Marcio Goldman is a professor of Social Anthropology in the Postgraduate Program in Social Anthropology at the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He is a researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) with a research project on African matrix religions in Brazil. Among others, he is the author of “Razão e diferença. Sobre Lucien Lévy-Bruhl”, “Como funciona a democracia. Uma teoria etnográfica da política” and “Do outro lado do tempo. Ensaios sobre as religiões de matriz africana.”

Anthropology and Organic Knowledge: The Possibles of a Cosmopolitical Encounter

The aim of this presentation is to address the challenge that the Quilombola thinker Antonio Bispo dos Santos poses to Western thought in general, and to anthropological thought in particular, when he refuses to equate what we call traditional (and what he calls “organic”) knowledge with academic or, as he prefers, “synthetic” knowledge. It is a question of reflecting on the effects that what we could call the “shortening” of the distance between academic and non-academic knowledge (caused in particular, but not only, by affirmative action policies) has had and, above all, could have in practice. anthropological. To do so, it examines recent anthropological perspectives on the relationship between these modes of thought, confronts Antonio Bispo dos Santos’ position with traditional debates, and asks about the meaning of an anthropology that recognises symmetry — but not equivalence! — between your practices of knowledge and those you propose to study.