| |
Created in 2004, the Center for Research in Culture and Economy (NuCEC) is a space for the collective production of knowledge and student training, bringing together researchers interested in understanding the structuring dimensions of contemporary social life. Based inside the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology at the Museu Nacional / Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, the center is coordinated by researchers from four institutions (Museu Nacional / UFRJ, IFCS / UFRJ, IESP / UERJ, UNICAMP) and composed by social scientists from several Brazilian centers and abroad.
NuCEC develops individual and collective research, maintains a permanent workshop and organizes interdisciplinary scientific events in the country and abroad. In 2008 it released the series of books "Culture and Economy", in partnership with publisher Garamond Universitária. The seminars serve as a permanent research workshop in which projects, field reports, articles, dissertations and thesis chapter’s drafts are regularly discussed.
The research undertaken by social scientists linked to NuCEC comprises a wide variety of topics. All of them are, however, unified by a common intellectual sensibility that privileges an ethnographic approach (prolonged observation of situations and social processes and the emphasis on native interpretations of situations, images and documents), a comparative method (in time, in space, and between levels of analysis) and a historical perspective, based on the idea that social life is always situated in time.
Originally, NuCEC researchers were mainly interested in understanding the social and cultural aspects of the economy. However, through an anthropological standpoint of the economy, informed by the intellectual perspective that characterizes the center, other dimensions of social life started being studied. Current ongoing investigations question traditional themes in the social sciences, such as the "economy", the "political," "religion", "development", "social movements" or "international cooperation". Modes of knowledge production, the effects of theories on the social world, modalities of exchange, forms of calculation and measurement, market dynamics and local and transnational circuits of commerce, forms of social protest and claiming of rights, relations between national and international processes, links between the different frames (religious, political, economic, scientific), and between different scales in which social life is constituted, are subjects addressed at NuCEC.
The research projects cover various situations and processes underway in Brazil, South Africa, Argentina, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, United States, France, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Hungary, Israel, Mozambique, Paraguay, Peru, and Serbia. Apart from individual research, the Center develops two major collective projects, "Project Haiti" and "Forms of collective action in comparative perspective: Brazil, Argentina and South Africa."
The Center’s activities are supported by CNPq, FAPERJ, the PPGAS (UFRJ), UERJ, UNICAMP, and other partners such as foundations, NGOs and national and international agencies.
|
|
|
