Relations of Power and Culture are polysemic concepts which are central categories for historical analysis. They are obligatory references in the study of a wide range of research objects: worlds of labor, social movements, citizenship, religiosity, material culture, literary culture, historiographic culture, political culture, and ideology. In adopting this focus for the area of concentration of our graduate program, we refuse a dichotomic separation between political history and social history. To the contrary we emphasize the interconnection of both, creating complex and multifaceted realties which can be examined and approached in diverse forms, depending on the theoretical and analytical reference adopted.
This research line involves projects which focus on relations and manifestations of power in societies, the uses of language, evidenced in intellectual practices, and the processes of the production, circulation, and reception of various ideas, representations, knowledge, and discursive modalities through different thematic and temporal viewpoints, favoring transcultural and interdisciplinary foci.
It starts with an expanded comprehension of the notion of power which goes beyond the categories of traditional political history, such as state, sovereignty, government, etc., considering them as effects of the functioning and dynamics of social practices and relations that are historically constructed, accentuating the multiplicity of these relations in the configuration and institutionalization of spaces, hierarchies, and social networks, in their different forms and contexts, as well as the duality of relations of domination/resistance, making more complex the study of cultural mediations, and political and intellectual practices.
The use of language – understood in various modes (textual, imagery, sound) of the symbolic elaboration of experience, socially shared and controlled – is the foundation of sociocultural relations in different historical contexts and times. Intellectual practices are delimited and organized through relations of strength which model and hierarchize knowledge, discursive systems, representations, collective identities, groups, institutions, and the individuals which produce them.
Among the research possibilities linked to reflections on the problem of language, are studies in the field of Intellectual History, which privilege, amongst other themes: the history of concepts; the history of historiography and questions and theoretical-epistemological notions, involved in the preparation of historical knowledge; the history of ideas; and the history of cultural practices and collective representations.
Using an interdisciplinary approach, among the possible research foci of intellectual history, as well as the historical authors of intellectual production, are the conditions and the contexts of the production, reception, circulation, and appropriation of collective representations, ideas, concepts, theories, images, and visions of the world, also including the analysis of constructions of social memory, protocols, and discursive strategies, material and rhetorical dimensions of texts, works, and documents, based on the reconstruction of its historical meanings.
This research line draws on various dimensions of social history, in dialogue with the perspective of economic history, political history, and cultural history, privileging relations of power, identarian constructions, the worlds of labor, and cultural practices under the auspices of hierarchies and identities of the Ancien Regime and the process of the development of capitalism. It focuses on processes of political participation, struggles for rights and citizenship, and relations of power between social actors and institutional structures in a global dynamics.
The emergence of processes of independence in the 1960s, and new social movements all over the world, which led to important questions based on various identarian demands – nationality, ethnicity, race, or gender – led, at the same time, to intense historiographic debates aimed at the need to integrate various other analytical categories and groups in their relation to class and led to the approximation between history and anthropology. Ethnographic approaches were incorporated in the analysis of historical process, taking culture to be a polysemic and conflictive field, in its material manifestations and symbolic practices produced and producers of social practices, looking for a sense of social belonging without reducing them to their determinants.
This research line focuses on customs, values, and cultural practices, in their multiple temporalities, which define and are defined by social relations in work, daily life, the spaces of leisure, and family life. Rituals, parties, and celebrations, involving uses of law, arts, and literature, are placed alongside the re-reading of more traditional objects of study, such as trade union organization and political parties as relevant themes which connect various aspects of social life in their relations with politics understood in a wide-ranging form. These elements also permeate the processes of work and relations of production, in which ethnic-racial and gender relations come to be seen as an indissociable, integral, and constituent part of the processes of formation of class, social transformation and organizational culture of relations of power.
We are thus attentive to the multiple forms by which power is constituted, including the formation of identities, the institution of hierarchies and trajectories of social mobility, based on various logics and dynamics in different temporalities. This involves understanding these logics in different moments and explaining how they are appropriated by distinct social groups.
The investigative areas mentioned place at the center of interest discussions of the local and the global. On the one hand, the micro analytical perspective allows, in addition to constructing and weaving individual trajectories, the challenging and recomposition of the context of a non-Eurocentric global history; on the other hand, the development of research on regions until recently not studied has begun to create conditions for a history which avoids the use of models focused on regions considered “central,” to propose explanations which consider relations with broader processes. In this sense, the effort of integrating the experience of a wide diversity of individual social and collective agents beyond the frontiers of a nation-state in connected and transnational, comparative and integrated histories have provided a rich exercise in historiographic renovation, through the analysis of the process of the international circulation of capital, goods, people, and ideas, and the role of institutions in the construction of relations of power.
Postado em 10/03/2020 - 14:51 - Atualizado em 18/03/2021 - 10:12
