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Vagner Gonçalves da Silva

Vagner
Gonçalves da Silva
Fellowship: 
Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow
Term in Residence: 
Fall 2008
Title / Appointment: 
Assistant Professor
Location: 
Universidade de São Paulo, Brasil

Contact Information

E-Mail: 
vgsilva@fas.harvard.edu

Biography Information

Vagner Gonçalves da Silva is Professor of Anthropology at University of São Paulo, Brazil, where he received his M.A (1992) and Ph.D. (1998). He is the author of Metropolitan Orixás (1995); Candomblé e Umbanda – Ways of Brazilian Devotion (2005, 2nd ed); The Anthropologist and his Magic: Fieldwork and Ethnographic Text in the Anthropology of Afro-Brazilian Religions (2000). He edited five books on Afro-Brazilian memories (3 volumes), religious intolerance and ethnography viewed by the observers. He is the author of several articles on black culture and Afro-Brazilian religious and arts. He was a member of the committee for the foundation of Afro Brasil Museum (São Paulo), where he is still a consultant and the curator of Divine Inspiration – Syncretism, an exhibition about Catholic and Afro-Brazilian art (2008).

Among the awards he has received are National Board for Technological and Scientific Development Fellowship, Foundation for the Support of Research of the State of São Paulo Fellowship, State Department of Education of Brazil Fellowship; Ford Foundation Fellowship and Fulbright Scholar Program 2008-09 Fellowship.

Project Description

Afro-Brazilian Religions and National Culture – An Ethnography in Hypermedia.

This research proposal, developed by the anthropologists Vagner Gonçalves da Silva and Rita Amaral, intends to answer two questions: 1) What is the role (or roles) of Afro-Brazilian religions in the building process of Brazilian cultural identity? And 2) How can hypermedia help us with the elaboration of ethnographies and with contemporary debates about the nature of anthropological representation?

One of the most famous Brazilian images is “the country of carnival, samba, mulata, macumba, football, feijoada and capoeira”. The choice of these symbols that originated in blacks’ culture as “markers of Brazilian nationality” is a result of a long historical process of negotiations between the (self-identified) white dominant classes and the black people. These negotiations occurred in the quotidian micro-relationships between that population and in the macro-relation between that population and the Brazilian State. In our hypothesis, the experience of the social organization of terreiros (temples of Afro-Brazilian religions) was fundamental for the formation of a circulation web of these cultural values. In the terreiros, many cultural and ethnic identities were accommodated. Some came from African groups (the Bantus and the Sudanese, for instance) and others from Brazilian ones (blacks, whites and mestizos). The result was a complex process of social and structural exchanges. We argue this circulation web was fundamental in the process of the production and the use of symbols, such as capoeira, music (samba), dances and popular feasts (carnival) etc., which gave the population in general and the State a “good to think” set of values (“bonne á penser”, according to Lévi-Strauss) about Brazilian identity as seen by natives and by foreigners.

Ethnographies in hypermedia could conjugate descriptive and analytical planes breaking the boundaries between them and covering  the different voices/points of view of interlocutors who represent the many agents present in their production. This allows, moreover, multiple readings, according to the paths chosen by the reader and not only those indicated by the authors, as is the case with the  linear text.

The results of this project are being presented in the site: www.doafroaobrasileiro.org

Photographs from Vagner's Colloquium: