The Masters And The Slaves by Gilberto Freyre

Extensive three-way cultural mixing led to the emergence of a finely graded, syncretic set of beliefs and practices wherein it was difficult to discern ‘original’ forms of group culture. In time, however, with their nomadic culture being destroyed by enslavement and the imposition of a latifundist, paternalistic, ‘ranch’ model of sugar cultivation, Amerindians were succeeded by African slaves. Miscegenation between the relatively small group of (almost exclusively male) Portuguese settlers and the native Amerindian population of Brazil was justified by the colonisers in terms of the lack of labour power. According to Freyre, because the Iberian peninsula had itself been subject to various waves of occupation and settlement, with considerable mixing (both biological and cultural) taking place between settler and subject populations, the Portuguese colonists had a relaxed attitude to ‘miscegenation’. Freyre makes a series of connected claims about the Portuguese settlement of Brazil which, over time, would be generalised and given the label ‘ luso-tropicalism’. Though Brazilian ‘racial democracy’ has been rightly debunked and labelled a myth (Araujo 2015), it’s easy to see why many people have identified The Masters and the Slaves as its inspiration. Over the course of the authoritarian regime that followed, the idea of ‘racial democracy’ became a mainstay of attempts to generate and mobilise Brazilian national identity, with many tracing this idea back to Freyre’s influential text. Casa Grande e Senzala was written while lawyer and politician Getúlio Vargas sought to consolidate his presidency.

His most famous book, published as Casa Grande e Senzala (Big House and Slave Quarters) in Portuguese in 1933 and translated into English as The Masters and the Slaves in 1946, was the first in a trilogy also comprising The Mansions and the Shanties ( 1963) and Order and Progress ( 1970). However, he didn’t limit himself to discussions of culture and cultural mixing, making bold claims about the political and social significance of this mixing as well as its implications for Brazilian national identity. Having been influenced by the cultural anthropology of Franz Boas while studying as a postgraduate at Columbia University, Freyre sought to chart the melding and borrowing that had taken place in Brazil along cultural lines. His upbringing in the northeast of Brazil where, from the sixteenth century, plantation society had taken root, would be important to both the focus of his work and the nature of his assertions. Gilberto Freyre (1900–1987) was born in 1900 in Recife, the principal city in Pernambuco, the oldest region of colonial Brazil.

The Masters And The Slaves by Gilberto Freyre