Caribbean Diaspora in the USA: Diversity of Caribbean Religions in New York City

Cultural Theories from Latin America and the Caribbean 113
the combination of culture and society with biology is today incomprehensible but had
dominated the Brazilian debate for a long time. 19
In his book Freyre investigates the rural colonial society that he describes from
the perspective of the master house (1990: 53, 441). As he explains, the master
house was only complete with the slave hut because only together did they create
an economic, social and political unity. Freyre characterizes this ‘syndicate based
on agriculture and slavery’ as an integrative system of production and work (a
latifundium mono-culture based on slavery), a transportation system (ox cart and
palanquin), a religious system (familial Catholicism with a chaplain), a sexual
and familial system (polygamous patriarchate), a system of body and household
sanitation and a political system (compadrismo). In his idealized perspective Freyre
describes the master house as a fortress, bank, cemetery, hospital, school, hospice
and even welfare institution for the elderly, widows and orphans.
His symbolic dichotomy of colonial society – in particular in his various reactionary
conservative parts – is outdated nowadays. Already in the 1940s parameters of a new
cultural critique were developing which exposed Brazilian culture as an ideological
construct and emphasized the social realities. 20 Freyre, who later became minister for
education under the authoritarian president Getúlio Vargas, is particularly accused
today of having supplied the ideological basis for the development of authoritarian
schemas of development and integration with his harmonious synthesis of races,
classes and cultures (Hollensteiner 1994: 162). Hence, people hold Freyre responsible
for the perpetual neglect of ethnic-social studies and the tendency for homogeneous
thinking. They refer, for instance, to his positive characterization of the Brazilian
civilização luso-tropical and its capacity for reconciliation (Freyre 1980: 82). Until the
end of the 1970s Freyre ignored the existence of racial conflict and even criticized the
development of a Black movement in Brazil (Hofbauer 2000: 58, fn. 24). However,
despite his often uncritical idealization of Brazilian society (one exception would
be his quite critical book Nordeste) his work has received more and more attention
in recent years as an example of the presentation of ethnic and cultural pluralism.
Spielmann, for instance, quotes the words of the Brazilian educator Anísio Texeira
about Freyre: ‘The importance of Gilberto Freyre is that we all became through his
work more Brazilian’ (quoted in Spielmann 1994a: 13, my translation). Even his critic
Darcy Ribeiro describes Freyre ‘as white shaman, as miracle in the adaptation of the
other in a kind that usually happens only during the trance of a medium, as an excellent
writer-anthropologist in the incarnation of various roles with an addiction to operetta
style ethic and aesthetic’ (Spielmann 1994a: 13, my translation). 21 Freyre became an
19 See Roberto da Matta, Relativizando: uma introdução à antropologia social
(Petrópolis, 1981), quoted in Jahn 1994: 78.
20 See Carlos Guilherme Mota, ‘A cultura brasileira como problema histórica’, in Revista
da USP (1986): 8–39, quoted in Jahn 1994: 29.
21 The words do not belong to a verbatim quotation, and Spielmann fails to state her
sources. Hence see Ribeiro 1980: 95–154 for an evaluation of Freyre’s work by Ribeiro
(originally published as the introduction to Casa grande e senzela in an edition from Biblioteca
Ayacucho, Caracas).