Image, Imaginary and memory: an anthropological trajectory (with Cornelia Eckert)

Abstract

In this interview, given on September 16, 2021, over two hours, via Googlemeet, Cornelia Ercket talks about graduation in Social Sciences, at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), to start the report about the intellectual trajectory built over more than 30 years. She returned to the conditions in which she carried out her master's thesis focusing on coal mine workers, under the guidance of Rubem Olivem, still at UFRGS. From his doctorate in France, he recalled how he continued his research on the miners, which led her to La Grand-Combe - a country town where he lived for four years and where he could examine the “mourning” of an entire community with the deactivation of its main economic activity, with the closing of the coal mine. As she remembers, that was a special moment in the awakening of interest in the correlation between narratives, images, imaginaries and memories. Quadriangulation so decisive for the unfolding of her work, at first following both the traces of French symbolic anthropology and the research and reflections of Brazilian anthropologists on the urban issue. Thus, in the continuity of the interview, Cornelia combines the course taken by her academic production with research projects in the setting up of the Visual Anthropology Nucleus of the PPGAS at UFRGS. It can then explain contributions, themes, disciplinary divisions, theoretical frameworks and methodological schemes specific to the design of visual anthropology in Brazil. The inclusion of reflection about on the image allows you to comment on the political situation in light of the impacts of Fakenews. The interview is completed in the way she locates her religious experience, as well as her work at the Brazilian Association of Anthropology (ABA), in commissions, directorates and currently as vice president of the ABA, in the diagnosis she proposes about the present and the future. of social sciences in the country.