open details

close details

Arlei Sander Damo

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul – Brazil

Ceres Víctora

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul – Brazil

Jean Segata

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul – Brazil

Patrice Schuch

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul – Brazil

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to disrupted and uncertain times. Epidemiological, political, economic and psychosocial effects of the virus are being seen on a global scale. In less than four months, starting in December 2019, thousands of cases of contamination and fatalities have been confirmed in more than 210 countries and territories around the world. The scientific community has responded by rushing to develop forms of treatment and a cure.  Meanwhile, several containment measures have been implemented, interfering with the daily lives of people, businesses, schools and many other institutions. Although SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) follows patterns of transmission similar to other viruses, local structures of inequality may render unique circumstances of dissemination and aggravate the severity of the disease, intensifying its social consequences. Even though COVID-19 is described as a catastrophe on a global scale, it is not an universal experience, rather enacted in many diverse and complex ways, influenced by unique infrastructures, materials, environments, relationships, and local customs. The qualitative and political know-how of social anthropology plays a crucial role in confronting the pandemic. Since COVID-19 is not a homogeneous experience, neither should be the solutions to mitigate the condition. This issue of Horizontes Antropológicos offers an opportunity to explore the multiplicity of COVID-19 from the perspective of theoretical debates and ethnographic experiences that highlight specific knowledges, practices, and lives. Through the publication of papers in a special format up to 4,200 words we encourage authors to intersect these anthropologies of a pandemic with different fields and subjects that constitute the plurality of the discipline, with special emphasis on contexts of vulnerability and social injustice.

open details

close details

Claudia Fonseca

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul – Brazil

Diana Marre

Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona – Spain

Fernanda Rifiotis

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul – Brazil

In keeping with the notion of reproductive governance, we propose in this thematic issue to discuss how, in different historical and geopolitical configurations, actors (individuals, experts, collectivities, institutions) employ moral, legislative, economic, political and social mechanisms to mold sentiments and behaviors traditionally associated with the notions of family and kinship. This approach includes contributions from classical anthropology, but also benefits from more recent lines of analysis – coming from feminist, post-colonialist, gay and lesbian, and science and technology studies – that evoke circumstantial forms of relatedness involved in the “intimate” spheres of family relations, sentiments of identity and belonging, and reproductive behavior. Our aim is to bring together recent ethnographic studies focused on theoretical and methodological issues in different national and international contexts that consider, for example: plural family forms and relations of interdependence in everyday care; parenthood, siblingship, substances and processes that compose family ties; public policies and modes of institutional administration that affect sexual and reproductive practices; memory and transgenerational transmission; new reproductive technologies; stratified reproduction and reproductive justice.

open details

close details

Eduardo Dullo

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul – Brazil

Patrícia Ferraz de Matos

Universidade de Lisboa – Portugal

Frederico Delgado Rosa

Universidade Nova de Lisboa – Portugal

This thematic issue intends to contribute towards a reassessment of the past of anthropology in a broad sense, by understanding the knowledge and ethnographic practices that precede or complement scientific institutionalization, also including features of amateurism and experimentalism in varied and interconnected contexts. We do not seek only a post-colonial criticism of the attempts to survey and analyse human variability, but rather to examine the contributions in their own time and place, in the historical dynamics of anthropology. This issue is open to case studies focused on peripheral, external or off-centre anthropological traditions as compared to the so-called “major traditions”: we seek to pay special attention to the lusophone and Ibero-American contexts (including all Latin America), considering not only their intersections, but also the fact that they are often excluded from hegemonic historiographic narratives. It is a comparative reflexion on the historical antecedents of the current paradigm of world anthropologies in the 19^th and 20^th centuries (up to the 1970s) and dissemination of anthropological praxis. The sub-disciplinary field is that of the history of anthropology, while it invites interdisciplinarity between anthropology, history, history of science and historical anthropology, and encourages dialogue through a re-reading of ethnographic and anthropological texts from different places, times and dimensions.