Histórias de vida: o pioneirismo de Gilberto Freyre

Abstract

The article attempts to show the importance of oral and life history as a data collection procedure in Gilberto Freyre’s social science. In his Ordem e Progresso, published in 1959, Freyre worked with oral narratives and written documents, collected in the 1930’s and 40’s, from Brazilians who had witnessed the disintegration of the patriarchal and slave-holding society. By comparing the statements of so many different people he was able to interview, Freyre tried to understand and interpret the “intimacy” ofsocial relationships and ways of life during that period of Brazilian history. The social life he described was that of persons from all social classes, from the very illustrious andfamous groups of the Brazilian society, to the world of the working classes and the destitute. In Brazil, the author was a pioneer in the use of oral and life histories as an empirical procedure in the social sciences, a technique that only much later, during the 1980's, became widespread among historians and his fellow social scientists. Furthermore, this essay calls attention to Gilberto Freyre’s multidisciplinary approaches, methods and techniques of social study, which opened way to his pioneering use of oral and life histories in Brazil.