PPGAS/UnB – 50 years

Abstract

In 2022, the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology (PPGAS) at Universidade de Brasilia reached half a century of age. Created in 1972, as a master's degree program, led by Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira, in 1981 it started training PhD students also.

The same spirit that guided it back in the beginning – one of taking the lead in new areas of ethnographic study, one of excellence in intellectual production and one that is about collaborating with national and international research centers – still guides its research and teaching activities today. In this spirit, over almost five decades, the PPGAS/UnB faculty and academic staff as well as its lines of research have diversified and renewed themselves.

With the goal of carrying out a critical assessment of the main contributions brought by the PPGAS/UnB to our discipline, as perceived by its own actors, the Anuário Antropológico is publishing, starting from vol 47(2), the section called “PPGAS/UnB - 50 years". It will include articles that systematize theoretical, methodological and ethnographic propositions elaborated by its professors and their respective research groups. Such articles are problematized by commentators, in order to offer the analytical mediations necessary and to allow us a deeper understanding of the challenges involved in the construction of knowledge in Brazil and in the contemporary world.

In this issue we have an article by Wilson Trajano Filho, which is commented on by Lorenzo Macagno and Annaïs Ménard. The next issues will provide readers with articles by Stephen Baines, Lia Zanotta Machado and other colleagues whose contributions to PPGAS and anthropology are indisputable.

We are sure this will provide constructive and edifying criticism as food for thought and thus we hope that this section will be a historic space to register some of the challenges that characterize our craft in the first quarter of this century and to foster improvement.