By FLÁVIO VALENTIM DE OLIVEIRA*

Problems of the popularization of Brazilian science experienced at the time of its bicentennial

This text is a brief record of the Nature and Culture project carried out during the 19th National Week of Science and Technology (SNCT 2022),¹ with the support of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPQ), whose theme was the bicentennial of science in Brazil. It is worth mentioning that this event of national relevance, organized by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI) with the aim of popularizing science and technology, especially with children and young people, was faced with a peculiar situation, namely: the weakening of public schools in all their dimension of space of secularity, scientificity and teaching pluralism² and with the social pressure of binary nationalist rhetoric that attacked “environmental groups and indigenous populations”, as well as the materialization of institutional skepticism in relation to climate science.³

Policies to encourage the popularization of science and technology are in line with the country's social inclusion agenda. However, in the last four years, the public school, the place par excellence for the democratization of knowledge, suffered from the moral agenda and, above all, from the punitive ideology that crime was spreading among these students and, therefore, it should be replaced every day. epistemic communities by Christian moral communities centered on valuing the Brazilian family.

It didn't take long, for example, for conservative critics to attribute the attack on the school in the west zone, in the capital of São Paulo, which caused the death of a teacher, to the fact that "doctrinaire" teachers removed subjects such as religious education and rituals from the school curriculum. crucifixes on the wall and the Our Father prayers. In other words, the secular state was leading schools to perdition, violence and early sexualization. Averse to negotiation and indifferent to any kind of youth protagonism by public school students, this conservative model is also characterized by aporophobia, hence the insistence on civic-military schools, whose objective would always be obedience to a major chief.

In the case of public schools located in the North region, the impact of a dismantling not only of institutions and environmental policy standards was felt, but also of a financialization of life against the way of life of riverside communities. As Kathryn Hochstetler (2021) explains, deforestation rates in recent years in the Amazon region reveal a total disregard for ecosystems and a growing stigmatization by groups considered “pre-human”⁴ that supposedly delay Brazilian national progress.

This whole context of hostility shows, therefore, that the popularization of science does not only mean a democratization of the “direct and objective reflections of Nature” but also means offering the public transparency “of negotiations, disputes and consensuses within a community”⁵, finally, of power relations themselves and the construction of knowledge. It is noteworthy, for example, that the first efforts to implement a Brazilian scientific model were concentrated in medicine and military engineering.⁶ It can also be said that a proposal for the popularization of science questions what we traditionally call “universal”, often associated “as European science” and providing a rediscovery of Brazil, focusing “on its institutions, practices and characters, from colonial times”.⁷

The pages that follow are intended to reflect on some problems of the popularization of Brazilian science experienced at the time of its bicentennial. We are witnessing a period in which doubt, skepticism – formerly raw material to lead philosophical and scientific thought to new perspectives – became a propagandistic instrument to spread hatred, resentment and contempt for universities, researchers and public schools. It is worth asking about the meaning of the popularization of science in environments marked by neoconservatism. A conservatism that feeds on denialism and even empties the content of youth protagonism, leading them increasingly to a defeatist, pathological and violent pessimism.

Resistance and inventiveness help us to overcome the atmosphere of violent schools, with the presence of young extremist preachers who attack science, against plurality, against public schools and who believe that their mission is to undo the democratic masquerade. This phenomenon also shows that fascism is devouring and popular, its taste in persecuting opponents can never be doubted. But fascism is not created without its ability to be festive and colorful for young students. In opposition to fascist life, the popularization of science in the Amazonian territoriality takes into account the process of silencing ancestry, especially an ancestry of struggles, resistance and creativity.

Popularization of science versus denialism

The names of self-described “conservative” thinkers began to appear in public school student speeches, with enthusiastic speakers preaching strange heroism to graduating high school classes. At the same time, it is not rare to find in school spaces (stairs and isolated corners) a young reader and antisystem focused on the works of these authors. These are not isolated cases. Philosophy and science were affected in our country by the worst of the so-called conservative sensibility and, of course, these ideas did not fail to influence public school teachers and students.

In most of his arguments, these ideas need a philosophical guise to persuade his unsuspecting reader to vent his anger, combining a caricatural and apocalyptic type of rhetoric. They need to spread existential calamities to justify themselves in the scientific world. Although laughable, – because any more critical reader would not contain himself before the expression: “solitude, it was the mother of my freedom of thought. The feeling of abandonment in the world was my father.”⁸ – this conservative doctrine wants to convince us of the failure of collective struggles for social freedom, the end of utopias, the victory of fate (or “bad luck”) over individual choices.

Evidently, one should not deny the pedagogical dimension of pessimism, the value of self-learning that it can provide to the lives of individuals, however, one should not deny the emancipatory and courageous dimension of pessimistic philosophies in times when it is appropriated. by denialism. This is because denialism itself presented itself on the scene as the true historical force. And, therefore, it was to be expected that denialism – the legitimate son of Brazilian neoconservatism – would lay the foundations of its fallacies against democracy. One is to associate democracy with the dangers of the rise of communist dictatorships and revolutionary violence, the other is to spread democratization as a masquerade of control and “aversion to freedom of opinion”.⁹

We are facing a right-wing radicalism that makes catastrophes its menu. However, the catastrophe of the world itself would be produced in an unfair and unequal way, since, from the perspective of these movements, it would be necessary to respect a cosmic hierarchy, point out that they are in a situation of inferiority in the world, turn the tables, change the rules of the game , which is why they really need that moment of catastrophe politics, that “moment of delirium”.¹⁰

Philosopher Theodor Adorno already said that “one should not underestimate these movements”, not so much for their intellectual level, but for their perfection in the use “of propagandistic means”.¹¹ The propaganda of these groups only shows that fantasies have an immense social and political productivity, even if in reverse. For example, their totalitarian fantasies show that democracy is always a threat designed to make people imbeciles or put more plainly: “a residue of incorrigibles or idiots”.¹²

The choice for the philosophical style is another example of the typical case of pretense of the extreme right, whose pessimism in itself could already be seen as the work of authors “guarantees of the future”. A pessimism necessary to restore the lost order. In any case, their anxieties and frustrations are transformed into “overvaluation of the national conscience as something of its own”.¹³ The catastrophe operates in a psychic way, as the fantasies of the end of the world are absorbed in propaganda and the unconscious desire for misfortune becomes a collective will or, as Adorno would say, one does not “just want the destruction of his own group, he wants , if possible, the destruction of the whole.”¹⁴

For this reason it is always necessary to be careful with the term popularization. It is a term that carries many recent historical lessons. And in this regard we must always be wary of fascism. Its etymological origin from the Italian language fascis [beam], which indicates an everyday use of the simple life of work, coming from the ideological image of “a bundle of sticks with an ax in the middle” popularizes feelings of strength and union. At the same time, the experience of fascist popularization is not possible without the “preacher’s exaltation”¹⁵ and in this sense, Victor Klemperer described the gigantic mouth as one of the symbols of fascism: a devouring, popularizing, emotion-consuming symbol and, above all, the persecuting mouth that utters words of hate and death against its opponents.

With popularization, the body of discourse itself underwent profound changes. Rhetoric is no longer the language of the skilful orator, destined solely to polis, the city of Athens – a space for free citizens – but it is now an expanded set of languages ​​that, as Victor Klemperer says, articulates the decoration, staging, coloring, communication technologies, ranging from banners, flags, radio , cinema to the current powerful social networks.

Let us quote Klemperer: “Now, discourse occupies a more important position, and its essence has changed. Addressed to everyone, not just representatives of the people, it needs to be understandable to everyone, that is, it needs to be more popular. What is more popular is more concrete. The more speech addresses the feelings, the less it addresses the intellect, the more popular it is. When it deliberately begins to set aside intelligence, dulling it, it crosses the line and becomes demagoguery or seduction”.¹⁶

In Brazil, specifically, the popular classes also felt encouraged to reframe the concreteness of discourse. There is nothing better for this than attributing strength to the swear word, understood here as a protest against decorum: a symbol of demagogic, corrupt and conventional life. It is no coincidence that a Brazilian negationist ideologue defined polite language as a “straitjacket” to freedom of thought, while swearing would be the demolition of the liar's linguistic authority.¹⁷

Indeed, the term popularization or democratization is not something that is said without a mixture of both hope and fear. In this regard, Judith Butler is right in stating that democratic theories prefer a certain amenity in the behavior of citizens, there is a clear fear that public assemblies will escape government control, that the popular will itself will take its form of disobedience. In any case, still following Judith Butler's observation, “popular demonstrations tend to be governed by fear of chaos or by radical hope for the future, although sometimes fear and hope intertwine in complex ways”.¹⁸

This issue raised by Judith Butler has resonances in Brazil. The world of post-truth has turned into a world of moral invention, pseudo-legality and imbecility. The desire for a scapegoat is associated with the post-truth belief that our society has characteristics of the “sadistic enjoyment” of humiliating the oppressed – which demonstrates that the abolition of slavery was only formal. Meanwhile, a post-State truth is transforming the State into private property, since if there is symbolic and material violence against the popular classes, it is characterized by the act of confusing the democratization of knowledge with crumbs of science, a concealed view as “individual merit”.¹⁹

Merits for one group and failure attributed to others. This is how, during the pandemic, the denialist discourse of the Bolsonaro government reinforced the “idea of ​​the strong man versus the weak man”.²⁰ More than an idea, this discourse was installed in the lives of some Brazilians in a somewhat ambiguous way. Its resonance (an issue that should still be studied in political psychology) was felt, in a peculiar way, in the North region. I emphasize here the life of the Amazonian riverside people. It is a discourse that reactivates the old stigma of the caboclo as a rudimentary, lazy and uncultured subject and, on the other hand, of a spiritually backward life that needs constant pastoral direction. Regarding this second point, the continuous growth of conservative religions in the communities of the Amazonian islands is not a mere coincidence.

Democratize and politicize technologies

“It was the first time I saw a microscope in my life. I saw that different things were going to happen at school” (Yasmin, 15 years old, public school student).

Neofascism loves new technologies, especially “communication technologies”.²¹ to engineer sophisticated and effective manipulations against science itself. This love is nourished by the possibility of direct communication with the public. As it is a political and ideological movement, its way of loving is only complete with its way of hating. Hence the hatred of the figure of the scientist, the intellectual and the teacher with their rhetoric classified as empty and boring. In general, science is propagated by these extremist groups as something elitist and perverse, thus forming a “cognitive breakdown” and “paranoid” narratives.²²that the earth is flat or that the pandemic was a punishment from God.

Along with this hatred of the world of science, the figure of the “hero of national morality” appears on the cultural scene, transfigured into the morality of the aporophobic conservatism of the middle classes who have social nightmares with the reduction of the “social distance between poor and rich”.²³ This is not a passing feeling, this hatred has catastrophic effects on any policy to popularize science. It is actually the profound effects of a reactionary republicanism, in this case, the mask of the Old Republic whose social mentality still spreads in Brazilian daily life through the ever-present “sadistic pleasure of the slave owner, the enjoyment of humiliation against those who do not he has a defense and has to put up with jokes, abuse, insults, in short, humiliation in all its forms”.²⁴

From this perspective, when the Nature and Culture project carried out microscopy workshops – as a science popularization strategy – with students from public schools, we sought to link this activity with the questioning of the coloniality that certain religions approach their own diseases in the Amazon. In microscopy, students scientifically observe the behavior of bacteria, protozoa and plant cells.

Thus, knowing the classification of living beings in kingdoms, students begin a reflection on the human and sustainability, realize that we are not alone in the ecosystem and, therefore, understand that in these kingdoms there are parasitic beings, disease-causing beings and others that can benefit the human body. These scientific literacy workshops show the importance of immunity and the vaccine to demystify superstitions and religious prejudices, since since the XNUMXth century, cholera, smallpox and tuberculosis have built in Brazil “images of sick bodies, with the biblical metaphor as a point of departure”. of departure".²⁵

Therefore, it is necessary to dialogue with public school students about the importance of historical studies that deal with the emergence of epidemics. The conquest of the Americas itself was not possible without the introduction and spread of measles and influenza in the XNUMXth century where many “natives suffered from illnesses”.²⁶ The mortality caused by these epidemics is not a supernatural punishment and, on the other hand, its origin is not linked to a supposed curse of peoples or ethnic groups that makes us believe in hygienic stigmas, such as: Spanish flu or Chinese virus.

From this same perspective, the bicentenary of Brazilian science would need to be treated in three dimensions. First, the human sciences must recognize the popular taste for the tyrant. And, even more, that the tyrant wins the favor of the population for the fact that he doesn't "meet the tongue", that "he doesn't have to pose".²⁷ Second, the sciences as a whole would need to politicize debates about technologies. Social technologies in Brazil have created a false meritocratic universe. Let's look at the use of apps like Rappi, Uber and iFood that indicate types of survival or technological servitude. Work platforms whose efficiency hides psychic suffering, creating an existence of failure and guilt.

Finally, the sciences always need to contribute to the debate about collective memory, given that there is a false nostalgia, a deceptive nostalgia for the past. Hence the romanticized view of the family and its mission to recover traditional values ​​against the secular school and against the public space: the public space would have become “the stage of immoral practices, such as exchange of affection between people of the same sex, precocious sexualization, protests of street where there would be nudity, pornography and disrespect for religious symbols”.²⁸

Popularization of science in the Amazon. From liberalism to neoextractivism

In the broader debate about school systems in Brazil and Latin America, it was the “children of the white elites” who benefited most, excluding “the natives, the blacks, those considered savages”²⁹ and, even in the promise of liberal equality projects, our educational systems have adopted a predilection for “European or North American systems, replacing popular cultures with the dominant culture”.³⁰

Thus, a project to popularize science and technology in Amazonian territories, specifically in public schools where black students, girls, LGBTQI+ and riverside groups were silenced in the curricula or standardized in everyday discipline, must take into account the importance of ancestry. Ancestry is understood here as a destabilizing knowledge and, at the same time, as a dynamic knowledge of the contradictions with the hegemonic civilizing models and that produces a critical view of the traditional epistemes.³¹

This criticism can be directed, for example, to Amazonian liberalism, especially in Pará, which has always had a double political feature, namely: manipulative and physiological. Already in the XNUMXth century, this liberalism had a keen vision of the free market at the time, of the limits of real power, of individual rights and, at the same time, a hesitant and constant concern in allying with and repelling social and universal ties with slaves, Indians and mestizos. Its leaders depended on “the support of local people in the region, to strengthen their own projects and political careers”.³²

It is true that one should not ignore the radical character of Amazonian liberalism in its beginnings, at least with regard to the anti-Portuguese sentiment, however, this policy of gradation between the universal and the particular escaped from the hands of local liberalism. On the one hand, some sectors of the Pará elites saw themselves as an integral part of Portugal (because of the free market for imports and exports of forest products with the Crown, the traditional family ties and the bond and social prestige given by Portuguese university education) . Not by chance, the once radical liberalism was readjusting itself to the very characteristic desire to reach “influential positions in the government” and to transform the universal projects of equality and freedom into privileges of “regional elites”.³³

In reality, when one seeks to popularize science in the country one discovers that liberalism has forged national myths. Perhaps the most famous of these is corruption as a “Brazilian cultural trait”.³⁴ Thus, Brazilians (especially the poorest) are “emotional and thieving” according to the myth of the “cordial” man – this same myth that General Mourão argued in his interviews to justify a permanent state of war in civil society .

Declared war on the Amazonian ways of life, seen as “small” or as a “demographic void”. From the point of view of the military and technical planners, these were despicable lives, a major reason that justified authoritarian integration. The civil and military dictatorship thus left the mark of its heritage in this social space, characterized by the “denial of difference” and the refusal of specific forms of use and appropriation of land and forest. This policy nurtured the logic of “internal colonization” which naturalized an expropriating and predatory model of development capable of even naturalizing the slave-owning forms of employment of the workforce in the region.

Neide Esterci is right to point out that at a time when there was no denunciation to the International Labor Organization (ILO) and in a pre-constitutional era of 1988, the voices of forest workers, a kind of green melancholy, were lost, because “thousands of young men were brought illegally over long distances to clear the bush. Many did not return”.³⁵

And yet, on the São Mateus Islands (Barcarena), where part of the project was developed, it was possible to observe among açaí producers a picture of what Hayek (the famous philosopher of the market) predicted and defended as authoritarian liberalism. For him, a “liberal dictator would be preferable to a democratic government without the principles of liberalism”.³⁶ They are agricultural producers who appear as small magnates of a new commercial export product. From the perspective of these producers, the solidarity economy is not of interest, but the option for the hard and invisible hand of the market.

In this same imaginary unfolds a moral capitalism, responsible, empathetic and supposedly “engaged” with the community. This constitutes one of the main strategies of neoextractivist corporations to sell the image of a “negotiating” entity. This image, however, contrasts with the testimonies of community leaders in the Barcarena region, who denounce various levels of violence: from symbolic to physical, from financial to military-judiciary. The communities describe the fear of both the discursive practice of neoextractivism: the type of progress is inexorable and the “tractor will run over” ³⁷or the fear of the architecture that these companies implant in the region, whose comfortable interior is filtered by cameras and security guards – an interior that shows that it is not a negotiating environment. The gardens, the railings and the guards show the place of non-rights, a space of silencing.

Neoextractivism thus implies the configuration of a certain spatial order that expresses the social distance between mineral exploration agents and the local populations that suffer the undesired consequences of their activities.³⁸

Likewise, the words resettlement and compensation are assimilated as a social nightmare for riverside and quilombola communities. Nightmare in the sense that they are communities based on ancestry: the history of work, the community burial rituals, the tree planted by the ancestor and the narratives told around that same tree that was absorbed as family heritage.

In this sense, “It is disregarded that there are intangible losses that cannot be monetarily quantified, such as sacred places, relationships of belonging, self-built houses and trees planted by ancestors”.³⁹ These communities also bear witness to the technical and bureaucratic rituals of these companies, such as the numbering or codification of houses - included in relocation or compensation plans, as well as the prohibitions imposed on these communities so that they do not build anything else in their houses on their own territory.

On the (re)encounter between the public school and the riverside way of life

One of the most notorious weaknesses in school curricula and teaching materials in public schools in the North is the lack of a critical approach to the place and role of Amazonian characters in the country's independence. The reflection on the bicentennial of science in Brazil promoted by SNCT-2022 would be an excellent opportunity to bring this subject to the fore.

When we refer to the importance of studying the Amazonian way of life in the popularization of science, we are referring to a political ancestry that contributes to public processes that reflect our history beyond a “southeastern, male and imperial” historiography, in which “others regional origins and protagonisms” acquire other formats and dynamics.⁴⁰ In place of the imperial figure, the intendant and the colonel, it proposes the rehabilitation of ancestral characters, such as: the cabano rebel, the quilombolas, the healer, the forest worker with his knowledge.

Figure 1. Ribeirinho explaining to students about the rubber cycle and the type of work of his grandparents.

This political ancestry, which opposes traditional historiographies, highlights the fact that the riverside way of life in the Amazon is still seen as a backward life. However, this does not mean that this way of life has not been assimilated by modernizing and media processes. The tribal, the local, the tropical became in themselves products of acculturation, types of phenomenon that Darcy Ribeiro called “reflex modernization” or even caricatures. If this phenomenon did not give rise to new ethnic figures, it engendered new products and processes of neocolonialism.

The difference, however, no longer lies in “destroying or rendering old ways of life obsolete”⁴¹ and, yes, gourmetize them, transforming them into modes of consumption without altering the marginalized living conditions of its inhabitants. Thus, it is possible that the “backward life” of these peoples can be experienced with emotion, as historical and ecological eccentricity.

In fact, the image of progress in Brazil has always absorbed colonizing content. Riverside life has always been seen as an appendage of animal life – backward and uneducated – in need of religious or scientific conversion. In this regard, in relation to both the pastoral transformation of the soul and the positivist transformation of rationality, it is important to highlight what Theodor Adorno mentions about the animal to illustrate many times the very vision of progress imposed on these communities. According to Theodor Adorno, the “animal responds to the name and does not have a self”⁴²; thus riverside life is objectified in its subjectivity, as it can only be authorized by organizing reason when docile, friendly and harmless eccentricity is legitimized.

In this way, the Nature and Culture project turned to pedagogical work on the islands of São Mateus de Barcarena (116 km from the capital Belém), proposing a socialization of learning between public school students and the riverside community. This socialization, however, was carried out through a critical reflection on the famous myth of “Brazilianness” and the “cordial man”: paradigms of the social sciences that also affected the image of the Amazonian man, that is, that “every Brazilian is cordial, emotional and a thief”.⁴³ Indeed, if the work of popularizing science is an empirical research, it would be necessary to overcome the canonized view of the “warm, emotional and open personality”⁴⁴ as an extension of the cordial man's negativity and his patrimonialism.

Another canonical vision – a colonial myth – was undoubtedly the teaching of history that advocated an absolute transition from indigenous to African labor, as if from this “transition” these two worlds: “indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans” were more in touch. Recent anthropological and historiographical studies show, on the contrary, that the slave economy from the XNUMXth to the XNUMXth century became more complex with indigenous and African workers. But contact between the slave quarters and the huts was not restricted to the world of work.

If, on the one hand, the indigenous people were trained militarily and used in campaigns to imprison blacks and fugitives, on the other hand, ethnic and political alliances took place in the depths of the forests and on the banks of rivers. These relationships could be cooperative or violent. Indigenous and Africans took refuge in mocambos, quilombos or villages and, at the same time, could attack each other in other contexts and other territorialities.⁴⁵

In any case, the Nature and Culture project proposed to take public school students to visit the domestic aesthetics of the riverside people, simple houses that do not fail to emphasize gardening, care for plant and animal species (dogs, birds and, often the very fish that are fed with leftovers from lunch). A scenario that often contrasts with the prejudice of the urban man who assimilated that the caboclo lives in the dirt. The interiority of riverside spaces shows an attachment to natural beauty and even the reinvention of everyday objects to adorn their homes: seeds, palm trees, açaí seeds and the preservation of ancestral medicine in handmade vases. This school/riverside experience is directed towards another historical reflection, namely: the issue of hygiene and hygienism.

It was necessary to resume the historical reflection that in Brazil (from the Empire to the Republic) cleanliness was closely associated with the conception of order and progress. Not by chance, in the XNUMXth century, the Eurocentric view harbored an ambivalent feeling in relation to the cleanliness of the Brazilian population: sometimes as a people who spit a lot and, at the same time, sported spittoons (as a decorative part of the house or as tools for the good health of lungs), sometimes like the taste for baths, for washing feet, for ironed clothes as habits of the virtues of Brazilians.⁴⁶

But, in general, when public school students socialize with the riverside way of life, they are returning to the Arenditian proposal that the concept of culture originates from the Latin word colere, which means “cultivate, inhabit, take care of, create and preserve”.⁴⁷ This exchange of experiences shows that the “man's dealings with nature” – something that students can observe at work and in riverside dwellings – can be applied to their lives, since the very meaning of life is given by culture as a way of living, of preserving, of creating.

Figure 2. Students, teachers and riverside dwellers gathered around a century-old samaum tree to exchange experiences.

Finally, gathered around a century-old samaum tree – where students listen to reports on the social and cultural life of riverside dwellers – an important reunion takes place. I say reunion because it is not uncommon for many students from the North to have grown up with their backs to the forest. In this reunion, the school learns that biology is a social reality and society itself is a biocultural reality. Popularizing science among students and riverside dwellers means showing that there is a polarity between biological life and cultural life.

As the philosopher Ernst Cassirer says, one always seeks “stabilization and evolution”, since if, on the one hand, one desires “fixed and stable forms of life”, on the other, the search “to break this rigid plane”, an incessant dimension of the struggle between “the reproductive and creative forces”. ⁴⁸

*Flávio Valentim de Oliveira is a professor of philosophy. Author, among other books, of Slaves, wild and crazy: studies on the figure of animality in the thought of Nietzsche and Foucault (Ed. Dialectic).

Notes

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1. Nature and culture project. Science, technology and ancestral knowledge through 200 years of Amazonian ways of life. Call SNCT-2022. CNPQ/MCTI/FNDCT. Process 404398/2022-7.

2. ABRUCIO, Luiz Fernando. “Bolsonarism and Education: when the goal is to deconstruct a public policy” in AVRITZER, Leonardo; KERCHE, Fabio; MARONA, Marjorie (Orgs.). Bolsonaro government. Democratic setback and political degradation. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2021, p. 264.

3. HOCHSTETLER, Kathryn. “The environment in the Bolsonaro government” in AVRITZER, Leonardo; KERCHE, Fabio; MARONA, Marjorie (Orgs.). Bolsonaro government. Democratic setback and political degradation. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2021, p.274.

4. Ibid., p. 281.

5. FIGUERÔA, Silvia. “Science & technology in Brazil: an ever-present theme” in BOTELHO, André; SCHWARCZ, Lilia M. (Orgs.). Brazilian agenda. Themes of a changing society. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2011, p.112.

6. Ibid, p.114

7. Idem, p.113.

8. PONDE, Luís Felipe. “The Making of a Pessimist” in Why did I turn right. São Paulo: Três Estrelas, 2014, p. 51.

9. ROSENFELD, Denis. “The left against the grain of history”. in Why did I turn right. São Paulo: Três Estrelas, 2014, p.89.

10. ADORNO, TW Aspects of the new right-wing radicalism. São Paulo: Unesp, 2020, p.54.

11. Ibidem, p.55.

12. Idem, p.50.

13. Idem, p.55.

14. Same

15. KLEMPERER, Victor. LTI. The Language of the Third Reich. Rio de Janeiro: Contraponto, 2009, p.102.

16. Ibidem, p.103.

17. ROCHA, Camila; SOLANO, Esther. “Bolsonaro's rise and the popular classes” in AVRITZER, Leonardo; KERCHE, Fabio; MARONA, Marjorie (Orgs.). Bolsonaro government. Democratic setback and political degradation. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2021, p.23-24.

18. SOUZA, Jesse. “The Deception of Combating Corruption: Or How to Stupidize People Who were Born Smart?” in SOUZA, J.; VALIM, R. (Coords.) rescue Brazil. São Paulo: Contracurrent/Boitempo, 2018, p.18.

19. BUTLER, Judith. Bodies in alliance and the politics of the streets. Notes for a performative theory of assembly. Rio de Janeiro: Brazilian Civilization, 2018, p.7-9.

20. AVRITZER, Leonardo. “Politics and anti-politics in the two years of Bolsonaro’s government”. in AVRITZER, Leonardo; KERCHE, Fabio; MARONA, Marjorie (Orgs.). Bolsonaro government. Democratic setback and political degradation. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2021, p.19.

21. ROLNIK, Suely. “For Brazil to ward off fascism”. Other words. 22/01/2023. Available in: https://outraspalavras.net/descolonizacoes/suelyrolnik-para-o-brasil-esconjurar-o-fascismo/. Accessed on: 24/01/2023.

22. Ibid.

23. SOUZA, Jesse. “The Deception of Combating Corruption: Or How to Stupidize People Who were Born Smart?” in SOUZA, J.; VALIM, R. (Coords.) rescue Brazil. São Paulo: Contracurrent/Boitempo, 2018, p.27.

24. Ibid.

25. PRATA DE SOUZA, Jorge. “Cholera, tuberculosis and smallpox: diseases and their bodies” in DEL PRIORE, Mary; AMANTINO, Marcia (Orgs.). History of the body in Brazil. São Paulo: UNESP, 2011, p.223-224.

26. WELLER, Leonardo; SANT'ANNA, André Albuquerque. “Past Epidemics and Covid 19: What Can We Learn?” in YOUNG, Frickmann; MATIAS, Carlos Eduardo; CURY, João Felipe (Orgs.). Covid 19. Environment and public policies. São Paulo: Hucitec, 2020, p.151.

27. ROCHA, Camila; SOLANO, Esther. “Bolsonaro's rise and the popular classes” in AVRITZER, Leonardo; KERCHE, Fabio; MARONA, Marjorie (Orgs.). Bolsonaro government. Democratic setback and political degradation. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2021, p. 28-33.

28. Ibid.

29. OLIVEIRA, Dalila Andrade. “Education in Brazil” in Brazilian schedule. Themes of a changing society. BOTELHO, André; SCHWARCZ, Lilia Moritz (Orgs.). São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2011, p. 181-182.

30. Ibid.

31. LIMA SANTOS, Denilson. “Ancestral knowledge: fabrics and poetic prints in the web of life”. New rev. Pac. Valparaiso, no. 74, p. 243-258, Jun. 2021. Available in http://dx.doi.org/10.4067/S0719-51762021000100243

32. HARRIS, Mark. Rebellions in the Amazon. Cabanagem, race and popular culture in Northern Brazil. 1798-1840. Campinas, São Paulo: EDUNICAMP, 2017.p.220-221.

33.Ibidem, p.223.

34.SOUZA, Jesse. “The Deception of Combating Corruption: Or How to Stupidize People Who were Born Smart?” in SOUZA, J.; VALIM, R. (Coords.) rescue Brazil. São Paulo: Contracurrent/Boitempo, 2018, p. 22.

35. ESTERCI, Neide. Amazon: traditional peoples and the struggle for indigenous rights Brazilian schedule. Themes of a changing society. BOTELHO, André; SCHWARCZ, Lilia Moritz (eds.). São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2011, p.38-39.

37. MAIA, Laís Jabace; BARROS, Juliana Neves. “Mega-ventures and resistance in neo-extractivist contexts: the perspective of those affected” in ACSELRAD, Henri (Org.) Neo-extractivism and authoritarianism. Affinities and convergences. Rio de Janeiro: Garamond, 2022, p. 173-174.

38. Ibidem, p.178-179.

39. Idem, p. 80,

40. Brasil Jr. A, Schwarcz L, Botelho A. INDEPENDENCE, MODERNISM AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES: A CONVERSATION WITH LILIA SCHWARCZ AND ANDRÉ BOTELHO. Sociol Antropol [Internet]. 2022;12(Sociol. Antropol., 2022 12(2)). Available from: https://doi.org/10.1590/2238-38752022v12211.

41. RIBEIRO, Darcy. The civilizing process. Stages of sociocultural evolution. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997, p.198.

42. ADORNO, Theodor W.; HORKHEIMER, Max. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 1985, p. 230-231.

43. SOUZA, Jesse. “The Deception of Combating Corruption: Or How to Stupidize People Who were Born Smart?” in SOUZA, J.; VALIM, R. (Coords.) rescue Brazil. São Paulo: Contracurrent/Boitempo, 2018, p.24.

44. Ibid.

45. SCHWARCZ, Lilia M.; GOMES, Flávio (Eds.). Dictionary of slavery and freedom. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2018, p.260-266.

46. ​​SANT'ANNA, Denise Bernuzzi de. “Hygiene and hygienism between the Empire and the Republic” in Del Priori M.; Amantino, M. (Orgs). History of the body in Brazil. São Paulo: Unesp, 2011, p.284-285.

47. ARENDT, Hannah. Between the past and the future. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1992, p.265.

48. CASSIRER, Ernst. philosophical anthropology. São Paulo: Mestre Jou, 1972, p.78-79.

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