This book provides an overview of the institutional and intellectual development of sociology in Brazil from the early 1900s to the present day; through military coups, dictatorships and democracies. It charts the profound impact of sociology on Brazilian public life and how, in turn, upheavals in the history of the country and its universities affected its scientific agenda. This engaging account highlights the extent of the discipline's colonial inheritance, its early institutionalization in São Paulo, and its congruent rise and fall during repeated regime changes. The authors' analysis draws on original research that maps the concentration of research interests, new developments, publications and centers of production in Brazilian sociology, using qualitative and quantitative data. It concludes with a reflection on the potential impact of the recent far-right turn in Brazilian politics on the future of the discipline. This book contributes a valuable country study to the history of sociology and will appeal to a range of social scientists in addition to scholars of disciplinary historiography, intellectual and Brazilian history.
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Yes, you can access Sociology in Brazil by Veridiana Domingos Cordeiro,Hugo Neri in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Sociology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Sociology in Brazil is a Brazilian Sociology. Since its inception, the main role of sociological research in Brazil has been understanding the country’s society. As the society changed, so did sociology. Here we provide an outline of the argument of the book, and a table compressing the historical mapping.
Keywords
Brazilian sociologyHistory of sociologyIntellectual historyInstitutional history
End Abstract
In a country with 84 undergraduate courses of social sciences, 56 graduate courses of sociology, and a history of sociology that dates back to almost 130 years ago, it is a challenging mission to write a “brief” history of the discipline. It is also challenging because there is a huge Portuguese-language literature on the history of social sciences in Brazil. We gave this book the subtitle “a brief institutional and intellectual history” because in addition to teaching the subject, Brazilian sociologists have been producing sociological interpretations on different phenomena since the arrival of the first sociological ideas in the country. It is a delicate task too, because it is impossible to demonstrate the relevance of every contribution made over these years in the books and the insights of intellectuals chosen to be highlighted this (hi)story.
If we consider the classical writers of sociology and the great works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it is hard to make a case for the existence of sociological traditions outside European and American Sociology. Nevertheless, although we could have presented the literature and institutional events in our field merely as “sociology in Brazil,” we have chosen to call it “Brazilian Sociology.” European and American Sociology has obviously influenced Brazilian sociology; however, Brazil has produced an entirely autonomous and independent body of work on both theoretical and empirical matters. These innovative interpretations date back to the late nineteenth century when sociology was not even well-defined abroad. For this reason, this book, unlike others in this series, deals with the history of sociology in the years long before 1945.1 The period between the late nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth is key in understanding the whole history of sociology in Brazil.
Whenever possible, we have tried to widen not only the chronological spectrum, but also the disciplinary spectrum, since Brazilian Sociology has always maintained strong links and active and important dialogues with neighboring disciplines such as anthropology and political science. This characteristic is mutually reinforced by the fact that even today Brazil does not have undergraduate programs exclusively focused on sociology, but rather undergraduates study a combination of sociology, anthropology, and political science—or sometimes other combinations, such as sociology and anthropology, or sociology and politics. Specialization happens at the graduate level, in Master’s or Ph.D.’s programs. The profound relationship between the social sciences is a paradoxical feature that marks all of Brazilian Sociology: on the one hand, it has forced sociology to look at other approaches and engage in dialogue with them; on the other hand, sociology has always tried to emancipate itself and establish disciplinary borders as has happened with sociology in the rest of the world.
This emancipatory movement has always been a feature in Brazil among sociology and its neighboring disciplines; nonetheless it has never been an attempt to emancipate Brazilian from foreign sociologies, particularly because the sociologies produced in Portuguese-speaking countries had almost no exchange or dialogue with each other. According to Filipe Carreira da Silva’s book Sociology in Portugal: A Short History (2016), Brazilian sociology and Portuguese sociology had very few contacts as they followed their distinct trajectories. The same can be said about sociologies produced in Portuguese-speaking countries in Africa. Certainly, Brazilian sociology impoverished as a consequence of this poor contact. But this separation should also be understood to be related to the pioneering role of Brazilian sociology, which developed decades before sociology in other Portuguese-speaking countries.
This history is marked by two well defined periods: before and after the 1930s. In the first period, although neither teaching nor the existence of empirical research is recorded, there were many social analyses of Brazilian society elaborated by non-specialized intellectuals, mainly interested in formulating theoretical principles and interpretations of Brazilian society in a non-specific way. In the late 1920s, there was a crucial period of transition when sociology became part of the basic and higher education. Simultaneously, sociology began to be recognized as a science separate from other fields, especially due to its professionalization. During this period, when some major universities were opening and a more scientific and legitimate approach to social issues was being supported, the spread of sociological thought was rapid. After the 1930s, Brazilian sociology officially inaugurated its history and ever since has endured through ups and downs. Experiencing and responding to social, political, and economic changes, Brazilian sociology has been developing and expanding in many aspects since then achieving institutional amplitude, thematic variability, and intellectual consolidation—although the period of the military-oriented far-right in the country jeopardizes social sciences as a whole.
Since its birth, the Brazilian Sociology has been grounded on a strong theoretical basis imported from European sociology—in particular, from the French tradition—and from American sociology—in particular, from the Chicago School. Moreover, the objects of study have always emerged from our own complex social reality. Brazilian sociology is rarely concerned with the “far other,” but rather with our racial miscegenation, criminality and violence, urban growth, political processes, native people, human rights, and religious syncretism, among many other complex social, cultural, and political phenomena of our hybrid and heterogeneous country. There is a phrase attributed to the renowned musician and conductor Tom Jobim (Antônio Carlos Jobim) that has become a popular saying, “Brazil is not for beginners,” which is also true for social scientists. He was right. The interpretation of the Brazilian reality is a task for specialists with accurate and diverse theories, methods, and data. For almost a hundred years, Brazilian sociologists (and foreign sociologists who worked in and written about Brazil) have engagingly and unremittingly done that.
The book synthesizes this rich history in five historical chapters which cover the pre-scientific, transition, and consolidation stages, highlighting the main institutional events and sociological ideas that characterize Brazilian sociology. The sixth chapter maps the state of the art in Brazilian sociology in the most recent decades by presenting departments, undergraduate and graduate programs, journals, professionals, and most-researched topics. This attempt to condense and systematize the history of Brazilian sociology aims to present an overview of how the discipline has faced abrupt historical changes, including, the establishment of the new republic, the birth of the universities, two authoritarian periods, the urbanization process, the restoration of democracy, two presidential impeachments and the new challenge of a conservative turn. We have ventured to augment the text with short historical footnotes which will help the reader to understand the Brazilian historical context at least at a basic level.
Brazilian sociologists have been researching the history of the discipline ever since the 1960s. Among so many great works, two distinct approaches may be discerned. One seeks to understand the extent to which sociopolitical events impact on the discipline; the other articulates the ideas, theories, and methodologies developed in the country over the years. We have tried to combine both approaches, hoping to provide a complete overview to the reader. The table below organizes the main intellectuals, matters, and influences according to their periods. Despite the reductiveness, these divisions were heuristically built to simplify the complexity of the relation between historical processes and streams of thought, and intellectuals, books, laws, and institutions. The content and connections within this table will be explored in the following chapters (Table 1.1).
Table 1.1
Historical mapping
Source: Authors’ production
Footnotes
1
World War II did not play a central role in Brazilian sociology. Thus, it could never have been a watershed for the development of the discipline here.
Interpretation of the Brazilian reality is much older than the institutionalization of sociology. Since the end of the nineteenth century, the self-taught, dilettantes, and intellectuals from other disciplines have been publishing their views on contextual topics, such as the formation of the nation-state, identity, and racial miscegenation. This “social imagination” thought critically about the Brazilian reality. Proto-scientific writings appeared under the influence of both culturalism and positivism. The culturalist approach influenced further works and established a tradition called Essayism, which creatively combined literature, history, and sociology, whereas positivism waned in importance across the decades. These first “social imagineers” envisioned many of the issues further worked on by sociology in Brazil.
Unlike the Spanish practice of establishing universities in its invaded lands, their practice since the beginning of colonization, the Portuguese Crown was busy exploring and exploiting natural resources in the first three centuries of colonization. In 1808, the Portuguese Court settled down in Brazil after its flight from the Napoleonic Siege. From this date onward, Rio de Janeiro became not only the residence of the Court, but also a cosmopolitan European-style city with a considerable political, economic, and cultural significance. Only in the nineteenth century did Brazil glimpse the early signals of modernization with the establishment of higher education institutions and the opening of its ports. The arrival of the Crown acted as a catalyst in to the ongoing process of independence that every New-World colony had been passing through for the previous half-century. This lengthy process of rupture with the metropole evolved into the disintegration of the colonial system and the establishment of the nation-state. Independent Brazil was born as an empire in 1822, when Prince Pedro of Portugal declared independence from Portugal one year after his father, king Dom João VI, returned to Portugal. Pedro would become Emperor Pedro I of his own former colony.
The new nation-state was born with a need to understand what it was and in which direction it would march. This demanding political and cultural intellectual effort required a proper institutional space, and in Brazil, the only institutions of higher education were medical schools and military colleges, which could not be expected, and indeed did not deign, to address social issues. In 1827, the Emperor enacted the creation of the first law schools, which would have the task of furnishing questions and answers about our social reality, of understanding and beginning to solve the national identity puzzle: What kind...
Table of contents
Cover
Front Matter
1. Introduction
2. Before the 1930s—Interpreting the Nation State: Sociological Imagination in a Pre-institutionalized Context
3. 1930s–1940s—Institutionalizing Sociology: The Settlement of an Academic and Scientific Environment
4. 1950s–1960s: Sociology in a Golden Era of Consolidation
5. 1964–1985: The Dictatorship and the Jeopardizing Social Sciences
6. 1985–2000s: Rebuilding Sociology in the New Democracy
7. 2010s—Sociology’s State-of-Art: Graduate Programs, Academic Career, and Journals
