Thursday, 25.8.2022, 17.00 h (UTC+02, Berlin), via Webex

Would the most recognizable ideas in the French social sciences have developed without the influence of Brazilian intellectuals? While any study of Brazilian social sciences acknowledges the influence of French scholars, Dr. Ian Merkel, Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin, argues the reverse is also true: the French social sciences were profoundly marked by Brazilian thought, particularly through the University of São Paulo. Using the idea of the “cluster,” Merkel traces the intertwined networks of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Fernand Braudel, Roger Bastide, and Pierre Monbeig as they overlapped at USP and engaged with Brazilian scholars such as Mário de Andrade, Gilberto Freyre, and Caio Prado Jr. Through his collective intellectual biography of Brazilian and French social sciences, Ian Merkel reveals connections that shed new light on the Annales school, structuralism, and racial democracy, even as it prompts us to revisit established thinking on the process of knowledge formation through fieldwork and intellectual exchange.

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