Departament d'Humanitats i Ciències de l'Educació

This chapter is an invitation to rethink some narratives about the emergence of the modern Western world – restricted to Europe in the beginning and then expanded gradually to encompass the United States of America – and the ways in which this process has been explained through historical accounts at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is an attempt to return to a societal process that was left aside when what was happening in a ‘borderline’, liminal time and space became the status quo. More to the point, the focus here is on some aspects of what was regarded as America, the ‘New World’, before and after the modern ruptures that occurred in the liminal ‘age of revolutions’ (Wagner, 1994; Armitage and Subrahmanyam, 2010). It is argued that America went through a process of bifurcation, or divergence, of North and South, at exactly the point when certain historical events of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries started to be seen as inaugurating the modern times. In this process, many of the links which were used to make the New World as a whole a significant idea started to change in the early nineteenth century, became strongly separated out in the second half of this same century, to become irrec-oncilable after the first decades of the twentieth century.

The tendency to spatially displace imaginaries of societies and their specific historical development is not new. The interpretation of a space based on geographical orientation has indeed seldom been based on any natural idea of what the space is (Gregory 1994; Garfield 2013). Recently, though, much attention has been devoted to the discussion of space as a political and historical entity. It has been rediscovered as a privileged object for the analysis of different historical processes largely crystallised in different parts of the globe.

En el ámbito estrictamente pragmático cada uno de los proyectos políticos que hoy se citan

Neste artigo argumentamos que os temas da ação e da história presentes em alguns contos de Jorge Luis Borges antecipam alguns pontos que apareceram nas discussões pós-estruturalistas – nos campos da história, filosofia, antropologia – das últimas décadas do século XX. No seu labirinto literário-filosófico, especialmente por meio da ideia de destino, Borges explora elementos chave que se tornaram parte da noção de crítica que enfatiza as ideias de contingência e da impossibilidade de controle deliberado dos efeitos da ação humana em seu curso temporal.

The notion of multiple modernities as developed by Eisenstadt has become increasingly influential in debates about modernity and the historical formation of societies in comparative perspective. On closer inspection, the theoretical framework is less than straightforward when it comes to specific applications. This article considers Brazil from the perspective of a revised theory of multiple modernities. There has been virtually no application to specific case studies within the countries of the South. Brazil could be considered an important case study of modernity that deserves attention in its own right. The article shows that the theoretical framework of multiple modernities offers insights into the Brazilian trajectory of modernity, a consideration of which also challenges some of the assumptions of Eisenstadt’s approach. Despite the limits of the framework, the notion of multiple modernities offers a good basis for a global analysis of modernity. Greater attention needs to be given to civilizational encounters and to sources of conflict and plurality within modernity and which cannot be accounted for in terms of the principles of axiality postulated by Eisenstadt.

Drawing on archaeological findings about individuals of the archaic Brazilian ‘hunter-gatherer’ societies and on the life and work of a contemporary Brazilian artist, Paulo Nazareth, this paper argues for the use of a timeless history in which chronological historical time will be less important in sociological comparative analyses. There are processes that belong to a significant past which still inform how societies imagine themselves and which cannot be understood from the established perspective of a divided human and natural history. These processes can only be interpreted by overcoming disciplinary constraints and by assuming that history goes beyond the systematic organisation of the facts and historical evidence. There are aspects of American archaic history that are not only completely unknown to us, but they also inform societal practices and imaginary significations of the past, present and future in many New World societies. The paper critically discusses historical-sociological literature on Brazil. Based on a number of perspectives developed in the fields of philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and archaeology, it will be argued that the division of the world into ‘civilisation’ and ‘other simplistic social-historical-economical-cultural groups’ is incompatible with a comparative historical sociology that does not aim to hierarchise diff erent societal forms.

The past half century has witnessed major socio-political transformations across the globe. The end of formal European colonialism, basically achieved except for small pockets in the aftermath of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal in 1974, was followed by the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 in parallel to the one of Keynesian organized capitalism in the Northwest and of “state-led development” in much of the South, but also the rise of Asian economies, starting with Japan and now featuring China. The subsequent era of globalization and individualization was short-lived and has given way to the notion of a “multi-polar” globe marked by the at best half-intended withdrawal of the US from hegemony and the loose association of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa under the name of BRICS. What has not changed across this half century is the depletion of the earth’s resources and the pollution of the environment. This article retraces the rise of ecological issues to become a global concern, and it does so by relating shifting interpretations of the issue to assignments of political responsibility in the changing global context. Emerging from a comparative research project on Brazil, South Africa and Europe, it draws its examples from these regions, but aims at developing a more general argument about the current impact of historical power asymmetries on ways of dealing with the ecological crisis.

La entrevista ahonda en el análisis de Peter Wagner y Aurea Mota sobre los procesos de democratización que se dieron en Brasil y Sudáfrica de manera más bien tardía, considerando el fin del apartheid en este último país y una inclusión más social que política en el caso de Brasil, los que significaron, por largo tiempo la exclusión de un importante sector de la sociedad de dichos lugares. En este sentido, se debate también sobre el concepto de democracia, no solamente desde una perspectiva formal sino en especial a partir de considerar quiénes son las personas que “van quedando atrás” en los distintos procesos de avance democrático. En este marco, se discute además la supuesta “excepcionalidad” de Europa y de su centralidad en un contexto de relaciones en permanente interacción con otros territorios, interacciones que eventualmente dieron lugar al pensamiento político ilustrado y al concepto moderno de humanidad. Finalmente, se abordan las movilizaciones actuales en Chile y otros países, además del incremento de los movimientos de derecha los que, nuevamente, plantean excluir a ciertos grupos de personas de los derechos sociales y políticos, dando cuenta de la necesidad de tener una mirada global para abordar los desafíos que actualmente enfrentamos.