{"id":251389,"date":"2018-01-12T13:29:48","date_gmt":"2018-01-12T15:29:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=251389\/"},"modified":"2018-01-12T13:53:41","modified_gmt":"2018-01-12T15:53:41","slug":"the-living-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/the-living-past\/","title":{"rendered":"The living past"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

L\u00c9O RAMOS CHAVES<\/span><\/a> The researcher and her books: scientific prose marked by literary and mythological referencesL\u00c9O RAMOS CHAVES<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Ecl\u00e9a Bosi, professor in the Institute of Psychology at the University of S\u00e3o Paulo (IP-USP), died in July at the age of 80. Over the course of her career, she brought new relevance to her field in the Brazilian intellectual community with the research she performed on collectivity and memory. During her lifetime, her 1973 book Mem\u00f3ria e sociedade \u2013 Lembran\u00e7a de velhos<\/em> (Memory and Society: Remembering the past), in which she bases her interviews with the elderly on the works of sociologists like Maurice Halbwachs (1877\u20131945) and philosophers like Henri Bergson (1859-1941), would become an obligatory reference in the field.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn a dialog with Halbwachs, Ecl\u00e9a discusses the past as it was lived and felt by different groups, and then revealed and also filtered through collective memory,\u201d explains Jos\u00e9 Moura Gon\u00e7alves Filho, a colleague of Bosi\u2019s at IP-USP. \u201cWith Bergson, she presented memory as the reappearance of the deep, untamed past, almost free of the filters and only heard by people,\u201d he says. \u201cMemory, which is originally a collective endeavor, may develop as personal work that is more or less untied by ideologies. In these cases, it can lead the past to speak more than it could speak to groups.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his article Mem\u00f3ria e Sociedade: <\/em>Ci\u00eancia po\u00e9tica e refer\u00eancia de humanismo<\/em> (Memory and Society: Poetic science and humanistic reference), Paulo de Salles of the Department of Social and Labor Psychology within IP-USP cites some of the researchers who believed that Bosi\u2019s work reaches beyond the frontiers of psychology. \u201cOctavio Ianni [1926\u20132004], from the field of sociology, found \u2018a beautiful life lesson\u2019 in the book. Paulo S\u00e9rgio Pinheiro, a political scientist, felt that \u2018the social history of S\u00e3o Paulo was taken leagues deeper with this master dive.\u2019\u201d As Salles describes, the book reverberated outside Brazil as well: Pierre Bourdieu (1930\u20132002) \u201cchose chapters of Mem\u00f3ria e Sociedade<\/em> for reading and debate with his graduate students in his courses,\u201d and in Self Studies<\/em> (1995), psychologist Karl Scheibe of Wesleyan University in the American state of Connecticut \u201capplauds Mem\u00f3ria e Sociedade<\/em> as a miraculous encounter between lonely elderly people, the wait for illness or their final days, and a researcher who becomes a true friend.\u201d<\/p>\n

Explaining her research methods in Mem\u00f3ria e Sociedade,<\/em> Bosi wrote that her goal was \u201cto record the voice and, through it, the lives and thoughts of people who have worked for their contemporaries and for us.\u201d This understanding of memory is not to be confused with \u201chistory,\u201d though history is part of it. It is also not simply \u201creliving.\u201d Memory is an active resource for rebuilding and rethinking the present based on ideas of the past. This way of reflecting on individuals\u2019 special relationships with the past was summarized in the title of Bosi\u2019s 2003 book O tempo vivo da mem\u00f3ria \u2013 Ensaios de psicologia social<\/em> (The Living Time of Memory: Essays on social psychology).<\/p>\n

Bosi sought to understand how social memory is constructed and what its complex relationship is with individual memory. How do they interrelate? What is remembered and what is forgotten? What meaning do memories have for the present day? What does old age mean in capitalist society? Bosi answered these questions from her field of study using stories recounted by her informants, a deeply ethical analysis, and scientific prose marked by literary and mythological references.<\/p>\n

\"\"L\u00c9O RAMOS CHAVES<\/span><\/a>Recollections<\/strong>
\nOne example of Bosi\u2019s work was her comparison of the narratives given by two sisters named Brites and Lavinia, who were interviewed for Mem\u00f3ria e Sociedade<\/em>. Bosi showed how there is a significant difference in the way they remember the end of World War I: Brites remembered her sister, six years older, coming home and waking her father to tell him about the event and the fact that a dance in Trianon was interrupted to play the National Anthem. \u201cIt was November 11,\u201d Brites recalled. Lavinia, meanwhile, did not remember that fact\u2014for her, \u201cit was a thing with no repercussions,\u201d though she explains that the French family likely celebrated it. Far from concerning herself with finding a single truth, Bosi was interested in understanding how the different observations of the same fact complement and counteract each other. \u201cTo find a memory, Ariadne’s thread is not enough [in Greek mythology, Ariadne gives a thread to the hero Theseus so that he may leave the labyrinth after facing the Minotaur]; threads must be unraveled from various spools, because memory is a meeting point of several threads,\u201d she writes.<\/p>\n

\u201cEcl\u00e9a provided our understanding of the relations between the researcher and the research subjects with a very deep idea: that of a common destination,\u201d explains Jos\u00e9 Moura. \u201cThis presupposes that, in order to understand his or her research subjects, the researcher must in some measure be involved with their chance and luck, their burdens and fortunes.\u201d In the case of the book Mem\u00f3ria e Sociedade<\/em>, the common destination is the idea of aging; it is from this common point that the researcher must speak and listen to the subjects.<\/p>\n

Another one of Bosi\u2019s noteworthy writings was the one that resulted in her 1972 book Cultura de massa e cultura popular: Leituras e oper\u00e1rias <\/em>(Mass Culture and Popular Culture: Readings from Workers). Bosi conducted interviews with factory workers and found women expressing a strong desire to have access to education for themselves or their children, and who spent a significant portion of their wages on high-interest loans in order to buy books. The books they bought were often worthless to the publishers, but they received a place of honor in the factory workers\u2019 houses. One book could cost as much as eight days\u2019 work.<\/p>\n

Odair Furtado, professor of the social psychology program at the Pontifical Catholic University of S\u00e3o Paulo (PUC-SP), says that this project\u2014advised by Dante Moreira Leite (1927\u20131976), a pioneer in this field in Brazil\u2014had a huge impact on students in the early 1970s. \u201cPsychology has always had its more elitist groups within private practices or at universities. At the time, government organizations almost never hired psychologists,\u201d Furtado recalls.<\/p>\n

The social strata described by Bosi and also by psychologist Arakcy Martins Rodrigues, author of Oper\u00e1rio, oper\u00e1ria<\/em> (Male Worker, Female Worker; 1978), broke with this logic, and was published in the middle of the Brazilian dictatorship. Bosi\u2019s social and political commitment to her interviewees allowed her to design and implement changes beyond traditional research and advising. Along this vein, her most important activity was her creation and long-time coordination of the Opening Universities to the Elderly program. Created in 1994, the program allowed more than 100,000 seniors to participate in undergraduate courses, seminars, lectures, and exchanges of information and experiences with USP students.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ecl\u00e9a Bosi worked to show that memory is also used to rethink the present","protected":false},"author":633,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1348],"tags":[257,261],"coauthors":[1654],"class_list":["post-251389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-obituary","tag-psychology","tag-sociology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/633"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=251389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251389\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=251389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=251389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=251389"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=251389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}