AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
ARTICLE
Anthropology and the South-South Encounter:
On Culture in BrazilAfrica Relations
I n the early 1990s, Arturo Escobar (1991, 1995) called
attention to anthropologys active if ambivalent position
in an evolving world system, in which peripheral regions
under colonial rule became Third World countries in a
West-centered development apparatus. One decade later,
he announced, along with Gustavo Lins Ribeiro (Ribeiro
and Escobar 2006), the dawn of a new era for the discipline,
when former center-periphery divides that underlay both
classic anthropology and international development were
becoming increasingly blurred and politically complex, and
anthropology itself was, accordingly, becoming more plu-
ral. But while much ground has been covered since then in
recognizing anthropologys diversality (3), a counterpart
to that diversality has been relatively neglected by the dis-
cipline (Cesarino 2012a; Mosse 2013). I am referring here
to the pluralization of the development apparatus brought
about by the emergence of new donors from the Global
South, such as China, India, Brazil, and many others. Most
of these countries prefer to speak in terms of South-South
cooperation and horizontal partnership, rather than devel-
opment aid or donorship, in order to differentiate them-
selves from the World Bank, the United States, or Western
European countries. If, as Ribeiro and Escobar write, tight
connections always exist between world systems of power,
the development of social theory, and changes in particular
disciplines such as anthropology (2006, 6), then the rise
of world anthropologies and of South-South cooperation
must be somewhat connected and need to be taken into ac-
count further. These are not simple relations, however. As
Escobar (1991) showed for international development and
Talal Asad (1973) showed for colonialism some years ear-
lier, anthropologists have been imbricated in complex and
ambivalent ways in such historically situated processes.
In this article, I propose one way of approaching this
issue based on my experience as a Brazilian anthropologist
and a student of Brazils cooperation with the African conti-
nent. Different from donors in the Global North, Brazilian
cooperation does not regularly employ anthropologists as
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 00, No. 0, pp. 19, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433.
All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.12874
Letcia Cesarino
workers or consultants; in fact, its private branch is overall
quite incipient (Cesarino 2012a). I will, therefore, proceed
indirectly through a reciprocal mirroring of Brazilian devel-
opment cooperation and anthropology anchored in a notion
that has been central to both: culture. I do so by extending
to Brazilian anthropology my previous focus on the multi-
scalar, self-referential aspects of international cooperation
(Cesarino 2013a, 2014) from a metatheoretical perspective
inspired by systems theory (Luhmann 1995).1 I believe that
this procedure sheds an interesting light on the construc-
tive tension between anthropology as a universal and as a
multiplicity that is at the core of the world anthropologies
project (Ribeiro and Escobar 2006, 3), as it foregrounds
the refractions that occur when key notions such as culture
travel across, and within, domestic and international scales.
I present this discussion in three steps. The first section
describes the rise of Brazil as an emerging donor in Africa,
focusing on the differential productivity of culture-talk
across the scales of cooperation discourse and implemen-
tation. It then takes a diachronic look at this same gap by
providing an account of how culture became a preferred
domain for framing the specificity of BrazilAfrica relations.
The second section recasts this question in terms of classic
power-discourse debates in the anthropology of develop-
ment literature. I argue that Brazils views on Africa have
been largely shaped by domestically hegemonic views of
African Brazilians, where a culturalist idiom has played a
historically central role. Inspired by Latin American critical
scholars such as Pablo Casanova (1965) and Anibal Quijano
(2000), I consider this as a postcolonial kind of Orientalism
that is based less on empire building than on domestic expe-
riences of nation building and internal colonialism (Cesarino
2012b). I recognize, of course, that the term Orientalism
has typically been used to refer to Euro-American attitudes
and images of the Muslim world and other parts of the Ori-
ent, following Edward Saids (1979) trenchant critique.
But I hope to show here its relevance and usefulness in a
more general sense as well. The last section brings these
C 2017 by the American Anthropological Association.
2 American Anthropologist Vol. 00, No. 0 xxxx 2017
insights to bear on a reflexive discussion of the role of Brazil-
ian anthropology and social theory in the historical making
and contemporary unmaking of Brazils Orientalism with
respect to Africa and Africans.
BRAZILIAN COOPERATION AND THE
DISCOURSE-IMPLEMENTATION GAP
Between 2010 and 2012, I did research on the deliv-
ery of technical cooperation to Africa by the state-owned
Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, best known
by the acronym EMBRAPA (Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa
Agropecuaria) (Cesarino 2013a). EMBRAPAs cooperation
portfolio was heterogeneous and fragmented, ranging from
small, short-term collaborations with individual African re-
searchers to broad capacity-building workshops held at EM-
BRAPAs units in Brazil and longer-term technology-transfer
projects in African territory, and even to one regional office
originally established in Accra. During fieldwork, I focused
on EMBRAPAs capacity-building workshops held in Braslia
and on one larger project with the so-called Cotton-4 group
(Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, and Chad) (Cesarino 2013a,
2014, 2016). EMBRAPAs international capacity-building
and technology-transfer initiatives were a direct response to
demands by Brazils Ministry of Foreign Affairs (best known
as Itamaraty, after the Itamaraty Palace where the ministry is
headquartered). Brazilian foreign policy took a strong Third
Worldist turn during President Lula da Silvas two-term ad-
ministration (20032010). Following Chancellor Amorims
mandate, Itamaraty pursued an aggressive policy that sought
to raise Brazils profile as a relevant player in world politics
and trade, most prominently by reviving the countrys long-
standing bid for permanent membership on the United Na-
tions Security Council. The intensification of the countrys
South-South cooperation activities was part of this broader
effort that ranged from exponential growth in technical co-
operation projects in fields such as agriculture, education,
and public health all across the Global South to Brazil taking
up leadership of a UN peacekeeping force in Haiti, and Brazil
providing increased funding for research and academic ex-
change with the Community of Portuguese Language Coun-
tries (CPLC). Although the African continent has always
figured as a privileged target in those moments when Brazil-
ian diplomacy underscored Third Worldist policies (Saraiva
1996), recent South-South cooperation efforts widened that
scope to embrace countries that did not have a history of
close relations with Brazilthat is, beyond former Por-
tuguese colonies and those parts of West Africa from which
slaves came or where returnees settled (especially Ghana,
Benin, and Nigeria). The Lula da Silva administration also
sought to render the provision of cooperation more system-
atic. These efforts included unprecedented financial support
to the Brazilian Cooperation Agency (Agencia Brasileira de
Cooperacao, or ABC) and its domestic partners in project
implementation, such as EMBRAPA.
Elsewhere (Cesarino 2013a, 2014), I have described in
detail the organizational outline of Brazilian cooperation,
arguing that it can be best understood as an emerging appa-
ratus assembled around three main institutional scales: Ita-
maraty (foreign policy), the Brazilian Cooperation Agency
(cooperation policy and management), and implementing
agencies (a heterogeneous set of dozens of domestic
mostly stateinstitutions, such as public universities, re-
search institutes, and federal ministries).2 I argued in those
works that each of these scales also demarcates differences
in sociality and perspectives across the multiple actors in-
volved: diplomats, managers, and EMBRAPA employees.
Thus, I found that between the upper scale of diplomacy
and the lower scale of implementation there was significant
discontinuity, with little mediation by the kind of manage-
rial bureaucracy typically found in aid agencies in the Global
North (Cesarino 2012a, Ferguson 1994, Mosse 2004, Rot-
tenburg 2009)to the extent that some have described
Brazilian cooperation as having a policy of no policy
(Cabral and Shankland 2013, 15).
Extending further the insights found in the anthropo-
logical literature about the development apparatuss self-
referentiality, I argued that each of these scales operates
according to its own logics and efficacy regimes that only
partially connect with one another (Cesarino 2012a, 2013a).
Thus, for instance, where Itamaraty operates, words (nar-
ratives, speeches, pleas, promises, agreements, signatures)
are a major and efficacious part of the diplomats occu-
pational tool kit, just as, at the scale of implementation,
agronomists perform their work largely by deploying experi-
mental models, seeds, fertilizers, and other material and con-
ceptual tools. In the case of Brazil and possibly other emerg-
ing donors, therefore, the pervasive gaps found between
rhetorics and rituals [and] the complex and messy realities
of engagement do not map neatly onto a divide between
discourse and practice (Mawdsley 2012, 163). They reflect,
rather, discontinuities between scales in which discourse and
practice are differently articulated, even if ultimately they
are all supposed to be coherently united under the single um-
brella of Brazilian South-South cooperation (Cesarino 2014).
Here I will explore this discontinuity between scales fur-
ther by pursuing the empirical deployment of a notion that
is of particular interest to our discipline, that of culture. My
preliminary analysis of documents and official statements
on Brazilian cooperation identified a persistent interest in
culture (or, more precisely, the supposed cultural affini-
ties between Brazilians and Africans) held by the diplomats
and other government officials responsible for crafting the
image of Brazil as an emerging donor to the African conti-
nent. As I moved to observation of implementation on the
ground, however, I was struck by the disinterest in culture
among the agronomists, breeders, and other researchers
in the agricultural sciences operating at the front line of
Brazilian cooperation.
During the period when I was conducting fieldwork, au-
thoritative statements on Brazilian South-South cooperation
came most explicitly from official documents, and they were
most evident in the ritual moments that were a regular part