Positivism as culture

Abstract

This article discusses positivism during the implantation of the Brazilian Republic at the turn of the twentieth century, highlighting the medical discourse that pathologized Africans, Afro-Brazilians and indigenous groups. Conceived in the eighteenth century and strengthened in the nineteenth century, this discourse meant that by the turn of the twentieth century, former slaves had been transformed from objects of work into objects of science (Nina Rodrigues, Roberto Lyra). Crowning abolitionism, positivism was mediated by a process defending the whitening of the Brazilian population. A long time in the making, it fed on the mechanisms of objectification and verticalization, as well as the Encylopédie’s updated classification, to form a strand of biological determinism that spread from the physical to the social sciences, without becoming distanced from theology. This knowledge was harnessed in the European conquest, substituting theological arguments for scientific arguments in the legitimization of colonial rule