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Sociologists map
possible utopias


ALVARO KASSAB

The XI Brazilian Congress of Sociology did more than reveal the how many are you going production of research developed in theoretical and practical fields and which usually sheds light on the Brazilian and international reality. It showed that dialogue between sociology and other areas of knowledge is increasingly necessary, a recurring theme in conferences, round tables and debates that brought together hundreds of teachers, researchers and students at Unicamp, between the 1st and 5th. .

O Journal of Unicamp heard from ten intellectuals who participated in the event. In the interviews that begin on this page and continue in the following three, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Danilo Zolo, Francisco de Oliveira, Laymert Garcia dos Santos, Leila da Costa Ferreira, Marcio Pochmann, Marcelo Ridenti, Maria Arminda do Nascimento Arruda, Renato Ortiz and Sérgio Adorno address, among other topics, the functions and role of the contemporary state, the new reality of the labor market, violence, the impact of new technologies and the challenges of contemporary sociology. On at least one of the themes, opinions converged: utopias have been transfigured, but they are still there. "Even when all material misery is swept from the earth, which is far from happening, men will certainly create other utopias. The greatest of them is the utopia of the happy man", stated sociologist Francisco de Oliveira.

Eustáquio Gomes and Carlo Alberto Dastoli collaborated

Journal of Unicamp - What are the biggest challenges facing contemporary sociology?

Boaventura de Sousa Santos - It is to capture the immense and inexhaustible richness of the experiences of resistance to neoliberal globalization, the struggle for dignity and the struggle for social inclusion. I think that our social sciences are still poorly equipped to capture all this richness and dignify it.

Danilo Zolo - The fundamental problem may be trying to understand both the complex processes of national societies and obviously the processes of globalization. It is necessary to understand the motivations of these processes, provide the basis for explanatory theories and, therefore, allow political interventions. It is imperative to ensure that globalization does not destroy people's social identities, freedom and security.

Francisco de Oliveira - After the grand narratives, contemporary sociology turned to specific sociologies that are generally minimalist, which deal with small themes and various smaller aspects. According to this position, the great historical-sociological narratives hid much of the diversity and plurality of the world and were influenced by the concept of totality. So-called postmodern sociology abandons this thing of totality and seeks what is specific, what is singular. As a result, the field of sociology was greatly enriched, obviously, but the ability to think about total processes that continue to exist was lost. Sociology today is somewhat powerless to understand the great total processes. Hence the fact that the field of history that tries to cover the entire discussion about globalization has gained greater notoriety and greater prominence, such as, for example, the long historical tradition of works by authors such as Hobsbawn, who is almost a sociologist in the sense of thinking about total processes . The great challenge of contemporary sociology is, therefore, to recover the ability to narrate and understand major total processes, without obviously giving up the path taken, which was to seek to find pluralities in more complex processes.

Laymert Garcia dos Santos - The biggest challenge of contemporary sociology is technoscience. It poses problems for contemporary society that undermine the parameters with which sociology is accustomed to working.

Leila da Costa Ferreira - We have several themes that could contribute to understanding the complexity of today's world. We are talking more about uncertainties than certainties. The first major theme is undoubtedly the issue of violence. Another is the environmental issue - not only major global issues, such as climate change, biodiversity, etc., but also issues that permeate our daily lives, such as, for example, the issue of water resources and atmospheric pollution. This is very correlated with the issue of violence. These are totally transversal and interconnected themes. I also think that the issue of globalization and globalization is relevant and important for contemporary sociology, as is the issue of the centrality of work.

Marcio Pochmann - The challenge is twofold. The first, from the point of view of knowledge of a changing reality, since the contribution of sociology is precisely not only the identification of social phenomena, but a theorization about the structure of society, its past and future perspectives. The second challenge concerns applied social science - how sociology can continue to be an instrument of support for those who fight for social transformation, based on the knowledge of the reality that this same sociology allows us to identify.

Marcelo Ridenti - Sociology is committed to unveiling social appearances. What we see today is a very mystified, very masked world, in which we have an ever-increasing advance of capitalism, which is widespread across the globe and transforms everything into merchandise. Paradoxically, the more this capitalist system spreads and expands, the more difficult and blurred it becomes to recognize its structure and functioning. I would say that the task of sociology is to help unmask this world that appears increasingly less clear to social agents.

Maria Arminda do Nascimento Arruda - Strictly speaking, social sciences have always faced challenges, as they are disciplines directly connected to the understanding of social and collective situations. As society changes a lot, new challenges are always imposed. But that's not a way to answer, because I can say that the challenges are permanent. But nothing has changed? There are some challenges for each moment. For social sciences, it is not enough to say that there are a set of new problems in society that pose a challenge for reflection. Strictly speaking, this is only in fact constituted for reflection to the extent that that social issue is formulated as a problem of reflection and investigation. This involves the formulation of a problem, it is not an immediate relationship between the social scientist and society's problems. There are a multitude of questions, as we live in a very unsettling world, which is heading towards an increasingly complex and difficult coexistence. Just look at what is happening on the international scene. More than that: what is happening in our particular case, which is the most obvious challenge. The first of these is the vulnerability of social coexistence in large cities; These are increasingly acute social issues. Brazil today has a set of problems to be resolved - the problem of land, of social inequality. As a sociologist of culture, I believe it is very important that Brazilian society has almost gone from being an illiterate society to immediately coexisting with a cultural industry system. Television, for example, occupied an almost integral space in our society. This needs to be asked. It's one thing if you have a viewer with conditions of judgment - the result of a society that has consolidated a certain type of culture. But when you have a society that has a huge movement of population displacement, as has happened in Brazil in recent times, this has another meaning. There are a plurality of very serious issues in Brazilian society.

Renato Ortiz - The current challenge is to think about the transformations that have occurred in the last two decades. It has to do with the context of globalization, the entire problem of the nation-state, that is, the development of a computerized society. Working on this problem in the contemporary world with categories that were not yet available in the historical tradition we had in sociology. This is, in my opinion, the main challenge, with an advantage, perhaps: this transformation process, although not entirely completed, is already clearer than it was, say, 15 years ago. This allows us to have a perspective of understanding that is different from the common sense that is widespread in the media and in everyday conversations.

Sergio Adorno - There are several challenges. One of them, certainly, is the issue of violence, which is less and less a problem of disorder in the traditional sense and is much more a complex phenomenon with multiple roots in society. It is a phenomenon through which you can today decipher a series of other questions. It is possible to decipher problems of identity, power and underground organizations in society. Violence is an important place to think about contemporary society.

Continued on pages 06 and 07