Concerning the artifices practiced in documenting the documentation: on writing, testifying and learning to file

Abstract

This article aims to shed light on the formal and official paths through which researchers seek to obtain authorisation to conduct our research, particularly in state offices. Thus, I begin from the conviction that letters, certificates, academic transcripts, and research projects, together with their subsequent circulation within various sectors at the Instituto Médico Legal [Medical Examiner’s Office], São Paulo, Brazil, are excellent sites of analysis precisely because they reveal the different management and government strategies put into operation both by researchers and by those who, as designated authorities, form the employees of these bodies. Artifices made of paper that, on the one hand, forge and convey an idea and an image that is projected and recurrently reaffirmed of what the state is. While on the other, they enable us to provide ethnographic nuances to the ‘common condition of state subjects’ in which all of us are immersed, by force or desire.