Sociologia

This thesis aims to contribute to the comprehension of the social organization of the production of cultural and artistic goods/services. Considering as a target the cinematographic production that has been characterized as the "novíssimo cinema brasileiro" ("brand new" Brazilian cinema, in reference to Brazilian 1960's "new wave", meaning a production made ​​by young filmmakers with low budgets and less specialized and hierarchical organizational structures, which begins to get organized in early 2000 and gain public national recognition by the end of 21st century's first decade), this thesis is developed based on two goals. The first is to comprehend "novíssimo" cinema taking into account the positioning the filmmakers occupy in the larger Brazilian cinema field, which triggers a set of specific practices and representations. The second goal is to bring elements that contribute to the discussion of cultural/artistic productions known as 'independent' – from the observation of the cinema case, we seek to build a category of independence that can be used for understanding other contexts of symbolic production.

Chileans, a population used to earthquakes, woke up with surprise in the morning of February 27th, 2010 since right after the earthquake that hit Concepción, the third largest metropolitan area in the country, massive looting to stores came about. Fed by rumors about roving mobs, Concepcion residents formed their own neighborhood defense squads to guard their homes, whereas the Chilean government declared State of Exception to restore the social order. Drawing on testimonies of men and women I interviewed in Concepción two years after the disaster, this exploratory and qualitative research examines the relationship between earthquake, collective violence, and urban insecurity. Following a theoretical discussion about collective memories, I explore how silence and forgetting are active elements in the process of collective remembering. In addition, this project analyzes the sense of exceptionality that my interviewees, other scholars, and state authorities have assigned to looting in the aftermath of the earthquake; events that, as I shall demonstrate, were interpreted as a symptom of moral decadence of Chilean society under the neoliberal regime. By scrutinizing historical data about past earthquakes, I look at traces of social and political conflicts associated with the occurrence of natural disaster like the one I describe here. Concerning the 2010 facts, I make use of the framework offered by Charles Tilly and Javier Auyero to present, at a micro-scale level, looting targets, dynamics and repertoires based on narratives collected empirically (among them, testimonies of storeowners who were victimized by the crowd). Finally, to explore the displacement of fear—in particular, from the fear to earthquake to the fear of the “others”—I point out the need to pay attention to the ways in which different neighborhoods are conceived of as well as the role of rumors.

This research is located in the theme of globalization, specifically of transnational processes related to products and people mobility that makes São Paulo’s downtown a stage of the “globalization from bellow”. The research object are the Chinese migrants in the commerce galleries of 25 de Março street region, São Paulo. The research had an exploratory character about what is the role developed by these migrants, based in an ethnography made between 2009 and 2012.

We argue that massive arrival of Chinese in the region of 25 de Março street was possible due to a commercial device in which galleries appear as an important sales model, whose proprietors are mainly Chinese migrants that came in the 1950s and 1960s. It is true that significant recent flow of migration occurs at a time of reactivation of the Chinese diaspora around the world in the wake of the effects of Chinese industrialization. However, it was the Chinese of the previous flow that could become importers of products made ​​in China, which abound in downtown São Paulo markets, partially displacing the supply chain of products which previously passed through Paraguay to imports directly from the Asian country. There are more recently arrived Chinese sellers than importers and owners of galleries, but only the latter two types had a "transnational condition" that allowed them to legally open their businesses and, through social networks, connect themselves to the other side of the globe. Therefore they alter the scale of the trade practiced by engendering a new kind of sales: galleries full of Chinese merchants who sell products directly from the Asian country.

In this research, I perform a sociological analysis of the concept of rule of law and demonstrate the implications of this concept in the formation of a particular vision of the social universe. I demonstrate that, if we focus on its construction as a collective one, operated at the major field of power – more than a doctrinaire formula generated mainly inside the academic universe of the law universities – the rule of law will hold many different, ambiguous and even contradictory meanings. But it is precisely because of this quality that it will be decisive for the conservation of a state power identity under its emblem. To understand the historical process through which the rule of law symbol reaches its supremacy, it was necessary to perform a his­ torical sociology on the global ascension of legal elites in the field of state power, at the histori­ cal process of decay of the military regime and further redemocratization at the 1990s. To un­ derstand the amplitude of meanings of the rule of law that stems from its collective character, I’ve analyzed an extent ensemble of articles published on the most important brazillian newspa­ per since that time, the daily Folha de S. Paulo. Those articles were written by an expressive variety of elite members from different fields, but most prevailingly individuals with a law for­ mation. As I recognized some structures shared by most of those who appear at these debates, despite of apparently different political perspectives, I sought the structurant elements of a theo­ rization of society under this juridicist perspective. 

The object of this study is located in the fluid field of the illicit acts and their repression, in the context of São Paulo City, starting at the years 30 of the Twentieth Century. Through the illegalism analysis category and its distinguished management, the investigation was focused on how remote and long lasting social control practices, marked by Police discretion and by the selective desactivation of the Law, as in corrective arrests, got linked to the urban criminal economies, which up to the middle of the sixties established themselves  mostly around prostitution, as well as took part on its decline. The corrective arrests, as ways of intervenience of the Police force on criminal activities, associated with exaggerated patterns of institutional violence, showed themselves crutial to the rising of urban delinquency in the seventies, as an event related to the patrimonial mass criminality, diffuse, street type. As for the nineties, the consolidation of a new urban crime economy, the retail commerce of illicit drugs, together with the intense recruiting of that isolated and patrimonial criminality to jail, has contributed to the surge of a phenomenon qualified in this work as articulation of the criminality, for which, once more, the management of the illegalism, in a new version, performs a main role. Last, in order to focus the most recent dynamics of common crime management in the city, this study analyzed statistic data on prisons in the very act, in the city, in an attempt to establish a certain cartography of the urban crime and its management. Still under this perspective, it was aimed to retrace, taking as departing point the trajectories of teenagers enrolled at the basis of the social stratum of crime, from the well organized and disciplinary drug traffic, to the isolated and violent robbery, the logic connected to the maintenance and reproduction of the urban crime market, the renewed roles performed in the web of the illegalities, announcing, at last, changes in the division of the Police work which tend to increase  militarization as the organizing principle not just of the management of these illegalisms, but also of the more contemporary ways of governmentality.

This dissertation aims to comprehend the analytics carried out by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in his lectures at the Collège de France entitled The Birth of Biopolitics (1978-79) regarding the neoliberal art of government. We seek to apprehend the relation between the analyses of Neoliberalism and other moments and concepts of the foucauldian bibliographical production, such as the notions of “biopolitics”, “governmentality” and “disciplinary power”. In order to accomplish such task, we approach several works written by Foucault, such as The order of things (1966), Discipline and punish (1975), The History of sexuality volume 1 – The will to knowledge (1976), as well as the lectures Society must be defended (1975-76) and Security, Territory, Population (1977-78). To conclude, this text also contributes to the study of Neoliberalism as a whole, emphasizing the paths opened by Foucault’s theory and pointing beyond an exercise of theoretical exegesis of the foucauldian philosophical experience.