Abstract:
This article aims to question the rupture of Jessé Souza with the sociology of inauthenticity, represented by the work of Sérgio Buarque de Holanda. Souza’s work was fundamental to demarcate the insufficiency of the great culturalist and essentialist interpretations of contemporary Brazil, which interpret us as pre-modern and completely inferior to modern countries such as the United States. With his theorization, Souza made an important contribution to, from the periphery, also to produce sociological theory. Nonetheless, I argue that Souza repeats rural dualism (traditional)- urban (modern) that is crucial for the author to remain in the shadow of the sociology of inauthenticity and continue to reproduce Brazil’s image as incompleteness, diversion and absence when compared to the central countries, as it happens with the interpretation of the Netherlands criticized by the sociologist.
Keywords:
Jessé Souza; selective modernization; sub-citizenship; sociology of inauthenticity; dualism