O PAÍS DISTORCIDO: MILTON SANTOS E O LUGAR DAS IDEIAS

• Autor(a) principal: Machado, Thiago Adriano
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Revista Geographia (Niterói. Online)
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.uff.br/geographia/article/view/59486
• topic: Milton Santos; país distorcido; Brasil; geografia; pensamento social brasileiro; Milton Santos; distorted country; Brazil; geography; Brazilian social thought; Milton Santos; país distorsionado; Brasil; Geografía; Pensamiento Social Brasileño

Milton Santos' critical and reflective attitude about how Brazil is thought of by Geography and by intellectuals, national or foreign, has important repercussions in evaluating theoretical-methodological assumptions and political possibilities linked to a discourse and a theory of Brazil. In this way, the author identifies deforming dynamics of the national reality that result in the image of a “distorted country” due to the historical tendency to welcome a foreign modernizing dynamic and to be interpreted according to imported ideas. The present work aims, therefore, to examine how Santos understands Brazil as a “distorted country” from the relationship between the ideas mobilized to interpret the country and its respective geographic contexts, exploring the adjustments proposed by the author to mitigate the mechanisms of distortion derived from the expectations of national modernization. The methodology starts by comparing his theoretical production with the sources here named “reflexive” (newspaper articles, interviews, speeches, and conferences), from which Santos intervened more directly in the public debate. The hypothesis suggests an inseparability between his theoretical-methodological project of critical renewal of Geography and the construction of a geographic interpretation of Brazil, in the sense of producing an effective discourse and a theory of Brazil. As a result, we understand that the author proposes an interpretation of Brazil geographically situated, positioning himself within the scope of the so-called “formation paradigm” based on the proposal to revitalize the national project. To this end, he recognizes the protagonism of slow men (poor, black, and migrants) as historical subjects, to relate corporeality's existential dimension with the socio-spatial formation's national scale. Finally, we recognize that his intellectual trajectory took place in an “in-between place” of ideas by tensioning the geographical canons from the global South perspective, appropriating and reformulating foreign ideas to enunciate a new discourse from an authentic and “decolonial” intellectual project.