Urgent Ethnography and the Ethics of Nós por Nós

Abstract (English)

This paper engages with urgent ethnography through the lens of nós por nós, a stance and movement of knowledge production in Brazil’s urban peripheries (Fabricio and Melo 2020; Souza 2020). Based on my engagement with Coletivo Papo Reto and Raízes em Movimento, collectives in the Complexo do Alemão favelas in Rio de Janeiro, I examine how favela intellectuals challenge extractivist research and reshape ethnographic expertise. Nós por nós means both “us-for-ourselves” (emphasizing self-organization amid structural precarization) and “us-by-ourselves” (asserting authorship over periphery narratives). It reflects an Afrodiasporic ethics of self-formation (Hirata 2022; Silva & Lee 2024) and a long history of grassroots infrastructure in the Global South (Caldeira 2017). In the face of epistemic silencing, long critiqued in postcolonial studies (Spivak 1988), nós por nós emerges as an urgent response to dominant frameworks that position favelas as spaces of lack rather than sites of knowledge and political agency. To illustrate this, I turn to the Faveladoc documentary workshop, a program by Raízes em Movimento for young favela residents. In 2021, I joined a class led by filmmaker Janaina Oliveira ReFem, a Black woman from Imbariê, in the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. She stressed the importance of writing one’s own reality as a political act, urging students to contest dominant academic hierarchies. She proposed an inversion: rather than periphery residents being studied by white, middle-class scholars, her students should conduct fieldwork in an elite condominium in Barra da Tijuca. This provocation underscored asymmetries in knowledge production, highlighting who is granted the authority to observe and theorize. In addition to being an ethnographic refusal, this case points to an epistemic contestation. Collectively, ReFem and the students challenged presuppositions about who can produce knowledge and whose accounts are recognized as legitimate. “Response” is perhaps the crucial aspect of the ethics of knowledge production and self-formation embedded in nós por nós. In a critique of British Social Anthropology, Talal Asad (1986) suggested that “‘[c]riticizing savages who are after all some distance away,’ in an ethnographic monograph they cannot read” is problematic. “In order for criticism to be responsible,” he adds, “it must always be addressed to someone who can contest it” (p. 156). The nós por nós peripheral contestations of prefigured ethnographic models, hierarchies, and practices are thus forms of response by subjects who ultimately demand a less unequal academic field.