Essayism as a Sociological Research Tradition in Brazil: a Definition of Essay and Essayism for Sociology
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Essayism as a Sociological Research Tradition in Brazil: a Definition of Essay and Essayism for Sociology Veridiana Domingos Cordeiro 1
& Hugo
Neri 2
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The paper discusses the form of the essay as a writing and thinking style in Sociology. By resuming some relevant German sociological writings (esp. Simmel, Weber and Elias), we explore how they are essays profoundly influenced the first Brazilian (pre) sociological writings. At the beginning of the institutionalization of Social Sciences in Brazil, we find essayists (esp. Buarque de Holanda, Freye and Prado) who wrote essential texts on the nation formation and Brazilian ethos. Its non-systematic, literary style and historical arguments join them together in what would be later called as the “Brazilian Essayism.” After these first writings, although a scientific wave flooded Brazilian Sociology, the discipline have always referred (positively or negatively) to these seminal works. Keywords German Essayism . Brazilian Essayism . Brazilian ethos
Introduction What is the contemporary epistemological purpose of essays in Social Sciences, or particularly in Sociology? Do they contribute with scientific knowledge when compared with the scientific paper, which is the dominant genre? As a scholar of the essayist genre states, “as science became collectively organized, it tended to become less essayistic … the essay stayed on the margins of science, as a vehicle either for unorthodox speculations or for communicating some of science’s results to a nonspecialist audience” (Good 1997, p. ii). Following Good’s cue, the primary role of the
* Veridiana Domingos Cordeiro [email protected] Hugo Neri [email protected]
1
Department of Sociology, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
2
Center for Artificial Intelligence, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
The American Sociologist
essays within the hard sciences is popularizing scientific production. There is a long list of extraordinary scientist-essayist playing this role, such as Thomas Huxley, Oliver Sacks, Carl Sagan, and Richard Dawkins. The baseline of hard sciences’ essays is the use of “personal reflection as a means to teach, use a story to make a case, and discuss major cultural and scientific issues by relating episodes of the authors’ lives.” (Dowdey 1997, p.1592). Besides the social role of this production, these essays do not add anything new to the advancement of scientific knowledge as produced within the hard sciences. At odds with hard sciences, Sociology has no established orthodoxy. It is considered a pre-paradigmatic science (Kuhn 1962) or better saying “non paradigmatic.”1 Even if we take a smoother concept for the characterization of science, such as the concept of research tradition (Laudan 1977), there is still someopaqueness regarding sociological theories or sociological approaches. According to Larry Laudan, a research tradition is a “cluster of beliefs ... [that] consists of at least two compo
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