The Masters And The Slaves by Gilberto Freyre

Since the sociologist adopted the house as the centre of interest of a great part of his works, and analyzed it to comprehend Brazilian society, there is a lot of information in his texts regarding certain types of buildings, as well as information concerning the cities where these buildings were placed. But there is also another possibility which is to find morphological and typological approaches throughout Freyre's work.

One can read them to know about Brazilian society other to understand the process of mixing races from which resulted Brazilian people yet some other can do that to get to know the History of Brazil from a sociological point of view. There are many possible ways of reading Gilberto Freyre's work. Passados Trin-ta anos de sua morte, procuro nesse artigo analisar a atualidade de seu pensamento, buscan-do apontar quais questões que ele nos lança que ainda nos são relevantes para pensar o Brasil. Suas obras, com destaque para Casa-Grande & Senzala (1933), são continuamente revisitadas através de inúmeros balanços críticos, especialmente no que tange à questão das relações raciais no Brasil. RESUMO: O trabalho de Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987) é reconhecido como um dos mais originais e relevantes de interpretação do Brasil. Thirty years after his death, I seek in this article to analyze the actuality of his thought, seeking to point out which issues he throws at us that are still relevant to think about Brazil. His works, notably The Masters and The Slaves (1933), are continually revisited through countless critical balances, especially with regard to the issue of race relations in Brazil.

The work of Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987) is recognized as one of the most original and relevant interpretations of Brazil. His idealization of the Portuguese colonization and of the slave-owning society (the myth of the kind master and the contented slave) provoked Marxist reactions, which criticized its conservative character. He was the precursor in dealing with various topics in cultural studies and in the history of mentalities, such as fashion, customs, diet, sex. In Casa-Grande e Senzala (literally, The Big House and the Slave Quarters), going against the racism of the time, he attributed the wealth and the strength of Brazilian culture to the mixture of races. He was one of the organizers of the 1st Brazilian Congress on Regionalism (1926), which supported the values of regional cultures against the importation of European cultural manifestations. The Masters and the Slaves Gilberto Freyre Gilberto de Melo Freyre, sociologist and writer, pioneer of culturalism in the study of the formation of Brazilian society, defended his Master´s thesis on Brazilian society in the mid 19th century, while at the University of Columbia, New York, in 1922.

The Masters And The Slaves by Gilberto Freyre