The "hesitant racialist": Nina Rodrigues and his studies on cultural anthropology and crowd psychology (1880-1906)

Abstract

The work of the doctor and anthropologist Raimundo Nina Rodrigues is traditionally interpreted in the framework of a typical scientifi c discourse of the late 19th century, marked by a dogmatic racialism, imported and adapted to Brazilian national scenario. This article problematizes such perspective, common to studies of Brazilian social thought, and shifts the Rodriguean intellectual heritage from the sphere of an exacerbated Social Darwinism and its typical racial determinism to areas of antagonistic studies. Taking as an axis of reflection his texts on cultural anthropology and gregarious psychology, this article aims to open paths little explored by historiography, by highlighting the adoption by the physician from Maranhaõ of readings of the so-called social evolutionary school and also of the Tardian sociology. The contact and accommodation of proposals that diverged from the paradigmatic nineteenth-century content that was so familiar to him made Nina Rodrigues's entire work-especially the part concerning the racial question-an intricate object, an archetype of the tensioned moment through which sciences went at that time.