The man who did most, in the nineteenth century, to destroy some of the European superstitions about the Amazon climate was H. W. Bates who lived for eleven years in the Amazon jungle, and in the rustic Portuguese or Brazilian pioneer settlements around it, When about to return to England, he hesitated over leaving the tropics. He wrote that, as he thought of living again in a cold European country, "pictures of startling clearness rose up of the gloomy winters, the long grey twilights, elongated shadows, chilly springs, and sloppy summers; of factory chimneys ... confined rooms, artificial cares". While, in leaving tropical Brazil, 'I was quitting a country of perpetual summer ...' But it is true that three years after his return he wrote 'after three years' renewed experience of England, I find how incomparably superior is civilised life ... 'Bates' change of mind poses the question: 'Is it, or is it not, possible to combiné the advantages of civilised life with the advantages of tropical climate? The Brazilian experience-or experiment-seems to be an answer to this question. And this answer seems to be 'Yes'. Brazil is one the largest national spaces in the world. It is like an American Russia or a tropical China. In this vast tropical, national space dwells a people whose, European culture is mainly Iberian and Catholic and whose ethnic composition is also Iberian to a considerable extent. And today its civilisation is perhaps the greatest, or at least the most advanced, modern civilisation so far developed in a tropical region.

It is true that the vast Amazon area of Brazil remains a challenge to Brazilian capacity to deal with tropical difficulties which are numerous there. But there are encouraging aspects of the Brazilian effort to overcome them, creating there the same civilisation that the Portuguese pioneers and their Brazilian descendants, generally men of mixed blood, white and Amerindian, and known as 'Bandeirantes', were able to create in other parts of Brazil. The accomplishments of these Bandeirantes were remarkable; and sufficient to make one accept the effects of the mixture of whites and Amerindians as a desirable ethnic combination. They met, with a rare energy, all kinds of human opposition - opposition from wild Amerindian tribes, from Spaniards, from Jesuits. And there were the hazards of insects, animals, high mountains, deserts, swamps, and tropical rains.

A historian has written that they not only made possible the vast Brazil of today, but poured millions of pounds of gold into world economy in the crucial years when England was becoming a banking and industrial power. This historian, Professor Paul Shaw, goes on in his appraisal of the Brazilian Bandeiras and reminds us of the words of Werner Sombat, the well-known German sociologist: 'without Brazil's gold we would not have modern economic man'; and also the equally significant words of an English historian, Wingfield Stratford, that the influx of Brazilian gold into seventeenth-century England contributed to create the basis of modern economy. If this is true, we have to come to the conclusion that a mixed group of whites and Amerindians - vigorous racially and culturally - not only laid the basis for a new type of civilisation in tropical America, modern Brazil, but also contributed to create the basis of modern economy in Europe.

In this the African Negro and the descendant of the Negro (the African was imported to Brazil as a slave) also played their part. This fact that Amerindians and Africans, as well as Europeans, and their mixed descendants, have made an active contribution to the development of Brazil seems to explain why Portuguese America has now a civilisation with so vivid characteristics of its own; and why one of these characteristics is what has been described by some authors as Brazilian ethnic democracy. Many characteristics of modern Brazilian civilisation originate in the fact that the Negro, through the comparatively liberal treatment given to him in Brazil, has been able to express himself as a Brazilian, and has not been forced to behave as an ethnic and cultural intruder. He behaves as a Brazilian of African origin and not as a 'Brazilian Negro' not as does the 'American Negro' of the United States. And the same thing has been true, even in a more vivid way, of the Amerindian; just as the same thing is becoming true of the Japanese as well as of the German, the Italian, the Polish immigrant. Some of these are becoming, in their second generation, prominent in Brazilian political life, not as German-Brazilians, or Italo-Brazilians, or Polish-Brazilians, but as Brazilians; and they are also taking their place in Brazilian art, and in literature written, of course, in Portuguese - which in Brazil has been enriched with words from other languages without losing its Portuguese structure. The new literature of Brazil is beginning to attract as much attention from Europeans and North Americans as the modern architecture and the music and cuisine of the Brazilians.

It may be said that the civilisation that Brazil is developing in the tropics is not a purely western or European civilisation. But this view, or a similar one, has been duly considered by an Anglo-American scientist, Professor Marston Bates. He once wrote:

Latin America might possibly be used to support the thesis that western civilisation, in its pure form, is not readily adaptable to tropical conditions.

But he added:

... this is hardly damning except to those who consider the western variety to be the only possible form of civilisation in general.

He points out of Mexican art - one of the greatest expressions of modern culture in the tropics - that its interest is not in its not being typically western but in its enrichment with elements drawn from the local environment, or from the tropics.

An Extra-European Civilisation

The same thing can be said of the civilisation that the Brazilians are developing in tropical America. It is not a mere sub-European civilisation. In some respects it is extra-European, because it seeks to adapt itself to conditions and possibilities that are not European but tropical: tropical climate, tropical vegetation, tropical landscape, tropical light, tropical colours. So it is that São Paulo has become what is generally described as the greatest industrial centre of Latin America; and this is certainly an anticipation of a technical or technological development that seems to be either following or preceding other cultural developments in other areas of Brazil, including the north-east and the extreme north of the country: the equatorial part.

Examples of pioneering work, of scientific as well as of practical interest, done by Brazilians to further the general development of modern civilisation in the tropics - for other tropical countries like Venezuela are profiting from the Brazilian experiments - are the new breed of cattle specially adapted for the tropics, obtained by crossing the descendants of animals imported in colonial days from Portugal with zebu stock from India; and also the type of grass that Brazilians have found the most adequate for cattle in the tropics - the so-called Para grass. When Anglo-American farmers began to develop an interest in Brazil they thought that what Brazil needed was the introduction of pure-bred Herefords or Shorthorns to cross with the native stock of the country, the gado crioulo. But although results obtained with foreign-blooded stock thus imported justified the experiment, practical Brazilians held that the thoroughbred native type of cattle was likely to pay better, because of its greater immunity from insect pests peculiar to tropical Brazil, to which the unacclimatised imported beasts often succumbed. In other words, the climate and insect pests of Brazil are factors in the problem not necessarily to be solved by applying the experience of Texas or Argentina.

What is true for cattle is true, too, for most other things. Brazil is a country so essentially tropical that its agriculture, its cattle-raising, its architecture, its food habits, its styles of dress, even its recreation habits, have to match its physical situation. So it is that the Brazilians have succeeded, despite great difficulties, in developing values that are essentially European in an environment that is essentially non-European. They have not attempted to ape the Europeans in all their conventionally European ways. South American nations like Argentina and Uruguay and perhaps Chile can do this: not Brazil. Brazil has had to find its own ways of combining modern civilisation with a tropical environment. It is no easy task. But it makes for creativeness. It demands from Brazilians what some of them would like to avoid: a constant effort towards new solutions for problems of the relations of civilised men with nature, and of civilised men with men whose cultures are not civilised. For these still exist in Brazil: and their ways, values, experiences, instead of being radically repudiated, must be analysed and considered carefully, and carefully utilised, for a possibly new cultural synthesis that will be at once European and tropical.

In following this policy, Brazilians are following in tropical America an old Portuguese method of dealing with non-European peoples and cultures in tropical areas of Asia and Africa - a policy often entirely different from that followed by other European Powers in the tropics. According to a British writer who has specialised in the study of eastern tropical subjects, Guy Wint, even Britain, trough following in regard to political problems policies 'on the whole respectable, often throws away, by its indifference to the culture of oriental peoples' all that it gains by those policies. In Brazil, indifference to the non-European cultures that have already become a part of modern Brazilian civilisation was never a characteristic of Brazilian leaders or of the Brazilian political and intellectual élite. When Brazil became independent it kept the European monarchical form of government and the old European royal family that Brazilians had known for centuries as the ruling family of their Portuguese ancestors. At the same time, it developed a nobility whose titles were taken not from the Portuguese or from any European language but from the Amerindian language dominant among the real natives of Brazil: names of rivers, mountains, trees; telluric names; tropical names. And there was no hesitation, from the very birth of Brazilian independence, in extending titles of nobility to the descendants of Amerindians. On the contrary: when they were the descendants of Amerindian chiefs or caciques, they were considered to be essentially noble. The Portuguese had thought so even in colonial times. This explains why the Marquis of Pombal, in Portugal, a man with Amerindian blood, could become the most powerful man in the Portuguese empire of his time. It explains, too, why the Pope chose a member of an old Brazilian aristocratic family, a family with Amerindian noble blood, to be Latin America's first cardinal. It was as if the Roman Catholic Church, by this choice - half a century ago - approved the Brazilian policy of attempting to develop a civilisation in the tropics, at once European and Amerindian, European and tropical; and, consequently, really universalistic in its main designs and in its techniques.

I say 'in its techniques' because what is happening to cattle-raising and agriculture in Brazil is happening, too, in other human activities, which form part of a civilisation or a culture. The art of gardening, for instance. Brazil is developing its own styles of ornamental gardens complementary to its own styles of architecture, through the use of the same methods or techniques of combining tropical experience with European science. Here, as in other matters, Brazilians agree with G. V. Jacks and R. O. Whyte, when the authors of The Rape of Earth (1939) write:

European men, despite their skill and power over Nature, have learnt only how to cultivate European soils in a European climate.

A New Science?

This is why some modern students of these and other problems concerned with the expansion of civilisation think that a new science has to be developed to deal with these complex problems from a tropical point of view or angle, complementary to, if not in place of, the European or boreal one, so far over-dominant in science and technology. Why not a special science to deal with the adaptation of European science and technology to tropical situations even with the invention of new techniques designed to solve problems peculiar to the tropics - problems not only of cattle-raising, agriculture, architecture, urbanisation, regional planning, but even of psychology - problems relating to education, to political organisation, to mental hygiene? For the behaviour of man in the tropics has to be considered, in some of its aspects, in relation to situations and conditions peculiar to tropical environment; to the fact, for instance, that a tropical climate is favourable to an easy, informal contact, in public squares, between crowds and political leaders, without the need of indoor party meetings that create a distinctly party atmosphere. Music, the drama, theatrical performance, religious rites, may be similarly affected by tropical weather or climatic conditions, so that they develop new forms through a new psychological and social relationship between artists or religious leaders and large crowds as crowds; a relationship not to be achieved through the radio and the television, whose importance is probably greater in boreal than in tropical countries.

One thing at least is true: the development of a modern civilisation in Brazil is becoming more and more the development of a new type of civilisation - which makes the Brazilians, already considerable pioneers in their history, pioneers of a new and even more exciting future.

Fonte: FREYRE, Gilberto. Modern Brazil: a new type of civilisation. The Listener. London, n. 56, v. 1427, p. 149-150, aug. 2, 1956.