Nº 59

February, 2001
Price: 8 €

Em Português 
João Clímaco 
A critique of optimal decision
This article discusses and critiques the ideological framework which has led to the preponderance of the concepts of utility and optimality as fundamental referents for decision in the modern era. In this critique, the author assesses the limits of traditional operational research, which can only be surmounted by the adoption of a constructivist approach. According to the author, only the viable contribution of this approach can meet the demands of the civilization process.

Rui Cunha Martins 
The paradox of emancipatory demarcation: the border in the era of its iconic reproductibility
This article attempts to make a critical reinvention of the idea of the border. Contesting (because of its inefficacy) the puristic ambition of extracting from the concept, in order to make it workable, the vectors of opacity, regulation, and constraint, and contesting also (because of its acritical bend) the automatic conflation of transgression and emancipation, the author proposes an alternative thinking which is capable of dealing with the different dimensions of the concept, in the context of what will be called positional heteronymy. There is also a challenge in this: the acknowledgement of an aura-like character in the border, in other words, how it can be - because of its reproductive potential - the presence of an absence .
 
Sérgio Costa
The social sciences and the post-national constellation: Habermas, Beck, and post-colonial studies 
The post-national constellation characterizes the contemporary context, in which a considerable part of social processes are no longer bounded, in their scope and reach, by the geographical frontiers of a nation-state. Considering this constellation, the social sciences - consolidated within the national institutional space and having the territorial boundaries of the nation-state as their privileged unit of analysis - face the need of reformulating many of their categories. This article studies three recent proposals for overcoming the congenital bond between the social sciences and national societies, pointing to some of the limitations of each of them.
 
Vera Lúcia Calheiros Mata e Artur Nunes Gomes 
Gilberto Freyre, Casa grande & senzala, and the myth of origins of the Brazilian people
The authors investigate the role that Gilberto Freyre had, through his major work Casa grande & senzala, in the formation and preservation of the Brazilian myth of national origin - that is, the belief that Brazilian society derives from the harmonious fusion of three racial matrices. The article argues that the Freyrian model of analysis, by harmonizing the contrasts that exist in this society, allows the persistence of the "myth of the three races" as the basis of the idea of "being Brazilian". The authors conclude that the work of Gilberto Freyre reveals the adaptative capacity of Brazilians and their tendency to avoid conflict. This characteristic was apparent in the commemorations of the 500 years of the Discovery of Brazil, during which, in spite of the many protests that put in question the (ambiguous?) harmonizing model of Brazilian society, it was obvious that this model is still ideologically cultivated by the elites that shape, and above all reproduce, the national ethos.
 
António M. Magalhães 
The transformation of the mode of state regulation and education systems: autonomy as an instrument
The conferring of autonomy to the institutions of the education system is a resource of political management of that system that corresponds to an emerging mode of state regulation: regulation through deregulation. The laws of institutional autonomy in Portugal seem to follow this pattern, which has become established in the last decades in Western Europe. This form of regulation is a correlate to the end of the model of the welfare state, based on a fiduciary logic, and to the emergence of a new model, based on a contractual logic of relations between the different actors in the system. The latter does not correspond to the establishment of a logic of pure deregulation, but to a reinforcement of the Prince's arm, as several cases testify. In Portugal, this situation is made more complex due to the historical and social absence of consolidation of the welfare state.This context confers a hybrid character to the policies and political instruments established to manage the system, and autonomy itself emerges as an ambiguous set of possibilities. 
 
Elisabete Figueiredo e Filomena Martins 
"A voice within"... Expectations, dispositions, and reasons of the population for participating in the functioning of the Vale do Côa Arqueological Park  
This article aims to show, on the one hand, that the process of establishment of the Vale do Côa Arqueological Park (PAVC) is representative of the vulnerability of the institutionalized model of participation, and on the other, to create conditions for a debate about this issue. In this specific case, vulnerability is the result, to a great extent, of two factors: first, because it is a direct issue of the option not to build the dam, and second, because there is a lack of dissemination of information among the social and economic actors in the area. The first factor creates in local actors an attitude of expectation and even of a relative "conformance" in relation to the PAVC; the second may work either in a positive or a negative way, both because of the expectations that it seems to create, and because of the incapacity that it seems to generate in individuals and entities in relation to the assumption of a clear position vis-à-vis the many aspects involved in the establishment and functioning of the Park, obviously including that of participation itself.
 
Ana Cristina Santos e Fernando Fontes 
The Portuguese State and the challenges of (homo)sexuality  
During the last decade, we have witnessed protests, demands, and debates around the rights of homosexuals. The Portuguese State constrains homosexual identity through the operation of obstruction mechanisms, such as juridical-legal omission or non-regulation of laws previously approved by Parliament. The ambiguity between text and juridical effectiveness has been the most characteristic form of action of a State which, in this way, attempts to sanction the principles of equality and non-discrimination established by the European Union, while it legitimates simultaneously a rigid morality, heir to centuries of religious puritanism and to the absence of critical opposition. This article seeks to take into account these and other contradictions, analysing the role of the State in the process of assertion of homosexual identities in contemporary Portuguese society.