Seminars

In this presentation, I examine how Afro-Brazilians engage African American people, culture, and ideas through the lens of ethnography and film. I argue that these processes can challenge Brazilian racial exceptionalism, or the idea that Brazil contains less severe forms of racism than the United States. Afro-Brazilian perspectives on African Americans can bring both these groups and Brazil and the United States into a relation of commonality rather than exception and difference.

In this presentation Diana Brown and Sid Greenfield revisit and examine their individual experiences doing ethnographic fieldwork during the period of the Brazilian dictatorship (1964-1985). Diana Brown was studying African-influenced Umbanda in Rio de Janeiro in 1966 and 1968-69 and Sid Greenfield was learning about networks of dyadic exchanges in Minas Gerais in 1965-66, then planning research projects to be conducted in Ceará and later teaching at the Museu Nacional in in Rio de Janeiro in 1968. The presenters reflect on their training in anthropology at Columbia University that did not prepare them for what they encountered in the field. One of their goals is to invite others who did research in Brazil during this period to reflect on their own experiences and share them.

This presentation outlines the sisteminha, a project developed in a partnership between the Federal University of Uberlandia (UFU), the Minas Gerais State Research Support Foundation (FAPEMIG) and EMBRAPA to promote food security, sustainability and income generation in rural, urban and peri-urban areas in Brazil. Using local resources and sustainable practices, the model strengthens the local economy and improves the quality of life of families by integrating poultry farming, fish farming, water reuse, and the correct management of plant and animal waste in the cultivation of vegetables and grains, using scientific knowledge and local resources. The quilombola community of São Martins, in Paulistana in the state of Piauí, exemplifies how the Sisteminha can transform communities, increasing food self-sufficiency and contributing to the country's socioeconomic development. I will show how the project has evolved to serve entire communities.

Drawing on ongoing ethnographic and documentary film research in and on the neighborhood of Caju in Rio de Janeiro’s port region, the presentation will experiment with telling the city’s history from the perspective of its waters. It will elaborate the theoretical underpinnings and empirical findings of the pilot, web-based documentary film project “Águas do Caju” that tells the story of how this former imperial, elite neighborhood, squeezed between a massive complex of cemeteries, two expressways, and kilometers of land reclaimed from the sea to support port logistics and infrastructure, became a sacrifice zone on a metropolitan scale. I will provide a brief overview of this collective project, highlighting the challenges and potentials of narrating the city and its production from the perspective of its multiple waters.

This presentation is about the study I did as a journalist with the Cinta Larga, an Indigenous Amazonian people that had no peaceful contact with the Western world until the 1960s. In the 2000s they came to run an illegal diamond mine. My goal was to invert the usual Western narrative of the Amazon, telling this story of "contact" not from the perspective of white explorers but through the eyes of Indigenous people -- and to that end, my most important source was the Cinta Larga themselves, in hundreds of hours of interviews going back to 2017. In this presentation, I'll talk about their messy encounters with capitalism, their rejection of clichés like that of the "forest guardian," and how the extent of their "assimilation" into Brazilian society became central to a court case in which several were accused of killing 29 prospectors. I'll also talk about the journalistic and ethical quandaries of such a project and what it meant to them.

A Lakota medicine man had a dream. His grandson would visit an indigenous Brazilian people and help them revitalize their own culture and spirituality. The presentation examines how this dream about a transcultural experience between people from diferente continents (North and South America) -- made possible in part by the presenter and some of the people who will join him -- became reality and explores how the dynamic is working out today. Mitakuye Oyasin. (We are all related.)

Dr. Erica Resende will present on academic freedom under siege by populist threats, non-state attacks, and will analyze the case of Bolsonaro's Brazil. Traditionally conceived as a key cornerstone of democratic regimes, academic freedom is under attack everywhere in the world. More recently, attacks from right-wing populist leaders, have eroded the freedom to teach, learn, research and disseminate knowledge everywhere. If historical attacks on academic freedom have predominantly come from state agents in the form of censorship, dismissal from universities, and even arrest, today this pattern has changed. In recent times, instead, attacks have come from non-state agents such as university managers and donors, parents, grassroot groups, as well as digital militia. Looking into the case of Brazil under the Jair Bolsonaro administration (2019-2022), this presentation will highlight how academic harassment in democratic regimes takes the form of online monitoring of professors and teachers, budgetary retaliation, and legislation proposals against ‘leftist’ indoctrination and DEI initiatives. As a result, attacks on academic freedom have become yet another piece in populist cultural wars in polarized societies.

The presentation examines the role of evangelical Brazilian football players as global missionaries, based on findings from a multi-sited ethnography conducted across various countries, alongside a screen ethnography of media portrayals. It explores how these athletes leverage their international visibility to spread religious messages, often viewing their careers as a platform for faith-based outreach. A key focus is how they perceive their lives abroad as a form of "sacrifice," navigating professional football careers while maintaining their spiritual mission. It further analyzes how faith shapes their values, guiding their conduct on and off the field, and how football clubs profit from this faith-based identity, capitalizing on the players’ strong ethical commitments and influence within religious communities.

This project investigates the efforts by favela residents to combat misinformation and restore trust in journalism within communities experiencing significant information inequalities. These efforts are particularly relevant in low-income communities in Brazil, which heavily rely on no-cost platforms like WhatsApp but have limited broader web access, making it challenging to fact-check information. Consequently, WhatsApp users among the lower classes are particularly vulnerable to misinformation. Given this deep informational inequality in Brazil, promoting accessible local news sources is a crucial way to deliver quality content to marginalized communities and reduce their vulnerability to misinformation. Local reporting often ranks higher than national news in trusted news sources. Preserving and promoting these local outlets may be our best hope for repairing trust in journalism. This project addresses two central questions: How can we combat misinformation, especially in marginalized communities, and how can we restore trust in journalism? It builds on ongoing work in the favelas of Brazil, where I have collaborated with grassroots Community Media Hubs, such as Varal Agência de Comunicação (Vitória, ES), since 2013. To date, these collaborations have focused on analyzing how favela residents have appropriated technologies to liberate themselves from various forms of oppression.

Drawing from extensive engagement with the activism of the Krenak, Munduruku, and Yanomami peoples, I analyze the impact of shamanic traditions on Indigenous activism and political movements in the first decade of the 21st century. shamanic traditions embody a holistic view of the environment (sic), where humans and nature are inextricably linked (one). Shamans, as mediators between the human and non-human worlds, translate these complex relationships through rituals and storytelling, fostering a sense of multispecies citizenship (ontologies). This approach challenges the dominant narrative of nature as an object to be managed or conserved, proposing instead a model of coexistence. Therefore, the political discourse of Indigenous peoples, enriched by shamanic insights, navigates between self-objectification through imposed categories (such as territory, culture, and environment) and the cosmological reinterpretation of their experiences. This dual grounding allows for polysemic spheres of meaning: a symbolic construction of history that legitimizes ethnic discourse through cosmological knowledge, (thereby) maintaining cultural coherence and political transformation.

In this presentation I discuss the radicalization of some segments of precarious workers in Brazil. As informal workers start enterprising on digital platforms, I have been investigating the extent to which this technological shift produces political radicalization. Is this political identification a reflection of predisposed political views that were already latent previously? Or are the digital platforms pushing them to the far right? Based on a combination of intensive long-term ethnography and extensive computational approaches, I explore push and pull factors that enable the encounter between precarious workers and authoritarian populism.

Rather than a paper the presentation will be a talk-video in which a series of short clips will be used as a trampoline for crystallized concepts such as “exemplars of liberty,” “the myth of extinction,” “foundational fictions,” “mobilized intersectionality,” and “forest diplomacy.” The emphasis will be on indigenous and pro-indigenous media activism and on examples of indigenous self-representation and performance. The presentation also is about the use of media to communicate the interest and the urgency of relating to the issues engaged by indigenous people.

This paper examines the collision between three forces in motion to make a provocation: Brazil is a protagonist in the global making of infrastructures of unfreedom. First, the country is amidst a historically discontinuous shift that is seeing an exponential prison construction project materialise across the country with striking uniformity. Second, countering abiding volatility, infrastructure has become a darling pet project for international investors, development banks and pension and hedge funds, who seek to extract sustained profit from the bedrock provision of services by states. Third, rising climate temperatures and global concern create novel impetus for foreign investment to finance and build new solutions. Looking to the literature on infrastructure as ‘lively’ and ‘social’, I counter with an ethnographic and humanistic look at how this collision must return us to a material understanding of infrastructure. Doing so reveals an apparently sibling relationship between sustainability and incarceration, environmental devastation and prison re-construction, and international climate finance and debt funded prisons.

In January 2020, several newspapers in Brazil reported, with great pride, that a Candomblé temple (terreiro) from Bahia would inaugurate a subsidiary in the Nigerian city of Oyo. This would be the first enterprise of such kind on African soil and was meant “to affirm the importance of the Brazilian diaspora, a recognition from Africa of the importance of religious traditions that were transmitted by African ancestors and preserved in Bahia for centuries.” The initial excitement soon turned sour. Part of the Afro-Atlantic community responded to this project with accusations of Brazilian neocolonialism, deploying African aphorisms related to kinship and descent: “a child cannot give birth to their mother.” As an anthropologist initiated in Candomblé, in this talk I explore controversies on neocolonialism, religion, power, and Black identities in Afro-Atlantic perspective, considering contemporary understandings of liberty against a background of slavery and unrealized promises of abolition.

The objective of this presentation is to discuss the process of religious change that is taking place among the Sororó Indigenous people (Suruí-Aikewara) in the Brazilian state of Pará (in the Amazon basin). With the introduction of Pentecostal Protestantism, most indigenous villages in the process of evangelical conversion are using their traditional animist cosmology to incorporate, re-signify, and create new expressions of the sacred. From a real and symbolic dispute between a Pastor and a Pajé (shaman), there emerged the emic category of ‘índio-crente’ (indigenous believer/evangelical) and an ideal type, in the Weberian sense, that I am calling 'indigenous Pentecostalism.' In the Aikewara indigenous context, there is no rupture with the original cosmology, but rather a logic of correspondence, cohabitation of opposites, strategies of accumulation of different logics of thought, symbolic categories, and religious practices. Even constituting themselves as distinct paradigms, the two models – indigenous-shamanism and Christianity Pentecostal – are intertwined in a web of magical-religious relationships, materialized in evident religious hybridity, in a new syncretic religiosity with distinctive healing practices, with a real and/or symbolic efficacy (Lévi-Strauss, 1958).