Recently completed field studies and research from primary sources on Brazil constitute the main interest of this seminar. Brazilian, the U.S. and other visiting scholars participate, contributing their interpretations of recent events. Portuguese may be spoken whenever convenient.
All seminars will meet over Zoom for the 2020-2021 academic year. Meeting links provided upon RSVP. Meeting dates and times are subject to change.
Meeting Schedule
09/17/2020
Online Meeting 7:00 PM
Five years on from Zika to COVID -– mothers share their stories: A Film, An Updating on Effects of COVID, and a Discussion
Parry Scott, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (Brazil) Abstract
Abstract
Since the Zika virus hit the headlines in 2015, thousands of children and their families in Brazil were affected and have been living with the consequences, such as the intense daily care, therapies and treatments needed, ever since. Five mothers whose lives have been completely changed as a result of the impact of the Zika virus on their children share their stories of strength, survival and love in a series of short films they have written, co-produced and co-directed in the context of a four-year study being done by Anthropologists from the FAGES Study Group on Family, Gender and Sexuality of the Federal university of Pernambuco. [You will find a link to the film at the end of the abstract. Please try to view the 35-minute film prior to the seminar. We will assume that you have by Sept. 17 when the seminar begins.]
The film highlights how disease outbreaks, like Zika as well as Covid-19, not only have enormous impact on individual families but also expose and are shaped by the inequalities - economic, social, health and more - in which they emerge. Now, in 2020, in the context of Covid-19, there are increased challenges for caring responsibilities and facing economic hardships. The Zika epidemic and the COVID pandemic have fallen hardest on women and the poor and vulnerable communities. What is the capacity of families and communities to respond to these challenges and what may be learned from the Government response from health to housing, education and social protection?
With the film as a starting reference point, the discussion will be focussed on consequences for families for health services and for health and medical research in and beyond Brazil and the formation of different care domains built around the Zika Syndrome children.
Link to the film: Doing Ethnography on Care: Women tell their stories
(Etnografando cuidados: mulheres contam suas histórias)
https://vimeo.com/407994903
or
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP-08eAakKM
10/15/2020
Online Meetnig 7:00 PM
COVID-19 and the perceptions of Brazil’s indigenous peoples
Maria de Lourdes Beldi de Alcântara, Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil) Abstract
Abstract
According to the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Labor Organization (ILO), all indigenous peoples have the right to free health care. Brazil is a signature to all relevant United Nations’ protocols. The problem is that Brazil’s present government headed by President Jair Bolsonaro refuses to recognize the distinct status of the country’s indigenous populations preferring instead to treat them as just one more group within Brazil’s diverse national society. This clearly violates both the letter and the spirit of the UN protocols. After summarizing the impact of COVID-19 on Brazil’s indigenous peoples the focus will turn to the Dorados reservation in Mato Grosso do Sul. The question to be addressed, given the present coronavirus pandemic, therefore will be: Who may the indigenous peoples of Brazil, and specifically those on the Dorados reservation, enter into dialogue with so as to have what they rightly believe is there due implemented?
11/19/2020
Online Meetnig 7:00 PM
Democracy and Representation in a Favela in São Paulo
Karina Biondi, Universidade Estadual do Maranhão (Brazil) Abstract
Abstract
This presentation analyzes distinct, and perhaps complementary, modes of “democracy.” It follows the case of an electoral campaign in São Paulo, during which a candidate for city council visited a favela. Accompanied by a community leader, he met with a leader of local “criminals” in order to discuss his candidacy. The criminal in question was responsible for the hegemony of the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) in that neighborhood. The PCC, identified by security specialists as a powerful transnational criminal group, arose in São Paulo’s prisons during the beginning of the 1990s as a means for prisoners to unite in the face of what they dubbed “state oppression.” In ensuing decades, under the banner of “Peace, Justice, Liberty and Equality,” the PCC has become a way of life through which people orient themselves in a type of ordering of existence. Yet the political candidate did not understand much about this seemingly peculiar means of holding and being oneself in the world, and he spoke to the criminals in relation to a representative democracy. Meanwhile, the criminals sought to interpret what the politician said in terms of their own means of producing knowledge of the world. According to this worldview, no one may speak or act in the name of another or in the place of another. Instead, what people do is “run alongside one another” in a search for the realization of their objectives. The ethnographer, who witnessed the conversation made note of a series of responses that failed to fit with questions elaborated, interpretations that failed to connect, and a certain communicative difficulty that seemed unfit for supporting a coherent dialogue. This paper argues that what was in play that day were two very different ideas of democracy and representation.
Notes: Presentation will be in Portuguese.
12/17/2020
Online Meetnig 7:00 PM
Racism and Antiracism from a comparative perspective
Júlio César de Tavares, Federal Fluminense University (Brazil) Abstract
Abstract
In these last years we have seen an explosion of demonstrations throughout the Americas, Europe, and even in Asia. All are struggles against supremacist sentiments and politics that are trying to dominate contemporary governments. This “Ebony Spring” characterizes the uprising of black people confronting hundreds of years of racism, eugenics, anti-black terror, inhumanity, and large rates of incarcerations. Many analyses locate this persecution of blacks as a factor of the Modern Era. However, we find considerable evidence to show that peoples of color have been judged by the color of their skin for much longer than we had thought. In this presentation I trace this mindset from the time of the Iberian colonization of the Western Hemisphere, emphasizing that race and racialization, in particular as it concerns anti-negro racism, have a hidden proto-history that has continued from its beginnings in the sixteenth century and might be part of our cognitive understandings up to the present.
01/21/2021
Online Meeting 7:00 PM
Resisting Dispossession: Ownership and the Retaking of Indigenous Lands in Brazil
Jeremy M. Campbell, Roger Williams University Abstract
Abstract
Taking Munduruku and beiradeiro community efforts to demarcate their lands along the Tapajós River (Pará) as its point of departure, this presentation explores the prospects for a decolonized concept of ownership in Amazonia. While making territorial claims that hold juridical force in Brazil has been historically important for “povos tradicionais,” contemporary crises warrant a reexamination of whether engaging the terms and territorial policies of the state is worthwhile. These reflections are based on ethnographic engagements with communities' decades-long efforts to demarcate their own territories in the face of incessant invasion, state inaction, and racist/genocidal positions of senior leadership within Brazil. Concepts and lines of analysis from the literature of decolonization put Indigenous territorial practices in new relief, revealing a generative space between “terra é nossa” and “terra é nós.”
02/18/2021
Online Meeting 7:00 PM
Fading shadows: Religious Borders and the Power of Transformation?
Vânia Zikán Cardoso, Federal University of Santa Catarina (Brazil) Abstract
Abstract
Drawing on several anthropological scenes from an Afro-Brazilian religious center in the suburbs of the city of Rio de Janeiro, this presentation turns to the “shadowy” (Crapanzano, 2006) dimensions of such practices. By addressing the uncertainty of ritual, the unstable choreography of rituals that invoke the presence of the povo da rua, entities who preside over limen and chaos (Turner, 1987), it seeks to distance ethnography from the equation of knowledge to transparency, dwelling instead on what Édouard Glissant (1997) would call its opacity. Inspired by what Jose Carlos dos Anjos refers to as the political philosophy (2008) of Afro-Brazilian religious practices, it seeks to explore uncertainty and instability - of explanation, of ritual, of life - as the creative principle that animates such religious practices in the scenery of contemporary Brazil, and that might also animate a certain mode of doing ethnography.
03/18/2021
Online Meeting 7:00 PM
Media, Researchers, and Communities Past and Future
Anthony Seeger, University of California, Los Angeles Abstract
Abstract
This presentation will discuss the importance of archiving and digital migration for scholars, local communities, and future scholarship and social movements as well as the proactive use of video by the Suyá/Kĩsêdjê Indians in Mato Grosso. Regarding recordings, in a few years it will be impossible to play or copy most analog audio and videotape recordings from the 20th century that have not been digitized. Vast amounts of music, stories, interviews, and other materials will be lost if they are not digitized soon. Digital formats aren’t in much better shape: rapidly changing formats and proprietary platforms render late 20th and early 21st century recordings extremely difficult to play and copy after a decade or two. Is it ethical to fail to make your research recordings available to the people/families/communities you recorded, and to future scholars? What will happen to Indigenous recordings of their own lives? I will discuss the use video materials made by the Suyá/Kĩsêdjê Indians and examine the
04/22/2020
Online Meeting 7:00 PM
The Gender of Pandemic: The Black Female Face of Covid-19 in Brazil
Building on my previous experience studying the intersection between gender and epidemics in Sierra Leone during the Ebola Epidemic and my present work at Cidacs/Fiocruz in Brazil, I begin the presentation with the observation that every epidemic around the world is marked by gender, race and social class. In Brazil, poor Black women, who must cope with the social burden of care giving in the public and domestic spheres, are the most affected group. They must manage the difficulty of unemployment, declining incomes and purchasing power, domestic violence, physical and mental health disorders and grief. In contrast with an earlier unsubstantiated hypothesis that the Coronavirus affected more men than women because male bodies have lower immunization against the virus, the evidences now indicates that the social risks and damages of this pandemic fall more heavily on women, especially those who are poor and black. Brazil also has experienced one of the highest rates of maternal mortality due to Covid-19 in the world, leaving a large number of orphans who will have to be cared for when the pandemic is over. This little discussed matter may constitute a significant problem for the nation when the pandemic eventually ends.
05/20/2021
Online Meeting 7:00 PM
Field Station Bahia: E. Franklin Frazier, Lorenzo Turner, Frances and Melville Herskovits, and the Transnational Making of Afro-Brazilian Studies: 1935-1967
Livio Sansone, Federal University of Bahia (Brazil) Abstract
Abstract
The talk deals with an important moment, in many ways one of the founding moments, of African Studies: the debate on the notion of Africanism, which occurred in Bahia in the years 1940-42 and its consequences for the making of African-American and Afro-Brazilian studies in the US and Brazil. Then, four important scholars Melville and Frances Herskovits, Lorenzo Turner and E. Franklin Frazier carried out research among descendants of Africans in South America and diverged over the origin of what in the US became well known as the black family structure, but agreed on how African culture could bear a lot on the construction of black cultural expressions in the New World – and especially in Brazil, Cuba, Haiti and Surinam. Frazier and Turner were African-Americans. Soon after coming back from the field trip in Bahia these scholars set up the first departments of African studies in the US, respectively at Northwestern, Fisk and Howard. Their lives will be entangled until their death, and so will be in their trajectory the relationship between African-American and African studies. First, I expand on the entanglement between, as it were, perspectives and gazes on the Afro world and Africa in the 1940’s through the 1960’s. Herskovits was the first president of ASA and Frazier was chosen president in 1963. Second, I focus on the “magic“ place of Bahia in the making of African American anthropology and Brazilian anthropology writ large. Such a magic place has not delivered much in terms of better conditions for the production of knowledge locally.
