ABSTRACT
This article discusses ethnography in the life and works of Brazilian writer Mário de Andrade (1893-1945). It begins by presenting his support, as head of the Culture Department of the city of São Paulo, of ethnographical activities, including: trips to Mato Grosso and the Amazon by Claude and Dina Lévi-Strauss (1936 and 1938); the Folklore Research Mission to the Northeast (1938); and the first course on ethnography ever taught in Brazil (1936). In the second and third parts, the article deals with Mário de Andrade’s voyage to the Amazon region in 1927, and what I call his “imagined ethnographies”, which he himself described as “satires of scientific explorations and ethnography”. He wrote fictional accounts of two “Indian tribes” near the Madeira river, the Pacaás Novos (a group which indeed exists in what is today the state of Rondônia; Mário de Andrade planned to visit them, but never did); and the “Do-mi-sol”, an invented “tribe” in which communication was based on singing, not speech.
KEYWORDS:
Mário de Andrade: criticism and interpretation; Amazon: literature and ethnography; Dina Lévi-Strauss and Mário de Andrade; Brazilian Modernism and ethnography