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The musical genre designated as "metal", contrary to most popular music genres, highlights religious phenomena within its discourse. Controversy, opposition, and transgression of social norms are entangled in its narrative since its inception. Despite its relatively long history, it had until recently received little attention from social scientists. In this article, we analyze the symbolic context of songs from three subgenres - thrash, death, and black metal - that deal with an unusual subject matter: Islam. We argue that, through a specific attitude regarding the autonomy of the artistic field, the deep, derisive, and scathing critiques of social, political, and religious structures reflect public discourse, becoming an emblematic case for various cultural tensions in contemporary society, as it converges against expectations both from the left and from the right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1930 Revolution was a heterogeneous politicalmilitary movement that ended the First Republic (1889-1930) and brought Getúlio Vargas to power. From the 1930s to the present day, the 1930 movement has generated different readings and interpretations from contemporaries and Brazilian specialists, especially historians and social scientists. Our objective is to show, in general lines, some of the main interpretations and analyzes of contemporaries and specialists about 1930 and its consequences. In this way, we hope to contribute to the systematization of 1930's interpretations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between laws and social practices in Brazil has been object of frequent reflexion from social scientists, public authorities and even from common persons. Some analysts point to the malleability of the rules according to the contexts, while others argue in favor of the hardening of the codes. This article intends to present a contribution to this debate, examining these extreme positions in terms of cultural relativism. The research dates from more than a decade and involves fieldwork with application of questionnaires, informal interviews with open questions, and direct ethnographic observation. The main theoretical orientation consists in the consideration of certain social situations as "social dramas" (GLUCKMAN, 1987; TURNER, 1970, 1974, 1975; DAMATTA, 1979, 1985, 1993) in which there is a search for conflicts resolution. Our data demonstrate that the plasticity of the rules in Brazil is a cultural phenomenon, which acts both in the micro and in the macro spheres of the Brazilian society. They confirm also that this malleability is not limited to soften the effects of the laws. Frequently it corresponds to a hardening of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Countless urban revitalization or urban renewal projects have been implemented in innumerous cities around the world. The results cause what social scientists call gentrification. There is, however, a great debate about the use of this term. While some criticize its indiscriminate use, others believe it is necessary to make the concept a little more complex. This paper intends to discuss the definitions and the use of the gentrification term. Furthermore, our hypothesis consists that the gentrification is not a collateral effect or a natural catastrophe; it is planned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Romantic and modernist Brazilian literature tried to tackle the issue of our nationality as a means of self-recognition, a search for national identity. With the rise of post-modernism and especially of cultural studies, the question of national identity and of the representation of the nation is back again; historians, social scientists and literary and visual arts critics have been discussing the theme and we, therefore, see analysis of novels, short stories, poems, paintings, installations, movies and TV series, among others, which deal with how these media try to represent the nation - or if it is still possible to speak in a totalizing way about narratives of the nation and of national identity. Nonetheless, this matter does not seem so compelling in theatre studies. Although there are plays which attempt to narrate a space and its society, whether it be the nation or the city - the latter sometimes representative of an idea of nation -, the debate on what this idea of nation and national identity are is, in theatre studies, limited. Thus, this article aims at analyzing how the nation was imagined and the understanding of national identity in the play BR3, signed by Bernardo Carvalho and staged by the company Teatro da Vertigem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting off from Friedrich Nietzsche's well-known expression “beyond good and evil”, the idea of “beyond the social” is proposed together with the establishment of a dialogue between Nietzsche and the philosopher Spinoza. This notion is developed by showing how it can be connected to Nietzsche’s critique of the sociology practiced at the time, stuck to a “herd instinct”. The domain of the “social”, however, is also recognized, and an effort is made to establish ethnography as a possible connection at the disposal of social scientists between these and other domains with the help of the servitude-liberation pair and the idea of expression as proposed by Gilles Deleuze in contrast with that of representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concerning Brazil, Sébastien Fath, in his text “From the margins to the mainstream: social challenges of the evangelical rise, a transamerican comparison”, rightly reiterates two predominant tendencies: the Catholic decline and the Evangelical growth. This text presents the main reflections produced by social scientists to explain this reconfiguration of the religious landscape, that has been taking place in the country for some decades. In particular, it analyzes the question about the possibility of Evangelicals to supplant Catholics in Brazil, advances hypotheses about the two lines of force mentioned, highlighting that they result from internal and external situations to each of religious and, finally, the text presents some affinities observed in the evangelical fields of Brazil and the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presence of immigrants in the cultural and artistic labor markets has captured the attention of social scientists. However, to this day, an analysis focused strictly on the socio-professional profiles of artists coming from countries outside of the European Union to Portugal is still lacking in the literature. This article presents a comparative analysis between Portuguese, European Union, and non-European Union artists in Portugal taking both their sociodemographic characteristics and their professional situations into consideration. Census data from 2001 and 2011 allow us to identify a number of similarities and differences between these groups, as well as significant changes across the first decade of the XXI century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An obituary for social scientist and reformer Fátima Patriarca, who passed away in Lisbon, Portugal, on March 11, 2016, is presented.

Faith is still a topic that generates interest and debate today. This research has as object the faith. The faith has a bibliographical nature, through the systematic and hermeneutical analysis of the thematic, due to several authors. Faith is understood as a human dimension, immanent, but it has also a transcendent perspective for many people. Establishing the relationship and anthropological faith and religious faith today, as well as between faith and meaning off life. It is the focus of this research because faith is a response to the crisis of meaning that contemporary society faces. The faith in this research is analyzed in two ways: religious and anthropological, addressing historically how the concepts of the term have undergone changes in the course of history and how they are explored today. There is the approach to the position of contemporary philosophers and social scientists like Ferry, Gauchet, and Sponville, who reflect on the misconfiguration of the religious and the fallibility of religion. It also discusses the theory of religious crisis, which relates to laicization and secularization, and the phenomena that produce the deinstitutionalization and growth of the "nonreligion", according to the last demographic census, whether atheists or religious faith. One of the importants conclusions shows that there is a re-reading of the patterns of expression of faith, established by the great religious traditions, and an explosion of new ways of experiencing the religious is currently configured. Even atheists experience a non-religious spirituality in search of balance and meaning. It is noteworthy that the meaning of life, which was primarily related to the religious, was affected by contemporary changes and presents itself as a challenge that affects everybody, not only people who have religious faith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses several interfaces between memory and history, based on the contribution of the following contemporary authors: Pierre Nora, Michael Pollak, Jacques Le Goff and Roger Chartier, among others. It then investigates how social scientist Gilberto Freyre constructed his historical narrative in a dialogue with the interfaces discussed by these authors. This investigation is oriented by the hypothesis that Freyre undertook his intellectual project (between 1922 and 1926) tracing the borders of memory and of history. We demonstrate how the author proposed a "symbiotic relationship" between history, memory and poetic time based on the conciliation of fields such as science, literature and popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview with Portuguese sociologist Boaventura Sousa Santos is presented. He discusses his political consciousness as social scientist as well as his interest in social problems of the 21st-century society. Particular focus is given to his notion of competent rebellion against conformity. Other topics discussed include the illusion of neutrality in social sciences, his participation in the Fórum Social Mundial, and critics to eurocentrism.

This article presents ideas relative to the definition of 'social reality' and 'the social' developed by the social scientists Norbert Elias and Bruno Latour. The presentation of these ideas is guided by the following questions: what is the criticism that the authors make to the sociological assumptions of which they move away?; How do they understand the social reality, society, the social?; What is the discussion and proposal that they do about the relationship individual - society?; What are the differences and similarities between the two proposals?. With the response to these issues, this article makes a connection to the main theoretical suppositions of the Elias's Sociology of figurations and to the Latour's Sociology of associations, as well as makes a presentation of the contributions of the authors to the contemporary sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The survival of small companies in the capitalist development. The role of small companies in capitalist development has raised, throughout the years, the analytical curiosity of economists and other social scientists. In spite of the enormous disadvantages that they possess in competing with big capital, there are innumerable reasons for their survival. The empirical evidence is clear in attesting the importance of small companies in terms of GDP share and job creation and, at the same time, their difficulties for surviving. This paper presents a theoretical revision, departing from Marx, Marshall, Steindl and Schumpeter up to some contemporary authors, concerning the role of the small companies in capitalist development, emphasizing the reasons and the difficulties for its survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with discourse based on two previous studies with newspaper texts that interpret not only the discourse process but also the political aspect concerning the linkage of language with history and ideology. Thus, it evaluates the theoretical-methodological principles and procedures of the French Discourse Analysis (DA), based on its use in the Social Sciences field, especially byPolitical Science. It shows that the connection between the social scientist and DA allows the awareness that it is not a field exclusive to Linguistics, but is formed by both Psychoanalysis and Marxism, with close relation to the Social Sciences. Guided by Althusser's analysis of Marx, it reviews concepts of ideology and subject as well as the relation that is established between them in the subjectivation process. The use of this methodology, which is also a theory, places the social scientist, during the process of understanding the studied object, up against theoretical-methodological challenges that may lead him/her to review this reflection based on his/her own education and disciplinary fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors suggest elements for a definition of the culture of free software. They go on to look at the points where two social worlds intersect: the world of advocates of free software and activists in the co-operative movement in Quebec. They analyse points of divergence and convergence between the former's innovative practices in the technological field and the latter's innovative practices in the social field. They put forward the hypothesis that these cross-fertilizations of practices produce new models of social and technological innovation which come close to what some social scientists call ascendant innovation processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the following interview, the sociologist Laymert Garcia dos Santos discusses his intellectual trajectory. The highlight is the subject about which he has been writing in recent times: the question of the "future of the human". Here, this point is discussed against the framework of its philosophical implications and of the debate concerning politics and technology. Members of the group "Knowledge, Technology and Market", which Santos coordinates, carried out the interview. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]