Anthropology and History

Research Projects:

Reception and transfer of classical artistic tradition between Mediterranean Europe and America

Description: The project coordinated by Luciano Migliacio and Claudia Valadão, included as thematic in FAPESP, conducts a comparative analysis of different artistic productions and intends to carry out a general survey of the Brazilian collections.

Professor in charge: Lilia Katri Moritz Schwarcz (lilia.ms@uol.com.br)

 

Formation of the intellectual field and culture industry in contemporary Brazil

Description: This research aims to investigate the decisive transformations undergone by the social history of Brazilian culture, although it does so through an unique thematic confluence - it undertakes a critical history of Brazilian culture from the 19th century until present times, seeking the connections between strategic outbreaks of classical cultural production and the expansion of dynamic sectors of the culture industry: on the one hand, the modelling of intellectuals in the Empire and the traveller literature, social novels, communist intellectuals, dramaturgy, literary and artistic avant-garde in comparative perspective; on the other, the changes in the press, publishing, and audiovisual media. The aim of this project is, therefore, the intelligibility of the conditions that governed the independence process of the cultural production field in the country, based on the selective analysis of key experiments of that history. Intellectuals and artists infusing directions and languages in the media at a historical conjuncture, and, reversibly, the changes of the cultural industry imposing features and meanings to the work of cultural producers. The cultural life will be examined by referring to the universe of socialisation of producers, writers, artists, and expert professionals, whose unveiling requires understanding its links with the space of the ruling class.

Other crucial analysis dimensions include the institutional injunctions of the studied media, the recruitment and trajectories of cultural scene agents, the mobile competition actors in cultural goods market, and the demands of a diversified public of consumers. The purpose of this project is to obtain a compact and expressive reconstitution of the social processes that have shaped the Brazilian cultural life, investigated through the prism of an empirical approach capable of conveying the multiple determinations of these experiences. Precisely, the aim is to articulate literate culture to cultural industry.

Professor in charge: Sergio Micelli Pessoa de Barros (zaem@usp.br)

 

Miscegenation projects: Lima Barreto in comparative perspective

Description: The purpose of this project is to understand Lima Barreto as a myth of the First Republic. If he represented an example of social exclusion - being black, from a decadent middle class, and then considered insane -, this also demonstrates the paths of the creation of blackness and civic consciousness projects, which were very popular from the beginning of the century until the 1930s.

Professor in charge: Lilia Katri Moritz Schwarcz (lilia.ms@uol.com.br)