The writing gestures in Raymundo Faoro’s diaries (Porto Alegre, 1943-1946)

Abstract

Raymundo Faoro (1925-2003) was a Brazilian jurist, historian, and writer. He is considered one of the most prominent social interpreters in 20^th century Brazil. He wrote 20 volumes of diaries between 1943 and 1952, totalizing, almost, 6.800 manuscript pages with a fully unprecedented content. In this article, I will investigate the construction process of this archive, describing and analyzing the author’s daily writing. I conceive of writing as practice. It means that, from an ethnographic perspective, I will investigate the gestures of Raymundo’s writing. So, I will investigate it by its gestures from an ethnographic perspective, looking for their motivations and meanings. Focusing on the 3 first notebooks (1943-1946), I will concentrate on the descriptions of the period when the author experiences during their first years living in Porto Alegre. I sustain that, more than show, for the first time, facts about Faoro’s intellectual formation, these diaries reveal relevant cultural and social aspects of the period, providing some clues about the requisites to become an intellectual in 20^th century Porto Alegre and Brazil. Beyond studying diaries as a literary and intellectual genre, I aim to advance the terrain of the anthropological history of writing.