Darcy Ribeiro, Brazil and the conundrum: An exercise in epistemological decolonization

Abstract

Darcy Ribeiro challenges the absence of a particular way of sociological imagination to characterize the Brazilian thought, not allow themselves to be guided by a presumed modernity that ignores the positivity of the experiences available here. Taking on the one hand, "The Civilizin Process" (2001), and the other, "The Brazilian People" (1995), in this essay, I seek a hermeneutics of the Darcy Ribeirós legacy. My hypothesis is that there are issues present in the Darcyś studies still capable of carrying a "critical decolonizing the social sciences in Latin America", impacting the geopolitics of knowledge that historically separated the cultures that investigate from those are investigated. Perhaps, the Mameluco social thought inspire us to believe that human creativity can overcome the historically real damage imposed by the logic of modernity-coloniality, adding to the social sciences new forms of cognition.