A morte do homem cordial

The intellectual and biographical trajectory of Sérgio Buarque de Holanda has been recounted with a linear and memory-based bias from the 1980s onward.In general, this approach, which connected Sérgio's modernist past with the mature militant of the Worker's Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores) and of the left at the end of his life was constituted by a bias toward the exceptionality of the personage, still seen today in academic publications and events which give it support.Based on this verification, this thesis recounts the history of Sérgio Buarque de Holanda through the perspective of memory and the sites at which it was registered and propagated according to the understanding that at these sites we can perceive its material, symbolic and functional dimensions.This is how we find Sérgio Buarque registered in memorial texts, funeral speeches, books, events, streets, libraries and archives, a set of sites of acclaim created by a specific group of scholars aiming to shape him to the will of their memory.In this operation the erasing of political traces of Sérgio Buarque was intentional, these being more connected to the educational and pedagogical fields than to the old combating left as some of the official commentators currently insist upon.Finally, this thesis also seeks through the "archive approach", material and functional support of this memory, to show that Sérgio Buarque de Holanda constituted himself, in the keeping of his printed legacy, as a character of himself, feeding the official and linear version of life exposed at these different sites

Militant · Brazilian cultural history and politics · History of Education Research in Brazil · Sociology and Education in Brazil