Twentieth-century South American mythologies: variations of the myth at the borders between history and ethnology, in Brazil and France (1940-1970)

• Grant number: 21/12687-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: June 01, 2023
• End date: May 31, 2027
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology - Theory of Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Lilia Katri Moritz Schwarcz
• Grantee: Diogo de Godoy Santos
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research will focus on the the variations of the concept of 'myth' in a selected and representative portion of South American mythology studies: the one that gathered in Brazil and France between the 1940s and 1970s and dedicated itself to the 'mythical' narratives elaborated, reproduced and collected in the southern hemisphere of America. Departing, provisionally, from the Mythologies (1964, 1966, 1968, 1971) by Claude Lévi-Strauss, and from Visão do Paraíso (1958) by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, due to the quality and quantity of interpretation problems that these works pose, I will try to describe and to compare the ways in which, at different times, the discursive forms and theoretical matrices of this concept were thought on the border between two disciplines considered, at times, antagonistic: history and ethnology. And, through this historical and ethnographic development, I will seek to examine the philosophical premises and conceptual tensions of the knowledge constituted about the 'myth', as well as the adherence of these discourses to the social and political contours in which they emerged. The general hypothesis to be developed is that the variations in this conceptualization resulted fundamentally from the impasses of determination, through a given empirical representation, of an object whose heterogeneous nature fostered the theoretical and ethnographic richness of South American mythology. While the scale of analysis of the mythical phenomenon has changed over time due to a sharp questioning in the history of the human sciences about the social links between "subject" and "object" of knowledge, which led to an ethical and politics of the use of the term to describe and analyze the South American narrative universes. (AU)