A Etnografia como extensão da guerra por outros meios: Notas sobre a pesquisa com militares

Abstract

This article investigates the results and consequences of carrying out ethnographic research with the military. Beginning with a wide-ranging discussion of the idea of anthropologists working "with the military", I then seek to situate the results of an ethnography carried out with the Brazilian Army through the symptoms and/or collateral effects that were visible both during and after my research. By taking up the relationship that was established, and also that which was not, it was possible to observe the centrality of the concepts of "friend" and "enemy" in the definition of a wide range of ties between the military world and the "outside world". These concepts, which were initially understood to be relationships derived from a native notion of warfare, project themselves, to some extent, upon the relationships between military men and researchers, which, in this specific case, led me to approach ethnography in continuity with a, formerly transformed, anthropological notion of warfare: warfare as relation. From this relational premise, I will investigate certain methodological consequences of an anthropology of this sort of research object.