The Nucleus of Anthropology of Politics (Núcleo de Antropologia da Política, NuAP) was founded in 1997 and is institutionally located in the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology of the National Museum/Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (PPGAS/Museu Nacional/UFRJ). It assembles researchers from various academic institutions, mostly in Brazil. Its aim is to examine politics as experienced, emphasizing ethnography and observing aspects of the whole social tissue. This perspective resulted from the ethnographic implosion of commonsense – including academic commonsense – categories that distinguish sealed domains such as kinship, family, politics, religion, territory, law, bureaucracy. The publication of the 33 books in the Anthropology of Politics Series (in this site for download) made it clear that “politics” was itself a category always under scrutiny, even when explicitly defined in analytical terms. This was the perspective adopted by multiple studies about a wide range of themes, including research on elections, political meetings and rallies, demonstrations, social movements, political celebrations, violence and crime, rights, loss of congressional mandates, public policies, monographs on life in small towns and metropolitan peripheries, civil documentation and identification – most of this as a result of the analysis of episodes, situations, dramas, rituals, and critical events. This option for ethnography in the research project on which NuAP was originally based has enabled the revitalization of anthropology’s initial and basic theoretical perspective: that the search for alterity re-positions, or even implodes, rigid classificatory categories to which we adhere in the Western world, leading to further doubts and to new and enriched questioning.

This site was produced with the support of CNPq and Faperj.