This article intends to emphasize the macro-sociological content of Gilberto Freyres work in the 30s. Instead of the themes classically linked to his work, such as inter-racial mixing and the history of private life, the main point of this paper is different: it aims to reconstruct the clash between the already bourgeois European western values, which take over the country in 1808, and the traditional ones which Freire calls oriental to refer to the set of African, Portuguese and rural values of Brazilian Colonial life. In Sobrados e mucambos Gilberto Freyre develops a historiography of the institutionalization of these new westernizing values which go against the prevaling idea of Brazil as still being ruled by personal and semi-traditional values.
Brazilian culture; western culture; iberianism; macrosociology; Gilberto Freyre