Avatar: entre utopia e heterotopia

Com este artigo examinamos os conceitos de utopia e heterotopia, como colocados por Michel Foucault, a partir da noção de lugar e não-lugar. O filme Avatar é o objeto com o qual seguimos, passo a passo, os princípios estabelecidos para caracterização das heterotopias. Nesses lugares outros, procuramos mostrar os pontos de inflexão das propostas de contestação ou de compensação, no que diz respeito aos processos que não respondem aos nossos ideais, ou, mais que isso, não respondem à preservação e dignidade de nossa espécie.

'Beheading', Rule Manipulation and Fraud: The Approval of Election Results in Brazil, 1894-1930

Studies of electoral fraud tend to focus their analyses only on the pre-electoral or electoral phases. By examining the Brazilian First Republic (1889-1930), this article shifts the focus to a later phase, discussing a particular type of electoral fraud that has been little explored by the literature, namely, that perpetrated by the legislatures themselves during the process of giving final approval to election results. The Brazilian case is interesting because of a practice known as degola ('beheading') whereby electoral results were altered when Congress decided on which deputies to certify as duly elected. This has come to be seen as a widespread and standard practice in this period. However, this article shows that this final phase of rubber-stamping or overturning election results was important not because of the number of degolas, which was actually much lower than the literature would have us believe, but chiefly because of their strategic use during moments of political uncertainty. It argues that the congressional certification of electoral results was deployed as a key tool in ensuring the political stability of the Republican regime in the absence of an electoral court.