ANTHROPOLOGY, SCIENCE, ENGAGEMENT: JOSÉ LOUREIRO FERNANDES AND THE MEANINGS OF INTELLECTUAL ACTIVITY

Abstract

This article deals with the science and anthropology conceptions of José Loureiro Fernandes (1903-1977), the founder of the Anthropology and Ethnography chair of the Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences and Letters of Paraná in 1938, a relevant actor (but little known today) of the initial configuration process concerning Social Sciences in Brazil. Loureiro Fernandes created and directed several intellectual and scientific institutions and became one of the founding members and one of the first presidents of the Brazilian Association of Anthropology in the 1950s. Part of his intellectual production is used as the main source of this study, comprising biographical reviews of characters from the history of Paraná whose trajectories touched his interests. When describing their lives and arguing about the model character of their existences, Loureiro Fernandes allows us to glimpse values dear to him and which he pursued in his own trajectory. The study of the way in which he articulated his scientific practice and his political actions and responses, as an intellectual of his time, to the questions he considered essential at the time, allows us, from the difference that is his own, to reflect on the different meanings that can be attributed to anthropological undertakings.