Anthropology of Expressive Forms

The film experience in Anthropology

Description: This thematic project focuses on two aspects. One of them deals with the reflection on the relations between Anthropology, Photography, and Cinema, a relationship that began in the early days of the invention of the photographic camera, the film projector, and the anthropological subject itself.

If the initial encounters between anthropology and these new image reproduction techniques marked the first discoveries of contact and contagion possibilities, one hundred years later, there are as many tensions as the effective approximation between the areas. One of the purposes of this project is, therefore, to reflect on the experiences of mutual appropriation between them from the anthropological theory, and also experiencing the possibilities of this encounter by producing ethnographic films and photo essays. The second aspect is more closely linked to what is called Anthropology of Art. This second line of research aims to perceive the audiovisual realisation within the production of anthropological knowledge as an expression of a dialogue between classical anthropological theory and other fields of anthropology itself, such as art and ethno-aesthetics, as well as analogous fields, such as visual and performing arts.

Professor in charge: Sylvia Caiuby Novaes (scaiuby@usp.br)

 

Shared Anthropology: Contemporary Challenges

Description: In the project ‘Shared anthropology: contemporary challenges,’ I aim to reflect on the anthropological audiovisual production, taking as its starting point the visionary project by Jean Rouch on sharing anthropology using cinema.

This is part of the thematic project ‘The Film Experience in Anthropology,’ supported by FAPESP. This thematic project focuses on two aspects. One of them deals with the reflection on the relations between Anthropology, Cinema, and Photography, a relationship that began in the early days of the invention of the photographic camera, the film projector, and the anthropological subject itself.

If the initial encounters between anthropology and these new image reproduction techniques marked the first discoveries of contact and contagion possibilities, one hundred years later, there are as many tensions as the effective approximation between the areas. One of the purposes of this project is, therefore, to reflect on the experiences of mutual appropriation between them from the anthropological theory, and also experiencing the possibilities of this encounter by producing ethnographic films and photo essays. The second aspect is more closely linked to what is called Anthropology of Art. This second line of research aims to perceive the audiovisual realisation within the production of anthropological knowledge as an expression of a dialogue between classical anthropological theory and other fields of anthropology itself, such as art and ethno-aesthetics, as well as analogous fields, such as visual and performing arts.

Professor in charge: Rose Satiko Gitirana Hikiji (satiko@usp.br)

 

Anthropology of Performance: drama, aesthetics, and ritual

Description: Above all, this project aims to contribute to the formation of a research field. It emerges as the expression of an effort that has been developed since the 1990s by researchers at the Department of Anthropology at the University of São Paulo (USP) and the Institute of Arts at the University of Campinas (Unicamp), now gathered in the Centre of Anthropology, Performance and Drama (Napedra) around a common proposal. It highlights the production of this group - by publications, theses, dissertations, and monographs - and their efforts in organizing working groups, research forums and symposiums, at national and international levels, aiming to consolidate the field. The project deals with the emergence of a relatively new field of study in Anthropology in Brazil.

It emphasizes its scope. Around the concept of performance - favourable to the development of interdisciplinary (and antidisciplinary) perspectives -, it is possible to gather studies conducted in multiple research areas, from indigenous rituals to popular festivals, oral literature, religious events, everyday staging, gender relations, ethnic identities, psychodramas, music, dance, theatre, film, and social movements. We consider not only the relevance of anthropology of performance for the study of various forms of symbolic action in Brazil, but also the relevance of these forms as a way to rethink issues of this field. It aims to explore scopes and limits of performance approaches for the study of various expressive forms in Brazil. And this from a particular place - the Napedra -, where certain approaches in this field of study has aroused a special interest. We hope that these researches contribute to the expansion of knowledge in its various forms regarding the Homo performans.

Professor in charge: John Cowart Dawsey (johndaws@usp.br)

 

Bixiga in Arts and Crafts: audiovisual routes

Description: Mapping of perspectives on the performance of artists and artisans from the Bixiga neighbourhood (São Paulo).

Professor in charge: Rose Satiko Gitirana Hikiji (satiko@usp.br)

 

Experiences of language in ethnography: ethnographic photograph and film

Description: The purpose of this project includes an in-depth reflection on the relations between Anthropology, Photography, and Cinema, aiming to analyse the experiences of mutual appropriation between them from the anthropological theory, and also experience the possibilities of this encounter by producing photo essays. This project counts with a CNPq productivity grant in research.

Professor in charge: Sylvia Caiuby Novaes (scaiuby@usp.br)

 

Modernism and anthropology: (in)disciplinary dialogues

Description: Having started as a project focused on Gilberto Freyre and modernism in Pernambuco (between 1920/1940), in 2001, the investigation was considerably expanded from research by the coordinator and students associated with him.

We are now thinking about the many faces of modernist production (as well as the profile of its producers), based on its multiple interfaces with social studies. One of the axes of the analysis is directed to the questioning of the relations between popular culture and high culture, and between art/crafts. A second axis turns to the consideration of essays and other hybrid forms of artistic and scientific expression. The project benefits from its location on the borders between art and anthropology, thinking of the two-way traffic between the domains. The project also includes an expanded reflection on the relations between anthropology and modernism, or between art and anthropology, in other contexts (French, for example), unfolding on an axis of reflection on the relation between aesthetics and politics.

Professor in charge: Fernanda Arêas Peixoto (fpeixoto@uol.com.br)

 

Audiovisual production as performance: the production of images and sounds in the ethnographic context

Description: The project in which I am developing this theme aims to analyse the audiovisual introduction in the ethnographic research process from reflections on the field of Anthropology of Performance. I propose to think as performatic the process in which the relationship between anthropologist and research subjects is mediated by the camera. Narrative forms elected by the anthropologist (in ethnographic film) or by the native (when stimulated to experience the audiovisual language) is taken into account.

Professor in charge: Rose Satiko Gitirana Hikiji (satiko@usp.br)

 

Paradigms of Theatre in Anthropology

Description: The initial issues of this research project (Productivity in Research - PQ, protocol 5387818717103034) arise from an associate professor thesis, ‘What do the Boias-Frias Laugh About? Walter Benjamin and Brecht’s Epic Theatre on Truck Wagons’ (Dawsey, 1999). In that text, I stumbled upon something that presented itself as a theatre of ‘boias-frias’ (seasonal labourers), and became interested by the inflection of theatrical thought in anthropology. I tried to understand the dramaturgical principles that were possibly revealed in everyday staging performed in sugarcane plantations and trucks. The manner in which dramas erupted in these stages called attention. In search of means for the analysis of the theatre of ‘boias-frias,’ I explored scopes and limitations of the approaches of Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz. If Turner’s anthropology (cf. Dawsey, 2005) provided a fruitful methodological shift, leading me to focus on events that took place on the margins of social life, in moments of suspension of roles, the ethnographic data suggested a second shift, for the purpose of discussing the margins of the margins. In turn, if Geertz (1978b: 316) demonstrated the amazing possibilities that an ethnography of gestures and hearing could offer - with the purpose of capturing ‘stories they tell about themselves to themselves’ -, the field experience raised an interest on the noise in these stories, and the suppressed elements, or at risk of being forgotten. Inspired by Taussig (1980, 1986, 1993), I became interested in the critical thinking of Walter Benjamin. The ‘boias-frias’ seemed to sniff out by laughter a story of forgetting. To understand what is happening in these truck wagons, maybe it was really necessary to carry out Benjamin’s task of ‘brushing history against the grain’ (Benjamin 1985b:225). In an Benjamin scale, one might suggest, ‘thick description’ (cf. Geertz 1978a) also becomes a ‘tension-packed description’ (full of tensions), ‘capable of causing in readers an opening and shutting of eyes, a kind of awe in face of everyday life, now estranged, a wakening’ (Dawsey 1999: 64). The laughter of ‘boias-frias’ may cause one to shudder. I also found affinities between the boards of these truck wagons and the stages on which Brecht rehearsed epic theatre and ‘estrangement effects.’ It is, in both cases, ‘a practice that calculates the place where things are viewed’ - according to the suggestive formulation of Barthes (1990: 85) to define theatre. Possibly, in both cases, as Barthes also said (1984:194) regarding Brecht’s epic theatre, not so much a semiology as a seismology, ‘seismic jolts’ in the ‘logosphere.’ Two issues were presented: 1. Recognizing the specific approaches of Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz, would there be, nevertheless, between these authors a fundamental affinity revealed in the way they contribute to the formation of a paradigm of dramatic theatre in anthropology?; 2. Would there be, in the thought of Walter Benjamin and the dramaturgy of Bertolt Brecht, fruitful perspectives for the study of cultural events taking place on the margins of the fields of view of Turner and Geertz?

Professor in charge: John Cowart Dawsey (johndaws@usp.br)

 

Roger Bastide and Gilberto Freyre, between cities and Brazilian ‘Africas’

Description: Developed from a previous research supported by CNPq, ‘Roger Bastide: Africa and africanisms between France and Brazil,’ this project aims to continue the reflections and previous investigations I have been carrying out in the context of anthropology history and theory, sociology of culture, and intellectual history. This time, I aim to compare the experiences and specific productions of Roger Bastide (1898-1974) and Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987) - which, although different in origin, formations, and theoretical inspirations of the characters in question, are similar in terms of trajectories, concerns and problems. The intercrosses between the authors and their works will be perceived here in two stages. In the first, it analyses how the topic of Africa in Brazil, central for Bastide and the Africanist face of his production (object of previous project), develops to the problem of Brazil in Africa, which is embodied both in the so-called Lusitanian-tropical production of Gilberto Freyre in the 1950s and in part of the Bastide’s writings: in ‘Brazil, Land of Contrasts’ (1957), in articles written during his trip to Africa in 1958, and in essays of applied Anthropology (1974) (object of current project). In the second stage, the research aims to analyse the production of both authors about Brazilian cities, which allows us to grasp consonance and dissonance of perspectives, not only on material forms and urban sociabilities, but also in terms of the discussions proposed by the authors on the relations between tradition and modernity. The reflections of Gilberto Freyre on the development of cities are present in his books ‘Practical, Historical and Sentimental Guide of Recife,’ 1934; ‘The Mansions and the Mocambos,’ 1936; ‘Mocambos of Northeast,’ 1937; ‘Olinda - 2nd Practical, Historical, and Sentimental Guide of Brazilian Cities,’ 1939; ‘A French Engineer in Brazil,’ 1940; and also in his regular journalistic contributions to the newspaper ‘Diário de Pernambuco’ from 1918, collected in ‘Apprentice Times’.

Professor in charge: Fernanda Arêas Peixoto (fpeixoto@uol.com.br)