Lilia Moritz Schwarcz

Espetáculo da miscigenação

In the late nineteenth century, Brazil was seen as a huge laboratory for racial experimentation. This view of a country of hybrid races, constructed by countless foreign visitors, was also accepted by the Brazilian scientists working in various teaching and research centers: historical and geographical institutes, museums of ethnography, law and medicine schools. Oddly enough, however, it was these intellectuals, believers in models of racial determinism, who popularized an extremely pessimistic view of the future of this nation made by miscegenation. The challenge faced by the present article is to apprehend the originality of local thinkers and the unlikely juxtaposition of two supposedly incompatible models: liberalism and racism.

Simpósio: cinco questões sobre o pensamento social brasileiro

Twelve eminent professors and researchers respond to the questionnaire that aims to explore not only the theoretical concepts about the area, but also ways to work in research, teaching, training programs and develop courses. The result is a consistent overview of the research area of the Brazilian social thought, its development, and current challenges.

Ao vencedor as batatas 30 anos: crítica da cultura e processo social: entrevista com Roberto Schwarz

This interview, given by Roberto Schwarz on August 24, 2007 at his house in Sao Paulo, has integrated the activities elaborated by the Grupo de Trabalho Pens...

Questões de fronteira: sobre uma antropologia da história

The article investigates the way anthropology deals with historical processes. Focusing on a wide range of theoretical schools, it tries to analyze the role played by history in each tradition, as well as understand how it helped build anthropology as a discipline. Taking as guideline the work of authors such as Levi-Strauss, Marshall Sahlins and Thomas Mann, the author discusses the notion of time not only in distant cultures, but also in occidental society.

Black nannies: hidden and open images in the paintings of Nicolas-Antoine Taunay

ABSTRACT This article discusses the contradictions faced by a select group of academic and neoclassic French painters, most importantly Nicolas-Antoine Taunay, when visiting Brazil in the early nineteenth century. Taunay and his peers, formed by the Enlightenment, were not used to slavery and found depicting its violent system of compulsory labour extremely difficult. In what follows I examine Taunay’s ‘challenges’ in painting slavery, and especially in depicting the enslaved black nannies. If enslaved men were always depicted working, enslaved black nannies appeared in the paintings in highly ambiguous ways. Taunay’s depictions of enslaved nannies, I show, simultaneously denounced and reinforced the slave system.

Machado de Assis: Creator and Character in a Troubled Scene

This chapter functions as a historical introduction to Machado and the political and social environment in which he lived and with which he dialogued through his work. His life spanned seven decades that saw substantial political changes during the formative years of Brazilian nationhood. The Paraguayan War, the abolition of slavery, and the declaration of the republic are merely a few of the landmark events that impacted Machado’s life and work as a Brazilian writer. Schwarcz also traces his life from his agregado childhood to the cementation of his literary and cultural acclaim, from his beginnings as a typographer apprentice and teenage poet to founding the Brazilian Academy of Letters.

LIMA BARRETO LEITOR DE MACHADO DE ASSIS: LEITOR DE SI PRÓPRIO

The main goal of this article is to elaborate a balance of the impressions, ambivalent for sure, that Lima Barreto had on Machado de Assis. This new angle on Lima Barreto as a reader of Machado can be developed through the reading of articles, letters, short stories, where Barreto explicitly or implicitly refers to Machado. The comparison between them became more radical over the years, eliding what was a kind of personal, political and literary strategy for Lima Barreto, whose goal was to find another place for himself in the republic of letters.

CARNEIRO, Edison. A sabedoria popular, São Paulo, Martins Fontes, 2008, 180 pp.

“Nao temos pesquisadores do negro. Nao nos aproximamos, sequer, das margens do grande rio de alegria e beleza que o escravo, com suor e sangue, fez surgir no cenario de seus sofrimentos. Mas o rio corre – e um dia se misturara definitivamente a todas as aguas que formam a nacionalidade brasileira. Se nao o explorarmos, se nao utilizarmos a sua energia, se nao navegarmos em todo o seu curso, tanto pior para nos.” E dessa maneira que, em 1957, no livro A sabedoria popular – que acaba de ser reeditado –, o historiador, etnologo e folclorista Edison Carneiro definia a situacao da “cultura negra no Brasil”.

A vadiagem e sua inscrição nos corpos

ngana-se aquele que pensa que tudo que a memoria faz O lembrar.Os arquivos estao repletos de lembrancas, mas tambOm devastadospor silŒncios e omissies: assim como O funcao lembrar, faz parte dooficio esquecer.No caso brasileiro tal logica nao poderia ser diferente. Se a memoriasempre fez parte S na nossa cultura S dessa prAEtica do registro, aoficializacao de tal ato, e sobretudo das prAEticas criminais, tem data elugar. Foi no ano de 1906 que se inaugurou no pais uma nova politica deidentificacao para fins criminais, assim como se formularam as primeirascriticas a seu uso extensivo. Por sinal, fazia parte desse debate o uso dacâmara fotogrAEfica S as famosas ‚chapas™ tiradas nas delegacias, que tinhaum carAEter oposto a voga dos daguerreotipos e das cartes de visite . Se oretrato era fartamente utilizado pelas elites brasileiras S que viam neleuma maneira de perpetuar uma certa memoria que dignificava e falavada ‚civilizacao entre nos™ S, radicalmente diferente era seu uso parafins judiciais. Neste caso instalava-se uma politica de ‚humilhacao evexame™, ou entao um certo fiestigma da desonrafl, como tao bemdenominou Barata Ribeiro.Mas a fotografia O so pretexto para comeco de anAElise. Ela seriacrescentemente substituida pela impressao digital, que se tornariaobrigatoria como identificacao em 1932. Com efeito, nao foram poucas astOcnicas de identificacao criminal, assim como tornavam-se sofisticados osaparatos cientificos, juridicos e policiais que protegiam o Estado da acaodos individuos criminosos. No entanto, se muitos foram os registros, maisinteressa pensar na sua eficAEcia simbolica e em sua rAEpida disseminacao nascapitais brasileiras, nas primeiras dOcadas do sOculo XX. Nesse contextocriavam-se a figura do ‚cidadao criminoso™ e a imagem de um grande arquivoque corporificava uma nacao utopica, uma vez que seriada, classificada enomeada.Em torno dessa questao desenvolve-se a obra de Olivia Maria Gomesda Cunha, que faz dos arquivos de identificacao um mote para pensarna producao da memoria que se constroi sobre certos sujeitos sociais.Para tanto, elegeu como objetos de estudo os discursos e as prAEticas de