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