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THE TEAM
CONTACT
This second book appeared in 1936 with the title Sobrados e mucambos. Decadência do patriarcado rural e desenvolvimento do urbano [The Mansions and the Shanties. The Making of Modern Brazil], published by the Companhia Editora Nacional in São Paulo as part of its highly respected collection Coleção Brasiliana. This was the same year that his first publisher, Schmidt, released the second edition of Casa-grande & senzala. Gilberto Freyre took advantage of this coincidence to explain and defend, within the pages of the works themselves, his particular way of analyzing Brazil: in the new preface to Casa-grande, he said he had restricted himself to "attempting to establish certain aspects of the patriarchal formation of the Brazilian family, at times venturing into interpretations", but the "certainly more noble" task still to be concluded, he left to a group he vaguely termed "thinkers" since his works brought together merely "a group of facts that, for their social significance, might perhaps give rise to a few thoughts". Further on, he justifies the scarcity of references to the "great masters of our history", such as Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen, Capistrano de Abreu and Oliveira Lima, by explaining that he gave priority to variety and quantity of sources over bibliography, which "would humanize" the reconstruction of the past (CGS, 1936, p. 33-34).
Following the same line, the preface to Sobrados e mucambos presented the new essay as the continuation of the "attempt at the reconstitution and interpretation of certain more intimate aspects of the social history of the Brazilian family that had been begun in a previous work", and that it was written "following the same criteria and the same study techniques" (Sobrados e mucambos, 1985 [1936], p. 38). For this reason, he also warns further on that the second part of his study would continue to prove strange to those who were avidly seeking conclusions since these were virtually absent - although their absence did not signify "rejection of intellectual responsibility for what there might be that is not very orthodox in these pages; what is contrary to what is established, accepted, acknowledged". It had, in fact, a "revolutionary quality", coming from "the very evidence from the material here gathered and here revealed and interpreted using the greatest objectivity possible, both of method and of technique", with a view to understanding as a whole the "series of profound misalignments, alongside the adjustments and balances" that had formed Brazil. As "the human being can only be understood by the human being - up to the point where he may be understood", it was necessary to "leave space for doubt and even for mystery", acting with "humility before the facts": this is what he imposed on "the new Franciscans who seek to save the truths from History, both from hard stratification into dogmas and from rapid dissolution in extravaganzas of the moment" (idem, pp. 50-51).
