The growing body of literature on the idea of the Anthropocene has opened serious questions that go to the heart of the social and human sciences. There has been as yet no satisfactory theoretical framework for the analysis of the Anthropocene debate in the social and human sciences. The notion of the Anthropocene is not only a condition in which humans have become geologic agents and thus signalling a temporal shift in earth history: it can be seen as a new object of knowledge and an order of governance. A promising direction for theorising in the social and human science is to approach the notion of the Anthropocene as exemplified in new knowledge practices that have implications for governance. It invokes new conceptions of time, agency, knowledge and governance. The Anthropocene has become a way in which the human world is re-imagined culturally and politically in terms of its relation with the Earth. It entails a cultural model, that is an interpretative category by which contemporary societies make sense of the world as embedded in the earth and articulate a new kind of historical self-understanding, by which an alternative order of governance is projected. This points in the direction of cosmopolitics -and thus of a 'Cosmopolocene' -rather than a geologisation of the social or in the post-humanist philosophy, the end of the human condition as one marked by agency.
The notion of multiple modernities as developed by Eisenstadt has become increasingly influential in debates about modernity and the historical formation of societies in comparative perspective. On closer inspection, the theoretical framework is less than straightforward when it comes to specific applications. This article considers Brazil from the perspective of a revised theory of multiple modernities. There has been virtually no application to specific case studies within the countries of the South. Brazil could be considered an important case study of modernity that deserves attention in its own right. The article shows that the theoretical framework of multiple modernities offers insights into the Brazilian trajectory of modernity, a consideration of which also challenges some of the assumptions of Eisenstadt’s approach. Despite the limits of the framework, the notion of multiple modernities offers a good basis for a global analysis of modernity. Greater attention needs to be given to civilizational encounters and to sources of conflict and plurality within modernity and which cannot be accounted for in terms of the principles of axiality postulated by Eisenstadt.
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This chapter reconstructs the conceptual, rather than geographical, separation of ‘the Americas’ into a North America and a South America with distinct sociopolitical connotations. More specifically, it examines what it calls the paradigmatisation of history and the emergence of the modern Western world, along with some aspects of what was regarded as America, the ‘New World’, before and after the modern ruptures that occurred in the liminal ‘age of revolutions’. It also discusses what became known as the ‘American Revolution’ with its notions of ‘manifest destiny’ and ‘American exceptionalism’. The chapter argues that what used to be understood as the New World went through a process of divergence during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that this divergence was appropriated by instituting different significant categories by the narratives of the enlargement of the modern Western world in the twentieth century.
Nuestro destino (a diferencia del infierno de Swedenborg y del infierno de la mitología tibetana) no es espantoso por irreal; es espantoso porque es irreversible y de hierro. El tiempo es la substancia de que estoy hecho. El tiempo es un río que me arrebata, pero yo soy el río; es un tigre que me destroza, pero yo soy el tigre; es un fuego que me consume, pero yo soy el fuego. El mundo, desgraciadamente, es real; yo, desgraciadamente, soy Borges.Jorge Luis Borges "Nueva refutación del tiempo" RESUMO Neste artigo argumentamos que os temas da ação e da história presentes em alguns contos de Jorge Luis Borges antecipam alguns pontos que apareceram nas discussões pós-estruturalistas -nos campos da
Michel Agier's Borderlands first appeared in French in 2013 under the title La Condition cosmopolite: L'anthropologie a`l'epreuve du pie`ge identitaire (La Découvertee, 2013), and in 2015 the book was translated into both Portuguese and Spanish. 1 The book is a farreaching exploration of the problem of the border and some of its possible meanings for the analysis of contemporary societies. It applies the classical tools of anthropological and ethnographical research to reflect on the formation of the 'banal' experiences of cosmopolitanism in different parts of the world. The book will probably be criticized by classical ethnographers who do not see the point of generalizations; and it will probably also be criticized by 'generalists' who will say that neither the empirical nor the theoretical bases for the argument put forward by Agier are strong enough to hold together the structure he wants to sustain. Why I dismiss those criticisms and applaud the book is because Borderlands shows how one can break down the walls imposed on our way of thinking and interpreting contemporary societies. Borderlands shows that we would be better off not following the orthodox rules established in the social sciences to fully address the problems of contemporary societies. It is possible (and I would say also indispensable) to establish, in Agier's prose, a 'global ethnography' of border situations. A reflection on borders rightly asks for located social thought. In light of the specific problems that we face, new methods, theories, and perspectives could be brought together for a reinterpretation of the world that we are living in.The book advocates a 'situational' anthropology of the border, understood by Agier not as a physical entity that splits worlds or something that creates the idea of an insider and an outsider. Quite the opposite; it is a ritual fully inscribed in spatial and temporal experiences that are themselves the source of the social relations created at the border.What the border displays is both a division and a relationship. Its action is double, external and internal; it is both a threshold and an act of institution: to institute one's own place,
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