Events

with Marco Tobón Ocampo (Unicamp) and Roberta Marcondes Costa (NEIP / USP)
Mediation: Arthur Fontgalant (PPGAS / USP)

Who owns the land? Who has the right to claim parts of it and the various beings that inhabit it? Who determines its distribution or division? ”Asks philosopher Achille Mbembe before a world that limits movement and reinforces borders. Borders increasingly become spaces for reinforcing and reproducing vulnerabilities, for imprisoning ideas and movements. But what are borders?

Among geopolitical and symbolic meanings, borders are commonly read as limits, boundaries, contiguous spaces. In addition to the demarcation of spatialities, the notion of frontier also produces and accentuates vulnerabilities, limits movements, encodes bodies and relationships, seeks to control becoming and intensities. The fact is that the notion of frontier has long moved anthropological thinking, in different forms and in different fields.

While the ethnographies produced in the so-called territorial “frontier regions” pursue this notion, demonstrating both their permeability through the transit of people and collectives and the contingency of relations between lands and their people, Anthropology itself is produced by producing its own borders, mobilizing objects and issues that stabilize and / or deconstruct theoretical, conceptual, methodological and disciplinary boundaries. If anthropological knowledge is inherently relational (Wagner, 1975), researchers' relations with other worlds make our discipline continually rethink and (re) invent its borders.

From gender studies to the Anthropology of the body and health; from scientific practices to native cosmopolitics, among other fields, Anthropology is faced with “frontier regions”, marked by codifications, movements, stabilizations and destabilizations. If anthropologies that attempted to identify boundaries between ethnic groups seem distant, the notion of boundary certainly does not seem to be an “endangered object” (Sahlins, 1997).

On the Friday of the month of September we want to think from the frontiers and we invite everyone, everyone and everyone to know some anthropological points of view around this notion, taking it as a datum of certain contexts of ethnographic research, as well as an object of conceptual reflection of our discipline.

with Alana Moraes (National Museum / UFRJ), Chirley Pankará (USP) and Jacqueline Moraes Teixeira (USP)
Mediation: Jesser Ramos (PPGAS / USP)

At the end of the semester, due to the strike and mobilizations in defense of science, public education and universities, the Sixth of the Month collective invites everyone to think about the challenges of doing anthropology at the moment we are living, in that Brazil is going through so many setbacks.

Under the title "Anthropology in times of catastrophe", we will start from political and ethnographic experiences to bring together the student body and reflect not only on the effects of the current moment on academic production in Anthropology, but especially on how collaborative trajectories between anthropologists and their partners , in different research contexts, can produce deviant (or creative) ways of challenging this reality - read by many as a catastrophe. As Isabelle Stengers proposes in the time of catastrophes, what must be done today is not only to question those responsible for the crises, but to “intervene”, that is, to ask questions, think about what should be done and for the possibility to exist of a future that is not barbaric, starting from struggles that are already underway.

Borrowing the idea of ​​"ethnographic pact", which Bruce Albert developed in his relationship with the Yanomami, we want to transform this Friday of the Month into an assembly, not only of researchers, but of perspectives around anthropological doing - and different experiences "ethnographic pact". In short, it is a methodological but also eminently political reflection.

From Jacqueline Teixeira we will hear about research with evangelical women at IURD; Alana Moraes will speak from the kitchens of the homeless occupations in the city of São Paulo; Chirley Pankará, in turn, brings contributions from indigenous collectives and schools, sharing reflections as a researcher, manager and parliamentarian; Jesser Ramos, mediator of the debate, offers us his experiences at Casa 1 - Center for Culture and LGBT Reception.

with Dibe Ayoub (National Museum / UFRJ) and Fabiana de Andrade (USP)
Mediation: Letizia Patriarca (PPGAS / USP)

In her celebrated study of gender problems, anthropologist Marilyn Strathern comes to the conclusion that, although the idea of ​​machismo is indebted to a Western epistemology, even in indigenous contexts, such as the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, women do not they are immune to acts of violence. Although analytical categories are constructed historically and contextually, as Strathern teaches, the drama of aggressions against women is persistent and continues to pose questions to anthropological discipline. After all, why, everywhere, women, trans and cisgender, continue to suffer violence? In Brazil, a woman is a victim of rape every nine minutes; three women are victims of femicide a day; every two days a transgender person is murdered; and every two minutes a woman registers an assault under the Maria da Penha law. This Friday of the month we invite everyone to think about this problem. From women who are abused in their most intimate relationships to mothers who practice acts of violence to protect their families and their lands, we will learn about ethnographies carried out in contexts marked by the narratives and perspectives of women themselves regarding violence.

with Andrea Barbosa (Unifesp) and Carolina Junqueira dos Santos (USP)
Mediation: João Campos (PPGAS / USP)

The image, as an object of anthropological thought, has long fueled reflections on its production, its status and its role in the production of knowledge in Human Sciences. Furthermore, it has provided a basis for theoretical and methodological debates, whether from other theories of image, or from the encounter between anthropological making and the production of films, photographs, paintings, drawings. In this * Friday of the Month *, we want to invite everyone to a debate on the power of images as ways of thinking the direction of our history, but also of translating other modes of existence from the imagery experience. It is, above all, the possibility of reconstructing peripheral narratives and creating images of the social that are sometimes erased from our memory. It is also a matter of discussing the political-epistemological implications of the use of images in and for anthropological production, collaboratively or not. Finally, it is also a matter of thinking through images, what they bring up, like threads of memory, what they transform with their circulation, of what they do.

With Bruna Franchetto (National Museum / UFRJ) and Majoi Gongora (CEstA / USP)
Mediation: Jaime Mayoruna (PPGAS / USP)

Marching through the streets of big cities, dancing at indigenous village parties or weeping sorrows in a country bar: the word in its sung expression makes the voice a vehicle for communication between worlds. Thinking about the power of transformation and creation of songs in different contexts, the Sixth of the Month invites us to reflect on different aspects of the sung word, its role in the production of people and collectives, its ability to connect visible and invisible spaces and its forms of transmission over time. Interface between music and verbal art, sound and meaning, the songs gain attention from Anthropology through a number of questions: What do the songs of an Amerindian shaman and an immigrant musician do? Who is sung and how are the words and melodies composed by singers composed? How do you learn to sing and how do repertoires circulate between different people and generations? How are chants able to cross and connect spaces and times, transformed or not by the use of registration and diffusion technologies? What is the role of Anthropology to highlight the ways in which different collectives give meaning to verbal arts, musical practices and singing?

With Vitor Grunvald (USP) and Julia Ruiz (ASA / USP)
Mediation: Priscila Almeida (PPGAS / USP)

Body, party, dance, voice, color, transformation. These could be keywords to describe the countless popular demonstrations that have taken over the streets in Brazil and in the world, especially in the last decade, and that make attention to the overlap between political action and expressive forms inescapable. Be in the powerful and colorful manifestations of LGBTI pride in big cities or marches against political figures and big corporations around the world, what these events show us is that there is no insurgency without gesture, without sound, without imagery.

Expressions like "my body is political" and "the boon is also a struggle" intensify connections between different signs and their capacity to produce new worlds, new ways of being in the world. Disputes over taxonomies and the meanings attributed to dissident, non-conforming or unwanted bodies go through capture processes that range from the reduction of the concept of gender to an ideology and even speeches by presidential candidates. Given these findings, the Friday of the Month of September - which occurs exceptionally in the first week of October - invites to think and discuss motivations, desires, as well as the potentialities and political effects of the arts and corporealities in popular upheavals, political acts, upheavals.

How are the relations between gender, art, ethnicity and sexuality expressed and experienced in these events or in everyday micropolitical experiences? How to think about the agentivity of expressive forms in the construction of bodies and collectives? How do they act in the construction of another policy? How can anthropology strengthen the debate about the transposition of boundaries between what is art and what is political action?

With Lux Boelitz Vidal (USP) and Lilia Moritz Schwarcz (USP)
Mediation: Júlia Vilaça Goyatá (PPGAS / USP)

"Where are the blacks?" asks the flag, extended at the front of one of the most important Brazilian museums, the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP). Intervention by the 3 de Fevereiro Front, the work is an icon of an expographic project, curated by anthropologists, which reflects on the flows of people between Africa, America, the Caribbean and Europe marked by Slavery. MASP is no exception: numerous museological institutions around the globe have been engaged in rethinking their practices, atoning for colonial violations through the repatriation of indigenous objects or the construction of collaborative curatorial projects. In addition, there is a recent movement of appropriation of these institutions by indigenous and traditional peoples, who have been increasingly interested in the construction of their own museums, appropriating them as locus of political action. Reflecting on the different roles assumed by anthropologists in these processes, the Friday of August invites us to think: what is the place of indigenous or traditional arts, their exhibition and commercialization? How has Anthropology historically connected itself to different museological enterprises and how has it innovated in this field? What theoretical advances have these engagements fostered in anthropological reflection on expressive forms? How do the categories race and art move through these processes and relate to the decolonizing debate and struggle? What are the epistemic transformations involved in the relocation of the exhibition objects to the villages / places of “origin”?

With Juliana Borges (FESPSP) and Juliana Farias (PAGU / Unicamp)
Mediation: Milena Mateuzi (PPGAS / USP)

In recent months, the use of state strength has been present in the main media vehicles in the country. Military intervention in Rio de Janeiro, the murder of Marielle Franco following complaints against police violence in Irajá (RJ), as well as the use of violence as a common way of resolving conflicts in the countryside, added up to the long history of violence and murders through which dominant groups exercise their power. According to the philosopher Achille Mbembe, the right to decide about life and death make up the fundamental attributes of sovereignty, which through the political use of death (necropolitics) seeks to subdue and immobilize specific people and social groups. In addition to these deaths by direct use of force, there are invisible and everyday deaths, due to the reproduction of conditions of misery and social exclusion, which impels us to think about issues related to the visibility and recognition of death itself as a product of the socially oriented violence of the necropolitics. Anthropology, by devoting its attention and listening to groups that historically were instituted as preferential targets for the exercise of necropolitics, is inserted in the field of disputes around the representations and visibilities to which this debate is directed. With attention to the urgency of the issue, the Friday of the Month launches the discussion on the concept of necropolitics: What is your relationship with the concepts of biopower, feminicide, ethnocide and genocide of blacks and indigenous people? To what extent is death faced or silenced in our ethnographic and writing experiences? What place do anthropological works occupy in a field of disputes around the representation of violence and death?