Risky closeness and distance in two fieldwork sites in Brazil

ABSTRACT

This article discusses how closeness and distance affected my ethnographic research in two Brazilian cities. I first address the pitfalls I encountered researching Luz, a run-down transportation hub and residential area in São Paulo’s city centre, also known as Crackland for its drug trade and consumption. In Luz, I was confronted with everyday hostility in an environment of unknown others and an ever-changing cityscape: users of cultural offerings, temporary residents and by-passers, police removal of drug users, house evictions and demolition in deteriorated buildings, and contentious and short-lived state policies with regard to the area. The second part of the article contrasts this experience with living and conducting research in Ouro Preto, a Brazilian UNESCO World heritage site where residents have a strong sense of social cohesion. While, for me, the violence and disorder of Luz made conducting research there impossible, the strong networks and familiarity in Ouro Preto created its own challenges. Drawing on 15 months of fieldwork in these two distinct contexts, I discuss how researchers can face intimidation brought about by both distance from informants and excessive closeness, and how research questions and findings are often limited by such personal possibilities and positions.

KEYWORDS:

• Fieldwork
• Crackland
• Ouro Preto
• methods
• detachment
• closeness

Acknowledgements

I thank the University of St Andrews for the support during ethnographic research in Brazil. My thanks to all informants in both field sites who made my research possible. I wish to thank Alexander Mielke and three anonymous reviewers for valuable comments, and Dr Julten Abdelhalim and Professor Monique Marks for organising this series.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography, at the University of Oxford. With a focus on urban ethnography, Andreza incorporates themes of cultural heritage, informal housing, infrastructure, participatory city planning, social memory and migration into her work. As part of the Urban Transformations Portfolio, she also coordinates cities research projects in Brazil, China, South Africa and India funded by the ESRC. Before arriving in Oxford, she obtained her PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, an MA in Social Sciences at the University of Freiburg, University of KwaZulu Natal and Jawaharlal Nehru University, and a BA in Political Science at the University of Brasilia.

ORCID

Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3585-8683

Notes

1 The Luz area is a polygonal around the Luz train station – the largest in the city – and has a population of more than 11,000 people. The housing re-development project, with attention to cultural and trade schemes, begun to take concrete shape in 2009, when a law of urban concession was approved. The proposed Luz redevelopment revolved around a model of an urban concession to a consortium of construction companies. The idea was based on the consortium’s right to evict residents of specific buildings, demolish some structures and construct new ones that could be sold for profit. In exchange, the consortium had to improve Luz in accordance with a plan agreed upon by City Hall, which included the design of sidewalks, green parks, libraries and other amenities for the city and its inhabitants.

2 My interview partners in Ouro Preto often repeated this Brazilian expression, which in Portuguese is manda quem pode, obedece quem tem juízo. I use the translation that Goldman (2013, p. 54) uses in his book about politics in Brazil.

Additional information

Funding

This author would like to thank Russell Trust Awards; Scottish Funding Council; and University of St Andrews for financing the fieldwork and PhD research.