XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

The Good Neighbor Circuits of Rural Sociology: Debating Modernity and Social Reform across the Americas

• In Event: American Exchanges: Ideas and Policies across Brazil and the U.S. 1930s-1970s

Abstract

The years following the 1929 crisis were marked by rich debates about political regimes and societal models that could overcome the shortcomings of laissez-faire capitalism. In the US, the enthusiasm of reformist intellectual circles for social planning experiments, which gave the State a hitherto unusual role in the country's economy, also translated into a renewed interest in the study of societies and cultures living south of the Rio Grande. Among New Deal rural sociologists, then grappling with the dissolving effects of capitalist modernization on US farm communities, Latin American nations were often seen as sources of original societal experiences. In this paper I analyze the role played by Brazilian intellectuals in the construction of this informal sociological networks across the hemisphere, paying particular attention to the connections between Brazil’s well-known social thinker Oliveira Vianna and US scholars committed to social reform in Roosevelt’s Agrarian New Deal. I argue that Vianna’s much discussed propositions regarding the State’s leading role in the construction of a modern social order in Brazil should not only be examined in the light of domestic concerns over the nation-building process but also as part of broader, Inter-American attempts to reimagine society in more communitarian, and less individualistic, terms. Although Vianna’s writings did not enjoy the same level of international circulation and recognition as their US counterparts did, his work was key for US social scientists approaching Latin America during the Good Neighbor Policy years.

Author

• Thiago Lopes, Fundação Oswaldo Cruz