T. Lynn Smith is well known to all Latin Americanists for his book Brazil: People and Institutions, which now in its fourth edition, has become a modern classic as well as for his many other books and articles. It should not be surprising, therefore, that the present volume is an important contribution to our understanding of Brazil. It contains a series of essays many of which have not been published before and others which have appeared in recent years in publications not easily at hand.
The volume opens with a short essay entitled “Sociology and Sociologists in Brazil and the United States” which is of special interest to those of us who have followed the development of Brazilian social science. The remainder of the volume has more general interest treating three broad aspects of Brazilian society, namely the Brazilian Population; Social Structure and Social Institutions; and Social-Culture Change and Development. Some of these essays are concise interpretations of complex data on Brazilian society such as the three on population. Some contain new comparative perspectives on Brazilian and North American societies. Others provide fresh substantive data on Brazil such as the essay on “Religious Differentiation and Syncretism” in which the growth of new religious forms embodying spiritism and African traits is shown to challenge the orthodox Catholicism of Brazil.
My favorite essays in this volume are the concluding ones—“Urbanization in the 1970s” and “Some Comparisons of the Process of Urbanization in Brazil and the United States.” In these, Smith makes use of his erudition to show how Brazil and the United States reached the stage of urbanization by different routes and at different times. The United States became “statistically urban” around 1918 and Brazil not until 1965. The cities of Brazil missed the “horse and buggy days” during which the already teeming cities of the U.S.A. received energy to move people and things directly from the farms. Lacking the “having complex” which was absent in their Mediterranean heritage, Brazilian cities could not support the millions of horses and mules to pull carts, buggies, drays, and cabs which were present in their U.S. counterparts prior to 1910. Brazilian cities became truly urban only after the appearance of the combustion engine depending upon the “clean” automobile which did not litter their “streets with dung nor slicken them with urine” (p. 234). By 1970, Brazilian cities had overcome this dubious lag and were also jammed with millions of motor vehicles.
Brazilian cities (except for perhaps São Paulo) did not receive the European immigrants or the middle class rural migrants which flooded cities in the U.S.A. prior to 1920. These were the people who built the systems of communications, transportation, sanitation, and industry of so many North American cities. After about 1940, however, the cities of both countries began to receive a new element in their present population. These people are poor; they inhabit the “inner city” of Detroit and the favelas of São Paulo, to cite only two examples. They are also analogous in their origins. In the U.S.A. they came from the farms of the South (and even from the West Indies) where remnants of the plantation system persist. Thus, again, Brazilian cities seemed to have “skipped a stage” in their development and this difference is reflected in the “relatively” greater urban crisis of modern Brazil. In my opinion, these two papers taken together are important contributions to comparative sociology. In fact, this whole volume should be read by anyone interested in the sociology of development.