Meet Our New Wadsworth Fellows: Rafael Damasceno
With the support of the Wadsworth International Fellowship Rafael Damasceno will continue his training in sociocultural anthropology at Paris 10-U of Nanterre, hosted by Emmanuel Grimaud.
The convergence between my interests in the anthropology of science and technology and indigenous ethnology has been pivotal in shaping both my academic trajectory and my choice to pursue PhD studies at the Laboratory of Ethnology and Comparative Sociology (LESC) at the Université Paris Nanterre. While pursuing my Social Science degree at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro initially I was drawn to science and technology studies. But I found I was equally fascinated by my readings on the indigenous peoples of the South American lowlands in the ethnology courses I took. I became intrigued by the realization that these communities do not merely offer alternative solutions to problems we all share about the world and its entities; but I learned that they formulate entirely different questions — questions most of us can scarcely begin to imagine. With this perspective in mind, I began to approach the study of artificial intelligence technologies in ways that invert frames of reference that typically inform technology studies. This has been a central focus of my research since beginning my 2018 master’s degree at Museu Nacional under the supervision of Prof. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.
My interest in the process whereby technology driven by Western rationality is introduced and reimagined in non-Western contexts led me to choose Prof. Emmanuel Grimaud as my Host Sponsor. As a leading specialist on the relationship between automation technologies, religion and philosophy in India, his scholarship challenges conventional frameworks. More recently my focus has shifted to China; a country which is quickly becoming the world’s leader in AI, where the use of these technologies is widespread and, above all, where the ‘AI problem’ has undergone a (re)formulation to fit its unique cultural background. My doctoral research aims to investigate the way in which Mainland China’s revival of Chinese tradition, beginning in the last decades of the twentieth century, has shaped its relationship to technological development. I will focus on how its ‘satellite tentacles’ have expanded worldwide, with special attention on exploring the processes that have enabled them to reach the Amazon rainforest of Brazil.
The imagery of Sino-Brazilian satellites in the Amazon is an unconventional research subject and one that is challenging for a Brazilian social anthropologist to pursue. Over the past few months, I have been able to advance my research thanks to the Wadsworth International Fellowship awarded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation.