The 93rd issue of the institutional journal "Estudos Avançados" inaugurates a series of publications focused on primary and secondary education. The main dossier of this issue brings a set of articles on the teaching of humanities, area of knowledge chosen to open the sequence. Besides reflections on the current conjuncture of Brazilian education, the texts present reflections on the teaching of philosophy, history, geography, music, literature and religion.

The journal also has three other sections, with different themes. In the first one, Urban Life and Health, four articles seek to understand how environmental and behavioral attributes of large cities affect the lives of their inhabitants. The second set of texts, Arts and Culture, brings comprehensive discussions on higher education in the arts and reflections on important works of the last century. The last section honors economist Paul Singer, who died in April, with a large and expressive interview in 2016.

To editor Alfredo Bosi, the humanities face a paradoxical situation. "At the same time we have a reflection on the new methods proposed by pedagogy and specific didactics that open new directions for teaching, we face a depreciation of the same humanities by the technicist thinking that has been generalized in bureaucratic organs inside and outside the University," he points out. He believes that the intense demand for specialization generated by industrial and technological revolutions has hampered the balance between human and biological sciences.

This context, according to Bosi, fuels the need to think about knowledge in a holistic and problematic way. A starting point, for him, would be to apply philosophy as a methodology of any and all modality of knowledge. "The reader will find articles by professors who experience this project both in public schools and in particular situations, such as teaching reading to inmates or the successful attempt to introduce Greek and Latin to elementary school students," he says.

Bosi dedicates issue #93 to Paul Singer and Paulo Freire, who, according to him, "took their democratic ideals to the heart of the economy and pedagogy of the oppressed ones."

Dossier

Between 2012 and 2013, Ana Vieira Pereira participated in a series of workshops on creative writing and reading mediation at the Romão Gomes Military Prison in São Paulo. Pereira's experiences and apprenticeships in the period are reported in the article Sidelines - Literature Experiences with Imprisoned Persons, which also composes the main dossier. According to her, the work made it possible to perceive literature and the telling of their own history as "powerful mechanisms for the personal reorganization and the discovery of new forms within the field of language".

In the article The reform of secondary education and its questionable conception of quality of education, Celso João Ferretti critically analyzes the reform promoted by the Ministry of Education in 2017. The political and economic interests of the restructuring, the ideological disputes that were presented and the official objectives announced by Michel Temer's government are some of the points dealt with by Ferretti. He further states that he has given "special attention to the curriculum flexibilization and the quality of education conception on which the reform is based."

In the article Latin and Greek in a municipal school of Elementary School, Paula da Cunha Corrêa presents a successful pedagogical experience conducted from 2013 at the Desembargador Amorim Lima Municipal School of Elementary Education (EMEF.) Using the "Minimus" method, created by Barbara Bell, Corrêa has organized the implementation of classic language courses - Latin and Greek - for students in the 4th and 7th grades of the school, which is located in the city of São Paulo. According to her, in addition to language teaching, the project offers "diverse aspects of classical culture," to students, namely mythology, history, politics, theater, poetry, music, art and architecture." The "Minimus Project" is still in force and seeks new schools to expand its operation area.

Other themes

The first two texts of the section Urban Life and Health show the consequences of violence and lack of basic sanitation for the health of the peripheral population. The latter two present comments on the last book authored by physician Paulo Saldiva, current director at the IEA-USP.

In The metropolis and the health of its inhabitants, Helena Ribeiro describes and analyzes the general themes addressed in Saldiva's work. According to her, the book clearly shows "the problems that urbanization has brought to physical and mental health" of the inhabitants of large cities.

Article writer Fabio Angeoletto emphasizes that the problems presented by Saldiva are not limited to São Paulo and other metropolises, but to all Brazilian cities, in Urban life and health. For him, the conclusion of the reading gives rise to a clear but not explicit message by the author: "Cities, in their complexity, demand planning, and multiple academic formations and social actors need to be involved in this work."

Among the seven authors in the Arts and Culture section are former IEA Director Martin Grossmann and two USP professors that participated in the first edition of the Institute's Sabbatical Year Program in 2016: Dária Jaremtchuk and Lúcia Maciel Barbosa de Oliveira. The papers in this edition represent part of the results of their research at the Institute.

In the article Abdias do Nascimento in the United States: a "black art painter," Jaremtchuk discusses the 10-year period that the Brazilian painter has spent in the United States. According to her, the time was fundamental for Nascimento to reaffirm "his commitment to the creation of works aligned with the African cultural heritage."

In Oliveira's On Conquests and Tensions, in turn, there is a discussion on the emergence of new cultural dynamics anchored in information and communication technologies. "The current moment demands a non-simplifying understanding of the innumerable representations, contradictions, voices and silences that vie for visibility in the public arena," she argues.

Paul Singer

The last article of the issue celebrates economist Paul Singer, who died April 16, 2018, at the age of 86. Singer was a full professor at USP's School of Economics, Business and Accounting (FEA,) and a member of the first composition of IEA's Board (1987-1992.) Born in Vienna, he was the creator and greatest advocate of the "Solidarity Economy."

The article Paul Singer: a life of struggle and work for socialism and democratic participation, by Cris Andrada and Egeu Esteves, presents an interview with the economist in the year 2016. Singer talks about his migration to Brazil, the youth in the Post-war São Paulo, his relationship with the union movement - with emphasis on the participation in the 300,000 Strike - and, notoriously, Solidarity Economy.

"Only a few bring together intellectual greatness, genuine humility, and deep coherence between the writer and the practitioner," say the authors. "Paul Singer not only reflected on the violence of the world of work, but also devoted his studies to sharing it with workers, shoulder to shoulder, for years."

Roger Buergel, director of the Johann Jacobs Museum in Zurich and curator of the 12th Documenta in Kassel, will be at the IEA for the conference The Museum of Things in-Between. The speech will be broadcast live on the Institute's website.

On February 9, at 2.30 pm, he will address the need to give more visibility and space to things that are now in an in-between condition in the field of culture. In Buergel's opinion, one must get rid of the museological categories, and of the distinctions between art and non-art, promoting the appreciation of the uniqueness of objects on display. The researcher believes that the existence of categories in museums leads to a restricted human perception about things.

According to Martin Grossmann, coordinator of the Research Group Fórum Permanente: Cultural System Between Public and Private, which organizes the meeting, the museum format proposed by Buergel operates in a post-colonial (transcultural) mode, critical to a museum model that was developed in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but still very present today. "It is a museum that promotes a more horizontal relationship between cultures, languages and cosmologies, where the object - 'the thing' - can act 'in-between', whether in relation to museological or disciplinary categories, or in relation to different notions of space and time," he explains.

Grossmann recalls that the subject has already been explored in Brazil, mainly in the fields of cultural theory and criticism. Silviano Santiago's "The Space In-Between: Essays in Latin American Culture" (1971) and Roberto Schwartz's "Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture" (1977) are two examples of works that address possibilities of action out of the European modern tradition.

The meeting at the IEA will feature a debate with the participation of Lisette Lagnado, director of the School of Visual Arts Parque Lage; Carlos Roberto Brandão, director of USP's Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC); José Teixeira Coelho Netto, former director of MAC-USP and curator-general of MASP from 2006 to 2014; and the former director of the Museum of Modern Art of Bahia, curator and culture-specialized journalist Marcelo Rezende. Moderation will be in charge of Grossmann.

Yoshiyuki Suto, from the Nagoya University.

The Hellenistic world, regarded as the earliest age of globalization in human history, was discussed at the conference Articulating Time in the Hellenistic World, given by Yoshiyuki Suto, a professor of Ancient History and academic staff of the Center for the Cultural Heritage and Texts (CHT) at the Nagoya University..

The emergence of a multicultural society has imposed the need to synchronize calendars and to standardize documentary records and the dating of historical events. "The setting of time was closely related to the sense of social stability," said Suto during the Humanities / Social Sciences Workshop of the second phase of the Intercontinental Academia (ICA), on March 10.

"We have agreed on the use of units such as hours, minutes, seconds and days to express time, but we do not think about the origin of these markers."

From the observation of the stars, the Egyptians have been the first to count annual periods and also the pioneers in creating 12 subdivisions of time based on seasons. Greek historian and geographer Herodotus wrote on this ability of the so-called "time masters" in 3 BC. "Their calculations are more accurate than those of the Greeks, who added an intercalary month every two years so that the seasons could coincide. The Egyptians counted 30 days for each of the 12 months, adding five days to the total of each year and thus the full circle of the seasons would coincide with the calendar," Herodotus wrote.

Suto has been specializing in the history of Egypt under the Ptolemaic dinasty. "It is interesting to observe not only the advanced knowledge of the Egyptians, but also the unique feature of that moment. During Hellenism there has been the first era of globalization in human history. The creation of huge empires and the division into large kingdoms features a totally different time in comparison to the previous one," he said.

This period was marked by the expeditions of Alexander the Great to Asia, by the first invasion of Rome in Eastern Greece and by the spread of the Greek language. Public announcements and historical events often needed to be recorded in more than one type of spelling or language, and considering the calendars adopted by different peoples, Suto said. Those were common public documents referencing reigns, bishoprics and other historical facts, accordingly to Sumerian, Egyptian or Greek calendars, to avoid mistakes about the date or the fact that they wanted to portray.

Thus, the time synchronization was necessary. In order to date documents, some important reference points have been used, such as the Trojan War, the Flood of Deucalion (the Greek Noah) or the Return of the Heracleidae. A more explicit time series was created from the Olympic Games in Athens. "The new benchmark was based on the list of Olympic winners," Suto said.

To show how time synchronization evolved between the different peoples of ancient history, Suto introduced two basic concepts related to time in history. The first concept compares progressive time and recurring time, where progressive time is connected to a linear chain of events between past, present and future, and recurring time is caracterized by a repeated cycle of events from period to period, such as celebrations. The second concept compares natural time and human time, where natural time is related to astronomical phenomena and nature, and human time is linked to cultural articulations and a personal interpretation of natural time.

Even in ancient societies, natural time did coincide with celebrations and human needs as harvesting and planting, for example. But it was during the Hellenistic period that the definition of beginning and end of basic chronological units occurred, as well as the synchronization of various human times and ways to denote human time in daily life, he said.

There was no way to articulate a unit of time that had more than one year. Besides, there were difficulties to distinguish one year from another in a chronologically progressive time. Initially, the way that was found to do this was giving the name of a magistrate or an elected priest to a year. "It has certainly avoided a lot of trouble, but it was not practical because these references did not give a sense of relative sequence in relation to the facts," Suto said.

The way to mark time progressed in the Hellenistic kingdoms, especially in the Ptolemaic Egypt, the most successful and enduring of them. An alternative system became better known: to count the year from the throne succession of each king. For example, the year of the coronation of Ptolemy I (305-4 BC) was called the Year I of Ptolemy of Egypt.

The establishment of the concept of regular years has not only contributed to the identification of a given year, but also of longer periods. "It allowed to articulate progressive time with the respective period of each king's domain," he said.

This was demonstrated in a 300-name-long king list graphed over a papyrus. The document, entitled Turin Royal Canon, dates from the time of Ramses II and brings the exact duration of each reign. It is unknown why it is the only list of kings of the Pharaonic period.

Ptolemy II, co-regent of his father, Ptolemy I Soter, introduced changes in the calendar. He tried to extend the year of his reign, considering the period during which he was co-regent. "The reason for this is unknown but it is believed that it has been an attempt to extend his authority over the legislators of other kingdoms," Suto said.

After all, the regular year system starting from the year in which a new king succeeded the former one resulted in a convenient way to determine the beginning and the end of each period, Suto said. Thus, the striking feature of the Hellenistic phase was not only the structural and cultural integration of the kingdom. There was also the important time synchronization that in previous periods was locally separated in different parts of the kingdom.

Kirill Thompson addresses the perception of time in consciousness.

Daoism, Zen, Time Awareness, and the Reality of Time was the title of the lecture given by Kirill O. Thompson, from the National Taiwan University (NTU), during the Humanities / Social Sciences Workshop of the second phase of the Intercontinental Academia (ICA), on March 10.

An expert on neo-Confucian philosophy and Chinese philosophy, Thompson has examined the perception of time in the human consciousness according to Eastern traditions such as Taoism and Zen Buddhism, and compared this notion to the Western philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).

Taoism and Zen Buddhism are religious philosophical traditions of East Asia intended to reorient the common personal experience to a broader life experience. The consciousness of time is a part of that shift, said Thompson.

For Kant, time is not simply inserted in the experience: time is the very condition of the experience, the pure form of inner intuition. Time summarizes the flow or the pulse of consciousness and thus the mind synchronizes and applies this time to the world's events flow, said Thompson, who is a professor at the Foreign Languages and Literatures Department, and serves as Associate Dean for Humanities at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences (IHS) of the NTU.

The German philosopher also conceptualizes the perception of objects as a basic experience that requires "time" to allow the mind to refer to memory and identify the object. Neurologically, this happens in a "self-centered" way because it is molded by mental filters. It is a sensory response that requires "time" to be filtered by personal experience, said Thompson.

The recognition or perception of objects or people is an experiential phenomenon reasoned by the Noumenon, which for Kant is inaccessible. The Noumenon (from the German Ding an sich, meaning "the thing itself") is the sphere of higher reality within the philosophic mind. It can also be understood as the essence of something or that what makes something what it is. The Noumenon exists in itself regardless of the conditions of the common experience phenomena, including time and space. In neurological terms the Noumenon is independent of mental filters of experience, said the professor.

Thus, the common experience is never a raw sensation; it is always conditioned by the forms of intuition and categories of understanding. The object, as a phenomenon, is seen in the context of subjective needs, desires, dislikes, goals or in addition to its own character and relationships.

According to the professor, the social sciences tend to value a self-centered point of view, referring rational interests as the great guide of ideal personal conduct. On the other hand, the Taoist response to existence is the negation of the ego and the dissolution of the mind filters.

Thus, the oldest Taoist text, the Laozi, challenges and refutes the independence and the ultimacy of objects, showing its origin from the non-being (invisible, formless) and mutual codependency. "But how could it be possible to experience that?," asked Thompson.

First, he said, we should note that the common egocentric experience is based on ego as a unified system or a set that brings together the expertise and its categories, and forms of intuition which filter and shape the experience. In this case, linear time is a condition for the exercise of memory, recalling past events and planing the sequence of future events.

In Taoism, the appropriation of time requires a "step back" in the common experience of being, and of its forms and categories of understanding. This involves a change of perspective, a general reorientation so that Laozi and Zen Buddhism can convey their message. The key is to relax and focus the mind through meditation.

One can directly see things as co-emerging and interdependent, according to Thompson. If this mindset - meditation - is successful, the result will be a dissolution of the intuition model, of the understanding categories, of the mind filters simultaneously including the dissolution of the ego, and of course of linear time. Meditation opens the path to be holistic and time gets suspended, said Thompson.

Thompson cited American neurologist James H. Austin, who engaged in holistic trial through Zen Buddhism. Author of Zen and the Brain, Austin seeks to relate the neural activity of the human brain and the practice of meditation. His book was awarded the Scientific and Medical Network Book Prize in 1998.

"Austin underwent Zen Buddhist trial and tracked its impact on the neural processes during meditation. He confirmed that the internal neural metronome turns off in relation to clock time and thus time ceases. Such dissolution of the filters that connect the experience and divide subject and object open the path for a direct and holistic orientation," he said.

The sense of achronia (cessation of time, eternity) accompanies the deep kenshi and the satori experience when a person opens into the void. Thompson defines achronia as the absence of any sense of time during meditative detachment. It is not a sense of timelessness or loss of time.

The horizon of consciousness opens beyond all notions of previous limits. There are neither past nor present. This lack of time enters the nonverbal experience as eternity. Neurologically, this kind of orientation contrasts with the egocentric pattern of the Western experience outlined above.

In the allocentric experience - which has interests and considerations centered on the other, contrary to the egocentric orientation - the being can grasp objects as they really are. Instead of a subjective perception filtered by wants and needs, a person acquires an objective perception to themselves and to others.

When consciousness is freed from rigid categories and mental filters, the path will be open to more flexibility and fluidity in thought and action, which enhances creativity in the arts, in problem solving, in life management and in the field of ideas.

Ultimately, the Zen notion about the nature of Buddha in regard to "empty" and "enlightenment" complements Kant's Noumenon (Ding an sich), said Thompson. The philosopher's ideas are static and logically chained, and posit the object as it is, ie, prior to the intuition of taxes, categories and mental filters that shape the common experience.

In theory, the concept of the Noumenon (Ding an sich) encourages us to see through the phenomena as they primarily appear.

Linear time as pure form of inner intuition is a common experience condition. Given this form of intuition, the internal neural metronome follows the pulse and the flow of the experience from within, which also keeps us in sync with the flow of events in the world.

In contrast, at the deepest level of allocentric experience, when the ego is dissolved and the internal neural metronome stops, time is suspended. Therefore, time such as distance is related to the forms or time measuring systems, said Thompson.

Political scientist, philosopher and diplomat Sérgio Paulo Rouanet, former National Secretary of Culture and author of the cultural incentive law that bears his name, will give the inaugural conference of the Olavo Setubal Chair of Arts, Culture and Science, of which he is the first holder.

Rouanet will address the influence of modernity in the economic, political and cultural contexts through the ideas of sociologists Max Weber and Manuel Castells, and philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Modernity and its Ambivalences will take place on May 17, at 10 am, in the former University Board Room.

The debaters will be jurist Celso Lafer, former Minister of Foreign Affairs; philosopher Renato Janine Ribeiro, former Minister of Education and coordinator of the IEA's Research Group The Future Inquires Us; and sociologist Barbara Freitag, professor emeritus from the University of Brasília (UnB). The opening of the seminar will be attended by the president of USP, Marco Antonio Zago, by the director of the IEA, Paulo Saldiva, and by Eduardo Saron, director at the Itaú Cultural Institute.

A project of the IEA in partnership with the Itaú Cultural Institute, the Olavo Setubal Chair will be a space to discuss and promote activities related to the world of arts, with special focus on cultural management. Its goal is to foster interdisciplinary reflections on academic, artistic, cultural and social issues of regional and global scope.

The concept of modernity

According to Rouanet there are still doubts about the concept of modernity even though it is being discussed more than ever before. One of the definitions has been presented by sociologist Anthony Giddens: "Modernity refers to the ways of life and the social organization that emerged in Europe from the 18th century, and subsequently became global in their influence."

However, Rouanet believes that "if we want to give a concrete content to this mature chronological frame, we should go back to the classical analyzes of Max Weber," for whom modernity is the product of cumulative rationalization processes that occurred:

• economically – free mobility of production factors, wage labor, rational techniques of accounting and management, and continual incorporation of science and technology to the production process;
• politically – replacement of the decentralized feudal state by the centralized national state;
• culturally – secularization of traditional worldviews (Entzauberung) and their internal division into value spheres (Wertsphären): science, morality, law and art.
  

Rouanet seeks to integrate these Weberian categories in the context of Habermas's theory of communicative action. As a case study, he proposes the analysis of more abstract questions about books and their future prospects in the face of new technologies of information and communication, taking advantage of Castells's approach.

Photo: Cecília Bastos/USP

At a time of marked reduction in the possibility of work for a large number of workers as a result of restrictions on displacement and public contact due to the COVID-19 crisis, the 98th issue of the journal Estudos Avançados, released this month, discusses two themes already problematic in Brazil before the pandemic: the still little recognition of care work, which is essential in view of the aging population, and the characteristics and impacts of new forms of work, including on workers' health. The online version (Portuguese only) is available at SciELO.

The content of the issue was defined before the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the pandemic caused by the international spread of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. Thus, rigorous analyses are not presented, as they could not have been produced in the early stages of the outbreak.

However, the issues addressed in the dossiers deserve extra attention as they are among those for which society must seek answers in the post-pandemic period in order to ensure decent and equal work for everyone, in addition to rights and health protection.

In "Work, Gender, and Care", the first dossier, care for people is analyzed in its various forms. An example is when care occurs as "help," without being characterized as a professional activity or as a parental obligation. The topic is discussed by sociologists Nadya Araujo Guimarães, a senior professor at USP's Faculty of Philosophy, Languages and Literature, and Human Sciences (FFLCH), and Priscila Pereira Faria Vieira, a researcher at the Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP).

Helena Hirata, former visiting professor at the IEA and director emeritus of research at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), addresses the main points of convergence and divergence in the activity of elderly caregivers in Brazil, Japan, and France, without neglecting the centrality of women in this work. The objective is to demonstrate how gender, race, and social class help to build the professional and personal trajectories of caregivers.

In the article "Care and Responsibility," Natacha Borgeaud-Garciandía discusses the work of immigrant caregivers for the elderly in Buenos Aires. A researcher at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO), Borgeaud-Garciandía focuses on responsibility as the assumption of a moral obligation towards a vulnerable person. One of the addressed aspects is the role of responsibility in the complexity of the caregivers' exploitation plots within the framework of unequal power relations.

The legal treatment of care in Brazil and public policies aimed at the socialization of social reproduction activities fall short of social demands, according to Regina Stela Corrêa Vieira, a researcher at CEBRAP and a professor of the graduate program in Law at the University of West Santa Catarina (UNOESC). To her, labor law, which "historically ignores or neglects domestic work, whether paid or unpaid," has made some progress such as the Constitutional Amendment 72/2013 and the ratification of Convention C189 of the International Labor Organization (ILO), but currently sees labor reform as a "threat to the hard-won rights of domestic workers."

The struggle of these female workers for the enhancement of their professional activity is also analyzed in an article by Louisa Acciari, from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), and Tatiane Pinto, from the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRRJ), who discuss informal negotiations with employers and union mobilization in the category. They propose a redefinition of the concept of work with the full inclusion of care work, something "indispensable to guarantee the dignity and equal rights."

Labor precariousness

The discussion on the lack of rights and dignity in the context of caregivers and domestic employees in general is extended in the second dossier of the isssue to address the characteristics and impacts of the transformations underway in the world of work, including health.

In his article, sanitary professional René Mendes, a collaborating researcher at the IEA, summarizes the concerns that led him to propose the development of the research project "Impacts of the New Morphologies of Contemporary Work on Life, Sickness, and Death."

Mendes starts from the perceptions of existing studies on the problem mainly carried out from a sociological perspective, but seeks to deepen the reflections on the nature and complexity of the pathogenesis mechanisms of the new morphologies of work on the workers' life and health from the perspective of social epidemiology.

One of these new forms of work is the "uberization," subject of the article by Ludmila Costhek Abílio, a researcher at the University of Campinas's Center for Union Studies and Labor Economics (CESIT-UNICAMP). Her study is based on empirical research with cosmetic dealers and motorcycle drivers, and on secondary data on Uber drivers and the so-called bike boys.

Abílio's analysis considers two theses: 1) uberization is an ongoing global trend to consolidate the worker as an available subordinate self-manager defined as a just-in-time worker devoid of guarantees and rights; 2) companies present themselves as mediators, when they actually operate forms of subordination and work control, in what can be called algorithmic work management.

The third article in the dossier, authored by sociologist Clemente Ganz Lúcio, a technician at the Inter-Union Department of Statistics and Socioeconomic Studies (DIEESE), presents a brief history and the current context of the debates on union reform and the system of labor relations in the National Congress and in the Federal Government. Lúcio points out that countless aspects of the world of work have undergone changes, such as jobs, occupations, labor dynamics, forms of hiring, working hours, and working conditions, among others.

For him, some guidelines should be considered in these changes. One of them is the development of an autonomous and effective system of self-regulation between workers and employers, which supports the union's restructuring of the labor relations system and resolves conflicts through instruments created by the parties.

Bioeconomics, energy, and vegetation

Themes related to the environment and sustainable development have had a regular presence throughout the journal's 33 years, and are present in this issue in three articles. André Luiz Willerding, a biotechnologist at the Amazonas State Secretariat for Economic Development, Science, Technology, and Innovation (SEDECTI), and five other researchers from SEDECTI an Amazonas State University, present an overview of the state's reality regarding the development of bioeconomy strongly linked to the potential of natural resources. According to the authors, the discussion on this theme goes against the search for alternatives for the state's economy, still centralized around the Manaus Industrial Pole, which "becomes increasingly threatened year after year."

Another region addressed in this section is the Brazilian Northeast, in an article on the importance of integrating social, economic, and environmental policies around the supply of energy to the semiarid region. Based on the food-water-energy nexus, which seeks to examine the interrelationships of these three essential components of environmental and human quality, Marcel Burztyn, from University of Brasília's Center for Sustainable Development (CDS-UnB), proposes the promotion of photovoltaic energy generation by family farmers.

When studying issues such as the degree of complexity and diversification of the Brazilian landscape, it must be taken into account that a landscape may be the result of recent environmental changes or relics of much more remote conditions. This is what geologists Daniel Meira Arruda, from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), and Carlos Ernesto Gonçalves Rynaud Schaefer, from the Federal University of Viçosa (UFV), point out in another article. They discuss the biogeographic theories formulated and modified over the past 60 years of studies on the reconstruction of Brazil's vegetation under the impact of the climatic changes of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), which occurred 18,000 years ago. According to both researchers, the recent advance of global climate models has provided new perspectives for a more faithful reconstruction of the conditions of that period.

Literature and other cultural themes

The "Culture" section brings texts about works by writers Samuel Beckett, José de Alencar and Murilo Mendes, and about the costumes of the Brazilian Indians during the time of Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen's government (1637-1644) during the Dutch occupation in the country's Northeast. The set of articles also includes "The Impediments of Memory," by Jeanne Marie Gagnebin, and "Ideological Automata," by Benhur Bortolotto.

Estudos Avançados #98 also presents tributes for the ten years since the death of Portuguese writer José Saramago, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature. There are three articles on some aspects of the author's work written by Jaime Bertoluci, Marcelo Lachat, and Jean-Pierre Chauvin.

Finally, the edition includes reviews of five books: "Reflection as Resistance: Homage to Alfredo Bosi," organized by Augusto Massi, Erwin Torralbo Gimenez, Marcus Vinicius Mazzari, and Murilo Marcondes de Moura; "The French School of Geography: a Contextual Approach," by Vincent Berdoulay; "The Double Night of Linden Trees," by Marcus Vinicius Mazzari; "Historia von D. Johann Fausten," translated, organized, and commented by Magali Moura; and "The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus," by Christopher Marlowe, with translation and notes by Luís Bueno and Caetano Waldrigues Galindo.

The list below contains the names of the authors who have contributed with each one of the addressed themes:

Work, Gender, and Care

Nadya Araujo Guimarães and Priscila Pereira Faria Vieira
Helena Hirata
Natacha Borgeaud-Garciandía
Regina Stela Corrêa Vieira
Louisa Acciari and Tatiane Pinto

Labor Issues

René Mendes
Ludmila Costhek Abílio
Clemente Ganz Lúcio

Environment and Development

André Luis Willerding, Leonardo Rodrigo da Silva, Roseana Pereira da Silva, Geison Maicon Oliveira de Assis, and Estevão Vicente Cavalcanti Monteiro de Paula
Marcel Bursztyn
Daniel Meira Arruda and Carlos Ernesto Gonçalves Reynaud Schaefer

Culture

Jeanne Marie Gagnebin
Luciano Gatti
Fabiano Lemos and Ulysses Pinheiro
Pablo Simpson
Aline Leal Fernandes Barbosa
Benhur Bortolotto
Fausto Viana

José Saramago: Themes and Languages

Jaime Bertoluci
Marcelo Lachat
Jean Pierre Chauvin

Reviews

Alexandre Koji Shiguehara
Nilson Cortez Crocia de Barros
Klaus F. W. Eggensperger
Rafael Rocca dos Santos

The director of the IEA and coordinator of the Institute's research group Fórum Permanente: Cultural System Between Public and Private, Martin Grossmann will be one of the lecturers of the seminar Museums, Museumgoers, Media – A Visionary Project, organized by the Humboldt-Forum in Berlin from December 3 to 5. "The Stranger's Guide to the Museum Galaxy" is the name of his conference, to be given on Friday, the 4th.

On December 10, Grossmann will deliver a more detailed presentation on the same theme at the University of Birmingham's Institute of Advanced Studies, where he will stay as a Distinguished Visiting Fellow Professor during this month and in June 2016.

With a title inspired by the bestseller "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams and Marshall McLuhan’s “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man,” the speech intends to "offer a storyboard for a critical guide to attendees of museums in the contemporary society." In the future, the information may join a book or digital guide.

According to Grossmann, the paradigm of 20th century art museum, the "white cube" that has the MoMA as an exponent, has been deconstructed in recent decades. "Other types of museums are strengthening their differences and gaining global recognition. Today we are able to experience different types of 'mise-en-scène' in buildings aimed at art and culture," he says.

He highlights the growth of what he calls "paradoxical museum". A result of the "society of the spectacle", defined by Guy Debord, the phenomenon has as its backdrop the "spectacular" museums such as the Beoubourg in Paris, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, and the Tate Modern in London, besides the constant updating of the MoMA. Highlighted in this scenario is now the Humboldt-Forum, which will open to the public in 2019.

The exhibition Grace at the boundary of knowledge, by artist Sandra Boeschenstein, will be inaugurated at the University of São Paulo's MariAntonia Cultural Center on August 6, at 11:00 am. With free admission, it will run until November 20 and will be open to the public from Tuesday to Sunday and on holidays from 10:00 am to 6:00 pm. At the opening, at 12:00 pm, there will be a conversation between the artist and the Brazilian curator.

Curated by Martin Grossmann (Institute of Advanced Studies at USP) and Britta Padberg, former executive director at Bielefeld University's Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), the exhibition showcases an "unregulated encounter of things, images, and words that unleashes the qualities and potentials of media." Boeschenstein's attention is focused on these transitions and on the ways of experiencing them. According to the organizers, "the exhibition is a continuum of intertwined gestures, placing the act of perception at the center and making visible the dynamic nature of meanings."

"In this case, the MariAntonia Cultural Center becomes an interactive extension of this interdisciplinary platform that is the IEA-USP by providing the ambience and the necessary complementarity for its realization. This partnership, whether with MariAntonia or with the ZIF, further enhances this ambitious mission of fostering encounters of different cultures, knowledges, disciplines, and practices that the IEA has been carrying out throughout its 35 years of life," explains Grossmann.

Whether for her singular investment in the language of drawing in expanded mode or for her remarkable participations in other institutes for advanced study in Europe, interacting in equivalence with scientists and intellectuals of different matrices, Sandra Boeschenstein provokes reactions and questionings of the most diverse forms with her daring drawings.

Grace at the boundary of knowledge establishes a kind of game with the visitor. However, the pieces, the board (the spatiality), the rules, and the references are not objectively delineated. Warning: the experience causes strangeness, displacement, and questioning, all fundamental to the updating and expansion of knowledge.

The activity is a cooperation between the ZiF and the IEA. Support is provided by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, IEA's research group Fórum Permanente, and USP's Office of the Provost for Culture and Extension (PRCEU).

The artist

Sandra Boeschenstein is a visual artist who lives and works in Zurich. She has studied Philosophy and Art History at the University of Zurich for a year and graduated as an artist from the University of Arts in Bern in 1995.

Through drawing, she proposes to seek knowledge and analyze the interaction between perception and thought, exploring the border between tangible and intangible, between image and language, and between information and poetry. Over the past few years, Boeschenstein has expanded her drawing on paper to drawings on walls, in which she arranges real objects that relate to the images and lines in space.

“When is something and how does it accrue meaning? How do the situation, the image, and language touch each other? What is the appearance of a knowledge beckoning between material, picture, and language and that cannot be further extracted? Bringing light into darkness is simpler than darkness into light. The boundary of knowledge forms in the hierarchy-free play of these two actions. This is work with both the constructing and the decaying energies of meanings”
Sandra Boeschenstein

---

Grace at the boundary of knowledge
August 6 - November 20
Free of charge
Tuesdays to Sundays and holidays, 10:00 am - 6:00 pm

MariAntonia Center - Joaquim Nabuco Building
Address: Rua Maria Antônia, 258, Vila Buarque - São Paulo, SP
Near subway stations: Higienópolis (Yellow line) and Santa Cecília (Red line)

Throughout their studies, Jan and Aleida make a distinction between two types of memory: a communicative one, related to memories passed from one generation to another in an informal and daily way, usually by oral tradition, and a cultural one, referring to the collective memories of the past that have a symbolic character and that last through texts, images, rites, monuments and other mnemonic supports.

The main aspects of the theory developed by them are synthesized in the research project "The Past in the Present: Dimensions and Dynamics of Cultural Memory", on which they have been working since 2011. The seminar is supported by the Department of Modern Languages of the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences (FFLCH) of USP.

Lecturers

Aleida Assmann is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Konstanz. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Heidelberg and in Egyptology from the University of Tübingen. Her published papers cover fields such as Egyptology, English Literature and History of Literary Communication, but since the 1960's she has been working on memory theory. Her research focuses on cultural memory, with particular interest on the tensions between individual experiences and official memories of Germany's history in the post-World War II period.

Jan Assmann is Honorary Professor of Religious and Cultural Theory at the University of Konstanz, where he currently teaches, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Heidelberg, where he served until 2003. He holds a Dr. honoris causa title in Theology from the University of Münster. His publications cover the fields of Egyptology, focusing on interpretations of the origins of monotheism, Reception of Egypt in the European Tradition, History of Religion, Historical Anthropology and other topics. In recent years, he has been focusing on the dimension of cultural memory in a distant timeline, dating back more than 3000 years. From this, he seeks to understand the role of memory in disputes between Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East and between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland.

The exhibitor will be the Italian researcher Tatiana Bazzichelli, who studies the relationship between artistic manifestations and the business of social media. The conference will be held in Italian with consecutive translation by Massimo Canevacci, visiting Professor at IEA.

At the event, Bazzichelli will talk about the conditions for hacker and artistic practices on Web 2.0 and how social networks can develop and incorporate these digital culture practices. Examples of network art and hacking in California and Europe that challenge the notions of power and hegemony will also be presented.

Bazzichelli is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center of Digital Media’s Innovation Incubator of the Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany, and holds a PhD in Media Studies and Information from Aarhus University, Denmark. She is also a member of the curatorial team of Transmediale Festival Berlin and author of Networking. La rete come arte (2006) /Networking. The Net as Artwork (2008).

Canevacci is Professor of Cultural Anthropology and of Digital Art and Culture at Università Degli Studi di Roma 'La Sapienza', Italy. His studies focus on ethnography, visual communication, art, and digital culture. The research he has been developing at IEA, situated among these themes, includes four main conceptual frameworks: self-representation, ubiquity, visual fetishism, and critical and experimental theory.

The 13 papers that comprise the work result from the series of conferences held by the group in 2009, within the official program of the Year of France in Brazil. The set outlines a broad overview of cultural exchange between Brazil and France from the points of view of literature, photography, music, history, anthropology, architecture, theater and visual arts.

Following the chronological order of the key moments of the relations between the two countries, the texts explore the reciprocal influences - initiated soon at the time of Brazil's discovery - from a historical perspective that goes from the 16th to the 20th century.

Among the episodes covered there are the two attempts of colonization undertaken by France in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Artistic Mission of 1816, when French artists have been invited by the court to establish the first school of arts in Brazil, the presence of French theater in Brazil in the 19th century, and the Brazilian influence in the avant-garde musical work of the French composer Darius Milhaud.

The last four texts extrapolate those five centuries and raise questions about recent artistic manifestations of France as well as propose a reflection on the supposed 'decline of French culture'. According to Perrone-Moisés, coordinator of the cycle that led to the book, 'these current references allow us to continue the dialogue with the letters and the arts of the country that has left such deep marks in our culture'.

Sesame is a center for research and advanced technology around a “third generation” synchrotron light source in construction in Allas, Jordan. It is supported by Unesco and a partnership between Palestinian Authority, Bahrain, Cyprus, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Pakistan and Turkey, which have full control over its development, use and funding.

Eliezer Rabinovici, former director of the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, will present his views on the project and the increments that the proposal received in 2012 at the conference ‘Sesame: A Visit to a Parallel Universe’ on August 22, at 2 pm, in IEA’s Event Room.

The panelists will be professors Nathan Berkovits, of the Institute for Theoretical Physics of Unesp, Mahir Saleh Hussein, of the Institute of Physics of USP and researcher at the IEA, Arlene Clemesha, from the Faculty of Philosophy, Languages and Literature, and Human Sciences (FFLCH), Guilherme Ary Plonski, of the Polytechnic School (EP) and the Faculty of Economics, Management and Accounting (FEA), both of USP, and board member at the IEA, and Bernardo Sorj, director of the Edelstein Center for Social Research and visiting professor at the IEA.

COOPERATION

The SESAME (Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East) will be the first major international research center in the region. It is a joint initiative of scientists and governments of the Middle East and is modeled on the Cern (European Organization for Nuclear Research).

Sesame will both:

• Foster scientific and technological excellence in the Middle East and neighbouring countries (and prevent or reverse the brain drain) by enabling world-class scientific research in subjects ranging from biology, archaeology and medical sciences through basic properties of materials science, physics, chemistry, and life sciences; and
• Build scientific and cultural bridges between diverse societies, and contribute to a culture of peace through international cooperation in science.

The event will be broadcast live from IEA's Event Room at www.iea.usp.br/aovivo.

Video of the event

At the event, Menninghaus will present the results of a research project that is being developed with the goal of establishing "being moved" and "being touched" as concepts of genuine emotion and revealing their role in aesthetic appreciation. According to the researcher, “this includes a novel perspective on the time-honored issue of aesthetic pleasure associated with negative emotions."

Full member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, Menninghaus is founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, created in 2013 with the proposal to use scientific methods to investigate the psychological, sociocultural and neural bases of aesthetic perceptions, preferences and reviews. His research focuses on the philosophical, evolutionary and empirical / psychological aesthetics; models, boundary phenomena and aesthetic functions of mythology and lifeworld, and literature since 1750, with emphasis on German Romanticism and literature of the 20th century.

The opening of the conference will be in charge of Helmut Galle, professor of German Literature at the Department of Modern Languages of USP’s Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences (FFLCH).

The event will be broadcast live on the web.

Special attention will be given to the imagery documentary record, seen as an inventory of social and cultural practices that contributes to human and social sciences in the mapping and interpretation of Amazonian realities.

According to the organizers of the debate, "science and the technology perspective associated with it tend to understand the Amazon as a repository of natural resources, biodiversity and genetic 'bank', which must be harnessed to meet human needs, specifically to answer the hegemonic model of progress."

However, the researchers warn that "science and technology, as drivers of rational development and of the ideals of human flourishing behind it, oppose the traditional knowledge, meaning knowledge and ways of life of people and local communities, considering that they constitute an obstacle to modernization."

Given the possible tensions arising from the meeting of these narratives, some questions arise:

• Are traditional knowledge and science competing rationalities?
• In spite of their differences, is the cooperation between these rationales a viable alternative?
• Are there rational justifications for the human to be separated from their environment and for biodiversity to be separated from human cultures?

According to organizers, cooperative dialogue between the two sides find support in the theoretical framework of the model of interaction between science and values ​​which is developed by the research group [read the interview with Hugh Lacey on this model]: "The arguments of the model in favor of strategic pluralism point to the need of a research based on methodological complementarity and the possibility of adopting unconventional alternative practices for biodiversity conservation."

Three central issues will be addressed by the two debates of the event:

• The imagery documentary record and field survey: from image to translation of realities
• Dialogue between science and traditional knowledge: from the model of interaction to methodological pluralism
• Communication and polarization between scientific and popular narratives in biodiversity conservation

PROGRAMME

April 9 from 9.30 am to 12.30 pm

Exhibitors: Antonio Carlos Diegues (NUPAUB-USP) and Sylvia Caiuby Novaes (FFLCH-USP)

Discussant: Stelio Marras (IEB-USP)

Mediator: Ana Tereza Reis da Silva (FE-UNB and IEA-USP)

April 10 from 9.30 am to 12.30 pm

Exhibitors: Mauro William Barbosa de Almeida (IFCH-Unicamp) and Ana Tereza Reis da Silva (FE-UNB and IEA-USP)

Discussant / mediator: Stelio Marras (IEB-USP)