The last chapter will conclude by foregrounding certain trends in the project’s emerging technology adaptation and transfer strategy, as I came to see it: relatively hands-off, fluid, and open to inputs by actors on the recipient side. This has meant greater potential for horizontality, but also vulnerability to all sorts of noises in the translation chain . It could even be argued that this mode of engagement marks many of the relational interfaces in the Brazil-Africa cooperation assemblage: between nation-states, between research institutes, and between researchers, technicians, and farmers. Whether this is better than what happens in Northern aid, depends on the perspective; but it is certainly more open-ended. It comes however at a risk: that of the denying of, or disinterest in, the relation by the African partners – in which case it will inevitably die out. To address this last issue, instead of the technical jargon of ownership or an emphasis on the self-referential character of development cooperation , I will deploy the more relational and open-ended idiom of robustness. In their account of the rise of Mode 2 science in the contemporary “age of uncertainty” , Helga Nowotny and colleagues argued that robust scientific knowledge is that which, rather than shielding itself from society in a position of expert authority , actively seeks to be strongly contextualized in it . When discussing an ethnographic example of such a configuration amidst the “rise of management audit”, Strathern complicated the abstract, preemptive notion of society that is being conjured up in some of these schemes. But by acknowledging the inherent open-endedness of social transactions, she points to the possibility of the same schemes activating new relations, producing “in real time, on [their] own scale, unlooked-for effects” . Similarly to Mode-2 science, technology transfer has always been about not just avoiding isolation from society,procona london container but finding ways to actively produce strong contextualization in it; if the travelling technology’s relations with its new environment are not robust enough, it will neither thrive nor disseminate.
In the case of Brazil-Africa cooperation, robustness seems to be an open question, both theoretically and practically. Theoretically, one may say that, precisely because the hold of policy and bureaucracy over front line practice is, as Chapter 1 will argue, less firm than in development aid organizations, the possibility should be acknowledged of its effects being different than the ones described in the ethnographic literature. And since, as Chapter 1 will also argue, one of the effects of this loose grip of policy is heterogeneity in the implementation of projects, it is likely that if robustness is achieved, it will be more so in some cases than in others. But robustness was a question that imposed itself less through my readings of the literature than through my relations with some of the cooperantes. Having had little experience with international development before the recent surge in Brazil’s South-South cooperation, many of these people – who are research scientists, rather than development workers – seemed to have a sense of possibility that I did not envisage in the ethnographies of aid. I suspect that experienced and professionalized development workers in a way already know, and probably expect, that particular development initiatives will be short-lived, even if the overall system will certainly keep on going. By and large, however, this was not the case of Brazilian front liners. I would not equate this with naiveté, though; this sense of possibility seemed indeed real, precisely because of the emerging character of Brazil-Africa cooperation. In other words, at this point, future directions are open-ended, and, given the gloomy picture provided by the anthropological literature on development aid, that is a good thing. Finally, this leads to another reason why I have chosen the analytics outlined here over all-encompassing notions common in the anthropology of development such as governmentality.
In a discussion with fellow anthropologists in Brazil , I pondered whether, at least if deployed in a totalizing manner, these kinds of approaches would not run the risk of congealing virtualities that are today in full effervescence in this moment of emergence of Brazilian South-South cooperation – a moment marked by vitalities and internal tensions that seem to be no longer present in the cold landscape of Northern development aid. I therefore preferred, I affirmed, to instigate these vitalities and their multiple potentialities – to evoke a Deleuzian-Guatarrian idiom, the lines of flight flowing from their smooth spaces – than to incarcerate them in one single analytics that, albeit perhaps acceptable to, or even expected by, my relations at the desk, would not be productive, or even fair, in terms of my relations in the field. If, as may as well happen, Brazilian cooperation eventually goes on to be engulfed by development’s self-referential machine and these lines of flight fade away, this dissertation will nonetheless remain as the register of a moment – of a window that may be already closing – when things could have been different. This leads to the last cluster of general questions to be tackled in this Introduction, that of knowledge production and reflexivity in anthropology.How and when to pull the breaks on this “fractal unfolding of complexity” – or, in Akrich’s terms, the “propagation of causal chains in all directions” – inevitably brought about by ethnography? Akrich was a student of technology transfer, a phenomenon that is particularly conducive to the evocation of scales of context beyond micro-practice. She once responded to this question much along the lines of how her supervisor Latour probably would have: “On what grounds would the analyst stop [to extend the network] – apart from the arbitrary one of lassitude? Quite apart from the indefinite amount of time such a study would take, there is also the question as to whether it would be interesting” . I find Akrich’s response highly unsatisfying, and the reasons why point precisely to a broader problem with Latour’s version of actor-network theory and its “myopic” method : the “flatness” of the network, which in my view stems from Latour’s poor investment in reflexivity, as opposed for instance to the work of Strathern or Haraway. His perspective assumes that the analyst is as an observer whose task is to witness and register immanent relations in a flat network until some “arbitrary point of lassitude”. She supposedly operates at the same scale of the actors in the network, but is not situated in it, in the Harawayan sense ; what she must do is to describe what she sees and hears.
From this point of view, indeed, to reach for scales beyond the immediate scope of micro-practice would seem not just “uninteresting”, but illegitimate. Scaling and context-making are a major part of what they do,cut flower transport bucket and they do it asymmetrically; as many have noted before me , actor-networks are never flat. Far from being arbitrary, these moves have a direction – at times, a very clear one – driven by the actors’ interests and the politics in which they are enmeshed. To access these moves and later on provide an account of them necessarily entail, therefore, that the analyst situates herself in her field relations. Ethnographers are never free of the risk of being called upon, by her field interlocutors, to make this explicit, especially as the products of research go back to circulate in the field – among the examples that come to mind are Latour’s involvement in the nineties’ “science wars”, and the controversy that prompted David Mosse’s reflections on relations between “field” and “desk” . Any ethnography is therefore a compromise between at least two relational networks: one in the field, and one in academia . At the “desk”, when to pull the breaks on the unfolding of complexity unleashed by fieldwork is hardly arbitrary either. Often, however, the ways by which this happens are eclipsed by recourse to the supposedly disembedded domain of theory. Take, for instance, the debates about technification-depoliticization in the literature on development. To argue that development discourse and practice are about rendering technical or depoliticizing problems that find their roots elsewhere assumes that the analyst knows what is the actual cause of poverty, underdevelopment, and so forth: namely, politics, usually conceived in terms of historical and political economic processes. This assumption that it is historical and political economic processes that matter – that are the real ones – may have been embraced by the analyst even before she went to the field, during seminars or in preparation for qualifying exams. In the writing stage, theory is brought back in to select and weave field data together – Gramsci, Foucault, or some other European philosopher of choice. This kind of operation follows knowledge practices that are prevalent in academia, rather than in the field. I do not have qualms with the depoliticization-technification claim as such; in fact, it is an assumption that I do share with the literature. What I try to do differently is to make explicit how my account is anchored both on debates in academia and on my field relations. This kind of movement can be found, for instance, in De Laet and Mol’s explicitation of their “love” for the Zimbabwe bush pump and its creator as “what moves [their] writing” . As a Brazilian citizen who has been personally interested in the politics of agriculture since long before this PhD, I have my own, non-academic stakes on the topic this dissertation is addressing; these have shaped my relationship with informants as well as the way I looked at their claims about South-South cooperation.
This oriented, for instance, my choice of what elements eclipsed by the actors to bring to the fore here – not an abstract “political economy” or “history”, but concrete political processes that have been central to Brazil-Africa relations, or to Brazilian domestic politics. Moreover, the fact that the empirical processes that I describe here are unfolding, as Maurer put it, “coincidently” with writing, led me to provide feedback to my field interlocutors not separately, but in this dissertation. Parts of my account, especially in Chapters 3 and 4, are responding to demands and debates coming less from academia than from the field. In a similar vein, assumptions of flatness and transparency that underlie actor-network theory’s formulations are rendered problematic when one acknowledges that the ethnographer’s view on the network is itself also directed by the actors’ interests. In other words, rarely is she given access to any and all actors and interactions in the field, and when and where she does, this happens through an often implicit “contract” with interlocutors that further constraints what can or cannot be made explicit in writing. Indeed, questions of access have been common in the anthropology of development, especially for those wishing to study up: that is, the developers rather than the poor communities or peasant farmers to be developed – normally more accessible to, because more vulnerable than, the ethnographer . Quite often, ethnographers of developers have had to “pa[y] their way [into the policy world] with knowledge products” by working for these institutions as consultants or volunteers, and that is how they get direct access to their internal operations: what Rottenburg described as “the main rule of access – ‘No admittance except on business!’”Alternatively, access can be granted through connections of a non-academic type, and this has been the case of some of the Brazilian literature on which I drew here. Many students of institutions such as Itamaraty, Embrapa or the WTO have either personal ties to their officials,or worked at them.Indeed, in occasions when I recounted my fieldwork experience to Brazilians from academia or from Embrapa who were not directly within my research scope, their first assumption normally would be that I worked at Embrapa, or was providing consultancy for the Brazilian Cooperation Agency. This was not the case, however. I had neither personal nor professional networks whatsoever in any of these institutions before I started this project. This often made things slow and sometimes oscillating for me during fieldwork, and, coupled with the rapidly changing character of Brazilian cooperation in its early moments, resulted in a fragmented fieldwork experience in institutional, geographic, and temporal terms. Thus, my field ended up including multiple institutions ; multiple countries ; multiple cities within countries ; three fieldwork languages ; and multiple fieldwork periods – not to mention long-distance interactions through email, skype, or facebook. This fieldwork experience has shaped writing in at least two ways. On the one hand, this dissertation does not reproduce the development version of Malinowskian fieldwork: it is not an in-depth experience of one particular cooperation initiative as it was observed locally.