The reception of the first Chicago School of Sociology in Brazil

Donald Pierson was a student of Robert Park. He did his fieldwork in Bahia for his PHd thesis in 1935-37 (Negroes in Brazil: a study of race contact at Bahia. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1942) and was invited subsequently to teach in Sao Paulo at the Escola Livre de Sociologia e Politica where he remained for 16 years.  He is known as the exponent of the First Chicago School of Sociology in Brazil through the emphasis on empirical work, the translation of articles related to that « school », the emphasis on  community studies, urban ecology and the way a city should be studied. To what extent was Park’s idea of a city as a laboratory taken over by Brazilian sociologists ? How did Brazilian scholars address the issue of race and ethnic contact in the city, and how did Park’s ideas, via Pierson, contribute to shape the debate? To what extent were the urban ecology ideas diffused among Brazilian social scientists ? How were community studies undertaken?  In this paper I shall try to tackle these questions by dealing with the urban literature and the race relations literature in Brazil in the period 1940-1970.