Videos by Leticia Cesarino
Presentation at the Roundtable: Authoritarianism and Digitalization: Paradoxes, Entanglements, Pr... more Presentation at the Roundtable: Authoritarianism and Digitalization: Paradoxes, Entanglements, Practices (Convenor: Nurhak Polat)
Biannual Conference of the German Anthropological Association (GAA / DGSKA): "Worlds. Zones. Atmospheres. Seismographies of the Anthropocene“, University of Bremen, 27 - 30.09.2021
My English is not that bad. I was very tired that day :) 45 views
Lecture papers by Leticia Cesarino
Keynote delivered at the II Populism and Conspiracy Theory (PACT) Conference at Tübingen Universi... more Keynote delivered at the II Populism and Conspiracy Theory (PACT) Conference at Tübingen University, September 15, 2022.
In the past year or so, I'm sure many of you have had to transfer your research to online environ... more In the past year or so, I'm sure many of you have had to transfer your research to online environments in part or in full, and are struggling to make the most out of a fieldwork that never quite feels like doing 'real' ethnography. The fact however is that new media technologies have become an integral part of many of our interlocutors' practices and worldviews, as well as our own. Today, digital anthropology is less a sub-field than as a transversal concern to our discipline's full spectrum of research possibilities. The internet is no longer the site of a separate culture-cyberculture-, but a complex, multi-scalar cybernetic apparatus whose rhythm and logic has influenced the pace and shape of human cognition and behavior in virtually all domains of our lives: from the most intimate to the most public. In fact, platforms operate by disintermediating and reintermediating domains that have been foundational for anthropological knowledge and method: public and private; individual and collective; human, animal and machine; authentic and spurious; freedom and control. In this presentation, I'll tackle one aspect of these processes, which concerns how platforms unsettle conventional ways of understanding and practicing agency, causality, boundary-making and authenticity. [Slide 2] What anthropologist Crystal Abidin recently called 'refracted publics' is not about a fixed spatial layer of the internet, but indicates 'below the radar' dynamics whereby users play with the internet's multi-layered topologies and their unstable, transactionable visibilities, yielding unintended, but nonetheless systemic effects, that are nonlinear, performative, and uncanny. This calls for renewing our methodological and conceptual toolkit, for instance towards compounding qualitative and computational methods-as in Gray, Bounegru and Venturini's proposal for approaching what they call the internet's 'infrastructural uncanny'. Here I'll suggest how anthropology's contradictory historical constitution-of being a four-field social science, which offers both the most particular and the most general perspective on culture-puts the discipline in a good position to tackle many such challenges in creative ways.
Book Chapters by Leticia Cesarino
Populism and Conspiracy Theory: Case Studies and Theoretical Perspectives, 2024
This chapter suggests that much of what we recognize today as conspiracy theory involves a techni... more This chapter suggests that much of what we recognize today as conspiracy theory involves a technical dimension stemming from its material embedding in new cybernetic media. It does so by bringing anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s ecology of mind approach to bear on a mixed-methods analysis of far-right publics in Brazil. Drawing on James Gibson’s ecology of perception, it proposes the notion of conspiratorial affordances in order to make sense of how the logic of algorithmic architectures feeds into conspiracy semiotics, and vice versa. It champions the ecological approach as a promising generative path toward bridging some of the “great divides” in conspiracy theory studies between conjunctural/historical/socio-cultural and structural/psychological/statistic analyses.
Metodologia e Relações Internacionais - Vol. 4, 2023
Corruption and Illiberal Politics in the Trump Era (Goldstein and Drybread, orgs.), 2022
Researching South-South Development Cooperation: The Politics of Knowledge Production, 2019
Sautchuk, Carlos (org.). Técnica e Transformação: perspectivas antropológicas. Brasília; Publicaç... more Sautchuk, Carlos (org.). Técnica e Transformação: perspectivas antropológicas. Brasília; Publicações ABA.
Intercultural Communication and Science and Technology Studies, 2017
This reader on energy has a point of view. It is anthropological in that anthropology is a field ... more This reader on energy has a point of view. It is anthropological in that anthropology is a field linked to the natural and social sciences and the humanities. Yet, most of the authors included in this reader are not anthropologists. They are physicists, philosophers, economists, engineers, businesspeople, historians, and more.
Research Articles by Leticia Cesarino
Latin American Perspectives, 2023
An in-depth ethnographic account of the online ecosystem that emerged around early treatment for ... more An in-depth ethnographic account of the online ecosystem that emerged around early treatment for COVID-19 in Brazil suggests that, rather than being made up of straightforward science deniers, this community may be best understood as a kind of "alt-science" that grew from the margins of mainstream science and policy making by taking advantage of the voids opened up by the pandemic state of scientific exception and the Bolsonaro government's reckless handling of the pandemic. Digital platforms have been key enablers of this process, affording the proliferation of early-treatment knowledge practices on a fold not just between medical science and populist politics but between these and bottom-up forms of neoliberal "fast policy," entrepreneurialism, and patient activism. Um relato etnográfico aprofundado do ecossistema online que surgiu em torno do tratamento precoce para COVID-19 no Brasil sugere que, em vez de ser composta por negacionistas explícitos da ciência, essa comunidade pode ser melhor compreendida como uma espécie de "alt-science". Ela cresceu às margens da ciência dominante e das políticas públicas, aproveitando o vácuo aberto pelo estado de exceção científico e pelo tratamento negligente da pandemia pelo governo Bolsonaro. As plataformas digitais têm sido os principais facilitadores desse processo, permitindo a proliferação de práticas de conhecimento de tratamento precoce em uma dobra não apenas entre a ciência médica e a política populista, mas entre essas e as formas de "política rápida" neoliberal a partir de baixo, empreendedorismo e ativismo de pacientes.
Revista de Estudos Brasileiros, 2022
Link para o artigo completo: https://www.revistas.usp.br/rieb/article/view/201360
Caderno CRH, 2021
Link para o artigo completo: https://www.scielo.br/j/ccrh/a/9cxXP4r9pj6NHPkTKZVgqzc/
O artigo ab... more Link para o artigo completo: https://www.scielo.br/j/ccrh/a/9cxXP4r9pj6NHPkTKZVgqzc/
O artigo aborda como a inflexão populista-autoritária do neoliberalismo global tem ganhado tração no Bra-sil ao se friccionar com sua densidade histórica pós-colonial, marcada pela disjunção entre ideais liberais, igualitários e universalistas, e uma realidade social desigual e particularista. Volta-se especialmente à con-vergência infraestrutural entre neoliberalização e plataformização, que, ao consolidar uma temporalidade paradoxal de crise permanente, abre espaço para ressonâncias com “forças e poderes” que também operam de forma não linear, segundo a metafísica da desordem, como os diversos modos de nostalgia, milenarismo e tradicionalismo que acompanham a ascensão da direita radical pelo mundo. Argumento a partir de dois momentos do bolsonarismo: o messianismo populista nas eleições de 2018 e sua rotinização paradoxal en-quanto governo parasítico na pandemia da Covid-19, que opera numa temporalidade de exceção. Sugere-se que, diante da deriva iliberal do neoliberalismo contemporâneo, o bolsonarismo lança o Brasil à vanguarda, colocando as ideias “de volta no lugar”.
Civitas - Revista de Ciências Sociais, 2021
O artigo transpõe para a antropologia digital o argumento polêmico de Tim Ingold de que “antropo... more O artigo transpõe para a antropologia digital o argumento polêmico de Tim Ingold de que “antropologia não é etnografia”, reivindicando a vocação transdisciplinar da disciplina nos “quatro campos” a partir da perspectiva que Gregory Bateson chamou de explicação cibernética. Ilustra as possibilidades dessa abordagem explorando a produtividade de noções da teoria antropológica clássica para lançar luz sobre alguns dos efeitos antiestruturais – não pretendidos, porém sistêmicos – da plataformização.
Digital War
The polarizing tendency of politically leaned social media is usually claimed to be spontaneous, ... more The polarizing tendency of politically leaned social media is usually claimed to be spontaneous, or a by-product of underlying platform algorithms. This contribution revisits both claims by articulating the digital world of social media and rules derived from capitalist accumulation in the post-Fordist age, from a transdisciplinary perspective articulating the human and exact sciences. Behind claims of individual freedom, there is a rigid pyramidal hierarchy of power heavily using military techniques developed in the late years of the cold war, namely Russia Reflexive Control and the Boyd's decision cycle in the USA. This hierarchy is not the old-style "command-and-control" from Fordist times, but an "emergent" one, whereby individual agents respond to informational stimuli, coordinated to move as a swarm. Such a post-Fordist organizational structure resembles guerrilla warfare. In this new world, it is the far right who plays the revolutionaries by deploying avantgarde guerrilla methods, while the so-called left paradoxically appears as conservatives defending the existing structure of exploitation. Although the tactical goal is unclear, the strategic objective of far-right guerrillas is to hold on to power and benefit particular groups to accumulate more capital. We draw examples from the Brazilian far right to support our claims.
Ilha - Revista de Antropologia
Este artigo busca contribuir para "limpar o terreno" das discussões contemporâneas sobre pós-verd... more Este artigo busca contribuir para "limpar o terreno" das discussões contemporâneas sobre pós-verdade, propondo uma explicação do tipo "cibernética" (Gregory Bateson) para o amplo espectro de fenômenos que tem recaído recentemente sob este rótulo. Com base em estudos clássicos do campo CTS, em especial Thomas Kuhn e Bruno Latour, defino pós-verdade como aumento da entropia informacional decorrente de transformações profundas nas estruturas mediacionais das nossas sociedades. A partir daí, busco estender um argumento anterior de que a pós-verdade demonstra convergências estruturais importantes não apenas com os populismos contemporâneos mas como o "neoliberalismo realmente existente", quando este é visto através de um prisma epistêmico. Sugiro, ainda, que todos esses processos compartilham um mesmo campo de complexidades emergente, decorrente de alterações profundas na infraestrutura mediacional das nossas sociedades, com a expansão extensiva (global) e intensiva (na relação com os indivíduos) da chamada "revolução digital" na última década.
https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/ilha/article/view/75630
Trabalhos em Linguística Aplicada, 2020
Texto completo disponível em: https://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0103-18132... more Texto completo disponível em: https://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0103-18132020000100404&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en
In the past decade or so, populism and social media have been outstanding issues both in academia and the public sphere. At this point, evidence from multiple countries suggest that perceived parallels between the dynamics of social media and the mechanics of populist discourse may be more than just incidental, relating to a shared structural field. This article suggests one possible path towards making sense of how the dynamics of social media and the mechanics of populist mobilization have co-produced each other in the last decade or so. Navigating the interface between anthropology and linguistics, it takes key aspects of Victor Turner's notion of liminality to suggest some of the ways in which social media's anti-structural affordances may help lay a foundation for the contemporary flourishing of populist discourse: markers of social structure are suspended; communitas is formed; the culture core is addressed; mimesis and anti-structural inversions are performed; subjects become influenceable. I elaborate on this claim based on Brazilian materials, drawn from online ethnography on pro-Bolsonaro WhatsApp groups and other platforms such as Twitter and Facebook since 2018.
Internet & Sociedade, 2020
Desde ao menos a eleição de Trump e o referendo sobre o Brexit, o tema do populismo voltou à tona... more Desde ao menos a eleição de Trump e o referendo sobre o Brexit, o tema do populismo voltou à tona com grande força ao debate público e acadêmico. Este artigo busca avançar a discussão com base na experiência eleitoral brasileira de 2018, onde, em contraste com os eventos de 2016, interveio de modo significativo o aplicativo WhatsApp. Baseado em dez meses de pesquisa online em redes sociais bolsonaristas, o presente estudo avança o conceito de populismo digital para pensar as particularidades e efeitos da digitalização contemporânea do mecanismo populista clássico descrito por Ernesto Laclau e Chantal Mouffe, articulando-o com noções da cibernética, teorias de sistemas e teoria antropológica.
Revista de Antropologia, 2019
Este artigo aborda a profunda reorganização do campo político-identitário no Brasil, que vinha se... more Este artigo aborda a profunda reorganização do campo político-identitário no Brasil, que vinha sendo avançada gradualmente através de redes sociais, mas que ganhou força e projeção repentinas com a vitória de Jair Bolsonaro nas eleições presidenciais de 2018. Partindo de uma perspectiva cibernética inspirada em Gregory Bateson, explora alguns dos dilemas emergentes que a digitalização da política tem colocado para a dupla problemática da identidade e representação na antropologia, a partir de três ângulos: representação populista e formação do "corpo digital do rei"; bivalência reconhecimento-redistribuição; e formação fractal de identidades por meio de mídias digitais.
[não inseri o PDF para não atrapalhar a métrica da revista. o link para baixar é: https://www.revistas.usp.br/ra/article/view/165232]
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Videos by Leticia Cesarino
Biannual Conference of the German Anthropological Association (GAA / DGSKA): "Worlds. Zones. Atmospheres. Seismographies of the Anthropocene“, University of Bremen, 27 - 30.09.2021
My English is not that bad. I was very tired that day :)
Lecture papers by Leticia Cesarino
Book Chapters by Leticia Cesarino
Research Articles by Leticia Cesarino
O artigo aborda como a inflexão populista-autoritária do neoliberalismo global tem ganhado tração no Bra-sil ao se friccionar com sua densidade histórica pós-colonial, marcada pela disjunção entre ideais liberais, igualitários e universalistas, e uma realidade social desigual e particularista. Volta-se especialmente à con-vergência infraestrutural entre neoliberalização e plataformização, que, ao consolidar uma temporalidade paradoxal de crise permanente, abre espaço para ressonâncias com “forças e poderes” que também operam de forma não linear, segundo a metafísica da desordem, como os diversos modos de nostalgia, milenarismo e tradicionalismo que acompanham a ascensão da direita radical pelo mundo. Argumento a partir de dois momentos do bolsonarismo: o messianismo populista nas eleições de 2018 e sua rotinização paradoxal en-quanto governo parasítico na pandemia da Covid-19, que opera numa temporalidade de exceção. Sugere-se que, diante da deriva iliberal do neoliberalismo contemporâneo, o bolsonarismo lança o Brasil à vanguarda, colocando as ideias “de volta no lugar”.
https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/ilha/article/view/75630
In the past decade or so, populism and social media have been outstanding issues both in academia and the public sphere. At this point, evidence from multiple countries suggest that perceived parallels between the dynamics of social media and the mechanics of populist discourse may be more than just incidental, relating to a shared structural field. This article suggests one possible path towards making sense of how the dynamics of social media and the mechanics of populist mobilization have co-produced each other in the last decade or so. Navigating the interface between anthropology and linguistics, it takes key aspects of Victor Turner's notion of liminality to suggest some of the ways in which social media's anti-structural affordances may help lay a foundation for the contemporary flourishing of populist discourse: markers of social structure are suspended; communitas is formed; the culture core is addressed; mimesis and anti-structural inversions are performed; subjects become influenceable. I elaborate on this claim based on Brazilian materials, drawn from online ethnography on pro-Bolsonaro WhatsApp groups and other platforms such as Twitter and Facebook since 2018.
[não inseri o PDF para não atrapalhar a métrica da revista. o link para baixar é: https://www.revistas.usp.br/ra/article/view/165232]
Biannual Conference of the German Anthropological Association (GAA / DGSKA): "Worlds. Zones. Atmospheres. Seismographies of the Anthropocene“, University of Bremen, 27 - 30.09.2021
My English is not that bad. I was very tired that day :)
O artigo aborda como a inflexão populista-autoritária do neoliberalismo global tem ganhado tração no Bra-sil ao se friccionar com sua densidade histórica pós-colonial, marcada pela disjunção entre ideais liberais, igualitários e universalistas, e uma realidade social desigual e particularista. Volta-se especialmente à con-vergência infraestrutural entre neoliberalização e plataformização, que, ao consolidar uma temporalidade paradoxal de crise permanente, abre espaço para ressonâncias com “forças e poderes” que também operam de forma não linear, segundo a metafísica da desordem, como os diversos modos de nostalgia, milenarismo e tradicionalismo que acompanham a ascensão da direita radical pelo mundo. Argumento a partir de dois momentos do bolsonarismo: o messianismo populista nas eleições de 2018 e sua rotinização paradoxal en-quanto governo parasítico na pandemia da Covid-19, que opera numa temporalidade de exceção. Sugere-se que, diante da deriva iliberal do neoliberalismo contemporâneo, o bolsonarismo lança o Brasil à vanguarda, colocando as ideias “de volta no lugar”.
https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/ilha/article/view/75630
In the past decade or so, populism and social media have been outstanding issues both in academia and the public sphere. At this point, evidence from multiple countries suggest that perceived parallels between the dynamics of social media and the mechanics of populist discourse may be more than just incidental, relating to a shared structural field. This article suggests one possible path towards making sense of how the dynamics of social media and the mechanics of populist mobilization have co-produced each other in the last decade or so. Navigating the interface between anthropology and linguistics, it takes key aspects of Victor Turner's notion of liminality to suggest some of the ways in which social media's anti-structural affordances may help lay a foundation for the contemporary flourishing of populist discourse: markers of social structure are suspended; communitas is formed; the culture core is addressed; mimesis and anti-structural inversions are performed; subjects become influenceable. I elaborate on this claim based on Brazilian materials, drawn from online ethnography on pro-Bolsonaro WhatsApp groups and other platforms such as Twitter and Facebook since 2018.
[não inseri o PDF para não atrapalhar a métrica da revista. o link para baixar é: https://www.revistas.usp.br/ra/article/view/165232]
seu método e o tipo de conhecimento construído a partir dele foram originalmente
estruturados com base no estudo de pequenas comunidades locais? O artigo tratará
do trânsito entre escalas micro e macro a partir de uma das vertentes (meta)teóricas que tem sido propostas desde a “virada interpretativa” nos anos 1980, inspirada na obra de Marilyn Strathern. Essa perspectiva, baseada no primado da relacionalidade e da reflexividade entre as duas faces do ofício do antropólogo (trabalho de campo e escrita etnográfica), aborda operações de produção de conhecimento rotineiramente empregadas tanto pelos antropólogos quanto por seus “nativos”, envolvendo o acionamento de escalas, contextos, domínios e analogias. O artigo buscará operacionalizar esse instrumental analítico no caso da cooperação Sul-Sul brasileira com o continente africano, entendida enquanto composição (assemblage) emergente marcada por esforços de produção de contexto e busca de robustez relacional.
Texto completo disponível em: https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0104-71832014000100002
PDF disponível em: https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0104-93132007000200003
A proliferação de movimentos conspiracionistas de extrema direita como o QAnon é um sintoma dos últimos 40 anos de crise permanente causado pela instabilidade neoliberal. É um combo que mistura narrativas paranóicas, pânicos morais, refluxo da secularização religiosa e slogans vazios que surgem como resposta às latentes inquietações frente a falta de alternativa ao realismo capitalista que estamos submetidos.
Pesquisadora da Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina analisa como funciona a rede de apoio bolsonarista e propõe a renda básica universal como alternativa a uma nova agenda de esquerda.
https://www.ihu.unisinos.br/601291-a-virada-digital-do-populismo-a-cauda-longa-de-uma-transicao-profunda-e-complexa-entrevista-especial-com-leticia-cesarino
The first interface approached by this dissertation is the one that constitutes South-South cooperation as such, by means of its claims to difference vis-à-vis Northern development aid. These claims are assessed in Chapter 1 in terms of two domains historically privileged by the anthropological literature on international development: global politics, and organizations. Inspired by postcolonial perspectives that complicate simplistic renditions of the North-South divide, I chart a possible genealogy of South-South cooperation from the situated standpoint of Brazil, focusing on its discursive principles on the one hand, and on its hemispheric and domestic politics on the other; and describe Brazilian cooperation in terms of its emerging organizational architecture and dynamics. The chapter concludes by foregrounding South-South cooperation's ambivalent historical constitution within a global apparatus built under Northern hegemony, suggesting that the practical enactment of some of its principles stems less from a coherent, alternative policy apparatus than from its very organizational "fragility" relatively to Northern aid.
I then move on to Brazil-Africa relations, to look in Chapter 2 at Brazilian cooperation's official discourse on Africa, uniquely based on claims to similarity and sharedness that are particularly emphatic when it comes to the domain of culture. A look at history indicates that this discursive emphasis has, for at least fifty years, eclipsed other vital dimensions of Brazil-Africa relations. Based on my ethnographic experience, I argue that this discourse does not find an easy counterpart in the practice of contemporary cooperation initiatives either. The chapter traces the origins of this special interest in culture to Gilberto Freyre's racial harmony ideology (itself a postcolonial rendition of Franz Boas' culturalism), and proposes the notion of nation-building Orientalism to characterize a view on Africa that, even though not inaugurated by Freyre, was taken by him to new heights. Inspired by classic and contemporary postcolonial literature, I argue that this view is fundamentally characterized by an interplay between domestic concerns (in this case, with the place of African descendants in Brazilian nationhood) and Brazil's own historical sense of subalternity vis-à-vis European and U.S. hegemony.
As one zooms in further on the scale of technical cooperation in agriculture, this concern with culture recedes to the background, giving way to considerations centered on shared natural environments and (peripheral) agricultural development. Chapter 3 focuses on one of Embrapa's technical cooperation modalities, capacity-building, to suggest how Brazilian cooperantes' reach to their African counterparts can be best characterized as being based on demonstration rather than intervention. More than actually transferring technology or knowledge, I argue that this mode of engagement aims at making a context for relations between Brazil(ians) and Africa(ns) where these were largely unprecedented, and where organizational and financial resources are limited relatively to those available to Northern donors.
The two final chapters take a closer look at one of the emerging assemblages conjured up by the recent South-South cooperation wave: Embrapa's Cotton-4 Project with Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, and Chad. They tell story of the project's early beginnings in Brazil's cotton dispute with the U.S. at the World Trade Organization during the mid-2000's, map out the new organizational assemblage that formed around the project, and describe how the project framed, and proposed to address, the problem of low cotton productivities in West Africa by adapting and transferring a package of Embrapa technologies made up of three components: no-till, integrated pest management, and plant breeding. Here, I draw on STS works on technology transfer based on Bruno Latour's actor-network theory to provide an account of technology transfer as the co-production between technology and context. I elaborate however on avenues little explored by the literature: in particular, the actors' scaling operations and the socio-technical controls they exercise differentially across contexts that are perceived less in terms of difference than in terms of an asymmetry between capacities. Based on my observations of this project's ongoing technology adaptation and transfer efforts, I conclude with a situated discussion about Brazilian South-South cooperation's potential for robustness.
in Latin America. Nominated Theology of the Inculturation and realized by Christians missionaries in the last
decades, this experience aims to establish an intercultural dialogue between equals differents and, not, between
differents being become identicals, affirming that the god’s face of the other makes visible the face of my god.