Two questions underlie the argument in this article: to what extent Freyre takes up the task of deconstructing a conceptual framework that is perceived as perpetuating the image of incommensurability between the Brazilian societal experience and that of the "modern civilized societies"? What place does the tropical environment occupy in this project? I examine three operational hypotheses: 1) Freyre makes a conscious attempt to relativize the exclusive (epistemological, normative and aesthetic-expressive) role claimed by societies traditionally regarded as models of modernity; 2) since the beginning of his work, the tropics was a key part of such ambitious intellectual project, because of peculiarities that would work as catalysts for an innovative social experience non-reproducible in hegemonic European societies; 3) the ambitious Freyrean attempt to destabilize the epistemological centrality of "European modernity" results inadvertently frustrated, insofar as this very experience (and the kind of sociability deemed to be peculiar to it) is resumed as a pattern to assess the singularity of Brazilian modernity.
Modernity in Brazil; Gilberto Freyre; Brazilian sociology