Histórias das antropologias latino‑americanas: experimentações contemporâneas

International conference, 12-15 June 2023, São Paulo & Campinas

The international conference Histories of Latin American Anthropologies: Contemporary Experiments continues the discussions proposed on the occasion of the conference to launch the international research network, “Transatlantic Histories of Latin American Anthropologies” (IRN, CNRS), held in Paris in June 2022. The IRN is an international network of researchers made up of anthropologists from Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, France and Portugal, all collaborators and associates of BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology. The scientific ambition of the network is to contribute to a transatlantic history of ethnography and anthropology in several Latin American countries (19th–21st centuries) from a comparative perspective, in order to compose a diverse and heterogeneous picture of anthropologies practised in the south of the continent and in the Caribbean area. Without disregarding the contexts of production of anthropological ideas, the term contemporary present in the title of the first conference (Contemporary Histories of Latin American Anthropologies) indicates the uses and meanings of the past within the anthropologies that we do today and that we project for the future. The same spirit presides over this second conference. It aims at recovering historical subjects, concepts and practices to “rethink anthropology” – following the well-known formula of Edmund Leach. Theoretically informed, reflexive histories of anthropology are thus guided by questions of the present, while refusing radical “presentism”, skeptical towards the writing of history, as well as “antiquarian” approaches unrelated to present time, which carry illusions about the study of the past in itself.
This second meeting aims to focus on “contemporary experiments”, which can be of various types: experiments with (and against) history; theoretical and methodological experiments; institutional experiments (museographic and museological experiments); experiments with various types of knowledge (academic and non-academic); also with the natural sciences, arts and literature. In this sense, participants favour case studies allowing wider conclusions to be extracted through an analytical dive and set against each other in the debates and joint reflections. The idea is to go back in time in order to think with historical characters and past experiences, as well as to shed light on recent experiments, paying attention to the transits of knowledge and transatlantic flows; to materials and materialities; to inflections of gender, race and sexuality; and to new museographic knowledge and shared curatorships. The guiding idea of the conference is to radically play with the idea of experimentation, bringing new topics, new actors and their problematics to the fore as a reflection of risky and daring experiments. By listening to them and thinking with them, alternative tools and unexpected memories and histories of anthropology may emerge. The central goal of this meeting is thus to review – and play with – the diverse anthropologies developed in Latin America, and to consider their potential for a broader reflection on anthropological knowledge and its reconfigurations.

N. B. Free admission.


 Download the program. PDF