BRAZILIAN RACE RELATIONS, FRENCH SOCIAL SCIENTISTS, AND AFRICAN DECOLONIZATION: A TRANSATLANTIC HISTORY OF THE IDEA OF MISCEGENATION

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 801-832
Author(s):  
IAN MERKEL
Keyword(s):  
Race Relations ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
Cultural Integration ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Racial Democracy ◽  
Transatlantic History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Blacks And Whites ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Fernand Braudel

AbstractThis article analyzes how debates concerning Brazilian race relations, miscegenation, and racial democracy unfolded in France in the 1950s. During those years, Gilberto Freyre and those critical of him emerged in French social scientific discourse, offering distinct visions concerning race, culture, and the possibility of harmonious coexistence in a world structured by racial, social, and colonial inequalities. Certain French social scientists such as Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel embraced Freyre's vision as a possible source for racial and cultural mixing, whereas others, especially Alfred Métraux and Florestan Fernandes, directly criticized his work. Roger Bastide mediated between the two, translating Freyre's Casa-Grande & Senzala and coauthoring a UNESCO-based study on blacks and whites in São Paulo that largely repudiated Freyre's claims. I argue that in a period in which decolonization was already underway, Freyre piqued the interest of French social scientists looking to overcome the growing antagonism between colonizer and colonized, even if other models of cultural integration and autonomy contested the validity of Brazil's so-called racial democracy.

scholarly journals Corrigendum

2018 ◽  
Vol 66 (5) ◽  
pp. 828-828
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Large Percentage ◽  
Cultural Integration ◽  
Racial Democracy ◽  
Made In

Silva GM (2016) After racial democracy: Contemporary puzzles in race relations in Brazil, Latin America and beyond from a boundaries perspective. Current Sociology 64(5): 794-812. DOI: 10.1177/0011392115590488 The author would like to draw attention to the following correction. On p.802 of this article, where it is written: “[…] scholars who want to underplay the importance of race in Brazil tend to see this as evidence that race is not as central, or at least not a factor of discrimination for a large percentage of non-whites (Fry, 2005)” This section should read: “[…] scholars who emphasize the convergence of opinions tend to see this as evidence of a more successful policy of cultural integration that illustrates understandings of race as less essentialized (Fry, 2005)”. This correction does not change the main arguments made in the article.

Between the Charybdis of Capitalism and the Scylla of Communism: The Emigration of German Social Scientists, 1933-1945

1987 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irving Louis Horowitz
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Open Sea ◽  
Full Explanation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Western Democracies

I would like to examine two aspects of German scholarly emigration to the Western democracies, especially the United States and Great Britain. I do not necessarily seek to offer a full explanation of this complex historical and ideological issue, but rather an analysis that attempts to avoid the maze of sociological generalizing that has grown up around the politically inspired migration of scholars.Let me state quite frankly that I am neither a devotee of the history of ideas approach nor an apologist for any particular group of exiles or their ideology. Rather, I seek to understand the common denominators, or better, the root elements that recently led René König (1984) to locate the source of the German sociological exodus in the virulent nationalism of the 1920s, and to argue that the fusion of conservative and radical elements in post-1933 rational socialism was a culmination rather than a cause of social scientific breakdown. As Otto Neurath put this plight: “We are like sailors who must rebuild their ships on the open sea without benefit of a dock, or an opportunity to select the best replacement parts” (Blum, 1985).

scholarly journals FORMS OF SYSTEMATIZATON OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF RACE RELATIONS IN BRAZIL

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 169-191
Author(s):  
Veronica Toste Daflon
Keyword(s):  
Race Relations ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Scientific Racism ◽  
Racial Democracy ◽  
History Of ◽  
International Social

Abstract Throughout their training as researchers and teachers, academics working with race relations assimilate a canonical history of the production in the field. With some variations, this production is usually organized around a narrative that begins with the reception of scientific racism in Brazil, then goes on to formulate the culturalist approach and the thesis of ‘racial democracy’ and, finally, mentions the ruptures that led to the recognition and investigation of patterns of racism and discrimination in Brazil. This article presents a synthesis of this history and then interrogates it from different angles and perspectives. To achieve this objective, it turns to interpreters of the sociology and historiography of race relations to reveal how certain theoretical and methodological reorientations in the field, along with national and international social changes, are connected to the different questions raised with regard to the phenomenon of racism in Brazil.

scholarly journals ‘Nothing Is Less Universal than the Idea of Race’

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-132
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Social Scientific Study ◽  
Cultural Anthropologist ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Race ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Post War ◽  
Cross National

In 1950, the cultural anthropologist Alfred Métraux, a student of Marcel Mauss, was appointed to head a new Race Bureau at UNESCO in Paris whose mission was to combat racism with the tools of social science. Métraux had worked in the Americas since the 1930s, and his appointment allowed French social scientists to join the global struggle to remove prejudice ‘from the minds of men’. To what extent did French scholars help shape Métraux’s efforts, given that at the time American sociologists and social psychologists dominated the study of race relations? Booklets commissioned by UNESCO and authored by French and American scientists in the early 1950s suggest that linguistic and conceptual barriers made cross-national discussions of race difficult, but not impossible. Thanks in part to Métraux’s campaign, the social scientific study of race relations in post-war France began earlier than is typically remembered.

The Problem

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mats Alvesson ◽  
Yiannis Gabriel ◽  
Roland Paulsen
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Research Papers ◽  
Prestigious Journal ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Academic Researchers ◽  
History Of ◽  
Wide Gap

This chapter introduces ‘the problem’ of meaningless research in the social sciences. Over the past twenty years there has been an enormous growth in research publications, but never before in the history of humanity have so many social scientists written so much to so little effect. Academic research in the social sciences is often inward looking, addressed to small tribes of fellow researchers, and its purpose in what is increasingly a game is that of getting published in a prestigious journal. A wide gap has emerged between the esoteric concerns of social science researchers and the pressing issues facing today’s societies. The chapter critiques the inaccessibility of the language used by academic researchers, and the formulaic qualities of most research papers, fostered by the demands of the publishing game. It calls for a radical move from research for the sake of publishing to research that has something meaningful to say.

Why they shared: recovering early arguments for sharing social scientific data

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-119
Author(s):  
Emily Hauptmann
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Data Sharing ◽  
Financial Stability ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Scientific Data ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Ethical Imperative ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
The University ◽  
University Consortium

ArgumentMost social scientists today think of data sharing as an ethical imperative essential to making social science more transparent, verifiable, and replicable. But what moved the architects of some of the U.S.’s first university-based social scientific research institutions, the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research (ISR), and its spin-off, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), to share their data? Relying primarily on archived records, unpublished personal papers, and oral histories, I show that Angus Campbell, Warren Miller, Philip Converse, and others understood sharing data not as an ethical imperative intrinsic to social science but as a useful means to the diverse ends of financial stability, scholarly and institutional autonomy, and epistemological reproduction. I conclude that data sharing must be evaluated not only on the basis of the scientific ideals its supporters affirm, but also on the professional objectives it serves.

Denaturalizing the Monroe Doctrine: The rise of Latin American legal anti-imperialism in the face of the modern US and hemispheric redefinition of the Monroe Doctrine

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 541-555
Author(s):  
Juan Pablo Scarfi
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Elastic Behaviour ◽  
Legal Tradition ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Monroe Doctrine ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Pan Americanism

AbstractThe Monroe Doctrine was originally formulated as a US foreign policy principle, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it began to be redefined in relation to both the hemispheric policy of Pan-Americanism and the interventionist policies of the US in Central America and the Caribbean. Although historians and social scientists have devoted a great deal of attention to Latin American anti-imperialist ideologies, there was a distinct legal tradition within the broader Latin American anti-imperialist traditions especially concerned with the nature and application of the Monroe Doctrine, which has been overlooked by international law scholars and the scholarship focusing on Latin America. In recent years, a new revisionist body of research has emerged exploring the complicity between the history of modern international law and imperialism, as well as Third World perspectives on international law, but this scholarship has begun only recently to explore legal anti-imperialist contributions and their legacy. The purpose of this article is to trace the rise of this Latin American anti-imperialist legal tradition, assessing its legal critique of the Monroe Doctrine and its implications for current debates about US exceptionalism and elastic behaviour in international law and organizations, especially since 2001.

Fingierte Mündlichkeit – inszenierte Interaktion. Die Novelle als Erzählmodell

2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Lubkoll
Keyword(s):  
Structural Features ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
Cultural Relevance ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Short Novel ◽  
History Of

AbstractThe reflection of the genre of the “Novelle” (short novel) offers one way for a productive interpenetration of scientific literary and linguistic discussions about the phenomenon of textuality. It is the genre of the “Novelle” whose characterization has always been very dissatisfying according to traditional genre definitions within the scientific discourse. Typical formal and structural features are often too unspecific and mostly remain on the surface, if their function for the (con)text is not reflected adequately. Furthermore all the different catalogues of typical features mostly appear as static schemes that cannot do justice equally well to all the various manifestations of the “Novelle” as to the historical change of the genre itself.Due to these facts the article by Christine Lubkoll tries to define the genre of the “Novelle” and its specific textual manifestations with regard to its historically changing contextual conditions. The thesis of the article is that theThe first part of the article by Christine Lubkoll illustrates the history of the genre of the “Novelle” and its specific social and cultural relevance within different literary époques. It is then followed by the second part, an analysis of Goethes “Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten” and Musils “Die Amsel”.

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