The Joaquim Nabuco Institute and the Intellectual Sensitivity Towards Poverty

In this article, we analyze how sensitivity and intellectual experience regarding poverty were experienced at the Joaquim Nabuco Institute (IJN) in the mid-20th century. In the immediate post-war period, the intellectual community in Recife regarded the observation, recording, and reflection on poverty as a kind of intellectual pathos. This collective experience fostered a modern self-understanding of the country from a regional and local perspective. In the following analyses, we highlight how the IJN emerged as an effort to construct and deepen this new sensitivity towards regional poverty, moving away from accepting poverty as a natural order of the world. Finally, we examine the ways in which the IJN sought to give a canonical meaning, in its own way, to the harsh reality of poverty in the Brazilian Northeast.

Keywords:
Joaquim Nabuco Institute; intellectual sensitivity; underdevelopment