Antropologia multissituada e a questão da escala: reflexões com base no estudo da cooperação sul-sul brasileira

Abstract

Como a antropologia pode abordar fenômenos transnacionais, dado que seu método e o tipo de conhecimento construído a partir dele foram originalmente estruturados com base no estudo de pequenas comunidades locais? O artigo tratará do trânsito entre escalas micro e macro a partir de uma das vertentes (meta)teóricas que tem sido propostas desde a "virada interpretativa" nos anos 1980, inspirada na obra de Marilyn Strathern. Essa perspectiva, baseada no primado da relacionalidade e da reflexividade entre as duas faces do ofício do antropólogo (trabalho de campo e escrita etnográfica), aborda operações de produção de conhecimento rotineiramente empregadas tanto pelos antropólogos quanto por seus "nativos", envolvendo o acionamento de escalas, contextos, domínios e analogias. O artigo buscará operacionalizar esse instrumental analítico no caso da cooperação Sul-Sul brasileira com o continente africano, entendida enquanto composição (assemblage) emergente marcada por esforços de produção de contexto e busca de robustez relacional.

Anthropology and the South-South Encounter: On “Culture” in Brazil-Africa Relations

“…EMBRAPA's cooperation portfolio was heterogeneous and fragmented, ranging from small, short‐term collaborations with individual African researchers to broad capacity‐building workshops held at EMBRAPA's units in Brazil and longer‐term technology‐transfer projects in African territory, and even to one regional office originally established in Accra. During fieldwork, I focused on EMBRAPA's capacity‐building workshops held in Brasília and on one larger project with the so‐called Cotton‐4 group (Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, and Chad) (Cesarino , , ). EMBRAPA's international capacity‐building and technology‐transfer initiatives were a direct response to demands by Brazil's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (best known as Itamaraty, after the Itamaraty Palace where the ministry is headquartered).…”

“…Elsewhere (Cesarino , ), I have described in detail the organizational outline of Brazilian cooperation, arguing that it can be best understood as an emerging apparatus assembled around three main institutional scales: Itamaraty (foreign policy), the Brazilian Cooperation Agency (cooperation policy and management), and implementing agencies (a heterogeneous set of dozens of domestic—mostly state—institutions, such as public universities, research institutes, and federal ministries) . I argued in those works that each of these scales also demarcates differences in sociality and perspectives across the multiple actors involved: diplomats, managers, and EMBRAPA employees.…”

“…In the case of Brazil and possibly other emerging donors, therefore, the pervasive gaps found between “rhetorics and rituals [and] the complex and messy realities of engagement” do not map neatly onto a divide between discourse and practice (Mawdsley , 163). They reflect, rather, discontinuities between scales in which discourse and practice are differently articulated, even if ultimately they are all supposed to be coherently united under the single umbrella of Brazilian South‐South cooperation (Cesarino ).…”

“…In previous publications, I approached the issue of multiscalarity through Marilyn Strathern's idiom of scaling (Cesarino , ). Luhmann's idiom turned out, however, to be a more robust frame for recognizing the self‐referential aspects of social systems as well as for making sense of the discontinuities that commonly arise during multisited ethnographies of complex assemblages such as Brazil's South‐South cooperation (Cesarino , ). Although I keep using the notion of scale here, it is to be understood in terms of Luhmannian systems.…”

Pelas franjas dos santuários: turismo, fé e religião em flashes etnográficos

“…Os "flashes" etnográficos deste texto compõem um mosaico que pode ser chamado de etnografia multissituada, ou seja, uma etnografia feita em distintos lugares e tempos que se articula em torno de um eixo semântico-propositivo. (CLIFFORD, MARCUS, 1986;CESARINO, 2014). 2 Para maiores fundamentações das fases, etapas e estruturas do trabalho etnográfico, veja Urpi (2012).…”