Abstract
This article investigates the senses and connotations of “time” that work to define the cognitive horizons of the first editions (1936) of Roots of Brazil and The mansions and the shanties. By ascribing to Brazilian society a temporal configuration distinct from those attributed to so-called central modern societies, both essays tend to depict Brazil’s modernization as a dissonant case in terms of the institutional, cultural, moral-ethical, epistemological and aesthetic patterns commonly associated with modernity. At the same time, the article also seeks to demonstrate that these very same works - striving to explain a societal configuration that appeared to them anti-paradigmatic in many of its features - offer valuable clues for a critical assessment of the “substantialist” and “internalist” biases that frequently orient the sociological imagination concerning modernity and its temporality.
Keywords:
The mansions and the shanties; Roots of Brazil; Brazilian sociology; modernity in Brazil; sociological theory