Events

We invite everyone to the AntropoCena screening of the film “Drags in da House”, directed by Paula Bessa Braz, Mihai Andrei Leaha, Caio Rincon, Gab Italiani and Dida Silva. Paula and Mihai will be in attendance for a discussion, moderated by Rose Satiko Gitirana Hikiji.

Synopsis: When two anthropologists and three drag queens meet at a drag race competition in São Paulo, an ambitious project to document the city’s vibrant queer scene is born. But the onset of the pandemic radically transforms this creative journey. What was to be a conventional documentary becomes something deeper: an experimental collaboration in which the boundaries between observers and those being observed dissolve. Through video diaries, digital performances and virtual meetings, the group captures not only a cultural scene, but a historic moment of adaptation, resistance and creation.

Mihai Andrei Leaha is an audiovisual researcher, anthropologist, filmmaker and educator. He…

LISA will host a lecture entitled ‘The "Mateira" Science and the Protection of Isolated Indigenous Groups’, given by Daniel Cangussu.

Daniel Cangussu is a botanist and specialist in indigenous affairs. At FUNAI, he heads the Madeira River Ethno-Environmental Protection Unit. In his Master’s dissertation, “Vestígios da Floresta” (published by SESC), and in his doctoral thesis, “Ecologias do Não Contato”, he adopts the concept of “Mateira Science” to define the set of traditional practices and knowledge used to identify and monitor isolated and recently contacted groups.

The event will also feature a screening of the documentary “Vestígios” by Leão Serva and Rogério Assis, which follows the work of Daniel Cangussu and his team in protecting isolated indigenous groups.

The event is free and open to the public.

DIGITAL COLLECTIONS FOR INDIGENOUS HISTORY:
Balaio de Memórias, Armazém Memória, and Instituto Socioambiental
November 17, 2026, at 5:30 p.m.
Organized by: Center for Mesoamerican Studies (CEMAA-USP) and Center for Amerindian Studies (CEstA-USP)

Balaio de Memórias
This digital platform is an Ikorẽ initiative that compiles and makes available to the public the historical collection of the Center for Indigenous Culture (NCI), produced between the 1980s and 1990s.

Angela Pappiani
A journalist (ECA-USP), she worked at the Center for Indigenous Culture (NCI) and the Institute of Indigenous Traditions; she is the author and founder of Ikore, a publishing house and production company in partnership with Indigenous peoples.

Siã Hunikuin Sales
A young Huni Kuin, a geography student at USP and former law scholarship recipient at PUC-SP, works at Ikore with the NCI collection and collaborated on the cataloging of *Balaio de Memórias…

Prof. Marcelo Gonzalez Galvez (PUC Chile)
Wednesdays, 2.00 pm, from 18 November to 9 December

The course proposes a discussion of the potentially fruitful relationship between anthropology and the notion of failure. By understanding failure not (only) as the unfortunate outcome of a particular endeavour, but as a counter-hegemonic predisposition, this relationship is explored in two dimensions. Firstly, failure emerges as a phenomenon that is not confined to specific events and which constitutes social life in general, giving rise to creativity, discomfort and even a challenge to various social norms: this is what we shall call the anthropology of failure. In the second, ethnographic practice is conceived as guided by failure, both by the humility and constant adjustment it demands and by the nature of its products, which are particular and, by definition, cannot be universalised.