Do "Melting-pot" ao espírito clânico: a trajetória epistemológica de Oliveira Vianna (1932-1949)

Abstract

This is a thesis about the ideas of Oliveira Vianna as a social scientist, with the greater historiographical intention of shedding light on the understanding of the beginnings of social sciences in Brazil. This presupposes studying certain authors and their texts that are in an intermediate place between a personal opinion and objective propositions that are equally valid in various consciousnesses; or between the essay/literature and the scientific text as we understand it today. Thus, as a historiographical option, there are no peremptory judgments in this thesis about whether a proposition is scientific or not, or whether an author is a scientist or not. This research highlights historical mechanisms of epistemological development of social sciences in Brazil, focusing on the trajectory of the lawyer and sociologist Oliveira Vianna. I divided his trajectory into three phases, with the publication of three works specifically as a time frame: Populações Meridionais do Brasil (1920), which marks the essayist phase; Raça e Assimilação (1932), from his naturalist phase; and Instituições Políticas Brasileiras (1949), culturalist phase. My problematization is centered precisely on a certain epistemological conversion that occurred in Vianna, from naturalist in 1932 to culturalist in 1949. I argue that there are mechanisms within the community of Brazilian, European and American social thinkers, even at a not yet institutional stage, that mitigate idiosyncrasies, prejudices and personal choices of individuals who propose to produce science. There is a global circulation of ideas, a general communicability between individuals who produce science independently of the intermediation of institutions. There is a becoming specific to sciences that have a relative degree of autonomy in relation to social history, with their own temporality and logic. This work, situated within the scope of the history of ideas, aims to understand these mechanisms through research into the intellectual trajectory of Oliveira Vianna, the analysis of his ideas and, mainly, the establishment of connections between the studied author and the general propositions of Sociology and Ethnology as established sciences.