Space, social theory and peripheral imagination ... - SAGE Journals

Article

Space, social theory and peripheral imagination: Brazilian intellectual history and de-colonial debates

International Sociology 26(3) 392–407 © The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0268580910388964 iss.sagepub.com

João Marcelo Ehlert Maia

CPDOC (School for Social Sciences and History), Fundação Getúlio Vargas, Brazil

Abstract The spatial turn is a much discussed theme in social theory. However, it is still based on a Eurocentric perspective that excludes other forms of reflection about space. In this article the author addresses the spatial turn from a perspective with a basis in Brazilian intellectual history, so as to argue that the Brazilian case presents a classical tradition of geographical thinking that provides a different framework for global spatial imagination. The author looks to de-colonial critiques in order to analyse this tradition from a contemporary point of view.The aim is to argue that this perspective helps to de-center social theory by providing new spatial images that diverge from those related both to the language of the city and the Eurocentric perspective that still characterizes the spatial turn.

Keywords Brazilian intellectual history, de-colonial, geography, social theory, spatial turn

In 2006 the European Journal of Social Theory released a special issue on the problem of borders and space in social theory. In that issue, Chris Rumford argues that social sciences have gone through a ‘spatial turn’ during the last two decades (Rumford, 2006). According to him, authors such as Ulrick Beck, Manuel Castells, Zygmunt Bauman, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt and others have sought to redefine space and territoriality by avoiding the traditional perspective that considered these variables to be simple ‘scenarios’ for actions and institutions. This theoretical shift renders space a social force able to recreate social networks and economic flows in new configurations. However, I believe that the spatial turn is still based on a Eurocentric perspective that excludes other forms of reflection about space. Therefore, in this article I address this

Corresponding author: João Marcelo Ehlert Maia, CPDOC/FGV, Rua Praia de Botafogo, 190/ room 1423, 22250-900 Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil. Email: [email protected]

Maia

393

spatial turn from a perspective with its basis in Brazilian intellectual history, so as to argue that the Brazilian case presents a classical tradition of geographical thinking that provides a different framework for spatial imagination. My aim is to argue that this perspective helps to de-center social theory by providing new spatial images that diverge from the ones related both to the language of the city and the Eurocentric perspective that still characterizes the spatial turn. The article is organized into three sections. First, I discuss the role of space in social theory, briefly presenting the spatial turn and its consequences and then arguing the need for a non-Eurocentric perspective on it. My discussion is based on de-colonial critiques, although I consider that these critiques lack a deeper knowledge of specific forms of spatial imagination in Brazil. In the second section I present the Brazilian case, focusing on the scripts left by the Brazilian writer Euclides da Cunha (1866–1909). In the last section I provide some theoretical ground for the link between non-European classical social thought and concept formation in social theory. In order to do so, I recast Da Cunha’s writing in this new light and demonstrate how Brazilian intellectual history and its spatial images can be useful for this enterprise.

Space, social theory and de-colonial critiques There has been a rich discussion concerning the consequences of the spatial turn for social theory, but both its full potential and the contribution of non-European forms of spatial imagination remain unexplored. In order to expand on this issue, it is necessary, first, to answer the following question: What are the main effects of the spatial turn and what is it still missing? Edward Soja (1989) argued that critical theory lacked a strong reflection with regard to space and territoriality, for it was based on a heavy historicist approach. He drew on Foucault’s work to provide a theoretical ground for his critique of historicism and highlighted contributions by Marxists intellectuals such as David Harvey (1982) and Henri Lefebvre (1991) as well. Soja’s own contribution was to recast geography in the light of social theory, stressing a postmodern perspective that allegedly avoided the historicist bias and emphasized the spatiality of social practices. For other analysts such as Collin Flint and Fred Shelley (1996) the main contribution of the spatial turn was its critique of the state-centered bias of social theory. According to them, a dialogue between geography and social sciences could avoid this bias by resorting to world-system analysis. In globalization studies, the spatial turn has been useful to provide theoretical frameworks for the understanding of new forms of spatiality that transcend old divisions between local, national and international (Sassen, 2000). It has also helped social scientists in comprehending new forms of producing borders and frontiers that exclude/include subjects (Newman, 2006). In social theory itself, Anthony Giddens made an attempt to incorporate space as a crucial variable to understand both micro–macro links and the relations between social structure and human action in contexts of situated interaction (Giddens, 1984). Despite all these reflections on the spatial turn, there is still lacking a more de-centered perspective that encompasses forms of spatial imagination produced outside both the European and the Anglo-Saxon world. Globalization theories, for instance, still reflect

394

International Sociology 26(3)

their northern origins when it comes to the description of an allegedly ‘boundless’ world (Connell, 2007a). A de-centered perspective can help us to improve concept formation in social theory by clarifying the limits of Eurocentric spatial imagination. Thus, these limits must still be specified. Space and geography did not play a strong analytical role in classical social theory although the European imagination drew on spatial metaphors to differentiate itself from other areas of the world. As Immanuel Wallerstein states, the main concepts in classical sociology are closely related to notions of progress and development that seem to homogenize different locals and singular territories (Wallerstein, 1996). Despite this disembodiment it is possible to notice a specific geographical imagination when it comes to social theory. After all, the spatial setting of modern processes was mainly the European city and its particular features (e.g. division of labour, industry, massive urban poverty). Marxist scholar Ira Katznelson stated that social theory framed large cities as universal symbols of modernity and central arenas for the processes of capitalist development (Katznelson, 1993). As a result, the concept formation in social theory builds on the features of this space and depicts other territories as non-moderns or just ‘rural’ vestiges. This territoriality means that society was rendered equal to the city and its major characters – workers and the bourgeoisie. The concept of civil society is thus connected to a discourse about the urban world that stresses specific features such as rational action based on interests, civility and strong separation between private and public spheres (Kumar, 1993). The particular embodiment of this concept revealed its limits when translocated to non-western territories such as Africa, where different kinds of protests and social interactions fit badly into the boundaries of the concept of civil society (Hearn, 2001; Mamdani, 1996). It is clear that one needs to overcome these limits in order to address the spatial turn from a de-centered perspective. But what are the main clues available for this project, and what can one learn from them? Edward Said’s classic work, Orientalism, is the main source for the critique of western geographical imagination (Said, 1979). By taking the European scripts focused on ‘oriental’ subjects as an object of enquiry, Said provided a major critique of Orientalism as a theoretical corpus that reified Asia and Middle East as ‘cultural’ Others. By analysing the mechanisms of representation engendered by French, English and German specialists, he showed how geographical images – such as ‘West’ and ‘Orient’ – were fetishized in order to stress ontological differences between Europe and the Other. Spatiality in Said’s work is interpreted as a discourse that classifies non-European people and renders them objects of study by western scholars. Orientalism is closely related to Foucault’s insights about the relations between discourse and power, but its perception on spatiality is closer to Marxist and existentialist perspectives that depict geography as an essentialist reification that eludes the possibility of history and emancipation. Said’s book inspired postcolonialist discourses that articulated a strong criticism of the false universalism of social and political theory. Subaltern studies was one of these attempts. Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) claimed that one should provincialize metropolitan theory in order to criticize great explanations based on the expansion of European history over what was considered ‘the rest of the world’. Chakrabarty stated that European social theory framed abstract reason and capital as universal features of modernity, when in fact they were the embodiment of a particular history which colonized other areas of the world.

Maia

395

The close relation between modernity and colonialism is a relevant aspect of subaltern studies works (Chatterjee, 2001). However, I believe that a specific branch of postcolonialism discourse provided a more powerful critical stance with regard to the limits of Eurocentric territoriality. I refer to the strand of ‘de-colonial critique’, which builds on a Latin American perspective to colonialism (Coronil, 2004). De-colonialist intellectuals argue that colonialism preceded modernity and had intimate ties with the constitution of European thought during the period of Renaissance and expansion overseas. This perspective also addresses the issue of spatiality in a more critical way, which makes it crucial for the argument of this article. Walter Mignolo has developed a de-colonial programme which criticizes the epistemology of modernity and stresses its colonial dimension (Mignolo, 2002). In his book on the darker side of Renaissance, Mignolo (2003) argued that the European self was engendered through a process classified by him as ‘denial of coevalness’. That is, the colonial encounters in the New World resulted in the denial of Amerindian forms of framing time and space. Thus the rationalization of space was based on a particular cognitive performance that produced an abstract point of view from which Europeans classified the ‘rest of’ the world. Mignolo claims that de-colonial programmes must recognize that even critical theories engendered in continental philosophy were unable to take into account the colonial difference and the local designs that shaped it. Exploring a quotation from Deloria, Mignolo states: Time and history allowed global designs (religious, social, economic and epistemic) to emerge as responses to the need of a given place that were assumed to have universal value across time and space. The experience, in which global designs emerged, is emptied when a given global design is exported and programmed over the experience of a distinct place. (Mignolo, 2002: 69)

The theoretical shift that Mignolo is claiming for is linked to a geopolitical criticism of modern knowledge. Mignolo recognizes the spatiality of discourses and practices and provides some interesting insights on how to think about space and territoriality from a non-European perspective. His idea of local/global designs is not rooted in a nationalist fundamentalism, but is built upon a critical perspective that recognizes the colonial difference related to a specific place of thinking. This place is characterized as a ‘spacein-between’, which means a locus of discourse that at the same time rests ‘outside’ modernity and is produced by it. In another article, Mignolo and Madina Tlostanova articulate the concept of border thinking in order to address the disembodied epistemology of modernity (Mignolo and Tlostanova, 2006). They argue that the language of modernity is essentially a colonial one, because it creates a reference point from which the rest of the world is seen and classified. From this point of view, reflection from the borders – and not just of the borders, as in the spatial turn – is a good strategy both to stress the territoriality of modern thought and to highlight the possibility of building new modes of cognition from colonial places of discourse. The search for a geopolitical critique of modernity is also present in the work of another de-colonial intellectual, Fernando Coronil (1996). Coronil critically analyses

396


‘Occidentalism’ as a form of self-representation deeply related to colonial encounters with the Others and suggests that one should employ non-imperial geohistorical categories. In his perspective, the theoretical approach that locates modernity in the West (Europe and the US) and classifies peripheries as places that just passively received capitalism is fundamentally wrong. Coronil draws on the Marxian concept of ground rent in order to depict colonial territories as crucial agents in the production of global capitalism and its objects. He resorts to the work of Cuban intellectual Fernando Ortiz in order to describe the global web that encompasses cities metropolises and peripheral locations. Coronil states that the self-representation of Occidentalism departs from a stable cartography that frames the Other as a closed entity contained by reified categories and classifications. While writing about the networks that constitute capitalist production, Coronil provides new spatial images that challenge this Occidentalist cartography. Mignolo’s and Coronil’s works provide a more complex vision of spatiality and social theory than other postcolonialist studies. Both authors manage to notice how an epistemology that recognizes territory and spatiality in non-western areas could bring theoretical gains. In so doing, they address discussions concerning the spatial turn from a de-centered perspective that avoids the limits of Eurocentric spatiality. However, this programme still lacks a fuller comprehension of specific forms of spatial imagination built in Latin America, mainly in Brazil. As José Maurício Domingues stated (Domingues, 2009), Mignolo holds a unilateral version of modernity in Latin America that must be critically evaluated. Domingues claims that modernity is ambivalent, meaning both control and emancipation, and as Latin America is deeply modern it would make no sense to ‘transcend modernity’. Therefore we should focus on the different ways Latin American societies experienced modernity and its twofold dimension. Concerning this point Domingues seems to be right, but I also agree that the de-colonial programme is correct in pointing out the need for a de-centered perspective on global modernity. Thus although the project of ‘transcending modernity’ may be unattainable, a critique that departs from the space-in-between is essentially a good strategy towards de-centring both modernity and social theory. This kind of critique is not restricted to de-colonial thinkers. Sociologists around the so-called Global South have tried to improve the concept formation in social theory departing from a critical stance towards Eurocentrism. Syed Hussein Alatas (2006) has claimed that sociology in non-western areas must pursue autonomous social science traditions that recognize its specific historic conditions. In so doing, scholars may apply concepts originating in their local experiences to other contexts. His son Farid Alatas follows this project in his article on Ibn Khaldun and the theory of state formation (Alatas SF, 2006), in which he states that one could trace a Muslim tradition of reflection on political communities that could be useful to sociological theorization in general. The project launched by Alatas senior is not supporting an indigenization programme but instead an intellectual exchange that recognizes other classical narratives that can improve concept formation in social theory. Recently, Raweyn Connell’s work on social theory (Connell, 2007b) built upon different forms of social thought in the Global South in order to criticize hidden assumptions that structures what she calls ‘northern theory’. Connell argues that this theory is based on false universalistic claims, therefore she takes

Maia

397

into account different critical discourses produced in the South, ranging from Islamic thought to dependency theory, so as to provide new grounds for theorization. Thus I would like to advance this de-centered programme by incorporating the Brazilian intellectual tradition as a kind of non-European imagination whose geographical discourse is not based on the city. My aim is to provide a selective account of this tradition to establish the grounds for a de-colonial perspective concerning the spatial turn.

Others stories: Spatial thought in Brazil Since the mid-1990s, many scholars have been stressing the relevance of geographical imagination in the history of social thought in Brazil. Nísia Lima has argued that a dualistic framework that portrayed Brazil as being divided between the urban shore and the sertões1 (the backlands) was very common not just in the beginning of the 20th century, but also during the 1950s and the 1960s (Lima, 1999). Lima maintains that Brazilians intellectuals were always ambiguous when it came to the evaluation of the sertões. On one hand, they saw these areas as backward regions, which lacked civilization and thus should be incorporated into the modernization process. On the other hand, they would praise the ‘national spirit’ of the people who lived there, as if the sertanejos (people who were born in the sertões) were more authentic Brazilians than the cosmopolitan-urban people who lived in Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo. Candice Souza also stresses the role performed by spatial images in classical Brazilian texts about nation building (Souza, 1997). Rubem Barboza Filho considers the language of space to be one of the main features of the Iberian political philosophy (Barboza Filho, 2000). He argues that Portuguese and Spanish thinkers of the 17th century rejected liberalism and sustained a corporate-state perspective that framed society as a network of hierarchical places. However, when it comes to the administration of colonial America, it was not possible just to reaffirm traditional mechanisms of power and pre-existing social arrangements, because one had to deal with totally unknown places and people. That is to say that the baroque language that characterized Brazil was a political experiment that incorporated new spaces and subjects to colonial rule in an expressionist and creative fashion. Thus Barboza Filho relates the spatial imagination depicted by Lima and Souza to an organic view of political community. Some geographers suggested that territorialism was one of the main features of the Portuguese colonization in Brazil. According to Robert de Moraes (2002), colonizers depicted Brazil as a gigantic territory instead of a nation with its own people. This territorial colonialism resulted in a logic of state guided by geographical ideas. Therefore it is possible to understand this geographical imagination as a form of colonialist discourse that denied historicity to dominated people in Iberian colonies. As Mary Pratt puts it, stressing spatiality was a form of depicting America as a ‘virgin’ scenario, inhabited by natives who lived in a kind of timeless place and did not share the same historical process that Europeans did (Pratt, 1992). The great amount of travel literature produced by explorers in the 18th and 19th centuries could serve as proof of this imperial eye. However, if one sticks to the de-colonial hypothesis advanced in the previous section of this text, it would be possible to reveal a critical dimension contained in some classical examples of this geographical imagination.

398


One of the figures who is always remembered when one discusses such imagination is Euclides da Cunha (1866–1909). Da Cunha was one of the most famous Brazilian thinkers in the beginning of the 20th century and wrote some of the most remarkable works in Brazilian social thought. Os sertões2 (Da Cunha, 1995b) was published in 1902 and it was a giant effort to interpret the War of Canudos (1896–7), a battle between the Republican Army and a large rural guerrilla force conducted by a religious leader in the heart of the state of Bahia. At that time Da Cunha was a military engineer who was working as a journalist for the O Estado de São Paulo newspaper. He was sent to Bahia in order to report the story to readers in the city of São Paulo but he could only follow the end of the battle, which state troops won after several defeats. His book became a huge success and he was soon elected to a chair in the Brazilian Literary Academy, the most prestigious institution of the intellectual establishment. His account assembled scientific theories, poetical images, geographical data and an epic tone that resulted in a unique style. Audiences read the book not just as one of the first major attempts to analyse the reality of those Brazilians by employing sociological tools, but as a great essay about the identity of the country as well (Abreu, 1998). In his work, Da Cunha3 drew heavily on European theories which stated a deterministic relation between men and nature, composing his text as a triad in Taine’s model: race, milieu and moment. In fact, Da Cunha inverted Taine’s model and started his work by presenting a great description of the milieu (terra – land), which was followed by a section on race (homem – man) and a final chapter on moment (luta – struggle). By the time Da Cunha published his book, positivism was already one of the main currents in Brazilian intellectual life (Alonso, 1996). Comte had been widely read and quoted by military, physicians, politicians and other elite groups during the 1870s and 1880s. Frederic Amory (2009) argues that Da Cunha would soon abandon positivism in order to encompass social Darwinism, Glumpowicz’s statements on the war of races and Spencer’s theories on evolution. This means that Os sertões should not be read as a classical positivist work but as a combination of different approaches. In fact, one can state that Da Cunha’s positivism was more a question of self-fashioning than an intellectual commitment with a doctrine (Maia, 2008). What strikes the reader is how Da Cunha articulates his reading on Taine and other European writers with Romantic forms of narrative and a strong poetical bent (Hardman, 1996). The first section presents an impressive description of the space where the struggle occurs, so as to put together geographical theories and poetical portrays of plants, soil, mountains, etc. Da Cunha tried to establish a connection between the barbaric aspects of nature in the backlands and the rude personality of the sertanejos. Some scholars have pointed out that Da Cunha employed these images both as scientific concepts and as metaphorical tools that addressed the ‘meaning’ of space and nature (Santana, 2001; Ventura, 2003). The second part of the book was an attempt to describe the people of the backlands, as well as their habits, psychology and religion. Da Cunha’s perspective on the backlands was ambiguous because he drew on racial theories that looked down on sertanejos. Therefore he criticized the lack of civilization in that area but at the same time he stressed the strength of the sertanejos. Da Cunha believed that sertanejos had been developing as an isolated people, with no contact or seacoast influence, and that this geographical

Maia

399

condition rendered them more authentic than the urban cosmopolitans of Rio de Janeiro. He employed the oxymoron Hercules–Quasimodo in order to highlight the ambivalent features of the backlands people. Hercules was the legendary figure in Greek mythology who became symbol of strength and courage. Quasimodo was the main character in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, published in 1831. Being born with physical deformities, Quasimodo is taken by Da Cunha as a symbol for the awkward appearance of the sertanejos. Da Cunha considered the sertanejos to be the most authentic characters in Brazil (he called them ‘the rock of nationality’), but he thought that they would disappear with the advance of the civilizing process. In a very famous passage Da Cunha wrote that Brazilians were condemned to civilization. This ambiguous statement fits well the third section of the book, where Da Cunha depicted the epic struggle between the Republican Army and the sertanejos. Civilization and barbarism are interplayed in these passages as Da Cunha shows growing empathy for the backland rebels, especially in the final pages. How could he solve this puzzle of the opposition between modernity and the backlands? In another of Da Cunha’s works, we can find an interesting answer. During 1905, he travelled through Amazonia and wrote some texts about the nature and the people who lived there (Da Cunha, 1995a).4 He intended to call this work ‘Paradise Lost’, making reference to the famous poem by Milton. While in Os sertões he depicted an isolated area inhabited by people who were thought to be ‘frozen in time’, in the Amazonian scripts Da Cunha analysed a moving land, which followed the changing rhythm of rivers. The people who were colonizing Amazonia when Da Cunha travelled there were not born in that area, but sertanejos, immigrants, foreigners and other people who did not share a common cultural background. While he depicted people in the backlands as a racial product of territorial isolation, Da Cunha portrayed Amazonian people as traveller figures who had managed to settle down. Da Cunha wrote dozens of pages trying to describe a kind of nature that seemed impossible to be depicted by his scientific-positivistic approach. His disappointment with the hyperbolic descriptions provided by travel writers whose works he read before his journey would soon be replaced by astonishment. The forest seemed too big and too different from classical naturalists’ accounts. The weather was extremely hot and wet, and the geographical conditions did not favour decent work. The majority of people worked as seringueiros (men who worked extracting latex, a raw material for the production of rubber), receiving low wages and being exposed to terrible working conditions. Da Cunha described the whole scene by applying the expression ‘Green Hell’, and compared the seringueiros to Dostoyevsky’s characters – quiet, fatalist and religious. Some scholars, such as Francisco Hardman, have pointed out that Da Cunha’s work was a major critique of the brutal effects caused by the modernization process in an area like Amazonia (Hardman, 1988). According to Hardman, Da Cunha highlighted the ruins left by unfinished economic enterprises (railroads, for instance) and the suffering of workers confronted by market forces. Nevertheless, I understand that Da Cunha also produced a theoretical insight about the civilizing process in former colonial territories. When one reads the geographical description of Amazonia as a metaphor for a nation which was ‘still in the making’, one discovers some interesting remarks about modernity

400


in these areas. First of all, Da Cunha praised the ‘barbarian’ seringueiros. Although they experienced intense suffering and showed a conformist behaviour, they were also pioneers, facing both the jungle and the weather conditions in order to work and settle down. They were men from different backgrounds who managed to adapt to the land. Thus civilization was not an output of some cultural heritage, but the product of men and women capable of inventing new forms of living in extreme conditions. Da Cunha compared these pioneers with the bandeirantes, the violent adventurers who were constantly moving through the hinterland during the first centuries of colonization in search of native Brazilians and gold. Amazonia was like a frontier zone, which was being reinvented by migrants from the east. Da Cunha also compared the methods of European colonialism with the strategies employed by Brazilians seeking to settle in the state of Acre – a region in the heart of Amazon which originally belonged to Bolivia. He argued that the former were based on colonial textbooks that ignored local realities while the latter were invented in a pragmatic and unplanned fashion. By taking this into account, he described the Amazon as an area where capitalist exploitation and new forms of living existed side by side. Moreover, his description rendered the peripheral territory of northern Brazil central for the understanding of capitalism. As I have stated elsewhere (Maia, 2008), the spatial imagination fostered by Da Cunha in his Amazon scripts was not ‘geographical determinism’ but instead a form of explanation that recognized the distinctive features of former colonial territories. Da Cunha’s texts suggest that the power of land was more intense in these areas, as if the writer turned an old positivistic remark into a theoretical statement fitted for non-western great societies. One can say that Da Cunha wrote and thought from a ‘space-in-between’, as Mignolo conceives it. But what could one learn from the intellectual tradition started by Da Cunha? Is it possible to articulate such an old account with contemporary discussions in social theory? In the next section I provide some theoretical grounding for this dialogue.

Spatial images and concept formation Reflections on land and modernity are not restricted to the essayist tradition of the first three decades of the 20th century. Brazilian political sociology has been addressing this topic since its classical period in the 1950s and 1960s (Franco, 1974). Recently, sociologist André Botelho (2007) drew on these classical studies in order to argue that this tradition can provide ground for contemporary political sociology. He focused on texts that depicted political violence in the backlands and the blurring frontiers between public and private spheres. Botelho states that these works rendered rural areas crucial for sociological explanation of modern Brazil because these spaces are central spots for understanding both the language of violence and the distinct features of the nation building process in Brazil. This discussion on land and social theory is not restricted to Brazil. The work of the Ugandan sociologist Mahmood Mamdani (1996), which aims to provide an interpretation of political rule in postcolonial Africa, stresses the language of customary law in rural areas as a variable key to understanding the ‘bifurcated state’ in the continent and

Maia

401

its politics of tribal division. As one can see, Mamdani also brings what would be called ‘rural’ to the analytical forefront, highlighting the role of these spaces in the configuration of modern rule in Africa. These two brief examples show the contemporary relevance of land in sociology. My borrowing from the Brazilian intellectual tradition follows these attempts, although I chose to focus on spatial images engendered in classical Brazilian social thought. But how is it possible to establish the links between loosely defined ‘images’ and scientific concepts? Is it possible to draw on texts that did not fit analytical parameters in contemporary theory? I maintain that this dialogue must depart from the recognition of the relevance of classical spatial images for theorization. The power of imagination in geographical discourse is a traditional theme that was originally developed by John Wright in a famous article, ‘Terra icognitae: the place of imagination in Geography’ (Wright, 1947). In this article, Wright argued that geography was not just a collection of variables and concepts, but also a discourse that employs spatial images in order to create new meanings. The geographical cognition contained aesthetic qualities that could reveal unknown aspects of phenomena instead of just reflecting data concerning territories. Following this neo-Kantian approach, Wright states that: The imagination not only projects itself into terra incognitae and suggests routes for us to follow, but also plays upon those things that we discover and out of them makes imaginative conceptions which we seek to share with others. (Wright, 1947: 4)

David Livingstone and Richard Harrison researched the metaphorical dimension of geographical images and explored theoretical tools provided by linguistic studies (Livingstone and Harrison, 1981). They distinguished between metaphors that just translated words in a symmetrical way and metaphors that could produce new ways of meaning in order to argue that classical images were useful to understand contemporary settings. Thus concepts such as frontier, coined by Frederick Turner in his 1893 classical piece on American history ‘The significance of the frontier in American history’, could be employed to address contemporary problems in major urban areas, such as Los Angeles. Livingstone and Harrison believe that thinking by analogies – the city as a ‘frontier’, or the city as ‘wilderness’ – could reveal new meanings about these spaces. Livingstone and Harrison’s approach allows one to reflect theoretically about classical spatial images. The authors argue that these images operate as intellectual tools which reveal different features of society hitherto concealed by regular scientific discourse. This is exactly what Da Cunha’s texts provide to contemporary readers. Luis Costa Lima (1997), a great scholar in the field of Brazilian literature, argued that the main problem in Da Cunha’s 1902 book about the backlands was how his poetical descriptions of nature did not fit into positivist theories and concepts. Costa Lima stated that the writings concerning Amazonia seemed to address this problem in a different fashion because Da Cunha was able to recognize the unique features of that territory and to express it in a more literary fashion. I would add that this is why his spatial images work as metaphors that can improve our theoretical discourse. Da Cunha’s description of Amazonia not only provides a reflection on territoriality that addresses global

402


capitalism from a de-centered perspective – as Coronil claims – but also employs spatial images that reveal how Brazilians behave in the face of a moving space. As I stated in the first section of this article, the city once worked in classical social theory both as the main locus of social mechanisms and as the great metaphor for ‘society’ and its functionality. In the 21st century, this geographical setting has been radically transformed by economical and political processes that have destroyed the regular conceptions of the ‘city’ (Davis, 2006). The traditional association between urban development and economic growth has been undermined in Third World cities and recent works are trying to analyse this complex picture. As the Brazilian sociologist Vera Telles (2006) stated, Marxist approaches emphasized macro-structural features of the city and stressed exploitation as one of the main analytical tools to understand it. However, contemporary metropolises in Brazil do not resemble the image of the city once built in classical social theory. Therefore one needs to search for new concepts in order to address this issue. Why not explore different spatial images that can reveal new meanings for this scenario? When reading Da Cunha’s texts and other classical essays about Brazilian non-urban spaces, one can identify the sertões and the frontiers as images that address these issues and interpret them as regular features of the modernization process in the Brazilian territory. An illustration of this argument is best seen in the case of the favelas (Brazilian slums). These areas were usually understood as a topic for study in urban sociology, which means that social scientists saw them as originating from the bad functioning of city mechanisms. Brazilian sociologist Maria Alice Rezende de Carvalho (1994) called this framework ‘the sociological city’ and claimed that it was based on a unifying conception of space. In Latin American thought it is possible to notice how the spatial practices in the continent fit badly into this unifying idea of the European city. Angel Rama’s famous essay (Rama, 1985) criticized the abstract rationalism that presided over urban planning in colonial America. More recently, Argentinean scholar Adrian Górelik (2005) has argued that Latin American sociology in the 20th century went from an utopian urbanism based on social reform and state planning to a strong disappointment with the promises of the ‘sociological city’. All these different visions coincide in the diagnosis of a cognitive crisis concerning the city as a spatial framework for understanding Latin American territories. Why cannot the favelas be considered as outcomes of social relations within frontier spaces? This means that one should study the features of spatiality in a country like Brazil instead of framing it in the classical language of urban sociology. Throughout Brazilian history, subaltern populations moved restlessly through the hinterland in search of work and land. Historians have already pointed out how this dynamic (Campos, 2005; Faria, 1998) engendered both social mobility and violent conflicts. In its turn, Brazilian political sociology considers the frontier to be a crucial variable in understanding the geography of capitalism in Brazil and its spread through the hinterland (Martins, 1997; Velho, 1976). The opening and closing of these spaces through the advance of market relations generate class conflicts and geographical mobility, a process that affects Brazilian modern metropolises and new agricultural spaces in the center-west of the country as well. Consequently one could analyse the problems of urban settlements in the framework of the constant struggles over the uses of land in the Brazilian spaces (Santos, 2000).

Maia

403

Thus it would be possible to avoid the classical language of urban ecology that stills frames some analyses of the Brazilian cities. This approach could also provide a different perspective on other issues related to favelas. Common sense usually depicts these urban areas as lacking the state’s authority. Actually, a complex network of state agencies, civil organizations and illegal markets characterizes these spaces, just as in the internal frontiers where traditional forms of controlling the labour force are articulated with contemporary forms of capitalist production (Oliveira, 2003). Therefore, the traditional dualism between state and civil society that structures both classical theory and the sociological city does not properly characterize this interchange between subalterns and governments, whether in cities or in the hinterland. Recently, Marcelo Rosa’s account of landless movements in Brazil has convincingly demonstrated how social movements act upon a configuration wherein the state and its officials play a significant role (Rosa, 2009). These movements – such as the MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem-Terra) – are focused on land distribution and the rights of poor people in the countryside, usually opposing the advancement of agribusiness. Rosa criticizes theories that interpret these struggles as the outcome of a previous ‘rural’ identity that is fighting the modernization process. Furthermore, he states that these configurations reveal institutional arrangements in which the state’s officials may create social identities. Based on this, one can argue that Rosa’s reflections on the landless movements are not restricted to ‘rural sociology’, as the favelas also have complex networks encompassing the state as well as informal associations. I suggest that the duality ‘rural–urban’ which lies at the core of classical sociological theory eludes the fact that one must analyse the features of peripheral spatiality instead of resorting to the typical unifying image of ‘the city’. Take for instance the problem of violence, another common issue related to the favelas. Classical Brazilian thinkers that focused on the land pointed out that violence was constitutive in the Brazilian social order, and not just an anomaly engendered by bad functioning of modern institutions. Willi Bolle’s (2004) study about the fiction of Brazilian writer Guimarães Rosa (1908–67) tackles this point. Bolle asserts that Rosa’s novels did not depict the ‘rural world’, but instead it took the agrarian spaces as central sites for explaining how violence and class relations were linked in Brazilian nation building. Therefore, the sertões should be seen as a metaphor for the pains of modernity in Brazil. One must notice that the smaller cities in the Brazilian interior are facing problems that were usually thought of as ‘urban’, such as youth crime, drug addiction and high homicide rates. It is also common that these problems follow a fast process of informal settlement – a typical feature of the favelas. This is strong evidence of how interpersonal violence is closely related to the process of expanding capitalist frontiers in Brazilian spaces and not just restricted to big metropolises. That’s why one could employ Da Cunha’s text as a source for developing a spatial imagination, by following Livingstone and Harrison’s suggestions. These examples thus demonstrate how spatial images from the Brazilian intellectual history could be useful to concept formation. While classical social theory stressed the city as the spatial image for modernity and depicted other spaces as backward vestiges, the discussion I have presented in this article puts other spatial images in the foreground. This

404


could help both to avoid the urban–rural division and to improve one’s comprehension of modernity from non-western perspectives. This task is closely related to the programme put forward by de-colonial criticism, which builds on a critical geopolitical discourse in order to point out limits of European theory. I hope that the language of the sertões presented in this article may be helpful to this project. Funding This article is part of the author’s PhD thesis, which was funded by CNPq (the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development) through a PhD scholarship.

Notes 1. There is not a unique space that corresponds to the sertões. Usually, this word was used to characterize great unknown areas in Brazil’s interior, specially the dry regions of the northeast. But even some places in the Amazon were seen as sertões. As one can see, what matters most here is the relational perspective, because the sertões were always defined by the absence of civilized aspects that were attributed to urban areas. 2. An English translation was published as Rebellion in the Backlands in 1944. 3. All Da Cunha’s texts cited here are extracted from his complete works, published in 1995 by Ed. Aguilar. 4. Da Cunha was invited to the region in 1904 by Barão do Rio Branco, a famous Brazilian diplomat who was trying to reach an agreement with Bolivia concerning a territorial dispute.

References Abreu R (1998) O enigma de Os sertões. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Funarte/Ed. Rocco. Alatas SF (2006) A Kaldunian example for a historical sociology for the South. Current Sociology 54(3): 397–411. Alatas SH (2006) The autonomous, the universal and the future of sociology. Current Sociology 54(1): 7–23. Alonso A (1996) De positivismos e de positivistas: interpretações do positivismo brasileiro. Revista Dados 42: 109–134. Amory F (2009) Euclides da Cunha: uma odisseia nos trópicos. Cotia: Ateliê Editorial. Barboza Filho R (2000) Tradição e artifício: o barroco na formação americana. Belo Horizonte: Ed. UFMG. Bolle W (2004) Grandesertão. br: o romance de formação do Brasil. São Paulo: Duas Cidades, Editora 34. Botelho A (2007) Sequências de uma sociologia política brasileira. Dados – Revista de Ciências Sociais 50(1): 49–82. Campos MV (2005) Goiás na década de 1730: pioneiros, elites locais, motins e fronteira. In: Bicalho FM and Amaral VL (eds) Modos de governar: idéias e práticas políticas no Império Português. Séculos XVI–XIX. São Paulo: Alameda. Carvalho MAR de (1994) Quatro vezes cidade. Rio de Janeiro: Sette Letras. Chakrabarty D (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chatterjee P (2001) Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. Connell R (2007a) The northern theory of globalization. Sociological Theory 25(4): 368–375 Connell R (2007b) Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Sciences. Cambridge: Polity.

Maia

405

Coronil F (1996) Beyond Occidentalism: Toward nonimperial geohistorical categories. Cultural Anthropology 11(1): 51–87. Coronil F (2004) Latin American postcolonial studies and global decolonization. In: Lazarus N (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Costa Lima L (1997) Terra ignota. A construção de Os sertões. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Civilização Brasileira. Da Cunha E (1995a) Terra sem história. In: Coutinho A (ed.) Obras completas, Vol. II. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Nova Aguilar, 249–319. Da Cunha E (1995b) Os sertões. In: Coutinho A (ed.) Obras completas, Vol. I. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Nova Aguilar, 99–515. Davis M (2006) Planet of Slums. London and New York: Verso. Domingues JM (2009) Global modernization, ‘coloniality’, and a critical sociology for contemporary Latin America. Theory, Culture and Society 26(1): 112–133. Faria S de C (1998) A colônia em movimento. Fortuna e família no cotidiano colonial. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira. Flint C and Shelley FM (1996) Structure, agency and context: The contributions of geography to world-system analyses. Sociological Inquiry 66(4): 496–508. Franco MS de C (1974) Homens livres na ordem escravocrata. São Paulo: Ática. Giddens A (1984) The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Górelik A (2005) A produção da cidade latino-americana. Tempo Social 17(1): 111–133 Hardman FF (1988) Trem fantasma: a modernidade na selva. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Hardman FF (1996) Brutalidade antiga: sobre história e ruínas em Euclides. Estudos Avançados 10(26): 293–310. Harvey D (1982) The Limits to Capital. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hearn J (2001) The ‘uses and abuses’ of civil society in Africa. Review of African Political Economy 87: 43–53. Katznelson I (1993) Marxism and the City. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kumar K (1993) Civil society: An inquiry into the usefulness of an historical term. British Journal of Sociology 44(3): 375–395. Lefebvre H (1991) The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Lima NT (1999) Um sertão chamado Brasil: intelectuais e representação geográfica da identidade nacional. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Revan. Livingstone D and Harrison R (1981) Meaning through metaphor: Analogy as epistemology. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 71(1): 95–107. Maia JME (2008) A terra como invenção: o espaço no pensamento social brasileiro. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar. Mamdani M (1996) Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Martins J de S (1997) Fronteira: a degradação do outro nos confins do humano. São Paulo: HUCITEC. Mignolo W (2002) The geopolitics of knowledge and colonial difference. South Atlantic Quarterly 101(1): 57–96. Mignolo W (2003) The Darker Side of Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization. Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan University Press. Mignolo W and Tlostanova M (2006) Theorizing from the borders: Shifting to geo and bodypolitics of knowledge. European Journal of Social Theory 9(2): 205–221. Moraes ACR de (2002) Território e história no Brasil. São Paulo: Hucitec.

406


Newman D (2006) Borders and bordering: Towards an interdisciplinary dialogue. European Journal of Social Theory 9(2) 171–186. Oliveira F de (2003) Crítica à razão dualista. O ornitorrinco. São Paulo: Boitempo. Pratt ML (1992) Imperial Eye: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Rama A (1985) A cidade das letras. São Paulo: Brasiliense. Rosa M (2009) Sem-Terra: os sentidos e as transformações de uma categoria de ação coletiva no Brasil. Lua Nova 76: 197–227. Rumford C (2006) Introduction: Theorizing borders. European Journal of Social Theory 9(2): 155–169. Said E (1979) Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Santana JCB (2001) Ciência e arte: Euclides da Cunha e as ciências naturais. São Paulo: Ed. HUCITEC/Feira de Santana: Ed. UEFS. Santos M (2000) Por uma outra globalização: do pensamento único à consciência universal. Rio de Janeiro: Record. Sassen S (2000) Spatialities and temporalities of the global: Elements for a theorization. Public Culture 12(1): 215–232. Soja EW (1989) Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso. Souza CV (1997) A pátria geográfica: sertão e litoral no pensamento social brasileiro. Goiânia: Ed. UFG. Telles VS (2006) Trajetórias urbanas: fios da descrição de uma cidade. In: Telles VR and Cabanes R (eds) Nas tramas da cidade: trajetórias urbanas e seus territórios. São Paulo: Associação Editorial Humanitas. Velho O (1976) Capitalismo autoritário e campesinato: um estudo comparativo a partir da fronteira em movimento. São Paulo: DIFEL. Ventura R (2003) Retrato interrompido da vida de Euclides da Cunha. São Paulo: Ed. Companhia das Letras. Wallerstein IM (1996) Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wright JK (1947) Terra incognitae: The place of the imagination in Geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 37(1): 1–15.

Biographical note João Marcelo E Maia is an assistant professor at the School for Social Sciences and History (CPDOC) at Fundação Getúlio Vargas in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He has a PhD in sociology and his main interests are: Brazilian social thought, social theory in the periphery and sociology of culture. Recently, he has been working on a discussion that brings together social theory and Brazilian thought. His aim is to analyse classical Brazilian texts from early essayists as forms of peripheral imagination, comparing it with other intellectual traditions and addressing current debates in social theory.

Résumé Le tournant dit spatial occupe une place très controversée au sein des débats théoriques sociologiques. Le présent article vise à explorer quelques-uns des effets de ce tournant et propose une approche qui ne soit pas centrée sur le cas européen pour l’appréhender. En s’appuyant sur des débats postcoloniaux, l’article affirme également que quelques traditions intellectuelles périphériques mobilisent le langage de l’espace de manière expérimentale depuis fort longtemps.

Maia

407

Le cas de l’histoire intellectuelle brésilienne sert de cas d’étude, afin de vérifier cette hypothèse et débattre de ses conséquences théoriques. Mots clés: Théorie sociologique, géographie, sociologie

Resúmen El denominado giro espacial ha sido muy controvertido en los debates de teoría social. Este artículo explora algunos resultados de este giro y propone entenderlo desde un enfoque no eurocéntrico. Tomando como referencia los debates sobre la descolonización, el artículo también argumenta que algunas tradiciones intelectuales periféricas han experimentado con el lenguaje del espacio desde hace mucho tiempo. Igualmente, toma la historia intelectual brasileña como un estudio de caso para sostener esta hipótesis y discutir sus posibilidades teóricas. Palabras clave: Teoría sociológica, geografía, sociología