HISTORY, CULTURE & IDENTITIES
The possibilities opened by the articulation between culture and identities constitute a key for understanding today’s historiographical perspectives. Tributary to the present historical context, these perspectives are open to crucial questions that touch contemporaneity, defining its contours and rhythms. In other words, we live in a time in which cultural and identity dilemmas become fundamental, since they are configured as problems, but also as possible problematics for the understanding of the present time. Hence their inevitable connection with the historiographical questions and practices of our time.
The historiographical operation is confronted with the need to answer the questions of the cultural universe, especially those related to questions of ethnicity, religiosity, gender, education, behavior, etc. -, from which various research intentions and interests emerge; but, as anthropologist Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira reminds us, “if identity and cultural questions go together, not for that reason should we see in the relationship between the two a causal link.” Therefore, the area of concentration of the course – HISTORY, CULTURE & IDENTITIES – ,places itself as a problematizing element of the very relation between these terms, besides being a referential conception for the Research Lines Institutions and subjects:knowledgeandpractices and Discourses, representations:productionof meaning. It is understood, thus, that Culture & Identities, even though dynamic and dynamizing concepts, must be adequately problematized, that is, according to specific temporalities, a concern that is historiographically effective in the different research projects that integrate the above mentioned Research Lines.
It should be emphasized that the connection between Culture and Identities, besides providing diversified conceptual approaches, makes possible, in empirical terms, a broad investigative questionnaire. Recently, the notion of identity has been in question: immersed in a turbulent context of breakdown or fragmentation of cultural systems, identity, continuously re-elaborated in relation to the ways in which we are represented and represent ourselves in the surrounding cultural systems, presents itself even more open and provisional. Mixtures and composite genres resulting from the hybridization of ethnic, class, generational, national, and other traditions proliferate.
If it is not possible to conceive that national cultures, at any time, have presented themselves as homogeneous and absolutely distinct entities, today their hybrid and segmented character becomes more evident, given the increasingly intense and rapid flows of messages, goods and people. In this sense, such articulation implies in researching different value systems, beliefs, habits, uses and customs, ways of life, social experiences, practices, discourses, representations, apprehended in relation to plural, sometimes ambiguous and almost always contradictory identity processes. Identity processes are understood as the socio-cultural construction of class, gender, ethnic, professional, institutional, political, ideological, religious, age identities, among others; processes which are inscribed, materially and symbolically, in different spatialities and territorialities: global, national, regional, local.
Thus, the area of concentration HISTORY, CULTURE & IDENTITIES becomes a field of possibilities: an access route providing instruments of investigation and analysis, at the same time that it constitutes itself as an object of investigation, suggesting different questions and problems. The articulation points to the construction of quite elaborate research objects, incorporating to the material the ideals and the imaginary, the symbolic and the quotidian, in a word, the culture of different social strata and segments located in time and space. Finally, the articulation does not disregard the political components of the processes, affirming the understanding that culture and identity, whether at the individual or collective level, are built in the constant relationship of alterity and are inseparable from the power relations that cross and constitute human societies.