Created in 2004, the Culture and Economics Research Laborat ory (Núcleo de Pesquisas em Cultura e Economia) is a space dedicated to the production of collective knowledge and to training students. Based at the Postgraduate Program in Social Anthropology of the Museu Nacional and uniting researchers interested in understanding structuring dimensions of contemporary social life, the laboratory also includes social scientists from various other Brazilian and international academic centres. NuCEC coordinates both individual and collective research projects, runs a permanent seminar and organizes interdisciplinary scientific events in Brazil and abroad. In 2008 a book series entitled ‘Culture and Economics’ was launched in partnership with the Garamond publishing house. The permanent seminar functions as a research workshop in which participants discuss projects, field reports, early versions of articles, and draft versions of thesis and dissertation chapters. The research undertaken by social scientists linked to NuCEC covers a wide range of themes. All of the projects, though, are united by the same intellectual sensibility, foregrounding an ethnographic approach (long-term observation of social situations and processes, and the ethnographic analysis of documents and images), a comparative emphasis (in time and space and between levels of analysis), and a historical perspective, based on the idea that social life is always temporally situated. Originally NuCEC was founded by researchers interested in understanding the social and cultural nature of economics. However, setting out from the anthropological view of economics, informed by the intellectual perspective adopted by NuCEC, other dimensions of social life began to be studied. Today new inquiries are questioning the tenets of some of the classic areas in the social sciences, such as ‘economics,’ ‘politics,’ ‘religion,’ ‘development,’ ‘social movements,’ or ‘international cooperation.’ The laboratory investigates topics such as ways of producing knowledge, effects of theories on the social world, modalities of exchange, forms of calculation and measurement, market dynamics and local and transnational commercial networks, forms of social protest and demands for rights, relations between national and international processes, interconnections between diverse fields (religious, political, economic, scientific and so forth) and the diverse scales in which social life is constituted. The research projects cover a wide range of contemporary situations and processes in Brazil, South Africa, Germany, Argentina, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, United States, France, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Hungary, Israel, Mozambique, Paraguay, Peru and Serbia. As well as individual projects, the Laboratory also coordinates two large collective projects: the ‘Haiti Project’ and ‘Forms of collective action in comparative perspective: Brazil, Argentina and South Africa.’ The Laboratory’s activities receive support from CNPq (through projects approved in the universal and human science areas and productivity grants distributed to NuCEC’s members), FAPERJ (through ‘Cientistas de Nosso Estado’ program grants and other awards), PPGAS (UFRJ), IFRCS (UFRJ), IUPERJ, UNICAMP, and other partnerships, such as foundations, NGOs and national and international agencies.