Rafael José de Menezes Bastos

Rafael José de Menezes Bastos, born in Salvador, in the state of Bahia, on 26 December 1945, is a Brazilian ethnomusicologist whose work focuses on the indigenous musical cultures of the lowlands of South America. His output, holistic and integrative in character, occupies an important place in Brazilian ethnomusicology and also extends to the popular music of his country.

He graduated in music from the University of Brasília in 1968 and obtained his master's degree in social anthropology at the same institution in 1976. His postgraduate research was carried out in the Alto Xingu indigenous reserve, where he studied the musical culture of the Kamayurá. Later, at the University of São Paulo, he completed his doctorate in human sciences, specialising in social anthropology, in 1990; his thesis, entitled A festa da Jaguatirica, analyses the complex relationship between music and Kamayurá ritual.

His academic career combined teaching and research. He was an assistant professor of anthropology at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, where he taught and researched the ethnology and ethnomusicology of the indigenous peoples of the South American lowlands. Between 1992 and 1994 he was a visiting postdoctoral researcher at MIT, where he worked on a project on cognition and musical structure centred on the yawari of the Kamayurá, and in 1994 he was a research fellow at the Smithsonian Institution. He also took part in national and international professional bodies, such as the Brazilian Association of Anthropology and the ICTM, and sat on an indigenous affairs committee of the Brazilian anthropological association. As a researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, he directed various projects on music, culture and society.

His legacy lies in having placed music at the centre of anthropological analysis, understanding it as an inseparable part of the social and ritual life of the peoples he studied, and in having disseminated that perspective through a broad body of written work.