Raízes do Brasil by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda

The researcher will take advantage of his stay there to reconstitute the documentary field of the research carried out by Sérgio Buarque to draw up his dissertation. “What is delineated in the work is a complex cultural horizon made up of multiple ethnic influences and one that mapped out a singular path in the scenario of the discoveries”, explains De Decca, who has just taken up in Lisbon the Brazil-Portugal chair in Social Sciences, created by the agreement between Unicamp and Portugal’s Higher Institute of the Sciences of Labor and of the Company. In the dissertation, though, the author settles on the metropolis in the age of the discoveries, shows Portugal’s strangeness inside Europe itself, and encounters in this singular scenario several embryonic aspects of the future colony. “In Raízes, our culture is a synonym of absence, and for this reason the most famous phrase from this work continues to be: ‘we are still a few exiles in our own land'”, recalls De Decca. And, by virtue of this, the Brazilian’s cordial character flourished – to give priority to personal relationships and seek intimacy in social intercourse, a concept coined by Buarque wrongly mistaken for benevolence. In Raízes, the historical analysis sets off from the criterion of absence: our culture lacked a work ethic, the rational state absented itself before the predomination of patriarchism and paternalism. Something that loses force in the work for a master’s degree was what was transformed into the most marking trait of the Raízes do Brasil, which is a historical essay about what was missing and what was denied in the constitution of our identity.” “Some things changed in Sérgio Buarque’s perception. “There is an impressive line of continuity between this dissertation and the classic Raízes do Brasil, published in 1936”, explains De Decca. The text slumbered in the historian’s collection, entrusted to Unicamp after his death.De Decca was surprised and intrigued with what he found. Recently, a copy of the dissertation was found by historian and professor from the State University of Campinas (Unicamp) Edgar de Decca, a scholar in Buarque’s work. Very few people indeed know the 145 page work entitled Elementos Formadores da Sociedade Portuguesa na Época dos Descobrimentos.

It is a dissertation for a master’s degree, defended by Sérgio Buarque in 1958 at the São Paulo Free School of Sociology and Politics, which was never transformed into a book and remained submerged in a sort of academic limbo.

The reflections about the legacy of Sérgio Buarque de Holanda (1902-1982), prompted by the centenary of his birth last year, had the gift of redeeming a forgotten chapter of the work of the historian who dedicated his academic career to understanding the national soul.

Raízes do Brasil by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda