Abstract

VIEGAS, Susana de Matos. Ethnography and public categories: the making of compatible agendas in contemporary anthropological practices. Etnográfica [online]. 2010, vol.14, n.1, pp.135-158. ISSN 0873-6561.

This article is a debate on research that deals with categories pre-defined in the public agenda. It is supported by an experience of doing an anthropological study for the Tupinambá of Olivença aimed at the identification of a juridical category of “indigenous land” defined by the 1988 Constitution of Brazil. The main argument developed in this article starts with the assumption that in the contemporary situation the definition of public categories that involves cultural and social rights of minorities, such as terra indígena, have been defined in public debates in which anthropologists were involved. One of the necessary results of such a situation is that anthropology cannot see these categories as exogenous concepts to be criticized, but as categories of knowledge to be addressed. A detailed proposition of how I have addressed the issue concerning the delimitation of the seacoast border of the indigenous land of the Tupinambá of Olivença is here developed, showing how ethnography in anthropology is a particularly good device to achieve this challenges. Through the Tupinambá case, it is showed how ethnography as situated knowledge, enmeshed in a comparative project and prepared to incorporate the struggles that people face when dealing with conflict situations, intertwines public and indigenous definitions of social categories (in this case, the land) through what is here named compatible agendas.

Keywords : ethnography and advocacy; indigenous human rights; landscape and sociality; indigenous land; Brazil; Americanist debates.

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