A group of guest researchers was invited to explore the relationship between anthropology, history and literature, and their role in interpreting social processes. The historian and writer Ivan Jablonka proposed breaking down the boundary between literature and history, because the social sciences can be literary. To explore this fruitful relationship, we invited participants to examine the potential of the encounter between the social sciences and literature through a literary work chosen by the participants. Ethnography, history, sociology and political science contribute facts and concepts; literature works with them through writing to transcend the boundaries between the intimate and the subjective, serious and collective themes, events, societies, institutions, resistance and social movements. As Maurice Godelier pointed out, fiction contains more than the imagined and the imaginary, because it brings together within the pages of a book various elements of both real and unreal worlds—characters, events and symbols—thereby making societies and their dimensions comprehensible. Whether it be the past, knowledge of which results from work on sources of diverse origins that open up the field of possibilities for knowledge, or the contested futures, viewed prospectively, both confront the researcher with fields of possibilities. Whether through its documentary basis or its causal chain, literature is not merely a world of imaginary beings, opposed to the world of actual reality. In line with Jacques Rancière, we consider fiction to be a structure of rationality that allows us to compare scattered traces in the construction of identifiable situations and characters, to designate events, to establish links between these events and to give them meaning. It is from this premise that we proceed here.

Organising Committee

Alice Samara (IHC - NOVA FCSH)

Atílio Bergamini (UFC)

Camila do Valle (UFRRJ)

Débora Dias (CHAM - NOVA FCSH)

Elena Freire (USC)

Paula Godinho (IHC - NOVA FCSH)

Organization

CHAM - NOVA FCSH

IHC - IN2PAST - NOVA FCSH

Museu do Neo-Realismo

Associação Promotora do Museu do Neo-Realismo

Casa da Achada