Patricia Lorenzoni

Biography

B. 1975. Post-doc fellow at School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg. PhD in History of Ideas, University of Gothenburg 2007, with dissertation Att färdas under dödens tecken: Frazer, imperiet och den försvinnande vilden. Visiting Research Scholar at Centre for Global Studies and the Humanities, Duke University, funded by STINT, in 2005.

Ongoing research

Departing from Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call for a theoretical “provincialization” of Europe within academic history, Lorenzoni will study the concepts of state, nation, and sovereignty in legal texts regulating indigenous minorities in Brazil, in particular the Estatuto do Índio from 1973. This legislation, still in force although widely criticized, struggles with how regulate within the law those who are understood as outside it. The purpose of the Estatuto is stated as “preserving” the culture of “índios or silvícolas” (wild), and to “integrate them, progressive and harmoniously, into the national communion”. The presence of indigenous minorities within the geographical boundaries of the state, points to how its claimed territory does not coincide with what is in the legislative text defined as the nation. Although original to the territory, the índios are understood as belonging to the “wild” rather than to the national culture. Expressed here is the necessary continuation of a 500 year long process of gradual consolidation of “civilized” society, springing from the desire for a nation to be identical with itself, where the territory coincides with the population. Since the purpose of the legislation is also stated as “preserving” indigenous culture, tensions arise around the possibilities for national belonging. This tension is not limited to the conceptual level, since level of integration or non-integration historically has allowed or denied access to rights. Chakrabarty urges us to write history from the productive parts played by encounters with that which was – and is – non-reducible to the categories of Occidental scholarship, thus striving to open up for imagining political possibilities not easily congruent with Occidental modernity.

Selected bibliography

”Killing the Savage: Frazer, Conrad and Spencer on Violence and Sacrifice”, under revision for Ideas in History, forthcoming.

– Att färdas under dödens tecken: Frazer, imperiet och den försvinnande vilden (Glänta Produktion, Göteborg 2008)

– “’Understanding the Past to Speak the Present’: Imperial Anthropology and Critical Historiography” i Lectures on Relativism: Reprints from the Relativism Conference, Göteborg University, September 17-18, 2004, red. Torbjörn Tännsjö och Dag Westerståhl (Göteborgs universitet, Institutionen för filosofi, Göteborg 2005)

– ”Mänskliga kvarlevor och levande döda: om att visa vildar som vetenskap och som spektakel” i Vetenskapshistoriska uppsatser, Arachne no 19, red. Aant Elzinga och Ingemar Nilsson (Göteborgs universitet, Institutionen för idéhistoria och vetenskapsteori, Göteborg 2004)

– “Finns det en människa för Brasilia?” i Om utopier: En vänbok till Nils Eriksson, Arachne no 18, red. Johan Kärnfeldt och Sven-Eric Liedman (Göteborgs universitet, Institutionen för idéhistoria och vetenskapsteori, Göteborg 2002).