https://repositorio.ufba.br/handle/ri/6476 2026-05-17T06:24:34Z https://repositorio.ufba.br/handle/ri/44385 MODA AFRO - AFRO (NA) MODA: REFLEXÕES SOBRE O CONSUMO DE MODA AFRO E RELAÇÕES IDENTITÁRIAS EM DUAS DIÁSPORAS AMERICANAS Santos, Daisy Conceição Sousa Júnior, Vilson Caetano This thesis investigates how ethnic identities are constructed and expressed through the consumption of Afro fashion in two central cities of the Black diaspora in the Americas: Salvador (Brazil) and New York (USA). Drawing from the fields of consumer anthropology and racial studies, the research seeks to understand the role of Afro fashion in the (re)affirmation of Blackness, as well as who produces and consumes these cultural goods, and with what motivations. The investigation articulates multi-sited ethnography (with participant observation conducted in both cities), autoethnography, semi-structured interviews with producers and consumers, in addition to some virtual ethnographic analyses. The results indicate that, although Afro fashion is consolidated in the consumer market, it is traversed by racism and market disputes in both territorial poles. Consumption, in turn, reveals itself as a practice of belonging, reclaiming identity, a sense of community, and image construction, operating simultaneously as an aesthetic, political, and affective gesture. It can be concluded that Afro fashion acts as a device for identity agency in diasporas and as a field for the elaboration of visual narratives that reconfigure the Black presence in contemporary urban spaces. Universidade Federal da Bahia Tese 2026-01-05T00:00:00Z https://repositorio.ufba.br/handle/ri/43859 Círculos de mulheres no Brasil: frestas e vazamentos dos sagrados femininos Ribeiro, Thainá Soares Tavares, Fátima Regina Gomes This work presents the agencements (enactments/activations) of Women's Circles in Brazil, a non-institutional movement of feminine spirituality organized by women and for women, predominantly cisgender, white, and middle-class. However, the research, conducted in Salvador and its metropolitan area, identified a more diverse movement, with the presence and protagonism of Black women and openness to the participation of trans women. To understand these dynamics, I carried out fieldwork in Circles across different formats of gatherings: online, in-person, and I monitored several profiles on Instagram. In total, there were eight in-person Circles in Salvador and the metropolitan area, five online Circles, the monitoring of twenty Instagram profiles, and in-depth conversations with seven women. In these spaces, the “sacred feminines” from various traditions overflow, and the feminine principle acts as the guiding force of life, experienced as a “wild and intuitive” quality. In this way of exercising spirituality, the body is the path and the manifestation of the sacred, enacted through rituals and practices such as “natural and autonomous gynecology.” The body’s processes—the fertile period, menstruation, etc.—are enacted based on the cycles of the moon, the seasons, and the circadian rhythm. Simultaneously, these cycles of life enact the cycles of the body. Based on this observation, I developed the category "cyclic and permeable bodies," as for these women, the body’s cycles and the cyclicity of life are the result of interwoven agencements (enactments). Due to this being an embodied spirituality, I utilize the analytical category "feminine sacred" in articulation with the native category "sacred feminine," to understand the multiple arrangements of the body-psyche-community relationship—transcendent and immanent—within these experiences. Although some Women’s Circles have been absorbed by the alternative therapy market, there are politicized Circles that establish themselves as an inspiration, offering an alternative way of living. In these spaces, bodies (with or without a uterus), connected to the cycles—expansion (spring, summer, day, waxing and full moons) and contraction/recollection (autumn, winter, night, waning and new moons)—establish a rhythm of life that counters capitalism. Capitalism, in turn, demands continuous expansion that results in the destruction of ecosystems. By valuing intuition and the "knowledge embodied in life's cycles," these Circles offer fissures through which other forms of inhabiting and knowing the world can emerge, distinct from those imposed by the hegemonic mode. Universidade Federal da Bahia Tese 2025-11-10T00:00:00Z https://repositorio.ufba.br/handle/ri/43724 Patrimonialização de terreiros de candomblé na Bahia: agentes, agências e mediadoras. Lopes, Emmanuel Bastos de Magalhães Caroso, Carlos Alberto Soares This dissertation is part of an ethnographic research of the government, documents and bureaucracy studying public policies for the heritagization of Candomblé terreiros in Bahia. The first terreiro was declared a heritage site in the 1980ties, however, after the new Federal Constitution of 1988 the landmarks of heritage recognition changed and some cultural assets linked to ethnic groups and minorities began to be recognized, especially in their immaterial dimensions. Beginning in 2003, new sociopolitical conditions for the recognition and appreciation of cultural heritage emerged, with successive listings of some “mother-houses”, federal and state agencies are undergoing broad instrumental and technical reforms; assets, now cultural references, represent the immanence of the practices of once-neglected groups. At this stage, anthropology professionals are increasingly working in government careers, sometimes in fragile work situations; their technical work operates traditionally with ethnographic resources and methods, but they face new challenges: the operationalization of public policy based on a truncated bureaucracy cluttered with documents, forms, protocols, and systems. These are simultaneously products of labor and devices endowed with agency, sensoriality, and acting through the power of humans and non-humans. Therefore, we investigate, based on Bruno Latour's actor-network theory, the legal and bureaucratic mediations in heritagization processes. Through a bibliographic and documentary review, we analyze the listing of Nagô houses, which we compare with other research and the demands that Bantu traditions must reaffirm their uniqueness not through purity, but through a blend that dispenses with rethinking the criteria for recognition and protection. It is understood the role of institutional actions, such as the GTIT - Interdepartmental Group for the Preservation of Terreiros - within the scope of IPHAN (National Institute of Historical and Artistic Heritage), and their impacts on the heritage field of terreiros with a view to producing bureaucratic efficiencies. The activities of other projects, such as Itoju, Pergunte a Onilé, and Milonga, are also reconsidered. Strategic actions by terreiro groups aim to pressure and, at the same time, collaborate with the government to overcome the structural racism that persists in the underrepresentation of cultural assets of African origin. Finally, we observe a treatment of documents, papers and bureaucratic systems that is not completely detached from coloniality, despite the efforts of both the academic discipline and part of the state's normative composition, which become agents, together with other beings and entities of Afro-Brazilian cosmology, in the task of heritage recognition. Universidade Federal da Bahia Tese 2025-08-11T00:00:00Z https://repositorio.ufba.br/handle/ri/43044 Cortes, pontos e contrapontos: embates epistemológicos, humanização do parto e formação em obstetrícia na Bahia Neves, Naiara Maria Santana dos Santos Vega Sanabria, Guillermo This dissertation analyses medical training in obstetrics, focusing on a maternity teaching hospital in Salvador, Bahia. It examines how medical residents construct knowledge, practices, and subjectivities in a daily routine shaped by hierarchies, institutional pressures, and technical-emotional dilemmas. Medical residency, experienced as a rite of passage and a liminal space, found in the chaos of hospital shifts its core learning matrix, under strong tension between technique and emotional involvement, theory and ‘feeling,’ protocol and experience. Based on scientific session observations, field diaries, and autobiographical reflections, the research seeks to understand the disputes within the social field of obstetrics and how the ‘good obstetrician’ is formed – one who balances between structuring dichotomies. The dissertation explores the judicialization of health as a phenomenon that impacts both training and professional practice, potentially reshaping hierarchical structures within the medical-hospital field. The notion of quality of life is taken as an expression of the ambiguities between personal life and professional care. The ethnographic journey is marked by dilemmas and negotiations around the ethics of scientific research, especially in relation to the Research Ethics Committee (CEP) and healthcare professionals as arenas of epistemological dispute. The tension between biomedicine and the human sciences emerges both in bureaucratic-institutional hurdles and in the methodological, relational, and emotional challenges inherent in “studying up” research practices. The thesis offers a critical perspective on disciplinary boundaries and on feminist scientific-political doxa, reflecting on the limits of the enlightened common sense that pervades both scientific and activist discourse. It also outlines two major waves of the childbirth humanization movement in Brazil: i) the aesthetic-individualist ideal of the ‘beautiful birth’; and ii) the collective struggle for reproductive justice and against obstetric violence – including the role of anthropology as a midwife of this movement. By taking herself as part of the field, the researcher brings to light – and assumes – the effects of an anthropology entangled with the object and disputes it seeks to study. Ultimately, this is a dissertation that weaves together science, politics, and life through the ethical and emotional engagement of the researcher in the field. Universidade Federal da Bahia Tese 2025-07-25T00:00:00Z