"Some things that happen there, I can’t tell you about"

Methodological insights from two research projects in Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

Based on the respective experiences of academic exchange in Rio de Janeiro in which the authors participated, this work reconstructs common aspects of their research trajectories in that city by carrying out a comparative exercise with their research with young boys and girls from working-class neighborhoods and street vendors from the city of Buenos Aires. This analysis focuses, first of all, on the implications of the enrollment of ethnographic work, investigating the relationships built on the basis of (dis)trust upon the insertion of the anthropologists in the different social environments. Secondly, the analysis focuses on the particularities acquired by ethnographic research in social contexts crossed by different forms and manifestations of violence(s), trying to deconstruct the meanings (local and proper) associated with it, in order to approach a problematization of the native use of this category that would allow the outlining of some theoretical generalizations.