A Two-Headed Thinker: Rüdiger Bilden, Gilberto Freyre, and the Reinvention of Brazilian Identity
A Two-Headed Thinker: Rüdiger Bilden, Gilberto Freyre, and the Reinvention of Brazilian Identity
This chapter discusses how the creative use of Franz Boas's ideas to analyze Brazilian culture and society and to “discover” Brazil for the Brazilians was the work of two scholars, the Brazilian Gilberto Freyre and the German Rüdiger Bilden. Freyre has been credited with the invention of Brazilian identity with the publication of his Casa-Grande & Senzala (translated into English as The Masters and the Slaves) in 1933 and is described as Boas's most outstanding Latin American disciple. On the other hand, Bilden, a German scholar who was closer to Boas and once seemed to have a brilliant future, later dropped out of the academic world and disappeared into obscurity.
Keywords: Brazil, culture concept, Gilberto Freyre, Franz Boas, Rüdiger Bilden, Brazilian culture
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