56 | Imitation, simulation and counterfeit

56 | Imitation, simulation and counterfeit

year 26, n. 56, Jan./Apr. 2020

Ruben George Oliven

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul – Brazil

Arlei Sander Damo

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul – Brazil

Louise Scoz Pasteur de Faria

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul – Brazil

The mimetic faculty of human beings has interested anthropologists since the beginning of the discipline. The ability to create a second nature, to copy, imitate, cheat, simulate, disguise, deceive, and even counterfeit is closely linked to the production of difference.

Since Mauss coined the concept of prestigious imitation, when analyzing the uses of the body, this term has been central to the social sciences. Imitation is not only a form of educating the senses to perform everyday tasks but also a mechanism of social interaction and regulation. Individuals borrow a series of movements executed by others and embody those that have been successfully performed by people who have the confidence and above all the authority over them.

An illuminating ethnographic example of the analytic and reflexive power of imitation is Hauka, a movement of a religious sect that originated in the 1920s in French colonies in Africa and whose possession rituals involved imitating French officers and appropriating the symbols of power. Anthropological readings of Hauka opened research paths that still resonate in contemporary productions, emphasizing the creative, political and subversive potential of imitation.

To imitate, copy and simulate are practices that involve a degree of fascination and danger. Becoming another is to embody their character and is therefore an act of knowledge and power that enables us to invent ourselves in our social existence. However, the copy also suspends norms and values that organize our experience and its critical potency awakes a multitude of accusatory reactions and moral panic.

Nowadays, there are numerous debates that explore the thin line between real and false: counterfeit of consumption goods and medicines; policies of combating piracy; the invention of cultural traditions, the circulation of rumors, urban legends and fake news; the creation of fake internet profiles, the debate on plagiarism; forgery of works of art, historical documents, photographs, and coins.

This issue of Horizontes Antropológicos is open to theoretical and empirical contributions that reflect on imitation, simulation and counterfeit in local and global contexts of research.

Projected date of publication: April 2020
Submission of articles closed in 31th January 2019

57 | Anthropology of biosecurity

57 | Anthropology of biosecurity

year 26, n. 57, May/Aug. 2020

Jean Segata

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul – Brazil

Andrea Mastrangelo

Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas – Argentina

Sanitary and environmental emergencies have gathered the attention of anthropology. Vector diseases and zoonoses such as Leishmaniasis, American Trypanosomiasis, Dengue, Yellow Fever, Zika, Chikungunya, Malaria and Influenza, or epidemics, pandemics, disasters and environmental and food contamination are some of the situations that are in the focus of state health department actions for the control, prevention or surveillance of humans, animals, artifacts and environments. Furthermore, biosafety policies and practices have been produced from the global infrastructures of science, technology, and their international corporations, and at the same time involve local relations between nature and society. However, in some cases, these policies act as science experiments extended to the world, without discussing with local knowledge and practices, and in most cases their implementation has been based on discourses that turn nature into a threat to society or on the perverse association between poverty, risk and vulnerability. Moreover, in this sense, in particular, the interface with health allows us to address dense complexities between humans and nonhumans, intermediated by different actors such as mosquitoes, poisons, traps, antibiotics, transgenic, vaccines among others, as well as diagnostic models, campaigns and actions of prevention, control and combat. The anthropological attention to the articulation between human, animal and environmental health allows analyzes that cross and embroil national-state domains, international borders, economics, rights and moralities, from different fields of interest such as biopolitics and micro biopolitics, human-animal and multispecies relations, indigenous ethnology, global health, science anthropology or new digital technologies. In that way, this issue of Horizontes Antropológicos is inscribed in an intersection between different matters and fields that deal with contemporary and future issues for ethnography and anthropological theory like environment, risk and disaster, medical and health anthropology.

Projected date of publication: June 2020
Submission of articles closed in 31th May 2019

58 | Historical anthropology and indigenous people

58 | Historical anthropology and indigenous people

year 26, n. 58, Sept./Dec. 2020

Pablo Quintero

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul – Brazil

João Pacheco de Oliveira

Museu Nacional/Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro – Brazil

The indigenous people have been systematically considered stagnant and primitive societies. The only tools for the comprehension of the latter were therefore restricted to the exotization of differences, the cultural relativization, and the negation of coetaneity between researchers and their research topic. The poetic and political aspects of these representations are mainly inspired by the colonial culture and used by the media, but also by social science scholars and contemporary ethnology research groups.

Originating from a critical movement within the social sciences, the so-called historical anthropology is defined as a field of research with new study themes, methodologies and knowledge protocols. It aims to contribute improving the visibility of indigenous people as political and social actors within specific historical situations by means of an analytical movement taking into account the fact that the culture does not imply historicity denial or reflexivity omission.

This research method about – and with! – the indigenous people induces a double epistemological movement considering the past as an ethnographic problem which analyses the present as a historical problem. Considering this approach, the issue of this number of Horizontes Antropológicos aims at receiving articles based on ethnographic works that consider the indigenous people from the point of view of their historical-procedural dimensions and their political strategies. Theoretical articles establishing a debate between anthropology and History are also very welcome.

Projected date of publication: September 2020
Submission of articles closed in 30th September 2019

59 | Anthropology of children

59 | Anthropology of children

year 27, n. 59, Jan./Apr. 2021

Patrice Schuch

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul – Brazil

Fernanda Rifiotis

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul – Brazil

Clarice Cohn

Universidade Federal de São Carlos – Brazil

Fernanda Ribeiro

Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul – Brazil

The anthropology of children has developed in the last decades and presently represents a flourishing and fertile field in which very diverse research work has been done. Considering that researching about and with children means both doing anthropology and raising specific issues to this field from a theoretical, conceptual and methodological innovation perspective of the discipline, this thematic issue proposes to assemble different studies that point to the diversity of the area itself. Over the last decades, it has been shown that children have much to reveal in research, not only for their own sake but also for shedding some light on essential points in the field of study that would be obliterated otherwise by not taking into account their points of view and their actions. Besides, their protagonism and their role as subjects have been the background to encourage the several efforts of anthropological reflection made with and about them.

This thematic issue proposes to gather works focusing on how children develop as subjects so as to map and discuss the theoretical and methodological challenges in the field of Anthropology of Children. As a way of producing a thematic issue which can bring together studies that despite published more dispersively have gained attention in academic events through Working Groups, Round Tables and Symposia dedicated to the theme, we are interested in bringing forward the potential of children to reveal what is not always addressed by studies focusing exclusively on adults. We would like to receive works on different kinds of childhood with their related themes – urban, peasant, quilombola, indigenous, gypsy, landless, settled, working, school-going, institutionalized, middle and high class children – to raise questions about gender, race, specific rights, and state subjugation. We stress the importance of thinking about the rights and protection of these subjects, as well as about the “subjects of these rights” and their “social protagonism.” From this perspective, the thematic issue proposal is to collect recent ethnographic research that raises theoretical, methodological and ethical discussions in different national and international contexts, embracing: studies that promote theoretical and methodological reflections on research done with children; studies that take into account children’s development experiences as subjects; studies that undertake analyzes of public policies aimed at these subjects or even contexts in which the State itself violates their rights; studies that discuss childhood concepts; studies that address the problem of children’s relationship to the technologies of government and studies that put in perspective the question of the protection and rights of these subjects and their social role.

Projected date of publication: January 2021