Races, Crowds, and Souls in Brazilian Social Thought, 1880-1922

FAIN: FA-52661-06

Dain E. Borges
University of Chicago (Chicago, IL 60637-5418)

An intellectual and cultural history of two great cities, Salvador and Rio de Janeiro, emphasizing responses to religious change (millenarian movements, separation of Church and State, folk and elite spirit-possession religions, Protestant missions) in a time of crisis, 1880-1920. Positivist race sociology and new social psychologies connected race to political crowds and to individual selves or "souls." Critical Brazilian intellectuals, many of them men of color, struggled to comprehend cities undergoing dramatic transformation.