Anthony Leeds

A sociologia do Brasil urbano

Em meio as comemoracoes pelos 450 anos de fundacao da cidade do Rio de Janeiro, a Editora Fiocruz traz ao publico a segunda edicao de um livro que e referencia no estudo de habitacoes populares e favelas no Brasil e na America Latina. A Sociologia do Brasil Urbano, do antropologo Anthony Leeds e da cientista politica Elizabeth Leeds. O original, fruto de uma decada de pesquisas, havia sido originalmente publicado em 1978 por iniciativa do antropologo Gilberto Velho. A nova edicao, organizada por Elizabeth Leeds e pela sociologa Nisia Trindade Lima, vem reparar uma ausencia: a obra encontrava-se esgotada e, portanto, inacessivel as novas geracoes de pesquisadores. A Sociologia do Brasil Urbano apresenta analises sobre a estrutura de poder e de classes a luz da historia das favelas e dos assentamentos nao controlados na America Latina. As favelas do Rio de Janeiro, objeto privilegiado pelo estudo, foram analisadas pelo modo como foram tratadas pelo Estado e como eram desenvolvidas as politicas de habitacao...(AU)

Cities and Countryside in Anthropology

Most current discussion of “urbanism” and “urbanization” can be shown to be ethno- and temporocentric and based on a historically particular class of urban phenomena and urban forms of integration. Exegesis of text after text—whether produced by persons ostensibly doing “pure,” “objective,” descriptive, or “basic” science, or engaged in some form of application—shows systematic orientations whose axiomatic presuppositions and logical consequences can be clearly laid out as emanations of a specific world view.

On the "Shantytown" Conference Report

development of the three children in Browns study. It shows that the course of language development is much the same in Quiche as it is in English. The similarity in the acquisition of Quiche and English seems to hold at the more basic level of the individual grammatical morphemes. Brown (1973:274) found that his three subjects learned 14 grammatical morphemes in approximately the same order. Table 1 shows the mean order of acquisition of the morphemes in Browns study and the order in which Al Chaay learned a set of semantically comparable grammatical morphemes in Quiche. (The numbers for the English morphemes give their order of acquisition among the 14 morphemes that Brown studied.) The Quiche morphemes are, of course, only approximately semantically equivalent to the English morphemes. The Quiche copula, in particular, is distinct from the English copula both in meaning and in the fact that it is stressed. Such similarity in acquisition order despite the tremendous differences in the formal properties of English and Quiche morphemes is especially surprising. There are other parallels between Al Chaay and children learning English. In Quiche all nouns are marked for person. The person markers for subjects and objects are prefixed to the verb root (A stands for absolutive, Ev for ergative with vowel root, Ec for ergative with consonant root, and 1,2,3,4 for person):

'SUBJECTIVE' AND 'OBJECTIVE' IN SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL EPISTEMOLOGY*

Anthropology has often been accused, especially by social science disciplines which have modelled their epistemologies and methodologies on those of the physical sciences, 1 of being not only without rigor but especially of not being objective. Being subjective is, of course, bad.

Sociobiology, Anti-Sociobiology, Epistemology, and Human Nature

E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, the New Synthesis has received ebullient critical acclaim as a breakthrough in science in relation to its own claim to be a “new synthesis” of various biological and social sciences. It has elicited equally ebullient critical attack for its immeasurable failure to understand human cultural and social organization, a failure based on a biologically and socioculturally misconceived human nature, as well as on some basic misconceptions in biology itself. In what follows, I treat only the question of human nature which I conceive to be central to Wilson’s book and to most of the issues raised by its attackers, for whom that question is also a central, unresolved problem.