Dr. Diamantino P. Machado was born in Lisbon, Portugal, but has been a resident of Philadelphia since 1965 and a U.S. citizen since 1969. He has an Associates Degree in General Studies from the Community College of Philadelphia; a Bachelors Degree in Sociology from La Salle University; and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Temple University. Throughout his career, Machado has participated in sociological conferences in the U.S., Canada, and Oxford, England. He has taught sociology courses at several universities since 1980, and his dissertation, "The Structure of Portuguese Society, the Failure of Fascism," was published in 1991. Currently, Machado is a full-time auxiliary professor of Sociology at Drexel University.
ASK recently caught up with Machado to discuss his career, his native country, and the social construction of human beings.
: Before you became a professor, you worked in international banking and urban renewal, correct? Can you tell me about the different projects you've worked on and the positions you've held within these fields?
Diamantino Machado: Correct. In international banking, I began as a lower-level operations staff member handling documentation and negotiable instruments pertaining to international business transactions. Later, I worked in administration as an area assistant to international banking officers for Latin America. In that capacity, I was also being trained to become an international banking officer for Latin America, particularly Brazil.
In the urban renewal field, I started as a rent collector of properties owned by the agency. Later, I became a residential relocation specialist and a commercial/residential relocation supervisor. I became very familiar with Philadelphia neighborhoods and learned a lot about the real workings of city politics.
: Tell me about post-structuralism, "systems of thought," and the social construction of human beings. How would you define these concepts and their implications?
DM: By post-structuralism, I mean a way of seeing the world, particularly the social world, that is in disagreement with the Enlightenment or Modernist project. It is a critique of the epistemological and ontological assumptions and postulations of the Modern "Episteme" or "system of thought." Foundationalistic, totalizing, and universalistic grand-narratives are rejected.
"Systems of thought" is actually the term of Foucault's Chair at the College de France. He was a professor of the "History of Systems of Thought" [Epistemes]. What the term indicates is that human thought is not natural, universal, and fixed. The way we "think" [writ large] today has a history. So, for example, while we today take social sciences for granted, and consequently human beings as "objects" of scientific inquiry, eighteenth century Europe had neither social sciences nor the concept of "man" as an object of study. Those who are engaged in the study of past systems of thought are very aware of how foreign, or different, periods of human past are from our present.
By the Social Construction of Human Beings I mean that humans are not "constitutive" or self-made [the problem of modernist humanism], but "constituted" or "constructed" [subjectified] by language and social forces [bio-power] or systems of thought of a particular society and a particular time. Upon their biological birth, humans are thrown in to the world of an existent social formation with a particular symbolic system of meanings and communication, or language. So, for example, feminine aspects of social life and symbolic representation are much more present or included in my native language Portuguese, and in other Romance languages, than they are in English.
: What made you switch to teaching?
DM: When I began working in urban renewal, I also began "moonlighting" at the credit department of the old Lit Brothers Department store. I needed the extra income, being the head of a family with two young children. At Lit Brothers, I found a few married men that had had the second job for more than ten years. I remember being very upset by the thought that the same could happen to me. So, with some financial sacrifice, I left Lit Brothers and went to college. I also became very familiar with Federal and State regulations regarding urban renewal and eminent domain and began training my co-workers. Shortly thereafter, I was called the "professor." I realized that I could teach and liked teaching.
: How did your experiences growing up in Portugal affect the way you approach your life today? What lessons did you take away from that experience?
DM: I am quite cognizant of the fact that my approach to life yesterday and today was profoundly determined by two fundamental circumstances surrounding my youth: poverty and the political dictatorship that ruled Portugal from the 1930s to 1974. The result was that I started to think sociologically before I knew anything about sociology, a discipline not commonly found in dictatorships and not that popular even in self-professed democratic systems. In my early teens, I had two quesStions: Why was there so much poverty in my country even though it had a colonial empire, with colonies in Africa, India, and China? And secondly, why are people different in their thinking, behaving, speaking and even somatically in terms of body types? Why confidence, security, and lack of confidence and insecurity? In my dissertation, I answer the first question; and I have been working on the second. I am getting very close to answering the second question.
: What was the answer to the first question?
DM: I found that the poverty around me and throughout the country was by "design." Portuguese latifundists¹ and English industrialists blocked authochthonous² possibilities for the development of native competitive industrial capitalism, for the transformation of Portugal from a traditional agricultural nation into a modern, industrialized country. Portugal never experienced a "bourgeois" revolution. Instead, while possessing a vast and wealthy empire, she remained undeveloped, dependent— as a "de facto" colony of England— and the poorest country in Western Europe.
: Some of the courses you teach at Drexel, such as Wealth and Power, present ideas that many find controversial or that conflict with their previously held beliefs. Do you find it challenging to teach these courses? Do you find students to be resistant or open to this new, and often shocking, information?
DM: The ideas and topics I present in my courses at Drexel are not controversial to me. They are actually very accurate and very real. The fundamental problem is that the vast majority of the American people, old and young, live in a rather imaginary America – call it "The Cave" – and when some of the residents of that imaginary America come to the courses I teach and are faced with the awareness that the world of the Cave is not real, and that the real is altogether and radically different, they experience "cognitive dissonance." Resistance is a normal reaction, it is to be expected. My concern is with those students who, at the young age of nineteen, twenty, believe they know all that they need to know – believe that they are right and the professor is wrong. An unexamined life at the age of twenty, thirty, forty, fifty is very sad!
Yes I do find teaching the courses I teach very challenging, but to educate [or "educare" or to bring forth] is a very satisfying vocation.
: What is the best aspect of your job as a professor?
DM: It allows me to live, to think, in a world beyond the daily existential activities. As a citizen, a husband, a father, a faculty member, I am, like everyone, "inside" a social world, inside a society. As a professor of sociology interested in the history of systems of thought, I am often "outside" the social world, questioning, probing and then sharing my interpretations and the interpretations of fellow thinkers with the students in the courses I teach.
: If students could take away one message from your courses, what would you wish it to be?
DM: Kant's famous evocation, "Aude Saper:" "dare to know," "dare to reason." And question authority.
: If you could offer one piece of advice to students, what would it be? Is there anything different you would say to a freshman or a graduating senior?
DM: To a freshman, I would advise him or her to have an open mind, to question why he or she is a college student, to remember that learning should be a painful exercise. To both, I would, of course, recommend "Aude Saper." To the graduating senior, I would recommend the development of an "aesthetics of existence," or the ability to be touched by beauty in its many configurations, to develop a strong sense of ethics [for X deed may be legal but unethical], and not limit one's life to excessive rational thinking, particularly of the kind that accepts the idea that "the ends justify the means," and to excessive preoccupation with materialism.
1"Latifundists" are the owners of large, very large, areas of land, or "latifundia." Since their livelihood is based on agrarian activities, they are not interested— and can not be— in industrialism, factories, and urbanization. In Latin America, land reform, or the breaking up of latifundia, has been a hot political issue.
2"Authochthonous" is defined as "indigenous" or "native."