[Brazil within the concert of nations: the struggle against racism in the early days of Unesco]. / O Brasil no concerto das nações: a luta contra o racismo nos primórdios da Unesco.

This article has the objective of approaching the political and scientific context that led Brazil to the position of Unesco paradigm for racial matters. I set out from the hypothesis that soon after the Holocaust, the positive image of race relations in Brazil was in greater evidence, becoming sort of anti-Nazi Germany. At this time, a number of unforeseen efforts took place in the sense of striving for an association between the search for understanding the German totalitarian phenomenon, the radical critique of the scientific standing of the concept of race, the evidencing of socio-economic demands of underdeveloped countries, and the choice of Brazil as a socio-anthropological laboratory. This combination of aims only became viable from the onset of a transnational political-academic alliance universalistic in nature.

[The Rio de Janeiro Medical and Surgical Society: the genesis of an alternative institutional network]. / A Sociedade de Medicina e Cirurgia do Rio de Janeiro: a gênese de uma rede institucional alternativa.

Creation of the Rio de Janeiro Medical and Surgical Society serves as the basis for this study of late-19th-century medicine in Brazil. The hypothesis is that beginning in the 1880s changes to institutions and the diversification of medical community inaugurateed the structuring of a field of social relations specific to medical practitioners. With official medical institutions undergoing crises, alternative groups that emerged outside the government framework worked together toward common ends, particularly the construction of a kind of Brazilian medical knowledge that could play a role on the international scientific scenario.

[Brazilian physician Nina Rodrigues: analysis of a scientific career]. / A medicina de Nina Rodrigues: an lise de uma trajetória científica.

One of the most productive ways of investigating the history of Brazilian medical practice at the turn of this century is to focus on the fruitful and ambiguous careers of those physicians that played an important role in the changes affecting the medical field at that time. This paper aims at analyzing the scientific career of physician-anthropologist Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, taking as its conceptual basis Pierrre Bourdieu's notion of "scientific field ". The paper's point of departure is the notion that the medical field is a space of confrontation that is structurally determined by previous conflicts in which physicians try to monopolize claims to scientific authority and competence. Nina Rodrigues' medical profile appears in this context as a precise indicator of the process of specialization and competition that took place during that period.