Abstract
In 1934, a young group of Brazilian students became the first to step off the jagged sidewalk on Maria Antônia street and into the doors of the brand-new University of São Paulo—Brazil's first higher education institution with a liberal arts program. They had high expectations of their professors, who had recently arrived from Paris, France. The students may not have known, however, that some of the professors were themselves unknown (even unpublished) college graduates who had accepted the position to conduct their own research or to get out of a dead-end high school teaching career. The first cohort of students were disappointed on more than one occasion—especially with their absentee anthropology professor who cancelled classes more often than he held them. Yet in time, members of that French cohort would go on to become intellectuals known and respected worldwide: Roger Bastide, Fernand Braudel, Pierre Monbeig, and the absentee professor himself: Claude Levi-Strauss. Here in Terms of Exchange, Ian Merckel asks how Brazil's interwar intellectual environment transformed these young academics into such formidable thinkers. Merckel ultimately argues that—especially given the influence of structuralist thought on Atlantic social sciences after the Second World War—Brazilian ideas, institutions, and investment permanently transformed the French Social Sciences.