Abstract
This article revisits one of the main thesis that crisscrosses Gilberto Freyre’s celebrated work, namely, that Brazilian society, itself the outcome of a unique historical formation, succeeded in softening, sometimes even resisting with a great deal of creativity, a set of mental, behavioral, aesthetic as well as institutional standards that imposed themselves from the 19th century onwards. While paying due attention to the connotations of time and space found in the work of Freyre I am especially interested in analyzing how he envisages contemporary Brazil as a successful modern experience of its own rather than an imperfect or distorted version of Western modernity. Last but not least, I will probe into the potential contributions of Freyre’s formulations to the sociological discourse of modernity.
Keywords:
Gilberto Freyre; Brazilian social thought; modernity; sociological theory