“TRAVELING TO AFRICA AND CROSSING PORTUGUESE OVERSEAS PROVINCES”: LUÍS DA CÂMARA CASCUDO AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF A POLITICAL PROJECT IN SERVICE OF THE PORTUGUESE GOVERNMENT (1962–1967)
Câmara Cascudo; Portuguese Africa; African Continent; Luso-Tropicalism.
This dissertation investigates the political itinerary of the intellectual from Rio Grande do Norte, Luís da Câmara Cascudo (1898–1986), based on his journey to Africa, carried out in 1963, when he left Brazil to study the roots of Brazilian food in that continent. We consider that this trajectory began in 1962, when Assis Chateaubriand addressed him an invitation to develop ethnographic research for the Sociedade de Estudos Históricos Dom Pedro II, and ended in 1967, with the publication of the last work resulting from this project. The journey reinforced intellectual interests that had marked his activity as a folklorist, granting him the role of a political mediator and resulting in a scientific production that dialogues with the luso-tropicalist colonial policy. Thus, the main objective of this work is to problematize Câmara Cascudo’s journey to the so-called Portuguese Africa, seeking to understand how his intellectual production was constructed in order to strengthen the idea of luso-tropicalism, which presented Portugal as a civilizing empire of the African colonies. The theoretical framework that supports our reflections is based on authors such as Jean-François Sirinelli (2003), who discusses the concept of the intellectual; Angela Castro Gomes and Patricia Santos Hansen (2016), who explore the notion of political and cultural mediator; Michel Foucault (2013), who mobilizes the idea of relational space, in dialogue with Cascudo’s activity on the African continent; and Cláudia Castelo (1999), whose work illuminates the relations between luso-tropicalism and intellectual practices. As methodological procedures, we examined periodical sources of that time: articles, interviews and reports about the journey, as well as correspondence between Cascudo and other intellectuals, telegrams sent to the Portuguese government, and records of the mission, such as notes, a documentary and photographs. We also analyzed the author’s bibliographical production related to the theme, especially A Cozinha Africana no Brasil (1964), Made in Africa (1965) and História da Alimentação no Brasil (1967), works that directly resulted from this experience. All this material was investigated in the light of discourse analysis, according to Michel Foucault (2004), in order to understand how the luso-tropicalist idea was being elaborated in Luís da Câmara Cascudo’s thought from his journey to Portuguese Africa.