Pierson was born in
Kansas on September 8, 1900. He received his doctorate degree from the
University of Chicago in 1939, the subject of his doctoral thesis being on race relations in
Bahia. The thesis was based on research made from 1935 to 1937. Afterwards, he remained as a professor at the Escola de Sociologia e Política de São Paulo until 1959. His 1942 book,
Negroes in Brazil, a Study of Race Contact at Bahia, based on his thesis, contains numerical tables classifying people based on race, and concluded that although Black people had occupied the lower ranks of the Brazilian social hierarchy, there was not racism as it had been defined in the
United States. His findings largely advanced the now-disproven
racial democracy theory of Brazilian society, which posited that Brazilian society at large was not racist and that societal inequities were defined by class rather than by race. Pierson also dedicated two chapters to the local culture, which has strong influences from Africa. While at the Escola de Sociologia e Política de São Paulo, he coordinated research and studies, among the most notable being
Cruz das Almas: A Brazilian Village (1951) and
O Homem no Vale do São Francisco (1972), both part of his "community study" program, the first research program carried out by Pierson. Pierson was a colleague of
Emilio Willems at the Escola de Sociologia e Política de São Paulo, and had, as an important theoretical reference, the German philosopher
Georg Simmel. He also initiated his research with a
symbolic interactionist perspective, influenced by academics such as
George Herbert Mead,
Robert E. Park, and
Robert Redfield. Pierson was named a
Guggenheim fellow in 1963. He later was also named professor emeritus at the
Faculty of Philosophy, Languages and Human Sciences, University of São Paulo in 1993. Pierson died on October 13, 1995, in
Florida. == Works and publications ==