History Events DA

Victor Secco will present central themes of his doctoral research, defended at the University of Manchester (England), which investigates the intersections between science, religion and multispecies interactions, based on an ethnography conducted with Hindu priests and microbiologists in the city of Varanasi, in northern India. The Ganges River, which runs through the city, is simultaneously revered for its sacred waters and known for its high levels of pollution. While millions of people depend on these waters for religious rituals and daily activities, the river receives huge volumes of sewage and other pollutants every day. Microbiological research reveals the presence of several bacteria, including antibiotic-resistant strains, but also identifies therapeutic potential, such as the use of bacteriophages for treatments.

The course "Morals, Emotions and Anthropology" invites everyone to the lecture "Textures of the Ordinary", given by Prof. Fiona Ross, from the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

The event will include translation!

Suggested Reading: Raw Life and Respectability Poverty and Everyday Life in a Postapartheid Community. In: Current Anthropology Volume 56, Supplement 11, October 2015

Based on the experience of Zapatista territories in Chiapas, Mexico, the presentation addresses indigenous autonomy as dynamic processes of territorialization and creation of their own forms of sociopolitical organization. In dialogue with other Latin American experiences, we will reflect on how the Zapatistas (re)construct, on a daily basis, autonomous spaces in opposition to the processes of heteronomy imposed by the State and capital.

With
Fábio M. Alkmin (PhD in Human Geography/USP)
Lucas Keese dos Santos (PhD student at PPGAS/USP)
Mediation: Silvia Adoue (Unesp and Escola Nacional Florestan Fernandes)

The film “Rio das Mortes: nossa vida” will be shown in the AntropoCena session on June 12, 2025, at 5:00 p.m., in the LISA auditorium, in partnership with the Visual Anthropology Group of the University of São Paulo (GRAVI-USP), and will feature the presence of Ana Lúcia Ferraz, Associate Professor of the Department of Anthropology and Coordinator of the Ethnographic Film Laboratory of the Fluminense Federal University (UFF).

Ana Lúcia graduated from USP and holds a master's degree in Anthropology (1999), a PhD in Sociology (2005), and a postdoctoral degree in Social Anthropology (2010). She currently works in the fields of Indigenous Ethnology and Visual Anthropology, and is the author of a series of ethnographic films, including, with the Guarani Nhandeva, Nhande Ywy/Nosso Território (2018) and Öwawe dahoimanadzé/Rio das Mortes: nossa vida (2024).

On June 6 (Friday) there will be a seminar entitled "Genetic taming and the narrowing of multispecies futures", which will be taught by the professor of the Department of Anthropology at UFRGS and researcher at the Department of Humanistic Studies at Università Ca'Foscari Venezia, Dr. Jean Segata. The event will be held from 4 pm to 6 pm, in auditorium 8 of FFLCH - USP, and is promoted by the anthropology collective CHAMA.

INVITATION | Friday of the Month invites everyone to the May thematic panel! ✨

Theme: “Research practices in an international context”

Anthropology has historically consolidated itself as a field of knowledge intrinsically intertwined with colonial projects, oriented towards the construction and investigation of a supposedly radical Other, conceived from epistemic and political asymmetries, often designed as if it were located overseas. The production of this knowledge has always been crossed by internal and external disputes, including financial ones, involving multiple scales — local, transnational and imperial — that put tension on the ways of knowing, representing and relating to otherness.

The objective of this panel is to share the paths and obstacles involved in conducting ethnographic research in contexts of radical alterity. The proposal of this panel is to reflect on whether this previous construction is acceptable and makes sense in the type of research we currently conduct, on the dynamics of fieldwork and the processes of cultural and linguistic adaptation, and also on the possibilities and challenges related to research funding.

In this talk, I present the first reflections of an ongoing research project dedicated to investigating the processes of elaboration of gendered bodies among the Tupi peoples of the sixteenth century. By tracing the vocabulary of substances abundantly present in the chroniclers’ accounts—references to blood, semen, cauim, puba, among others—I seek to evoke echoes of a cosmopolitics of substances, in which gendered bodies were formed by voluntary, collective, and densely conceptualized acts. In this first approach, I propose a panoramic view: I begin with the role of substances and their flows in the rituals of post-menarche and post-homicide seclusion, which aimed at the formation of adult male and female bodies, and I conclude with a reflection on some figures that escaped the binary colonial technology of genders used by the chroniclers: the transgender figures “tebira” and “çacoaimbeguira,” the young “panema” and the old “uainuy.”

The Encyclopedia of Anthropology will celebrate its 10th anniversary in 2025! This date calls for celebrations, but above all for assessments and reflections on the work carried out in order to plan future projects.

In this sense, we invite the public to the roundtable "Digital encyclopedias in action: crafts, technologies, collaborations", organized in partnership with the Ethnographic Laboratory of Technological and Digital Studies at USP.

The event will bring together scientific dissemination projects for an exchange of experiences on the production of digital encyclopedias, considering the challenges of collaborative management, editing and writing. In addition to EA, we will talk about the encyclopedias Indigenous Peoples in Brazil, from the Socioenvironmental Institute, and Bérose - encyclopédie internationale des histoires de l’anthropologie; and also about workshops on creating and editing Wikipedia entries, which have been held at the university, promoted by Wikimedia Brasil.

LISA, CEstA and GRAVI invite you to the screening of the film "Hosts half a century ago: the mỹky version of history" on May 23, 2025, at 2 pm, in the LISA auditorium.

TALK WITH PAULO MAIA
(UFMG School of Education and post-doctorate DA/USP)