brazilian people. At the very beginning of the book Ribeiro ask himself and the reader, "why hadn't Brazil turned out right yet?" (p. xiv). The book is a sort of tour through the themes of Brazilian history and Ribeiro's own work with major sections on the collision of races, "ethnic gestation," the sociocultural processes that produced modern Brazil, and Brazil's diversity and national character.

Like Freyre, Ribeiro focuses on the unique identity of Brazil forged out of the formation of a new people through the fusion of Africans, Indians, and Portuguese. He stresses the enormous costs of this process, especially the brutality of it and the inequalities that it generated. Yet, despite his harsh judgment of the past, he always returns to his hope for the future. Midway through the book he observes that, "The task of new generations of Brazilians is to take this country in their hands and make of it what it should be, one of the most progressive, just, and prosperous nations on earth" (p. 143). Like Freyre he contrasts Brazil (and most of Latin America) with the United States and Canada, nations "that are mere transplants of Europe onto broad spaces overseas" (p. 321). Ever the leftist of the sixties, Ribeiro closes his book with a call to join all Latin Americans in a common destiny against "Anglo-Saxon America" (p. 322). Harking back to the lusotropicalism of Freyre, his closing lines emphasize Brazil's racially mixed and tropical heritage and his optimism returns as he speaks of a Brazilian people "located in the...