Social movements, culture, and politics in brazilian sociology

Social Movements, Culture, and Politics in Brazilian Sociology

            It is generally accepted that sociology's choice of topics is the product of particular historical contexts. This is especially the case with work on social movements. When Brazilian society began its return to democracy in the 1970s, demands for the public recognition of basic social and political rights—housing, child care, health, education, and jobs—erupted on the national scene in such novel forms as mass demonstrations by both trade unions and the general public, and Brazilians felt that their society was at last coming back to life. In this context, social movements became a focus of sociological research and analysis that modified theoretical positions and produced results that were applicable to the field of practical politics. It was these innovative social and political movements that drove sociologists and others in the human sciences to become analysts of Brazil's destiny at the moment of its institutional renewal. The sociological literature is full of references to "novelty," applied both to what is considered emergent in terms of political practices and to what appears to be unusual in theories of change and social conflict.

              This paper develops the hypothesis that the academic treatment of social movements was conditioned both by the return to democracy in Brazil and by the influence of interdisciplinary theories, with contributions from both anthropology and political science, that gave analytic centrality to social and political actors. Out of this emerged technical perspectives that informed sociological accounts on both the micro and the macro level. The paper reflects mainly on the output of Brazilian sociology of the last 30 years of the twentieth century, but, with regard to the most recent research, also takes into account the influence of foreign writers.