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This chapter discusses how the creative use of Franz Boas's ideas to analyze Brazilian culture and society and to “discover” Brazil for the Brazilians was the work of two scholars, the Brazilian Gilberto Freyre and the German Rüdiger Bilden. Freyre has been credited with the invention of Brazilian identity with the publication of his Casa-Grande & Senzala (translated into English as The Masters and the Slaves) in 1933 and is described as Boas's most outstanding Latin American disciple. On the other hand, Bilden, a German scholar who was closer to Boas and once seemed to have a brilliant future, later dropped out of the academic world and disappeared into obscurity.

The idea of Brazil as a ‘racial democracy’ and a mixture of peoples and cultures became a central part of its national identity following the publication of Gilberto Freyre's Casa-grande e senzala in 1933. This chapter argues that the idea of racial democracy cannot be understood without taking into account the dialogue, dating from much earlier than 1933, between Brazilians and North Americans, based (in the former case) on an emphasis on the mixture of black and white, and (in the latter) on the ‘one drop rule’ and the segregation that came with it.

This chapter examines the two congresses that called academics together to discuss the African contribution to Brazil. The first Afro-Brazilian Congress, held in 1934, and the second, held in 1937, aimed to move discussions of race from biological terms to the language of culture and sociology. The 1934 Afro-Brazilian Congress was held in Recife and organized by U.S.-trained sociologist Gilberto Freyre. On the other hand, the Afro-Brazilian Congress of 1937 was organized by Afro-Brazilian intellectuals in Bahia. Although both congresses had the same aim, their results were very different. The chapter also describes the role played in the 1937 congress by leaders of Bahia's Candomblé community.

This book shows how questions of labor and land have animated writing about Pernambuco for more than a century. In 1883, the abolitionist Joaquim Nabuco condemned slavery for setting up a “struggle of men against the land.” When Freyre picked up on this theme, lamenting the wounds inflicted by slavery and sugar, he was joined by other intellectuals of the 1930s who pondered similar associations. The nationally renowned novelist Jose Lins do Rego set a series of five novels in the zona da mata, even writing one of them from the perspective of a sugar worker who migrates to the city. Still, the elite discourse that highlighted the importance of the environment also naturalized power relations between planters and workers. The persistence of these themes over the course of this period helps explain why the historiography of Pernambuco lacks extensive work on the transition from slavery to freedom.

This chapter focuses on Brazil's racial order, characterized by widespread miscegenation and cultural blending. The country implemented a ternary racial order characterized by fluid racial markers that distinguish individuals as White, multiracial, and Black based on physical appearance rather than ancestry. Moreover, there was no legalized racial discrimination. Social inequality was supposedly based on class and culture. Brazil's racial democracy was popularized in anthropologist Gilberto Freyre who argued that the Portuguese colonizers, compared to their Anglo-North American counterparts, were receptive to miscegenation and generous in differentiating multiracials from Blacks. However, these phenomena were motivated by self-interest, and related respectively to the ratio of European men to women, and the ratio of Whites to Blacks.