This article analyzes the Brazilian period of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1935-1938), tracing his publications, classes, and research during the time in which he was a professor of sociology at the Universidade de São Paulo in order to better understand the place Brazil occupied in his intellectual itinerary. The purpose is to show that although this period was brief (and largely silenced), it was crucial to subsequent developments in the author's career as ethnologist and Americanist. The text also assesses the significance of Lévi-Strauss' coming to Brazil in the French context of the time, when Americanism was a scarcely explored terrain, contrary to Africanism, a "calling" then in vogue.