João Paulo Pereira Lazaro, Alicia Ferreira Gonçalves, Juan Carlos Gimeno Martín, Maristela Oliveira de Andrade, Victoria Puntriano Zuniga de Melo
{"title":"Gobernanza, reciprocidad y dinámicas políticas en Brasil: la auditoría como campo etnográfico","authors":"João Paulo Pereira Lazaro, Alicia Ferreira Gonçalves, Juan Carlos Gimeno Martín, Maristela Oliveira de Andrade, Victoria Puntriano Zuniga de Melo","doi":"10.1590/1809-43412023v20d811","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1590/1809-43412023v20d811","url":null,"abstract":"Resumen La propuesta de este artículo es profundizar en la rutina de las instituciones de gobernanza, teniendo como espacio investigativo la gestión contratada de unidades de salud pública en un estado federativo de Brasil; fueron problematizadas las acciones de los agentes públicos enredados en las dinámicas de poder, construidas y mantenidas por las élites gubernativas y políticas. La investigación de campo tuvo como perspectiva metodológica la observación participante, que duró trece meses y exigió una mirada hacia el enfoque normativo, que dota al cotidiano administrativo de reglas formales; y otra mirada hacia las conductas informales y/o paralelas que atraviesan la rutina gubernativa, imponiendo sus reglas. Esta doble mirada fue una condición necesaria para aprehender cómo funciona el poder gubernativo al interior del movimiento de sus élites. Los resultados del estudio muestran las tramas que conducen hacia la apropiación de lo público con fines privados. Los análisis conclusivos afirman que el patrimonialismo sigue presente en el modo de gobernar las instituciones y conducir la política en Brasil.","PeriodicalId":37082,"journal":{"name":"Vibrant Virtual Brazilian Anthropology","volume":"58 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67213756","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Government institutions and cultural models: learning about civil service in the recruitment of a bureaucratic elite","authors":"Bóris Maia","doi":"10.1590/1809-43412023v20d805","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1590/1809-43412023v20d805","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines the learning process of candidates in public selection exams for tax auditors in Brazil. Articulating cognitive theories of culture with anthropological studies of the state and its institutions, the author proposes the concept of a cultural model of civil service to explicate the standardized values and behaviours related to the bureaucratic-administrative practice that these institutions seek to instil in their agents. The aim is to show how the recruitment of a bureaucratic elite involves the incorporation of social representations concerning the role of state officials and the governmental legitimacy exercised in performing their function as auditors, even before the effective entry of these candidates into government institutions. The data is taken from ethnographic research conducted between 2015 and 2017 in Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil, which included participant observation in the classes of two preparatory courses for public selection exams.","PeriodicalId":37082,"journal":{"name":"Vibrant Virtual Brazilian Anthropology","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67214161","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Un abordaje del estado en/desde sus fronteras nacionales: el caso del lado argentino de la Triple Frontera del Paraná","authors":"Hernan Ezequiel Garcia","doi":"10.1590/1809-43412023v20d806","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1590/1809-43412023v20d806","url":null,"abstract":"Resumen El presente artículo resulta de las discusiones sobre la perpetuada idea de estado y el empleo del método etnográfico en el estudio sobre los agentes y las instituciones estatales. Para ello se tomaron en cuenta las prácticas estatales de control fronterizo que formaron parte del proceso de cierre de fronteras llevado a cabo por agentes e instituciones que se encuentran nucleados en el Centro de Frontera Iguazú, ubicado en el lado argentino de la región transfronteriza de la Triple Frontera del Paraná. El escrito tiene un posicionamiento teórico que hace uso de la noción del estado nación como abstracción discursiva, pero, por otro lado, teniendo en cuenta que se (con)forma y se materializa por agentes e instituciones articulados entre sí, que presentan sus propias particularidades a su interior. Esto genera una ruptura con las nociones estáticas que llegan a considerar al estado como una entelequia omnipresente y homogénea.","PeriodicalId":37082,"journal":{"name":"Vibrant Virtual Brazilian Anthropology","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67214169","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Itineraries and forms of management in the awarding of commendations by São Paulo municipal councillors: an exercise in researching with","authors":"Pedro Campos, Telma Hoyler","doi":"10.1590/1809-43412023v20d801","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1590/1809-43412023v20d801","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines the awarding of commendations in the São Paulo municipal legislature. Seen at the interface between politicians and society, the granting of commendations is a highly ritualized practice, reflecting its importance in the management of social prestige and in political disputes over official history. However, the practice is little ritualized internally to the extent that one of its key stages, the collection of signatures, is performed by bureaucrats. This practice represents an organizational enactment of the agreement, an informal set of rules of conduct and institutions that operates in the legislature, producing predictability amid the competition over resources. In this arrangement, bureaucrats play a leading role in producing the boundaries between the dimensions of cooperation and political dispute, contributing to maintenance of the agreement. Inspired by the para-site methodology of George Marcus, which aims to afford the ethnographer better access to spaces of power, the study highlights what we call a method of researching with.","PeriodicalId":37082,"journal":{"name":"Vibrant Virtual Brazilian Anthropology","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67214075","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Andrea Cornwall, Silvia Cordeiro, Nelson Giordano Delgado
{"title":"Ethnographic Encounters: Using Ethnography to Study Brazil’s Participatory Governance Institutions","authors":"Andrea Cornwall, Silvia Cordeiro, Nelson Giordano Delgado","doi":"10.1590/1809-43412023v20d810","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1590/1809-43412023v20d810","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article explores the contributions that ethnography and ethnographers can make to understanding governance institutions. Told through the story of a collaborative research project on participatory health governance in the municipality of Cabo de Santo Agostinho in north-east Brazil, we explore how the principles of ethnographic research intersected with other principles: of collaborative enquiry, participatory research and a methodological ethics grounded in the reversal of the conventional relationship between researcher and researched. Picking up on some of the core defining features of ethnography as a methodology, we examine how these came to inform our understanding of the dynamics of politics, power, and participation. In doing so, we reflect on how it is the pliable and improvisational nature of ethnography in practice that contrasts most substantially with the conventional tools of the political scientist and that makes ethnographic encounters so rich and valuable for the study of political institutions.","PeriodicalId":37082,"journal":{"name":"Vibrant Virtual Brazilian Anthropology","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67213746","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Helen Barbosa dos Santos, Angelo Brandelli Costa, H. Nardi
{"title":"Delivering bad news: family members who have survived armed conflicts in the trauma hospital","authors":"Helen Barbosa dos Santos, Angelo Brandelli Costa, H. Nardi","doi":"10.1590/1809-43412023v20d814","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1590/1809-43412023v20d814","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Ethnographic research in a trauma hospital made it possible to systematically accompany one of the families who have survived armed conflicts. We observed, in the work process of the Intensive Care Unit, how a body between life and death is revealed through the interactions between health professionals and family members. It is perceived that the \"delivering bad news\" perspective suppresses the effects produced by state practices of life and death management, in contexts of criminalization of violence reiterated in the daily routine of the trauma hospital. To rectify responses based on biology and protocol, we adopted the epistemological perspective of anthropology and social psychology. This study has shown that the discursive practices reproduced the dynamics of social inequality linked to racism and classism, while families from precarious territorialities constantly experience traumatic situations and imminent grief for violent health problems.","PeriodicalId":37082,"journal":{"name":"Vibrant Virtual Brazilian Anthropology","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67213886","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Conflicts surrounding the “natural antidote against COVID-19”: Brazil sanitation governance in action","authors":"Lara Ramos, Marisol Marini, R. Corazza","doi":"10.1590/1809-43412023v20d808","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1590/1809-43412023v20d808","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract As the COVID-19 pandemic sprawled across every continent, ‘hand-washing’ became the official guideline to prevent contagion. In this scenario, governmental and non-governmental actors mobilised to promote the provision of water supply and customer services to the largest number of people. With the imposed isolation, virtual events became the centre of the political debate, bringing to light strategies and challenges to guarantee basic needs, debated within the scope of the federal legislative and executive branches and civil society. The purpose of this article is to explore the discourses produced and the interventions proposed between April and May 2020. In the light of social studies of science and technology and discussions regarding the enactment and production of the state, mapped through the actions of key actors, this ethnography enables us to outline the conflicts of sanitation governance in Brazil.","PeriodicalId":37082,"journal":{"name":"Vibrant Virtual Brazilian Anthropology","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67213711","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"What to do with teenage sexuality? The anthropology of forms of government in Brazil","authors":"E. Brandão","doi":"10.1590/1809-43412023v20d807","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1590/1809-43412023v20d807","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article discusses how the Brazilian Ministry for Women, the Family and Human Rights operates in relation to the prevention of so-called “teenage pregnancy”, analysing the Ministry’s political strategies, directives, initiatives for conversation with society-at-large, and campaigns for engaging their target public. We find, at the interstices of state bureaucracy, peculiar ways of dealing with and erasing teenage sexuality and gender markers that bear on teenage socialization, both of which are constitutive dimensions of these subjects, in favour of an idyllic family ethos which is contrasted to the sociocultural, material and symbolic dimensions that weave relations between generations within the domestic sphere. Childhood and self-care become central to government rhetoric, mobilizing conservative strategies that stem from an alarmist outlook which remains restricted to the private domain, singling out the (cis)heteronormative family - rather than schools - as the locus for sexuality education.","PeriodicalId":37082,"journal":{"name":"Vibrant Virtual Brazilian Anthropology","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67214178","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"FUNAI and INCRA PCI - reflections on Anthropology and agribusiness","authors":"Julia Marques Dalla Costa","doi":"10.1590/1809-43412023v20d802","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1590/1809-43412023v20d802","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Between 2015 and 2017, a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry (PCI) took place in the Câmara dos Deputados (Brazil’s lower house) of the Brazilian National Congress, which investigated the formerly named National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) and the National Institute for Colonisation and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) in their attributions of demarcating lands, Indigenous and Quilombola lands, respectively. This PCI was established by the Ruralista caucus, a group that represents the interests of agribusiness inside Congress. One of the focuses of the PCI was to discuss the role of anthropology in the demarcation processes of Indigenous and Quilombola lands, questioning not only the work of anthropologists, but the field of knowledge itself. Through an ethnography of documents (shorthand notes of the meetings and reports presented) and by direct observation, the research that culminated in this article sought to reflect on the anthropological practice related to public policies for the redistribution of land to Indigenous peoples and Quilombola communities and their friction with agribusiness interests. The centrality of the agrarian agenda and the model of territorial development defended by agribusiness clashes with public policies for the democratisation of access to land. The FUNAI-INCRA PCI reveals yet another articulated attempt by agribusiness to establish new benchmarks for these public policies, through the Ruralista caucus, and for this reason anthropology was included in the debate.","PeriodicalId":37082,"journal":{"name":"Vibrant Virtual Brazilian Anthropology","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67214109","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"La cara pública de lo secreto: Antropología de la Investigación policial","authors":"Brígida Renoldi","doi":"10.1590/1809-43412023v20d813","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1590/1809-43412023v20d813","url":null,"abstract":"Resumen Este artículo centra su atención en el lugar del secreto para la investigación policial federal en casos asociados a drogas ilegalizadas en una metrópolis de Brasil. Parte de esta tarea toma el nombre de trabajos de inteligencia: actividades secretas que apuntan a descubrir redes delictivas. Mediante una aproximación etnográfica conectaré los términos nativos que evocan lo secreto para el trabajo policial, con el concepto de información (su relevancia para los procedimientos policiales y judiciales) y con el valor de la confianza en las relaciones interpersonales. La indagación evidencia cómo el estado se sostiene y recrea en redes de asociaciones provisorias e intereses que, desde las teorías nativas, cuestionan las fronteras atribuidas por las teorías producidas desde el campo de los conocimientos científicos. Analizar el secreto como “forma” de relación y como pauta de transacciones e intercambios permite entender la importancia de lo que produce como tal, dejando el “contenido” que guarda u oculta en un lugar de significación secundario.","PeriodicalId":37082,"journal":{"name":"Vibrant Virtual Brazilian Anthropology","volume":"41 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67213798","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}