thegoodfellas/blogset-br huggingface dataset:
de ideias, sentimentos, modas e arte. Recordo-me da alegria de Carole e Isaac caminhando por entre as barracas, onde carnes penduradas sangravam o chao, ervas medicinais para todos os males do corpo e do espirito, cantadores improvisando os versos, inventando enredos para as pessoas que assistiam, outros dancando o forro (for-all), outros comendo iguarias nordestinas: galinha cabidela, buchada de bode, carne de sol com baiao-de-dois, carne seca desfiada com farinha e por ai vai. Tapioca (beju), cocadas, doces de rapadura (quebra-queixo) e outras sobremesas. As pecas de artesanato misturando sagrado e profano, bem medievais: falos de madeira e bonecos de barros trepando, ao lado de imagens de santos.O grande tour que fizemos com os dois, no entanto, ocorreu alguns dias depois, quando fomos a Vila Mimosa, uma zona de prostituicao, campo de estudo para a dissertacao de mestrado de Soraya Simoes. Trata-se de uma area nem sempre tranquila. E preciso saber caminhar neste espaco, onde a presenca de segurancas, policiais e todo tipo de pessoa traz um potencial para violencia relativamente grande. Em um momento de tensao, diante da presenca ostensiva de armamento pesado nas maos desses policiais, ficamos espantados com a preocupacao de Isaac sobre nossa seguranca. Para nos, nao havia risco e, so depois, pudemos compreender o insight que o olhar do estrangeiro havia nos trazido e pudemos nos despir da naturalizacao com passamos pela violencia urbana do dia-a-dia da cidade. Mas terminamos o dia num botequim da Lapa, dos tempos em que o bairro do rio sustentava a fama de centro boemio do pais. Ao nosso lado, adolescentes estudantes de musica da academia improvisaram uma roda de chorinho e samba. Acho que foi um fecho de ouro para as incursoes aos diversos campos de estudos dos alunos de Mello. A cidade presente em todos eles e com sua alma aberta aos olhos daqueles dois visitantes, como se soubesse que se revelar assim so vale a pena mesmo para quem sabe ver. Os compromissos e o prazo relativamente curto de sua viagem impediu que ele pudesse ir a Amazonia, visitar o poeta Thiago de Mello, meu tio, com quem tinha arranjado uma viagem aos maues, na cabeceira do rio Andira. Gostaria muito de ouvir os relatos desse encontro entre o filosofo e o poeta, no coracao da floresta. Agora, so talvez na proxima vida. Mas, pelo menos, fizemos nossa "flanerie" pelas ruas encantadoras do Rio, como ha muito sugeriu o grande escritor Joao do Rio, tendo ele mesmo desvendado a alma da cidade pisando com o coracao aberto suas ruas, vielas e becos. Tendo cruzado com os mais dispares personagens, as historias mais extraordinarias de vidas que, no entanto, vivem apenas o cotidiano.E nos, por outro lado, pudemos desfrutar do olhar singular de Isaac, sua sensibilidade, sua experiencia e sobretudo o afeto, bem ao seu modo parisiense, que ele nos deu nesse encontro riquissimo. Por isso, quando soubemos de sua morte, ficamos como baratas tontas, sem saber o que seria desse elo que se havia tao fortemente estabelecido entre nos, nao so no plano academico, mas sobretudo do ponto de
a bond usually referred to as "rapport." Unlike the missionary, the colonial official, the trader (all of whom Malinowski seems to have regarded as fools or worse) or, nowadays, the embassy aide, Coca-Cola representative, journalist, and junketing economist, the anthropologist "understands the people," and, appreciating this, the people in turn reveal to him their innermost thoughts and feelings.This unsophisticated conception of rapport is, of course, self-serving and sentimental, thus false. Nevertheless, some bond of sympathy is at the heart of effective field research; and the ability to encourage an informant, who has no particular reason for doing so, to talk with some honesty and in some detail about what the anthropologist wants him to talk about is what separates the gifted from the miscast in ethnography. The value of Malinowski's embarrassing example is that, if one takes it seriously, it makes it difficult to defend the sentimental view of rapport as depending on the enfolding of anthropologist and informant into a single moral, emotional, and intellectual universe. In whatever way Malinowski obtained the material for the more than 2500 pages of the major descriptive monographs which he produced on the Trobriands, he didn't do it by becoming one with the natives:At 10 I went to Teyava, where I took pictures of a house, a group of girls, and the [food exchanges] and studied the construction of a new house. On this occasion I made one or two coarse jokes, and one bloody nigger made a disapproving remark, whereupon I cursed them and was highly irritated. I managed to control myself on the spot, but was terribly irritated that the nigger had dared to speak to me in such a manner.In fact, the relationship between an anthropologist and the people he studies is inevitably asymmetrical, and radically so. The two parties come to the encounter with different backgrounds, different expectations, and different purposes. They are not members of a single community, a fact which no amount of murmuring about human brotherhood or the society of all mankind can really obscure. Their interests, their resources, their needs, to say nothing of their positions in life, are all sharply contrasting. They do not see things in the same way nor feel about them in the same way, and so the relationship between them is characterized by moral tension, a fixed ethical ambiguity. Most anthropologists are not so ill-natured as Malinowski, and indeed he seems (though this may merely be a result of his having also been franker than most) something of a deviant, if not an extreme case. But the fact that most good ethnographers are decent and reasonably pleasant men who like and admire the people they work with doesn't really change the situation. The noblest of anthropologists face the problem Malinowski faced: how to penetrate a form of life not merely different from but incompatible with their own.WHAT SAVED MALINOWSKI, what kept him from sinking entirely into the emotional swamp the diary describes, was not an enlarged capacity for empathy. There is very little evidence in any of his work that he ever
found his way into any savage's heart, even the least shy. The psychology is all generalized, the ideas and emotions all standardized. "The Trobriander" (or, often enough, "The Savage") does this or that, feels this or that, thinks this or that. Individuals appear only momentarily as often suspiciously apt illustrations of some general feature of Trobriand mentality. What saved him was an almost unbelievable capacity for work. For a man who complains in his diary almost every day of lethargy, boredom, illness, despair, or just a general inability to get anything done, he collected a staggering quantity of data. Not universal compassion but an almost Calvinist belief in the cleansing power of work brought Malinowski out of his own dark world of oedipal obsessions and practiced self-pity into Trobriand daily life:As for ethnology: I see the life of the natives as utterly devoid of interest or importance, something as remote from me as the life of a dog. During the walk, I made it a point of honor to think about what I am here to do. About the need to collect many documents. I have a general idea about their life and some acquaintance with their language, and if I can only somehow "document" all this, I'll have valuable material.Must concentrate on my ambitions and work to some purpose. Must organize the linguistic material and collect documents, find better ways of studying the life of women [domestic implements], and system of "social representations." Strong spiritual impulse.The diary is laced with moral self-exhortation to leave off onanism, pawing native girls, and reading trashy novels and buckle down to doing what he was there to do. When this is combined with the constant theme of self condemnation, the book takes on something of the tone of a Puritan tract:Got up at 7. Yesterday, under the mosquito net, dirty thoughts: Mrs. [H.P.]; Mrs. C. and even Mrs. W....I even thought of seducing M. Shook all this off...Today got up at 7sluggish; I lay under the mosquito net and wanted to read a book instead of working. I got up and made the rounds of the village. [Studied barter trade.] I resolved absolutely to avoid all lecherous thoughts, and in my work to finish off the census, if possible, today. At about 9 I went to Kaytabu where I took the census with a bearded old man. Monotonous, stupid work, but indispensable.Woke up late; under the netting a tendency to let myself go, as usual, which I mastered. Planned details of excursion to Kitava and thought about documenting [native trade]. Wrote down conversations...Conversations with [the island chief].Moral tenets: I must never let myself become aware of the fact that other women [than his fiancee] have bodies, that they copulate. I also resolve to shun the line of least resistance in the matter of novels. I am very content not to have fallen again into the habit of smoking. Now I must accomplish the same thing in respect to reading. I may read poems and serious things, but I must absolutely avoid trashy novels. And I
clan!Malinowski himself wrote quite differently: "for the native is not the natural companion for a white man, and after you have been working with him for several hours...you will hanker after the company of your own kind." But, he adds, if you are alone, after a solitary walk you will seek out the natives' company as a relief from loneliness (ibid., p. 7). In this way he became acquainted with much of the imponderabilia of native life. In the same Introduction he mentions periods of despondency, despair, boredom, and the reading of novels as an escape.In all his writings Malinowski did stress the goal of understanding the native point of view, now generally accepted. Could the youngish American group of ethnographic semanticists who stress the same goal through linguistic techniques be regarded as having "extraordinary empathy?" Malinowski would have agreed completely with the reviewer's point about the false and sentimental concept of "going native." So do I and most all field workers.I have the impression from the diary that what empathy Malinowski achieved with the Melanesians was due to seeing himself as a "savage," mentioned a number of times. He emphasized knowing one's self as a way of understanding otherstheir emotional as well as rational life. The similarities between tribal and modern man are now generally accepted, but this was not so at the time Malinowski wrote his diary.It deals almost exclusively with a painful self-analysis in the life of a complex, sensitive, hypochondriac young Pole, isolated from loved ones and friends, doing field work under difficult conditions during World War I, among a Neolithic people in New Guinea. Malinowski had no one to talk to with understanding. In the diary he wrote his innermost feelingsfears, anxieties, guilt, loneliness, anger, love, sexual frustrations, and dreamsthe kind of data given usually by a patient to a psychoanalyst. Malinowski was well aware of psychoanalytical theories and interprets some of his dreams in Freudian manner. He wrote in the diary that it was a form of psychological analysis. It is well known that this kind of writing may be a catharsis.In his diary, Malinowski swears and curses the natives particularly when they were unreliable and lied to him. What, perhaps, Dr. Geertz did not know was that Malinowski used similar violent language about the "bloody English" and about many other people in his own society. I am told that the word "nigger," which is in the translated diary, does not exist in the Polish language and that the word in the original text meant "blacks," Moreover, Dr. Geertz notes only the instances of Malinowski's frustrations and irritations with the Melanesians and not those times (admittedly less frequent) when he writes about natives who were his friends and whom he trusted.Nor does the reviewer indicate the two quite different moodsfrom anguish to exultationexpressed in Doestoevskian fashion in the diary. True, the anguish predominates as one would expect in a diary of this type and in a man like Malinowski. But although he often longed to be away from the islands (as do most field workers in
similar circumstances), other times he thought he wanted to live there forever. The diary reveals a man nakedly alive with his senses open to many forms of reality: to the great and almost indescribable beauty of the islands, to the beauty of a woman's body, to the intricate design of a tortoise shell comb, as well as to himselfto his physical symptoms and his many personal problems, to the stench and smell of native life, to the lice and the interminable insects, and to almost every other facet of life.But Dr. Geertz sees only "a disagreeable man," "a crabbed, self-pre-occupied, hypochondriacal narcissist, whose fellow-feelings for the people he lived with were limited in the extreme." The reviewer continues, "For more than three years, this 'diary' suggests, Malinowski worked with enormous industry in this [Melanesian] world, and lived with intense passion in another. The significance of this fact for anthropology's image of itself is shattering...." But it is "shattering" only for those who do not understand the various levels of consciousness (as well as the unconscious) on which all human beings live, whether or not they are aware of them in the field as well as at home. Suppose spouses, lovers, friends, professors and their students daily revealed their innermost feelings (assuming they were aware of them) to each other and to the public!Dr. Geertz continues, "What saved him [Malinowski] was an almost unbelievable capacity for work." Certainly, hard work saved Malinowski (and most of us on difficult field trips). But talking to himself through a diary was probably also important in "saving" this troubled young man. The two may not be unrelated and it would not be the first time that a direct confrontation between the personal and the scientific resulted in bold and innovative scientific work. Obviously, it was the case with Freud (also a hypochondriac). This kind of confrontation is often a part of the creative processsimilar in the arts and sciences.The diary was not written for publication, but Dr. Geertz never raises the question of the propriety of that. Written in Polish, it was found among Malinowski's papers after his death; no one had previously known of its existence. Malinowski was indeed unfortunate in his choice of a literary executor, his widow by a second and late marriage, who is a painter. Her decision to publish the diary was as if a psychoanalyst published notes on a patient after the latter's death and without permission. However, granted that the private fantasies and intimate thoughts of a great anthropologist living in New Guinea under very primitive conditions more than fifty years ago might be data and have value, his literary executor could have made them available to scholars by depositing the diary in the University archives which house his field notes and other such data. (A grant for translation could have been secured from a Foundation.) An anthropologist interested in contemporary culture might note that Malinowski's widow apparently chose to have the diary contribute to the current expose-sensationalism of our culture, even though this expose happens to be dull.Hortense PowdermakerResearch
AssociateUniversity of California, BerkeleyLetter # 2November 9, 1967: Ashley Montagu,AN AGREEABLE MANBy Ashley MontaguIn response to Under the mosquito netTo the Editors:I enjoyed Clifford Geertz's review of Malinowski's Diary and Coral Gardens (NYR, September 14). Geertz very fairly conveys the effect of the Diary: however great an ethnologist Malinowski may have been he "was also apparently a disagreeable man." Those who knew Malinowski will be grateful for the "apparently." The Diary does, indeed, leave the impression of a difficult character, and there is no denying the fact that Malinowski could be disagreeable. But this would be to leave the reader with a very onesided view of the man as he really was.From October 1922 to the end of the academic year 1925 I was a student of Malinowski at the London School of Economics, as were Raymond Firth and Evans-Pritchard. Malinowski was a magnificent teacher, and the influence he had on his students was immense. I learned what a teacher should be like from him, and I am to this day still mining ideas to which he first drew my attention. I continued to take seminars with Malinowski, on and off, till 1929. We corresponded and met intermittently till his untimely death in 1942. As student, friend, and colleague I knew Malinowski for some 20 years. Like most of us he had his faults. They were very human faults. I knew Malinowski as a heroic suffering humane being whose wife, to whom he was completely devoted, was dying of a disabling and incurable illness, while he himself hardly knew a day free from the illness which eventually killed him. I never heard him speak of his own illness, though it was quite evident to me that he suffered much. I never saw him in anything but the most lively spirits, with his ready wit and sense of humor always to the fore, bantering, teasing, joking, even when discussing the most serious matters. He was most generous, kind, and helpful to students, and put himself out to further their careers as I have known few other teachers to do. His prefaces to many of his students' books will always remain a living testimony to his generous spirit. With a few of his old students he fell out. He accused them to me of being disloyal, disloyal in a way that hurt him. Temperament on both sides, I suspect, was involved.Malinowski once asked me how long it took me in looking over an ethnological work to determine whether or not it was worth reading. I modestly replied, "About three minutes." "Too long," said Malinowski, "All I do is look in the index for my name. If it's there I know it's a good book. It it isn't, then it's no good." This was in the early Thirties, and, of course, Malinowski was quite right. It was that sort of remark that earned him the dislike of the humorless. I am afraid theirs was the loss. Malinowski was as lovable as he was brilliant, and that is how I shall always remember him. His early
novas levas de imigracao:"O inicio de todos nos foi morar aqui, nesta regiao. Eu, por exemplo, morei na Senhor dos Passos em 1930. E, como todos os outros, trabalhava embaixo e morava no sobrado." [6]As fronteiras nao sao apenas fisicas, mas sobretudo morais. Contiguo a Saara, por exemplo, situa-se o Camelodromo, regiao reservada a vendedores ambulantes e de barracas registrados na Prefeitura, no limite da Rua dos Andradas, que separa os dois espacos comerciais. Estes limites, sinalizados por cavaletes de madeira pintados de amarelo e placa alertando que o trafego de veiculos e proibido, indicam precisamente onde comecam e terminam a Saara e o Camelodromo, cada area com suas regras e valores morais proprios.Os dois ambientes apresentam praticas de comercio e codigos de conduta distintos. Alem do aspecto da concorrencia, situacao de potencial conflito, ha nos discursos dos atores da Saara a visao de que os comerciantes vizinhos sao menos qualificados e atuam em situacao irregular, vendendo produtos ilicitos (frutos de roubo) e artigos falsificados (piratas), estando varios deles de alguma forma ligados ao crime organizado. De modo que a presenca de vendedores ambulantes e camelos e expressamente proibida e prontamente reprimida pela seguranca da Saara[7].Ja ao Sul, no limite com a Rua Buenos Aires, situam-se os comerciantes da Sociedade de Amigos do Largo do Sao Francisco (Salfa), entidade co-irma da Saara. Trata-se igualmente de uma area de comercio popular, bem ao estilo da Saara, com lojas dentro de sobrados do mesmo periodo da regiao vizinha, vendendo produtos similares ou complementares. Nao ha, no entanto, uma identidade etnica explicita como na Saara, onde o discurso etnico reforca o sentido de pertencimento ao definir seus limites como uma regiao moral. A Rua Buenos Aires, que divide as duas areas comerciais, tem o trafego de veiculos permitido, o que reforca o limite fisico entre a Saara e a Salfa.A Avenida Presidente Vargas e o limite fisico ao Norte da Saara. Sua abertura, em 7 de setembro de 1944, era um dos pontos principais do plano de renovacao urbana do Centro do Rio de Janeiro, elaborado pelo arquiteto Alfredo Agache. O plano previa redesenhar o tracado de ruas, abertura de avenidas e corredores viarios, para integrar o Centro a outros bairros e implicava a destruicao de casarios e remocao de populacoes. Uma segunda etapa do chamado Plano Agache chegou a ser anunciada no inicio dos anos 1960 e previa a destruicao do casario da Saara para a construcao da Avenida Diagonal, ligando a Av. Presidente Vargas a Lapa. Os comerciantes, no entanto, se uniram e conseguiram suspender a aplicacao do referido plano. O marco dessa mobilizacao contra a intervencao do Estado na vida da cidade foi a criacao da associacao da Saara, em 1962.Por fim, o Campo de Santana, no extremo Oeste, se impoe como fronteira natural. A Saara e ainda cortada no sentido Norte-Sul pela Avenida Passos, o que divide a regiao em dois blocos. O bloco Oriental e menor e situa-se ao lado do Camelodromo. Ali, as lojas da Saara sao, na maior parte dos casos, menores e muitas delas nao apresentam letreiros