See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/337903417

The field of Anthropology of Disasters in Brazil

Chapter · December 2019

DOI: 10.4324/9780429506727-3

CITATIONS READS

2 112

1 author:

Renzo Taddei
Universidade Federal de São Paulo
82 PUBLICATIONS   667 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Transferring climate knowledge in the science-policy interface for adaptation to drought in Uruguay View project

CLIMAX Climate Services Through Knowledge Co-production: A Euro-South American Initiative for Strengthening Societal Adaptation Response to Extreme Events View
project

All content following this page was uploaded by Renzo Taddei on 03 January 2020.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 2 The field of Anthropology
of Disasters in Brazil
Challenges and perspectives
Renzo Taddei

Introduction1
Brazil has a well-developed and vibrant anthropological community. In 2016,
the country had 49 graduate programs in the discipline, distributed among
29 university departments of anthropology or social sciences. According to offi-
cial records of the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Per-
sonnel (CAPES), the agency of the national Ministry of Education dedicated to
postgraduate programs, a growth of 300% took place in 16 years (2000–2016) in
a number of graduate courses.
It also has continental territorial dimensions, with a great diversity of ecosys-
tems and biomes. It adopted a politico-economic model that combines capitalistic
extractivism and a 19th-century ideology of modernization that prescribes heavy-
handed human domination over nature. Moreover, it is one of the most socioeco-
nomically unequal countries on the planet. The conjunction of these three factors
generates conditions of vulnerability of a different sort and produce disasters of
all types.
In spite of the vitality of Brazilian anthropology and of the frequency with
which disasters hit Brazilian populations, the field of Anthropology of Disasters
in the country is not formalized. This chapter intends to explore the reasons for
such a state of affairs, and analyzes recent transformations in the recent Brazil-
ian anthropological panorama in an attempt to forecast the future of this field of
research in the country.
The main argument of this chapter is organized around two facts: the first is
that, despite the systematic historical occurrence of events that typically could
be considered as being “disasters”, subsisted in the collective imagination of
mainstream society, throughout the 20th century and in the early years of the
21st, the idea that “there are no disasters” in the country. The second is that this
fact seems to be undergoing transformation, due to “natural” and “technologi-
cal” disasters that hit the political and economic centers of the country in the
last two decades. Anthropological agendas follow this same path. The underlying
questions that deserve exploration, and that will tangentially be addressed in this
text, refers to what the conditions and processes are that turn something in the
world into an object of anthropological treatment, and what relation this has with

15032-3240d-1pass-r02.indd 45 11/21/2019 3:12:42 PM

 46 Renzo Taddei

Map 2.1 Map Brazil. Case studies and main areas mentioned

transformations in patterns of mainstream collective imagination. In a word, dis-

asters are imagined, and are also de-imagined, and both alternatives have cultural
and political consequences.
The text was deliberately written in the form of (speculative) essay; it is not a
chronology of works and authors, although reference to main bibliographic contri-
butions are provided. The categories used for making reference to the geographic
divisions of Brazil are the ones adopted by the Brazilian Institute for Geogra-
phy and Statistics (IBGE), which are widely adopted in the country, including by
scholars in their attempt to address historical political and economic inequalities
in relation to disasters (see, for instance, Albuquerque Jr., 2014).

Brazil’s invisible disasters

Let me state this fact right from the outset: there is (almost) no disaster in Brazil-
ian anthropology. A brief evaluation of the seven journals edited in Brazil or in the
Portuguese language,2 with highest impact factor,3 carried out in November 2013,
demonstrates that., Out
o of 187 editions and over 1,300 articles, all open access at
the Scientific Electronic Library Online (Scielo), a search using the keywords dis-
aster, tragedy, risk, vulnerability, resilience, and climate resulted in only 14 arti-
cles, or 1% of the available texts. The keywords disaster, tragedy (in a nonliterary

15032-3240d-1pass-r02.indd 46 11/21/2019 3:12:42 PM

 Brazil 47
sense), vulnerability, and resilience did not produce one single result. Of the 14
found articles, 13 deal with the concept of risk and one with climate change.
The search was repeated in 2017, with no qualitative change in its results. Other
methods for data generation would perhaps present different results; still, even
if the method implied here is not appropriate to characterize the whole field of
anthropology in Brazil, it has the virtue of focusing on the journals and texts that
have the capacity for setting agendas and tendencies inside Brazil’s anthropologi-
cal community.
There are three important hypotheses that may help in the effort of making
sense of such a state of affairs. The first one refers to a mismatch of categories: an
objection could be raised that the absence of keywords associated to the concept
of disaster in the bibliography is due the fact that it is a Western category. The
attention put on emic categories in ethnographic work may have fooled search
engines such as the one used by the Scielo platform. It does not seem to me that
this could be the case, though. Throughout the 20th century, Brazilian anthropol-
ogy was not less colonial and patronizing to indigenous ideas than its American
and European counterparts, as indigenous intellectuals from Brazil and abroad are
quick to point out (Deloria Jr., 1969; Baniwa, 2016); the general tendency was
that emic categories were quickly dissolved into Western universalisms.4 Addi-
tionally, urban anthropology is as robust in Brazil as is indigenous ethnology, and
the topic of disasters has been absent there too. We can, therefore, discard the
option of categorial confusion.
A second possibility refers to specificities of the intestine topographies of
Brazilian anthropology; or, to put it more directly, the possibility that what is
framed as “disaster” in certain approaches and traditions may be framed other-
wise in Brazilian academia. There is a great amount of evidence that this indeed
explains part of the paradox. A number of important anthropologists in Brazil
refuses theoretical trends that address disasters as “excess”, that is, as phenom-
ena that systematically expose the limits of our conceptual schemes. The work
of some of the anthropologists who have published on mining-related catastro-
phes call attention to the fact that the very nomenclature, “technological disas-
ter”, is an expression that carries in itself a political risk. The idea of “normal
accidents”, for instance, proposed by Charles Perrow in 1984, while conceptu-
ally important, is at the same time politically dangerous in how it depoliticizes
the phenomena it describes. In the case of what is perhaps the two worst tech-
nological disasters in the history of the country, the rupture of mining ore reject
dams in two localities in the state of Minas Gerais, with a little more than three
years between the two events – the “disasters of Mariana and Brumadinho”
(to be presented in more detail later) – the existence of hard evidence that the
management of the mining companies (Samarco and Vale) knew about the bad
conditions of the dams led some authors to denounce the term “disaster” and to
advocate for the use of the term “crime” instead (Reis & Santos, 2017; Zhouri
et al., 2016a, 2016b, 2017).
By extension, something similar could be argued in relation to the effort of insti-
tutionalizing the Anthropology of Disaster as a subfield of Brazilian anthropology:

15032-3240d-1pass-r02.indd 47 11/21/2019 3:12:43 PM

 48 Renzo Taddei
what is gained and what is lost, one could ask, in reframing a research that has been
historically understood as Environmental Anthropology in a context of ecologi-
cal degradation by the mining industry, or research on/in the situations of politi-
cal conflicts in which traditional populations (peasants, fisherpersons, indigenous
communities) have their rights expropriated by extractivist corporations, when and
if these research efforts become “anthropologies of disasters”? Part of the concern
is associated to the construction of equivalences between the academic research
and the world of public policy/politics, so as to make research more politically
effective. While works framed as Environmental Anthropology may find interlo-
cution with existing environmental agencies in the body of the state, at municipal
and state levels, the issue of “disaster” is largely absent from the state apparatus,
with the exception of very centralized and highly inaccessible agencies at the fed-
eral government, or the highly militarized civil defense apparatus (Valencio, 2009,
2010). It is very clear that, from the perspective of the work with impacted popu-
lations, the political economy of categories is dramatically important, and it may
enhance, or dilute, the political efficacy of the work with the communities. As all
disciplinary fields are subject to similar performative effects of labels and divisions
(Bourdieu, 1979), this reflection itself is no stranger to the discipline.
All that said, it is important to notice that the category of “disaster” is extremely
fluid, and extends to diverse territories, populations, and circumstances, many
of which are disconnected to contexts in which political struggle and advocacy
opportunities are clearly identifiable (for complex ecopolitical reasons), even if
they exist. Tornados in southern Brazil and droughts in the Amazon region are
cases in point. So Sowhile
whileall
allelements
elementsofofthe
theargument
argumentpresented
presented here
here are
are still
still in
in
place, and
and aphenomena
considerablethat amount of important
in other contextswork
wouldon be
issues that in
framed asother con-
disasters
texts in
exist would easily
Brazil withbe framed conceptual
different as anthropologies of disaster
make ups, there isinaBrazil exists with
great amount of
“disastrous” phenomena that are simply never anthropologized,
different conceptual make ups, there is a great amount of “disastrous” phenomenano matter
what.
that are simply never anthropologized, no matter what.
That brings us to the third hypothesis to be considered in the effort to make
sense of the absence of disasters in anthropological production: this fact reflects
another absence, of larger demographic amplitude – the widely disseminated idea,
in effect throughout the 20th century in Brazil,that the incidence of disasters in the
country was minimal, if not completely absent. The perception that the country
was awarded with a “benign nature”, from which the “no-disaster” idea seems to
spring, is deeply rooted in the collective imagination of the country; it probably
reflects some elements of the European imagination about the America’s during
early colonial times (Wasserman, 1994: p. 30). One example from popular culture
is an old joke, still in circulation, in which Gabriel, the angel, asks God why he
spared Brazil from natural disasters when creating the country, and God answers
that the people he would put there would be a disaster in itself (Strasdas, 2011).5
Machado, in an article about one the many 19th-century European scientific expe-
ditions in Brazil, writes:

To a Brazilian, nothing sounds more familiar than statements that Brazil has
been blessed in terms of nature. Indeed, from our earliest childhood, we learn

15032-3240d-1pass-r02.indd 48 11/21/2019 3:12:43 PM

 Brazil 49
to identify our country through enthusiastic manifestations about the wonders
of our geography, not to mention the flora and fauna whose extraordinary
diversity and wealth comprise the treasures that God generously bestowed
upon us. . . . Pero Vaz de Caminha’s inspired letter reporting the discovery of
new lands to the King of Portugal in 1500, . . . described these lands in term
of Eden.
(Machado, 2004: p. 13)

Against all that, a consultation to news archives promptly provides evidence of

the cyclical occurrence of epidemies of suffering caused by extreme events, of
environmental and/or technological nature, in the country: droughts (with the fre-
quency of one in every five years in the N northeast region; less frequent in other
parts of the country, but still prevalent in the Amazon and the southern regions),
earthquakes in the N northeast region, destructive floods in the Amazon, and tor-
nados and floods accompanied by landslides in the southeastern and southern
regions – just to mention a few. It is remarkable that the benign nature narrative,
perhaps the most prevalent myth of origin of the Brazilian nation, had the power to
obfuscate the cyclicity and systematicity of the epidemies of suffering caused by
disasters, leaving no strong mark in the collective imagination; or at least not in the
collective imaginary of the social groups with power and capacity to generate and
disseminate narratives about Brazil, such as the cultural industries of the south-
eastern region (at cities such as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro), and the public poli-
cies created at the national capital, Brasilia.6 It is precisely the recent occurrence
of large-scale disasters in the southeastern region – a contingency of the destiny,
or the effects of climate change, or both – what seems to be changing the picture.

Brazilian social science’s invisible disasters

It is necessary to note that disasters are always thought through politics (Oliver-
Smith, 2010), and the political history of Brazil cannot be thought as detached
from ideologies and projects of modernization (Taddei & Gamboggi, 2010, 2011).
Disasters, in such context, play the double role of being agents of marginalization,
while being marginalized, at the same time. In the case of droughts, for instance,
they were, and still are, often understood as an impediment for progress; that is
made evident in the very name of the oldest federal agency created to handle natu-
ral disasters in Brazil, the National Department for Works Against the Drought
(DNOCS) – note the against. Droughts are also accused of being responsible for
the “backwardness” of the semiarid N northeast region. The disasters that took place
in the richest and most powerful region of the country, the Ssoutheast, were treated
as transient, episodic phenomena, which is what generated the perception that the
economic centers of the country have been mildly affected by droughts and floods
historically, if compared to marginal areas such as the N northeast and the Ama-
zon. In a typical chicken and egg situation, in this teleological perceptive scheme,
power and progress seem to minimize disasters, and these in turn are thought to
have spared power and progress, reinforcing the dominance of the richest region

15032-3240d-1pass-r02.indd 49 11/21/2019 3:12:43 PM

 50 Renzo Taddei
of Brazil, the Ssoutheast, as if the sociopolitical inequalities were a “natural” (when
not theological) phenomena. One way of understanding such a complex web of
relations is that disasters were historically constructed as natural-political devices
for “naturalizing” political and economic inequality (Oliver-Smith & Hoffman,
1999; Hoffman & Oliver-Smith, 2002).
A somewhat parallel strand of events took place in the history of the social
sciences in Brazil. Despite of the importance of northeast-based authors like
Gilberto Freyre and Câmara Cascudo,7 the institutionalization of the social sci-
ences in Brazil occurs in the Ssoutheast. Important historical moments were the
creation of the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters, and Human Sciences (FFLCH)
at the University of São Paulo (USP) – with the participation of Claude Levi-
Strauss – from which emerged the Paulista Sociological School; the foundation
of the Brazilian Anthropological Association (ABA), in 1955; and the creation
of the first graduate program in Anthropology at the National Museum, in 1968,
in Rio de Janeiro.8
Even if social scientists in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro were interested in
what happened in the rest of Brazil – the centrality of indigenous ethnology in
the academic production of the era demonstrates that – the research agenda had
as a wider ideological context the question of modernism, modernization, and the
construction of the Brazilian civilization. As it is widely known, in a typically
modern understanding of reality, nature is to be dominated and exploited. It was
left to anthropologists to document and make intellectual sense of the reality of
the victims of modernization: the context in which disasters gained the form of
genocide of indigenous and traditional populations. These genocides, neverthe-
less, took part in the political order in place, a political order that, despite of
being extremely perverse, had its intrinsic logic. In the context of origin and ini-
tial developments of social sciences in Brazil, the country was thought from, and
through, the modernizing Ssoutheast. “Total” disasters remained beyond cognition,
and therefore remained invisible.9
One theoretical aspect of the problem being addressed here lies exactly in the
aforementioned question of the reliance on a metaphysical assumption of existence
of order. Brazilian intellectuals were, unsurprisingly, mimicking European col-
leagues here. Both Émile Durkheim’s social fact (1982 [1895]) and Max Weber’s
ideal type (1949 [1904]) imply the effort in understating societies in their normal,
typical, and ordinary conditions. These ideas induced researchers to discard the
extraordinary as irrelevant – even if the kernel of the question lies in understand-
ing what exactly counts as extraordinary, and to whom. Evans-Pritchard (1940),
for instance, describes the typical organization of the Nuer and from it he erases
the influence of English colonialism in Sudan; likewise, occurrences that gener-
ate the radical disorganization in studied social forms are abstracted or sent to
the background of social action, so as to stress what is supposedly most relevant
in the theoretical realm: it is not the drought (something that can cause anomie)
that interests the researcher, but the processes of accusation of witchcraft (as a
sociologically established form of reproducing social order) that are associated to
it (Evans-Pritchard, 1976), and so on.

15032-3240d-1pass-r02.indd 50 11/21/2019 3:12:44 PM

 Brazil 51
Brazilian disasters made visible
In the last two decades, a series of facts, in three distinct fronts, seem to have
started a process of reversion of the scenario described above. The three fronts are
these: a) the occurrence of disasters of great proportions in the Ssoutheast region
of Brazil, what generated a process of transformation in the configuration of state
agencies dedicated to disaster prevention and relief in the country; b) the occur-
rence of international disasters that affected Brazil in inedited forms; and c) a
series of new developments in social theory that place the issue of disasters in
new analytical keys.

Disasters under the (national) spot

In the first of the aforementioned fronts, Brazil has some of the most vulnerable
ecosystems to climate change (rain forest, semiarid northeast, and the savannas
of the center-west), which, when added to environmental devastation, population
growth, and poorly managed urban expansion, creates the appropriate conditions
for an increase in number of disasters. And indeed, the last 20 years witnessed
a significant increase in the frequency of highly visible disasters. And yet, as
expected, this process, still in course, does not take place without some amount of
epistemological conflict. Two significant examples are related to hurricanes and
tornados. In March of 2004, hurricane Catarina made landfall in the state of Santa
Catarina (Lopes, 2015; Klanovicz, 2010). Some scientists argued that Catarina
could not be a hurricane, due to the simple fact that “there are no hurricanes in
Brazil”.10 The same happened with tornados: in the years of 2002 and 2003, while
I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the state of Ceará, I documented in inter-
views narratives on strong snorters, locally called “ventanias”, in the metropolitan
region of Fortaleza and in the Apodi hills. The described linear pattern of destruc-
tion immediately called my attention; when I inquired about whether those winds
were not in fact tornados, I heard from farmers and from meteorologists that they
believed so, but they could not openly talk about it, out of fear of being ridiculed.
In a way, seeing a tornado in Brazil at that time was equivalent to seeing a ghost. It
was with the tornado in the central area of the city of Indaiatuba, in the state of São
Paulo, in 2005, that Brazil discovered that there are tornados in national territory;
there is even a “tornado alley” in the country (Candido, 2012), and Brazil seems
to have the second highest frequency of tornados on the planet (Catucci, 2012).
Something similar happens with earthquakes, which occur at an average rate of
over a thousand per year in the states of Ceará, Rio Grande do Norte, and Paraíba,
with intensity that tend not to surpass level 3 on the Richter scale (Moreira, 2013).11
Droughts occupy a special and peculiar place in the collective imagination of
disasters in Brazil: of all phenomena that are typically classified as disasters, none
is more documented and studied in the country than droughts (see, for instance,
Gareis et al., 1997; Kenny, 2002, 2009; Nelson & Finan, 2009; Palacios, 1996;
Pennesi, 2013; Taddei, 2012, 2013). And yet, the prevalence of droughts puts
into evidence the bizarre contours of mental maps: if asked about disasters, most

15032-3240d-1pass-r02.indd 51 11/21/2019 3:12:44 PM

 52 Renzo Taddei
Brazilians would say the country is blessed with their absence; if asked about
droughts, the same people would say that they are “typically” northeasterner. And
“typical” northeasterner droughts are accompanied with “typical” images of suf-
fering and hunger – it is not the case of the (Brazilian imagination of ) “Israeli”
droughts, the ones that occur and no one notices their presence.12 The drought is,
then, the most common disaster in a country devoid of disasters.
And again, atypical events seem to have happened in the recent past: droughts
crossed geographic barriers, and also political and imaginary barriers in result.
In 2005, Brazil has witnessed droughts of large proportions in three of its main
regions at the same time: the Amazon, the N northeast region, and the southern
region (Taddei & Gamboggi, 2010). The concurrence of the three droughts con-
tradicts the widespread idea that the El Niño phenomenon induces extreme events
of alternated nature in the country: droughts in the Nnortheast occur in parallel with
floods in the southern region. The drought at the Amazon basin was so intense,
and its impacts so dramatic to the ecosystem and the communities, that the event
quickly gained the attention of the international press (e.g., Rohter, 2005). Dev-
astating droughts returned to the Nnortheast in subsequent years: in 2007, in 2010,
and finally between 2011 and 2018, in what is considered the longest drought
ever recorded for the region. In 2010 the Amazon basin was also hit by what
was considered the worst drought in the last 100 years. Then, between 2012 and
2016, the largest metropolis of the country, the city of São Paulo, suffered the
worst drought and water storage crisis in its history, with the depletion of one of
its strategic reservoir complexes: the Cantareira system (Leite, 2018). “This is a
situation we only saw in the Northeast, on TV”, was a phrase frequently repeated
in São Paulo, with a tone that suggested that the drought was being accused of
geopolitical insolence.
Concomitantly, a number of disasters associated to excessive rains took place,
generating floods and landslides, and mobilizing great media coverage and reper-
cussions with public opinion, especially around those taking place in the Ssoutheast
region. In 2008, floods in the Itajaí valley, state of Santa Catarina, made over 130
fatal victims (Silva, 2013). The floods at the same valley happened again, on an
equally destructive scale, in 2011 and 2013. In the first day of the year 2010, a
large landslide in the city of Angra dos Reis, state of Rio de Janeiro, made 50 vic-
tims. In that same year another landslide in the state of Rio de Janeiro, this time in
the city of Niterói, killed over 200 people. In the following year, a massive land-
slide in the Fluminense hills hit the municipalities of Nova Friburgo, Teresópolis,
Petrópolis, Sumidouro, São José do Vale do Rio Preto, and Bom Jardim, killing
840 individuals and leaving 440 disappeared (Silva, 2015). It is relevant to the
argument of this text that many of these cities provide mountain tourism attrac-
tions to wealthy inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro.
There were also technological disasters, especially oil spills, with its dramatic
impacts to life and coastal ecosystems. In 2010, a spill occurred at the processing
platform P-47, field of Marlim, in the Campos Basin (near the city of Macaé, Rio
de Janeiro). In the following year, another spill occurred, this time at a Chevron
platform, equally in the Campos Basin. In 2013, there was a spill in the city of
Bertioga, in the state of São Paulo.

15032-3240d-1pass-r02.indd 52 11/21/2019 3:12:44 PM

 Brazil 53
Added to all that was mentioned, the already-cited cases of the mining disaster-
crimes of Mariana and Brumadinho infamously occupy a prominent role in the
recent history of disasters (and of the anthropological analyses of them) in Brazil.
An occurrence that took place initially in the community of Bento Rodrigues,
in the municipality of Mariana, state of Minas Gerais, then possibly became the
worst industrial-environmental tragedy in Brazilian history, worked as a catalyzer
for the rapid growth of the group of anthropological professionals and students
doing systematic and robust work on disasters,13 – even if, again, the category
of disaster is actively resisted. In the morning of 5 November 2015, a reservoir
of rejects in an iron ore mine (owned by Samarco, which is controlled by Vale
and the Anglo-Australian mining corporation BHP) broke, devastating a number
of communities located downstream from it. The mud killed at least 19 people,
directly displaced over 200 families; it then reached the Doce river, killing all
forms of life in more than 663 kilometers of river, and then entering the sea,
where it created a fan of devastation. All the riverine populations, including the
Krenak Indians and a large number of traditional communities of fisherpersons,
were impacted by the destruction of their main source of food and income. The
city of Governador Valadares, with 280 thousand inhabitants, had the rio Doce
as its main source of fresh water, and suffered a severe water shortage after the
event. Thirty-nine cities are “officially” considered as affected by the disaster; the
number of municipalities that rely on the Doce river for water is around 230.
Then, on 25 January 2019, another iron ore rejects reservoir (owned by Vale)
broke, this time in the community of Córrego do Feijão, in the municipality of
Brumadinho – less than 200 kilometers away from Mariana. Over 200 individu-
als were killed, and over 93 remain disappeared. Two months after the event, the
wave of toxic mud, after having devastated over 200 kilometers of the ecosys-
tem of the Paraopeba river and affecting hundreds of cities and tens of thousands
of individuals, reached the São Francisco river, the fourth largest river in South
America and the most important river outside of the Amazon basin.
A report by the National Water Agency in Brazil issued in November of 2018
announced that the country had 45 dams in critical condition; the one that broke in
Brumadinho was not among them. The socioecological damage to the ecosystems
of the areas of both occurrences (that together are almost the size of Portugal)
does not fit in words and images; the population directly affected may well be in
the level of millions of individuals.
This dismal accountancy doesn’t have any other goal than to make evident that
the convoluted existence of the elements is not aligned to the cultural representa-
tions, historically shaped, of nature that are placid and passive to the assaults of
modernization. In any case, the occurrences here mentioned (and many others) in
the last two decades have filled the national and local news, and seem to be slowly
transforming the imaginary of the mainstream Brazilian population on what con-
cerns “their” disasters.
The idea that a major change in how disasters are institutionally dealt with in
Brazil would require the occurrence of disasters in the Ssoutheast region seem to
be confirmed by how the federal government responded to the massive landslide
that happened in the Fluminense hills in 2011. In 2005, the National Center for

15032-3240d-1pass-r02.indd 53 11/21/2019 3:12:45 PM

 54 Renzo Taddei
Management of Risks and Disasters (CENAD) was created, under the Ministry
for National Integration, and installed in a small room with 30 square meters of
area. In 2011, in the wake of the national commotion created by the mentioned
landslide, it was restructured and transferred to a new space, 20 times bigger in
area. CENAD works in partnership with the National Center for Disaster Moni-
toring and Alerts (CEMADEM), an agency which is linked to the Ministry of Sci-
ence and Technology and also created in the same circumstance, in 2011.

Brazil in overseas disasters, and vice-versa

The participation of Brazilian citizens in international disaster events, a fact that
has been widely exploited by the national media, is a second front in the trans-
formation of perspectives on the national imagination of disasters. The economic
stabilization and household income growth that characterized the 1994–2010
period in Brazil, added to developments in transportation and mobile communi-
cation technologies, placed Brazilians – tourists, professionals, and diplomats – in
the frontlines of disasters as victims, but also as producers and disseminators of
images and information. That happened in situations like the tsunami of the Indian
Ocean, in 2004, when national media chains did not have difficulty in finding
Brazilian citizens who had witnessed the disaster and produced photographic and
video records of it. The media coverage focused, in large part, on the death of Bra-
zilian diplomat Lys Amayo de Benedek D’Avola and her ten-year-old son. In the
2010 Haiti earthquake (Thomaz, 2010; Bersani, 2015), the strong presence of UN
Brazilian troops in the country, and the death of Zilda Arns, head of the Catholic
Pastoral Care for Poor Children, made the disaster one of the most intensely cov-
ered international events by the Brazilian media that year.
In what concerns technological disasters, also in 2010, the Deepwater Hori-
zon/British Petroleum oil spill – probably the worst oil spill in history – took
place, unequivocally alerting nations and companies about the perils of deep
water oil prospection, in a historical moment in which Brazil was inebriated by
the artificially inflated euphory of the discovery and beginning of operations of
what became known as its “pre-salt” oil fields. In the following year, the Japa-
nese tsunami and the ensuing nuclear disaster in Fukushima brought back old
nightmares – not only those related to Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, but also
of the case of Cesium 137 on Goiania (Silva, 2017; Fonseca & Klanovicz, 2014;
Vieira, 2010, 2013; Queiroz, 2017), which occurred in 1987. Maps of nuclear
accidents and disasters appeared once again on the Internet and on TV, and the
Goiania accident reminded the Brazilian population that the country features in
the list of nations where nuclear accidents occurred. New exercises of geographi-
cal imagination appeared after Fukushima: as American West west Coast
coast universities
started detecting signs of radiation in salmon and tuna captured in the Pacific, a
consequence of the uninterrupted flow of radioactive water from the damaged
Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant into the ocean, middle-class Brazil-
ians became concerned with the source of the salmon they eat in their sushi and
temaki.14

15032-3240d-1pass-r02.indd 54 11/21/2019 3:12:45 PM

 Brazil 55
Social theory
The third front refers to transformations in the panorama of the contemporary
social sciences. In the international English-speaking social sciences scene, soci-
ology clearly moved ahead of anthropology; the same can be said to have hap-
pened in Brazil.15 The theories of Ulrich Beck (1992) and Anthony Giddens (1990,
1991) on the risk society left an important mark in the sociological panorama: risk
was elevated to a constitutive element of the very ontology of contemporaneity,
while becoming, at the same time, a new metaphysics. Charles Perrow (1999),
in his turn, proposed the idea of normal accidents, in which complex systems,
technological or not, may assume internal configurations that, despite their cata-
strophic nature, are nothing more than one of its possible, and therefore “normal,”
states. A disaster, in result, is revealed as one of the possible states of reality.
In the border between sociology and anthropology, Bruno Latour (1991, 2013)
and other colleagues working with the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) articulate
a double accusation against the so-called hard sciences and also against the so-
called social sciences. While the “natural” or “formalist” science is evoked to dis-
articulate politics, that is, everything else of which it is not composed, the critical
social sciences – anthropology included – evoke (a certain) politics as a strategy
to disarticulate (the politics of ) science, technique, and everything else of which it
is not composed. The problem here is the refusal of the possibility of ontological
diversity: for naturalists, rituals of accusation of witchcraft are irrelevant; in the
best of circumstances, they are mystifications. The specific drought where such
rituals occur is also, in a certain form, irrelevant: what matters are the mathemati-
cal, abstract models of reality, in which data that don’t fit expected patterns are
called outliers and discarded. Also for the critical socials scientists, that same
drought is irrelevant, as is the specific witchcraft accusation ritual; what mat-
ters are the “social processes” in course, that is, sociocultural abstract models of
reality. In what has been called relational ontologies approach, and whose main
inspiration for Brazilian anthropology has been the works of Eduardo Viveiros de
Castro (2002), Arturo Escobar (2018), Tim Ingold (2011), and Philippe Descola
(2013, 2017), the rejection of the classic dichotomies of modern thought, such as
Nature and Culture, Subject and Object, Human and Animal, while transcend-
ent categories, reinserts the material dimension, on one hand, and the irreducible
singularity of present contexts, as inescapable elements in the theoretical effort of
the social sciences. What is rejected in such an approach is the speculative con-
temporary metaphysics that thinks the world without humans and humans without
the world (Danowski & Viveiros de Castro, 2016).

At the frontier of disasters

I end these reflections by suggesting a research agenda for an Anthropology of
Disasters in Brazil, listing themes that seem especially promising. Without los-
ing from sight the justified preoccupation with the performative effect of how
events and agendas are framed, I believe it is important to return to the relational

15032-3240d-1pass-r02.indd 55 11/21/2019 3:12:45 PM

 56 Renzo Taddei
ontologies approach, and how they propose the destabilization of the classic
Kantian phenomenological references of the constitution of the modern world.
What is needed, then, in my view, is the exploration of the consequences of such
destabilization. Three dimensions present themselves as fundamental: first, the
constitution and status of the human; second, of the subjective; and third, of the
political.
In such context, if the human ceases to the mere result of the imposition of
arbitrary historical Western distinctions between humanity and animality (Ingold,
2002), and the notion of the subject overflows beyond the species frontiers, it is
legitimate to ask this: what are the perspectives of non-human subjects (such as
animals) in face of the ontological disorganization of reality brought about by
disasters? How can social scientists have access to such perspectives? The meth-
odological challenges here are far from negligible.
Second, the idea that subjectivity, in the ways we are led to constitute and reify
it (in Western cultural contexts), is just contingent and not a phenomenological
a priori, puts in question the need to consider dimensions of existence in which
the experience of the world is not mediated by such configurations of subjectivity.
As I wrote elsewhere,

[T]his is one of the most interesting frontiers of the social sciences: from the
many variations of what is conventionally called “spirituality” to the phenom-
enon of crowds, we need to think non-subjectivated and non-subjectivizing
ways of being in the world, as a fundamental part of the constitution of the
existents (ontologies), without relegating these forms to an “other world.”
(Taddei, 2014: p. 604)

And third, the “political” (in its modern, Latourian sense) ceases to be the univer-
sal theoretical synchronizer, the great stabilizer of conceptual discourses – simi-
larly to what matter is in the physical sciences. We now live cyborg, asynchronous
realities, in which subjects are hybridized with beings of different species, techni-
cal objects, computational algorithms, automated processes, and big data: here
we witness the displacement of human mediation, and the agent/subject/ego of
the social action rarely can be reduced to the individual, in its classic sense. Let’s
take the Fukushima nuclear accident as an example: the disassembling of reac-
tor number 4 is probably the most dangerous and complex technological task on
all human history (Perrow, 2013b), and it can only be done by robots (Perrow,
2013a). In the military field, the use of autonomous drones with lethal power
became widespread around the globe. Given the notorious historical ties between
spatial and military technologies, and the militarization of the civil defense agen-
cies, particularly in Brazil (Valencio, 2009), the understanding of the (re)composi-
tion of worlds and contexts of action is a crucial task for the comprehension of the
conditions in which disasters will take place.
One of the consequences of what I propose earlier
here is the effort in trying to com-
prehend the universe of disasters as a form of “post-normal perspectivism of the
contemporaneity” (Taddei & Hidalgo, 2016): in altered states – of consciousness,

15032-3240d-1pass-r02.indd 56 11/21/2019 3:12:46 PM

 Brazil 57
of emotivity, of sensations, of bodily configurations; with fear, anxiety, injury,
ontological insecurity – other perspectives impose themselves. The question
that arises is, then, this: what other worlds are instituted in such contexts? These
states are, obviously, undesired; it does not follow, nevertheless, that they are
“abnormal” or “exceptional”. Climate change – the tip of iceberg of the Anthropo-
cene – will demand radical recomposition of socionatural (and therefore political)
realities (Latour, 2017; Tsing, 2015; Tsing et al., 2017). Under this prism, the need
to explore such post-normal perspectives became imperative.
Last, and taking the opportunity to make a reference to how Mexican anthro-
pology engages with the popular cultures of its country,16 I would like to raise the
question of why the world of the dead does not find a place among the legitimate
worlds in global debates about disasters and related topics. “Capitalism robbed us
everything, even death”, a physicist once told me in an ecoliteracy seminar at the
Universidad Veracruzana (Veracruzana University), in Xalapa, Mexico – making
reference to how Western medical practices disarticulate traditional Mexican
ways of “living” death. To take death as a mode of existence – something much
more possible in Brazil or in Mexico than in France or the United States – presents
us with extremely interesting methodological and ontological challenges, not only
in our anthropological reflection about disasters; it can be a venue of conceptual
development, especially relevant given the challenges predicted for the future of
the planet, for which Latin American anthropology may be better suited than other
traditions.17

Notes
1 The original ideas that eventually became the text here presented profited greatly by
discussions held at the Study Group on the Anthropology of Science and Technology
(GEACT), at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), and at the Research
Laboratory on Sociotechnical and Environmental Interactions (LISTA), at the Federal
University of São Paulo (UNIFESP). These ideas were developed across more than a
decade and a half of ethnographic fieldwork in different regions of Brazil, funded, at dif-
ferent moments, by the São Paulo State Research Foundation (FAPESP, 2007/56394–6,
2007–2009; FAPESP-CLIMAX 2015/50867–8 2016–2020), and the Inter-American
Institute for Global Change Research (IAI; CRN3035 and CRN3106, 2012–2017).
2 They are Mana, Horizontes Antropológicos, Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais,
Religião & Sociedade, Revista de Estudos Feministas, Vibrant, and Etnográfica.
3 In reality, I am using here a proxi for impact factor that is officially used in Brazil: all
of the aforementioned journals are at the A1 level (the highest) of the Qualis evalua-
tion system, put in place by the aforementioned Coordination for the Improvement of
Higher Education Personnel (CAPES).
4 I take the opportunity to call the attention of the reader to the fact that the approach
adopted in this text leaves absent indigenous views on what is being called disaster,
and therefore the account presented here is necessarily incomplete. To the best of my
knowledge, the closest to an “indigenous Anthropology of Disasters” ever produced in
Brazil is Danowski and Viveiros de Castro’s 2016 book.
5 There is no immediate reading of the joke, as it may enact, depending on the situation
in which it is uttered, racism and other forms of discrimination present in popular
culture, and/or what Nelson Rodrigues (1997) referred to as a national “stray dog com-
plex” (inferiority complex).

15032-3240d-1pass-r02.indd 57 11/21/2019 3:12:46 PM

 58 Renzo Taddei
6 Asymmetries in the ways distinctive social groups contribute to the amalgamation of
forms of collective imagination of society and the world exist at all levels, including
those more markedly “local” (Taddei & Gamboggi, 2009).
7 Freyre and Cascudo were authors born and based in the Northeast
northeast region, and whose
anthropological and sociological contributions were seminal to the development of the
social sciences in the country.
8 Brasília is an exception in such scenario of domination of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro
in the history of anthropology in the country. The presence of anthropology at the
national capital is due to the work of two scholars that migrated from the state of Minas
Gerais to Rio de Janeiro, and were later involved in the creation of the University of
Brasilia: Darcy Ribeiro and Roque de Barros Laraia.
9 These patterns of invisibility existed, naturally, in other, more complex configurations
of sociopolitical relations. In the 19th century, during what was perhaps the worst
drought ever recorded in Brazilian history (1877–1880), the Ceará state deputy and
acclaimed author, José de Alencar, denounced in the chamber of deputies, in Rio de
Janeiro, that the accounts of the hecatomb-like drought in his home state, Ceará, that
reached the capital of the Empire, could be manipulations by state elites to obtain more
funds from the imperial government (Greenfield, 2001).
10 At that time, the idea that there were no hurricanes in Brazil could be found in the
pedagogical materials of important public institutions, such as the National Service
for Industrial Education (Serviço Social da Indústria-SESI, s.d.); and also in popular
science magazines (Revista Superinteressante, 2004).
11 In the case of earthquakes, there are earlier works in the geosciences that document
their occurrence in Brazil (see for instance Berrocal et al., 1984), even if outside of the
radar of public opinion and of the social sciences.
12 Israel figures prominently in the collective imagination of the inhabitants of the drought
prone Brazilian northeast, as a place where technology has supposedly “won the war”
against the environment.
13 With the work of scholars and research groups placed mainly at the Federal University
of Minas Gerais (UFMG; see the work of Andréa Luisa Zhouri Laschefski and her col-
leagues at the GESTA research group; e.g., Zhouri et al., 2016a, 2016b, 2017), Federal
University of Espírito Santo (UFES; see the work of Eliana Santos Junqueira Creado
and colleagues; e.g., Creado & Helmreich, 2018), Federal University of Ouro Preto
(UFOP), and Federal University of Juiz de Fora (UFJF).
14 Sushi and Temaki are widely popular dishes in Brazil, reflecting the existence of a
large Japanese-Brazilian community in the country. Most of the salmon consumed in
Brazil is farmed in Chile.
15 Mainly due to the work of Norma Felicidade Lopes da Silva Valencio and her collabo-
rators (see, for instance, Valencio, 2004, 2010, 2014; Valencio et al., 2009; Siqueira
et al., 2015; Antonio & Valencio, 2016).
16 An earlier and less developed version of this text was first presented at the II Mexican-
Brazilian Anthropology Meeting, which took place in Brasília, in 2013. The opening
ceremony of the meeting was held at the Mexican Embassy on November 3rd – a day
after the Day of the Dead. The participants were received by a diplomat who affirmed
having been trained in anthropology. She then conducted everyone to an enormous
Day of the Dead altar placed at the entrance hall, and made a detailed and moving
description of the elements that constituted the altar, showing that in it pictures of
deceased relatives of employees of the embassy, including those of the ambassador and
her own, were placed there.
17 An example of that can be found in how Donna Haraway deals with the idea of
“dying well” in her 2016 book. Despite of the usual brilliance of the entire argu-
ment, she refuses to engage with the concept in the terms of the animistic traditions
that she herself mentions in the text, mainly of Native American and Inuit peoples
(Haraway, 2016).

15032-3240d-1pass-r02.indd 58 11/21/2019 3:12:46 PM

 Brazil 59
References
Albuquerque Jr., D. M. (2014) The Invention of the Brazilian Northeast. Durham, Duke
University Press.
Antonio, L. S. & Valencio, N. F. L. S. (2016) Animais de estimação em contexto de desas-
tres: desafios de (des) proteção. Desenvolvimento e Meio Ambiente. 38, pp. 741–767.
Baniwa, G. (2016) Indígenas antropólogos: entre a ciência e as cosmopolíticas ameríndias.
In: Rial, C. & Schwade, E. (orgs.). Diálogos antropológicos contemporâneos. Rio de
Janeiro, Associação Brasileira de Antropologia.
Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage Pub-
lications Ltd.
Berrocal, J. et al. (1984) Sismicidade do Brasil. São Paulo, IAG/USP-CNEN.
Bersani, A. E. (2015) O (extra) ordinário da ajuda: histórias não contadas sobre desastre e
generosidade na Grand’Anse, Haiti. Master’s Thesis, Campinas, Department of Anthro-
pology, State University of Campinas.
Bourdieu, P. (1979) Symbolic Power. Critique of Anthropology. 4 (13–14), pp. 77–85.
Candido, D. H. (2012) Tornados e trombas-d’água no Brasil: modelo de risco e proposta
de escala de avaliação de danos. Doctoral dissertation, Campinas, Geosciences Insti-
tute, State University of Campinas.
Catucci, A. (2012) Região de Campinas está na rota de tornados no Brasil, diz Unicamp. G1,
September 25. Available at http://g1.globo.com/sp/campinas-regiao/noticia/2012/09/
regiao-de-campinas-esta-na-rota-de-de-tornados-no-brasil-diz-unicamp.html. Accessed
December 14th 2018.
Creado, E. S. J. & Helmreich, S. (2018) A Wave of Mud: The Travel of Toxic Water, from
Bento Rodrigues to the Brazilian Atlantic. Revista do Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros.
69, pp. 33–51.
Danowski, D. & Viveiros de Castro, E. (2016) The Ends of the World. New York, Polity Press.
Deloria Jr., V. (1969) Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. Norman, OK, Uni-
versity of Oklahoma Press.
Descola, P. (2017) ¿Humano, demasiado humano? Desacatos. 54, pp. 16–27.
Descola, P. (2013) Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press.
Durkheim, E. (1982) The Rules of the Sociological Method. New York, Free Press.
Escobar, A. (2018) Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and
the Making of Worlds. Durham, Duke University Press.
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1976) Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande. Oxford,
Oxford University Press.
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1940) The Nuer. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Fonseca, M. K. & Klanovicz, J. (2014) Comemorar ou esquecer: 25 anos do acidente com
o Césio-137 em Goiânia/GO (1987). III Simpósio Internacional de História Ambiental e
das Migrações, Florianópolis, November.
Gareis, S., da Guía, M., Apolinario do Nascimiento, J., Franco Moreira, A. & Aparecida
da Silva, M. (1997) Aspectos históricos de las sequías en el nordeste del Brasil colonial
(1530–1822). In: García-Acosta, V. (coord.). Historia y Desastres en América Latina.
Lima, LA RED-CIESAS-Tercer Mundo Editores, vol. II, pp. 103–132.
Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age.
Stanford, Stanford University Press.
Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, Stanford University Press.
Greenfield, G. M. (2001) The Realities of Images: Imperial Brazil and the Great Drought.
Philadelphia, American Philosophical Society.

15032-3240d-1pass-r02.indd 59 11/21/2019 3:12:46 PM

 60 Renzo Taddei
Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with the Trouble. Durham, Duke University Press.
Hoffman, S. M. & Oliver-Smith, A. (eds.). (2002) Catastrophe & Culture: The Anthropol-
ogy of Disaster. Santa Fe, Nuevo México, School of American Research.
Ingold, T. (2011) Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. New
York and London, Routledge.
Ingold, T. (2002) Humanity and Animality. In: Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology.
London, Routledge, pp. 48–66.
Kenny, M. L. (2009) Landscapes of Memory: Concentration Camps and Drought in North-
eastern Brazil. Latin American Perspectives. 36 (5), pp. 21–38.
Kenny, M. L. (2002) Drought, clientalism, fatalism and fear in Northeast Brazil. Ethics,
Place & Environment. 5 (2), pp. 123–134.
Klanovicz, J. (2010) Apontamentos teórico-metodológicos para uma história ambiental
dos desastres “naturais” em Santa Catarina. Tempos acadêmicos. 6, pp. 1–18.
Latour, B. (2017) Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Malden, Pol-
ity Press.
Latour, B. (2013) An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. Cambridge, Harvard University
Press.
Latour, B. (1991) We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, Harvard University Press.
Leite, D. A. (2018) Water Discourses Management: The Communication of the Water Cri-
sis in the Metropolitan Region of São Paulo (2014–2015). Master’s Thesis, Campinas,
Institute of Geosciences, State University of Campinas.
Lopes, A. R. S. (2015) Desastres socioambientais e memória no sul de Santa Catarina
(1974–2004). Doctoral dissertation, Santa Catarina, Graduate Program in History, Fed-
eral University of Santa Catarina.
Machado, M. H. (2004) The Nature of Tropical Nature: Brazil Through the Eyes of Wil-
liam James. ReVista – Harvard Review of Latin America, pp. 13–15, Fall 2004–Winter
2005.
Moreira, P. I. (2013) Emannuel Liais, Louis Agassiz e Antônio Bezerra: a província do
Ceará e os debates geológicos do século XIX. Paper presented at the XXVII Simpósio
Nacional de História, Natal-RN, July.
Nelson, D. R. & Finan, T. J. (2009) Praying for Drought: Persistent Vulnerability and the
Politics of Patronage in Ceará, Northeast Brazil. American Anthropologist. 111 (3),
pp. 302–316.
Oliver-Smith, A. (2010) Haiti and the Historical Construction of Disasters. NACLA Report
on the Americas. 43 (4), pp. 32–36.
Oliver-Smith, A. & Hoffman, S. M. (1999) The Angry Earth: Disaster in Anthropological
Perspective. New York and London, Routledge.
Palacios, G. (1996) La agricultura campesina en el nordeste oriental del Brasil y las sequías
de finales del siglo XVIII. In: García-Acosta, V. (coord.). Historia y Desastres en Amé-
rica Latina. Bogota, LA RED-CIESAS-Tercer Mundo Editores, vol. I, pp. 221–257.
Pennesi, K. (2013) Predictions as Lies in Ceará, Brazil: The Intersection of Two Cultural
Models. Anthropological Quarterly. 86 (3), pp. 759–789.
Perrow, C. (2013a) Nuclear Denial: From Hiroshima to Fukushima. Bulletin of Atomic
Scientists. 69 (5), pp. 56–67.
Perrow, C. (2013b) Fukushima Forever. Worldpost, September 20. Available from www.
huffingtonpost.com/charles-perrow/fukushima-forever_b_3941589.html. Accessed
December 14th 2018.
Perrow, C. (1999) Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies. Princeton,
Princeton University Press.

15032-3240d-1pass-r02.indd 60 11/21/2019 3:12:47 PM

 Brazil 61
Queiroz, M. S. (2017) Dos “tempos do Césio”: memória coletiva de um evento crítico.
Resgate: Revista Interdisciplinar de Cultura. 24 (1), pp. 235–240.
Reis, M. R. C. & Santos, M. E. P. (2017) O desastre em Mariana (MG): expressão da luta
pela garantia dos direitos humanos. Anais do Seminário Científico da FACIG. 2, pp. 1–7.
Revista Superinteressante. (2004) Por que o Brasil tem poucos desastres naturais?
April 30. Available from https://super.abril.com.br/ideias/por-que-o-brasil-tem-poucos-
desastres-naturais/. Accessed May 3rd 2019.
Rodrigues, N. (1997) Flor de Obsessão: as 1000 melhores frases de Nelson Rodrigues,
organização e seleção de Ruy Castro. São Paulo, Companhia das Letras.
Rohter, L. (2005) Record Drought Cripples Life Along the Amazon. The New York Times,
December 11. Available from www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/world/americas/record-
drought-cripples-life-along-the-amazon.html. Accessed December 14th 2018.
Serviço Social da Indústria-SESI. (sd). Ensino Fundamental – 9a Fase – Tema: Cultura
e Ecologia no Século XXI. Available from http://bit.ly/PYd7QR. Accessed August 4th
2014.
Silva, C. A. M. (2015) Os desastres no Rio de Janeiro: conceitos e dados. Revista Cadernos
do Desenvolvimento Fluminense, 8, pp. 55–72.
Silva, R. A. C. (2013) Águas de novembro: estudo antropológico sobre memória e vitimi-
zação de grupos sociais citadinos e ação da Defesa Civil na experiência de calamidade
pública por desastre ambiental (Blumenau, Brasil). PhD Dissertation, Rio Grande do
Sul, Graduate Program in Social Anthropology, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul.
Silva, T. C. (2017) Silêncios Da Dor: Enfoque Geracional E Agência No Caso Do Desastre
Radioativo De Goiânia, Brasil. Iberoamericana–Nordic Journal of Latin American and
Caribbean Studies. 46 (1), pp. 17–29.
Siqueira, A., Valencio, N. F. L. S., Siena, M. & Malagoli, M. A. S. (eds.). (2015) Riscos
de desastres relacionados à água: aplicabilidade de bases conceituais das ciências
humanas e sociais para a análise de casos concretos. São Carlos, RiMa Editora.
Strasdas, P. (2011) Respeito é bom e eu gosto. Blogue Café Puro, November 6. Available
from https://cafepuro.wordpress.com/2011/11/06/respeito-e-bom-e-eu-gosto/. Accessed
December 14th 2018.
Taddei, R. (2014) Ser-estar no sertão: capítulos da vida como filosofia visceral. Interface –
Comunicação, Saúde, Educação. 18 (50), pp. 597–607.
Taddei, R. (2013) Anthropologies of the Future: On the Social Performativity of (Cli-
mate) Forecasts. In: Environmental Anthropology. New York and London, Routledge,
pp. 260–279.
Taddei, R. (2012) Social Participation and the Politics of Climate in Northeast Brazil. In:
Latta, A. & Wittman, H. (orgs.). Environment and Citizenship in Latin America: Natures,
Subjects and Struggles. New York, Berghahn Books, pp. 77–93.
Taddei, R. & Gamboggi, A. L. (2011) Marcas de uma democratização diluída: moder-
nidade, desigualdade e participação na gestão de águas no Ceará. Revista de Ciências
Sociais. 42 (2), pp. 8–33.
Taddei, R. & Gamboggi, A. L. (2010) Introdução. In: Taddei, R. & Gamboggi, A. L. (orgs.).
Depois que a Chuva Não Veio – Respostas Sociais às Secas na Amazônia, no Nordeste,
e no Sul do Brasil. Rio de Janeiro, Fundação Cearense de Meteorologia e Recursos
Hídricos/Instituto Comitas para Estudos Antropológicos.
Taddei, R. & Gamboggi, A. L. (2009) Gender and the Semiotics of Political Visibility in the
Brazilian Northeast. Social Semiotics. 19 (2), pp. 149–164.
Taddei, R. & Hidalgo, C. (2016) Antropología posnormal. Cuadernos de Antropología
Social. 43, pp. 21–32.

15032-3240d-1pass-r02.indd 61 11/21/2019 3:12:47 PM

 62 Renzo Taddei
Thomaz, O. R. (2010) O terremoto no Haiti, o mundo dos brancos e o Lougawou. Novos
estud. – CEBRAP. 86, pp. 23–39.
Tsing, A. (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton, Princeton University
Press.
Tsing, A., Swanson, H., Gan, E. & Bubandt, N. (2017) Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet.
Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
Valencio, N. F. L. S. (2014) Desastres, tecnicismos e sofrimento social. Ciência & Saúde
Coletiva. 19 (9), pp. 3631–3644.
Valencio, N. F. L. S. (2010) Desastres, ordem social e planejamento em defesa civil: o
contexto brasileiro. Saude soc. 19 (4), pp. 748–762.
Valencio, N. F. L. S. (2009) O Sistema Nacional de Defesa Civil (SINDEC) diante das
mudanças climáticas: desafios e limitações da estrutura e dinâmica institucional. In:
Valencio, N., Siena, M., Marchezini, V. & Gonçalves. J. C. (org.). Sociologia dos Desas-
tres: construção, interfaces e perspectivas no Brasil. São Carlos, RiMa Editora, vol. 1,
pp. 19–33.
Valencio, N. F. L. S. (2004) A produção social do desastre: dimensões territoriais e político-
institucionais da vulnerabilidade das cidades brasileiras frente às chuvas. Teoria & Pes-
quisa: Revista de Ciência Política. 1 (44), pp. 67–114.
Valencio, N. F. L. S., Siena, M., Marchezini, V. & Gonçalves, J. C. (orgs.). (2009) Sociolo-
gia dos Desastres. São Carlos, RiMa Editora.
Vieira, S. A. (2013) Césio-137, um drama recontado. Estudos Avançados. 27 (77), pp. 217–236.
Vieira, S. A. (2010) O drama azul: narrativas sobre o sofrimento das vítimas do evento
radiologico do Cesio-137. Master’s Thesis, Campinas, Department of Anthropology,
State University of Campinas.
Viveiros de Castro, E. (2002) Perspectivismo e multinaturalismo na América indígena. In:
A Inconstância da Alma Selvagem. São Paulo, Cosac Naify, pp. 345–399.
Wasserman, R. (1994) Exotic Nations: Literature and Cultural Identity in the United States
and Brazil, 1830–1930. Ithaca, Cornell University Press.
Weber, M. (1949) The Methodology of the Social Sciences. New York, Free Press.
Zhouri, A., Oliveira, R., Zucarelli, M. & Vasconcelos, M. (2017) The Rio Doce Mining
Disaster in Brazil: Between Policies of Reparation and the Politics of Affectations.
Vibrant: Virtual Brazilian Anthropology. 14 (2), pp. 81–101.
Zhouri, A., Valencio, N. F. L. S., Oliveira, R., Zucarelli, M., Laschefski, K. & Santos, A.
F. (2016a) O desastre da Samarco e a política das afetações: classificações e ações que
produzem o sofrimento social. Ciência e Cultura. 68 (3), pp. 36–40.
Zhouri, A., Valencio, N. F. L. S., Teixeira, R., Zucarelli, M., Laschefski, K. & Santos,
A. F. (2016b) O desastre de Mariana: colonialidade e sofrimento social. In Zhouri, A.,
Bolados, P. & Castro, E. (eds.). Mineração na América do Sul: neoextrativismo e lutas
territoriais. São Paulo, Editora Annablume, pp. 45–65.

15032-3240d-1pass-r02.indd
View publication stats 62 11/21/2019 3:12:47 PM