@article{THESIS,
      recid = {12897},
      author = {Amancio, Thomaz},
      title = {Field Work: Labor and Culture in Rural Brazil},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2024-08},
      number = {THESIS},
      abstract = {This dissertation explores how four major intellectuals  used fieldwork to study Brazil’s countryside and register  it in writing, between the late 19th and the mid-20th  century. Silvio Romero, Mário de Andrade, João Guimarães  Rosa, and Antonio Candido moved between literature and the  social sciences, but relied on field research in the  plantation and the cattle frontier to authorize their  writings. Their field experience was in turn deeply  informed by class, because it took place on the rural  estates of their families and friends, spaces reminiscent  of their own upbringing as heirs of rural patriarchy.  Moreover, class regulated the central relation upon which  fieldwork was built, the one between researcher and rural  worker. Rural workers were the main informants, subjects,  and characters of these texts, but also the subordinates in  those rural estates in which researchers were honored  guests. Thus, in the work of these researchers, a matrix of  intimate relationships marked by class, race, and gender  differentials was overcoded in aesthetic and social  scientific terms as common culture and mutual belonging,  laying the bases for ideologies of miscegenation, racial  democracy, and class consensus that defined the political  horizon of the nation. Chapter one analyzes Silvio Romero’s  folklore collection Cantos Populares do Brasil (1883) in  conversation with the ethnographic essays he wrote on the  subject. It demonstrates how Romero grounded his folkloric  work on autobiography, infusing descriptions of labor and  cultural realities with the register of white nostalgia. By  engaging with Romero’s influential work, it argues he  provided a model for the study of popular culture in rural  settings that combines a normative empiricism with a  sentimental attachment informed by slavery and its  afterlives. Chapter two analyzes the large archive related  to Mário de Andrade’s 1929 trip to the Brazilian Northeast.  It argues this archive registers Andrade’s relationship to  the field in a language of longing, condensed in the figure  of Chico Antônio, a singer and small farmer who worked  under the purview of a close friend of Andrade’s. Chapter  three engages the corpus connected to João Guimarães Rosa’s  field trips to the cattle frontiers of western Brazil.  Through an analysis of Rosa’s ambiguous style, it reads  these texts as evidence of his recurrent struggle to  represent the field, against the backdrop of state-led  expansion into the western territory, to which Rosa  contributed as an official of the Ministry of Foreign  Relations. Chapter four is dedicated to Antonio Candido’s  sociological monograph Os parceiros do Rio Bonito (1964),  based on Candido’s fieldwork in Southern São Paulo. It  argues that the book subtly undermines its progressive  political goals by adopting a cultural framework which  blurs the distinction between economic and cultural  categories, and thus horizontalizes the relationship  between landless and landowners. Therefore, by  historicizing field research in the countryside as an  epistemic and aesthetic practice informed by class, the  dissertation tracks the emergence of a way of engaging  rural realities which, born in the plantation, found its  way into scientific and cultural institutions and the  university. },
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/12897},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.12897},
}