São Paulo: Perspectives on the City and Cultural Production

5. Saudades do Brasil: Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Photographic Gaze on the City of São Paulo

69 5 Saudades do Brasil Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Photographic Gaze on the City of São Paulo Cheguei portanto a São Paulo preparado para encontrar bem mais do que um novo quadro de vida: uma daquelas experiências em tempo e em dimensão reais geralmente vedadas às ciências humanas por causa da lentidão com que se modificam os fenômenos e da impossibilidade material e moral de agir sobre eles. • Claude Lévi-Strauss, Saudades de São Paulo (14) Tristão bought maps of São Paulo but no two agreed; the bus routes wound about like tortured snakes, and when he emerged, sick from the twisting and swaying, he walked south when he meant to walk north. • John Updike, Brazil (59) São Paulo: Perspectives on the City and Cultural Production 70 In 1934 the young French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) set out from the French port of Marseilles to assume a position in sociology at the newly formed Universidade de São Paulo. Unlike Spanish-speaking Latin America, which had universities from early in the sixteenth century, Brazil did not have a university tradition properly speaking (although it did have professional schools, called Faculdades) until the twentieth century, as the landed oligarchy preferred to remand its sons, as it had for centuries, to fabled Coimbra in the motherland of Portugal. However, by the early twentieth century there were enough immigrant families without ties to Portugal to move for the founding of local universities, and (although there is some dispute over who was first) the German community sponsored the founding in 1910 of what is today the Universidade Federal do Paraná in Curitiba. By the 1930s, the new financial barons, through the newspaper O estado de São Paulo, were in a position to move for the formation of a university in what they considered to be the dynamic center of twentieth-century modernity; after all, the 1922 Semana de Arte Moderna did much to establish categorically modern Brazilian culture, drawing a line in the sand with respect to the traditionalists whom they associated with the predominantly Portuguese-identified capital—first of the Empire and then of the Republic—of Rio de Janeiro. Thus, it came as no surprise that the founding impulse of the Universidade de São Paulo, the USP, originated from French culture, whose vanguard influence was so evident in the Semana de Arte Moderna and the many subsequent faces of the Modernismo movement it helped generate (for a history of the USP, see Cardoso; also see chapter 20, “Modernism,” in Morse for the insertion of this artistic movement into the context of the socioeconomic history of São Paulo). The French government was instrumental in the formation of the new university, undoubtedly seeing the possibility for expanding their sphere of influence in Latin America, and to this day the USP is known, with as much disdain as affection , as the Brazilian aldeia gaulesa (Costa, passim).1 Not everyone would agree that the USP is Latin America’s premier university, especially in terms of its research faculty, but there can be no question that it ranks among the region’s top-tier institutions of higher learning. Lévi-Strauss’s tenure at the USP was relatively short lived, and by 1941, Lévi-Strauss was teaching at the New School for Social Research in New York City, having left Brazil in 1937. However, it was during his tenure in Brazil that Lévi-Strauss “discovered” the indigenous cultures of the region , as he so eloquently relates in his 1955 masterpiece Tristes tropiques, 71 and during the 1938–39 period he conducted the extensive investigations, financed by the French government, among indigenous populations in central Brazil that would comprise part of his groundbreaking Anthropologie structurale (Structural Anthropology), published in 1958. There are many gaps in the accounts of Lévi-Strauss’s tenure in Brazil: 2 I personally have always been struck by Lévi-Strauss’s lack of interest, as a Jew, in addressing anti-Semitism under the early Getúlio Vargas regime (Carneiro; Williams 225),3 prior to the shrewd commitment by the extra-constitutional president , who was not without his fascist leanings, to the cause of the Allies in 1941. Except for the rather brief remarks about São Paulo recording his initial impressions in the first chapters of Tristes tropiques, which...