“A rich examination of the intriguing crossings between Brazilian and French social sciences from the 1930s to the 1950s, Terms of Exchange offers the first history of the interactions among such characters as Roger Bastide, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Arthur Ramos, Caio Prado Jr., Florestan Fernandes, Paul Rivet, Gilberto Freyre, and Fernand Braudel.”

Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, University of Chicago

“This book reconsiders the intellectual itineraries of the French professors who came to São Paulo to found USP. Challenging traditional geographies of knowledge, Merkel situates the Brazilian experience of social scientists such as Braudel and Lévi-Strauss at the center of important epistemological inflections of the mid-twentieth century.”

Gabriela Pellegrino Soares, University of São Paulo

“Merkel explores with brio a little-known episode of transatlantic intellectual history: the prewar dialectics of exchange between a small group of not-yet-famous French visiting professors at the University of São Paulo and their Brazilian hosts. The great merit of the book is to highlight the weight of their Brazilian experience on those who later deeply transformed the French social sciences.”

Philippe Descola, author of Beyond Nature and Culture

"Merkel's work is a welcome addition to both Brazilian history and to the charting of the twentieth-century social sciences."

The Latin Americanist