Abstract

Brazilian anthropology has diverse founding heroes and landmark moments. The founding of the University of São Paulo should be counted as an important moment for having permitted the contracting of, among others, Lévi-Strauss, Radcliffe-Brown, Donald Pierson and Emilio Willems who, together with Herbert Baldus, were responsible for the formation of professionals such as Darcy Ribeiro, Florestem Fernandes, Egon Schaden and Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira. Aside from this context, we should remember Curt Nimuendaju, our greatest ethnographer, Eduardo Galvão (the first Brazilian to earn a Ph.D. in Anthropology) and Gilberto Freyre. Antropology as we know it grew and became consolidated as of the 1970 university Reform with the spread of graduate school programs. Before this, Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira took the initiative of implanting in the Museu Nacional (RJ) an extense Program for Graduate Studies in Social Anthropology, producing the first course in “specialization” in 1960. In the Southernmost part of Brasil, the development of Anthropology, from the I950’s on, was marked by certain specificities, the first teachers of the discipline being two doctors and a priest.