Traditional sociability as modernity: Critical reflections on some conceptions of “traditional” sociability in Brazil

When we speak on modernity some basic concepts come up, for example, well-established boundaries between public and private, free and rational individuals to act as they please and the rationalization and efficiency of the most distinctive institutional frameworks that make up society. These are basically some key ideas that underpin the concept of modernity sociologically, although contemporary studies show that in the West such proceedings were not historically developed with completeness and accuracy. Anyway, it was with this narrow and provincial conception of modernity that interpretations and analysis on the institutions and Brazilian sociability were performed, so that the diagnosis often resulted in the negativity of national modernity for non completion of those conceptions guiding. Aiming extend the sociological dimension of the concept of modernity, basing it on a concrete historical process, we aim at the way understood as traditional sociability, more specifically those in which there was the presence of a free man and dependent on the Brazilian slave society, to related and entangled with modern institutions and some imaginary, so to only exist through them. Relations which prevailed all kinds of domination and submission and that not had reference explicit to rules institutional or moral between formally free men before demonstrating a pre-modernity or a unconcluded modernity in Brazil, shows a proper configuration of modernity that cannot be understood with only the nation as a guiding methodology and those key ideas of the concept of hegemonic and Eurocentric modernity. Thus, from the Brazilian experience, to understand more fruitfully modernity and its settings in non-Western and peripherals societies is need to resize critically and extend the epistemological foundations of the concept.