‘Assimilação crítica’ and research on the periphery

Resumen

As one of my two contributions to this discussion, I would like to first comment on the state of affairs regarding the development of “um pensamento nacional autêntico.” Specifically, I would like to address the issue not from the perspective of the Brazilian trying to ‘critically assimilate’ foreign ideas, and so avoid the transplantation of inappropriate scholarship. Rather, I would like to look at it from the other end of this strained intellectual relationship. Much of my research related to Guerreiro Ramos has confirmed the threat that he raised regarding epistemic colonization, unwittingly exercised by a woefully parochial Anglophone scholarly community. The second topic I would like to discuss is a policy area in which Brazilians, especially in my discipline of public administration, might have something to learn from abroad, raised by Guerreiro Ramos himself in his Patologia social do branco brasileiro.