Like other emerging donors, Brazil follows the global standard of providing cooperation in the project format. As I will argue in Chapter 3, however, it does so through a mode of engagement that is more hands-off and based on demonstration, in contrast with traditional aid, based on more bureaucratized and large scale kinds of intervention. Here I will approach this question through an idiom closer to my relational analytics, that of robustness.At least since Ferguson’s insightful chapter on the politics of knowledge in World Bank reports in The Anti-Politics Machine, discourse lingered for a long while as a prevailing analytical angle in the anthropology of development , remaining important even after potent critiques during the late nineties that continue to resonate today . To refuse discursive determinism is not however to deny the importance of discourse, but to pay close, empirically grounded attention to its relations with history and practice. The first three chapters will begin by approaching South-South cooperation discourse in three domains: Chapter 1, South-South / North-South politics; Chapter 2, culture and history in Brazil-Africa relations; and Chapter 3, nature and agricultural development in the tropics. Each will seek to show how official discourse participated in context-making efforts, and then move on to look at its relations with front line practice. In this dissertation, however I will refer to discourse in two senses, which I try to differentiate. Most of the time, discourse will refer to a working tool consciously deployed by certain groups of actors in the field – most notably that of the diplomats, but also those in politics,raspberry container size academia and other intellectual circles. I tried to mark this specificity by qualifying it as official discourse rather than discourse in general. Official discourse in this sense is mostly concerned with a self-account of Brazilian cooperation. But one of my most forceful observations during fieldwork was how distant it could be from the practice of front liners.
The various chapters will suggest how, rather than describing the latter accurately or even shaping it directly, official discourse is more often than not disconnected from it: it follows a logic and productivity of its own that is largely circumscribed, by organizational and sociality lines, to diplomatic and more political and intellectual kinds of circles. Not that there are no relations between diplomats and front liners ; they not only exist as may play a significant part in cooperation activities. But as will be seen, they unfold in ways that do not follow a linear, coherent referential bridge between discourse and practice. The other way in which I talk about discourse here draws on the Saidian-Gramscian Foucauldian analytics found in much of the U.S. literature in the anthropology of development . In it, the Foucauldian view on knowledge production as part of the apparatus of power is refracted by Said’s postcolonial inflection and/or by Gramsci’s deeply historical approach to hegemony and special attention to political economy. Here, I will largely follow these refractions. Some of the discursive elements I will approach are long lasting and do seem to provide a common grammar that is shared by virtually everyone on the Brazilian side. I traced discourse in this sense to certain historical processes, in special those involved in shaping Brazil’s postcolonial condition. This discussion, which I have also started to entertain elsewhere , will be made explicit in Chapter 2. There I draw, besides on Said himself , on works on the question of post coloniality and modernity in Latin America in general, and Brazil in particular . In particular, some notions put forth by Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos such as double colonialism, internal coloniality, and situated post colonalisms were highly productive for making sense of Brazil’s postcolonial condition as well as of its past and contemporary relations with Africa . Here, I have coalesced these and other insights into an attention to how coloniality11 operates in two, interrelated directions: both externally and internally to postcolonial nation-states.
What is framed as the postcolonial condition in general usually focuses on the international dimension. Some Latin American authors, on the other hand, have sought to specify its domestic dimension through the term internal colonialism . Few however have made a sustained, empirical and theoretical, investment in looking at the relations between these two . While this dissertation will focus on how this double directionality has played out on the Brazilian side, this perspective could also be useful for looking at equivalent processes on the African side.12 I will introduce it in Chapter 2, through a discussion about a kind of hegemonic discourse on Africa that I term Brazil’s nation-building Orientalism. But like coloniality itself, this double directionality can be found in dimensions beyond discourse, from political economy to culture, from agricultural development to geopolitics. Some of these will be brought in the other chapters, albeit not as explicitly as in Chapter 2. Finally, the postcolonial inflection will reappear in Chapters 4 and 5, which will provide an account of an ongoing technical cooperation project between Brazil and four countries in West Africa. In these final chapters, I will try to bring these insights to bear on questions raised by science and technology studies and vice-versa – not unlike those who have been working at the scholarly interface some have been calling postcolonial science and technology studies.13 This discussion will bring us back full circle to the question of North-South difference raised in the first chapter, but now hopefully enriched by the analytics of relationality deployed more broadly here.This Introduction has already drawn on various analytical idioms of relationality found in anthropology and science and technology studies : interfaces, emergence, scaling, assemblages, context-making, socio-technical networks, situatedness, or robustness. These and others evoke works from science studies, such as those by Marilyn Strathern , Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway . To these I add insights from works that tread the path opened up by these authors, but introduce important new twists such as De Laet and Mol , Hayden , Da Costa Marques , or the Deleuzian approach put forth by Jensen and Rödje . Less frequently, a similar perspective has been brought to bear on discussions on development, although rarely incorporating the techno-scientific dimension of projects . We do not need to delve too deep into micro-practice to realize the centrality of relations to the phenomenon approached in this dissertation: it is in the very hyphen in South-South. As Chapter 1 will suggest, the duplication of the term brought into relation, “South”, is meant to evoke horizontality: a leveling opposition to the asymmetry explicit in the North-South configuration. As the hyphen in African- or Native-American, however, the one in South-South denotes less hybridism than an interface – which, I have been arguing here, is characterized by being in emergence. The character of this relation is therefore largely underdetermined; it is a work in progress being actively, and in some cases reflexively, performed by those involved in practicing and thinking it . As was already indicated,raspberry plant container the ways in which this interface is being worked will be approached here most frequently through an analytics of context-making, scaling and domaining, after some of Strathern’s discussions on gender, kinship and audit cultures.
This emphasis on the production of context came out of the empirical observation that interactions between actors from both sides of the Southern Atlantic have unfolded through relational channels which are much less consolidated than the ones underlying relations between, say, Mali and France. Correspondingly, given the largely unprecedented character of these relations, much of my field interlocutors’ efforts have been directed towards making a context for them, in a more intensive, less bureaucratized, and reflexive way than its Northern counterparts. In Strathern’s prolific oeuvre, context-making has appeared alongside related operations such as analogy-making, scaling, and domaining, all of which were also salient in the discourses and practices observed during fieldwork. As Brazilians and Africans are brought together into South-South cooperation’s emerging interfaces, their relational effort proceeds largely through analogies based on their respective experiences. In this process, some contextual elements are differentially assigned to preexisting domains and scales; some are brought to the fore, while others are left to evanesce in the background or are altogether eclipsed. Although these operations strive to coherence, quite often they lead to contradiction and ambivalence, especially as they straddle different interfaces and the lag between official discourse and cooperation practice. Indeed, when there is an over investment in certain analogies at a discursive level – most notably, between Brazil’s and Africa’s peripheral conditions, cultural outlooks, natural environments, developmental paths –, they not always correspond to practical relations. But as I will argue in Chapter 2, this does not mean, as those who have remarked some of these mismatches before me suggested , that official discourse is false, deluding, or naïve. There is, rather, certain diffuse functionality to it, including as an effort to open up a path for turning – to use a classic organizing duality in anthropology –metaphor into metonym: that is, to incite the establishment of mutually transformative, exchange-intensive interactions between Brazilians and their African counterparts. However, those who come up with the most explicit discursive analogies are not necessarily the ones who will work the hardest in practice to entice and nourish metonymic relations. Chapters 3 and 4 will focus on the work of the latter – the cooperation front liners – as they strove to make a productive context for their relations with their African counterparts during capacity-building trainings and technology transfer efforts. In these activities, as Chapter 3 will suggest, demonstration has been the prevalent mode of engagement. Here, demonstration is evinced from a contrast with the notion of intervention, which denotes conventional views on the global North’s prevalent mode of engagement with Africa .They show how capacity-building has been performed less as the imposition of abstract, authoritative techno-scientific knowledge than as the demonstration of a particular kind of experience in agricultural development and research, making explicit its socio-technical entanglements and enticing the audience to participate in context-making. Demonstration is the basis of key modalities of TT in agriculture in Brazil, African countries, and elsewhere. Context describes the site to which technologies will be transferred, which, in common policy views, denotes an inert background for a bounded object. Chapter 4 will draw on part of the STS literature, especially Latour’s actor-network theory and works on technology transfer inspired by it , to recast the process of technology transfer as a co-production between contexts and technologies. Vital to this end will be to bring more emphatically to the fore the question of power, which is not readily evident in Latour himself . For this, I will recruit in Chapter 5 the notion of sociotechnical controls. “Socio-technical” draws on an epistemological-methodological assumption that has by now become part of STS’s commonsense: that there is nothing essential about nature or society, the task being to trace how this ontological boundary is empirically made by scientists and those with whom they interact. Controls, on the other hand, are part of an idiom that came to the fore during fieldwork, especially during my time in Mali. It was enticed by a perception that what Brazilian and African researchers and technicians were doing in their experimental activities was less about constructing scientific facts than about deploying, or trying to deploy, practical controls – experimental controls, most obviously, but also sociopolitical controls. In fact, I came to see one type of control as inextricably linked to the other, and both as linked to the question of power at large: it matters where and when techno-science is being carried out, after all. Latour’s Salk Institute is not the same as Mali’s Institut d’Economie Rurale and even Embrapa research units – and yet these are part of a common global techno-scientific assemblage, but unequally so. The last chapter will foreground this paradoxical aspect of the cotton project, intimately tied especially to Sub-Saharan Africa’s postcolonial predicament, by proposing to view techno-science as being about controlling the flow of vitalities in both nature and society, in a multi-scalar network ranging from subterranean mineral molecules to the global rules of the World Trade Organization.