History and Representation in Narratives of Public Life in Brazil Sandra Jovchelovitch London School of Economics and Political Science

Narrative and Representation  Narrative is the essential medium of representation; through storytelling communities remember, deal with time and make sense of their surroundings.  Narratives connect the past, the present and the future; they are intertwined with the social representations of a community and the possibility of working through and reflecting upon the history and identity of a community

Narrative: Remember, Repeat, Work Through  Storytelling is a fundamental media through which communities understand their past and project their aims for the future.  “A group that does not understand its history is destined to repeat it” (Freud).  Storytelling allows remembering as elaboration, as a working through the past that once was, and prevents communities from “freezing” and compulsively repeating their history.

Public Life and the People  Brazilian scholarly self-interpretation and historiography:  The social body: biological metaphors that connect the difficulties of public life with the body of a sick man; the illnesses of Brazilian public life seen through the lenses of a sick body.  The people, race and mixture: biological metaphors that connect the mixture of “races” to an idea of degeneration and biological competition between superior and inferior races.

Examples:  Raízes do Brazil, (Sergio Buarque de Hollanda, 1947)  Casa Grande e Senzala (Gilberto Freyre, 1936)  América Latina: Males de Origin (Manoel Bonfim, 1903)

Public Life and the People  Studies on everyday representations of the public sphere show that the representations produced by scholarly self-interpretation and historiography jump into everyday life and penetrate common sense, mainly through myth (Jovchelovitch, 2000; Ribeiro, 1994; Ortiz, 1986).  They show that there is inter-penetration of scientific and everyday discourses in the construction of an specific mythology related to the origins and subsequent development of Brazilian society, its people and its public life.

Myth as a Form of Knowledge  Consider myth through a model that recognises the variability of knowledge systems; different forms of knowledge fulfil different functions and needs.  Who  identity; subjectivity  How  communicative action; the relational  Why  the dynamics of meaning production  What  the object  What for  the functions (identity, memory, community, ideology, future-making)

The Dynamics of Myth  Myths are systems of knowing the world that account for the genesis, development and characteristics of families, communities and nations, firms and institutions and the very trajectory of individual persons.  Chaui: “We live in the difuse presence of a narrative of origins. This narrative, though elaborated at the time of the conquest, does not cease to repeat itself because it operates as a founding myth.”

Founding Myths  Impose a strong bond with the past and tend to obstruct the work of temporal difference, so that the past keeps itself as a permanent presence.  Founding myths do not stop finding new means to express themselves, new languages and new ideas, in such a way that the more they seem to be something else, the more they are a repetition of themselves.  In the psychoanalytical sense myth involves an imaginary defence against the anxiety of tensions and conflicts through the compulsion to repeat.

Brazil: “Evils of origin”  The People: “le bon sauvage”, the problems of Iberia and black Africa; salvation or roguery?  The Climate: paradise or hell on earth?  The Mix: degeneration and the abandonment of purity  These elements are powerfully combined in a mythology of origins that locates in the emerging (mixed) peoples of the Americas and its natural landscape a “natural” explanation to the constitution (and unresolved problems) of social and political life.

The Functions of Myth  Identity, community, memory, antecipation and ideology  Comfort, reassurance and imagination  Close new meaning down (Jovchelovitch, 2000)  Caring nothing for the literal, myth is powerful because it is produced and recognised by individuals and communities and yet it can be easily permeated by the ideological function to fulfil purposes of domination.

Transformation of Myths?  Myth belongs to a register where accuracy in cognition is not required;  Myth produces a system of signification that can both call upon and teach the hidden motivation that put it into motion in the first place;  Myth distorts and disregards the “reality” of the object”, which rather than diminish its force constitutes the main source of its power;  In the continuous use of narrative lies the possibility of elaboration, and thus of eventually re-working our social representations and with them, our historical “truths”.