Bio: (1898-1974) French sociologist and anthropologist. Roger Bastide became a professor of philosophy in 1924. From 1938-1957 he taught at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. In 1958 he begin teaching at the Sorbonne as the chair of the social and religious ethnology department. He edited the journal Sociologie et psychanalyse and headed the Center for Social Psychiatry and the Laboratory for the Sociology of Consciousness at the CNRS. He studied African religions in Brazil and Africa, primarily the Yoruba religion. He studied religions as systems, the origin of religion, religious changes, religious syncretism between Christianity and African religions in the American continent, and theories of the sacred. He also dealt with race relations, Brazilian literature, the sociology of mental illness (he advocated the idea that trance in religious rituals had healing powers), as well as applied anthropology. Towards the end of his career, he studied the mental illnesses of Asian and African immigrants in France.

Main works

Les problemes de la vie mystique (1931);

Elements de sociologie religieuse (1936);

A poesia afro-brasileira (1943);

Sociologie et psychanalyse (1951);

Le Candomblé de Bahia, rite Nagô (1958);

Les Religions africaines au Brésil (1960);

Sociologie des maladies mentales (1965);

Les Amériques noires (1967);

Anthropologie applique (1971).

Books translated into English

The Mistical Life (1935, in French 1931);

Applied Anthropology (1973, in French 1971);

African Civilizations in the New World (1971);

The sociology of Mental Disorder (1972, in French 1965);

Social Origins of Religion (2003, in French 1935);

The African Religions of Brazil: Toward a Sociology of the Interpenetration of Civilizations (2007, in French 1960).