Roger Bastide

Roger Bastide (1 April 1898, Nîmes – 10 April 1974, Maisons-Laffitte) was a French sociologist and anthropologist, specialist in sociology and Brazilian literature. Bastide is known for his contributions to the study of Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Caribbean religions. He was raised as a Protestant and studied philosophy in France, developing at the same time an interest for sociological issues. His first sociological field research, in 1930–31, was about immigrants from Armenia to Valence, France. As scholars later noticed, already in his first works about the Armenians he was interested in how the memory of a different culture survives when a group of people moves to a faraway land, a theme that will become crucial in his studies of African populations in Brazil. In 1938, the University of São Paulo asked him to succeed Claude Lévi-Strauss in its chair of Sociology. He remained in Brazil until 1957, and in 1958 moved back to France, where he became a professor of Sociology of religion at the Sorbonne University. In 1958, shortly before starting his course at the Sorbonne, Bastide had made his first research trip to Africa, exploring the traditional religions of Dahomey and Nigeria. That same years, he published "Le Candomblé de Bahia". Bastide devoted the last part of his career to social psychology.