ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some closing and future-directed thoughts on the concepts, histories, and recent developments discussed in the preceding chapters of this monograph. In arguing for a remapping of Europe and its one-sided (self)narratives, I have made a case for an alternative way of understanding and doing sociology: a sociology overcoming its foundational and still powerful myth as the discipline in charge of studying the nationally contained societies of the self-appointed West and its proclaimed modernity. Exploring a borderland that has been continuously considered peripheral not only in French and Brazilian historiographies and geographies, but also in sociological (mis)readings of modernity, is to unmask these tales: the different threads that have crisscrossed and become interdependent historically, resulting in the complex knot that the borderland represents today, defy the state-centred and unilinear histories conventional sociology tends to uncritically perpetuate. A strict division of labour and macrogeographical entities between sociology, anthropology, and area studies thus systemically reproduces a blindness towards global entanglements and interstitial spaces. The chapters of this book have posited that an interdisciplinary cross-border lens is needed to account for blind spots like the French-Brazilian borderland and their linkages across the globe, including the part(s) of the world sociology self-confidently—yet wrongly—claims to know like the back of its hand: Europe.
