Biografia coletiva, engajamento e memória: A miséria do mundo

Abstract

This text aims to relate Pierre Bourdieu's proposal of collective biography and its theoretical possibilities to the historical question of the political 'commitment' of scientists, which pitches us once again into the debate on what is an intellectual, a key topic for many authors. As a polemical example, the article discusses the form in which this commitment is elaborated by Pierre Bourdieu in his book The weight of the world. It then seeks to develop these ideas into a coherent proposal for analyzing the social trajectories and life histories of individuals inserted in social groups, taking as its lead Halbwachs's concept of collective memory and Boltanski's notion of collective persona.