Anuário Antropológico (AA) is a journal of the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology at the University of Brasília (PPGAS/UnB). It publishes original articles, conferences, interviews, visual and bibliographic essays, book and film reviews, and other academic texts that present quality empirical research, relevant theoretical dialogues, and diverse analytical perspectives. The journal accepts texts in Portuguese, English, Spanish, or French. Contributions are evaluated by the Editorial Committee (regarding their appropriateness to the profile and editorial line of the journal) and by external ad hoc reviewers (concerning the content and quality of the contributions). The journal operates under an open science and continuous publication model and is guided by the IDEIA principles: impact, diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. Year of Creation: 1976 Thematic Coverage: Anthropology, Anthropological Theory Printed ISSN: 0102-4302 Digital ISSN: 2357-738X
Brasília DF: Universidade de Brasília Instituto de Ciências Sociais Departamento de Antropologia
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.en Creative Commons - Atribución- 4.0 Internacional - CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.en
In 1961, Roberto DaMatta took me along as an assistant in his fieldwork among the Gavião Indians in the state of Pará, then also referred to as the Western Gaviões, in order to distinguish them from the Krinkati and Pukobyê of Maranhão, who were likewise nicknamed Gaviões (Nimuendaju 1946, 16 and 19). The research he was to carry out was part of a project directed by Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira, which studied cases of contact between Indians and whites in light of the notion of “interethnic friction.” My participation in the research met the program requirement for fieldwork experience in the Specialization Course in Cultural Anthropology at the National Museum, in which I was enrolled. On the same occasion, Roque de Barros Laraia took another student in the course, Marcos Magalhães Rubinger, to the Suruí Indians, in a nearby area, but on the other side of the Tocantins River. This work would result in the book Índios e castanheiros: A empresa extrativa e os índios do médio Tocantins (Indians and Brazil-nut Gatherers: The Extractive Enterprise and the Indians of the Middle Tocantins), by Laraia and DaMatta (1967). A few years later, with Roberto deeply involved in research with the Apinajé and me with the Craô, I assumed that my Diary no longer held any interest for him and I took it from the Museum back home. But it did not occur to me to suggest that we return to the data I had collected, including the notes in my small notebooks and loose sheets, which remained with him. And time passed. In recent years, I tried to return the Diary to him, but there was no opportunity for us to meet in person. Not wanting to entrust the Diary to the mail, I sent him a xerox copy. But my handwriting was barely legible. For that reason, I decided to type it up myself—a very slow process, since I had lost what little skill I ever had at the keyboard. Yet this step-by-step reading, which typing forced upon me, made me realize that there was something of value in the Diary, because it gives an idea of how the Gaviões were organized and lived at a moment when a portion of them chose friendly contact with non-Indigenous people. For this reason, I decided to write this commentary on the data the Diary presents most clearly. Roberto DaMatta read it and responded with the generous message published alongside this text. Grateful, I begin my comments.
Copyright (c) 2025 Julio Cezar Melatti https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Comment on ‘Leafing Through My Gavião Diary’
Copyright (c) 2025 Roberto DaMatta https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Analytical Challenge of Brazilian-Style Citizenship: Notes Toward an Increasingly Necessary Field of Study
The recently published book by Luís Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira presents an arc of theoretical development on the theme of citizenship and rights in Brazil, grounded in 15 years of research and debates across diverse academic networks, attesting to the importance of exchanges and ethnographies for theoretical production in Anthropology. In thinking about how to organize my contribution to the debate, I decided to make two moves. First, I want to revisit here some points from this long trajectory, with a view to outlining a lineage that, among others, situates this book within the field of the anthropology of law in Brazil. Next, I want to describe—almost in the form of a vulgate—the analytical framework the author proposes. In doing so, I raise, by way of provocation (in the best sense), some reflections aimed at expanding the theoretical dialogue on the theme and on the effects of this framework for interpreting the ethnographic realities that lie ahead of us.
Copyright (c) 2025 Daniel Simião https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Rights, Violence, and Citizenship: Inequality and Moralities in a Comparative Perspective
Copyright (c) 2025 Lucía Eilbaum https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Anthropological Reflection on Inequality and the Paradox of Empty Grounding
Copyright (c) 2025 Roberto Freitas Filho https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Technical processes and built environments variations among the Kaiowa of Mato Grosso do Sul (Brazil)
Simpósio de Livro: "Desigualdade de tratamento e cidadania no Brasil: pontos, contrapontos e dilemas da igualdade cidadã"
Copyright (c) 2025 Lenin dos Santos Pires https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Exploring Dialogues on Inequality and Citizenship
Copyright (c) 2025 Luís Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
We propose a dossier featuring works that, attentive to classificatory and conceptual pitfalls, reflect on the multiple modes of governance at play. By “modes of governance” we mean a mode of action (state, private, community, para-state, among others) that, with each arrangement undertaken with “land,” guides a way of defining it, accessing it, stabilizing it, and making certain ways of life on it possible. Thus, the “government of land” is not limited to studies of public policies within executive, legislative, or judicial agencies. It more broadly concerns politics (exercised through a set of technologies) carried out by different actors or collectives to configure specific spaces and anchor particular social practices and conceptions within them.
Copyright (c) 2025 Nashieli Cecilia Rangel Loera, Igor Rolemberg https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Interview with Ayala Ferreira – “Restless Subjects”: 40 Years of the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement
This interview sought to take stock of the land, agrarian and agricultural policies designed to regulate access to land and the priority uses made of it in Brazil, from the perspective of an MST activist, in the context of the movement's 40th anniversary. The interview deals with the changes that have taken place in the agendas for demanding agrarian justice, the forms of mobilization undertaken, the public that participates in collective actions and the way in which dialogue with the state has been established, comparing the case of the Amazon with the rest of the country. The interview also discusses the changes in the state's policies in relation to the demand for land, and in the movement itself, over the last few decades.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ayala Lindabeth Dias Ferreira, Nashieli Cecilia Rangel Loera, Igor Rolemberg https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Making Authority Appear: Practices of Sovereignty Behind the Production of Peasant Territories and Governments
Tania Li (2014) pointed out that the concept of land does not mean the same thing to all actors and that it takes on different uses and meanings. She also emphasized that land, in its various forms, is produced through a process of composition. Something similar happens with territory, a notion that, since the 1990s, has gained prominence alongside land in the vocabulary of peasant organizations in Colombia and elsewhere. As with land, the definition of territory and the source of its value are at the center of multiple disputes. Several ethnographies on processes of territorialization in Latin America have shown that territories, in their varied forms, are constructed through what we might call “practices of sovereignty.” I propose using this term to refer to those experimental practices, often ephemeral and precarious in nature, that manage to bring forth certain bodies as subjects of authority and certain geographies, biologies, and populations as their territories. Drawing on the de facto formation of the Agro-Food Peasant Territory of the Northern Nariño Massif and Southern Cauca in southwestern Colombia, and on the production of “assemblies,” “mingas,” “guards,” “mandates,” and “popular consultations” within that process, I propose reflecting on these practices of popular sovereignty and on how they blend forms of community, organizational, and state authority.
Copyright (c) 2025 Maite Yie Garzón https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The land did not belong: the relation of movement with the land in the context of the struggle of people of Trombas and Formoso (GO)
This ethnography is about the relationship and meanings of the land evoked by the people of Trombas and Formoso, in the northern region of the state of Goiás, during the process of struggle for land that took place there in the 1950s. On the land, these people arrived, worked, made their roças, and when the time came, they left and let it go. They walked looking for a better life in another destination – a journey that, although it took different paths, was always oriented toward land. The land did not belong to the people of Trombas and Formoso and, until the arrival of those who claimed to be the owners, the land was not owned. The notions of posse and property emerged along with the process of struggling for land, when, despite their supposed owners, posseiros decided to stay and settled. In this article, I will try to demonstrate the agency of the land over the life of the movement of these people, whose practice radically altered the path – but never the direction – of these people, for whom the land was the only way to escape the cativeiro imposed by the order of the owners.
Copyright (c) 2025 Maiara Dourado https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
From the nationalization to the agrarian reform of the roças of São Tomé and Príncipe
Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the plantations (roças) of São Tomé and Príncipe (Africa), this article examines the nationalization of these areas and its effects on their current territorial configuration and on the inhabitants of the roças. The study focuses on two historical processes that took place in the archipelago: the nationalization of the roças in 1975 and the agrarian reform of 1991, both under the mediation of the São Tomé State. With the end of Portuguese colonization and the independence of the country, the roças became the property of the São Tomé State. The government later redistributed lands for agricultural use — but not for private ownership — to former contract workers and servants. Historically, the term roça in this archipelago has referred to large estates, sugar mills, agricultural enterprises, or plantation economies, but currently it is configured and comes closer to the idea of ​​communities and territories located in the interior and coastal regions of the two islands.
Copyright (c) 2025 Lauro José Cardoso https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Governing Shifting Coastal Land? From “Beach Grabbing” to “Managed Retreat” in California
Who owns sandy beaches when they shrink, or even threaten to vanish? And how can we govern the “lure for the shore” when the material conditions for human habitability on the coastal fringes are compromised? Based on the California case, this article explores how coastal lands, established through colonization and state control as available “resources”, are now sites of evolving contention. Beach conflicts are structured not only by the unequal distribution of access and use opportunities, but increasingly by struggles that politicize the “taboo” of a previously unthinkable “managed retreat”—a withdrawal necessitated by sea level rise and coastal erosion. Drawing on fieldwork focused on the “dual nature” of beaches as both living environments and historical inventions, we examine how marine transgression actively resists coastal engineering’s control efforts, which technical solutions are powerless to contain oceanic advance and stabilize shifting territories. At a time when shoreline governance appears to be failing or at least uncertain, the very conditions—whether material or symbolic—of our relationship with the “uncontrollable” or “undisposable” are called into question.
Copyright (c) 2025 Isabelle Bruno, Grégory Salle https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Women who combine with the Jaguaribe river: eating to take care of bodies, relationships and the fight of fisherwomen, Ceará
In this article, I intend to examine the political actions of fisherwomen from the Jaguaribe River, in which eating is relevant to the construction of bodies and relationships, whether intimate or public, within spaces related to the domestic. I also seek to understand how this act of care enters the spaces of activism where they construct their forms of defense of the body-land and water territory. I thus highlight the action of women as politicians, making explicit the centrality of their agency in the creation of life that is also made with non-humans. Perhaps, in this way, we can articulate a debate on land governance undertaken by fisherwomen, contemplating waters and the body, both as a fundamental part of the land issue.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ana Luisa Nobre https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article, which opens the dossier on contemporary family and kinship patterns, analyses how human reproduction is intertwined with political, economic and social dimensions, particularly in Brazil and Latin America. The authors argue that, in contexts marked by profound inequalities of class, race, and gender, reproductive governance operates simultaneously as a mechanism of state control and an arena of resistance, where female strategies of solidarity and intergenerational care networks emerge in the absence of a consolidated welfare state. The dossier brings together ethnographies that shed light on the ‘shadow spaces’ neglected in previous discussions and in other geographical realities, examining everything from motherhood prevented by legal and cross-border barriers to the removal of parental rights, revealing how moral economies, emotions and everyday negotiations materialise tensions between individual rights, state regulations and ethics of care, always permeated by social hierarchies that determine who can reproduce, raise children, and under what conditions.
Copyright (c) 2025 Andréa de Souza Lobo, Claudia Fonseca, Fernanda Riffiotis https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
“Being able to talk about what cannot be written”: notes on the emotional aspects involved in working with Removals of Parental Power in the Technical Sectors of the Children and Youth Courts in the State of São Paulo
The present text addresses the emotional aspects related to working with processes of Termination of Parental Rights in the state of São Paulo by the technical staff members of the juvenile courts. Based on interviews and analyses of case files conducted in my doctoral thesis, in which I argued to consider these actions as care work, I provide insights and further the discussion about the emotional challenges inherent in the determination, or not, of the permanent separation of children from their biological families.
Copyright (c) 2025 Janaína Dantas Germano Gomes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Gender, Debt, and the Neo-Fascist Right: The Questions of Contemporary Reproductive Governanc
This article argues that the Trumpists have not exactly taken up the previous half-century’s conservative reproductive politics, however. Instead, it suggests that we can locate their ruling narratives in gender ideology, a set of claims closely linked to xenophobia and what they call “critical race theory,” which can be characterized more broadly as a neo-fascist position being forged from the Americas to Europe. It brings together new forms of public policy claims on behalf of conservative religious groups, a form of reproductive governance that yokes anti-trans, xenophobic, racist, and anti-gay politics to reproductive rights.
Copyright (c) 2025 Laura Briggs https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Expectations, conflicts, and uncertainties: The construction of kinship ties among adopted individuals who find their families of origin
“The dream of my life is to know where I was born”, ‘it was closing an open door’ these are some expressions stated by people who, after years of intense and persevering search, managed to know their families of origin. These men and women are part of a group of activists who fight for the right to know their origins in Argentina. Most of them were falsely registered in the civil registry, which implies the absence of information and documentation to carry out their searches. This situation turns many of them into true researchers of their own history, tireless and creative “searchers” who have developed diverse technical and emotional knowledge and skills of all kinds to obtain information about their origins. From an ethnographic perspective, this text recovers experiences of people who found their families of origin with the aim of analyzing how kinship and identity ties are constructed and how meanings about family, motherhood, brotherhood and abandonment are elaborated in these cases. Although the encounter seems to signify the conclusion or the end of the search, these stories reveal dilemmas and uncertainties resulting from the encounter where conflict is a recurrent element. Thus, the encounter involves a new search for creative strategies to deal with the expectations, desires and demands of all involved. Therefore, information about origins, in addition to being a constitutive information of personal identity (Strathern, 1999), is a type of disruptive information for adopted persons in that it mobilizes, alters and modifies relationships, positions and emotions with both the family of origin and the foster family.
Copyright (c) 2025 Soledad Gesteira https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Vânias and Marluces: Violence, gender and policies for Children and Youth
Marluce, 20 years old, resident of the west zone of Rio de Janeiro, drug user, had a baby in a public hospital in this municipality. After the birth, she told the Social Service of the hospital that she would give the baby up for adoption. The Social Worker contacted Vânia, Guardianship Counselor, to go looking for Marluce's family, in order to dissuade her from the decision. Based on this narrative, I seek to understand how the situation experienced by this parturient illuminate the reflection on gender, violence, voluntary surrender, policies for Childhood and Adolescence and the markers of race, class and territory. In what way are women, their bodies, their reproductive capacities, their refusals to exercise motherhood a matter of State? How moral injunctions, coercive directives and control over Marluce's decision make it possible to reflect on the technologies of control of female bodies and the productions of kinship?
Copyright (c) 2025 Alessandra de Andrade Rinaldi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Of spectacular and routine violence. State management of “(in)adequate” maternity
In March 2024, a sentence for child abduction during the last Argentine military dictatorship (1976-1983) incorporated the concept of ‘gender violence, violence against women and dehumanised childbirth’ to convict, after 48 years, the person who had abducted a baby girl born in captivity. In this article, I use this important and novel interpretative key that links the appropriation of children with the violence suffered by their mothers to reflect on the ways in which other interventions are interpreted and connoted that focus on poor and vulnerable women who are separated from their children and judged to be incapable of exercising motherhood. To this end, I analyse a series of court rulings in which the declaration of adoptability of children is challenged by their mothers, but the measure is ratified by the courts. I postulate that the bureaucratic interventions that these women experience as violent are euphemised and not considered as such. Therefore, I propose to reflect on the ‘moral economy’ (Fassin, 2018) present in the invisibilisation of these forms of violence that are implicit in the practices of separation of children from their family environment.
Copyright (c) 2025 Carla Villalta https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cross-border reproductive travel to circumvent impediments to motherhood
This article analyzes the experiences of French women who, faced with biological, social and legal impediments to achieving motherhood, resort to cross-border medically assisted reproduction in Spain. Despite the reform of the Bioethics Law in 2021, which expanded access to assisted reproduction treatments for single women and same-sex couples, impediments to certain maternities persist, especially related to age limits and the long waiting times for gamete donation. Overcoming these obstacles requires a complex logistical effort, which falls mainly on the shoulders of the women. In addition to adapting to long-distance treatments and dealing with a different culture and medical system, they must manage to implement and manage a double follow-up between France and Spain. Although cross-border medically assisted reproduction helps to overcome certain impediments, it also confronts users with new challenges, such as the risk of treatment failure and pregnancy loss. However, these cross-border movements also open up the possibility of a conceptual “de-impediment” of motherhood, allowing for reconfigurations in family norms.
Copyright (c) 2025 Alexandra Desy https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Amerindian Experiences of Change and Hierarchy in Recent Ethnographies from South America
I discuss four recent ethnographies that are relevant to two current debates in Amerindian South American anthropology: change and hierarchy. First, I present some of their analytical tools and their approaches to Indigenous experiences in the Bolivian highlands, Patagonia, the Brazilian Upper Xingu, and Suriname. This review essay does not aim to exhaustively discuss the content of these books, but only those aspects relevant to comparing their main emerging problems and contributions.
Copyright (c) 2025 Juan Javier Rivera Andía https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Archaeology of the Past and Future in the Amazon
Until the end of the 20th century, the established hypotheses in South American archaeology divided the continent into four major cultural areas, which would also correspond to evolutionary stages: (1) the Central Andes, the supposed cradle of civilizations, structured religion, and the state; (2) the Circum-Caribbean, where forms of political control and religion would be less structured than in the Central Andes; (3) the Tropical Forest, including areas of the Amazon and the Atlantic Forest—part of the so-called “lowlands” east of the Andes—marked by the presence of populations living in autonomous villages with a certain mobility and practicing shifting agriculture; and, finally, (4) Marginal Peoples, present in different areas of the lowlands, characterized by the absence of permanent agriculture, high mobility, low population density, and the economic importance of hunting and gathering. According to this scheme, the supposed absence of permanent, dense, long-term settlements in the Tropical Forest would be the result of limiting environmental factors—poor soils or lack of animal protein—that would prevent demographic growth.
Copyright (c) 2025 Eduardo Góes Neves https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
On Capitalism and China: War and Trade, Tariffs and Viruses
Few topics have been as widely discussed in 2025 as the increases in U.S. import tariffs proposed by Donald Trump’s administration. We are facing a shift in the global infrastructure whose scope is still being assessed—something we will likely continue to grapple with, with varying degrees of success, in the coming decades. The rise in import tariffs is central because it involves the economy, and global because it concerns international trade.
Copyright (c) 2025 Marcos Lanna https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Algorithms and radicalization: A technopolitical perspective from anthropology
Since Jair Bolsonaro’s meteoric rise to the presidency in 2018, something unusual has occurred. Researchers and professionals in fields such as political science and journalism have noted—sometimes with a degree of surprise—how anthropology has been ahead of other disciplines in perceiving and analyzing these phenomena. This is usually linked to the central role of ethnography as a methodology, in which the anthropologist “is there,” immersed in the flows of ordinary people’s social lives and therefore able to detect trends that will only later erupt onto the surface of public debate.
Copyright (c) 2025 Letícia Cesarino https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Coloniality, the decolonial, and creoleness... Critical reflections on concepts and on the question of Brazil
This article has two origins: on the one hand, it is the product of a lecture given at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Brasília on April 4, 2025, at the invitation of Prof. Dr. Wilson Trajano Filho; on the other hand, it seeks to extend the discussion opened by the latter in a volume of the Anuário Antropológico in 2024 (49, no. 1): “Sobre a descolonização e seus correlatos” (On decolonization and its correlates). The article therefore begins by reviewing concepts commonly used in postcolonial and decolonial approaches: anticolonial, postcolonial, decolonial, decolonization, independence, neocolonialism, colonial state; but above all, it confronts them with the historical realities described at various periods of the capitalist world-system. It challenges the Latinocentrism of many decolonial authors who consider “1492” to be the birth date of the world system, race, the nation-state, and even gender. He then describes the rapid “epistemocentric” deviation of the decolonial approach, which started out as a rather materialist approach linked to social and indigenous movements, but evolved towards an essentialization of an undefined ‘West’ and a homogenization of the “South,” actually forgetting the anti-capitalist struggle, leading some to take a pro-Russian stance in the war to “de-Westernize” Ukraine. However, the author does not reject the concept of coloniality, provided that it is considered as a total social fact, not limited to its epistemic aspects but as a social formation characterized both by its insertion into the capitalist world system and by the non-hegemony of the capitalist mode of production in its areas. The article then takes up the debate opened by Wilson Trajano Filho on the subversive potential of creolization and its decolonizing capacity. Largely following the latter in his critique of post- and decolonial authors, he nevertheless rejects this interpretation of contemporary creolization. He points out that historical creolization is inseparable from coloniality as the formation of exogenous social milieus within conquered indigenous societies, milieus that are socially and racially hierarchical. He characterizes creolization as an identity cataclysm for its enslaved victims, even if it may ultimately have produced social milieus, or even entire societies, in the form of creoledom. But while creolization is a very specific social and identity-related process, once produced, creoledom are a form of ethnicity like any other, with no particular intrinsic qualities, no characteristics of openness, non-racism, or even decolonization.
Copyright (c) 2025 Michel Cahen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
A história de Souleymane. Diretor: Boris Lojkne. Produção: França, 2024. 93 min. cor.
Copyright (c) 2025 Julia Bertino Moreira https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Peer Review:“Perfect idiots”: senses of justice, moral insults and discursive exclusion from the perspective of three residents of a Rio de Janeiro favelas
Copyright (c) 2025 Daniel M. L. Cruz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
When the doctor cried. Forgotten griefs of the health system
Despite the daily contact with serious conditions and uncertain life prognoses, death is usually a taboo topic among health professionals who see themselves as maximum defenders of life. The objective of this article is to investigate the subjective experiences of health professionals in the department of Humahuaca (province of Jujuy, Argentina) in relation to the death of their patients, based on the narratives with which they try to communicate them. The analysis will be made from an existential phenomenological perspective anchored in the anthropology of experience. In this sense, the work takes into account the intersubjective dimension of ethnography and makes a thorough approach to the experience of both the ethnographer and his interlocutors, considering the influence of the structures that mediate these experiences. In conclusion, it can be said that professionals experience the patient's death as a loss which, as in all grief, must be understood and negotiated internally. This gives rise to a set of transformations with which they seek to recover from that difficult experience in order to continue working.
Copyright (c) 2025 Cristina Fontes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
“Perfect idiots”: senses of justice, moral insults and discursive exclusion from the perspective of three residents of a Rio de Janeiro favela
In this article, we explore the reactions and comments of three residents of a Rio de Janeiro favela in response to the publicity and repercussions of the circumstances surrounding the death of a resident of a neighbouring favela. We argue that these reactions and discourses are guided by moralities that express senses of justice and conceptions of rights that articulate attributions of differentiated status, based on identity criteria, with expectations and demands for an unequal distribution of forms of treatment. This formulation reveals an understanding of rights as a privilege of specific moral types that are articulated with experiences of moral insult and processes of discursive exclusion.
Copyright (c) 2025 Marcus Cardoso, Carolina Barreto Lemos https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Clothing in the costure of the times: corporeality, memory and social transformations
This article seeks to understand, by means of clothing, the relationships between corporeality and memory. Throughout the field research, the dialogue with women in a quilombo in Pernambuco showed that the ways of dressing constituted an important material and moral qualifier for reflection on asymmetrical relations and social transformations. Clothing was also a valuable social marker, due to its place in the public constitution of corporeality and the production of reputations. From this point on, I demonstrate how clothing and the work invested in it indicate social changes that are embodied, expressed both in subjective movements of self-care and in collective agencies.
Copyright (c) 2025 Marcela Rabello de Castro Centelhas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
“I take care of angels”: Everyday nursing in a Neonatal ICU in times of covid-19
This article addresses the routine of nursing professionals working in the Neonatal ICU of a public hospital located in the city of João Pessoa, Paraíba, Brazil, during the early months of the covid-19 pandemic. Starting from a theoretical discussion that interweaves care, gender and nursing, the article highlights attention to the singularities of caring for newborns at risk of life, and to the way in which Covid-19 has dramatically impacted this scenario. The text is part of the result of a master’s research based on online interviews with nursing professionals who worked to combat the pandemic in public and private healthcare networks in the same city between March 2020 and May 2021.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ana Paula Marcelino da Silva, Mónica Franch https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The amazonian domestication “syndrome“: an analysis of the controversies surrounding the debate
This article addresses the scientific controversies surrounding the idea of Amazonian Domestication, a narrative that challenges the traditional view of the rainforest as a pristine environment by highlighting the role of Indigenous populations in transforming Amazonian landscapes. In the first part, the text maps out the debate between two groups of scientists: on one side, researchers who argue that the Amazon rainforest was extensively shaped by pre-Columbian human practices, resulting in domesticated landscapes; on the other, scholars who contend that the evidence of domestication is localized and insufficient to support claims of widespread transformation. The debate encompasses methodological issues, the distribution of useful species, and the relationship between archaeological sites and biodiversity. In the second part, the article critically examines the discursive operations surrounding the concept of domestication, showing how its definition varies according to the adopted perspective. The dispute between domestication as a broad and gradual process versus a more restricted and intentional event reflects differing understandings of the degree of human influence on the Amazon rainforest. Throughout the text, it becomes evident that the controversy is not limited to empirical data but also involves epistemological and political disputes concerning the role of Indigenous populations in managing the Amazon. While recognizing this influence is crucial for environmental and conservation policies, conceptual tensions demonstrate the challenges of integrating multiple disciplines and perspectives in the study of human interactions with tropical environments.
Copyright (c) 2025 Guilherme Henriques Soares https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Parentality: Cornerstone of reproductive governance
In this article, we propose to reflect on “parenthood,” a theme that is currently emerging in family policies throughout the Western world. Using sociological and historical supports, with data drawn from cases in the United States, Brazil, Argentina and western Europe, we examine the operationalization of certain notions of good and bad childcare, manifested in terms such as “battered children,” “child abuse,” “neglect” and “positive parenting”. By examining these notions of good and bad parenting in different circumstances and at different times, looking at both the influence of experts and the moralities that find expression in parental subjectivities, we intend to provoke a reflection on where and who creates these mechanisms of governance, as well their role in processes of stratified reproduction. We end by suggesting that positive parenting is to poor and discriminated families what whiteness is to marginalized races. As long as silence reigns about this reference standard and the criteria for its definition (laden in many cases not so much with scientific evidence as with class and color preconceptions), we will not go far in understanding the problematic classifications embedded in the hierarchical and unequal infrastructures of childhood governance, nor in appreciating the plural ways of being and existing in the world.
Copyright (c) 2025 Claudia Fonseca https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Warao at the crossroads: conflicts and moralities in the indigenous shelters of Roraima
Operation Welcome was created in 2018 by the Brazilian government to deal with the influx of Venezuelans arriving in the country, including indigenous peoples. Based in the state of Roraima, it is an operation that has a military arm (Army) and a civilian arm (Social Assistance), in addition to support from United Nations agencies and NGOs through partnerships and shared governance. This article analyzes one of the axes of the operation, namely “reception.” The focus is on some of the services offered within shelters for indigenous people, such as food, hygiene, and security. By describing some of the social situations I observed within these spaces, we will see, through the lenses of the Warao, military personnel, humanitarian workers, and missionaries not only different perspectives and worldviews, but also different moral economies. The conflicts that structured the relationships between actors and institutions revealed both colonial recurrences and contemporary configurations characteristic of humanitarian military governments.
Copyright (c) 2025 Gabriel Tardelli https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
In this work, we seek to describe and analyse the processes that led to the transformation of the built environments among the Kaiowa from Mato Grosso do Sul over the course of a century and a half. For such a scope, instead of looking at such transformations as the result of acculturation or a mere change of aesthetic, we’ll focus mainly on technical relations that show how the experiences of the indigenous people with new materials and architectural structures have favoured a flexibilization of the domestic organization and ecology, turning the territorial mobility more capillary and making the production of an ample variation of shapes and residential structures.
Copyright (c) 2025 Fabio Mura https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
“¿La ley de la selva ?” Gobernanza y cultura política en los mercados públicos de la Ciudad de México
El objetivo de este artículo es el estudio de las percepciones que tienen los comerciantes sobre la gobernanza al interior de los mercados públicos. Desde una perspectiva antropológica que entiende la gobernanza como la administración del acceso y el suministro de derechos, servicios y bienes, en donde se involucra la inclusión y derechos que son explícitos o implícitos en las prácticas gubernamentales, interesa indagar en lo que piensan los comerciantes sobre dicha gestión y el papel que desempeña la cultura política al interior. Se considera a los mercados como un factor de conexión social y vitalidad de la vida urbana y de una cultura política específica. Se tiene el supuesto de que la gobernanza puede ser un ejercicio híbrido en donde conviven formas reglamentarias de la cultura política y también formas ilegítimas que permiten que la gestión cotidiana ocurra. Los hallazgos refieren que la percepción sobre la gobernanza tiene características entretejen formas legales, reglamentarias e institucionales con prácticas informales, clientelares y moralmente ambiguas, que garantizan el efectivo funcionamiento cotidiano del mercado.
Copyright (c) 2025 María Susana Rosales Pérez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0