This article analyses the presence of ethnography, especially the German ethnographic tradition, in part of the oeuvre by the historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda. In order to achieve this, we will focus on the book Caminhos e fronteiras (1957), a collection of essays written during the decade in which Sérgio Buarque was the director of the Museu Paulista (1946-1956). This article is divided in two interconnected parts, namely, one about the author’s experience when directing the Museu Paulista and how he got in contact with ethnology in that period; and one on how themes and concepts that were important in the German ethnological tradition also play a significant role in the book Caminhos e fronteiras. We intend to prove that ethnography was a central part of Sérgio Buarque’s analysis of the colonization of the outskirts of Portuguese America.
Sérgio Buarque de Holanda; Intellectual history; History of anthropology; Material culture; Ethnology