Abstract
This article deals with the relations between anthropology, health, development and race relations from the experience of the American anthropologist Charles Wagley at the Special Public Health Service (Sesp), during the World War II (1942-1945), and in the community study conducted in Gurupá (Pará, Brazil), one of the initiatives of the project of the creation of the International Institute of the Hylean Amazon (IIHA), sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco), in the year 1948. The book Amazon town (1953) brings Wagley’s ethnography, his experiences fond of applied anthropology, besides revealing the hallmarks of the Cold War, the politics of Point Four, the Area Studies program, the Unesco’s anti-racist agenda, and at the same time expressing concerns about the irreversible effects of the transformation processes of the world of tradition of local culture. To minimize potential conflicts arising from changes in the rural universe, Wagley considers that the hinterland populations must be understood in their own terms for the ongoing modernization to be successful. Thus, anthropological knowledge could contribute to the modernization of developing regions.
Keywords
Amazon; development; Charles Wagley; Unesco; history of social sciences