Ian Merkel, who teaches at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, has made a major contribution to transnational intellectual history. In Terms of Exchange, he focuses on the French intellectuals who arrived at the Brazilian Universidade de São Paulo (USP) in 1935, only a year after the now renowned university’s founding. They were young men, some not even yet working on their doctoral dissertations, largely ignorant about the country they had arrived in but, for the most part, intellectually restless and open to experience and influence. Many of these academics were not settled into a particular disciplinary perspective. The boundaries between disciplines themselves were not even all that rigid. A future luminary such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, a philosopher, learned from nonacademic Brazilian writers such as Mário de Andrade, who introduced him to the Brazilian interior as the Frenchman evolved into an anthropologist.
Merkel’s focus is on relationships as much as on ideas. Personal and intellectual networks among the French themselves developed early, on the trans-Atlantic voyages on ocean-liners that took them to Brazil. The chapter on the academics’ recruitment and their experience upon arrival is the most firmly grounded in the Brazilian historical context. Geographer Pierre Monbeig and the others gave public lectures in the evening. They were embraced by the São Paulo elite and often affected by the Paulistas’ own understanding of themselves as the ones leading Brazil forward. The Brazilians they met served as mediators, and sometimes as research assistants or sources.
For some of the French scholars, the Brazilian phase of their career would be short, only lasting until 1938. For others such as Roger Bastide, though not part of the original group at USP, the immersion would be deeper, grounded at first in literature, and would last much longer as he explored Brazil’s African-derived religions in the northeast. Bastide stayed in Brazil during World War II and remained until 1954. Merkel provides close readings of familiar and unfamiliar writings by these authors. But he also draws on a large body of extensive correspondence between French and Brazilian intellectuals over many decades. The ties between Brazilian and French scholars were strong and lasting.
In the years following World War II, Levi-Strauss, Ferdinand Braudel, and others played a major role in transforming the social sciences in France. France’s defeat in World War II was seen as an intellectual one as well. The networks they had established, their knowledge of Brazil, and the fieldwork and archival research as well as other new approaches they explored were now valuable and valued. Brazil for a time was viewed as a country, and Latin America a region, that might offer hope for progress on race, at least as long as people were convinced by the writings of Gilberto Freyre.
Merkel asserts that the “Americanization” of Brazilian intellectual life that seems so familiar was neither rapid nor uncontested, and French intellectual influence in some fields remains strong. Merkel does not reflect on the fact that, when US scholars focusing on Brazil came to figure most prominently, from the 1960s onward, they were often dismissed, even by the average informed Brazilian. “Brazilianist” became a pejorative term. In stark contrast to the French experience, these US scholars remained marginal figures in North American intellectual life.
I think that Merkel frequently loses sight of the “terms of exchange” themselves, but the evidence he provides certainly makes clear that French scholars benefitted greatly. Fortunately, the book already has been translated into French and Portuguese. In any case, Merkel deserves a wide audience among intellectual historians and among Brazilian and French historians. He provides an excellent model for how this kind of work should be done. One is grateful that the book exists.
