Arthur Ramos

Ramos was born on July 7, 1903, in Alagoas, Brazil.[2] In 1921, Ramos enrolled at the Faculdade de Medicina in Salvador, Bahia, where he specialized in clinical psychiatry and forensic psychology.[3] In 1926, Ramos completed his thesis, Primitivo e Loucura (Primitive and Madness), where he adapted Lévy-Bruhl's theory of dual mindsets, the idea of having a "primitive" mindset vs. a "Western" mindset, for Afro-Brazilians. Ramos argued that the negative traits applied to Afro-Brazilians were not a result of genetics, and he suggested that their situations could be changed.[3]

After completing his studies at the Faculdade de Medicine, Ramos worked as a psychiatric assistant at the São João de Deus Hospital in Bahia. Here, Ramos was able to apply the psychoanalytic approaches he had learned during his studies through psychopathological experiments.[3]

In 1933, Ramos moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he served as the Chief of the Mental Hygiene Service in the Institute of Educational Research for the Rio school system until 1938.[3] In this position, he conducted psychoanalytically based observations of public school children, identifying that what they had labeled as degeneracy was a learned process that could be improved through improvements in health, culture, and education.[3]

In 1939, Ramos started to take a more scholarly approach to his work, focusing on racial justice activism and collaborating with scholar Melville Herskovits.[2] Through this collaboration, he had the opportunity to visit and stay in the United States of America, where he toured the country speaking about race in Brazil and racial equality.[2]

Ramos also served as the founder and first President of the Brazilian Anthropological and Ethnological Society.[1] During his last three months, he served as the head of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)'s Department of Social Sciences.[1]

During his time at Faculade de Medicina, Ramos was influenced by psychiatrist Nina Rodrigues. Rodrigues argued that Black and mixed-race people were prone to mental illness, criminality, and violence not because of their heritability but instead by genetic atavism.[3] At the time, the majority of the medical schools in Bahia adopted the ideas of Rodrigues, specifically that Black and mixed-race people were predisposed to crime and insanity.[3] Ramos and fellow colleagues, influenced by the ideas of Sigmund Freud, contradicted these ideas arguing that this perceived criminality and primitivity were a result of acquired maladjustments, not inherited traits, that were pushed upon Indigenous and Black populations as a product of poverty and structural and racial inequalities.[3] Ramos research focused on the identifying the diagnostic traits of mental illness and connecting them to crime, separating crime from the inherited traits.[3]

While his beginning works focused on the application of psychoanalysis (O Negro Brasileiro, O Folclore Negro do Brasi), his later works shifted to a more anthropological view, focusing on social and human phenomena.[4] Many of his works have been translated to English, Spanish, French, and German.[4]