[Nettime-bold] Milton Santos, 'Geography's Philosopher'

[patrice@xs4all.nl]

(Apologies if send twice - webmail blues!) patrice

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(From Le Monde, June 29, 2001)

Milton Santos
the 'geography's philosopher'.

Milton Santos, Brazilian geographer, emeritus professor of Sao Paolo 
University, and prominent member of the black intelligentia in Brazil, died 
from cancer in a Sao Paolo public hospital, Sunday June 24. In 1994, he was 
the first non Anglo-saxon researcher to receive the Vautrin Lud Prize, 
usually held by specialist to be the Geography's equivalent to the Nobel 
prize.

Milton Santos was born the third of May, 1926, in Brotas de Macauba, a 
little town in Bahia State, where his parents, descendents of slaves freed 
after the 1888 decree of emancipation, were school teachers, a profession 
unlikely to bring one any material wealth in yesterday or today's Brazil. 
Able to read and write when he was five, Milton Santos went then on as a 
self-taught person till he was able to enroll as a boarder at the education 
institute in Salvador de Bahia. After his secundary studies, he envisaged a 
career in engineering, but had to renounce as racist prejudice precluded him 
any hope of joining the Polytechnical College.

He then went for studies in law, in which he graduated in 1948 at the 
Federal University in Bahia, and succesfully passed the competitive 
examination to provide for a professorship in  general education in Ilheus, 
the capital town of the cocoa trade, then a booming business. His thesis 
(The Population of Bahia), which he wrote in order to qualify for the post 
of college professor, exposed his true calling, that of an explorer of 
geography's human dimension. This led him to pusue his studies at Strasbourg 
University in France, where he earned a docorate in Human Geography in 1958. 
The sociological analyses that went with his research in Brazil made of him 
a staunch critic of the plight of those excluded by Brazilian society, and 
at the same time an ardent defender of the cause of nationalism in matters 
economic.

Milton Santos was arrested soon after the coming into power of the military 
dictatorship in 1964, but was released after two month of arbitrary 
detention due to a near heart-attack. Dismissed by the Education ministry, 
he took the road of forced exile, that saw him as a consultant with the 
International Labour Organisation, the Organisation of American States, 
UNESCO, and also as an 'itinerant professor', at various posts in France, 
United States, Canada, Peru, Venezuala, Great Britain, Nigeria and Tanzania. 
These travels inspired him to write many articles and essays, as befit a 
very prolific authors, with more than two scores of books to his name.

Member of the "Justice and Peace Commission" of Sao Paolo diocese since 
1991, and of the National Council for Urban Development, Milton Santos was 
also a very discreet 'fellow traveller' of the Workers Party, the principal 
political formation on the Brazilian left.

At the dawn of his life, Milton Santos was very critical about the unfolding 
globalisation. He branded it a 'perverse phenomenon' , that was using a 
'mendacious vocabulary', refering to 'the global village' and 'world 
citizens'.  For his collegue Asiz Ab'Saber, also emeritus professor of Sao 
Paolo University, Milton Santos was "a philosopher of geography", whose 
independent spirit was informed by "the same ideals that Jean-Paul Sartre 
stood for" .


article by Jean-Jacques Sevilla
Q&D T by yrs truly,
Amsterdam, on the 'dag van de afschaffing van de slavernij in Suriname'.
(Day of the


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