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Milton Santos
Thirteen years of exile, then geography's highest prize for a theory of space written from the South.
The rise
Born on 3 May 1926 in Brotas de Macaúbas, in the Bahian backlands, to two schoolteachers. He taught secondary geography in Ilhéus and wrote for the newspaper A Tarde while reading law at the Federal University of Bahia, graduating in 1948, and defended a doctorate on the centre of Salvador at Strasbourg in 1958.
What they did
Arrested after the 1964 coup, he left for France that December and stayed thirteen years away, teaching at Toulouse, Bordeaux, the Sorbonne, Toronto, MIT, Columbia and Dar es Salaam. In 1994 came the Vautrin Lud Prize, geography's highest honour and its only one to a Latin American. A Natureza do Espaço (1996) and Por Uma Outra Globalização (2000) read globalisation from below.
The full picture
His 1977 return was to a visiting post at the Federal University of Rio, not a chair; he became full professor at the University of São Paulo only in 1984, at fifty-eight. Nothing is alleged against him. Some geographers read his late books as philosophical essays rather than research, and his concepts as hard to apply.
Why it matters
He set the terms of a global scientific discipline from the South rather than borrowing them, and did it after his own country had taken thirteen years of his life away.
“The central problem is to take up the course of history again — that is, to put the human being back in his central place.”