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Email: matan.shapiro@ucl.ac.uk
Year of start: 2008
Subject: Social Anthropology
Research Topic/ Provisional Dissertation Title
Plural Intimacies, Singular Passion: Affective Interconnectedness and the Semi-Stabilization of Kin Networks in Maranhão, Northeast Brazil
Supervisor(s)
Allen Abramson and Martin Holbraad
Introduction
My doctoral research explores affective transactions characterizing quotidian kinship/gender relations in the state of Maranhão, northeast Brazil. Throughout Maranhão, enacting-out carnal and emotional dispositions (e.g. lust/desire, rage, longing, sadness, love) is a crucial source of agency for both men and women, who commonly enhance a political merit from the performance of affective bodily states in everyday situations (e.g. passion, jealousy, anger, mockery, seduction). Yet, this is accompanied by conventional fastidious judgments concerning personal respectability and familial responsibilities that effectively alert against the potentially destructive consequences of audacious affective interchange, heedless emotional attachment or sexual libertinism. Consequently Maranhenses aim at anchoring the dangerous free-flow of affective projections onto fixed networks of distinctive social relations (as husbands, wives, in-laws, etc.); while simultaneously pursuing emotionally- or sexually-charged seductive adventures that persistently attenuate these same distinctions. In my thesis I focus on how persons intermittently sustain, exert or exceed the subtle fine-tuning here implied.
Research interests
- Anthropology of affect, intimacy and emotions
- Anthropology of subversion, deception and concealment
- The relations between history, anthropology and postcolonial theory
- Chaos theory and its potential instrumentality in contemporary social scientific research
- Ethnography of dynamic forms/structures as anthropological method
- Anthropology and history of Brazilian society
Academic Background/Education
MA in anthropology from Ben Gurion University, Israel (honours degree).
BA in geography and sociology from Haifa University, Israel (excellence).
Publications
Shapiro, M. 2011. Affective Knowledge as Anthropological Knowledge. Anthropology Matters Journal, 13 (1). (online).
Shapiro, M. 2011. Bumba Meu Boi: O Desejo e a Origem Mítica do Maranhão. In, da Cunha (Ed), O Boi Contou. Petrobras: São Paulo and São Luis. Pp. 27-34.
Shapiro, M. 2006. The Israeli Electric Island: Be-longing, Occidentalism and Electricity Hyper-Consumption in Israel in the Early 2000s. Ben Gurion University Press: Beer-Sheva.
Funding
Overseas Research Student Scholarship (ORS) (2008-2011)
UCL Postgraduate School Fellowship (2011)
Wingate Foundation Fellowship (2011-12)
