O eco das sobrevivências: a formação do olhar antropológico nos estudos afro-brasileiros

Abstract

This study traces the transnational history of the idea of “survivals,” which became the prevailing notion among scholars in the first half of the twentieth century to describe the evidence of African culture in Brazil and the Americas. Such idea was intensively used during this time, but its meaning was barely discussed. This work outlines the previous debates around the “survivals” in anthropological theory before it was incorporated into the study of Afro-Brazilian cultural expressions: the theoretical inflexions it underwent between the schools of social evolutionism, cultural anthropology and the first ethnological studies on black populations in the Americas. The works of Edward B. Tylor (1832–1917), Franz Boas (1858–1942), Raymundo Nina Rodrigues (1862–1906) and Melville Herskovits (1895–1963) are taken as a starting point to analyze the different meanings the concept has acquired and the continuities and discontinuities between these authors perspectives. Thus, this research aims to approach a critical topic to the construction of Afro-Brazilian studies and to uncover its influence on the current “anthropological ways of seeing that we have inadvertently or purposively inherited” (Yelvington, 2006, p. 40).