Frederico Ágoas
Frederico Ágoas is a research fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center of Social Sciences, NOVA University Lisboa (CICS.NOVA - NOVA FCSH). He currently develops a comparative research project on the history of Portuguese metropolitan and colonial social research. He completed his doctorate in Sociology at UNL (2011) and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) and at NOVA. He works on historical sociology, the history of the human sciences and the sociology of knowledge and his current research interests comprise the history of empirical social research, modern state building and colonial science. He is a member of the ISA Research Committee on the History of Sociology (ISA RC08) and the Network for the History of Empirical Social Research (NHESR). He coedited “O Espectro da Pobreza. História, Cultura e Política em Portugal no Século XX" (Mundos Sociais, 2016) and his most recent publications include “Auguste Comte: filosofia positiva, teoria social e sociologia" (in Lições de Sociologia Clássica, 2019), “Governo, ditadura e ciências sociais: o caso português” (Tempo Social, 2019), “Ciências sociais, diplomacia e colonialismo: a participação portuguesa na Comissão de Cooperação Técnica ao Sul do Saara (CCTA)” (Estudos Históricos, 2019, co-author), "Social sciences, modernization, and late colonialism: The Centro de Estudos da Guiné Portuguesa" (Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 2020), "Inter‐African cooperation in the social sciences in the era of decolonization: A case of science diplomacy" (Centaurus, 2021, co-author) and "Continuity through change: state social research and sociology in Portugal" (History of the Human Sciences, 2021).
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Papers and book reviews by Frederico Ágoas
the European colonial powers to the scientific interest of the United Nations and North-American academic circles
in Africa, the Commission for Technical Co-operation in Africa South of the Sahara (CCTA) paid particular attention
to social studies, establishing a research agenda parallel to that of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Based on the diplomatic and scientific colonial archives, the article analyzes the
activity of the CCTA in that domain and, above all, the Portuguese participation in these dynamics, determining the
relative importance of the country in their promotion and their reflexes in the field of social sciences in Portugal.
the European colonial powers to the scientific interest of the United Nations and North-American academic circles
in Africa, the Commission for Technical Co-operation in Africa South of the Sahara (CCTA) paid particular attention
to social studies, establishing a research agenda parallel to that of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Based on the diplomatic and scientific colonial archives, the article analyzes the
activity of the CCTA in that domain and, above all, the Portuguese participation in these dynamics, determining the
relative importance of the country in their promotion and their reflexes in the field of social sciences in Portugal.
agrária em Portugal na primeira metade do século XX no quadro da história da
sociologia e no âmbito mais geral da produção de saberes centrados na população. A
recuperação dessa história permite discutir a genealogia nacional daquela disciplina.
Permite ainda discutir a relação da produção de saberes científico-sociais com o
processo de modernização da burocracia estatal e, inversamente, a relevância que os
problemas sociais identificados e produzidos pelo Estado ou em função de
racionalidades que lhe são específicas tiveram na emergência e institucionalização de
um domínio científico.
considered to be useful for the government of populations, has been focused in the activity of the Lisbon Colonial School (ISEU) or other bodies directly dependent of the metropolitan administration. Initially attributed to the initiative of some Portuguese Africanists, those transformations would in the meantime be regarded as by-products of the political reaction of the upper cadres of Portuguese colonialism to the radical transformation of the geopolitical context. More recently, it has been suggested that these transformations should be thought of in the light of the progressive rationalization of the colonial administration; the consequent reform of ISEU in 1946; and the appeals of the colonial cadres regarding their own professional training. Less explored, however, has been the importance of non-metropolitan initiative may have had in the same process. It is in this context that it is important to explore the precocity of the cultural and scientific initiative of the Portuguese Guinea Research Center (CEGP), created in 1946, itself not restricted to the ethnographic or social research that will be regularly published in its journal, the Boletim Cultural da Guiné Portuguesa (BCGP), or in the Center’s own editions. The substantive nature of these works, largely produced by colonial officers, is only marginally addressed in works that treat them as sources, and the activity of CEGP and its BCGP was only dealt with in works of a memorialistic nature or in studies centered on its main animator, the Navy Officer Avelino Teixeira da Mota, adjutant to the Governor of Guinea. In this paper I synthesize the social-scientific activity of CEGP's early years in the broader framework of its cultural activity, and I integrate the results of this exercise in an overview of the reforms undertaken by Sarmento Rodrigues as Governor of Portuguese Guinea. The study of these initiatives is all the more relevant given that Rodrigues will in the meantime assume positions both as teacher of ISEU and as Minister of the Colonies and that the future leader of the nationalist movement of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, Amílcar Cabral, will author several articles in the BCGP during the 1950s, at the time still as an agronomist at the service of the Portuguese Empire.