Becoming a repair entrepreneur: an ethnography of skills training in Brazil

Abstract

Santa Efigênia in São Paulo is an important Latin American hub for buying and selling electronics. This article draws on long-term fieldwork to discuss repair training in the neighbourhood. While scholars have looked at formal and informal educational spaces, this article looks at a new kind of institution that creatively combines aspects of street repair and high-end information technology services. Individuals from all over Brazil seek out this popular private school with the expectation of becoming self-employed cellphone technicians. The article starts with a description of repair practices in Santa Efigênia and an analysis of the barriers to and accessibility of repair knowledge, including for the female ethnographer. It then centres on the school’s training sessions, examining how students are prepared to become repair entrepreneurs through a mix of technical skills and para-technical concerns with ­aesthetics, logistical speed and networking. I show that this school redraws communities of practice, bringing new actors into repair while excluding others along social divisions of race, class, and gender. Engaging with critiques of the neoliberal push for entrepreneurship in development, I consider the contradictions of this institution, concluding with a discussion of how this case offers insights into the democratisation and dissemination of repair knowledge.

Keywords:

• Electronics repair
• entrepreneurship
• gender
• inequality
• information and communication technologies
• qualitative methods

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Hugh Raffles, Mara Mills, Miriam Ticktin, Ivan da Costa Marques, and Alexios Tsigkas for the thoughtful conversations about this research. I am also grateful to the editors, especially Trent Brown and Geert De Neve, and the anonymous reviewers for their time and constructive comments. Previous versions of this article received valuable feedback from participants in The Social Life of Skills Workshop organised by the University of Melbourne, the Histories of Maintenance and Repair Workshop organised by the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History at the University of Luxembourg, and the 2020 Graduate Student Conference of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Please note that ‘Efigênia’ is sometimes spelled as ‘Ifigênia’. The inconsistency stems from the fact that the neighbourhood bears the same name as its central street. Following a suggestion made by one of my interlocutors, throughout this article I will use ‘Efigênia’ to refer to the neighbourhood and ‘Ifigênia’ to refer to the central street.

2 Interview with a representative of the Santa Ifigênia Chamber of Shopkeepers, April 2019.

3 Interview with Ibrahim conducted in collaboration with Dr. Carlos Freire, June 2019.

4 Ethics protocol approved by the Human Research Protection Program of The New School (#2018-1071).

5 Original numbers from September 2019. Conversion from May 2021.

6 The minimum monthly wage in Brazil in 2021 was 1100 Brazilian reais.

7 Fieldnotes, September 2019.

8 Note that Brazil, and São Paulo in particular, has a strong history of public technical and vocational education and training (eg see Weinstein 1996), which is beyond the scope of this article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Liliana Gil

Liliana Gil is Lecturer at the honours college of the National University of Singapore and incoming Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University. An anthropologist by training, her current research focuses on postcolonial and feminist studies of science and technology, with a focus on Brazil and its Global South connections. She has published in American Anthropologist, among other places, and is currently working on a book manuscript provisionally titled Beyond Make-Do Innovation: Practices and Politics of Technological Improvisation in Brazil.