Road wanderers in Brazil: a study on modern psychosocial human mobility

Human mobility patterns are quite diverse nowadays and a very singular, extreme pattern is seen in the Brazilian scene: road wandering. Road wanderers are individuals who leave their home, family, work and other territories of a settled life and throw themselves into a life of solitary wandering along Brazilian highways. This study aimed to describe the lifestyle of road wanderers, investigate the reasons that led them choose this way of living and understand it against a background of modern human mobility patterns. A total of 63 interviews were conducted with individuals wandering on road shoulders. We found road wandering is associated with the following determinants: poverty; unemployment; marital conflicts; emotional suffering following the loss of loved ones; desires for adventure and freedom; and cultural symbols related to journey, migration, exodus and other modes of displacement. Despite its particularities, road wandering can be understood as a way of human mobility in the modern world.

O conceito de região e problemas filosóficos: significado epistemológico da história regional e a constituição histórica do espaço liso e do espaço estriado

The concept of region raises two related historical problems. First of all, it concerns the epistemological accomplishment of regional history, since the need to provide a total history, one of the main challenges of the Annales movement, undergoes an impact with the notion of local, so that the overflight of the historic totality becomes nowadays an intensive totality. The historian who overflies the reality is replaced by the wanderer historian. In addition to this epistemological question, we can think about the historical feature of spaces. From an ontological point of view, according to the modes of its composition, as well as from the standpoint of its practical constitution, space can be either smooth or striated. These types of space belong to the Gilles Deleuze s nomadology and their definition might improve the characterization and description of historical spaces with regard to a certain contemporary historiographical movement known as the New Cultural History.Key Words: history;space;nomadism.

América latina: as coisas para além delas mesmas

If Plato compared the artist's work a reflection of the things, the contemporary art transcends the projection of things beyond themselves by creating unusual pictures, requiring the reader a posture of meanings' digger to establish the signification. Our object is the mestizo, hybrid and heterogeneous Latin America presented by sensitive eyes of art. We chose the route of ambiguous and poetic language of art, selected three works of Brazilian artist Regina Silveira since the last two decades has sought to un/construction of the image from the shadow, reflection, anamorphic projections, which offers unusual images, poetic visual paradoxes. Art as a mirror labyrinth where the reader/viewer as a wanderer without contemporary "gps" to select territories where will step from a map that he will have to build.