The transformation of hunger: an ethnography of a category that enacts reality

• Grant number: 18/14476-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: November 01, 2018
• End date: August 31, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Ronaldo Romulo Machado de Almeida
• Grantee: Lis Furlani Blanco
• Supervisor: Nancy Scheper-Hughes
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), United States
• Associated to the scholarship: 16/07810-6 - To give the fish while you teach how to fish: an ethnography of the social trajectory of the Hunger Zero program., BP.DR

Abstract

Until the year of 2010 the guarantee of food to every citizen as a basic right was not in the Brazilian Federal Constitution. The process to include this right happened as a joint force with several measures from the Brazilian government since 2003. The Zero Hunger program was the main project of these measures. However, fifteen years after its creation the program is still subject of discussion, even thought it was diluted in several food security and income generation programs. I began my PhD research through the perspective that the Zero Hunger program, despite its effort to end hunger, can be considered a milestone in the Brazilian social public policies. Therefore, it is the main goal of my study to develop an ethnography of category of hunger that is enacted in the Food Security policies throughout the analysis of the trajectory of the Zero Hunger Program in Brazil. Going through the technpolitical knowledge interwoven on the creation of these public policies, it is the objective of my research to understand how 'hunger' is enacted and, in this process, it creates subjects and puts into circulation important categories such as rights, assistance, vulnerability, social welfare, but also the definition and the enactment of State itself.The work of Professor Nancy Scheper-Hughes in Northeast Brazil over hunger and its folk category "nervos" is a milestone in a type of ethnography that aims to understand objects in practice and how their meanings are connected with the enactment of power through an hierarchy in the construction of knowledge. Besides Professor Nancy, the University of California, Berkeley is the home of several renowned anthropologists that work in the interface between anthropology, medicine, health and politics, which is exactly the references and discussions that are still presented as gaps in my own educational background.