"Abraços do Velho"

Abstract

This master's thesis aims to reflect on the intellectual trajectory of Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira and his anthropology project, which brought together the creation of graduate programs in more than one institution, and a reflection on the strong overlap between teaching and research. It also aims to analyze the scope of his efforts to establish scientific associations of anthropologists and to consolidate international partnerships. I aim to contribute to the historiography produced about anthropology in Brazil, specifically in its professionalization period in the last decades of the last century, but also to elucidate a less remembered chapter in the history of the discipline, given that Cardoso de Oliveira is one of the best known and celebrated anthropologists in the country: it is also about investigating their relations with other intellectuals and other anthropology projects in Latin America. In order to do so, the research was carried out by means of analysis of documents in three distinct archives: the Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira fund, deposited in the Edgard Leuenroth Archive; the Guillermo Bonfil Batalla fund, located in the Archives of the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social; and the collection of the Latin American Association of Anthropology.Interviews were also conducted with Brazilian and Latin American anthropologists who worked with Cardoso de Oliveira within the different spheres of his project for the discipline. The objective is, therefore, to develop a twofold reflection: first, to present a new perspective, with the analysis of correspondences and other personal and institutional documents, of one of the people most responsible for the institutionalization of anthropology in Brazil (participating in the creation of graduate programs at the National Museum, at the University of Brasília and at the State University of Campinas) and proponent of a history of the discipline in the country; and second, to evaluate the heuristic possibilities of an ethnography of the archives that contributes with new information concerning this anthropologist and his work. In addition, the intention is to add to the discussion the partnerships established between different subjects and their work in anthropologies in Brazil, Mexico and also in the wider context of Latin America, based on the effort to recover the work that Cardoso de Oliveira developed in these places.