Roger Bastide (Nîmes, 1898–Paris, 1974) accepted the labels of sociologist, anthropologist and ethnologist. All are appropriate, but only in part. First because Bastide was trained as a philosopher and never lost sight of the large questions philosophers try to handle. A second point is that his sensitivity to human beings nearly always shone through any label that he wore or received. Thus Bastide was also a writer—and one who reflected on the work that writers and other artists do. But scholars are necessarily localized—we do our jobs in a modern specialized world—so a sociologist he shall be, adding however that sociology, for him, included anthropology and ethnology.

His Ph.D. equivalent was an aggrégation en philosophie obtained in Bordeaux in 1920, where he followed the teaching of Gaston Richard, who was a pupil of Émile Durkheim (and his successor in the philosophy chair of Bordeaux). His early intellectual context places him in the second generation of Durkheimian sociology. He reached his intellectual maturity in Brazil, during his professorship in sociology at the University of São Paulo, from 1938 to 1954. He showed there the scope of his interests and pursued his now classical work on Afro-Brazilian religions. From 1954 to the year of his death, his outreach was international, centered in Paris. His scholarship flowered in the era of the cold war and the rise of the civil rights movement in the United States.