Os informantes que jornais e fotografias revelam: para uma etnografia da civilidade nas ruas do passado

Abstract

This article intends to show that informants are important even "when the field (of anthropological research) is the archive". Based on two sets of historical sources preserved by the Arquivo do Estado de São Paulo I first define methodological singularities of researches in which the archive is the field. I then discern informants, which are theoretical constructions founded on the anthropologist's contact with the historical data. This is exactly what these informants have in common, even when originated from distinct kinds of sources. Despite this characteristic they differ from each other when the sources belong to different systems of representation: newspaper reports and comments about rules of conduct in the streets of the city of São Paulo in mid-nineteenth century, or photographs referred to this very space and time.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 21 citations exist upstream.