The Pluralism of Antonio Candido

Abstract

Some years ago Antonio Candido suggested that a necessary stage in an underdeveloped country's effort to overcome intellectual dependence lay in the ability of its people to produce first-class works influenced by national, rather than foreign, models. This would enrich the process of borrowing from abroad itself (Candido 1972). His suggestion spoke to the long-standing worry of Brazilian intellectuals that the immediate data of our experience are all around us, but our imaginations are basically Antonio Candido once put this problem directly but ironically: For us Brazilians, univeralism is already European. His own solution was to recognize that our link to Europe (or the United States) was not an option but almost a natural fact, sociologically linked to the state of cultural dependency, and to suggest that becoming aware of the country's own intellectual lineage would eventually create a reversal of experiences and a more open circulation of differing values. I will use Antonio Candido's own work to investigate this problem. My intention is to show the anthropological side of his work, as much in his sociology as in his literary studies. I intend thus to include him in the lineage of anthropological thought in Brazil, as someone who did anthropology without being aware of it. Happily, the worldview of anthropology is not the privilege of anthropologists. Antonio Candido is not, and was not, the only one to do a hidden anthropology. But he is an excellent example because of the quality and timeliness of his work, in addition to always having been very near, even flirting with, anthropology. Institutional barriers should not limit our imagination. As the argument unfolds, Antonio Candido's perspective will emerge as paradigmatic, not only for thinking about anthropology in Brazil, but also for the social sciences in general.