This is the revisede edition of a book on Brazil written and published in English in 1945 as Brazil: An Interpretation. It is not only a revised edition: it is so enlkarged as to be a new book, having four new chapters and this introduction. Some of the new material has appeared in the United States in The Atlantic Monthly, Foreign Affairs, and The Encyclopedia Americana; in Civilizations (Brussels); in Profress and The Listener (both London), in the Year Book of Education of the University of London; and in Kontinent (Vienna). But it appears now, expanded and revised. However, for the use of this material I Want to thank the editors of these publications.

No Latin American country seems at present to attract the amount of Anglo-American attention which some countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa are attracting. But Latin America is not a geographical space that Anglo-Americans or West Europeans can afford to disdain entirely for the sake of new loves or enthusiasms. It is too European and too Western to be considered entirely exotic from a European or Western point of view; and too exotic to be treated as a mere European extension in America-mainly in the tropics-or a mere "Latin" annex to Anglo-America. It is differente. And Brazil is so different even from Spanish America as to ask for special treatment as na anthropological or sociological subject. So specifically Brazilian is its way of being both "Latin" and "American" that some have gone so far as to suggest that its mystery reminds one of China or Russia: it could even be described as a tropcial China. Rapid and easy travel today has made countries appear less mysterious and much less differente from each other than they were half a century ago. but in a world that is passing through a process of intense standardization of dress, architecture, food, and even drink, these differences still exist.

There was a time when the foreigner arriving in even the capital of Brazil found himself in entirely unfamiliar surroundings. At the same time he gimself excited the curiosity of the less sophisticated Brazilians as much as if he gad come from another planet.

How human was the intruder? How Christian? At that time Brazilians believed that the English, heretics from the orthodox Roman Catholic point of view, were perhaps devils in theguise of humans, evenhad webbed feet like devils. And, ironically, the foreigner often imagined he was coming to a heathen cuntry, while someorthodox Prostestant and evangelical missionaries expected to find people not only hearhen but also almost subhuman.

The fact, however, was that Brazilians were human and had been a Christianized peolple since the early days of the Portuguese colonization of their country in the sixteenth century. Pagan survivals can, of couse, be found in their civilization, as they can in the purest form of European Christianity practiced by common people ( as opposed to minority groups of theologically strict Christians).

Sociologically, Brazilian development viewed as a whole may be considered predominantly Christian. As a "human" - in the sense of humane - expression of Amercan culture, it is characterized more by the desireof the typical Brazilian to enjoy life - through the appreciation of a well-cooded fish, a good cigar, fine guitar music, and kindness and tolerance to others - than by the pursuit of material gain or highly intellectual conquests that migt prove detrimental to a slow and pleasant rhythm of existence.

Europeans familiar with Brazil during the coonial era ( from the sixteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth) were surprised at the lack of interest shown by Brazilians in gooks, natural history, natural science, and even art. Only music was na exception, for the notes of a guitar were always to be heard coming from some window opened for the fresh breeze, a guitar usually played by a woman with fine dark eyes, with her husband or father as na appreciative audience.

The Insquisition's limitation of reading matter toRoman Catholic religious books is a possibleexplanation of the fact that the study of books was mainly restricted to a few colonists. In spite of this, however, literature began to appear as early s the sixteenth century. In those days, to be a military man was a great distinction, but it was equally distinguished to be a scholar, to war glasses and be able to read Latin or write Portuguese; and one of the early leadres of Pernambuco, a man of aristocratic Portuguese birth, was both a soldier and a literary man. Trade, industry, and any form of manual labor were not so highly considered, and from the earliest colonial days the Brazilians leftthe conduct of business affairs toPortuguese of humble origin or to other Europeans, and all manual work to Negro slaves or free mulattoes. They themselves adopted the attitude of landed gentry, giving orders to their slaves from the height of their horses or the depth of their luxurious hammocks, where they passed the day in comparative idleness. Those who were not landwners were satisfied to possess a few slaves to work for them.

This widespread lack of ambition for material gain or intellectual improvement was characteristic of the Brazil of that period. It há, however, its compensation in na wqually general Brazilian disposition to enjoy life and leisure - a disposition lacking in more energetic and progressive countries in which industrial slaves had replaced agrrian slaves, and industrial barons feudal land barons, losing in the process the capacity to appreciate music and art, to eat a good dinner ( except Christma dinner!) slowly, to linger over a cup of coffee, a glass of port, and a Bahia cigar, or to enjoy aromatic snuff.

Colonial Brazilians also had a particular love of finery, appearing in public in clothes "bedaubed with embroidery", according to na early nineteenth-century writer. But at home they dressed simply, the men in shirts and trousers, the women in thin muslin petticoats over na embroidered chemise, anticipating present-day Europeans in the hygienic reduction of dress in the tropics to a minimum. They can indeed claim credit for having "humanized" dress for the tropics, despite the fact that they continued passively to copy European dress for public functions, suffering even in the present century the torments of top hats, frock coats, and furs.

Such tropcial habits-habits of natives of the tropics - already followed by the indigenous population and by the Africans imported to Brazil since the early sixteenth century, as sleeping in hammocks, using cly vases for fresh drinking waer, and cooking fish in coconut milk, wereadopted and improved by the Portuguese and their descendants in Brazil, who at the same time gradually assimilated the native customs, styles, and values. By a cultural compromise and by their genius in combining civilized and indigenous values, they have been able, perhaps better than any other people of predominantly European origin, to adapt a European civilization to the tropics. They have made a considerable tropical area a place in which European values now flourish and where men of European culture can live, enjoy life, and prosper. In such cities as Rio de Janeiro and Santos, they have defeated the tropical enemies of Europeans: yellow fever and bubonic plague. The Oswaldo Cruz Institute in Rio IS One of theforemost centers for the study of tropical diseases. In the country areas the dangers of malaria and ancylostomiasis are being overcome, and in the Butantan Institute in São Paulo, Brazilizn scientists, following theexample ofDr. Vital Brasil, are fghting theperils of snake bite with carefully prepared serum. These great Brazilian victories in thehumanization of the tropics have contributed much to destroying theEuropean idea that these evils are inseparable from tropical conditions.

Thesevret ofBrazil's success in building a humane, Christian, and modern civilization in tropical America has been her genius for compromise. While the British, as no other people, have had this genius for compromise in the political sphere-their political system is a masterly combination of apparently antagonistic values-the Brazilians have been successful in using this same power of compromise in the cultural and social spheres. Hence their ethnic democracy, thealomost perfect equality of opportunity for all men regardlesse of race or color. The successful and almost free mingling of differente cultures can also be seen in the assimilation of values as diverse as British football and the French taste for pastry, the East Indian love of rice and the North Amercian sewing machine, the Amerindian hammock and the portugueses toothpick, the African dish couscous and the Chinese style of roof. But it is not mere passive imitation, for Brazilian footballers dance with the ball as if they were doing the samba; couscous is made with the local products (manioc and corn), instead of the African; and sewing machines have been eused to produceclothesin traditional Brazilian styles. The old art of hand embroidery is not forgotten in such a region as Alagoas, and girls in convents are still taught the lacemaking and handwork of colonial days. For though, in the last half century, parts of Brazil have gone through na intense process of North- or Anglo-Americanization, the typical Brazilian has a deep aversion to standardization, including ethnic standardization.

The mixture of races produces regons in which the population is a constant surprise to a European because of its variation of color and anthropology. A large family in northeastern or central Brazil may represent three o four anthopological types and various skin colorrs through the father's marriage first to an Amerindian and then to a Negress. And though each one may have a family nickname according to the color of his eyes, the type of his hair, or the shape of his nose, they love each orther as brothers. This "family situation - though many Brazilian families pride themselves on being exclusively white - is to a large extent typical of the Brazilian population. Men regard each other as fellow citizens and fellow Christians without regard to color or ethnic differences. Not that there is no race or coor prejudice mixed with class prejudice in Brazil. There is. But no one would think of having churches only for whites. No one in Brazil qould think of laws against interracial marriage. No one would think of having churches only for whites. No one in Brazil would thinkof barring colored people from theaters or residential sections of a town. A general spirit of human brotherhood is much stronger among Brazilians than race, color, class, or religious prejudice.

It is true that racial equlity did not vecome absolute with the abolition of slavry in Brazil in 1988. Bur it is true also that even before the 1888 law the relations between whites and colored, between masters and slaves, in Brazil attracted the attention of foreign observers as being particularly cordial and humane. Even before that law, miscegenation had occurred, freely practiced among the people in general, and on rare occasions a member of a distinguished white or white-Amerindian family married outside his color caste.

As a Brazilian historian who was also a philosopher has said, the Brazilian solution of the racial question is certainly wiser, more promising, and, above all, more humane than any solution that operates through separation or segregation. He suggests that because of the fraternal relations between indiciduals of different races there exists a certain Brazilian "happiness", though, as a good philosopher, he refuses to admit that Amerigo Vespucci was right when he located the Earthly Paradise in Brazil. There is in all likelihood no earthly paradise, but in respect of race relatons the Brazilan situation is probably the nearest approach to a paradise to be found anywhere in the world.

Brazilian happiness is, however, relative, for there are still, for a large part of the population, a poverty, a misery, and a series of diseases which probably account for the sadnesse expressed in Brazilian folk music and guitar songs. To some extent, this sadness is to be explained also by a trauma in the social past of a large part of the population: slavery. The slave, even when well treated, felt vaguely nostalgic, which made his song one of sadness, though his dance was often one of joy. From the Portuguese the Brazilians inherited the well-known nostalgia of the sailor, who is frequently far from his home; a feeling expressed in the Portuguese language by the word saudade.

In a country where women have been oppressed by men, some hypercritical foreigners think it pure fiction to speak of social democracy, but the truth is that for years Brazilian women have been as nearly the equal of men as colored are the equal of white and native the equal of E uropean. The first woman governor in the history of the Americas was Dona Brites, of Pernambuco, in the sixteenth century, and both in the early colonial days and during the Empire numerous widows took charge of large plantations and were accepted asreal substitues for their dead hsbands.

In modern Brazil women enjoy more freedom of expression than isany other Latin American country, and today any talented woman can take up a career as doctor, writer, civil servant, nurse, musician, or lawyer. Rachel de Querioz, a notable Brazilian author, writes as vigorously and independently today, denouncing political corruption or social abuse, as did a brilliant mulatto publicist, Antonio Torres, a few years ago, when as Brazilian consul in quasi-Nazi Germany, he gained the respect of even the Germans in spite of the independence of his views on a number of questions.

Probably the Itamarati - the Brazilian Foreign Office - remains the last great fortress of Brazilian "racism" or "aryanism", as well as of Brazilian belief that public office is as exclusive privilege of men. But even the Itamarati has surrendered to the pressure of theBrazilian tendency toward equalization of opportunity for all. Mulattoes, Torres, for example, have been appointed consuls, and women have been admitted to the Brazilian foreign service and have risen as high as consul orinister.

Women have been members of theBrazilian Parliament and of the Municipal Cahamber of Rio de Janeiro. A woman has been the very capable dirextor of the National Museum of Natural History of Brazil. There are a number of colored men in high public office, though Brazilian courtesty would describe them, not as "Negroes" (as even near-Nordic individuals with a drop of African blood are described in the United States), bu as morenos - that is, people of dark complexion. Even during theEmpire, a number of distinguished statesmen, members of the Imperial Cabinet and of the Imperial Senate, diplomats, judges, and natinal deputies, were morenos in this sense.

It is said of the Emperor Dom Pedro the Second that he was strict puritan s regard the private and public morality of statesmen, whose rise in office depended somewhat upon his approval. He used a red pencil to mark out names of men of whose conduct as privateindiciduals or as public officers he disapproved. But he probably never used his red pencil against a man simply because he was moreno in the sense of Negroid orhad a drop of African blood. On the contrary, he had among his best persoal friends men like theRebouças, who were dark mulattoes. It is said that once, at a very elegant court ball, one of the Rebouças was present, but felt rather out of place amog a predominantly "Aryan" aristocracyu. Dom Pedro then asked his own daughter,Princess Isabe, to dance a quadrille withe Rebouças. It was Princess Isabel who signed the 1888 Abolition Law in the absence of the Emperor, who was then in Europe in very bad healthg. She was the wife of Prince Gaston d'Orléans, Count d'Eu, and would have succeeded her father on the throne of Brazil had not the Republic been established in 1889 by a group of Brazilians eager for up-to-date political "democracy".

The fact is that the Imperial regime in Brazil was a happy combination of monarchy with democracy, together with a system of aristocratic selection bgased not so much on birth, race, color, or class as os individual capacity. The Empire gave Brazil a tradition of quality as opposed to the mere power of quantity characteristic of both plutocracy and demamogism. That tradition seems to explain why even today public life attracts or retains some of the most refined and cultured Braziliansin the highest positions, whereas in ogher American countries, capable men tend to become business and industrial leaders. Although pessimistic critics think that men of quality are being defeated as a general rule by men whose power comes from monyey or from the votes they can command, pessimists always exaggerate the dark side of facts, and for years the Republic has remainded loyal to this typical tradition of the Monarchy. But one should always remember that such a tradition was never incompatible with a broad tendency toward equality of opportunity for all. Hence the considerable number of men of humble birth who, during theEmpire, became barons, counts, and viscounts, and have also reached high office during the Republic. This perhaps unique combination - certainly unique in America-of democracy with aristocracy explains why Brazil is, as na American nation, at the same time so "old" and so "vew", so conservative and so liberal, so attached to its past and yet so ready toi make experiments in social and technical progess.

For Brazil may be in certain respects one of the most picturesquely archaic countries of the American continen--w-h gauchos or cowboys who have still Moorish customs of dress and of dealing with horses; with mulatto and Negro women sweets vendors dressed, as in Bahia, in somewhat Muslim or African styles; with sugar cane planted as in the sixteenth century and carried from the most archaic sugar mills to the coast in primitive boats or in oxcarts of the most rustic type; with two pretenders to the national throne, one living like a prince in a palace in Petropolis and ready to become the third emperor of Brazil is, also, in certain other respects, one of the most socially, culturally, and technically advanced countries in the world.

In aviation architecture, music, science, art, and literature, Brazil can hold her own in the modern world. Santos Dumont, a Brazilian, was a pioneer of aviation one of the first men, if not the first man, to fly a plane of his own invention, a feat that the French have recognized by dedicating a public monument to his honor. Today commercial aviation is developed far more highly in Brazil than in any other part of Latin America.

Brazil is a pioneer also in modern functional architecture. Public buildings, factories, and private residences recently built in São Paulo and Rio are considered by foreign architects to be examples of a really new method of building and happy solutions of a number of problems facing a modern architect in the tropics. In Heitor Villa-Lobos, Brazil has composer as modern and experimental as any in Europe. His work is typically Brazilian, combining, as it does, the gaiety and the sadness of his country.

On the Amercan continents, Brazilian painting - with Portinari, Dias, Cardozo Ayres, Brennand, the Monteiro brothers, Pancetti, and others - is considered by some critics, both foreigri and Brazilian to be second only to Mexican painting is its expression of advanced artistic feeling; and Brazilian sculpture, inspired by the vigorous work of na eighteenth-century mulatto sculptor whose monumental statues and decorations can be seen in the churches of Minas Gerais, is becoming equally original in execution.

From the point of view artistic vigor and human sgnificance, Brazilian literature is probably second to nome in Latin America. The poet Manuel Bandeira is great by any standard, guage, a language that Brazilian pessimism somentimes describes as "clandestine'. Another modern Brazilian poet of rank is Carlos Drumond de Andrade. Great, too, were Machado de Assis andLima Barreto, Brazilian prose writers of the late minteenth and early twentieth century, who are today followed by such novelists as José Lins do Rego, Graciliano Ramos, Jorge Amado, G. Cruls, A. Callado, P. Asfora, Rachel de Queiroz, Guimarães Rosa, Erico Verissimo, and Mario Palmerio. Both Assis and Barreto were mulatto, Assis never expressing himself as such, Barreto sometimes framatizing his condition of "Negro" and "plebeian" in a somewhat un-Brazilian way. The Brazilian essay-of which Assis, Joaquim Nabuco, Euclides da Cunha, and Ruy Barbosa were masters - is considered by foreign critics the most original expression of Brazilian literature. For it combines philosophical and social preoccupation with the artistic and literary, becoming therefore more than belles-lettres, a tradition that originated with the Luso-Braizilian of the seventeenth century, Father Antonio Vieira - a real genius - whose sermons were more like modern essays than like orthodox sermons.

Brazil is also proud of its axhievements in industry, and, indeed, much has been accomplished during the last half-century. It is interesting to observe that during the Empire the modern industrial development of Brazil had a remarkable pioneer in Viscount de Mauá, a man of great creative energy; today he is succeede by the well-known editor and industrialist Assis Chateaubrinad, whose activities are amazingly widespread.

It would not be accurate, however, to take these dynamic figures in art and industry as truly representative of take these dynamic figures in art and industry as truly representative of theBrazilian rhythm of activity, which expresses itself more typically in a combination of toil and leisure (the number of civil and religious holidays for which Brazil is famous well illustrates this point).

For Brazilians, being Latins, are free-perhaps too free-from the Protestant conception of leisure as a vice, and recognize, apparently instinctively, its importance as na antidote to those money-making activities which reduce man to a mere economic entity.

The too-hard-working people of today (with special reference to the United States na Russia) think of leisure as something to be chieved in the future. But why leave the enjoyment of leisure to the future? Why not more machines, but at a rate that will not break up the Brazilian tradition of leisure? When Elihu Root, the well-known North American Secretary of State, first arrived in Brazil in 1906, he was delighted with Salvador, with its suave rhythm of existence as well as its hospitality; and the people of Salvador themselves, in their capacity to enjoy leisure without being indolent, may well be considered the most civilized in Brazil.

In this happy combination of toil and leisure, na optimist might see that Brazil has a contribution to offer to the happiness of mankind. But some aspects of the Brazilian attitude toward leisure are not entirely happy, one being the assumption that thestate exists to provide them with leisure. It is a common thing for governmental departments, for instance, to have a staff greatly in excess of the work to be done, the surplus manpower being nothing more than parasitical.

The systematic combination of these two extremes, toil and leisure, is one of the tasks of social legislation in Brazil as the country changes over from na agrarian to na industrial economy. Work for all and leisure ofr all would be the ideal solution, but this can be achieved only gradually, for Brazilians in particular despise violent solutions. One should not forget that both capital punishment and dueling were abolished in Brazil many years aog as too barbarous to be tolerated by so humane a people. Revolutions, either for independence form Portugal or for theRepublic in 1889, have tended to be "white" rather than bloody, and even the abolition of slavery was carried through without violence. Brazil has also managed to solve her boundary disputes with neighboring Spanish-speaking republics by arbitration rather than war.

It is true that recently Brazil surprised theworld not with a revolution à La Latin American but with the violent death - by suicide - of its President. The suicide of Getulio Vargas may be considered somewhat un-Brazilian. Na explanation of it may be that he was born and grew up too near Spanish Amaerica, and though very Brazilian in spirit and feelings, seems to have been influenced by certain Spanish-American dramatic methods of playing politics. Until recently such methods included dueling, suicide, and assassination in a way almost unknown in Brazil-that is, amog the leaders of politics in Brazil. In this, as in other aspects of political and social life, monarchy seems to have preserved Brazil from the excessive romanticism of Spanish America: including the mystique of violence which seems to be a romantic rather than a classic method uded by statesmen or peoples for dealing with critical problems-though there are situations that man has to face tragically, no matter whether his prodominant inclinations are classic or romantic. After all, Greek tragedy is classic and not romantic; and Varga's end seems to have been marked by a touch of Greek tragedy rather than to have been caused entirely by a latent romanticism hidden in so sober, silent, and apparently cold a man. Some even think that he was led to suicide not so much by gis political opponents as by some friends and relatives who, having his full, absolute confidence, acted disloyally toward their patriarchal chief.

In any case, the Brazilian reaction to so unexpected and un Brazilian na event as Varga's suicide was classic rather than romantic. The army, the air force, and the navy acted in a way that seems fantastic in relation to Latin America, but which was almost normal when viewed in relation to a specifically Brazilian past or tradition and a specifically Brazilian psycholohy or, as sociologists say, ethos. No military leader manifested even a vague tendency to take advantage of a situation favorable to the military or Napoleonic adventure of the seizure of power by "a strong man". The three military forces - army, air, and navy-acted as a bloc, not thinking of themselves as a messianic element, but thinking of their responsibility toward the nation.

Years ago a famous Brazilian publicist, statesman, and diplomat, Joquim Nabuco, wrote that in Brazil the army, after taking control of the nation in 1889, when a republic was established, became a sort of inheritor of the constitutional role that during long years the crown or the emperor had played in the Brazilian political system: the role, in critical days, of a power that acted above the political parties and the economic particularist groups or interests, and for the sake of the nation as a whole. Brasil's recent political crisis seems to have come as a confirmation of Nabuco's theory: the army, Ter air force, and the vany acted as if their mission was to play the role that a consitutional, but not absent or weak, monarch would have played in face o a dramatic crisis in the life of the nation. Vice-President Café Filho took the presidency, and everything went normally in Brazil until elections for a new President could be held. Then, again, some of the most prominent army leadres considered it their duty to act so a to guarantee the access to power of Juscelino Kubitschek, a physician from Minas Gerais, who had been elected by a very small advantage over his opponent, a general of the army. It seems that the army and the other military forces continue to be ready to act in that supra-partisan way, if such actino is absolutely necessary to guarantee national peace or national order aginst particularist, sectarian interests, political or economic, though some fear that narrowly "nationalistic" elements are becoming too powerful in the Brazilian army.

Brazil is indeed differente from other natins of tis age and size, not only in South America, but also anywhere. And it has to be treated and interpreted as a nation by itself, and not only as a member of a group of nations-the American nations - to which its similarities are indeed many. Many, but not absolute. Brazil isLatin American, Roman Catholic, and a Republic, but it is also Brazil. Some have called it na American Russia, others, a tropical China, but not great enough to efface the personality of Brazil as a unique nation with a contribution of its own to make to civilization. That contribution is becoming more evident to the eyes of other peoples with the growth in importance of the tropics to Europe and to the United States, Canda and Japan.

For it is as new and modern type of civilization in the tropics-a predominantly European, but not sub-European, type of civilization carried on and developed in the tropics by a population in whose ethnic composition the number of non-Europeans is considerable and the amount of race mixture still more considerable-that Brazil is most significant. And it is as a modern tropical civilization that its creative originality is most conspicuous, in architecture as well as in music, in cookery as well as in landscape gardening.

Another pioneering work of scientific as well as practical interest which has been done by Brazilians in behalf not only of Brazil, but also of the development of modern civilization in the tropics-other tropical countries like Venexuela and Paraguay and Portuguese Africa are profiting from the Brazilian expeirments-is the new tuype of cattle specially adapted to the tropics which Brazilians have obtained by crossing with zebustck from India the descendants of animals imported in colonial days from Portugal. When Anglo-American ranchmen began to develop na intrest in Brazil from the point of view of the great meat industries of the United States, they thought that what Brazil needed was the introduction of pure-bred Herefords or shorthourns to cross with the native stock of the country, the gado crioulo. But according to a British observer who was in Brazil during the First World War and paid special attention to this problem-Mr. J. O. P. Bland-though the results obtained at experimental fazendas with foreign-blooded stock thus imported justified the experiment, practical Brazilians held that the thoroghbred native type of cattle was likely to pay better because of its greater immunity to insect pests peculiar to tropical Brazil, to ehich the unacclimatized imported beasts often succumbed. And the British observer agreed with practical Brazilians on this: that the climate and insect pests of Brazil are factors in the problem not necessarily to be solved by applying the experience of Texas or Argentina.

This is always the important point: Brazil is one of these countries which are so essentially tropical in their physical situation that their agriculture, cattle raising, archtecture, food habits, styles of dress, and recreation habits have to correspond to a situationdifferent from the European one. What makes modern Brazil particularly interesting as a social experiment of modern civilization in non-European surroundings is the fact that the Brazilians have succeeded, through great difficulties, in developing a number of essentially European values in na essentially nos-European environment. In order to do this they have followed the policy of developing new existential ways making that development possible, instead of attempting to ape European styles of living and dressing, food habits, architecture, methods of agriculture and cattle raising. South American nations such as Argentina, Uruguay, and perhaps Chile can imitate Europe, but Brazil cannot. Brazil has to find its own ways of combining modern civilizaton with a tropical environment. This is no easy task, but it make for creativeness. It demands from Brazilians what some Brazilians wolud like to avoid: a constant effort toward new solutions for problems of the relations of civilized men with nature and of civilized men with men, still numerous in Brazil, who are carriers of non-civilized cultures, and whose cultural ways, values, and experiences, rather than being radiclly repudiated, must be analyzed na considered carefully and carefully utililed for a possibly new synthesis of culture which will be at once European and tropical.

In following this policy, Brazilians are trying in tropical Amerca na old Portuguese method of dealing with non-European peoples and cultures in tropical areas of Asia and Africa. Sometimes this social policy has been entirely different from the methods of ogher European powrs in the tropics. According to Mr. Guy Wint, a British author who has specialized in the study of Eastern tropical sujects, even Britain, though following, in regard to political problems, policies "on the whle respectable... often throws away by its indifference to the clture ofOriental peoples" all that it gains by such policies. "This may be a ground of complaint by theEastern peoples", he adds. Indifference to the non-European cultures that have become a part of modern Brazilian civilization never has been characteristic ofBrazilian leadres or of the Brazilian élite, though some of them have been asNordic in race or blood as any British leader.

Brazil became na independent American nation, keeping not only the European monarchical form of government which colonial Brazilians had always known, but also the European royal family that they had known for a long time as a rulingfamily. At the same time, it developed a nobility whose titles were taken not from thePortuguese or from any European language, but from the Amerindian language dominant among the real natives of Brazil. Names of rivers, mountains, trees. Telluric names. Tropical names. And there was no hesitation, from the very beginning of Brazil as na independent nation, over extending titles of nobility to the descendants of Amerindians. On the contrary: when they were the descendants of Amerindian chiefs or caciques, they were considered to be essentially noble. Even during the colonial days the Portuguese had thought so. This explains whay the Marquis of Pombbal, a man with Amerindian blood, became the most powerful man in the Portuguese world of gis time-the eighteenth century-without any restricition to his position as a nobleman on account of hs Amerindian blood. It explanis also why the Pope's selection to be the first Latin American cardial of a man who was a member of na old aristocratic family of Brazil-na old family with Amerindian noble blood-was so well received by Brazilians. It was asif the Roman Catholic Church, by this choice-wich took place half a century ago-was approving the Brazilian policy of attempting to develop a civilization in the tropics, t once European and Amerindiam boreal and tropical, and consequently really universalistic in tis main designs and techniques.

I say in its techniques because ehat is happening tocattle raistin and agrculture is happening in Brazil with other human activities that are parts of a civilization or a culture: such activities as the art of gardening, for instance. Through the use of the same methods or tecniques of combinig tropical experience with European science, Brazil is also developing its own styles of ornamental gardens complementary to its own styles of architecture. Here, as in other matters, Brazilians agree with modern European scientists who have discovered that European men, despite their skill and power over nature, have learned only how to cultivate European soils in a European climate.

This is why some modrn students of these and other problems in the expansion of civilization think thata a new science has to be developed to deal with these very complex problems from a tropical point of view complementary to the European or boreal one that has been overdominant is science and technology. Why not a special science to deal with the adaptation of European science and tecnology topical situations, and even eith the invention of new techniques to solve problems peculiar to the tropics? Problems not only of cattle raising, agriculture, architecture, urbnization, and regional planning, but also of psychology connected with eduction with political organization, with mental hygiene. For it seems that the behavior of man in the tropicas has to be considered, in some of its aspects, in relation to situations and conditions peculiar to tropical environment; to the fact, for instance, that the tropical weather is favorable to easy, informal contact, in public squares, of crowds with political leaders-without the need of party meetings inside buildings that have a distinctly party atmosphere. Music, the drama, teatrical performance, religious rites may be affected in a similar way by tropical weather or climatic conditions, may develop new forms through na immediate psychological and social relation among the artists or the religious leaders and large crowds, and not through the radio and television, whose importance is probably to become greater in boreal than in tropical environments.

A German phytopatholoist who was in Brazil during the second decade of the present century, Professor Konrad Guenther of the University of Freiburg, wrote a fascinating book about his experiences, theEnglish edition of which is entitled A Naturalist in Brazil. Professor Guenther writes that all the time hewas in tropical Brazil he was impressed by the splendor of the blossom, "such splendor of blossom as I had never seen", to quote his own words. And there were always-he adds-the sunlight, and the blue sky, and the people in the streets, who enhance the charm of the picture "not only by their white or brightly colored clothes, but also by thealternation of white, brown, and black faces...." Such na atmosphere-a combination of nature and culture in effects of tropical brightness-is bound to affect men in their behavior, in their vharacter, in their art, in their philosophy of life.

The same German scientist writes: "The thing about the tropics, in my opinion, is that one is always, by day and night, in touch with nature. Just as the lightly clad body is in immediate contact with the air, so that one always feels free and comfortable, so in the tropics there are no closed rooms." Professor Guenther tells of a lady, apparently from northern Europe, who once told him that she coul no longr live in Europe, because"the rooms were so oppressive: she often had the feeling that she could not breathe". I have known northern Europeans who after years of residence in Brazil have failed to re-adapt themselves to Europe for exactly the same reason: they seem to develop a sort of claustrophobia, known to psyschologists and psychiatrists as a morbid exaggeration of na attitude that most men and women have toward oppressive rooms or oppressive situations. Perhaps some day there will be sanatoria in such tropical countries as Brazil for the reatment, or possibly the crue, of boreal Europeans and Americans who no longer can live a healthy life in boreal Europe or boreal America-the ord "boreal" is used here in its broadest sense-os account of climatic and other factors that make rooms and life too oppressive to some men and women, and also to some children.

Children in Brazil were for centuries, when they belonged to the higer class of Brazilians, the victims and even martyrs of the ide that European civilization should be preserved in Brazil just as it iskept or preserved-as if in ice-in boreal Europe. They were dressed as if they were European and the weather was European winter wather. Scottish dresses both for boys and girls became fashionable ofor sometime in nineteenth-century Brazil, and you can imagine what this meant for children eager to be free and comfortable, and also how thisdeveloped in some of them what modern psychologists call a complex-na anti-Sxottish complex-that in not a few emn has been cured by the fact that they have come to develop a high esteem for other Scottish values. I may add in this connection that Brazilians have adopted one combination of European civilization and tropical nature which seems to be unknown in tropical areas of Asia and Africa which I have visited. I refer to the combination of Scottis whisky and coconut milk.

European and Anglo-American scientists such as the German Professor Guenther and the Anglo-American Dr. Marston Bates are bringinga valuable contribution to the foundation of a possible special science for the intensive, systematic study of tropical men, tropical nature, and tropical cultures in places where they have stabilized or are stabilizing themselves in total and complex situations through the intimate contact, and eves fusion of culture and environment. For these scientists are adding to studies of these situations byu scientists or analysts born in the tropics, though educted in Europe and the United States, the comparison between their European or Anglo-American bachground and their experience in Brazil, for instance, adn their experience in India or tropical Africa.

"No one can get out of his skin", writes Professor Guenther, adding: "Even at the Equator the European is still a European; at first hefeels na alien in the tropics, and unrelated to tropical nature". Speaking as a European, he generalizes: "Only by a strenuous and exhausting effort is one able to see into the alien nature of the tropics and realize its essential character". And as if he were willing to contribute with his experiences and his science to the creation of that special science ofr which I have suggested the somewhat pedantic denomination of "tropicology", Porfessor Guenther summarizes his knowledge of tropical situations in these very significant words:

"While traveling in two different tropical countries will prevent one from drawing general conclusions from observations that hold good of one country only, it also makes one realize that there is a definite tropical character common to all countries astride the Equator, and which differs fundamentally from the character of the more temperate latitudes".

By includinh himself amog those who consider it their task "to determine this difference and to explain it is a scientific manner", theGerman phytopatholoist may be considered, together with Wallace, Gourou, the two Bateses-the Bristish one and the Anglo-American-a pioneer of a possible modern science, required by modern problems and their impact on the relations of modern Europe with non-European cultures and peoples, which might become known as tropicology.

I have suggested the convenience,as a sub-science of this special science, na equally intensive and systematic study of the various developments of European forms-forms more than substances or contentes, though the two are hardly separable-of civilization in tropical areas, carriers of which have been men and women from Spain and Portugal, particularly from Portugal. For it seems thata the Iberians have been able to identify themselves with tropical surroundings and to assimilate values from tropical nature and tropical culures and to mix with tropical races or populations in a way characterisitic anly of them, especially of the Portuguese, and of no other European peoples, whose activities in the tropics have been mainly politica, commercial, industrial, military, and not ethnically and culturally symbiotic as the relations of the Amerindians, the Africas, the Orientals of tropical areas have been.

I am one of those who think tha the advantages of Iberians over othe European peoples in developing such symbiotic relations with tropical nature, tropical men, and tropical cultures are mainly owing to the fact that since their beginnings as natonal and quasi-national societies Spain and Portugal have been only partly European: their climate and situation allowed them to adopt numerous values and tecniques from non-European civilizations whose origns were tropical. This explains why, during the early days of Brazil, the Portuguese began to build not only according to their European science, but also according to what they had learned from the Arabs, the Moors, the East. When the Dutch conquered northern Brazil and established themselves with Recife as their capital, tehy introduced in this town and this particular Brazilian region a type of architecture which proved to be na unsuitable import, with few or no concessions to tropical climate. It was characterized-a characteristic that seems to have affected architecture in Recife until a comparatively recent time-by what specialists in architecutral tecnique call "a prototype designed to keep out snow and let in sun", with eaves too high and too narrow to be "protective" of human habitation in the tropics. A modern student of "housing ofr the humid tropics," Professor Douglas H. K. Lee, whose article "Thoughts on Housing for the Humid Tropics", with photographs by Porfessor Robert L. Pendleton, appeared in the January 1951 number of the Geographical Review of New York, ponts out that equally unsuitable types of house, apparently adapted from the European "villa", are to be found in the modern Belgian Congo.

While the Dutch and theBelgians have behaved this way, the Portuguese have taken na entirely different attitude. Verandas qere adopted from theEast by the Portuguese and became a characteristic of archiecture in Brazil, being used even around churches and chapels, in the same way asin India. The word "veranda" seems to have been introduced in European languages by the Portuguese.

Much more than any other architecture, Brazilian architecture was affected by the close contact of thePortuguese with the East: not only were gardens filled with Chinese pavilions and pagodas, but also theOriental roof became characteristic of houses in Brazil. These influences emphasized the "Moorish" rather than the "Roman" traits of Brazilian domestic architecture: a doubleand sometimes antagonistic influence always present in the development of architecture in Brazil, as I shall attempt to suggest in a special chapter on a sociological interpretation of that development.

Roman traits were emphasized in Brazilian architecture, as in that of the United States, when a new economic and political order began to develop in Portuguese America with the expansion of monarchy from royal to imperial. Old colonial plantation lords became barons, viscounts, comendadores in na imperial nobility that also expanded from feudal agriculture into industry and trade. Consequently,as in the United States with the beginning of the phase that Mr. Lewis Mumford characterizes in his Stiks and Stones, in which the name "millionaire" became "the patente of America's new nobility", there arose in Brazil a scale of living and a mode of architecture with something imperial in tie, and this emphasized the Roman element in architecture, as against its Eastern and Eastern-tropical elements. The main effort of the architects of patrician domestic buildings of this phase, in Brazil, in such places as Rio, Recife, and Salvador, was to give façades of "big houses" - then called palacetes and even palacios, like the Cattete Palace in Rio, built by a coffee baron of the Empire days, and now the official residence of the President of the Republic-the effect of "dignity" and "permanence" which Mr. Mumford points out as characteristic of the "Imperial" or "Roman" period in the history of United States architecture. This occurred not only in domestic, but also in other forms of architecture. For one of the aspects of the period, perhaps more in the United States than in Brazil, was its unity. "In government, in industry, in architecture, the imperial age was one", Mr. Munford writes, referring to theUnited States. And he goes on to the last consequences in his anlysis of this unity: the imperial or "Roman" impluse in the United States expressed itself also in monumental tombs or temples, mausoleum architecture very characteristic of the period. In Brazil even tombs ceased to be predominantly "Moorish" - hidden in privagte chapels in the patriarchal country houses or in town churches-to become almost as public, "Roman", and imperial as the feçades of the new aristocratic or plutocratic residential buildings in towsns like Rio, Recife, and Salvador.

How could and Empire's or Emperoro's baron viscount, marquis, or comendador be buried in na almost secret place, when his imperial condition or almost Roman, consular dignity mde it imperative that his remainsbe kept in a sort of temple or mausoleum? During this period in the history of Brazilian architecture, its "Moorish" private, intimate element lost a great part of its importance under the impact of the "Roman", "imperial", public elemtn. Some of the aspects of this era in Brazilian social and architecture history are studied in my book Sobrados e Mucambos. Here I wish to empahasize the fact that in recent years a characteristic of the development of Brazilian civilization has been a greater integration between its Roman and Moorish elements, which has meant also a greater integration of its European and tropical alements. This tendency is clearly suggested by developments in building, thus showing that architecture is almost always a significant expression of integrative or disintegrative trends in other aspects of a civilization.

Although Brazilian architecture, as far it means a system of general rchitecture-church, military, official, domentic-is, from the north to the south of Brazil, Portuguese or Iberian architecture adapted to a tropical space, it has received, in differente phases and different regions of tis pre-national and national development, non-Portuguese influences, some of them contrary to tropical ecology. The influence of the East Indian bunglow, partly owing to the efforts of some British India to introduce into Brazil that Oriental type of residence considered ideal for the tropics by some. The influence of the violently anti-tropical Norman style-so prominent in the Rio de Janeiro's most parvenu domestic architecture when Rio began to be a "modern city" in the early part of the nineteenth century. German and Italian influences in the building of coutry houses and even urbgan houses-in Blumenau, for German and Italian colonists is some areas of southern Brazil. Fletcher and Kidder even tell us, in their book Brazil and the Brazilians, of a "perfect Yankee house" that, in about 1870, was to be found in Brazil: the house of na Anglo-American owner of a cotton factory at Saint Aleixo. Fletcher and Kidder inform us that "both ( factory and house) were actually framed in the United States, brought out in pieces and puta together in Brazil," the pine used for the house having, "in spite of predicitons to the contrary, proved superior in durability to Norwegian pine."

A number of foreign observers, and Brazilians as well, agree on recognizing that "the Dutch influence gave Recife, the capital of the State of Pernambuco (for some time, during the seventeenth century, occupied by the Dutch), its particular character". These are the words of Peter Fuss, the German author of a book entitled Brazil published in Berlin in 1937.like many other foreign observers, Herr Fuss based his remark on the fact that in Recife, as late as 1937, found that "old, high-gabled houses... still recalled the early activities of the Dutch colonists". These old houses were not the ones orginally built or rebuilt by the Dutch themselvès, but tehir high-gabled structure showed a building tradition that Herr Fuss and many other foreign observers of Recife archiecture have identified as north European, rather than Portuguese.

Fletcher and Kidder, without specifying a "Dutch" influence-as many oter observers do-write in their always reliable book that "many of the houses of Pernambuco (by Pernambuco they meant Recife) are bilt in a style unknown in other parts of Brazil". As a specimen of this style, they give the description of a house six stories high (first known by Didder) which, being Luso-Brazilian in its patriarchal functions, seems to have been the result of a neat north European, or "Dutchman"-"Dutch" and also commercial or progressively bourgeois-upon the building habits of this part of Brazil. The same authors-Fletcher confirms Kidder, who was the pioneer of the two, in the discovery of Brazil with Anglo-American eyes-state that when Kidder first knew the most ancient district of the city of Recife, in 1833, the buildings still exhibited "the old Dutch style of architecture", to which the Portuguese, after having regained the place from the invaders, had added their very Moorish "latticed balconies or gelouzias". What happened, then, was absorption of "Dutch" architecture by the Luso-tropical one. This was to be expected in regions like Pernambuco, as the "Dutch" architecture was artificial, brought in pieces-bricks and all-from Europe, just as the Santo Aleixo "Yankee house" eas brougy from theUnited States, whereas the Luso-Tropical architecture was na ecological system of building which specialized in using local materials -stone, woods, etc. - and in adapting itself to tropical conditions.

In Brazil, as in New Amsterdan, the Dutch seem to have "copied the styles of old Amsterdam, and as the crowded conditions of old Amsterdam had induced the narrow Sutch front with the rerraced gable-end, the unimaginative Dutch burghers reproduced the narrow buildings in New Amsterdam...." According to a United States historian, Professor Max Savelle in his Seeds of Liberty ( New York, 1948), this is how the Dutch behaved in the area that is now New York. Their behavior in tropical Brazil was characterized by a still more unimaginative attitude in regard to architecture in particular and to the art of adapting European values and European techniques to the tropics in general. This explains why they were so rapidly swallowed by the tropical China that Brazil is or has been in relation to European or Anglo-Amercan values not well adapted t oits tropical location. The success of the Portuguese in Brazil is to be explained, to a large extent, in terms of a constatn disposition on their part to adapt European values and European techiques to tropical conditions, going so far as to repudiate some of the European valus and tecniques and to adopt tropical ones instead. This they did in matters not only of architecture,but also of food, as the replacement of wheat by manioc in the most tropical areas of Brazil clearly indicates.

Only recently it was pointed out at the 1953 Conference on Tropical Architecture held in London that modern Brazilians have rediscovered values in tropical art, hygiene, and townplanning which, though known by ancient peoples, had not been recognized by Europeans or Anglo-Americans in their attempts to develop modern civilization in tropical areas.

Thus Mr. O. H. Koenigsberger remarked in his paper "Tropical Plannig Problems"( published in Conference on Tropical Architecture, London, 1954) that "it is already becoming clear that the virtue of wide streets is not as uncontested and axiomatic athe sanitary engineers of the earlier decades of this century believed. The arid tropics, for instance, have a tradition of narrow, arcaded, and sometimes even covered streets which provide shade and relief from heat and glare". This tradition, brought to Brazil by the Portuguese, has affected Brazilian architecture in its most genuine expressions, both "colonial" and "modern". Modern buildings in Brazil are returning to the old Eastern-Iberian style of arcaded streets through a sort of co-operation between architecture and urbanism.

Mr. S. O. Jaiyestimi, from Nigeria, speaking at the same Conference on Tropical Architecture in London, pointed out that "the use of new materials to build in the Western style will lead to the spread of modern civilization through the tropics, but a local architectural idiom will never evolve if architects fail to take the initiative in the use of local materials and crafts. At the same conference Mr. R. S. Colquhoun from Great Britain pointed out that "the Brazilians have rediscovered the pierce d sreen of Mogul architecture as a sun break..." It is interesting to note that the modern Brazilian movement to "rediscover" this and other Oriental values in architecture, some of them brought to Brazil by the Portuguese in the colonial days, started with the Conference on Regionalism that met in Recife in February 1926, organized for a Society for the Defense of Regionalism (in architecture as well as in other arts, literature, recreation, cookery, planning, urbanization, education, etc.) founded in Recife as early as 1924, having Pofessor Odilon Nestor as president. This has been recently recognized by one of the leading modern architects of Brazil, Senhor Henrique E. Mindlin, in what is probably the best book on the new Brazilian architecture: Modern Architecture in Brazil ( Rio de Janeiro, Amsterdam, 1956), with a preface by Professor S. Giedion. He states that the Regionalist Manifesto of Recife (1926) is a document of "positive significance" ofr the development of a Brazilian architecture at once modern and regional, its ideas finding expression in "recent attempts at integrating contemporary elements with anticipatin by the Recife Regionalists, has beenpointed aout by the professor of architecture at theSchool of Architecture of theUniversity of Rio de Janeiro, Senhor Paulo Santos. A similiar anticipation of the Recife regionalists in regard to mural painting and its themes as developed by Senhor Candido Portinari and other modern Brazilian painters has been noted by Professor Robert S. Smith. This anticipation seem to be generally recognized in literature; and in regard to social atudies the Regionalist Manifesto seems to mark a distinct beginning for modern anthropological and sociological studies in Brazil on an ecoogical or regional basis.

Another "Brazilianism" in the art and science of building was recognized by the architects who met in London in 1953, when it was pointed out by one of them that standards for indoor spaces have to be or can be reasonably lower in the tropics than in Europe. This subject was considered in a very intelligent way by the London Conference. One of the architects present, Mr. G. Anthony Atkinson, in a paper on "Tropical Architecture and Building Standards", remarked that medical and public health requirements usually adopted for architecture in the tropics are copied from European laws and-in the case of tropical territories under British control or influence-"seem to have little scientific validity, being based in British territories on English and Scotch regulations of the time". Moreover, in the tropics, "many activities can take place in the open air. A roof alone might be good enough to bife protection aginst the sun and the rain, and aginst the dew on cool, cloudless nights... It is most desirable to reconsider the basis of space standards and to think in terms of social rather than only of health requirements", he added, thus recognizing the social or sociological importance of modern efforts toward a scientific tretment of tropical problems of housing, as well as of town-planning and agriculture, according to tropical conditions.

Mr. A. Adedokun Adeyemi, from Nigeria, remarked, following the same line of thought:

"Modern planing schemes in Africa often fall into the error of designing for sophisticated Africans who attempt to lead a life based on a false conception ofWestern standards. The real need is to plan to raise the general standerd of living of the mass of the people, and this can be done by accepting what is good in the old tradicional way of life".

This is exactly what is being done in relation not only to architecture and town-planning, but also to music, agriculture, sculpture, literature, sociology, and cattle breeding by a number of Brazilians who have become deeply tropics-conscious, and who were awakened to this by the insistence, since 1924, of the Recife Regionalists, on the importance of Brazil's developing its civilization on the basis of a tropical ecology.

Even in regard to dress, Brazilians are showing a disposition to break eith a too-passive submission to European patterns and fashions, and to develop styles that will correspond from both hygienic and aesthetic points of view to tropical conditions. In connection with this, a recent experiment by Senhor Flavio Carvalho of São Paulo must be considered a pioneer attempt toward a scientific solution of the problem, not only for Brazil, but also for other modern civilizations situated in tropical areas. His ide is that of a bold modernization of suggestions taken from the East Indians, the Africans, and other tropical peoples. Specialists in nutrition in Brazil are doing the same in regard to traditionally tropical foods that had ceased to be elegant; their virtues as foods adequate to a tropical clime are being rediscovered. Hats and shoes in Brazil, or for a considerable number of Brazilians, have ceased to be orthodox European. There are distinguished Brazilians who do not wear either shoes or hats, but appear in the streets hatless and with sandals. The use of slacks and pajamas is becoming possible outside of strictly domestic or informal circles.

The traveler who more than a half-century ago wrote that "in their ambiton to copy European and North American fashions, the gentlement of Rio utterly disregard the eternal fitness of things, wearing broadcloth suits of black, with tall stovepipe hats, neither of which articles should be adopted for a moment in their torrid climate" and boldly stated "linenclothing and light straw hats are the true costume for the tropics", can hardly have imagined how the situation would change in a few decades.

It would have been wqually difficult for Europeans and Anglo-Americans who visited Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century to foresee that absorption of non-Iberian immigrants by tropical Brazil which is making such anticipations as the Italianization of São Paulo or the Germanization of Santa Catharina appear almost ridiculous. It is a fact that these non-Iberian immigrants have introduced a number of valuable Italianisms and Germanisms into the Portuguese language of Brazil, as well as into the food habits and other customs of the Brazlians. The same thing is true of other non-Iberican immigrants who have established themselves in Brazil, the Japanese included. But most of them have been Brazilianized as they have become adapted to the tropics. The tropics and Brazilian civilization seem to have a secret alliance against all possible enemies.

Writing of European immigrants to modern Brazil, Professor Arthur Ramos says in the chapter "Social Pioneering" in Brazil-na excellent book edited by Professor Lawrence F. Hill and published in 1947-that "from the point of view of racial contacts" the Italian colonist in Brazil has been "the most adaptable after the Portuguese". From the first generation on, he becomes "completely acculturated". Of the German colonists in Brazil, Professor Ramos points out that "in the plateau regions" of southern Brazil they estalished small fams "as opposed to the vst estates of the Portuguese-Brazilian system." Writing of the non-Portuguese or non-Iberian European colonists in gerenal ( Italians, Germans, Slavs), Ramos says that they changed "the character" or the "social structure" of a few of the sub-regions of southern Brazil, where they have established themselves specially through "small holdings", basic to their agricultural activity. He admits, with Professor Emilio Willems, the "marginality" of some of the German colonists in relation to Brazilian tradicional national culture. But he also agrees with Professor Roquette Pinto, Brazil's greatest modern anthropologist, on the desire of German immigrants to become assimilated by that culture, as expressed by the fact that "numerous German-Brazilian horsemen, mounted in teh gaúcho manner, with silver spurs, broad-brimmed hats, breeches with silver buttons, lassos" are seen in southern Brazil. In na essay, "O Mundo que Portugues Creou"-a summary of lectures delivered in European universities in 1937-I have pointed out less evident signs of the same desire of European colonists of non-Iberican orign in Brazil to become or Portuguese origin, a culture that some of them feel to express a longer and deeper harmonization of European ways with conditions in a tropical or quasi-tropical space.

In recognizing this, they have recognized the fact that Brazilians have solved a numnber of problems in connection with civilized life in the tropics in a way that places Brazilian civilization among the cretive civilizations that man has developed in the tropics. If the Brazilians have been creativs, credit should be given them for a quality not generally associated with the tropics. Lafcadio Hearn, though entusiastic about tropical life and tropical peoples, seems to have thought that the tropics life and tropical peoples, seems to have thougy that the tropics were not fit for men of ideas. Men should avoid thinking in teh tropics. The warm climate did not seem favorable to creative intelledtual life os a higher order.

Tropical Brazil does not seem to favor this and similar generalizations about the tropics. Its intellectual life has been a surprise to Europeans and Anglo-Americans. Teixeira de Freitas - a jurist whose influence reached Argentina and Chile-was a creative thinker born and raised in tropical Brazil. Brazilian was also Santos Dumont, na inventor, considred by authoritative European - British and French-historians of aviation to have preceded the Wright brothers in the invention of the modern airplane. Brazilian is the physics researcher Senhor Cesar Lattes, considered in the United States one of the creative young scientists of our day. Brazilian were Oswaldo Cruz, the Almerida brothrs, Vital Brazil, famous for their research on tropical problems of medicne, research illuminated by new ides on these problems. Brazilian literature, Brazilian architecture, and Brazilian social science have all showed signs of creativeness.

It was during a long residence in tropical Brazil that Alfred Russel Wallace developed ideas about biology which made him a rival of Darwin. Other Eruopean and Anglo-Americans have lived in Brazil a life of intensive and productive thought as scientists in differente branches of national or cultural science: Lund, a candinavian geologist; Grivet, a philologist born in Switzerland; Hartt, from the United States, also a geologis; Sigaud, a Frenchman who was a pioneer in tropical medicne, which he studied in Brazil; Patterson, an Englishman, who was a pioneer in the same field; Max Müller, a German, a naturalist. Jewish literature on the American continent was born in tropical Brazil with a poem written by Rabbi Aboab da Fonseca, for long years a residetn of Recife. It seems also that Protestant theological and social thought about problems created by the contact of European Christians with natives of the tropics began in Brazil with the French and Swiss Protestats who established themselves in Rio de Janeiro as early as the sixteenth century.

Brazil may be a tropical China for its power of absorption of exotic elements. But considered in some aspects of its civilization, it is a positive contradiction to the classic idea both of "China' and of "tropics" as spaces where human life is characterized by inrtia in its most passive forms.

Fonte: FREYRE, Gilberto. New world in the tropics: the culture of modern Brazil. New York: A. Knopf, 1959. 286p.