University College of the North

Faculty Member, Social Sciences

Assistant Professor of Anthropology; Chair of Social Sciences

Thesis Title: Hookers, Hustlers, and Gringos in Global Brazil: The Transnational Political Economy and Cultural Politics of Violence, Desire, and Suffering in the Streets of Salvador da Bahia

About

About:
Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Social Sciences, University College of the North in Thompson, Manitoba, Canada.

http://twitter.com/#!/samuelveissiere

I earned my PhD from McGill University in 2007 and have conducted fieldwork on violence, resistance and mobility in various parts of Brazil, Canada, and the European Union. My book, which came out this year with LIT Verlag, sums up and concludes this research cycle http://www.lit-verlag.de/isbn/3-643-90080-7z
I am also a visiting professor and research coordinator at the Federal University of Pará, in Belém, Brazil, under a Federal grant from CAPES, where I teach and advise in the Doctoral Program in Anthropology head a research project on "clandestine" border crossings, livelihoods and epistemologies in the Americas. Click here http://ucn-ca.academia.edu/SamuelVeissiere/Blog/57167/PROJETO-CLANDESTINO for a summary (in portuguese) of this research project.

As part of my exploration of the creative tensions between ethnography, literature, and experimental fiction I am currently working on a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.

For details on my research prior to 2011, see below.

Of late, I have also made a sharper turn into poetics and mostly work on projects that are at once more accessible (as defined against the arbitrary parameters of what is academically acceptable) and more experimental. All these projects can be defined as research because they are fundamentally concerned with epistemology (in the sense of what we can know, how we can know it, and how we can make it known), and are anthropological in the sense that they are premised on exploring the tensions between the universality of anthropos and the particularity of the ethnos: the old project of making the strange familiar and the familiar strange through radical encounters with many kinds of other people, things, landscapes, sounds, and planes of consciousness.


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Samuel specializes in the ethnographic study of cultures of resistance and struggle that emerge in transnational and postcolonial contexts. 
He has conducted fieldwork in France, Southern and Northeast Brazil, cyberspace, and the diasporic Canadian North,

His recent research, stemming from a decade of involvement in Latin America and Brazil and 14 months of fieldwork in Salvador da Bahia, began with an ethnography of the livelihoods of street-children and sex-workers in Northeast Brazil and their interaction with global tourists, (s)expatriates, and other gringos. Reflecting on both the hermeneutics and the political economy of sexual encounters between gringos and “mulatas” and their mediation through (neo)colonial narratives and performances of race, gender and violence, Samuel began to draw the outline of a what he terms the transatlantic cultural economy of desire. He is now involved in an ongoing attempt to make sense of the contradictory (at times liberating; at times violent) acts of North-South and South-North mobility that take place within, or begin with this colonial dialogics of desire.

Samuel’s concern with subaltern agency translates into a strong advocacy for research as social change, and he has published on the topic of participatory ethnography and participatory action research with the disenfranchised. He is also interested in border-thinking (Anzáldua, 1987; Mignolo, 2000) and the use of (auto)ethnographic writing as critical engagement with the suffering of others.
Finally, then, Samuel’s interest in border-epistemologies has led him towards an (auto)ethnographic field of study he calls Gringo Studies, or gringopolítica in which he uses the dialogical image of the gringo as hermeneutic grounds to explore questions of identity and power in a global, postcolonial era.

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