Paper short abstract:

My fieldwork explores both the identities supporting and opposing crime. This elicits new methodological opportunities and mitigates concerns around reinforcing criminalisation. Yet, it also complicates positionality and raises questions on the intersection of empathy and legal/moral questions.

Paper long abstract:

Those participating in (Northern) European Street Culture have multiple, sometimes opposing, identities. The most intimate and tense of these is between illicit behaviour and religion, frequently expressed through music. A focus on this tripartite relationship opens the door to new methodologies from religious and music (hip-hop) studies, such as musical elicitation and material/lived religion.

This broadened methodological palette mitigates the risk of ‘othering’ the studied subject by highlighting the different, diverging, and developing identities of those often reduced to ‘criminals’. However, this also raises new ethical questions. For instance, probing the tension and co-existence of said identities can be confrontational, eliciting strong emotions. This asks for careful and continued engagement, which supports instead of exploits the subject.

Navigating this successfully taps into questions of positionality as the attention for multiple identities complicates the in/outsider constellation between researcher, researched and their different identities. Whereas a multidisciplinary background including knowledge of crime and religion is necessary for this approach, striking the right balance is complex. For instance, during preliminary fieldwork, participants have tried to convert me or regarded me as a potential spiritual leader, complicating my role as a researcher.

Lastly, an approach aimed at disturbing the ‘othering’ of those involved in crime could create moral and legal difficulties. An emphatic approach of the inner conflict around criminal behaviour risks affecting the legal and moral obligations of the researcher. Guarding this and navigating the relationship between trust, empathy and (legal) morality remains a primary challenge of this type of research.

Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to problematize the ethical and epistemological dimensions that have emerged over more than four decades of ethnographic research on the criminal justice and public safety systems in contemporary Brazil, presenting some results of the studies carried out by our research network

Paper long abstract:

Anthropological research about justice and public safety, and the respective ethnography of the practices and representations of their agents, confronts us with a group of ethical questions and methodological choices. In this sense, false problems often arise in the field of anthropology when we are dedicated to studying groups with whom we don't have a relationship of empathy, solidarity or shared ideologies and conceptions of the world: the undesired Other. This issue becomes even more pressing when the aim is to describe differences in values and moral orientations that are foreign, but no less internal to the social universe of the researchers. The issue also becomes more complex when the subjects studied are in the upper echelons of society, they are likely to criticize and even reject anthropologists' interpretations, which may have unpredictable consequences from a judicial point of view. We will describe some of the main results of the research we have carried out since the 1980s, in an effort to problematize the ethical and epistemological dimensions that have emerged over more than four decades of ethnographic research carried out by our research network. After all, if anthropology consists of knowledge about the Other, what are the challenges imposed on anthropological research with this Other that is equidistant, but marked by enormous differences in terms of assumptions, practices and worldviews? How do we deal with the undesired Other? We believe that studying what (and who) challenges and disturbs us is a great challenge for anthropological thinking

Paper short abstract:

This paper approaches power relations among trans brazilian women, focusing on “cafetinas” and their “houses of prostitution. From a specific ethnographic case I discuss the forms that the anthropological writing can be carried out in contexts and relationships that are criminalized.

Paper long abstract:

Working with sex workers in the Brazilian context since 2013, I present an analysis of power relations in a specific neighborhood (Jardim Itatinga), where sex work is the main economic activity. Relations with "cafetinas" present an intersectional specificity in the Brazilian context, not really explained by the word "pimping". Also in dialogue with a solid Brazilian bibliography, I argue that these kind of relations can be of support, affective and effective for sex workers to face violence and vulnerability, especially among trans women. Therefore, I propose a political discussion about how ethnography can contribute to decriminalize, aiming to discuss possibilities of ethnographic writing and its political impacts in such cases. In this paper a propose to discuss the following questions: how can anthropological attention and disposition capture the relationship known as pimping, with its nuances? Is it enough to listen and reproduce what is being said? Can the owners of prostitution houses be heard? Which speeches should be selected? More than that, how can they be reproduced facing power inequalities and the criminalization of the interlocutors? How can we explore ethnographic details when the subject is itself criminalized? Finally I propose the discussion about the possibilities of ethnography writing in order to contribute for the decriminalization of the relations that are being studied.