Campinas martyred: a genealogy of violent cities

• Grant number: 21/05741-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: December 01, 2021
• End date: February 28, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology - Urban Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Susana Soares Branco Durão
• Grantee: Paola Daniela Argentin
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The death of Antônio da Costa Santos, mayor of Campinas elected in 2000 and murdered in 2001, was never resolved. Therefore, it raised narratives of webs of political involvement and criminal offenses that could have culminated in the mysterious and unfinished murder. This martyr of the city which dies under his management, turns crime into a moral tale that forces Campinas to (re)think of itself and to produce diagnoses about itself: about its multiple urban violence, corrupt relations, intersections of all kinds between police, politics and power, public administration and organized crime. For this project, it is interesting to go deeper and study what can be read as an urban moral tale (DURÃO & COELHO, 2013): a narrative of the dangerous city that needs, at any cost, to be held. For this project, I start from the hypothesis that the repercussions of this murder signal blurred governamentalities involving security agents and other producers of violent cities (FOUCAULT, 1984). This project proposes to make a genealogy of the moral tale and material performances in the violent city that originate from this and other disruptive events, involving urban violence, power mechanisms and security agencies operating at the same time (idem, 2014 [1988]). The main objective of this project is, therefore, from the repercussions, stories and documents of the mayor's murder to recover the logic of power networks at the municipal level, in public and private security, to understand the passion for urban safety and its blurred webs in the present. The project expects to contribute originally for studies of security and illegalities complementing this view with contributions from political anthropology, policing ethnography and urban history. (AU)