Lusitanian Roots and Iberian Heritage in Raízes do Brasil

Abstract:ABSTRACT.Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s essay, Raízes do Brasil, focuses on two central criticisms of Brazilian society: he makes one frontal attack on ‘cordial’ sociability and another on tropical ‘Bovarism’ (the tendency to adopt ideas from outside to resolve national problems). This double criticism generates an ideological undecidability: if a critique of ‘cordiality’ is deemed necessary, how can that critique be achieved without recourse to ready-made ideologies, that is, falling into an intellectual Bovarism, as much open to criticism as cordiality itself? Sérgio Buarque identifies in the Portuguese realism of the sixteenth century an organicist tradition capable of offering Brazilians a solution to this dilemma. This article investigates that key moment in Buarque’s historical imagination.