Images of another modernity: Gilberto Freyre and the Latin American space-time

Abstract

Time and space are two key categories in Gilberto Freyre’s intellectual program. Keeping in mind his most renown and celebrated work on the Brazilian social formation, this article seeks to identify the meanings and connotations that Freyre attributes to both notions while coming to grips with the place and importance of Latin America in modernity. As I intend to demonstrate, for Freyre the Latin American time-space configuration was irreducible to that of the so-called central modern societies, both on the conceptual level and on the level of everyday experience, which in and of itself is said to account for the peculiar patterns of sociability found in one and other societal contexts. Last but not least, the article aims at investigating the occasional existence of convergences between Freyre’s research agenda and a set of contemporary approaches that have emerged in sociological theory in recent times.