Document details

The term Luso-tropicalism was crafted in the 1950s by the Brazilian anthropologist and cultural historian Gilberto Freyre. In his earlier works on colonial Brazil, Freyre suggested that the Portuguese colonizers had a special ability to adapt to the tropics by easily intermingling, intermarrying, and interchanging cultural elements with different peoples, given that they were themselves the result of multiple mixtures. Two decades later, he expanded the idea into a concept suitable to all societies sharing Portuguese influence, whether colonial plantations, settler societies, or conquest territories.