“Neither Traditional nor Fully Modern...”

The issue of modernity has occupied the center stage of Brazilian sociology ever since its beginning. It is fair to say that “reaching for modernity” is a sort of obsession that crisscrosses and permeates the public imagery of a wide range of sectors of Brazilian contemporary society: “Are we really a modern society? How close is Brazil from the so-called ‘modern way of life’ experimented by First World nations?” This article is mainly concerned with showing how key-figures in Brazilian sociology have coped with such questions. I will focus on two of the most important and impacting sociological strands which are widely acknowledged in the Brazilian academia as two opposite lines of interpretation. These are: the so-called dependency approach (Caio Prado Jr., Florestan Fernandes, Fernando H. Cardoso and Octavio Ianni) and the patrimonial–patriarchal strand (Gilberto Freyre, S. B. Holanda, Raymundo Faoro and Roberto DaMatta). The argument that I pursue is that despite resting on different premises these two interpretive strands arrive at a quite similar diagnosis. In the end of the day, this shared diagnosis turns out to reinforce a sort of disorientating feeling that most Brazilians have about their contemporary condition, namely, that they are neither traditional nor fully-modern.