The yellow fever outbreak and its sociotechnical controversies: science, society, humans and non-humans in debate

• Grant number: 18/00580-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: May 01, 2018
• End date: April 30, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Uirá Felippe Garcia
• Grantee: Cassandra Moira Costa Moura
• Host Institution: Escola de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (EFLCH). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus Guarulhos. Guarulhos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The purpose of this project is the anthropological study of events and debates that can be thought as a "controversy", involving the recent yellow fever burst occurred in Brazil (2017), and it's several implications. Exploring the relation between the eradication of primates due to the disease outbreak, and the analysis of these events by the media, government and academics, our objective is to produce, in light of these events, an anthropological study that would put in perspective the phenomenon and its implications, especially in relation to the life and death of bugios (Alouatta) in the Atlantic Forest. In terms of theoretical background, the project is based on the so-called ontological turn of contemporary anthropology, in particular the recent production on multispecies studies (Tsing, Kohn, Van Dooren), that works with a practical ethnographic notion that intends to not establish hierarchies between the Occident and "everything else", human and not human, nature and culture, such as presented by several consolidated authors (Ingold 2000, Latour 1994, Viveiros de Castro 2002). The project's main target is to comprehend the juxtaposed relationship between the yellow fever outbreak and the eradication of non-human primates in several Brazilian regions (but mainly the southeast region). This will be done through the analyses of this impasse according to the latourian notions of controversy, translation practices and hybridization in scientific elaboration, and in which way this would affect the environment and many life forms (human, non-human, plants, rivers, etc.). (AU)