The origin of the alteration and the alteration of origin: anthropologies of Rousseau

Author(s)

Mauro Dela Bandera Arco Júnior

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2018-08-10

Examining board members

Maria das Graças de Souza; Evaldo Becker; Jacira de Freitas; Renato Moscateli; Pedro Paulo Garrido Pimenta

• Advisor: Maria das Graças de Souza

Abstract

Given the notoriety of the development of anthropology (that in the Greek etymology is understood as a study of man) during the century of the Enlightenment, and being Rousseau one of its exponents, the central objective of this thesis is to investigate the different meanings, not univocally apprehended, expressed by anthropological investigation in authors texts. The axis that guides the analysis is found in the passage of the physical man to the moral man, which refers to the opposition between the natural man and the man of the man. From this idea results two methodological approaches, namely: the negative anthropology, which seeks to reveal by a fiction the man from the pure state of nature, and the positive anthropology, which observes the real men (savage or civilized) by means of an ethnographic method. This is the general formulation from which different theoretical alternatives for the intelligibility of what is the man, and his relationship with the agentive forces that conform him, have been developed. Thus, the terms of the opposition that configure the anthropological problem are defined: how to conceive the passage of the physical man since the pure state of nature to a moral man, the man of man? The path that starts from an original model unfolds as degeneration and deviation, while another path multiplies the origins in order to affirm positively the differences. It entails the change of a discourse on the origin, and its alteration, to another one on the alteration of origin, or original alterations, which announces the ethnological knowledge by refusing the identification or mandatory approachment of a particular culture to the nature, thus opening space for otherness. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 13/16441-6 - The anthropology of Rousseau
• Grantee: Mauro Dela Bandera Arco Junior
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate