Roger Bastide

Roger Bastide (1898 to 1974) was a French sociologist and anthropologist, a specialist in the sociology of religion and in Brazilian literature, best known for his studies of Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Caribbean religions. Raised a Protestant and trained in philosophy, he began with a field study of Armenian immigrants in Valence in 1930 and 1931, already asking how the memory of one culture survives when a group moves far away. In 1938 the University of São Paulo asked him to succeed Claude Lévi-Strauss in its chair of sociology, and he stayed in Brazil until 1957 before becoming professor of sociology of religion at the Sorbonne. His books include Le Candomblé de Bahia (1958) and a study of the African religions of Brazil (1960), and his account of syncretism rests on a principle of compartmentalization that lets incompatible logics live side by side in one person. Later scholars criticized his declared identification with Candomblé practitioners as costing him objectivity.