Doctors, Social Scientists, and Backlands Peoples: Continuity and Change in Representations of Brazil's Rural World

Abstract

This article analyzes the importance of ideas mobilized by medical doctors active in Brazilian public health to interpret society and in discussions of the national question over the first half of the 20th century. Texts from three different moments are assessed: in the context of the movement for rural sanitation in the 1910s; those composing the fieldwork promoted by the Yellow Fever Service of the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1930s; and those from one of the most persistent debates among social scientists during the 1940s and 1950s revolving around the question of development, cultural resistance to change, and the “folk culture of the Brazilian backlander.” The article argues that, in the Brazilian case, the authors who constructed the domain of public health fulfilled, among other roles, that of social interpreters, influencing the process of the development of sociological thought in the country.