Founded by Egon Shaden in 1953, Revista de Antropologia was the first Brazilian journal of anthropology. At present, it is the international and bilingual journal of the Department of Anthropology of the Philosophy, Literature and Human Sciences Faculty at the University of São Paulo – FFLCH/USP. Revista de Antropologia will adopt, starting in 2023, the continuous publication modality with one volume per year. It will accept Articles, Reviews, Interviews, Dossiers and Photographic Essays at any time of the year, as submissions and publications are made in a continuous flow.
Universidade de São Paulo. Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas
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By describing the technical and documentary interventions that follow the judgments of the Brazilian Superior Court of Justice, the book A paixão do acesso, by Sara Munhoz, makes two original contributions to anthropological reflection on law. The first is to transform the very notion of jurisprudence by demonstrating that without sophisticated procedures for filtering, extracting, connecting and making available for consultation “legal theses” established in the rulings, with the use of digital resources, jurisprudence can no longer exist – and have repercussions – inside and outside the court. The second contribution, inseparable from the previous one, is to profoundly transform the issue of access, which gives the book its title. Instead of examining the obstacles to opening the doors of the judiciary to citizens, the counterintuitive choice of situating the observation at the “exit doors” of the court responsible for standardizing the interpretation of federal legislation deepens the understanding of how these two thresholds articulate. The ethnography explains how the joint work of human analysts and digital applications enhances the primacy of “exit doors” in determining what (and who) can pass through the court’s main entrance, by materializing its efforts to make the understandings it produces accessible and, thus, influencing the functioning of other instances of the judiciary, modulating its own entry and exit doors.
Jurisprudence; digital technologies; access; Superior Court of Justice
Copyright (c) 2025 Revista de Antropologia https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Emotions as connectors in the webs of worlds. Towards an expanded anthropology of emotions
The problem of defining the dimension of emotions lies in how different conceptual attempts have prioritized some of the constitutive dimensions of the "human," configuring culturalist, psychologist, or biologist perspectives. The aim of this article is to think of emotions as "connectors," which, from their relational characteristic, link the different instances that make up the "human" and weaves the webs of life's worlds. My argumentation begins by developing the path followed by emotions as an analytical category for anthropological knowledge; secondly, I address the debate that emerged in the anthropology of emotions in the north-American context, which led to the constitution of the field, and finally, I develop ethnographic situations in dialogue with authors who share this expanded perspective on emotions proposed in this article.
Introduction to the Special Issue: Revolution Talks; Ethnographies and Histories of a Political Endorser
Comentário ao debate |Brasil e seu papel pardo
Comentário ao debate raça e cor no brasil contemporâneo, oportunismo político e tendência histórica
Copyright (c) 2024 Revista de Antropologia https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Comentário ao debate | A influência da luta pelas cotas na dinâmica das identidades raciais no Brasil
Comentário ao debate | Negritude como força centrípeta: o pardo em disputa
Comentário ao debate | Os múltiplos sentidos do “pardo”
Autenticidad y violencia: Tradiciones revolucionarias en México y Venezuela. Entrevista con Claudio Lomnitz y Rafael Sánchez
Entrevista con Claudio Lomnitz y Rafael Sánchez
Amerindian political representation and presentation: coexistence and hybridization of political regimes in tropical South America
Apresentação do dossiê Representação e presentação política ameríndia: coexistência e hibridização de regimes do político na América do Sul tropical, vol. 1.
Special Issue Amerindian political representation and "presentation" vol. 1
The Weight of Hair: Relationships Between Corporeality, Hair Aesthetics, and Non-Binarity
This article portrays investments in hair made by non-binary people at a beard and hair studio located in São Paulo. Such investments will be understood as technologies for gender materialization in gendered corporealities and aesthetic stabilizations of relationships; intersecting with other materializations, such as class and race, in ways that create unequivocalities of gender or porvoke transitions, flowsx and displacements. The text is also a methological investment that discusses the potentials and limitations of the autoethnographic method, wile proposing another transepistemological approach: dirty ethnography. Hair interventions conducted within the framework of non-binariness simultaneously constitute possibilities for gender transition, challenging understandings of transsexuality and transgender identity within medical and psychosocial sciences, and represent terrible beauties capable os inhabiting the trope of monstrosity associated with trans people formulated by the cisheteronorm. The article ultimately shifts the idea of the body as understood within the sexual difference paradigm.
From affiliation to factionalism - political dynamics in the production of associations by Brazilian football supporters
Once defined as a modern totemism that establishes communality, football clubs are an important form of social relations in Brazil, as they produce collective feelings of affinity and rivalry via football. Beyond its fundamental logics of adherence, they also produce their own centrifugal tendencies, recognisable through its various processes of segmentation. These dynamics could be described as a schismogenesis that starts collective associations derived from clubs. To delve into the dynamics of the production of these collectivises, we analysed three modalities of the supporters' groups in Brazilian clubs (the Torcidas Uniformizadas, the Torcidas Organizadas and the Barras). Our approach emphasises the segmentary dynamics, often factional, of the pulverisation of supporters' associations. By pointing out the aesthetic issues involved in each mode of regimentation, we argue that the different supporters' groups can be thought of as having created their own forms of political participation beyond–and within–their football clubs.
Comentário de Gabriel Feltran ao dossiê Terror e Intimidade: Perspectivas etnográficas e desafios conceituais.
Comentário ao dossiê Terror e Intimidade
The Belgian philosopher Vinciane Despret (1959) adds a new book to her intellectual production, focusing on the relationships between the living and the dead. She previously explored this theme in To the Health of the Dead: Stories of Those Who Remain (2021), published by Cactus, and now presents Dead to the Work (2024) through the same publisher. The title itself suggests the core of the book. By altering the colloquial phrase "hands to work," Despret condenses and anticipates the material she offers the reader: artistic productions demanded after a death, whether recent or distant. Dead to the Work is a book composed of five stories, all linked by the productivity of the dead. Despret describes and historicizes the "insistence" of the "common dead" and the works attributed to them. The events narrated here feature victims of femicide, traffic accidents, war, the judicial system, and terrorism. Even though these dead are no longer among the living—a statement that is only partially true—their insistence gives birth to gardens, visual artworks, architectural projects, and musical pieces.
Trata-se de um resenha crítica da obra recente de Charles Stépanoff, L'animal et la mort: chasses, modernité et crise du sauvage, que investiga os fundamentos das relações modernas dispensadas aos animais e à natureza em geral. Essas relações são sintetizadas pelo autor em duas atitudes polares com o mundo selvagem: a proteção e a exploração. Entretanto, uma atividade se coloca de maneira embaraçosa entre esse polos: a caça. L'animal et la mort se dedica a uma mergulho analítico sobre a caça praticada no interior da França por populações rurais e caçadores regulares que visitam a região, e descreve aspectos da ecologia e da ética, dos fundamentos cosmológicos e políticos da atividade. O antropólogo adiciona à essa etnografia uma história de longa duração sobre as percepções e atitudes em relação à caça, abordando a filosofia, sociologia e política da caça na França e na Europa ao longo da era moderna. Ao fim, emerge uma distinção elucidativa entre tratamentos dispensados aos animal e seus fundamentos cosmopolíticos, assim como um caracterização dos alicerces da nossa atual crise ecológica.
Multispecies ethnography in the mayan máasewaalo'ob solar sites: care practices and more-than-human worlds
This article explores care practices between mayan máasewáalo’ob women and the animals that inhabit the solares in Chancah Derrepente, Quintana Roo, Mexico, based on ethnographic work carried out since 2016. It analyzes how care configures spatial relations, commensality, and shared labor. It highlights the central role of women in the maintenance and transformation of solares, where cultural norms and female bodily characteristics condition the activities assigned to each gender. The research addresses five types of links between people and animals: protection and hunting, appreciation and entertainment, respect and reverence, feeding and distancing. The article makes visible the agency of animals in each of these relationships, questioning the limits of care and notions of human possession, as well as the categories of domestic and wild. It also explores the relationship between gender, health, mobility, and multispecies care, challenging anthropocentric perspectives and opening new lines of analysis.
No Single Reason to Move: Mobility Decision-Making among Syrians and Palestinian Familiesin Brazil
Since 2011, over six million people have left Syria. While numerous studies address this displacement, few specifically investigate family migration decision-making. This article contributes to this knowledge gap by focusing on the journeys of two families. Through analysing migration decision-making, I argue that there is no single reason to move; rather, mobility must be understood within the broader economic, political, and cultural dynamics. The study is based on an ethnography conducted between 2016 and 2020 in São Paulo, Brazil. The data reveals the fears, struggles, aspirations, and hopes involved in reaching a new destination and how social markers and structural contexts shape families’ journeys.
Special Issue Producing Regimes of Asylum in Brazil and Italy
The "work of emotion" in navigating im-mobility experienced by migrants and asylum seekers
Still little explored, the condition of existential im-mobility experienced by refugees and asylum seekers within and outside the so-called reception system is the main argument of this article. Looking at the “work of emotions” (Hochschild, 1979, Hollan, 1992), the article investigates how the im-mobility experienced by migrants can be ‘navigated’ through different emotions. The theoretical analysis of the im-mobility of refugees and migrants is deepened and reinterpreted in light of ethnographic data and results collected among refugees and migrants living in northern and southern Italy, both within and outside the reception system.
Gazes and agencies: an anthropological approach to experimental films
Review of the book Expanded visions – a new anthropology of the moving image, by Arnd Schneider (Routledge, 2021).
Effluvia of gamonalism: the resilience of the symbolic worldof the hacienda in the Andes of Ecuador
This text is exploratory based on the experience of three decades of research in the Andes of Ecuador. It explores the presence of a series of symbolic elements of the world known as "gamonalismo" decades after the agrarian reform and the disappearance of the latifundism that sustained it. The argument of the text is that this ancient and long-lived regime of exploitation, insofar as it constituted a hegemonic system of power, generated habits and cognitive structures that were resignified in the post-reformist world that was constituted later. All this is reflected in the ways of understanding hierarchies of power, in the ways in which conflicts between communities are conveyed, and even in the redefinition of ancient lineages of power within the Kichwa world. The article defines the structuring features of what I denominate as the "hacienda cultural matrix".
Listen to the elements: the ethno-metaphysical proposal in The East of Dreams
Resenha do livro A leste dos sonhos: respostas even às crises sistêmicas de Nastassja Martin.
Weaponizing Near Eastern archaeology: violence, amnesia and the ‘cultural heritage experts’ − then, now and suggestions for a different future
Cultural heritage management in the conflict zones of the Middle East in the 21st century intersects with long-standing western hegemonic policies in the region, in continuity with its role as a political instrument in colonial interventions since the era of European empires. That this continues to be so has so far remained largely invisible not only in the public sphere but also within political, historical and sociological studies on colonialism. Instead, in the popular domain archaeology is often portrayed in a positive light, as an inherently innocuous but lofty pursuit in times of conflict, dedicated to the protection of (the tangible) cultural heritage. Such portrayals and perceptions of archaeology and ‘Heritage Studies’ overlook the context in which these fields of study operate and the covert aims that they are often made to serve. The present article details how the disciplinary evolution of academic fields related to cultural heritage often contributes to the very weaponization of the latter, through either a disciplinary-inflected, feigned indifference to politics or the committed embeddedness with military structures, which perpetuates imperialistic geopolitics akin to those of foregone centuries.
The Right to International Protection in the Face of Double Standards and the Dark Side of Group Logic: Anthropological Reflections
This paper offers a critical reflection on the use of group logic in the recognition of international protection, starting from the differentiated treatment given to Ukrainian citizens following the outbreak of the conflict in 2022. The reflections aim to uncover the normative and political rationale behind management tools. In fact, the legal categories within the protection procedure, built on a group logic such as nationality, present an ambiguity that deserves to be critically examined: on one hand, they have become instruments of protection, but on the other, they have exacerbated the labeling process, making them exclusionary and sources of fundamental rights violations. Moreover, the proliferation of categorical distinctions fails to embrace the complexity that characterizes contemporary migration flows and, instead, becomes a dysfunctional mechanism, entangled in the problematic integration between the universal-individual logic of vulnerability and that of the group
The humanitarian as capital accumulation: from mobility constraints to housing issues
The article explore the complex dynamics about migration in Italy. It is the outcome of 15-years-long fieldwork among Eritreans and Ethiopians in Italy, Sweden, Sudan and Ethiopia itself. The main focus of the article is about the value extraction connected to the Humanitarian management of the moving bodies. The article fall in that debate that try to shed light on the inner connection between capitalism, nation-state and Humanitarian, by going beyond the opposition humanitarism/securitarism.
Solidarities in Network and Networks of Solidarity: Humanitarian Reception and Housing Policy in an Urban Occupation of Palestinian Refugees in São Paulo
In this article, I describe the genealogy of the networks of relationships and events that led the Terra Livre housing movement and the pro-Palestinian Mop@t movement to create an intercultural urban occupation in São Paulo. These networks consist of actors, causes, and territories that become denser and expand through coalitions and events of high political and social impact. The Leila Khaled occupation became possible through the meeting of actors who constituted networks and created a space for cohabitation for Brazilian families, Palestinian families, and social movements. The building, once occupied by these movements, became a laboratory for NGOs, public figures and other social movements and political collectives.
The multiple existences of glyphoste: an ethnopgrahy of the agri-food industries by following a poison
Reler Malinowski pela primeira vez: revisitando um clássico
Resenha do livro TONIOL, Rodrigo; FLEISCHER, Soraya (orgs.). E quando a limonada antropológica azeda? Porto Alegre, Zouk, 2023, 195p.
Nationalism, musealization and (de)coloniality in Barbados: some preliminary considerations on sexual and gender diversity amongst indigestible legacies ans false paradoxes
Since 2019, the National Museum of Barbados has been presenting some temporary exhibitions that address the importance of social movements in promoting respect for sexual and gender diversity. This article aims to outline a reflection on the relations between the formation of national states, the effects of colonialism, the institution of heteronormativity and, finally, the recent visibility of sexual and gender diversity, based on the case of Barbados and its National Museum.
Race and color in contemporary Brazil, political opportunity and historical tendency
In this article, I present the data published by IBGE on the color and race/color of the Brazilian population in the period from 1872 to 2022 to examine the historical trends in the growth of white, parda and black racial groups. Three trends are observed. The first, between the end of the 19th century and the 1960s, a whitening process; the second, from the last census date until the last decade of the 20th century, is the continuous growth of the parda population to the detriment of both the white and black populations; the third, which began in 1991, is the gradual growth of the black and parda population and the constant decline of the white population. My argument is that these trends are mainly due to movements of racial reclassification of the population, therefore more to ideological factors – the way in which the Brazilian nation is preponderantly defined in each period – and less to demographic factors, or public policy incentives, like those that have benefited black and brown people since the present century.
Debate raça e cor no brasil contemporâneo, oportunismo político e tendência histórica