Ana Gomes

This article examines how oral histories of twentieth-century human genetics in Brazil reveal the politics of memory of fieldwork. Through a comparative analysis of interviews with prominent geneticist Francisco M. Salzano and technician Girley V. Simões, who worked with him for most of his career, this study explores the narrative strategies each employed to establish their historical accounts. Attending reflexively to the oral history encounters, the analysis examines how each narrator negotiates professional identity and moral legitimacy in light of changing ethical norms surrounding research with Indigenous communities. Simões's vivid recollections foreground invisible forms of technical and logistical labor, offering him the opportunity to recast his position as one of active knowledge-making. Salzano's controlled and diplomatic accounts, by contrast, illustrate how the senior scientist curated memory to stabilize his professional legacy and defend disciplinary ethics in the wake of controversy. Contrasting Salzano and Simões's approaches to describing their shared experiences drives home the complex social and political realities of narrating fieldwork, as well as the political valences of remembering and documenting these histories in the present.

Western culture has assigned an essential role to productive activity in defining our lives. In Locke’s and Hegel’s thought, we see the model that became dominant in modern political philosophy: that of conceiving the subject as a result of, and only possible within, the triad of work–property–subject. Nowadays, this has reached the level of shaping the meaning of living, and our entire existences seem to be subjected to a concept of lives-as-work. Combining anthropology and philosophy, this article seeks to rethink subjectivation beyond the process of work and appropriation, delving into worldviews different from those of the West. Specifically, we will focus on the Yanomami form of life, a non-stratified indigenous people living in the Brazilian Amazon. We will analyze how the Yanomami prevent the process of subjectification by the objectification of one’s own work through a sort of anti-work and anti-property apparatus. This is achieved through specific techniques of underproduction, which constitute another approach to work, as well as through a completely different way of conceiving subjectivity. Furthermore, the Yanomami’s view of all entities as subjects endowed with intentionality appears as de-ontologizing the subject position and deactivating the dyads of subject/object and own/common. The result is a worldview where, with everyone being subjects—humans and non-humans, living and dead, entities and things of nature—no one can be dominus of anyone.

RESUMO Um retorno ao ser aparece na contemporaneidade como uma via teórica importante para se pensar as possibilidades de uma política e de uma ética livres das conformações legadas pela história do Ocidente. É nesse sentido que Giorgio Agamben desenvolve em "O uso dos corpos" o que chamará de uma arqueologia da ontologia, buscando verificar se o acesso a uma ontologia ainda é possível nos dias de hoje. Partindo de Aristóteles, passando pela escolástica, até chegar a Heidegger, Agamben evidencia como a divisão binária do ser - em duas experiências contrapostas e ao mesmo tempo dependentes - mantém-se como uma aporia no pensamento e na práxis ocidental. A ontologia, como lugar originário da articulação histórica entre linguagem e mundo, é então percorrida por suas fraturas, levando o filósofo a propor uma nova leitura do ser a partir do que entende como ontologia modal. A partir dessas ideias, busca-se investigar como essa articulação medial entre essência e existência, ser e ente, comum e singular - constituída sempre em devir - propiciaria uma nova perspectiva do ser, na qual ontologia e ética se confundem. ABSTRACT A return to the being emerges in the contemporaneity as an important theoretical way to think about the possibilities of a politics and an ethics free from the legacy bequeathed by the Western history. In this sense, Giorgio Agamben develops, in the book "The use of the bodies", what he calls an archaeology of ontology, seeking to verify if the access to an ontology is still possible nowadays. Starting from Aristotle, passing by the Scholastics, until arriving at Heidegger, Agamben highlights how the binary division of being - in two opposed and, at same time, dependent experiences - remains an aporia in Western thought and praxis. The ontology, as the origin of the historical articulation between language and world, is then traversed by its fractures, leading the philosopher to propose a new reading of the being from what he understands as modal ontology. From these ideas, we intend to investigate how this medial articulation between essence and existence, being and entity, common and singular -always founded in a becoming - would provide a new perspective of the being in which ontology and ethics end up mixed.