In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Importing Freud and Lamarck to the Tropics: Arthur Ramos and the Transformation of Brazilian Racial Thought, 1926–1939*
  • Brad Lange

Introduction

If, in the work of Nina Rodrigues, we substitute the terms culture for race, and acculturation for mestiçamento, for example, his concepts acquire complete and perfect modernity.

—Arthur Ramos, 19391

Popular legend suggests that a mysterious curse fated Nina Rodrigues’ death in 1906.2 Though a pioneer of Afro-Brazilian studies, he posited that Afro-descendants possessed a genetic atavism predisposing them to crime and argued that widespread racial miscegenation had contributed to the fin-de-siècle “negro problem” in Brazil.3 Almost four decades following his death, the curse was reborn, striking Arthur Ramos shortly after he had revived the stagnant field of Afro-Brazilian studies using a modified version [End Page 9] of Rodrigues’ methodology.4 Both Brazilian men died in Paris in their mid-forties, just as they were reaching the summit of their respective careers.

Though Rodrigues and Ramos are bound by this mystical connection, their racial ideas were diametrically opposed. The former, so committed to theories of genetic determinism, was associated with the late nineteenth-century emergence of scientific racism in Brazil. The latter became affiliated with the 1930s movement that rejected biological explanations of racial difference and asserted the contribution of Afro-Brazilians to national identity. While historians have noticed the shift in racial thought between their respective generations, the explanations for it remain murky.

This study will address this lacuna by analyzing the life and thought of Arthur Ramos, whose career trajectory overlaps several important intellectual shifts related to racial thought in Brazil between 1926 and 1939.5 An examination of the origins and development of his ideas helps to explain how a number of intellectuals confronted deterministic racial theories in the 1930s, thereby suggesting an alternative discourse of national identity that celebrated, rather than rejected, the country’s African heritage. Using Ramos [End Page 10] as a guide, this article will analyze the transformation of the influential Bahia medical school during the 1920s, explaining how and why it jettisoned much of its conventional ideological foundation when it did. Traditionally associated with the racial determinism of Nina Rodrigues, many of the school’s students led a movement toward the elevation of the Afro-Brazilian that occurred in Rio de Janeiro in the 1930s during the presidency of Getúlio Vargas.6 Influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, neo-Lamarckianism, and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s concept of primitive development, Ramos and others developed a theoretical framework that provided leverage to attack theories of biological and racial determinism.

This article will demonstrate that a desire to whiten the Afro-Brazilian socially was an understated, yet crucial subtext of this movement, despite its non-racial language. Assuming that the Afro-Brazilian was not biologically “deficient,” as a previous generation of intellectuals had contended, Ramos and others fashioned a vanguard postulation that, through educational and medical reform, Afro-Brazilians could be “cured” of their alleged degeneracy and shepherded into a progressive non-racial Brazil. This assumption was informed by a mélange of pseudo-scientific theories that contended that personality was learned and suggested that if “deficient” individuals were “cured,” their future offspring would inherit the modified genetic material. This approach to social reform challenged the discourse of the previous half-century that questioned the viability of a Brazilian population so profoundly characterized by its African phenotype.

Before beginning the investigation of Ramos’ work, a glance at the era preceding the one in which he came to prominence is useful to understanding the intellectual antecedents of his unique thought.7

1870–1920: Origins and Transformations of Brazilian Racial Thought

Prior to the abolition of the slave trade in 1851, Brazil received more African slaves than any other nation in the Americas. By 1870, the census considered only 40 percent of its population to be white, a fact that troubled the political and intellectual elite.8 The latter year overlaps with a watershed in Brazilian intellectual history. Brazilian intellectuals, preoccupied with the nation’s precarious racial question, adopted a stream of European ideologies, [End Page 11] including positivism, criminal anthropology, and geographical determinism. Though heterogeneous...

pdf

Share