Freyre’s Brazil Revisited: A Review of New World in the Tropics: The Culture of Modern Brazil
T WENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO Gilberto Freyre reminded Brazilians with a wealth of detail that "Every Brazilian, even the light-skinned fair-haired one, carries about with him on his soul, when not on soul and body alike ... the shadow, or at least the birthmark, of the aborigine or the Negro. " New World in the Tropics** is an extended treatment of this and related themes and its review involves some perspective of his earlier works and an evaluation of any fresh insight and subject matter. After study in the UJnited States where Frainz Boas influenced him, Freyre returned to Brazil to continue his career as journalist and to write The Masters and the Slaves (1934) followed by Sobrados e mucambos (1936) and 0 mundo que o portugues creou (lectures prepared in 1937). Of these the first was a landmark in the writing of Brazilian social history and introduced Freyre as a modernized social historian aware of the uses of the rapidly changing social sciences, particularly anthropology and sociology, in understanding transculturation. With literary vigor and physiological candor he called attention to a major aspect of Brazilian society, rapid and early miscegenation among the three elements of its population-European, African, Indian-and the absence of institutional barriers to this process. Generalizing about Brazilian colonial evolution and focusing upon one region, his native Nordeste, he concluded that plantation monoculture and African slave labor had forged an "agrarian, slaveholding and hybrid" society apparently without creating a tradition of racial animosity prevalent where Anglo-Americans, Dutch, and French had colonized in the tropics. In Sobrados e mucambos he extended this thesis to monarchical Brazil of the nineteenth century when domestic currents and closer contact with industrializing Great