UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE SÃO PAULO

ESCOLA DE FILOSOFIA, LETRAS E CIÊNCIAS HUMANAS

Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ciências Sociais

Processo seletivo 2023
Prova de proficiência em língua inglesa

Instruções:
Leia o texto abaixo e responda as duas questões que o seguem, em português. Cada
resposta deve limitar-se a, no máximo, 20 linhas.

“(…) It is difficult to think of a more urgently relevant research topic in the world today
than climate change, as it threatens to undermine the conditions of human societies as we
know them. The literature proliferates inside and outside of the academic world and
numerous climate change research centres, academic faculty sections and task forces have
been established, often with a mixed basic and applied research mission (see, for example,
Fiske et al. 2014). Important transnational institutions, such as the United Nations, have
produced authoritative examinations, appraisals, and increasingly insistent policy
recommendations, notably including reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC). At the time of this writing (2021), five IPCC reports have been
published, the first in 1990, the most recent in 2014, with a sixth report due in 2022.
Climate change has not just driven scholars to coin the term Anthropocene, but also the
more recent and more controversial concept of the ‘Capitalocene’ (Moore 2016). The
latter, a term created by the environmental historian Jason Moore, explicitly blames
capitalism for the global predicament, suggesting that the overuse of resources, the
relentless search for profitability, the translation of nature into quantifiable ‘resources’,
and the commitment to endless growth are not characteristics of humanity as such, but of
a particular phase in our recent history. The influential multidisciplinary theorist Donna
Haraway concurs with Moore in preferring the term Capitalocene to Anthropocene
(Haraway 2016), but goes further by coining the concept of the ‘Chthulucene’, which
refers to the entanglements of, ultimately, all living species in a web of life. She argues
that the new planetary awareness of impending ecological catastrophe may nudge
humanity towards a recognition of the fundamental mutual dependency of all life. In a
contribution of comparable ambition and scope, the collective volume Arts of living on a
damaged planet (Tsing et al. 2017) explores options for human and non-human life in an
era tainted and transformed by reckless human activities. Neither Haraway, nor Anna
Tsing and her collaborators, call for a return to a pure and uncontaminated world, but
explore ways of ‘staying with the trouble’ (Haraway 2016).

The contemporary world of climate change has not evaded the attention of the social
sciences. In general social theory, climate change has been discussed as a consequence of
the growth paradigm and uncertainties produced by modernity. While Anthony Giddens
(2002) wrote about ‘a runaway world’ where rapid changes were out of control, and
Zygmunt Bauman (2000) argued that modernity by default produces uncertainties and
instability, Ulrich Beck (2009) increasingly considered climate change the defining
global risk of modernity, one that an overly successful industrialisation had inflicted on
itself, and that would not be solvable through single-state solutions. Focusing on speed,
rather than risk, Hartmut Rosa (2015) has argued that social life increasingly accelerates
as human beings produce, communicate, and transport more and more. Thereby, global
capitalism creates a situation where resources are being depleted and the environment
suffers. Discussions of climate change and the Anthropocene go hand in hand, as both are

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 UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE SÃO PAULO
ESCOLA DE FILOSOFIA, LETRAS E CIÊNCIAS HUMANAS

partially defined and measured by the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration,
linked to the use of fossil fuels (Steffen, Crutzen & McNeill 2007). Some scholars go so
far as to fear societal collapse in which climate change plays a fundamental role. The
archaeologist Brian Fagan (1999) has argued that El Niño events, which disrupt
precipitation patterns and temperature, have shaped South American societies for
centuries (Fagan 1999). In a major work, the archaeologist Joseph Tainter (1988)
compares our present to the collapse of the Roman and Maya empires, citing climate
change as one factor in accounting for the decline of complex societies. However, the
decisive cause, as Tainter sees it, is likely to consist of decreased marginal returns on
investments in energy (also referred to as EROI), owing to population growth and
subsequent intensification of food production with decreasing returns, coupled with
growth in bureaucratic, logistic, and transport costs. According to him, resource
shortages, a direct result of human dominance of the planet, may be a more acute problem
than climate change (for a similar analysis intended for a broad readership, see Diamond
2005).

The issue of climate change thus inevitably raises questions of human energy
consumption. Since the late eighteenth century, we have been able to exploit
unprecedented amounts of energy; at first in the shape of abundant surface-near coal
deposits, and subsequently through the extraction of oil and gas for the sake of economic
growth, profits for capitalists, and the general improvement of the human condition
(Mitchell 2011). The fossil fuel revolution has enabled humanity to support a fast-
growing global population – it has increased eightfold since its beginning. Yet the cost of
exploiting fossil fuels grows as this easily accessible resource is being used up.
Production relying on fossil fuels also bears within it an inevitable element of destruction
(Hornborg 2019) in a dual sense, since we are simultaneously exhausting resources which
it has taken the planet millions of years to produce, and undermining the conditions for
our own civilisation by altering the climate and ruining the environment on which we
rely. (…)”

(Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. (2021) 2023. “Climate change”. In The Open Encyclopedia of
Anthropology, edited by Felix Stein. Facsimile of the first edition in The Cambridge
Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Online: http://doi.org/10.29164/21climatechange).

Questões:

1) De acordo com o texto, como a teoria social tem abordado a questão da mudança
climática?
R: Na teoria social geral, as mudanças climáticas têm sido discutidas como
consequência do paradigma de crescimento e das incertezas produzidas pela
modernidade. Enquanto Anthony Giddens (2002) escreveu sobre “um mundo
descontrolado” onde mudanças rápidas estavam fora de controle, Zygmunt
Bauman (2000) argumentou que a modernidade por padrão produz incertezas e
instabilidade, Ulrich Beck (2009) considerou cada vez mais a mudança climática
como o risco global definidor da modernidade, que uma industrialização
excessivamente bem-sucedida infligiu a si mesma, e que não seria solucionável
por meio de soluções de estado único. Com foco na velocidade, e não no risco,
Hartmut Rosa (2015) argumenta que a vida social se acelera cada vez mais à
medida que os seres humanos produzem, comunicam e transportam cada vez 2
mais. Assim, o capitalismo global cria uma situação em que os recursos estão
sendo esgotados e o meio ambiente sofre.