By ALMERINDO WINDOW AFONSO*
Report on a journey through Brazilian sociology
I do not want to leave aside the founding fathers of sociology, who are the unavoidable canonical authors par excellence, and so many others in their wake, with and without convergent paths and contributions. But, at this stage of my life, I prefer to pick up and reread (more slowly) authors who were part of my initial training in political and social sciences, and some of whom, circumstantially, I called upon in later stages of my academic career, although I can always find many of them again, at any time, in books and articles that remain on the shelves of my library waiting to be highlighted or simply revisited. Without the constraints of metrics and deadlines, which, in fact, I struggled with and never got along with, I am trying (I said trying) to slow down – sympathizing, now more than ever, with slow science – and, above all, with a different perspective, experience and motivation. And furthermore, I completely agree when I see it written that “as an intellectual discipline, the social experiences of its practitioners always count for sociology, and a lot”[I].
In this sense, starting with a brief retrospective, the chains that follow are also justified by this.
From the initial (and initiatory) years of higher education, I cannot help but start by remembering the late Argentine sociologist and essayist Horácio González who, between 1977 and 1980, was the professor who most influenced me academically, during my years at the School of Sociology and Politics of São Paulo (still a 'complementary institution of USP') – the times of exile that, metaphorically, he called the “Brazilian parenthesis”. In classes, but also in frequent informal gatherings with students, I remember by heart some of the immense authors he referenced (not only sociologists), most of them French, from the unavoidable Émile Durkheim, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, to the Germans Max Weber, Karl Marx or Walter Benjamin, rarely English, of whom I remember Richard Hoggart, the author of The uses of literacy – some Marxists, neo-Marxists, post-structuralists, existentialists, others more difficult to catalogue. I acquired and read one or another (in the possible translations then available, some, half hidden, for sale at Djalma's bookstore, or at a newsstand on Avenida Paulista, in the classics collection). The Thinkers, published by Abril Cultural). And of those I have from that time, I also have some written by Horácio himself (either published in Brazil or acquired in Buenos Aires, on a memorable trip in which I visited him, together with our mutual friend, retired professor from USP, Afrânio Catani). After Horácio left us, some republished texts appeared, now more accessible, either individually or in anthologies. online.
Horácio – a sociologist, critical intellectual, professor (later distinguished director of the National Library of Argentina) – was above all a brilliant interpreter of multiple readings and ongoing reconstructions, not only of authors and theoretical-conceptual currents, but of world views. In a country still under military dictatorship, his classes, without any hint of proselytism, were an oasis of academic freedom and a space for the exercise of critical thinking, not unrelated to this a singular creativity and an unusual erudition, enhanced by the expression of convictions and doubts, gestures and laughter, and the (not infrequently syncretic) scribbles he made on the blackboard, losing himself and captivating us in the incursions, derivations, relationships and quotations that often exceeded our capacity for immediate comprehension, but which were always provocatively disturbing for students (like me) thirsty for knowledge of the social sciences and, in particular, sociology. In addition to the great deal I learned, many other things were recorded, and only years later was I able to understand and delve deeper into them.
Now rereading the text of a conference given by Horace in São Paulo – “Meditaciones Brasileñas” [ii]–, I found the reference he makes to Fernando Henrique Cardoso (FHC) curious due to the fact that the then President of Brazil evoked Marx's 18th Brumaire, reprising an indirect quote in Sad Tropics, by Lévi-Strauss. And on this subject, he makes some notes with his usual perspicacity: “And if it was indeed a meeting of appointments, it is not common to hear a President of the Nation invoke the 18 Brumaire. […] we can assume that in the case of President Cardoso we are witnessing the overwhelming fusion between the history of Brazilian sociology and the maximum expression of State power”. And, further on, he adds: “Cardoso is the creator of an intellectual history linked to the University of San Pablo, to the game of theories, to the political debates of the 60s, to the hopes of the left, to the inagotable discussions and recurring on the role of intellectuals. El 18 Brumario […] allows us to allude to a blurred past of commitments and then claim a present that with just mentioning it can obtain a melancholic indulgence when buried, citing it, in the past”[iii]. For those who are not familiar with the episode, I would like to clarify that FHC, after assuming the role of governor, began to be considered a kind of apostate by many of his peers, and several versions have emerged as to whether or not he told them to forget what he wrote as a sociologist. I summon here the old Thomas's theorem because it seems to apply well to this case: regardless of whether it is true or false, when people define certain situations as real, they are real in their consequences. For many the situation was real and the consequences were, at the very least, enough to build a fable – from you fable narratur, I remember in this regard this Latin expression that I heard for the first time in Horace's classes and that he used metaphorically, knowing that its origin referred to the Satires of another Horace (this poet and philosopher from ancient Rome).
Nothing unusual, therefore, since affirming and denying, or generating contradictory perceptions of one thing or another, or both at the same time, are recurring actions that have been understood in different ways, and are, in fact, part of the history of ideas itself (or of a subfield that some call the history of lies). The contributions are very old, even before Saint Augustine addressed the issue, or Kant spoke of the possibility or not of an ethics in (or of) lying, passing through Hannah Arendt's reflection on lying in politics, many other voices were heard.[iv]. I do not intend to say (nor do I know) much more than this. I am only interested, for the purpose of this draft, in suggesting that this supposed appeal by FHC regarding the forgetting of his work does not fail to reveal the old tension between the scientist and the politician (it is always worth revisiting Weber in this regard).
Interestingly, when it comes to tensions and contradictions between the scientist (social in this case) and the politician, as in FHC, the inferences have some similarity with what happened with Anthony Giddens who never escaped venomous criticism and some discredit among his peers for having been an inspiration for the third way of the governments of T. Blair. It makes no sense to say that this is the curse of this political-ideological version, but, by coincidence, the governments of FHC (and the management of Bresser Pereira focused on the reform of the State) configured the Brazilian version of third way, translating, at least in part, the hybridism of some policies in that period. In this regard, for example, the merits of the advances in universalizing access to primary education (in a logic still referable to the welfare state) are widely recognized, in a social and political context (perhaps, better yet, in an interregnum) where new political-administrative concepts were proposed to make the old State/market dichotomy more permeable, giving rise to a tripartite re-articulation, now counting on the community/civil society, reconfigured in the non-state public. Perhaps it was just an anticipatory rehearsal, because the alternative that was on the agenda at the time did not prevent the Brazilian recontextualization of the already emerging neoliberal orthodoxy. In this regard, I believe that much has already been studied, but also much still needs to be studied or explored in greater depth.
But as I had no intention of doing any draft In order to describe the governance of that period, I would like to return to a semi-academic record, with its hint of autobiography. And, with this caveat, still on the subject of FHC, I will briefly recall a small fragment of memory. I am curious to know more, for example, about the (sociological) balance of what FHC did or did not do as a sociologist, including his term as President of the ISA – International Sociological Association (1982-1986) – a position that led him to Lisbon at the time of the creation of the APS – Portuguese Sociological Association. I can no longer remember exactly, but it was certainly in 1985 that I crossed paths with him, when he was both president of the ISA and serving as Senator. On that occasion, we exchanged a few brief words, and I remembered having asked what my area of specialization in sociology was (I tried to get by and answered urban sociology, I suppose because I had read and studied something by Manuel Castells, and still knew very little about the sociology of education). A few years earlier (in the late 80s), FHC had also been one of the professors on the course I took on The international system and third world countries, sponsored by the Institute of Latin American Relations and the Institute of Third World Studies, both at the time located at PUC/SP (I don't know if they still exist), and by the Association of Sociologists of the State of São Paulo. Before that, in an undergraduate course, I had already read and abundantly underlined the much-referenced book, which I still have, Dependency and Development in Latin America [v]. This is the simple record of my closest contact with FHC. That is also why I remain curious, not only to learn more about what social scientists think about his contributions to Brazilian sociology, but also because I would like to read his biography in more detail, as I am an enthusiast of this literary genre. I particularly like what is reported about the meetings, influences and disagreements with social scientists who are so different and have such unique backgrounds and worldviews, such as Florestan Fernandes and Albert Hirschman, among many others. And, equally, what former colleagues, such as Francisco de Oliveira and Arthur Giannotti, have to say about him (sometimes with scathing criticism). A former student of FHC, and later also a colleague, Gabriel Cohn, was the supervisor of Horácio González's doctoral thesis in sociology, which I began by mentioning in the opening pages of this text. With an interesting academic career, Cohn is considered one of the sociologists who has the most in-depth knowledge of Max Weber's work. Interestingly, in an interview in which he masterfully explains Weber's vision, when asked whether the work of this great classic has any relevance for education, Gabriel Cohn acknowledges that Weber does not have a systematic reflection in this field, but that his perspective is still relevant for thinking about education, having had, among other concerns, with the “changes in the university” and with the “bureaucratization of the production of knowledge”, also suggesting that Weber can perfectly be called upon “to decipher the dynamics of the classroom”, the understanding of the social processes that occur in this context, the shared meanings, the interactions, the conflicts... because the “instruments he offers” are equally pertinent for “studying the internal dynamics of the educational process”. [vi].
To sociologically elucidate what might be present in a context microphone, or same meso, I have no idea whether Max Weber's comprehensive perspective influenced Howard Becker's work or not, but the truth is that symbolic interactionism has one of its pillars in the production of shared meanings that actors produce and attribute when they interact in a given context or social situation – and, at least in this aspect, the sociological contributions of these authors, so different, can be complementary. Here is a path to explore.
But of course I do not intend (although it would be a stimulating exercise) to confront, in a theoretically and methodologically sustained way, many of the sociologists I have read, in very diverse works and texts of different intensities. I would be incapable of doing it well, and when I did, I only did it tangentially. What always remains is a lot of learning to happen. I am essentially a critical “consumer” of the available social theory, which I try to summon to understand the world and social reality. Imagining productive dialogues, that is interesting. They are always, at the very least, hypotheses to consider. That is why I remembered to summon Howard Becker following Cohn's observation in relation to M. Weber and his possible contribution (also) to understanding education and the classroom. These are those connections, half read, half lived, in this case, at the level of the symbolic as a place of the meanings that subjects produce in interaction. And it was also my experience of more than a decade working with institutionalized adolescents and with behaviors divergent which led me, years later, at the beginning of my academic career, to make an incursion into the microsociology of the classroom, having studied disciplinary processes in a school context, from an interactionist perspective[vii]. It was mainly in the work outsiders from Becker that I found the concepts of symbolic interactionism that I needed for what I set out to study. In addition, his life story, his way of being in academic life, his privileged subjects, his writing style and the unique way in which he carried out and understood research, always provoked great curiosity and intellectual admiration in me.
Howard Becker has been to Brazil several times, at the invitation of anthropologist Gilberto Velho, organizer and author, among others, of the book Deviation and Divergence [viii]. Among other things, the Chicago School sociologist, “who used Gilberto Velho’s office as his headquarters, had plenty of time to explore the practices of his office”. With many books and other publications available there, he explored various readings in Portuguese. He says in this regard that it was through one of these readings, suggested by Gilberto Velho, that he discovered several fundamental authors who led him to understand the development of social sciences in Brazil, and he began to “feed a growing interest in António Cândido”, but also in Florestan Fernandes, Darcy Ribeiro and other Brazilian social scientists and intellectuals. And regarding this trivial episode in the lives of two academics, Becker discusses at length the coincidences that help to construct the history of a given knowledge, as forms of “useful imaginary”. These coincidences (or contingencies) therefore have many interesting particularities because they make us believe that “things are not exactly random, but they are also completely determined”[ix]Will there be more coincidences from here on?
*Almerindo Afonso Window is a professor at the Institute of Education of the University of Minho.
Notes
[I] André Botelho and António Brasil Jr. Florestan Fernandes: sociological cosmopolitanism. In JV Tavares dos Santos (org.). Critical cosmopolitan sociology. Autonomous City of Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2024, p.140.
[ii] Horacio Gonzalez. Brazilian Meditations. In Afrânio Catani (Org.). Latin America: impasses and alternatives, New York, University of Chicago Press, 2000, pp. 163-189.
[iii] Ibidem, P. 669-170.
[iv] Hannah Arendt. The Lie in Politics. Madrid, Alliance.
[v] Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto. Dependency and Development in Latin America New York, Oxford, 1977, 4th ed.
[vi] Gabriel Cohn, https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=Gabriel+Cohn+e+FHC&mid=04FA179F1A2165B75AAC04FA179F1A2165B75AAC&FORM=VIRE
[vii] Almerindo J. Afonso, The Disciplinary Process as a Means of Social Control in the Classroom. Braga, University of Minho, 1991.
[viii] Gilberto Velho (Org.). Deviance and Divergence: A Critique of Social Pathology. Rio, Zahar, 1981, 4th ed.
[ix] Howard Becker. Trucos del Oficio: how to conduct your research in social sciences. Buenos Aires, Siglo Veintiuno editors, 2009, pp. 49-55.
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