Roger Bastide’s Field Notebooks

Abstract

A considerable number of manuscripts, listed in an inventory, constitute a
vast field of discovery. My research falls into the category of analysis of
“field notebooks”, manuscripts by Roger Bastide, one of the researchers
who stayed the longest in our country, among those who came to Brazil
in the first decades of the twentieth century, and who made Brazil the
source of all his interests as a scholar and critic. We know that the “field
notebook” used as a research tool, not only shows an ability to observe
the “other”, but in the way it presents data, also allows aesthetic creation,
in an efficient literary mode. As I have been observing throughout my research, Roger Bastide’s field notebooks represent a set of preparatory
autographic writing, at the heart of which we can follow the researcher’s
steps in Europe, Brazil and Africa.