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WORLD ANTHROPOLOGICAL UNION

CONGRESS 2024​

Paper

Brazilian anthropology and its narcissistic pact of whiteness: between silences and transformations

presenters

    João Paulo Siqueira de Araújo

    Nationality: Brasil

    Residence: DF

    Universidade de Brasília

    Presence:Face to Face/ On Site

Keywords:

racism; university; subjectivity; positionality; transformation

Abstract:

This paper discuss the racial crossings in the production of Brazilian anthropological knowledge, constructed in the encounter with a certain otherness. First of all, I'm interested in mapping out who is this transparent "I" and this "Other" who are, respectively, the producer and the object of anthropological work. Although classic authors deny exoticism as the foundation of the hegemonic notion of Brazilian anthropology, I point out that this hierarchy was reproduced with the "internal natives" based on social markers of inequality, in other words, reinforcing whites in the position of producers of knowledge and listing blacks, indigenous people and quilombolas as objects to be studied. However, this hierarchy is not explicitly, I use the concept of whiteness to describe this modus operandi, especially the Narcissistic Pact among white Brazilians. From a decolonial perspective, I understand the white populations of Western Europe and Brazil as provincial racial groups, and that this position also produces an analytical bias, although it is projected that this is only done by researchers of minority groups - a discussion that has only gained momentum since the affirmative politic for blacks in universities. My hypothesis is that the narcissistic pact of whiteness has generated, not always conscious violence, refractory impacts on the inclusion of black and indigenous people in the discipline as researchers. To discuss this, I mobilize a recent ethnographic experience in dialogue with the productions of black and indigenous anthropologists who, in the encounter with the white alterity of anthropologists at the University, identified implicit violent practices, like paternalistic behavior and epistemicide. Finally, I present the non-essentialized potential of racial parity in research, of blacks and whites, and the urgency of an ethical-political commitment to the racialization of whiteness and the deconstruction of whiteness as possible means of transforming anthropology into an honest and multi-epistemic.