Who was Doctor Anisio?: The challenge of ethnic fiction to the social history of Rio de Janeiro (1889-1916)

Author(s)

Israel Ozanam

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas
• Defense date: 2018-08-14

Examining board members

Sidney Chalhoub; Tânia Regina de Luca; Ludmila de Souza Maia; Robert Wayne Andrew Slenes; Rodrigo Camargo de Godoi

• Advisor: Sidney Chalhoub

Abstract

How is it possible to reconstitute the worldview of members of the working class of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries if the majority of the documents referring to working class people are marked by the conceptions and value judgments of the literate elite that wrote them? This methodological question has gone hand in hand with social history for decades, and is at the center of this dissertation. The first part of the dissertation seeks an answer to this question through analysis of stories recounting the career of Doctor Anísio, a member of a group specializing in forgery and thefts in different Brazilian cities of the period, principally in Rio de Janeiro and, to a lesser extent, in Recife. Black, poor, literate, and highly educated, he at first appears an ideal representative of a "culture of theft" that opposed the prescribed social norms of elites by way of appropriating and manipulating the norms themselves. According to this interpretation, both the norms and this manner of opposing them are reflected in the sources, and it would be possible to examine not only the scientific discourse against subalterns, but also the strategies of the subalterns in action. However, beyond a particular moment in his life, Dr. Anísio no longer assumed a criminal identity, although this identity was still attributed to him by authorities and journalists. This contradiction puts the central research question at an impasse ¿ we cannot continue to consider Dr. Anísio as a model of confrontation of the dominant culture without first locating the origin of the dichotomy according to which the established order corresponded to an elite worldview, which would be in opposition to the "popular" worldview. The second part of the dissertation thus returns to the initial question, no longer to answer it, but rather to interrogate the theoretical presuppositions on which it is based. To do so, the articulation of this dichotomy is empirically reconstituted at the intersections of late-nineteenth-century Brazilian literature, ethnography, and criminal law, from which emerged a form of writing about the Brazilian society through the prism of otherness. Criminality featured in such writings as a culture of poverty and of inferior races, and the authors of these documents attempted to use this discourse about criminality to link the preservation of social order and rules of civility to an emergent literate identity that they themselves were, through these very articulations, constructing. This form of writing, here called "ethnic fiction," was largely responsible for conferring naturalness upon Dr. Anísio¿s confinement to the condition of representative type of the culture of theft, and points to the fact that the story from below must take into account the nuances of nineteenth-century literary debate in order to avoid its theoretical pitfalls (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 13/03914-3 - Literary bohemian, crime and labor: the making of differences in Recife in the time of Dr. Anísio (1875-1916)
• Grantee: Israel Ozanam de Sousa Cunha
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate