Research Topics

Topic 1: Culture and politics
This line of research focuses on the permanent re-articulation of the fields of culture and politics, both theoretically and empirically, departing from a complex conception of the contemporary world. In this way, it seeks to connect different national and international debates around themes such as: colonialism and post-colonialism; nation formation and diasporic movements; urbanization processes and diversification of ways of life in the countryside and city; socio-cultural inequalities and policies of recognition and redistribution; experiences with the sacred and new forms of religiosity; and the social organization of belief. It also addresses transversal reflections on social memory, human rights, state violence, political disappearances, reparation processes and transitional justice, and Truth Commissions. It includes cross-national comparative studies between Brazil and other national and regional contexts: Portugal, the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean, Southern Africa, and Central Eastern Europe.
 
Topic 2: Anthropology and Ethnographies of Knowledge
Characterized by dynamic research, this area combines two notions—knowledge and existence—as multiple modes (and their expressions) to be understood. This union brings theory and ethnography together to form ethnographic theories that hold imagination and expressions as central themes and challenges in research into description, narratives, orthographies, and images.
At the intersection between anthropology, art, literature, science, and so-called conventional knowledge lies the union of knowledge and existence. This line of research is also open to interests in the ethnography of institutions, in biography and the experiences of people, material, and cultural goods, and in the epistemology of anthropology. The professors and researchers working in this area focus on such relations in their courses and seminars and welcome research projects that propose some theoretical and methodological innovation.
Sub-lines of research:
*Archive, Heritage, and Memory;
*Narratives, Spellings, and Images;
*Biography and Trajectories;
*Science and Other Modes of Knowledge.
 
Topic 3: Ethnologies
This line of research covers ethnology in a broad and plural sense, from the fields of Africanism and Americanism (with an emphasis on the lowlands of South America) to studies of historically invisible "peasant classes,” which now lay claim to recognition of their ethnic and cosmological particularities, for example Afro-American populations (quilombos, palenques, cimarrones) and so-called traditional or indigenous peoples. Themes related to this line of research can be distributed across four broad interconnected fields: A) discourse analysis, cosmology and religion, aesthetics, mythology and ritual, gender, kinship and social organization; B) the sociogenesis and social micro-history of these collectives, their conceptions of history and memory, and the development of specific public policies aimed at those segments of the population, such as indigenism; C) questions concerning forms of spatialization and territorialization, mobility, territorial overlaps, conceptions of nature and management of resources, and finally, conflicts related to land titling and relationships with the State; and D) contemporary political organizations of an ethnic character, debates on official forms of recognition in the fields of health and education, as well as new forms of protagonists in the arts, in museums, and in the human and social sciences themselves.
Sub-lines of research:
*Amerindian Studies;
*Afro-Oriental Studies;
*African American;
*Quilombian Studies; peasants and traditional populations.
 
Topic 4: Sexuality, Gender, Body, and Intergenerational Relations
This area includes studies that problematize gender along with social, cultural, and political expressions, experiences, and practices around the body and sexuality. Its general objective is to implement and when possible refine or develop theories and methodologies based on research that, by addressing various manifestations related to the body and sexuality, highlights the connections between gender and other categories of identity, such as age, race, ethnicity, gender, and social class.
The following themes and fields of social life are delimited by studies in this area: family, conjugality, and parenting; courses of life and generations; eroticism, choices, and sexual identities; uses, techniques, and technologies of the body; cultural production and uses of the image. This line also concentrates the study of changes in the way in which life is periodized and the age experience is lived by distinct social groups in the younger and older segments of the population. Understanding ages as forms of classification and hierarchization of the world, the study of generations is centered on the analysis of power relations and open spaces for specific social practices, particularly within what has been considered as the realm of intimacy, private life, and of the family, and with regard to production in the scientific field, to the sphere of justice, and to public policies that presuppose solidarity or aim to curb intergenerational violence.