Historical circumstances and construction of social memory of the discovery of Brazil

Abstract

The celebration of the fifth centennial of the discovery of the Brazil included not only the program of official celebrations, but also the accomplishment of several academic researches. In this sense, among other initiatives, the project developed in the field of the social psychology, by Brazilian and Portuguese specialists, aimed at the study of the representations of the discovery in the two margins of the Atlantic Ocean, before and after the commemorations, with the aim of investigating the social memory of this event. Lucien Febvre, one of the founders of the so called school of Annales, a movement that revolutionized the historiography in the XXth century, in his Combats for history alerts the historians for the practice of interdisciplinary studies. This author highlighted especially the importance of social psychology for history, because he defended the need to understand the construction processes of what he called mental uses, i. e., the way representations are produced, conserved, elaborated and transmitted by a group through the interaction of its members. The relationships between social psychology and history, however, go beyond the possibilities traced by Febvre. They can be envisaged as a two-way road. If, on one hand, the psychosocial theory of social representations can contribute to the exploration of the social phenomena of memory, on the other hand, the historical method helps to determine the kind of historical circumstances in that memory was forged, allowing the identification of the elements that, along the time, interfered in the dialectics of memory and of forgetfulness. Basing in these premises, results of one of the researches undertaken by social psychologists are commented, especially those concerning the problem of the update of social memory relatively to the discovery of Brazil. A special place, concerning the existence of a common and widely spread image of the discovery, is granted to the relationships between the construction of the historical knowledge and its update by the basic teaching and by mass communication.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17575/rpsicol.v17i2.449