http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/2238-38752017v739 i Institute of Social and Political Studies of the State University of Rio de Janeiro (IESP-UERJ) and Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil
[email protected] ii National University of Buenos Aires (UBA), Buenos Aires, Argentina
[email protected] Christian Edward Cyril Lynch I Pía Paganelli II the culturalist conservatism of Gilberto freyre: society, decline and social chanGe in SobradoS e MucaMboS (1936) IntroductIon Gilberto Freyre is traditionally identified, along with other important commen- tators of the 1930s, with one of the major turning points in Brazilian thought, moving towards a greater commitment to historical and sociological objectivity and to the critique of Brazil’s social formation. His work has also been recognised as belonging to a lineage of authors who, after the rise of the Republic, devoted themselves to the historical review of the social and political formation of the colony and the Empire. Thus Ângela de Castro Gomes (2000) suggests that, with- out denying the major theoretical and methodological innovation introduced by Freyre in his interpretation of Brazil’s colonial legacy in Casa-grande & senzala 903, december, 2017 december, 903, – (translated into English as The masters and the slaves), his work displays simi- larities with the collective endeavour of diverse historians active during the first decades of the Republican experiment – concentrated especially at the IHGB (Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro) – to rethink the nature of historiograph- ic work and the use of historical methods and sources that went beyond an at- tempted Republican mythological reconstruction of the Brazilian past.