State violence and the ethnographic encounter: feminist research and racial embodiment

Abstract

This article explores the idea that black urban communities in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, particularly women, are currently under siege. This article examines the confinement and silencing of the anthropologist within the overall context of State policing of black communities and black women-led grassroots movements in Salvador. I argue that engaged research methods should be analyzed within the context of the violence of recent urbanization practices and systemic, as well as everyday practices of police abuse. This analysis illuminates the extent to which racial and gendered dimensions of State-sponsored urban violence in Brazil poses political challenges for ethnography aimed at social change. Furthermore, in a methodology based on the experiential, as well as the feminist position that the ‘personal as political’, in this article I draw upon my own experiences and subject position as a black woman to explicate how anthropologists’ bodies are marked by race, gender, and class – thereby mediating how they access the material resources of social movement activists. I suggest that feminist research, while urgent for black social movements, necessitates the anthropologist working with social movement actors, in solidarity, to negotiate ‘dangerous fields’.

Keywords:

• feminist research
• activist anthropology
• black women
• violence
• Brazil

Acknowledgements

I extend my deepest gratitude to Robert Adams, Dayo Mitchell, and Christen Smith who read earlier versions of this article and offered key insights that improved its analytical and ethnographic scope.

Notes

1. According to a 2008 Human Rights Watch universal periodic report of Brazil ‘police violence – including excessive use of force, extrajudicial executions, torture and other forms of ill-treatment – persists as one of Brazil's most intractable human rights problems’.

2. I find Charles R. Hale's (2001) definition of activist research useful for this analysis. Hale characterizes activist research to include, though not limited to, three main objectives: a) helps us better to understand the root causes of inequality, oppression, violence and related conditions of human suffering; b) is carried out, at each phase from conception through dissemination, in direct cooperation with an organized collective of people who themselves are subject to these conditions; c) is used, together with the people in question, to formulate strategies for transforming these conditions and to achieve the power necessary to make these strategies effective (p. 13).

3. Kovats-Bernat (2002) defines ‘dangerous fields’ as ‘those sites where social relationships and cultural realities are critically modified by the pervasion of fear, threat of force, or (ir)regular application of violence and where customary approaches, methods, and ethics of anthropological fieldwork are at times insufficient, irrelevant, inapplicable’ (p. 208).

4. In the anthology Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics (2001), editor Irma McClaurin explains that black feminist anthropological theory and praxis follow in the black intellectual tradition of conceptualizing the African diaspora and processes of diasporic community building and survival (p. 9). She writes ‘this diasporic perspective is evident in the way that Black feminist anthropologists’ ethnography is designed to look outward (at Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Europe), a direction consistent with the aims of the conventional anthropological gaze, and simultaneously to look inward (at the United States), in keeping with the aims of a Black intellectual tradition’ (p. 9). In essence, black feminist anthropology has been profoundly impacted by African Diaspora Studies and the theorization of the interrelationship between race, gender, and nation.

5. In a recently published book chapter, ‘Politics is uma Coisinha de Mulher (a Woman's Thing): Black Women's Leadership in Neighborhood Movements in Brazil’ in Latin American Social Movements in the Twenty-First Century: Resistance, Power, and Democracy (2008), I explain how neighborhood politics in Gamboa de Baixo and other urban neighborhoods developed as women's political terrain. In Gamboa de Baixo, since the post-military dictatorship organization of the Women's Association of the early 1980s, politics has been considered ‘women's work’.

6. Odrebrecht is a major multinational real estate developer known for its luxury construction projects in Brazil. It is known for its extensive airport renovations such as in Atlanta prior to the 2002 Olympics, in Haiti after the recent devastating earthquake, and massive redevelopment projects in post-war Angola. The company has been celebrated for its role in redevelopment the world's infrastructure more that it has been criticized. Oftentimes, this is because little attention has been given the small communities or homeless populations that are displaced during redevelopment processes being carried out by Odrebrecht and many other development firms.

7. As one newspaper article noted, 60.9 percent of household incomes of residents in closed condominiums are greater than 20 minimum salaries (20 times 300 reais; 1U$ = 1.7 reais) while 42 percent of residents in neighborhoods like Nordeste de Amaralina are classified as poor (A Tarde, 15 March 2007). Activists in Gamboa de Baixo argue that the poverty index in their neighborhood exceeds 50 percent.

8. The original quote from the ‘Carta Aberta (Open Letter)’ in Portuguese:

Com muita luta em busca da cidadania negada, nós, povo da Gamboa de Baixo temos resistido a estas e muitas outras demonstrações de discriminação social e racial. Somos negros e negras que temos nossa identidade negada, compomos uma grande massa de trabalhadores desempregados e ainda somos os alvos preferenciais da violência institucionalizada, ou seja, das polícias. Nossa comunidade sobrevive aterrorizada, sem segurança, sem ter a quem recorrer no que diz respeito à garantia dos nossos direitos. Como se já não bastasse os muitos de nós que foram vitimados pela continua violência da ausência de políticas públicas, os abusos e torturas físicas e psicológicas estão acontecendo com mais freqüência em nossa comunidade.