New from BEROSE: Historicizing Anthropology under and beyond Bolsonaro, by A.C. Souza Lima et al.

HAR is pleased to announce two complementary articles (in English) on recent and crucial chapters in the history of Brazilian Anthropology in the (newly renamed) Encyclopédie Bérose des histoires de l’anthropologie.

De Souza Lima, Antonio Carlos, & Caio Gonçalves Dias, 2025. “Waking the Zombies: Anthropology in Ultra /Neoliberal Brazil,” Encyclopédie Bérose des histoires de l’anthropologie.

Tambascia, Christiano Key, Fernanda Arêas Peixoto, & Gustavo Rossi, 2025. “What’s the Story? Contemporary Brazilian Experimentations and Alternative Histories of Anthropology,” Encyclopédie Bérose des histoires de l’anthropologie.

What does anthropology have to say in neoliberal contexts, in postcolonial states marked by extractivism and the wholesale violation of rights? What can be done to awaken realistic perceptions in a world irrigated by fake news and anti-scientism? With a focus on the Brazilian case, these articles explore the connections between ultra/neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and the challenges faced by anthropology in defending its epistemological, theoretical, and ethical frameworks.

Souza Lima and Gonçalves Dias consider Brazilian anthropology from the 19^th century to the present day: Once a science that served the interests of slave-owning elites in the exclusionary conception of a nation that would “become whitened and civilized,” modern anthropology in Brazil reinvented itself in the struggle to overcome the country’s corporate-military dictatorial regime (1964–1989). Anthropologists were then privileged interlocutors in the struggles for human rights and the territorial recognition of Indigenous and quilombola peoples, as well as those segments of the Brazilian population that were differentiated in terms of ethnicity, race, gender, and sexuality.

However, recent history (2016–2022) has revealed that the broad foundation of authoritarianism and violence upon which contemporary Brazil is based has led to the resurgence of dark scenarios. The advance of ultra-neoliberal and neoconservative forces has put the discipline under attack, especially in the fierce disputes over the demarcation of ethnically differentiated lands, a process in which the expert work of anthropologists has been fundamental. This article analyzes how the profession has faced these pressures, preserving a scientific and ethical commitment to the populations with which it dialogues, even in the face of direct attacks on its legitimacy, while at the same time seeking to transfer knowledge to broader Brazilian society as a whole. Published within HITAL – Transatlantic History of Latin American Anthropologies / International Research Network – INSHS (CNRS), directed by Christine Laurière; team of the Departamento de Antropologia/Museu Nacional/UFRJ, LACED, directed by Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima. Published as part of the research theme “History of Anthropologies in Brazil,” directed by Stefania Capone (CNRS, CREDA) and Fernanda Arêas Peixoto (Universidade de São Paulo).

Anchored in the examination of anthropological experiments that have taken place in Brazil over the last two decades, the second article proposes a reflective exercise on current ways of thinking about and doing the history of anthropology. Tambascia, Peixoto, and Rossi are interested in revisiting theoretical and methodological challenges faced by practitioners in this field of study, considered in the light of specific anthropologies practiced in contemporary Brazil. Stimulated by a set of questions and transformations that have marked Brazilian anthropology in the last two decades, they propose an expanded reflection on the ways in which intellectual and politically engaged experiences (and experiments) in the present have an impact not only on the historical imagination of anthropology, but also on the broader examination of anthropological knowledge and its reconfigurations.

Understanding recent anthropological experiments is inseparable from the transformations brought about by the affirmative action policies implemented in the country, which have ensured greater access to Brazilian universities for Black, Indigenous and transgender people; these transformations impact not only on the social and ethnic-racial profile of students and researchers, but also on research agendas and conceptions of what it means to teach and produce anthropology today. In this context, anthropological knowledge is increasingly being questioned by subjects who were historically positioned, not as the possible interpreters of Brazilian anthropology, but as its “objects”—as the “Other.” In Brazil and from Brazil, therefore, and without intending to provide exhaustive frameworks, Tambascia, Peixoto, and Rossi question how, in projecting new ways of practicing and teaching anthropology, the new generations of anthropologists redesign genealogies, take up past examples and reimagine history, helping to project futures and to create worlds and counter-worlds.

Published within HITAL – Transatlantic History of Latin American Anthropologies / International Research Network – INSHS (CNRS), directed by Christine Laurière; team of the USP/Unicamp, directed by Fernanda Peixoto, Gustavo Rossi, Christiano Tambascia. Published as part of the research theme “History of Anthropologies in Brazil,” directed by Stefania Capone (CNRS, CREDA) and Fernanda Arêas Peixoto (Universidade de São Paulo).