The present article analyzes Oliveira Vianna's text Race and assimilation, in which the author tried to build a scientific discourse on racial differences and their impact on the assimilation of immigrants. This discourse produced several texts that attributed a fundamental role to race as the cause for social phenomena at a time when anthropological racist views were falling behind due to cultural-oriented approaches. Vianna's reactive arguments were based on the defense of a scientific concept of race as the key to the interpretation of society. At the end of the article, the author analyzes the correspondence Vianna kept with Arthur Ramos and Roquette-Pinto on the scientific approaches demanded by racial studies, as well as on the political and administrative functions he attributed to science.
race; Brazilian social concepts; history of anthropology