Paper short abstract:

In Brazil, the rise of Bolsonaro´s government intensified concerns among anthropologists about denialist discourses. Also, other problems were raised while anti-denialist reactions emerged in the public space, questioning the plurality of sciences under the label of “pseudo-sciences”.

Paper long abstract:

In Brazil, the rise of Bolsonaro´s government intensified concerns among anthropologists about denialist discourses emerging from extreme-right political positions that severely affect various aspects of social life: the pandemics, global warming, vaccine efficiency, and even the ongoing Indigenous and Black people genocide. Such denying positions treat Brazilian democracy. The discourses coming from the extreme right seemed to highlight cultural relativism - a concept coming from anthropology and appropriated by reactionary agendas - to explain and justify multiple forms of social negligence and abuse producing highly visible, anti-denialist reactions. In this proposal, I will analyze one specific anti-denialist answer elaborated by a virologist and a journalist, working as coauthors (Pasternak & Orsi, 2023), Their contribution highlights the importance of science as a matter of State, but it also goes beyond this affirmation, questioning all kinds of sciences under the label of what they called “pseudo-sciences”. They doubted the “veracity” of popular curanderismo, the legitimacy of health and knowledge production in Afro-Brazilian religions, and even the “effectiveness” of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic tool. Through an attentive (n)ethnographic analysis of such statements, and also the answers to those statements coming from specific actors from civil society, I identify the need to produce other ways of answering and facing denialism, showing that we can face and dismantle denialisms without necessarily adhering to an apology of a hard-looking Science narrowed to the raw model of Westernized sciences.