Far beyond post‐colonialism: Guerreiro Ramos’ contribution to social theory

When academics think about ‘post-colonial theory’, they most likely point to the academic trend of postcolonial studies that flourished in the 80s with the publication of Said's Orientalism. It shows how there is no neutral intellectual activity, and that power hierarchies are always at work (Azim, 2001). Two decades later, post-colonialism has developed into an academic discipline, including debates on a variety of subjects. It highlights the pervasive power of the empire's legacies, and how our knowledge is not untouched by these colonial thoughts (Go, 2016). Despite this trend of thinking about post-colonial studies in the 80s with Said, Spivak and Bhabha, some authors have been pointing out that these figures are the second wave of post-colonialism, and that there was a first wave with the participation of Fanon, Césaire, Cabral and others (Go, 2016). The conceptualisation of post-colonialism, as well as which studies can be categorised under this category, is even more complex: when is the post-colonial? Who is the post-colonial? And what is post-colonial? (Childs & Williams, 1997). Social theorists tend to approach postcolonialism as ‘little else than a trendy fad lacking substance. At best, in their view, postcolonial theory dangerously celebrates the cultural and particular at the expense of the material and universal’ (Go, 2016: X). At the same time, authors that never claimed the status of post-colonial thinkers have been classified in this category. We ask: in which sense is it convenient for colonialism if we create and feed such classification? How colonialist is it to classify every south theorist as a post-colonialist? Who counts as a theorist? We aim to answer the first question above, analysing the processes by which some authors are being rediscovered and labelled as post-colonialists. And for that, we use the hypothesis that there is a convenient Northern tendency to label marginalised scholars as anti-racists, feminists and anti-colonials, instead of calling them social theorists. In this article, we bring Guerreiro Ramos as a study case. Other questions come from this analysis, but unfortunately—due to the limits of this paper—we will not explore them here. Our argument in this part of the article is that Guerreiro Ramos’ theories are not about the geopolitical periphery and colonised societies. Instead, they are reflections aimed to build a global framework for the social sciences based on the explicit knowledge of their constraints, and for that, they also exposed the constraints of the theories elaborated in central geopolitical contexts (Guerreiro Ramos, 1981). Ramos claimed that his last book (1981) was the most finished form of ideas on social theory he had been expressing since the 1950s. However, it was not the centre of his early writings, which addressed themes related to local context such as Brazilian development, the Brazilian political conjuncture, racism and the critique of national sociology. By studying these topics, he faced distorted interpretations due to the imitative attitude of many of the peripheral intellectuals. Therefore, he elaborated a methodology of critical assimilation of foreign knowledge, which would become a social theory about the modern human being living between the risk of alienating massification and the affirmation of a critical individuality aware of its social milieu and political will. Although Guerreiro Ramos is recognised as a precursor of post-colonial studies and an eminent diasporic Black intellectual (Filgueiras, 2012), we aim to go beyond these definitions that limit Ramos to a specific and smaller shelf of the social sciences. Ramos's theory was based on the explanation of his locus of enunciation as a Black man in a peripheral country, marked by the colonialist mentality. However, he did not intend to theorise about this locus, but from it. For him, universalism and totality in the social sciences are only possible when the sociologist's starting point was recognised. According to him, sociology is an epistemological habit engaged in the self-determination of individuals, groups and social systems (Guerreiro Ramos, 1958). Ramos went beyond a critique of the importation of alienated models of thought and built a theoretical and conceptual basis. His key concept is the universalisation of criticism, of the human capacity to identify the conditionings of life in society, and consequently, of its thoughts and worldviews. According to him, criticism is the ability to uncover the constraints and then condition them according to options reflected for future projects. There would be nothing more human than this ability to project on known bases and thus change the environment itself (Azevedo & Albernaz, 2006). These abstract conceptualisations, which we consider the author's most complete contribution to social theory, were carried out with the proposition of the sociology of organisation. However, his idea of aspiration for social totalities foresaw that his proposal would be a contribution to the social sciences in general. He saw the social sciences in an integrated way, as biases of interpretation and action in the social world (Guerreiro Ramos, 1981). It was mainly in the study of Brazilian society (50s–60s), however, that Ramos began to develop his more complete vision of the social sciences. Meantime, he has consolidated decisive contributions to the sociology of knowledge, and the studies of race relations, which go far beyond the realisation of the peripheral condition (Bariani Junior, 2008). The personal experience of being a Black Brazilian and the reflections that he made about it are driving forces of his thinking about the sociologies of development and knowledge and give him a perspective of a peripheral author. He considered that in Brazil there were three lineages or paradigms to think about the African diaspora. The first treated Blacks as an object and as an exogenous element of the national society. Throughout the book cited, Ramos uses the term ‘the black’ (‘o negro’, in Portuguese) with several distinct meanings, usually attached to an analogous and antithetical meaning to the term ‘the white’ (‘o branco’, in Portuguese). The three most important are: (i) the two population contingents that move to Brazil in opposite conditions of exploiter and exploited; (ii) the stereotyped imaginaries formed in the Brazilian population about each contingent, always transferring to ‘the negro’ the worst ethical and aesthetic stigmas associated with phenotypic characteristics; (iii) the individual and collective awareness of social positions determined by skin colour. Blacks were a subject yet to be constituted and would be able to do so only if acculturated from their African heritage and assimilated into White society. The second considered Blacks a constitutive part of the national reality but did not foresee emancipation actions to eliminate the dehumanising condition created by slavery. The third was a form of action: there are concrete and reflexively oriented attitudes towards emancipation (Guerreiro Ramos, 1957; Shiota, 2014). Ramos understood the denial of the Black matrix in the national formation as a consequence of the colonial mentality that remained not only in the White elites but also in the mestizos (eager to identify themselves phenotypically and culturally with the Whites) and in Blacks (who would lack mechanisms to rehumanise themselves). This imitative attitude and uncritical assimilation of foreign ideas, ethics and aesthetics were not limited to racism. In our political thought and our social sciences, the colonial mentality would lead to borrowing foreign narratives to the Brazilian reality. Against this attitude, he proposed the sociological reduction, the main concept of his sociology of knowledge. More than a conceptualisation of the social sciences in the periphery, it is an attitudinal proposition for sociologists. The reductive attitude presupposes: (i) a social scientist's commitment to the society in which he is inserted; (ii) a non-refraining from considering universal aspects related to scientific practice (such as the socio-historical context) and not innate; (iii) that any other foreign contribution must be subsidiary and not faced as a superior parameter; (iv) and the reductive attitude also depends on the cultural phase of a society, it depends on the progressive understanding of human self-determination and the interdependence of the conditionings of social life. If Ramos did not recognise himself as a post-colonial author, instead, as a sociologist; if his works did not address a geopolitical or post-colonial periphery, but strive to build a global framework; if the author did not speak about his place of speech; and if he aimed to build a conceptual and theoretical foundation not only for sociology, but for the social sciences, what makes him different from any Northern author to be called postcolonial? This article aimed to precisely analyse this process in which authors from the South, despite not having as their main goal in their work to talk about the post-colonial scenario, are often labelled as post-colonialists. We argue that this labelling process is a mechanism to reproduce epistemological hierarchies. It tends to categorise and classify the knowledge to take it back in a specific position in their architecture of knowledge. The Global North does not assimilate the knowledge and critics produced by the South integrating it with its own knowledge. Instead, they classify this knowledge in a specific position, as ‘critics’ or ‘postcolonial claims’, and they remain the main knowledge, not being affected by others. In this sense, the global north remains the main source of knowledge, and the global south remains only one more critic. Ramos is an interesting case study because in addition to symbolising this whole process in a particular way and being one of the authors who has been subjected to this ‘tendency’ (Cavalcanti & Alcadipani, 2016), Ramos already pointed out a way for us to think about it. He reiterates that self-determination and critical awareness are necessary for self-improvement. As individuals, we should incorporate the reductive attitude into our everyday life, and work on our sociological habitus to always identify our position when facing groups and social systems that make up our historical environment. In the world today, it would mean—maybe—to be suspicious about the Northern tendency to isolate us in post-colonial, anti-racist, and feminist sections, programs, departments and courses. And to challenge the epistemological hierarchies imposed by the Western forces—in this sense—is to self-call us social theorists.

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