Darcy Ribeiro, once rector of the University of Brasília and minister in the Goulart government and, since the revolution of 1964, professor-in-exile in Uraguay and Chile, has two aims in these first two volumes of a planned four-volume work. His first object—in The Civilizational Process and the first and last parts of The Americas and Civilization—is the formulation of a Third World interpretation of the history of the last 10,000 years. He does this by an updating of radical development theory which seeks to replace what he calls the academic-bourgeois theories and the dogmatic-Marxist theories. The complicated typology of pre-modern history will be of little interest to Latin Americanists, but the classification of modern societies is more interesting and informative. In his view, there have been two vast technological changes in the modern era, the Mercantile and Industrial Revolutions, and we are now in the beginning of a third, the Thermonuclear Revolution. The two previous revolutions have each set off the twin “oivilizational processes” of, in the first case, Colonialism and Nationalism, and in the second, Imperialism and Socialism. Yet—and here is Professor Ribeiro’s innovative, anthropological addition—the reception of any such process, say Socialism, occurs either through “acceleration” (autonomous development) or “incorporation” (dependent development), depending upon how “deculturated” any particular culture has become. In the first instance, one has genuine independence emerging; in the latter, neo-colonialism. The upshot of all this is a new world-historical interpretive scheme. The “developed” areas are classified according to whether their independence emerged through (1) Early Market Capitalism (Britain, France, the United States), (2) Later State-Subsidized Capitalism (Germany, Japan, Italy), (3) Recent Mixed Capitalism (Scandinavia, Israel, the White Dominions, Argentina), or (4) Socialism (Russia, China, Cuba). The “non-developing” areas are classified according to their marginality or degree of “incorporation” as follows; (1) Emerging Peoples (Africans and weaker Asians still in Nationalism), (2) Witness Peoples (Old Civilizations of Asia and the Mideast, the Aztec and Inca areas), (3) the New Peoples (the Chile-Paraguay-Brazil group, the Colombia-Venezuela-Guianas group, the Antilles), and (4) the Transplanted Peoples (the Anglo-Americans, the White Dominions, the Argentines). The implied explanatory function of this scheme is: World Wars I and II were caused by the challenge of Late to Early Capitalism, thus opening the way for the challenge of Socialism to Imperialism, which resulted in either Independence or Neocolonialism depending on the “acceleration” capacity of the various Peoples, with Transplanted Peoples co-opted into Recent Capitalism, the Witness Peoples setting off on autonomous development, and the New Peoples lagging behind in dependent neocolonialism.
The second and major aim—in The Americas and Civilization—is to describe the development of the cultures of the Americas according to this scheme. Part I is an anthropological-dialectical interpretation of the European source, Part II of the Witness Peoples of Middle America (Mexico, Central America) and the Andes (Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador), Part III of the New Peoples of Brazil, Gran Colombia, the Antilles, and Chile, and Part IV of the Transplanted Peoples of Anglo-America (the United States and Canada) and of the La Plata region (Argentina and Uruguay). Such an attempt to balance the influence of historical materialism and ethnohistory—of economics and mass psychology—on the cultural level inevitably leads to confusion on the question of whether the Antilles belong to Socialism or to Black Power, the Andes to Ché Guevara or the Indians, and so on. Likewise, it is not clear whether Socialism can “incorporate” cultures as well as “accelerate” them in Professor Ribeiro’s view, a not insignificant question when applied to the expansion of Russian, Chinese, or Cuban influence in the Americas. Nor do the categories of the Ribeiro typology take the French Canadians, the United States minorities, or the mixture of the Central American and Antillean peoples into sufficient consideration. Nevertheless, this is a book of great erudition, and some of the loose ends may be tied up in the remaining two volumes of the planned work, which are to be entitled The Dilemma of Latin America and Emergent Brazil. It is to be hoped that the authorities will allow those volumes to appear without the harassment which attended the original publication of The Americas and Civilization in 1968. For the publication of this series is an event comparable to the appearance of C.L.R. James’ Black Jacobins or Regis Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution?, that is, an act in the Latin American revolution in its own right. Professor Ribeiro thus takes his place in the line of intellectual activists which goes back to Sarmiento and beyond.
