It was my studies in anthropology in the Graduate Political Science School of Columbia University unde the direction of Professor Franz Boas that first revealed to me the Negro and the mulatto for what they are-with the effects of environment or cultural experience separated from racial characteristics. I learned to regard as fundamental the difference between race and culture, to discriminate between the effects of purely genetic relationships and those resulting from social influences, the cultural heritage and the milieu. It is upon this criterion of the basic differentiation between race and culture that the entire plan of this essay rests, aswell as upon the distinction to be made between racail and family heredity.

However little inclined we may be to historical materialism, which is so often exaggerated in its generalizations-chiefly in works by sectrarians and fanatics-we must admit the considerable influence, even though not always a preponderant one, ecerted by the tecniwue of economic production upon the structure of societies and upon thefeztures of their moral physiognmies. It is na influence subject to the reaction of other influences, yet powerful as no other in its ability to mwke aristocracies or democracies out of societies and to determine tendencies toward polygamy or monogamy, toward stratification or mobility. Studies in eugenics and cacogenics are still is a state of flux, and much of what is supposed to be the result of hereditary characteristics or tares ought rather to be ascribed to the persisitence for generations of exonomic and social conditions favorable or un favorable to human development. It is Franz Boas who, admitting the possibility that eugenics may be able to eliminate the undesirable elements of a society, reminds us that eugenic selection should concern itseilf with suppressing the conditions responsible for the creation of poverty-stricken proletarians, sickly and ill-nourished; and he further reminds us that so long as such conditions exist, the result can only be the creaton of more proletarians of thesame sort.

In Brazil the relations between the white and colored races from the first half of the sixteenth century were conditioned on theone hand by the system of economic production-monoculture and latifundia-and on the other hand by the scarcity of white women among the conquerors. Sugar-raising not only stifled the democratic industries represented by the trade in brazilwood and hides; it sterilized the land for the forces of diversified farming and herding ofr a broad expanse around the plantations. It called for na enormous number of slaves. Cattle-raising, meanwhile, with the possibilities it afforded for a democratic way of life,was relegated to the backlands. In the agrarian zone, along with a monoculture that absorbed other forms of production, there developed a semi-feudal society, with a minority of whites and lightskinned mulattoes dominatng, patriarchally and polygamously, from their Big Houses of stone and mortar, not only the slaves that were bred so prolifically in the senzalas, but the sharecroppers as well, the tenants or retainers, those who dwelt in the huts of mud and straw, vassals of the Big House in the strictest meaning of the word.

Conquerors, in the military and technical sense, of the indigenous populations, the absolute reulers of the Negroes imported from Africa for the hard labor of the bagaceira, the Europeans and their descendants meanwhile had to compromise eith the Indians and the Africans in he matter of genetic and social relations. The scarcity of white women created zones of fraternization hetween conquerors and conquered, between masters and slaves. While these relations between white men and colored women did not cease to be those of "superiors" with "inferiors", and in the majority of cases those of disillusioned and sadistic gentlemen with passive slave girls, they were mitigated by the need that was felt by many colonisits ofdouding a family under such circmstances and upon such a basis as this. A widly practiced miscegenation here tended to modify the enormous social distance that otherwise would have been preserved between Big House and tropical forest, between Big House and slave hut. What a latifundiary monoculture based upon slavery accomplished in the way of creating na aristocracy, by difiding Brazilian culture into two extremes, of gentry and slaves, with a thin and insignificant remnant of free men sandwiched in betwewn, was in good part offset by the social effects of miscegenation. The Indian woaman and the "mina", or Negro woman, in the beginning, and later the mulatto, the cabrocha, the qaudroon, and the octoroon, becoming domestics, conbucnies, and even thelawful wives of their white masters, exerted a powerful influence for social democracy in Brazil. A considerable portion of the big landed estates was divided among the mestizo sons, legitimate or illegitimate, procreated by these white fathers, and this tended to break up the feudal allotments and latifundia that were samll kingdoms in themselves.

Bound up with a latifudiary monoculture were deeprooted evils that for generations impaired the robustness and efficiency of the Brazilian population, whose unstable health, uncertain capacity for work, apathy, and disturbances of growth are so frequently attributed to miscenegation. Among other things, there was the poor supply of fresh food, subjecting the major part of the population to a adeficient diet, marked by the overuse of dried fish and manihot flour ( and later of jerked beef), or to na incomplete and dangerous one of foodstuffs imported under the worst conditions of transport, such as those that preceded the steamboat and the employment in recent years of refrigerator compartments on ships.

The formative patriachal phase of that society, in its virtues as well asin its shortcomings, is to be explained less in terms of "race" and "religion" than in those of ecomonics, cultural experience, and family organization; for the family here was the colonizing unit. This was an economy and a social organization that at times ran couner not only to Catholic sexual moratliy but to the Semites tendencies of the Portuguese adventurer toward trade and barter as well.

Spengler stresses the point that a race does not migrate from one continent to another; for that it would be necessary to transpot along with it the physical environment. In this connectin he alludes to the results of the studies of Gould and Baxter and those of Boas, which show that individuals of varying origin brought together under the same conditions of physical environment tend to a certain unifrom development with regard to stature and even, perhaps, bodily structure and shape of the head. The modifications, possibly fue to environment, to be bound in the descendants of immigrants-as in the case of the Sicilian and German Jews studied by Boas in the United States-would appear to be the result chiefly of what Wissler calls the influence of the biochmical content. Indeed, the study of such modifications in a new climate or milieu is acquiring na even greater importance.

Admitting the tendency of the physical environment, and especially of the biochemical content, to re-create in its own image those individuals who come to it from various places, we still must not forget the action exerted in a contrary directon by the tecnical resouces of the colonizers: their effect in imposing upon the environment strange cultural forms and accessories such as would permit the preservation of na exotic race or culture.

The patriarchal system of colonizatrion set up by the Portuguese in Brazil and represented by the Big House was one of plastic compromise between the two tendencies. At the same time it gave expression to the imperialist imposition of na advanced race upon a backward one, na imposition of European forms (already modified by colonizing experience in Asia and Africa) upon a tropical milieu, it meant a coming to terms with the new conditions of life and environment. The plantation Big House that the colonizer began erecting in Brazil in the sixteenth century-thick walls of mud or stone and lime, covered with straw or with tile, with a veranda in front and on the sides and with sloping roofs to give the maximum of protection against the strong sun and tropical rains-was by no means a reproduction of Portuguese houses, but a new expression, corresponding to the new physical environment and to a surprising, unlooked-for phase of Portuguese imperialism: its agrarian and sedentary activity in the tropics, its rural, slave-holding patriarchalism. From that moment the Portuguese, while still longing nostalgically for his native realm, a sentiment to which Capistrano de Abreu has given the name of "transoceanism" - from that moment he was a Luso-Brazilian, the founder of a new economic and social order, the creator of a new type of habitation. One has but to compare the plan of a Brazilian Big House of the sixteenth century with that of a Lusitanian manor house (solar) of the fifteenth century in order to be able to perceive the enormous difference between the Portuguese of Portugal and the Portuguese of Brazil. After something like a century of patriarchal life and agtrarian activity in the tropics, the Brazlians became practically another race, expressing themselves in another type of dwelling. As Spengler observes-and for him the type of habitation has a historical-social value superior to that of race-the energy of the bloodstream that leaves identical traces down the centuries must necessarily be increased by the "mysterious cosmic force that binds together in a single rhythm those who dwll in close proximity to one another." This force in the formation of Brazilian life was exerted from above downward, emanating from the Big House that were the center of patriarchal and religious cohesion the points of support for the organized society of the nation.

The Big House completed by the slave shed represents na entire economic, social, and political system: a system of production ( a latifundiary monoculture); a system of labor ( slavery); a system of transport ( the ox-xart, the banguê, the hammock, the horse); a system of religion (a family Catholicism, with the chaplain subordinated to the paterfamilias, with a cult of the dead, etc); a system of sexual and family life (polygamous patriarchalism); a system of bodily and household hygiene (the "tiger", the banana stalk, the river bath, the tub bath, the sitting-bath, the foot bath), and a system of politics (compadrismo). The Big House was thus at one and the same time a fortress, a bank, a cemetery, a hospital, a scholl, and a house of charity giving shelter to the aged, athe widow, and the orphan. The Big House of the Noruega plantation in Pernambuco, with its many rooms, drawing-rooms, and corridor, its two convent kitchens, its dispensary, its chapel, and its annexes, impresses me as being the sincere and complete expression of the absorptive patriarchalism of colonial times.

The Big House in Brazil, in the impulse that it manifested from the very start to be the mistress of the land, overcame the church. It overcame the Jesuit as well, leaving the lord of the manor as almost the sole dominating figure in the colony, thetrue lord of Brazil, or nearer to being than eitherthe viceroys or the bishops.

For power came to be concentrad in the hands of these country squires. They were the lords of the earth and of men. The lords of women, alo. Their houses were the expression of na enormous feudal might. "Ugly and strong". Thick walls; deep foundations, anounted with whale oil. There is a legend in the northeast to the effect that a certain plantation-owner, more anxious than usual to assure the perpetuity of his dwelling, was not content until he had had a couple of slaves killed and buried beneath the foundation stones. The sweat and at times the blood of Negroes was the oil, rather than that of the whale, that helped to give the Big House doundations their fortress-like consistency.

The ironical part of it is, however, that owing to a failure of the human potential all this arrogant solidity of form and material was very frequently wasted, and in the third or fourth generation enormous houses built to last for centruires would begin crumbling from disuse or lack of proper care, the great-grandsons or even the grandsons being unable to preserve the ancestral heritage. In Pernambuco the ruins of the big country house of the barons of Mercês are still to be seen, and it is evident that even the stables were built like fortresses. But all this pompa has long since turned to dust, and when all is said, it was the churches that survived the Big Houses.

The custom of burying the dead underneath the house -beneath the chapel, which was na annex of the house-is quite chacracteristic of the patriarchal spirit of family cohesiveness. The dead thus remained under the same roof as the living, amid the saints and the florl offerings of the devout. The saints and the dead were, indeed, a part of the family. In Portuguese and Brazilian cradle songs mothers never hesitated to make of their infant sons the younger brothers of Jeses, with the same rights to Mary's care, to the guardianship of Joseph, and the doting ministrations of St. Anne.

The patriarchal Big House was not only fortress, chapel, school, workshop, house of charity, harem, convent of young women, and hospital; it fulfilled another important function in Brazilian economy: it was also a bank. Within its thick walls, in the ground beneath the vricks or tiles, money was buried and jewels were sometimes kept in the chapel, being used to adorn the saints; whence all the images of Our Lady, laden down in the Bahian manner eith trinkets of all sorts, with balangandans, hearts, little horses, little dogs, gold chains, and the like. Thieves in those days were God-fearingt and rarely ventured to enter the chapel and tob the sacred images. True, a certain thief did steal the halo and other jewels of São Benedito, but his excuse, one that carried weight in those days, was that "a Negro ought not to be adorned so luxuriously"; and indeed, in colonial times, the use of "ornaments of a certain price" came to be forbidden to blacks.

In contrat to the adventurous nomad life of the bandeirantes-the majority of whom were mestizos, part white and part Indian-the Big House gentry represented, in the formation of Brazilian society, the most typical of Portuguese tendencies: namely, settledness, in the sense of a patriarchal stability. A stability based upon sugar ( the plantation) and the Negro ( the slave gut). Not htat I am here suggesting na ethnic interpretation in place of the economic. I would merely set alongside the purely material or Marxist aspect of things or, better, tendencies, the psychologic aspecto. Or the psycho-physiologic. The studies ofCannon on the one hand, and on the other those of Keith, would seem to indicate that, independently of the exonomic pressure, societies like individuals are acted upon by psychophysiologic forces presumably susceptible to control for the benefit of future scientifically formed élites-the forces of pain, fear, anger, alongside the emotions of hunger, thirst, and sex---forces that are possessed of a great intensity of repercussion.

The truth of the matter is that around the plantationowners was creted the most stable type of civilizatoin to be found in Hispanic America, a type that is illustrated by the squet, horizontal architecture of the Big Houses: enormouskitchens; vst dining-rooms; numeorus rooms for the sons and guests; a chapel; annexes for the accommodtion of married sons; small chambers in the center for the all but monastic seclusion of unmarried daughters; a ghnacceu; as entrywasy; a slave ht. The style of these Big Houses-style in the Spenglerian sense-might be a borrowed one, but its architeture was honest and authentic, Brazilian a a jungle plant. It had s aoul. It was a sincere expressin of the needs, interests, and the broad rhythm of a patriarchal life rendered possible by the income from sugar and the efficient labor of Negro slaves.

The Big House, although associated particularly with the sugar plantation and the patriarchal life of the northeast, is not to belooded upon as exclusively the result of sugar-raising, but rather as teh effect of a slave-holding and latifundiary monoculture in general. In the south it was created by coffee, in the north by sugar; and it is as Brazilian in the one case as in the other.

The social history of the Big House is the intimate hisory of practically every Brazilian: the history of his domestic nd conjugal life under a slave-holding and polygamous patriarchal regime; the history of his life as a child; the history of his Christianity, reduced to the form of a family religion and influenced by the superstitions of the slave hut. The study of the intimate history of a people has in it something of Proustian introspection-the Goncourts had a name for it: "ce roman vrai."

It is in the Big House that, down to this day, the Brazilian character has dound its best expression, the expression of our social continuity. In the study of their intimate history, all that political and military history has to offer in the way of striking events holds little meaning in comparison with a mode of life that is almost routine; but it is in that routine that the character of a people is most readily to be discerned. In studying the domestic life of our ancestors we feel that we are completing ourselves: it is another method of searching for the "temps perdu", another means of finding ourselves in others, in those who lived before us and whose life anticipates our own. The past awakesn many strings and hasa bearing on the lifre of each and every one of us; and the study of this past is more than mere research and a rummaging in the archives: it is na adventure in sensitivity.

Fonte: FREYRE, Gilberto. The Masters and the slaves: a study in the development of brazilian civilization. Traduzido por Samuel Putnam. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946. 537p.