Reflexividade e política no texto etnográfico: representações e efeitos da escrita

Abstract

In 2020, one year after a research that had as its main objective to analyze, comparatively, the cycles of sugarcane workers’ strikes in Pernambuco, and metalworkers of São Paulo and ABC Paulista, that occurred in the late 1970s, we returned to the questions raised in the field and in the interviews with former union members and workers to understand the ways in which the dialogue between us and them has influenced the formulation of research problems and hence the effects of the presentation of our identities/positions during the field work and in the scientific text that came to be published. Our goal is not merely to recognize the implications of ethnographic authority, but to argue in favor of the analytical fertility of this mediation with “the other” in our scientific practice.