History of Culture

Research projects:

Food and drugs as a historiographical field

Description: Historically, food and drugs have been studied extensively in recent decades. The objective of the research is to relate, classify and analyse the national and international literature on the subject for the organisation of a database to subsidise academic research in a Laboratory of Food History to be formed in the History Department of the University of São Paulo.

Professor in charge: Henrique Soares Carneiro (henricarneiro@uol.com.br)

 

The construction of America: images, representations, memory

Description: The objective of the research is to study America when it arises to the European world, in the colonial period, and after independence. Our interest is to capture the images and representations developed about it, and the manipulation of memory over time.

Professor in charge: Janice Theodoro da Silva (jtheodoro@plugnet.com.br)

 

The production of body and home – the consumer society in the perspective of material culture. São Paulo, 1850-1950

Description: This project aims to construct historical frameworks in which domestic artefacts operate - production, circulation, publication, as well as their forms of allocation and uses in the house. In broad terms, we attempt to understand such material repertories (among them the body itself) in action, i.e., as members of the practices associated with this universe, which had an active role in the structuring of the consumer society in Brazil, especially in São Paulo, in the second half of the 19th century and in the first half of the 20th century. The project has an important documentary side. As this is an area of knowledge in development, it is essential to gather and treat documentary masses that are still rather dispersed.

Professor in charge: Vânia Carneiro de Carvalho (vcarvalh@usp.br)

 

Ancient and modern: dialogues about the writing of history

Description: The project aims to reflect about practices and discursive instances of historical knowledge that consider the multiple relationships between Ancient and Modern. We focused on two major themes: 1) Myth(s) of Hero(s) and 2) Narrative, Memory, and the Writing of History. Our objective is to confront the equating regarding the production of history and historical knowledge making the propositions of ancient narratives interact with their (re)formulations in multiple contexts of the western tradition, especially in the fields of historiography and modern editorial tradition.

Professor in charge: Francisco Murari Pires (murari@usp.br)

 

Latin American identities in the 19th and 20th centuries: plots and contexts

Description: The project aims to study authors who studied the national identities in the 19th and 20th centuries in Latin America, and whose writings had wide repercussions in national and, in several cases, continental historiographies. The objective of this research is to analyse representative works regarding aspects that the elaboration of these identities have followed over time, relating them with the social thinking that trivialised them, as in the case of bleaching, miscegenation, indigeneity, tellurism, national psychologies and liberalism, among others. The project includes personal research, orientation of studies surrounding the central theme, and teaching in the same area.

Professor in charge: Dario Horacio Gutierrez Gallardo (horaciog@usp.br)

 

Historical narratives and the polyphony of the Brazilian humorous language (1930-1960)

Description: Is humour an essential part of human nature, an instrument in the service of the perpetuation of the species? Or is it a cultural product changeable through time, fluid and historically generated? While recent studies in the field of neurobiology respond affirmatively to the first question, human sciences are providing important answers to the second one. Traditionally viewed by the historiography as disposable items, or, at best, as moments that relieve analytic generalisation, is a hermeneutical and research effort valid to understand the humorous manifestations, raising them from ephemeral daily life to privileged indexes of the Brazilian cultural history? Is there a Brazilian humorous language as a singular cultural artefact or as a resignification of other universal standards of humorous language? This project is a continuation and an expansion of the research on the cultural history of humour in Brazil - synthesised in the book Raízes do Riso - developing some themes approached in an essayistic way and exploring other sources and alternative materials.

Professor in charge: Elias Thome Saliba (etsaliba@yahoo.com.br)

 

Representations in the medieval West (9th-13th centuries)

Description: The objective of the research is to study the representations in the medieval West, especially between the 9th and the 13th centuries, using the confrontation of sources of various origins, usually neglected by traditional historiography, such as musical scores, biblical apocrypha, anthropomorphic reliquaries, and culinary treaties.

Professor in charge: Hilario Franco Junior (hilfranjr@zipmail.com.br or hilario.franco@itelefonica.com.br)

 

Cultural aspects of the Modern State, monarchy, and royal power in the Iberian Peninsula

Description: This project aims to: discuss the concepts of the Modern State, monarchy, royal and local power in Portugal and Spain, in the first centuries of the Modern Period; and to reflect and discuss the forms of exercise of power and the ways of governing in the Iberian monarchies (Portugal and Spain) during the centuries known as the Early Modern Period, i.e., from the 15th to the 17th century.

Professor in charge: Ana Paula Torres Megiani (megiani@usp.br)

 

Cultural and social aspects in Brazilian daily life

Description: This project aims to study the collective imagination and social practices related to work and to the Brazilian daily life in the 19th and 20th centuries with an emphasis on teaching practices, religious manifestations and cultural production linked to the processes of urbanisation and modernisation.

Professor in charge: Maria Inez Machado Borges Pinto (mimborges@zipmail.com.br)

 

Culture and society in the medieval West

Description: The project is developed in the field of the history of culture and aims to retrieve aspects of European medieval society, i.e.: the games and the playful theme; the mythology; the iconography; the religiosity and the social tensions; and the music and sonorous culture.

Professor in charge: Flávio de Campos (flaviodecampos@usp.br)

 

Popular culture and football in the city of São Paulo in the first half of the 20th century

Description: This project aims to identify, map and understand the first experiences that occurred regarding football in São Paulo in the early decades of the 20th century. These practices should necessarily be understood in the broader set of the history of the city of São Paulo, in the expansion of urban cultures, in the construction process of informal and institutional sociability networks and in sports activities, in general.

Professor in charge: José Geraldo Vinci de Moraes (zgeraldo@usp.br)

 

Between the memory and the history of popular music

Description: The narrative and historiography of the Brazilian popular music began in 1930 and until the middle of that century it kept its own characteristics. Composed mainly by journalists, critics and popular artists, popular music tried to mediate and merge diverse cultural discourses present in the society, such as folklore, culture of entertainment and musical criticism. In the 30-year period, popular musical selected and determined the historical facts, it chose its ‘most important’ characters, created periodisations, organised and determined its memory. This way, it has an authentic and complex historiographical operation and it shaped a very unique narrative that needs to be analysed and unveiled. The project counted with a FAPESP Research Support, 2007/09 biennium, concession term 2007/53586-1, and with the support of Research Projects / MCT/CNPq 02/2009 Issuance - Human, Social and Applied Social Sciences, 2009/11 biennium.

Professor in charge: José Geraldo Vinci de Moraes (zgeraldo@usp.br)

 

Spirit and modalities of medieval utopias

Description: After a long theoretical discussion on the relevance of applying the concept of utopia to the centuries preceding the work of Tomás More, several case studies were conducted on social, literary, artistic, and religious history of the Middle Ages to prove the feasibility of the concept in that period.

Professor in charge: Hilário Franco Junior (hilfranjr@zipmail.com.br or hilario.franco@itelefonica.com.br)

 

To explain, understand, narrate: an investigation on the nature of historical knowledge

Description: The theory of historical knowledge was developed, since modern times – notably from the philosophical historiography of the 18th century – according to some great interpretative lines. Applied in the analytical tradition, contemporary authors such as C. Hempel and M. White extend to history the employment of the deductive-nomological model employment of explanation and prediction, which they consider common to all sciences. The proposal contravenes the pragmatic design, which supports the contextual diversity of the explanations. Against the reductionism of history to the paradigm of natural sciences, neo-kantians and mainly Dilthey, still in the 19th century, claimed to all the sciences of man – called spiritual sciences – a statute of their own. It consisted of understanding situations and events in their particularity, without trying to explain them as cases of general laws, as in natural sciences. In the 20th century, Collingwood and then William Dray defended the understanding of historical agents as apprehension of the thinking behind the action, to disclose reasons instead of causes. In the same non-reductionist tradition, authors such as Ricoeur or Gallie emphasised the narrative character of history. However, in all cases, the analysis of the arguments shows that several models of historical knowledge are not exclusive. Previously, every one of them seemed to assume a constitutive aspect of historical knowledge, as effectively practiced by historians. This congruence of fact suggests the construction of a theoretical model that includes both explanatory, understanding, and narrative aspects of the historical discourse, always considering their epistemic claims.

Professor in charge: Sara Albieri (sara@usp.br)

 

Fiction and history: dialogues and contamination

Description: The dialogue between history and fiction is old and it has been interpreted and considered in varied ways. Often, this relationship was mediated by another disciplinary field or language. The proximity of fiction with the historically lived experience is also clear and almost always explicit. The historian thinks about the historical experience and identifies his general and specific senses. Fiction, in many cases, comes from situations actually lived and recreated imaginatively. The studies that I am currently advising favour this dialogue, either by the quest about the paths of literary representation, or by seeking relationships with other languages, such as visual or musical.

Professor in charge: Júlio César Pimentel Pinto Filho (flh@usp.br)

 

Material and visual sources

Description: This project aims to study the material, physical, and sensory dimension (including visual as a particularisation) of the organisation, functioning and transformation of a society. In this perspective, the studies are elaborated according to the following themes: alimentation and the transformations of the urban space; dialogue between music and painting; meanings of photography and the film industry; the caricatures and social standards, as well as the role of the museum in the historic construction.

Professor in charge: Ulpiano Toledo Bezerra de Menezes (utbm@uol.com.br)

 

Football and national identity

Description: This project aims to study the forms of representation peculiar to the cultural history related to the playful theme, analysing football as a social ritual of celebration and its role in the construction of the Brazilian national identity.

Professor in charge: Flavio de Campos (flaviodecampos@usp.br)

 

History of intellectual culture

Description: The History of Intellectual Culture is a field of research whose object are the circumstances of production, discussion, writing and dissemination of ideas, through the critical study of discourses and texts, their contexts of production, transmission and reception, and through the recovery of their historical significance. The research field was developed, in general, between two methodological poles: internalist or intellectualist; and externalist or contextualist. From a historiographical point of view, the first stance would be to relate ideas according to a logic or internal dynamic. In modernity, the History of Philosophy began to follow this common thread. The History of the Ideas, originally conceived by Arthur Lovejoy, takes the ideas as entities, capable of crossing time and space, through languages, traditions, cultures, and nations. Such treatment was questioned for taking the ideas out of their contexts of historical production and transmission, which would be privileged by the second type of approach, placing the ideas in the context of the social, political, and economic circumstances of their particular period, without considering possible continuities. From the externalist point of view, the methodological focus on the intrinsic relationship between ideas is inevitably anachronistic, for example, when establishing relations of anticipation between authors and currents of thought. The tension between these two types of approach typically followed the History of Literature and the History of Science. Recently, Quentin Skinner claimed a linguistic treatment for the historical context of political ideas to avoid internalist anachronisms, at the same time recovering the historical meanings of the texts. Other studies are dedicated to the texts as materials through which ideas are written and read, disseminated, received, and appropriated.

Professor in charge: Sara Albieri (sara@usp.br)

 

History of literacy in Brazil – 1759-2013

Description: The project is divided into three phases: 1859-1890; 1890-1971; 1971-2013. It is based on archival materials, printed matter, newspapers, personal observations and interviews. The main objective is not just to rescue the teaching of the first letters and the construction process History of the Brazilian school system, but also to understand the literacy delay in the country through historical analysis. According to research, Brazil today has 66% of functional illiterates and 13% of absolute illiterates, which places the country among the ones with the worst literacy rates in the world.

Professor in charge: Maria Luiza Marcílio (marcilio@usp.br or maluiza@uol.com.br)

 

Social history of art and culture in contemporary Brazil

Description: The project seeks to study the social history of art in Brazil, mainly throughout the 20th century. By Social History of Art we understand not only the traditional history of artistic languages, but especially the historical conditions (social, political, economic, and cultural) in which these languages were created and on which they acted as an active and dependent part. Therefore, both particular works, the individual trajectories of artists and ‘schools’ as well as social groups involved in the sphere of production and circulation of art and culture are analysed. Cases and works outside Brazil are also studied so they can be compared with similar national situations. The ultimate objective is to create a historic panel in which the possible relations between art and social life are placed side by side, one illuminating the other, seeking a vast understanding of the artistic phenomenon as an effect of culture and social life. The project is divided into the following areas: visual arts, cinema, architecture, literature, music, and politics for art and culture.

Professor in charge: Francisco Cabral Alambert Júnior (alambert@usp.br)

 

Social history in Brazil: gender relations, slavery, and society

Description: This project involves the supervision of master’s and PhD projects with the concern of a critical and engaged history of gender relations and of the society’s formation in urban social areas from the second half of the last century. One of the main objectives is to demystify prejudices and stereotypes inherited from the dominant culture in Brazil between 1850 and 1930. Therefore, it involves culture and discourses criticism and ideological representations through the deconstruction of its historicity. Universal or permanent concepts are seen as belonging to a given situation of historical time and, therefore, in change processes. To explore the historical temporalities related to women’s roles and the organisation of family involves the history of daily life and social changes, which affect the continuity of values taken as hegemonic.

Professor in charge: Maria Odila Leite da Silva Dias (modila@uol.com.br)

 

History and cosmogony according to the Mesoamerican and Andean civilisations: characteristics and transformations in pre-Hispanic times

Description: To analyse the native sources to detect and explain the particularities of the Mesoamerican conceptions of time, space, agent and past, as well as the political functions and transformations of these ideas during the passage from the pre-Hispanic to the colonial period was one of the main objectives of previous studies, which addressed centrally the Nahuas peoples. Based on the results of these studies, the new investigations, carried out in this project, basically, pursue two objectives. The first is to analyse the conceptions of time, space, and agent in the historic and cosmogonic texts of Mayans and Mixtecs with the same degree of depth and detail that we dedicate to the Nahua peoples in previous research, in which the Maya and the Mixtecs sources were studied in secondary mode, just to give comparative support the to the Nahua case.

Professor in charge: Eduardo Natalino dos Santos (natalino@usp.br)

 

History and identity in São Paulo: the creation of an identity of inclusion and historiographical production – 18th-21st centuries

Description: This research project, which includes undergraduate and graduate students, aims to explore and analyse the historiographical production in São Paulo since the 18th century until today, focused on the identity theme.

Professor in charge: Raquel Glezer (raglezer@usp.br)

 

Regional history: practices, historiographical discourse, and teaching

Description: Studies on regional history and historiographical discourse analysis as well as its use in university and school teaching. These studies cover various periods in the history of Brazil, such as literature, education, press or legislation as informative sources of practice and representations for this research.

Professor in charge: Inez Garbuio Peralta (inezgp@ig.com.br)

 

History, population, and education

Description: Analysis of populations in the colonial and independent Brazil, particularly those formed by migration (forced or voluntary), including those of African and European origin and of national character. It is important to know the routine of these populations, associative practices, access to education, and the construction of civic consciousness in the Brazilian society.

Professor in charge: Maria Luiza Marcílio (marcilio@usp.br or maluiza@uol.com.br)

 

Inquisition and Nazism. Reflections on parallels

Description: In this project we intend to show, from inquisitorial studies, that the modern age reinforced repression, violence, persecution and exclusion of helpless minorities. Analysing the stereotypes and stigmas used by State and Church, against the descendants of Jews, converted in 1497, as well as the myths defended to legitimise persecution and exclusion, show, at a distance of five centuries, the continuity of the hate propagation to Jews and its repetition, with amazing details, in Nazi Germany, until it culminated in the concept of ‘absolute evil’ by Hannah Arendt. Violence and inhumanity that continue in several regions of the world, until today.

Professor in charge: Anita Waingort Novinsky (anito@terra.com.br or anito@attglobal.net)

 

Modernity and modernisation of Brazilian culture

Description: Studies of modernity and modernisation, images and education art-related in the Brazilian society of the 19th and 20th centuries, with emphasis on the study of social and cultural relations during the urbanisation of São Paulo.

Professor in charge: Nicolau Sevcenko (In Memoriam)

 

Music, art, and politics in Brazil (1983-1950)

Description: This is a study about modernity in Brazilian music and art and the political engagement regarding the assumptions of socialist realism active in this historic moment.

Professor in charge: Arnaldo Daraya Contier (flh@usp.br)

 

Narratives and cultural practices: formation and dismantlement of symbolic systems in Brazil

Description: This research project analyses several cultural practices and their narratives as strategies of construction of meanings in the various artistic fields. The research investigates the cultural movements in Republican Brazil, in the cinema, in literature, in music and in the plastic arts, considering the complex relationships between art form and social world. It also analyses the cultural expressions of specific social groups, involved in construction projects of new legitimacies and non-established rights, such as new immigrants, indigenous population, and ethnic minorities.

Professor in charge: Maurício Cardoso (maucardoso@gmail.com)

 

Narratives, chronicles, and ephemeral writings in the construction of historical memory

Description: São Paulo, which had its intense metropolisation process from the beginning of the 20th century, established a peculiar example of urban modernity, which recent historiography of culture has tried to explore, in the most varied facets. However, the rapid metropolisation of São Paulo also produced a kind of blurring of memories, collective and individual. The oblivion process creates a sort of social time emptiness, which begins to be filled by culture or, more particularly, by the invention of a past to the city that passed through a deep rupture and temporal uprooting. The power of articulating a historical narrative provides the basis for the appearance of historiography itself. The most significant records of this São Paulo’s ‘belle époque’, which this research intends to study, such as chronicles, memories, novels, poems, correspondence, first sound recordings, appear today as scattered echoes of a singular kind of oblivion. The purpose of this research is to study a series of writers and authors for whom we have no anthologies or ‘complete works;’ if we put ourselves in the perspective of the history of literature, they will automatically be excluded, because they were obscure chroniclers, freelance journalists or casual writers. Closer to the oral culture, transiting in brief shows and developing scripts for theatres and magazine - and then in radio recordings and musicals - we aim to verify to what extent they almost acted as ‘cultural intermediaries.’ It is a sociocultural universe that did not fit in the modernist canons of 1922, although it already had a touch of all the ambivalent modernist characteristics. This is because the meanings of modern and modernism were homogenised from those canons.

Professor in charge: Elias Thome Saliba (etsaliba@yahoo.com.br)

 

The Bedouin palace: tribal chief and royalty in Mari (Syria – 18th century B. C.)

Description: The project aims to answer a deficiency that prevented the proper understanding of the articulations between the forms of the exercise of palatial and tribal authority. Traditionally, the tribal element and its associated realities (pastoralism and nomadism) were addressed as an exogenous and disturbing element of an urban, sedentary and focused on palatial royalty order. Either because the palace was represented, since the historiography from the 19th century, as the local incarnation of a nation state, either because the questions of anthropology of 1960 have allowed only a glimpse of a more or less symbiotic dichotomy between the two realities, the assessments were, until now, largely insufficient.

Professor in charge: Marcelo Aparecido Rede (mrede@usp.br)

 

The power of ideas: the chain of the innocent people

Description: The panorama of this research is cultural policies, strategies of power, and involvement of intellectuals. In addition to a broader view on the strategy of the Cultural War for the world, created in the interior of the United States Department of State, we intend to focus on the importance of exoticism assumptions and estrangement in the design of these cultural policies. Art and culture, however, play their tricks as well as the human dissatisfaction and not everything goes according to plan. Anyway, the research is focused on these implications of cultural policies between Brazil and United States in the decades of 1950 and 1960 and the intellectual webs that came with it.

Professor in charge: Elizabeth Cancelli (cancellie@gmail.com)

 

Social order and identity borders

Description: The Project is the centre of the LEIR-SP activities (Study Laboratory of the Ancient Roman Empire), integrated to National LEIR and it has the expectation to elaborate relevant concepts to study the Roman Empire in its specificity and, at the same time, to dialogue with contemporary experiences. One of its central focuses is the reformulation of the concept of ‘identity’ as the catalysis of social differences and ‘social order,’ as opposed to the chaos and resulting from multiple social negotiations established in what we call ‘border spaces.’

Professor in charge: Norberto Luiz Guarinello (guarinel@usp.br)

 

Graphical thinking and ornamentation: the Canon Tables in illuminated manuscripts of the medieval West (9th-13th centuries)

Description: Little studied by historians and art historians, who often underestimate the role of ornamentation in images, the Canon Tables had, however, a prominent position in Bibles and Western medieval gospel books, until, at least, the 13th century. Traditionally ascribed to Eusebius of Caesarea, these graphic schemes enabled a better visualisation of the concordances between the four Gospels, and the related passages are arranged in columns, framed by architectural and iconographic representations. The objective of this project is to analyse the different operating modes of the images in a series of Canon Tables, not seeking a master switch, but to demonstrate the richness, the complexity and the variety of these eusebian systems reworked over the centuries.

Professor in charge: Maria Cristina Correia Leandro Pereira (mariacristinapereira@yahoo.com)

 

Social thinking and construction of identities in America

Description: With the American Independence processes, the need to think and build identities for the peoples whose territories were defined according to the colonial division arose. Therefore, different thinkers stood out as well as ideological currents, magazines and institutions that offer differentiating identities, which can be national, ethnic or related to the particular social segments. The project analyses the construction of these identities and its legitimacy or change in time.

Professor in charge: Dário Horacio Gutierrez Gallardo (horaciog@usp.br)

 

Power and solidarity relations in medieval Portugal

Description: The royal power in medieval Portugal governed and ordered interpersonal relationships, making the social fabric harmonious. This ordination was made through real prerogative to legislate, punish, and grace subjects. Thus, the aim of this groups is to study how solidarity relations engender in medieval Portuguese society and the control strategies or discretion established by instances of power.

Professor in charge: Carlos Roberto Figueiredo Nogueira (crfnogue@usp.br)

 

Religiosity and Judaism in medieval and Brazilian history

Description: Study focused on the religious phenomena during the Middle Ages as well as Judaism: the issue of the inquisition in Brazil in different periods of its history.

Professor in charge: Nachman Falbel (flh@usp.br)

 

Religion and evangelisation

Description: The characteristic imperial ideology of Spain and Portugal, from the 16th to the 18th century, even if considered in their national and historical peculiarities, should be analysed from their assumptions and specific evangelizing projects. The problem of the relationship between the common cultural matrix of the imperial and evangelising project and the consequent transformation of non-Western cultures points to the fundamental characteristics of Christian evangelism. Since the beginning of its constitution, Christianity has determined a close nexus between faith and political life. In this sense, this project intends to analyse several evangelising experiences lived during the Portuguese Empire, which produced a theoretical thinking about the organisation and administration of the societies the missionaries contacted.

Through the analysis of a particular case – the Kingdom of Mari, in the 18th century B.C., with its abundant textual and archaeological documentation, we will analyse the exercise palatial power as a variant of tribal leadership. From the interpretative contributions of the latest anthropology, the intention is - more than to oppose two different and exclusionary structures in cooperative or bellicose contacts - to clarify the process by which the tribal chief becomes a ‘royal’ and what are the implications of the ‘tribalisation’ of power for the ancient palatial organisation.

Professor in charge: Adone Agnolin (adone@usp.br)

 

São Paulo: foreigners and the construction of the city

Description: The purpose of this thematic project is to relate spatial and social processes occurring in the city of São Paulo at different times, examining them through the presence and role of foreigners who constitute, in their professional practices and sociability networks, the city itself. The objective is to reveal a city that is understandable by the articulation of its materiality, its sociability networks and construction processes of identities and alterities. At the same time, it proposes to understand the foreign in a framework of construction and problematisation of nationality as something related to the various universes and qualifications of work. The project involves the actions of photographers and artisans in the city of São Paulo. Regarding artisans, the case study helps to understand the history of work and the daily role of a large number of professionals engaged in the material production of the city. It focuses on the role of the Italian decorator-painter Oreste Sercelli (established in São Paulo, between 1898-1927), whose collection today belongs to the Museu Paulista of the University of São Paulo and consists of original planks of his decorative painting projects (for homes and public and religious buildings), and expressive library of ornamental repertoire. From this case study, we seek to resize the place of these social agents of foreign formation and origin in the consolidation of the architectural culture in São Paulo. This resizing implies discussing the notion of eclecticism from another perspective, which involves the relationship dynamics between client and craftsman/decorator, as well as the active role of the repertoires of printed ornaments disclosed by this professional category in the formation of standards of taste.

Professor in charge: Solange Ferraz de Lima (sflima@usp.br)

 

A history from the medieval European Judaism to Brazil

Description: The objective of the project is to cover themes, problems, figures and events that begin to compose an objective and critical cartography of the presence of Jews, since the Middle Ages until their arrival in the Brazilian territory, highlighting the role some of their characters and institutions gave them. The research includes a reflection on medieval Jewish philosophy (Schlomo ibn Gabirol and Maimonides), whose articles will be published in the compilation about the subject by the Perspectiva Publishing House. In addition, we analyse the immigration and the Jewish presence in Brazil, notably through the book that is being published by the Humanitas Publishing House titled ‘Jacob Nachbin, Os primórdios da historiografia judaica no Brasil’ [Jacob Nachbin, the beginning of Jew historiography in Brazil]. Another book is being published by the Ateliê Publishing House, titled ‘Estrelas errantes: memória do teatro ídiche no Brasil’ [Wandering stars: memories of the Yiddish theatre in Brazil].

Professor in charge: Nachman Falbel (flh@usp.br)

 

Ethics, history and memoirist discourse

Description: Studies on the issue of Social Memory increased since the 1980s, becoming an important interdisciplinary debate field in human sciences. This phenomenon is due, in part, to a rediscovery of the works of Maurice Halbwachs, associated with a rise of multiculturalism, Communism crisis, political of production and preservation of testimonies from victims of the Holocaust, emergence of a postmodern sensibility and Globalisation, among other factors that began in the 1960s and 1970s, but that still wield influence in the present, directly or indirectly. The research advances on this debate, attempting to outline the complex relationships established between socially shared memory and historiographical research, having as privileged object a set of literary works defined on the lines of the memoirist discourse. Such writings, articulating in an undefined genre that incorporates historiographical discourse, autobiography, romance, and parody, offer insights that help us rethink the relationship between Memory and Historical Representation. Contradicting the thesis of Halbwachs, the research works with the hypothesis that History is not only a different form of memory, a set of memories devoid of life, but a domain of human knowledge that performs specific functions and has, regarding memory, complex and sometimes contradictory relationships.

Professor in charge: José Antonio Vasconcelos (vasconcelos@usp.br)