My focus is therefore not on the terms but on the hyphen in South South cooperation. There is, as especially Chapter 1 will suggest, a whole politics behind this hyphen. Mine would have to be therefore a take on relationality that did not fail to attend to the play of power relations, more specifically those of a postcolonial kind, since South-South engagements grew directly out of another, more familiar power relation that is at the core of anthropology itself: between “North” and “South”. A first conceptual tool that came out of this exercise in crafting an analytics of relationality enriched by postcolonial insights refers to the scales of context at which such relations unfold, and which they simultaneously create. Typically, these have ranged from global politics, to organizational relations, to interactions between actors at the micro scale of practice. Moreover, following Strathern , scale will indicate not only levels of context, but also the comparative scales according to which these levels are evinced and assembled. To enter into relation, especially at a new interface, always entails a comparison with something that is already known – and indeed, as will be seen, Brazilian cooperation’s discursive and practical engagements with Africa and the global North has proceeded largely through the proposition of analogies. In the same sense, contexts are not to be understood as a preexisting background to relations observed during fieldwork,blueberry container size like an archaeological puzzle waiting to be unearthed as soon as its right theoretical match in the literature is found.

They are live participants in contemporary assemblages, constituting and being constituted by relations entertained between human and non-human actants. In my narrative, therefore, scaling, context making and related operations such as domaining or analogy-making will play a central role. These knowledge-making operations are also present in academia, and reflexively describe the work this dissertation does when bringing together my field interlocutors, other kinds of primary sources such as policy, PR and technical documents, and the academic literature itself. My ultimate grounding is however on field relations; it was always from there that I pulled, as it were, all the other threads, and from where I stood as I delineated a picture of how these scales were articulated to form an assemblage fit for the frame of an academic dissertation. My understanding of emerging assemblages resonates with other uses of the term in anthropology, such as those compiled by Ong and Collier .In his latest theoretical book, Bruno Latour also deployed a notion of assembling based on his long term reflections on the nature of socio-technical associations. The assemblage I have in mind does not however coincide fully with Latour’s network. The description I will provide here is neither an un-situated account of the actors’ immanent interactions in the field , nor a detached representation produced by an authoritative voice claiming to speak on behalf of society, culture, history, or whatever other transcendent explanatory tool brought ready-made from academia . It is, rather, a combination of both academic and field efforts at scaling and context-making: an analytics that “does not take for granted that ‘global’ and ‘local’ indicate orders of magnitude or scales of importance”, but looks at “techniques by which people shift the contexts of their knowledge and thus endow phenomena with local or global significance” .

In Maurer’s terms, this dissertation will venture into the muddled ground of using anthropology’s “tricks of perspective and scale to document a field that is similarly involved in such tricks of perspective and scale in documenting itself and its own objects” .This analytical preference for emerging interfaces at multiple scales of context stems as much from preexisting theoretical affinities as from my fieldwork experience – or, in the terms put forth by David Mosse which I will extensively deploy here, from both my social relations in the “field” and my academic ones at the “desk”. I have chosen it in part because it allows me to make as explicitly as possible the situated character of this account, and how it is ultimately a unique composition of many voices: those of my various field interlocutors, the literature, and my own, which orchestrated all the others. In this sense, the narrative offered here could not, I believe, have been written by someone else; indeed, it looks quite unlike other available accounts of Brazilian South-South cooperation,and it does not aim at objectivity. While this may be by now commonsense for anthropologists and other scholars, it has to be made explicit from the start for other potential readers of this dissertation. Finally, this analytics allows for bringing different bodies of literature into articulation with the two core ones, based on Strathern and Latour. The remainder of this Introduction will be dedicated to discussing where and how these and other writings – most centrally, in the anthropology of development, postcolonial critique, and science and technology studies – have been brought into the assemblage articulated by this dissertation. One of the first analytical challenges this dissertation faced was how to approach the question of difference between Northern development aid and South-South cooperation.

On the one hand, Brazilian actors themselves would frequently, and sometimes quite incisively, mark this difference by emphasizing not only their distinctiveness but superiority in relation to traditional aid. This appeared especially poignantly in diplomatic discourse, but also, and somewhat differently, at the front line practice of projects and other cooperation activities. My job as an anthropologist was to not take such claims to difference for granted; but on the other hand, I did have to take them seriously. Moreover, difference was indeed what came out of the exercise of looking at my fieldwork data in light of the anthropological literature on international development.Given that ethnographically based works on South-South cooperation are few and still in process of theoretical maturation, publications based on the study of Northern aid imposed themselves as my primary theoretical yardstick when it came to the domain of international cooperation. I therefore felt that my engagement with this literature called for an exercise in provincialization , which I began to entertain in previous occasions . The first danger to avoid was to slip into a lack-based analysis: after all, when compared to accounts in the mainstream literature on development, Brazilian cooperation will most often appear as lacking bureaucratization, governmentality, and other angles from which especially critical anthropologists have commonly looked at development aid . I wished to come up instead with a perspective on Brazil-Africa cooperation that would do more to respect its own terms. But then the opposite challenge immediately emerged: how to write a dissertation that would not be the mere description of a particularity? Actor-centered perspectives on development ,growing raspeberries in container for instance, seem more readily generalizable, even to a point where differences between South-South cooperation and its Northern counterpart would vanish. This kind of analytics is about sticking as closely as possible to the “immanence” of ethnographic materials, describing the various actors’ interests and backgrounds, and how they interact in the case of a particular assemblage . From this perspective, at bottom Brazilian cooperation is not fundamentally different from any other, Northern or Southern: it is also a network-like arrangement between various interest-bearing individual and institutional actors that come into a composition of relations the ultimate outcome of which will depend on the articulation and equilibrium achieved between them. Besides the richness in ethnographic description, an advantage of this approach over other perspectives in the anthropology of development such as those based on Foucault, is to anchor empirically the issue of power and political accountability – who gains what with development cooperation initiatives, even those that fail. In Foucauldian approaches, on the other hand, this question is usually rendered mute or downplayed by a view of power as lying in a systemic bureaucratic-discursive apparatus , or in a “will to improve” that is so generally defined that it could fit virtually any phenomenon involving the state or the market in the contemporary world.

These works do however have their own appeal: most notably from this dissertation’s perspective, to approach discourse as a key part of the field where power relations are played . Moreover, the focus on systemic dynamics showed some relevance for South-South cooperation, albeit not exactly in the same way as for its Northern counterparts. In the case of Brazil-Africa cooperation, power relations that can be empirically traced and historicized cannot be reduced to the ones mapped out by the anthropological literature on development through generalizing notions such as governmentality or discourse. Nonetheless, the anthropological literature on development was particularly instrumental in drawing my attention to institutions, or how organizational arrangements shape practical encounters on the ground while remaining separate from them, with their own self-referential drives, logics, and socialities.This led me to begin this dissertation in Chapter 1 with an effort at delineating the organizational architecture and dynamics of Brazilian cooperation. Unfortunately, I have not found such work ready-made anywhere in the academic or policy literature, at least not with the scope I deemed necessary for making sense of what I saw in the field. The picture I provide was based on materials drawn from heterogeneous sources: reports, academic publications, government documents, and interviews, which were systematized according to the most recurrent way relations seemed to unfold as they were observed during fieldwork. This exercise yielded a three-leveled picture: official discourse ; policy and management ; and implementation – were typically agronomists and other research scientists. This was evinced through a comparison with the ethnographic literature on development aid, and turned out to be a major touchstone for ascertaining the differences between Brazilian cooperation and its Northern counterparts, in terms of organizational architecture and dynamics . As I had argued previously and will reassert in Chapter 1, the chief contrast ended up being that, while in Northern development aid the mid-level of policy and management tends to over determine the other two, in Brazilian South-South cooperation the opposite relation is obtained, with a policy level atrophied relatively to diplomacy on one side, and front line practice on the other. The anthropological literature on development aid also usefully drew my attention to the pervasive gap between discourse and front line practice. I concur with other analysts that this “disjuncture between rhetorics and rituals … and the complex and messy realities of engagement” can also be found in South-South cooperation. But the character of this gap in this case remains largely unexplored. Here I will suggest that in Brazilian cooperation the dynamics between the two sides of the gap plays out differently than in the highly bureaucratized relationship found in Northern aid, whereby the messiness of practice is systematically purified back into development policy , or even parasitized by it . But this is not because in South-South cooperation the path between principles and front line practice is mediated by a bureaucratic apparatus oriented by an alternative kind of policy. In fact, as Chapter 1 will suggest, it is precisely the lack of robustness at the level of policy and available resources that has prompted the practical enactment of South-South principles such as non-interference, non-conditionality, demand-drivenness, horizontality, or tailoring projects according to each context. In the anthropological literature, a common corollary to the bureaucratization argument has been that aid de-politicizes developmental issues by submitting local realities to a kind of expert knowledge that renders them technical and diagnoses problems according to preconceived solutions . Chapter 1 will also pose this question for Brazilian cooperation, and will suggest a paradox of sorts: while emerging South-South relations are indeed marked by politicization effects at the international level, it may lead to depoliticization effects domestically. These effects however are not the same that have been underscored by the literature on development aid, and play out differently among recipients of cooperation on the one hand, and providers on the other. Finally, the literature on development aid points to a dilemma that is also shared by South-South cooperation: that of – to use the development jargon – ownership, or the continuity of the projects after the donor leaves.