Abstract:
Usually, the work of the doctor and anthropologist Raimundo Nina Rodrigues is treated as a kind of archetype of scientific racism, a trend that prevailed in Brazilian intellectual circles at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. The implications of this reading continue to this day informing about the vital ideas of a “man of sciences”, interpreter of Brazil, an indispensable figure in the authoritarian tradition of Brazilian Social Thought. Starting from the multiplicity of approaches of this specific domain of the Human and Social Sciences - but privileging the historiographic work that it welcomes - we aim to clarify the theoretical and methodological stratagems mobilized in favour of a reinterpretation of Rodrigues’ work. The idea is to shift the focus from a single and exclusively fatalistic and fixist discourse - prevalent until to this day - to a more complex one, which escapes racial determinism and appropriates other paradigmatic contents of the time - especially social-evolutionism and Tardian sociology. The present proposal aspires a new interpretation of the Rodrigues’ writings, an author that accommodated ideas, authors and concepts that diverged from the racial-Darwinist canons (excessively linked to it), but no less discriminatory.
Keywords:
Nina Rodrigues; social thought; race; evolutionism; historiography