The challenge of proximity

Gilberto Velho
(Translated by Clarissa Carvalho)

Anthropology has expanded its field of activity to such an extent in recent decades that it
becomes increasingly difficult to name a sociocultural theme or phenomenon that has not been the
object of research or at least of some kind of reflection. The city is largely responsible for this
expansion, as anthropologists increasingly identify and construct objects of investigation in the
urban milieu.

In Brazil - although there are some important precedents - it was mainly from the beginning
of the 1970s that, in a more systematic way, the city was incorporated into the field of
anthropological research. This movement meant a change in relation to the dominant axes of
concern until then, which were ethnology, interethnic relations and the study of peasant groups
and/or traditional situations, such as those that constituted the object of community studies.

Since Nina Rodrigues, at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, Afro-Brazilian cults and
populations of African origin in general have been the object of attention of Brazilian and foreign
anthropologists, such as Edison Carneiro, Roger Bastide, Artur Ramos, Ruth Landes and Melville
Herkovitz. In most cases, the focus was on urban populations. These authors worked mainly
between the 1930s and 1960s. The theme of Afro-Brazilian cults and other religious manifestations
not only continue to be important, but become, within urban studies, one of the most productive
areas. But now, from the 1970s onwards, they are associated with significant changes in focus and
perspective.

Anthropologists who research in cities have progressively turned their interest to the
investigation of systems and networks of relationships. Also the favelas1, another area of
investigation with older roots, began to stimulate the elaboration of works in which they were part
of broader social situations and processes, thus involving other actors. Anthropologists began to
get closer and closer to their universes of origin, among other movements. It is worth noting, in
this sense, the importance of Carnivals, rogues and heroes, by Roberto Da Matta, which

1
Favela is an umbrella name for several types of working-class neighborhoods in Brazil. The term
means slum or shantytown.

1
constituted a milestone in this development, with its analyzes of rituals in Brazilian society.
Undoubtedly, in the broad spectrum of investigation, the already mentioned favelas, Afro-
Brazilian cults, the working class, deviant groups, among others, were privileged themes.
However, in many ways, Brazilian anthropologists were confronted with similar and more or less
"known" situations.

This is how Gilberto Freyre was rediscovered, an author relatively marginalized or

forgotten by university institutions for many years. Above all, the book Sobrados e mocambos
came to be seen as a pioneer in research about the relationships between different social categories
in the urban environment. Freyre, in all his work, was certainly also a pioneer in the investigation
of his own milieu. From the 1970s onwards, researchers studying Umbanda2, for example, began
to recognize their maids and, in the ritual centers, they began to run into acquaintances and
neighbors. Moreover, these researchers reached different groups and different places through
people who were part of their more or less intimate relationships. This is not the situation of a
researcher who, in a strange land, manages to approach informants who will be able, with greater
or lesser ease, to promote new encounters. The Brazilian researcher, usually in his own city, makes
use of his previously existing network of relationships and prior to the investigation.

My personal experience began with research in Copacabana, carried out in the context of
the master's thesis that led to the book A Utopia Urbana (The Urban Utopia). I had lived in
Copacabana for 16 years and, when I got married, I moved to the same neighborhood, in an
apartment building. My parents' house was two blocks away, in a building inhabited mainly by
senior officers of the Armed Forces, liberal professionals and their families. From this first
research experience, I have tried to reflect - in my own works and in discussions with my students
- about closeness and distance, familiarity and strangeness.

In the article "Observando o familiar" (Observing the Familiar), I tried to explain some
theoretical-methodological problems arising from the research experience in Copacabana and
within the field studied in my doctoral thesis, Nobres e Anjos (Nobles and Angles). If, in
Copacabana, I had researched a small middle class spatially close, but relatively distant from my

2
Umbanda is a syncretic Afro-Brazilian religion that blends traditional African religions with Roman
Catholicism, Spiritism, and Indigenous American beliefs.

2
universe of origin, in the second case, I dealt with people not only of great sociological proximity,
but who were, significantly, part of my circle of friends.

It is worth mentioning that the distance that separated me from the white-collar universe of
Copacabana was not similar to that which separated the feudal aristocracy and the land servants. I
went to live in the apartment building because I had received it from my father, as a precious
wedding gift given to a couple of graduate students who depended on modest and irregular grants
to survive. In other words, my family owned an apartment for rent in that building and passed it
on to me. My paternal grandmother had even spent a few months there after she became a widow.

So, our stay in that building for about a year and a half put us in a situation of transit to a
better place. We weren't the only ones in that category, but we were certainly the minority. Bank
officers, shop clerks, civil servants who occupied at most an intermediate position in their work
prevailed in the building. However, just like my grandmother, there was also a population of
elderly people who were married, single or widowed, of varying levels within the universe of the
urban middle classes. On the other hand, girls classified as prostitutes or call girls lived in some
apartments. The most fascinating thing about the building was this heterogeneity of figures and
styles. At this point, there was a stark contrast to the relative sociocultural homogeneity of my
parents' building.

Sometimes I wonder if our conviction that staying in the building was transitory was not
tempered by a slight concern about the possibility that, if things didn't work out, we might stay
there for a much longer time than we initially imagined. That is, in the dynamics of the mobility
processes of modern-contemporary Brazilian society, the distances are not like those of the caste
society of classical India.

Then, in the PhD research, I dedicated to the study of the upper middle strata bordering the
elites. These boundaries were somewhat complex because they involved income, status, education,
and lifestyle. In certain situations, bankers’ families could coexist with artists and intellectuals of
modest financial situation, although with some prestige or social notoriety. These differences were
not ignored, but placed in a kind of parenthesis. When I decided to research the "aristocracy of
middle strata", I was already aware of the peculiarities of the task. Some of the members of this
layer were related to my family, and others had been high school classmates of mine. Thus, the

3
bonds that existed within the universe involved kinship relations by descent and alliance, as well
as old ties of friendship and collegiality.

At the Estrela Building, in Copacabana, I based my work mainly on direct observation and
permanent contact with the residents and with the life in the building in general. I talked to people
and watched conflicts and dramas of all kinds. But the whole time I felt like someone from that
world, although today I can even relativize that view a little. In the case of Nobres e Anjos, I saw
myself, in relation to the "nobles", as a peer, as a teacher and researcher, just as the others were
artists, journalists, diplomats, etc. In relation to the "angels", the generational distance produced
significant differences in terms of ethos and language, even more accentuated by the characteristics
of the world of drug-using surfers and their surroundings. The assistance of a younger research
assistant helped me to deal with these difficulties. However, the main focus of the work was on
the "nobles", with whom I lived regularly. I interviewed several of them, sometimes more than
once, complementing participant observation, which was my starting point. In fact, I turned a
significant part of my network of social relationships into an object of research, in a somewhat
heterodox movement by the traditional standards of anthropology. Therefore, I already had an
important type of knowledge and information about part of the universe that I set out to investigate.

The movement of finding the familiar strange was important and crucial - a non-trivial task
and certainly not always successful. Fortunately, I don't think I've ever had omnipotent and
mistaken ideas of studying friends and acquaintances as if they were ants. There was an awareness
of the difficulty of denaturalizing notions, impressions, categories, classifications that constituted
my worldview. However, it is worth mentioning that, for reasons of training and personal
trajectory, the exercise of a certain distance was not strange to me. It is possible that this involves
an interest in literature and history prior to the option for anthropological research. I believe that
this came to enhance and strengthen certain characteristics of my intellectual profile.

The fact is that, nowadays, studying the neighbor, the people next door, the friend, is no
longer such an exceptional undertaking. On the contrary, researches about the middle classes,
gender, generation, artistic and intellectual life, family and kinship, religion, politics, etc., which
imply dealing with the problem of familiarity and estrangement, are multiplying. I believe that this
is a very strong and characteristic movement of Brazilian anthropological production, which - at
least since the mid-1960s - sought to respond to the challenges and questions produced by the 1964

4
coup and the establishment of the military regime. In this sense, it was important to broaden and
deepen the field of anthropological research. It was politically and scientifically interesting to
study the most exploited and oppressed dominated groups. However, investigations of other
segments and categories, such as the middle classes and the elites, also proved to be important.

Another sub-area within urban studies that had great development in the same period was
research on deviance and deviant behavior. Thus, mental illness, prostitution and homosexuality
are some of the themes present in Desvio e Divergencia (Deviation and Divergence), a book I
published in 1974, bringing together articles written by myself and my students. Drug use was one
of the basic hooks of my approach to the universe of the upper middle classes in the South Zone
of Rio de Janeiro, studied in Nobres e Anjos. There was, therefore, an approximation with the psi
area, due to some common interests and concerns. The interactionist tradition itself, a strong
influence on our work, was linked from its origins to social psychology. The subject of the
individual and society is, therefore, closely linked to most of the investigations in urban areas that
have multiplied since the 1970s. Not only the authors of the Chicago School, heirs of Georg
Simmel's work, but other currents, like the works of Michel Foucault, enriched the intellectual
repertoire of the expanding anthropological research area.

The objects studied and the most used theoretical perspectives inevitably led to the
increasing use of life stories, biographies and individual trajectories. In this way, individuals, in
their uniqueness, also became subject of anthropology, as they were perceived as subjects of a
social action constituted from networks of meanings. Instead of considering individuals as
determined by previous encompassing instances, they were studied as interpreters of sociocultural
maps and codes, emphasizing a dynamic vision of society and seeking to establish bridges between
the micro and macro levels.

This perspective was fundamental for me as it enabled me to deal with the universe of
upper middle classes that I studied, because it was clearly about individuals with discourses and
practices of criticism and innovation. Of course, among those people I studied in Copacabana, I
also found people who made relevant comments and reflections, as may happen in any society or
social group. However, when dealing with a more intellectualized sector of Brazilian society, I
came across, and not surprisingly, artists, intellectuals and liberal professionals informed, to a
greater or lesser extent, about sociology, psychoanalysis, history and literature. Some not only

5
answered the questions asked by me, but also constructed answers in which some of the main
themes of the intelligentsia were present, not only in Brazil, but internationally.

In my book Subjetividade e Sociedade (Subjectivity and Society), in which I transcribe

more extensive testimonies, this becomes even clearer. Years after the thesis was ready, on the
occasion of its publication, some of those researched people spoke to me, exposing their points of
view and making interesting observations. Not all of them were intellectuals, and not just the most
intellectual commented on books written about them. It is enough to recall Street corner society,
by William Foote Whyte, in which the author recounts the reactions and even the criticisms made
to the book by some individuals in his research universe, inhabitants of a popular neighborhood in
a North American city.

The education of the more intellectualized among my interviewees, therefore, was basically
a combination of psychoanalysis, some Marxism, art history, literature and, in a few cases, political
science and economics. None of them were social scientists at the time, but many were
knowledgeable about and concerned about critical issues in contemporary Brazilian society. One
of the main consequences of this was that the dialogue between us took place quite thoroughly.
Although I was very close to some of my subjects, this was not the rule. With some of them I had
scant and occasional contact. Others I knew practically by sight and from more or less formal
greetings. This situation helps us to think, not only about the type of research possible, but also
about some characteristics of contemporary society.

Since Simmel, at least, the complex and diverse nature of life in the metropolis has been
discussed and analyzed. The growth of cities, changes and the production of new values mark
boundaries in relation to a traditional society. I return here to a point that I have already explored
in other writings. Not only sociological complexity and differentiation, but the multidimensionality
of the real world, expressed in different levels and provinces of meaning, in the terms of Alfred
Schutz, point to processes of identity construction in which belonging to various groups, networks
and social circles is a basic phenomenon to be investigated and understood in modern-
contemporary society.

Hence the importance of studying individual and collective projects in which the possible
contradictions and ambiguities arising from multiple belongings are, at least in part, subordinated
to a rational action. At the same time, it is this multi-belonging that allows the anthropologist to

6
research his own society and, within it, situations with which he has some kind of involvement
and in which he participates. The fact of not being encompassed by any exclusive group - added
to the anthropologist's own characteristics and training, which, in principle, produces and values a
certain distance - allows for a movement of critical estrangement towards the familiar.

The chances of this undertaking being successful undoubtedly depend on the peculiarities
of the researchers' own trajectories, who may be more inclined or able to work with a greater or
lesser degree of proximity to their object. Therefore, for a change, there are no formulas or recipes,
but attempts to put together strategies and research plans that avoid impoverishing schemes. Thus,
each researcher must seek their own trails from the repertoire of possible maps.