Institutional
The Graduate Program in Social Anthropology is structured in two levels: Master's and Doctorate, and comprises a single area of concentration—Social Anthropology—and four teaching and research axes, covering a broad range of subjects and fields of investigation. Conceived as such, it has been a fertile space for teaching, research, and debate in areas ranging from the ethnographic and historical study of indigenous and traditional societies to the analysis of conflicts and transformations in the contemporary world, encompassing topics such as nature and technology, difference and identity, body and sexuality, gender and race, religion and media, state and capitalism, and marginalized populations. The Program aims to train anthropologists of the highest scientific and professional competence, qualified to work in higher education institutions, research centers, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations.
Established in 1971, and one of the first in Brazil, the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology at Unicamp initially offered only a master's degree—although, as early as the mid-1970s, we had two defended and approved doctoral theses, authored by Professors Manuela Carneiro da Cunha and Luiz Mott. The doctoral program, part of the PPGAS program, was established in 2004 (the first class was formed in 2005). Prior to its establishment, the program's faculty offered courses and provided guidance in the various areas of the Doctorate in Social Sciences, an interdisciplinary program founded in 1985. The expansion of the program with the implementation of the Doctorate in Social Anthropology, with its disciplinary format, meant, above all, more effective integration between the three levels of education—undergraduate, master's, and doctoral—as well as the possibility of better articulating the lines of research at these different levels. Furthermore, integration gives the Program greater visibility and institutional distinctiness, meeting growing student demands.
The history of the Program
The Graduate Social Anthropology Program at the State of Campinas University [1]
(by Mariza Corrêa)
The crisis experienced by the University of São Paulo was partly responsible for the transformation of the University of Campinas, a long-standing local project, into the State University of Campinas in the late 1960s. With the appointment of Zeferino Vaz as dean of the new university, the process of establishing several faculties and institutes and hiring a large number of professors began, many of them intellectuals persecuted by the military regime. At the Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences, this process began with the creation of a Department of Economics and Economic and Social Planning, to which economists were later hired, and with the hiring, soon after, of linguists, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists.[2]
Philosopher Fausto Castilho, who Zeferino Vaz commissioned to make these initial hires, recalls that the idea, in the late 1960s, was to revive the University of São Paulo project—a university where faculty were highly qualified and freedom of thought was guaranteed. Given the political context of the time, the strategy in the humanities was to emphasize planning to lend a businesslike touch to economic analyses; linguistics was the umbrella discipline that would lend a scientific aspect to social science analyses, which were frowned upon by the military government. As a consequence of this creative strategy, several of Fausto's first hires, who had received support from FAPESP (the state of São Paulo Research Foundation) to pursue their doctorates in Europe, committed to pursuing courses in linguistics as well.
The first person hired in the Anthropology field, Antonio Augusto Arantes, a recent graduate, was an instructor at the University of São Paulo and describes the climate at USP as one of great intellectual turmoil at the time, a "climate of great solidarity, mutual respect, and commitment to a cause, let's say, of modernizing knowledge, of connecting knowledge with social and historical issues. Engagement with the social and political dimensions of a social scientist's work. This was very strong, very important at the time. (...) And the invasion of Maria Antônia, the institutional crisis, created serious problems for the development of this—not really a project, but this flow of ideas, activities, and decisions at USP. And it was at this moment that Bento (Prado) asked me: 'Don't you want to work in Campinas, at this university that has no professors and that's supposed to start in two years?' (...)". So, soon after the dismantling of Maria Antônia, he traveled to Besançon to pursue his linguistics degree alongside the Institute's first group of hires. The stay in Besançon was brief for everyone – within a few months, each was pursuing their own research interests. In Antonio's case, he was in England and working with Edmund Leach, who accepted him as a student at Cambridge.[3]
Through Antonio and also through a letter from Fausto Castilho, Leach learned about the Unicamp project and mentioned it to Peter Rivière, Verena Martinez-Alier's thesis advisor, who then discussed the matter with his colleague Peter Fry, then a professor at University College London. At some point, the three of them—Antonio, Verena, and Peter—met to plan their trip to Campinas. Verena says she came to Brazil because she couldn't return to Cuba, where she had done her doctoral research; Peter says he came because he couldn't return to Africa, where he had done his fieldwork.[4] The three met at the Brazilian consulate, since Consul Ovídio de Mello was also in charge of finding tenured candidates for the new university. Today, they recall with amusement the delicate situation in which each tried to discern the others' political leanings, at a time when Brazil was better known abroad for its dictatorship than for its universities.[5]
The three began teaching the first undergraduate class in Social Sciences in 1970, and then, the following year, Fausto Castilho tasked them with starting the graduate program. Because the group was very small, they frequently relied on visiting professors and faculty from other fields, which meant that the program not only provided early dialogue with colleagues from other disciplines but also exposed students to a wide variety of theoretical approaches brought by the people invited.[6] The program's hallmark, however, was undoubtedly the influence of British anthropology, brought by its founders. Peter and Verena also recall learning about the country upon their arrival, whether in redesigning the courses’s programs, which they soon realized were far removed from the students' interests, or in developing their own research here. Peter's work in Africa led him to become interested in Umbanda: "Initially, I began studying it not only because it constituted a challenge in my quest to decipher Brazilian culture, but also because I believed it could have a political importance analogous to that of the traditional religion of the Shona people, which I had studied in Zimbabwe." The conclusions he reached, however, brought him closer to those of a Brazilian anthropologist than to his own in the previous study: “... I perceived Umbanda not as a resistance to the dominant culture, but as the sacralization of a fundamental aspect of all Brazilian culture: it showed me the legitimacy of the rogue, of the dirty tricks and of favors.”[7] It was from his work with religions that he began a pioneering research on homosexuality[8] and continued his dialogue with colleagues at the National Museum, to where he transferred in 1983.
Verena, who had begun her work in Anthropology with a study on “racial attitudes and sexual values,” continued to encourage these lines of research in her master’s degree, and the first dissertations she supervised dealt with issues of gender, or family, and racial relations.[9]
The newcomers' dialogue with colleagues in the Department of Social Sciences, Linguistics, and Economics was not without its conflicts. Peter recalls his shock, as a young professor, with the grand theories he encountered upon his arrival. And soon after: “They were all Chomskyans or Levi-Straussians; they came from Chicago or Michigan and brought much more comprehensive references than mine. But this was very good, because I was forced, if not to read, at least to try to understand Poulantzas, Althusser... When E. P. Thompson's book (The Poverty of Theory) came out, I felt avenged for so much suffering. And I even theorized on the subject: since the Portuguese language is very restricted in its use, people translate a lot. I read, for example, Discipline and Punish in Portuguese long before my friends in England... In any case, since we couldn't compete with the elaborate baroque discourse of others, we insisted more and more on field research (...) Verena and I were shocked by the lack of knowledge about Brazilian society at all levels. And that's why we were called empiricists by our colleagues in other disciplines.[10]
In addition to the emphasis on empirical research, the other important aspect from the beginning in the training of students in the Campinas Graduate Program was the relationship between Anthropology, albeit not with Linguistics, as would have been expected, given the context of its creation, but with History.
Verena's work with women who worked in the sugarcane plantations of Campinas was crucial to implementing this influence, as she recalls. "As I collected life stories and worked with historical documents to establish a continuity between the 1980s and the 1970s in Campinas, I began to realize what it was really about. It's not just, in the abstract, trying to introduce a historical perspective into Anthropology—an Anthropology that was truly ahistorical and functionalist at the time—nor is it about adding a sort of historical introduction after doing the typical case study, but about introducing historical dynamics through the analysis of the subjects who make history. Then, at that moment, Peter Worsley said something to me that I thought was excellent, because it sums up the problem very well. He rightly says that conventionally History tells about events, facts, without people. Battles, revolutions, etc. occur, but there are no subjects—except for some historians like E. P. Thompson, E. Hobsbawm, and the Marxists. While Anthropology has written endlessly about people without history. So the question is to unite history with subjects.”[11] This perspective was reinforced by the later creation of a History Department at the Institute and by the reciprocal influence of the two disciplines on the broader panorama of research in the field of Humanities.
The group's initial small number of participants led to several moves toward hiring other anthropologists: Roberto DaMatta joined the program as a visiting professor for its first two years, as did Francisca Vieira Keller, both from the National Museum. Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira was invited when he was deciding whether to stay at the Museum or go to Brasília. However, the group began to grow through the hiring of alumni from the new programs in Campinas, the National Museum, UnB, and USP. This reinforced the trend, already noted, of greater circulation of anthropologists among graduate programs, which, besides pointing to a new situation in Brazilian universities, also seems to suggest the strengthening of a common field of action. Both institutional initiatives and intellectual debates have been important in creating this field.
In addition to debates within each program, or between programs and their institutional neighbors, there was also a constant dialogue between programs, albeit partial. That is, the discussions never involved the programs as a whole, but rather representatives from specific areas—of ethnology studies, of agrarian issues, of gender relations, of urban studies, etc. These dialogues also reinforced the various research areas that developed over the years, creating working groups that often extended beyond the university's boundaries.
Peter Fry recalled the importance that Roberto DaMatta's analyses had for him in understanding Brazilian reality; Antonio Arantes recalled the impact of Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira's doctoral thesis defense when he was completing his degree at USP – the relationships between the faculty of the Brasília program and those of the National Museum have already been mentioned. It was also through an alliance between faculty from the Campinas and São Paulo programs that the ABA (Brazilian Anthropological Association) resumed its activities in the late 1970s.[12] This opening of the institutional scope of each program to a broader role in the field of Brazilian anthropology inevitably led to an expansion of the dialogue between different trends in anthropology. As Peter Fry says: "When Manuela (Carneiro da Cunha) arrived with a letter from Lévi-Strauss, Verena and I, who had only known British social anthropology, were impressed. But something interesting emerged from this conversation..."[13]
The conversation continues, now with a much larger number of interlocutors, but here it is only possible to recover part of it, the one that occurred at the initial moment of the constitution of this field.
[1] We reproduce here part of a broader essay by Mariza Corrêa on the formation and consolidation of the field of Social Anthropology in Brazil. See: CORRÊA, M (1995): “A Antropologia no Brasil (1960-1980)” in MICELI, Sérgio. História das Ciências Sociais no Brasil. Vol 2. São Paulo: Editora Sumaré (pp. 65 – 72).
[2] On the State University of Campinas, see ADUNICAMP (1991). Adunicamp – em Defesa da Universidade. Campinas: Ed. da Unicamp. E. N.: on the beginnings of Unicamp, see also GOMES, Eustáquio (2006). O Mandarim – História da Infância da Unicamp. http://www.unicamp.br/unicamp/unicamp_hoje/ju/indice-mandarim
I owe the clarifications I received about Unicamp in the late 1960s and early 1970s to Fausto Castilho, André Villa Lobos, and Luiz Orlandi, whom I thank for the many hours of conversation they shared with me. The Institute of Philosophy currently has six departments (Anthropology, Political Science, Sociology, Philosophy, and History); the former Economics and Linguistics departments have become, respectively, the Institute of Economics and the Institute of Language Studies.
What Fausto defines today as a strategy was, however, perceived by some actors at the time as a project in which, as Antonio Augusto Arantes says, “linguistics appeared as the discipline that would provide the theoretical articulation of the others.” (Interview given to Cíntia Ávila de Carvalho. See CARVALHO, Cíntia A. de. (1990): “Sobre a Antropologia na Unicamp”. Campinas: Unicamp, mimeo). E. N.: Currently, the Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences has six departments: in addition to those listed above, there is also the Department of Demography, formed by professors from the departments of Anthropology and Sociology and with a very intense relationship with NEPO (Center for Population Studies), Unicamp.
[3] Structuralism was beginning to arrive at Brazilian universities, and although he had read The Elementary Structures of Kinship with Ruth Cardoso and discussed the subject with Bento Prado, Antonio was familiar with the English authors, having been a tutor for Eunice Durham, preparing seminars on Malinowski, Firth, and Radcliffe-Brown. “I think one of the milestones in my education was Leach’s Rethinking Anthropology, in which he critiques taxonomic and classificatory anthropology and proposes, in empiricist terms, so to speak, a structuralist understanding of social practices.” Antonio returned to defend his master’s degree at USP, but defended his doctoral thesis at Cambridge. See ARANTES, A. A. (1975): “A Sagrada Família.” Campinas: Cadernos do Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (5), Unicamp; ARANTES, A. A. (1982): O trabalho e a fala. São Paulo: Kairós. E. N.: O Trabalho e a Fala will soon be available online on the PPGAS – Unicamp website, as the second volume of the “50 e tantos” collection, part of the PPGAS – Unicamp AVAKUAATY editorial imprint.
[4] See FRY, Peter (1975). Spirits of Protest. Cambridge University Press; and MARTINEZ-ALIER, Verena (1974). Marriage, Class, and Color in Nineteenth-Century Cuba – a Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society. Cambridge University Press. Verena's volume was reissued by The University of Michigan Press in 1989. E. N.: The volume includes a Spanish version – Racismo y Sexualidad en la Cuba Colonial – published in 1992 in Madrid by Aliança Editorial. Peter's book was published in Portuguese in the aforementioned "50 e tantos" collection by PPGAS – Unicamp AVAKUATY. Verena's book will soon be published in the same collection.
[5] Peter and his colleagues also like to tell the anecdote he recorded in Para Inglês Ver: “Right from the start, I faced a ‘reality’ that was difficult for me to understand, from customs to the university. I was a little disappointed with the food, because every day, in the restaurants of Campinas, I devoured steaks, rice, beans, and salad. I found both the restaurants and the food very little different from European or African ones, and I suspected that my friends were hiding the ‘true’ Brazilian culinary culture from me, the one that would distinguish it from all other cultures. In my wanderings around the city, I had seen an open-air restaurant with a counter and tilting windows, which I found so ‘different’ that it could only be the locus of the authentic national dish. I told my friends about the discovery, took the opportunity to criticize them for always taking me to places with ‘imported’ culture, and invited them to accompany me to the place in question. It was a Chinese bakery.” FRY, Peter (1982). Para Inglês Ver: Identidade e Política na Cultura Brasileira. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar.
[6] Visitors to the Program included, among others, Carmelo Lisón-Tolosana, Juan Martinez-Aleir, Daniel Gross, Richard Price, Robert Shirley, Diana Brown, Mário Bick, Helène Clastres.
[7] See FRY (1982: 13).
[8] Idem.
[9] See the article by Verena Martinez-Alier (1973): “Cor como símbolo de classificação social”, in Revista de História (96), São Paulo, and the introduction to the second edition of her doctoral thesis (1989).
[10] Peter Fry, testimony of December 25, 1991.
Verena confirms Peter's words: "I remember (...) that the discussions were absolutely surreal (...) because the concepts were endlessly examined, reviewed, discussed, turned around, reinterpreted. And my reaction was always: 'Let's see what people say, shall we?' And I don't think it was a mistake to insist. (...) Mao once said (...), I think in that text on class structure in China: 'Those who don't research have no right to speak.' And that, within the general political environment, was a kind of citizenship letter for me." (Testimony from September 24, 1990). It's difficult today to recover the details of the debate of those years, since no programmatic text was published. But the perception of the Program students, if I interpret it correctly, was that there was a theoretical determinism, mainly on the part of economists, which opposed the anthropologists' view, expressed by Verena and Peter: that it was necessary to know what the agents of history thought. In a way, we were re-enacting the Willems-Florestan controversy in new terms—but Florestan, by this point, was already an icon of resistance to the regime and was reread in that vein. Hence, perhaps, the affinity between the structural-functionalism of the anthropologists who were his students at USP and the professors at Unicamp.
[11] Peter Worsley was one of the program's visiting professors. It is worth remembering that the dialogue took place a few years before The New History began to hit bookstore shelves. For the final results of the research, see STOLCKE, Verena (1986). Cafeicultura: homens, mulheres e capital (1850-1980). São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense. José Graziano da Silva's review of this book (“Café amargo”) and Verena's response (“O povo na história”), published in the Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais, No. 3 (1), February 1987, clarify, years later, some of the points of that internal debate.
[12] In the biennium election that began in 1980, Eunice Ribeiro Durham was nominated for the presidency of the Association; the secretary was Antonio Augusto Arantes and the treasurer was Peter Fry.
[13] It would be impossible to reconstruct, within the limits of this work, all the small relationships involved in these comings and goings of anthropologists between the programs: partly by chance, partly due to the injunctions of their personal trajectories, Antonio Augusto Arantes did not go to Harvard to do a doctorate within the agreement established with the National Museum, Carlos Rodrigues Brandão left Brasília, where he had defended the first master's dissertation of the program, to come to Campinas and so on.