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[Type text]
Texto A The Idea of Latin America: Uncoupling the Name and the Reference*

01 An excess of confidence has spread all over the world regarding the ontology of
02 continental divides. While it could be debated whether there are four, six, or seven continents, it is
03 unquestionable that the count of six or seven includes the basic four-way subdivision of Asia,
04 Africa, America, and Europe. That undisputed division underlies not only debates over continental
05 divides but also ideas of East and West, North and South, and explicitly hierarchical categories
06 such as first, Second, Third, and Fourth Worlds (the last a term invented to accommodate
07 Indigenous people in the Americas, New Zealand, and Australia). It may be common practice to
08 buy a plane ticket to “Australia” or “sub-Saharan Africa” as opposed to “north Africa,” but
09 the wide acceptance of those geographical designations hides the fact that the division of
10 continents and the geo-political structures imposed upon them are all imperial
11 constructions of the past five hundred years. A god did not create the planet earth and divide
12 it, from the very beginning, into four continents. “America,” the fourth, was appended to the three
13 that had been imagined in Christianity, which St Augustine articulated in The City of God.
14 The narrative and argument here is not about an entity called “Latin America,” but on how
15 the “idea” of Latin America came about. One of the main goals is to uncouple the name of the
16 subcontinent from the cartographic image we all have of it. It is an excavation of the
17 imperial/colonial foundation of the “idea” of Latin America that will help us unravel the
18 geo-politics of knowledge from the perspective of coloniality, the untold and unrecognized
19 historical counterpart of modernity. By “perspective of coloniality” in this case, I mean that the
20 center of observation will be grounded in the colonial history that shaped the idea of the
21 Americas. I refer to the process as an excavation rather than an archeology because it is
22 impossible to simply uncover coloniality, insofar as it shapes and is shaped by the processes of
23 modernity. After all, the Americas exist today only as a consequence of European colonial
24 expansion and the narrative of that expansion from the European perspective, the perspective of
25 modernity.
26 You can tell the story of the world in as many ways as you wish, from the perspective of
27 modernity, and never pay any attention to the perspective from coloniality. I am here referring to
28 something important and much more than a mere “conflict” of interpretations. To illustrate,
29 consider that a Christian and a Marxist analysis of a given event, say the “discovery of America,”
30 would offer us different interpretations; but both would be from the perspective of modernity. That
31 is, the “discovery of America” would be seen in both cases from the perspective of Europe. A
32 Fanonian perspective on “the discovery of America,” however, would introduce a non-European
33 perspective, the perspective grounded on the memory of slave-trade and slavelabor exploitation,
34 and its psychological, historical, ethical, and theoretical consequences. In this case, it would be a
35 perspective from coloniality and from the Afro-Caribbean rather than from Europe. Readers will
36 be more familiar with Christianity and Marxism than with Fanonism – a critical current of thought
37 inspired by the twentieth-century Martinican intellectual and activist Frantz Fanon – which should
38 already point to an important aspect of the issue that structures my entire argument. Of course, I
39 could have organized my argument from a European perspective, even if I was born and
40 educated in South America. All I would need to do would be to embrace the philosophical frame
41 of reference that is already in place and locate myself within a paradigm of knowledge that, in
42 spite of conflicting interpretations within it, is based on the geo-historical location of Europe.
43 Instead, I situate my argument within the decolonial paradigm of knowledge and understanding
44 enacted by Waman Puma de Ayala, as well as other intellectuals after him belonging to the
45 sphere of society that anthropologist Eric Wolf identified as “people without history.”
46 From the sixteenth-century Spanish missionary Bartolomé de Las Casas to G. W. F.
47 Hegel in the nineteenth century, and from Karl Marx to the twentieth-century British historian A. J.
48 Toynbee, all we can read (or see in maps) about the place of the Americas in the world order is
49 historically located from a European perspective that passes as universal. Certainly, every one of
50 these authors acknowledged that there was a world, and people, outside Europe. Indeed, both
51 people and continents outside of Europe were overly present as “objects,” but they were absent

1
52 as subjects and, in a way, out of history. They were, in other words, subjects whose perspectives
53 did not count. Eric Wolf’s famous book title, People without History, became a metaphor to
54 describe this epistemic power differential. By “people without history,” Wolf did not mean that
55 there were people in the world who did not have memories and records of their past, which would
56 be an absolutely absurd claim. He meant that, according to the regional concept of history as
57 defined in the Western world from ancient Greece to twentieth-century France, every society that
58 did not have alphabetic writing or wrote in a language other than the six imperial languages of
59 modern Europe did not have History. In this view, History is a privilege of European modernity
60 and in order to have History you have to let yourself be colonized, which means allowing yourself,
61 willingly or not, to be subsumed by a perspective of history, life, knowledge, economy,
62 subjectivity, family, religion, etc. that is modeled on the history of modern Europe, and that has
63 now been adopted, with little difference, as the official model of the US. Perspectives from
64 coloniality, however, emerge out of the conditions of the “colonial wound,” the feeling of
65 inferiority imposed on human beings who do not fit the predetermined model in Euro-American
66 narratives.
* Extraído e adaptado de: Mignolo, Walter. “Preface: Uncoupling the Name and the Reference.” The Idea of Latin America.
Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. x−xii.

De acordo com o texto A, escolha a alternativa que contém a resposta correta nas questões que
seguem.

- De acordo com o trecho contido entre as linhas 113,

a) a divisão do mundo em apenas quatro continentes é consenso nos dias de hoje.
b) a divisão de mundo em continentes não possui relação com nenhuma noção de valorização
hierárquica.
c) a divisão do mundo em continentes é apenas uma questão de designação geográfica para
facilitar a orientação.
d) a divisão do mundo em continentes está aliada a estruturas geopolíticas impostas nos últimos
500 anos por uma política imperialista.
e) a divisão do mundo em quatro continentes foi inicialmente concebida por Santo Agostinho
como criação divina.

- De acordo com as ideias contidas no segundo parágrafo (linhas 1425), é CORRETO afirmar
que a América Latina
a) nomeia uma realidade geográfica.
b) é uma ideia geopolítica.
c) está na contramão da modernidade.
d) nunca deixou de ser colonial.
e) existe independente de uma narrativa expansionista europeia.

- A expressão “paradigma decolonial” (linha 43) implica em

a) adotar uma perspectiva interpretativa que leve em conta a experiência da colonialidade.
b) adotar uma perspectiva interpretativa marxista da “descoberta da América”.
c) interpretar a partir da localização na América Latina.
d) interpretar com base em filosofias europeias aceitas cientificamente.
e) conhecer e compreender de um ponto de vista a-histórico.

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- Qual a afirmação CORRETA em relação aos “povos sem história” (linha 45), conforme
identificado pelo antropólogo Eric Wolf?

a) Trata-se de povos que não se reconhecem como sujeitos.

b) Trata-se de povos que se identificam como parte da narrativa histórica europeia.
c) Trata-se de povos que não possuem nenhum registro histórico.
d) Trata-se de povos cuja história está de acordo com a perspectiva da história da Europa
moderna.
e) Trata-se de povos que pensam sobre si numa linguagem diferente das utilizadas pelos centros
imperiais.

- De acordo com o texto, a visão de História da modernidade europeia (linha 59)

a) desenvolveu-se no Ocidente desde a antiguidade grega até a França do século XX.

b) considera a perspectiva epistemológica dos povos que não estão subordinados a ela.
c) reconhece todos os povos como sujeitos de sua própria história.
d) provê o modelo ideal para os povos atrasados escreverem a sua própria História.
e) foi ultrapassada pela visão adotada nos Estados Unidos.

- De acordo com a definição de “ferida colonial” (linha 64) apresentada no texto, qual
alternativa se refere a sujeitos que NÃO a sentem:

a) os povos indígenas das Américas, Nova Zelândia e Austrália (linha 07).

b) aqueles que possuem a memória da exploração do comércio e do trabalho escravos (linha 33).
c) Franz Fanon e os críticos que seguem sua perspectiva (linha 37).
d) Waman Puma de Ayala e outros intelectuais afins depois dele (linha 44).
e) Karl Marx e A. J. Toynbee (linha 47).

- Traduza para o português, de forma correta e fluente, os trechos que seguem:

a) It may be common practice to buy a plane ticket to “Australia” or “sub-Saharan Africa” as opposed
to “north Africa,” but the wide acceptance of those geographical designations hides the fact that the
division of continents and the geo-political structures imposed upon them are all imperial
constructions of the past five hundred years. (linhas 07‒11)

……………………………………………………………………………………..………………….........……….

……………………………………………………………………………………..………………….........……….

……………………………………………………………………………………..………………….........……….

……………………………………………………………………………………..………………….........……….

b) It is an excavation of the imperial/colonial foundation of the “idea” of Latin America that will help us
unravel the geo-politics of knowledge from the perspective of coloniality, the untold and
unrecognized historical counterpart of modernity. (linhas 16‒19)

……………………………………………………………………………………..………………….........……….

……………………………………………………………………………………..………………….........……….

……………………………………………………………………………………..………………….........……….

……………………………………………………………………………………..………………….........……….

3
Texto B Longevity data hint at no natural limit on lifespan
Death rates plateau in elderly people, reviving a debate about how long humans can live*

01 There might be no natural limit to how long humans can live – at least not one yet in sight.
02 That proposal – which runs contrary to the claims of some demographers and biologists –
03 comes from a statistical analysis published on 28 June in Science. It examined the probabilities of
04 survival of nearly 4,000 “super-elderly” people in Italy, all aged 105 and older.
05 The study was led by Sapienza University demographer Elisabetta Barbi and University of
06 Roma Tre statistician Francesco Lagona, both based in Rome. Their team found that the risk of
07 death – which, throughout most of life, seems to increase as people age – levels off after age
08 105, creating a ‘mortality plateau’. At that point, the researchers say, the odds of someone
09 dying from one birthday to the next are roughly 50:50.
10 “If there is a mortality plateau, then there is no limit to human longevity,” says Jean-Marie
11 Robine, a demographer at the French Institute of Health and Medical Research in Montpellier.
12 That would mean that someone such as Chio Miyako, a Japanese great-great-great-
13 grandmother who, at 117, is the world’s oldest known person, could live for years to come – or
14 even forever, at least hypothetically.
15 Researchers have long debated whether humans have an upper age limit. The consensus
16 holds that the risk of death steadily increases in adulthood, up to about age 80 or so. But there’s
17 vehement disagreement about what happens as people enter their 90s and 100s.
18 Some scientists have examined demographic data and concluded that there is a fixed,
19 natural ‘shelf life’ for our species, and that mortality rates keep increasing. Others have
20 looked at the same data and concluded that the death risk flattens out in one’s ultra-golden years,
21 and therefore that human lifespan does not have an upper threshold.
22 In 2016, geneticist Jan Vijg and his colleagues at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New
23 York City rekindled the debate when they analysed the reported ages at death for the world’s
24 oldest individuals over half a century. They estimated that human longevity hit a ceiling at about
25 115 years – 125 tops.
26 Vijg and his team argued that given few, if any, gains in maximum lifespan since the mid-
27 1990s, human ageing had reached its natural limit. The longest known lifespan belonged to
28 Jeanne Calment, a French super-centenarian who died in 1997 at age 122.
29 Experts challenged the statistical methods in the 2016 study, setting off a firestorm into which
30 Barbi and Lagona now step. Working with colleagues at the Italian National Institute of Statistics,
31 the researchers collected records on every Italian aged 105 years and older between 2009 and
32 2015 – gathering certificates of death, birth and survival in an effort to minimize the chances of
33 ‘age exaggeration’, a common problem among the oldest old.
34 They also tracked individual survival trajectories from one year to the next, rather than
35 lumping people into age intervals as previous studies that combine data sets have done. And by
36 focusing just on Italy, which has one of the highest rates of centenarians per capita in the world,
37 they avoided the issue of variation in data collection between different jurisdictions.
38 As such, says Kenneth Howse, a health-policy researcher at the Oxford Institute of Population
39 Ageing, UK, “these data provide the best evidence to date of extreme-age mortality plateaus in
40 humans.
41 Ken Wachter, a mathematical demographer at the University of California, Berkeley, and an
42 author of the latest study, suspects that previous disputes over the patterns of late-life mortality
43 have largely stemmed from bad records and statistics. ”If we can get data of this quality for other
44 countries, I expect we’re going to see much the same pattern.”
45 Robine is not so sure. He says that unpublished data from France, Japan and Canada
46 suggest that evidence for a mortality plateau is “not as clear cut" . A global analysis is still needed
47 to determine whether the findings from Italy reflect a universal feature of human ageing, he says.
48 Brandon Milholland, a co-author of the 2016 Nature paper, says that the evidence for a mortality
49 plateau is “marginal”, because the latest study included fewer than 100 people who lived to 110
50 or beyond. Leonid Gavrilov, a longevity researcher at the University of Chicago in Illinois, notes

4
51 that even small inaccuracies in the Italian longevity records could lead to a spurious conclusion.
52 Others say the conclusions of the study are biologically implausible. “You run into basic
53 limitations imposed by body design”, says Jay Olshansky, a bio-demographer at the University of
54 Illinois at Chicago, noting that cells that do not replicate, such as neurons, will continue to wither
55 and die as a person ages, placing upper boundaries on humans’ natural lifespan.
56 This study is thus unlikely to be the last word on the age-limit dispute, says Haim
57 Cohen, a molecular biologist at Bar-IIan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel. “I’m sure that the
58 debate is going to continue.”
*Extraído e adaptado de: Dolgin, Elie. Longevity data hint at no natural limit on lifespan. Nature vol. 559. 5 July 2018.
Disponível em: <https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05582-3?utm_source=briefing-
dy&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=briefing&utm_content=20180629>. Acessado em: 07/07/2018.

De acordo com o texto B, escolha a alternativa que contém a resposta correta nas questões
que seguem.

- Assinale a alternativa INCORRETA quanto às informações apresentadas no texto sobre a

proposta à qual a expressão “that proposal” (linha 02) faz referência.

a) Trata-se de uma pesquisa dirigida por uma demógrafa e um estatístico.

b) O estudo não tem aceitação unânime.
c) A proposta defende que, após os 105 anos de idade, as chances de sobrevivência de um ser
humano são praticamente nulas.
d) Os sujeitos da pesquisa são italianos de 105 anos de idade ou mais.
e) O resultado da pesquisa foi publicado na revista Science, no primeiro semestre deste ano.

- A expressão “mortality plateau” (linha 08), conforme utilizada no texto, refere-se

a) aos fatores que determinam os níveis de mortalidade entre duas ou mais regiões.
b) a uma estabilização no risco de morte após os 105 anos de idade.
c) às causas de morte entre os idosos participantes de um estudo.
d) a um maior índice de morte a partir dos 100 anos de idade.
e) ao aumento do risco de morte à medida que a idade aumenta.

- Assinale a alternativa que NÃO CORRESPONDE às informações contidas entre as linhas

1017.

a) Para Robine, é certo que não há limite para a longevidade humana.

b) Atualmente, a pessoa mais velha do mundo é uma chinesa de 117 anos de idade.
c) A existência ou não de um limite de anos de vida do ser humano é uma preocupação antiga
entre os pesquisadores.
d) É consenso entre os pesquisadores o fato de o risco de morte aumentar até por volta dos 80
anos de idade.
e) Há discordância sobre as previsões de vida das pessoas que entram nas décadas de 90 e 100
anos de idade.

- Em relação ao trabalho realizado por Vijg e seus colegas (linhas 2228), é CORRETO afirmar
que

a) a pesquisa introduziu o debate sobre o limite de longevidade humana.

b) Vijg e seus colegas analisaram os registros de morte das pessoas mais idosas do mundo
dentro de um período de 50 anos.
c) O ponto de vista de Vijg e sua equipe era de que houve ganho considerável em anos de vida
desde a metade de 1990.
d) Para Vijg e sua equipe, o limite para a longevidade humana ficava entre 115125 anos.
e) os resultados foram amplamente confirmados por especialistas.

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- Assinale a alternativa que NÃO CONFERE com as precauções tomadas por pesquisadores
para verificar os dados de um estudo sobre longevidade em idosos italianos com idade de
105 anos ou mais entre 20092015. (linhas 2937)

a) Alteração dos métodos estatísticos originalmente utilizados.

b) Coleta de registros de nascimento de todos os idosos com 105 anos de idade entre 2009 e
2015.
c) Verificação da sobrevivência de cada um, de um ano a outro.
d) Concentração do foco na Itália porque o trabalho foi feito com o Instituto Italiano de Estatística.
e) Tentativa de controlar a variação na coleta de dados.

- Assinale a alternativa que apresenta as palavras ou expressões que melhor substituem, no

contexto, as palavras “lumping” (linha 34), “stemmed” (linha 43), “spurious” (linha 51) e
“wither” (linha 54), respectivamente.

a) fastening  originated  counterfeit  disappear

b) combining  branched  fraudulent  diminish
c) putting together  sprung  misleading  wane
d) grasping  emanated  false  deplete
e) hooking  proceeded  deceptive  parch

- Traduza para o português, de forma correta e fluente, os trechos que seguem:

a) Some scientists have examined demographic data and concluded that there is a fixed, natural
‘shelf life’ for our species, and that mortality rates keep increasing. (linhas 18−19)

……………………………………………………………………………………..………………….........……….

……………………………………………………………………………………..………………….........……….

……………………………………………………………………………………..………………….........……….

……………………………………………………………………………………..………………….........……….

b) This study is thus unlikely to be the last word on the age-limit dispute, says Haim Cohen, a
molecular biologist at Bar-IIan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel. “I’m sure that the debate is going to
continue.” (linhas 56−58)

……………………………………………………………………………………..………………….........……….

……………………………………………………………………………………..………………….........……….

……………………………………………………………………………………..………………….........……….

……………………………………………………………………………………..………………….........……….