Editorial

Abstract

The current issue of INTERthesis presents a variety of peculiar articles, reviews and translations on Sociology, Psychology and Anthropology, but with frequent incidences – and this is the point that calls our attention the most – in two aspects that one can infer from reading between the lines, when not clearly mentioned: the political repercussions of theoretical issues or basic science, and the review of methodology and concepts. The problem of the poverty scandal in a globalized civilization, technically able to solve all humanity’s sufferings, does not have its genesis in the political will alone, or in the administrative corruption, but, according to Diamantino Machado, also in the way in which the social sciences have defined poverty: deviant behavior of those who, supposedly able to determine how to eliminate poverty, fail to determine the theoretical tools and, in practice, build the reproduction of the evil instead. Ana Maria Fernandez writes the book review of Conflitos Ambientais no Brasil (Environmental Conflicts in Brazil) by Henri Ascelrad. The author highlights the challenge of finding instruments for analysis in order to interpret the complexity of the social, ecological and political processes, which bring Nature to the innermost parts of the social conflicts. Failure on the conceptualization of movement, always badly explained, is what Giorgio Agamben, in Selvino Assmann’s translation, says has led people against politicization; a dominion of the people by the parties corresponds to the apparent democracy of the concept. It’s similar to Gilberto Ferreira da Silva’s and Rejane Penna’s criticisms towards the studies about people with African background in the graduate studies in Brazil: instead of contributing to the overcoming of unfair situations motivated by racism, the researches ostentatiously display a very little consistent methodology, mainly in spoken interviews, harming this way the results and the positive actions. The theme is back in Sílvia Maria de Araújo’s article on collective actions, where the author highlights the mistakes in the elaboration of the category of analysis: the phenomenon in itself is evident and almost omnipresent, but the concepts involved in its studies must be distinctly expressed. As Vera Viviane Schmidt studies the organized society, she makes a short historical review of the public health politics in Brazil since 1980, confronting them with the general guidelines of the National State politics. She then analyses the concept of civil society and its practical concretizing, and afterwards studies the ways of political interventions in the organized society, then the social movements, without criticizing, as we often see in many other people’s articles, the conceptualization and methodology, but rereading the pertinent theories applying all these analyses to the health politics, and showing, inversely, how successful practices can interfere in the discussions of the paradigm. In this set of texts about the relationship between methodology of sciences and the political action, one can notice another set that has a bigger incidence in other basic areas, illuminating, this way, the two kinds of observations and research results. Steven Pinker discusses an issue that worries the anthropologists a lot and that has recently received new guidelines of solutions: Does the determination of the human behavior receive more influences from nature (genetics) or from culture (the artificial society)? And again we face the “accusation”: methodology and wrong concepts in the basic sciences have hazardous consequences in the practical action – including family raising. Rafael Raffaelli deepens the man’s acting issue as he analyses the changes of the psychoanalytical conceptions and their approach to phenomenology: more than the method, or the theory of the method, the author enters the epistemology and the reviews of theories about the human being. This way, our texts have gone from the collective to the individual action, and have come closer to the idea of body and life, which Mirko Drazen Grmek focuses under a contrasting perspective, as he discusses death, in Selvino Assmann’s translation. It is the concept of death that, involving problems of medical definition, leads to critical practical procedures, such as the determination of the state of death made by medical consensus, but without any definition of the patient’s state. This clash forces us to discuss life and how the notion of death has implications in the medical decisions in acute cases. The author ends up recurring to metaphysics to clarify the biologist’s reflections, and this is where we realize that in the conceptual and methodological discussions of this journal, Philosophy somehow has always been present. João Lupi Editor