This dissertation explores how four major intellectuals used fieldwork to study Brazil’s countryside and register it in writing, between the late 19th and the mid-20th century. Silvio Romero, Mário de Andrade, João Guimarães Rosa, and Antonio Candido moved between literature and the social sciences, but relied on field research in the plantation and the cattle frontier to authorize their writings. Their field experience was in turn deeply informed by class, because it took place on the rural estates of their families and friends, spaces reminiscent of their own upbringing as heirs of rural patriarchy. Moreover, class regulated the central relation upon which fieldwork was built, the one between researcher and rural worker. Rural workers were the main informants, subjects, and characters of these texts, but also the subordinates in those rural estates in which researchers were honored guests. Thus, in the work of these researchers, a matrix of intimate relationships marked by class, race, and gender differentials was overcoded in aesthetic and social scientific terms as common culture and mutual belonging, laying the bases for ideologies of miscegenation, racial democracy, and class consensus that defined the political horizon of the nation. Chapter one analyzes Silvio Romero’s folklore collection Cantos Populares do Brasil (1883) in conversation with the ethnographic essays he wrote on the subject. It demonstrates how Romero grounded his folkloric work on autobiography, infusing descriptions of labor and cultural realities with the register of white nostalgia. By engaging with Romero’s influential work, it argues he provided a model for the study of popular culture in rural settings that combines a normative empiricism with a sentimental attachment informed by slavery and its afterlives. Chapter two analyzes the large archive related to Mário de Andrade’s 1929 trip to the Brazilian Northeast. It argues this archive registers Andrade’s relationship to the field in a language of longing, condensed in the figure of Chico Antônio, a singer and small farmer who worked under the purview of a close friend of Andrade’s. Chapter three engages the corpus connected to João Guimarães Rosa’s field trips to the cattle frontiers of western Brazil. Through an analysis of Rosa’s ambiguous style, it reads these texts as evidence of his recurrent struggle to represent the field, against the backdrop of state-led expansion into the western territory, to which Rosa contributed as an official of the Ministry of Foreign Relations. Chapter four is dedicated to Antonio Candido’s sociological monograph Os parceiros do Rio Bonito (1964), based on Candido’s fieldwork in Southern São Paulo. It argues that the book subtly undermines its progressive political goals by adopting a cultural framework which blurs the distinction between economic and cultural categories, and thus horizontalizes the relationship between landless and landowners. Therefore, by historicizing field research in the countryside as an epistemic and aesthetic practice informed by class, the dissertation tracks the emergence of a way of engaging rural realities which, born in the plantation, found its way into scientific and cultural institutions and the university.