Verena Stolcke's transatlantic trajectory: transnational circulation and knowledge production

• Grant number: 22/02301-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: April 01, 2022
• End date: September 30, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology - Theory of Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Luís Felipe Bueno Sobral
• Grantee: Luísa Registro Fonseca
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 19/05567-5 - Historiography of anthropology, AP.JP
• Associated scholarship(s): 23/05044-8 - Verena Stolcke and the circulation of knowledge: the traveler of anthropology, BE.EP.MS

Abstract

The anthropologist Verena Stolcke (1938-) has a singular trajectory. She was born in Dessau, Germany, on the eve of World War II, and ten years later immigrated with her family to Argentina, where she grew up in a German colony. Afterward, returned to her home country, and then did her doctorate degree at the University of Oxford, under the guidance of Peter Rivière, with a groundbreaking thesis in historical anthropology that discusses race and sexuality in colonial Cuba. In 1970, shortly after her doctorate, Verena was invited by Unicamp, along with Antonio Augusto Arantes and Peter Fry, to found and develop the course of social anthropology. In the 1980s, she obtained a position at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where she is currently an emeritus professor. This transnational and cosmopolitan trajectory, of which one of the main stages took place at Unicamp, offers a rare opportunity to study individual intellectual production in a variety of social, cultural, historical and institutional conditions; in other words, it is about the production of anthropological knowledge in motion. In this way, her trajectory challenges some stagnant analytical frameworks present in historiography of anthropology, which tend to privilege the study of national traditions, thus ignoring the circulation of people and ideas that, in fact, are vital to understanding these same traditions. (AU)