ETHNOGRAPHY IN THE CITY: CHALLENGES OF PROXIMITY IN CONTEXTS OF VIOLENCE

Abstract

This paper conducts a historical trajectory of the Brazilian criminological thought, pointing to this as constituted, at the beginning of XX Century within the ethnic-racial relations system in the country and contributed to the legitimacy of criminalization of the black population at Brazil. In its origin, the Brazilian criminology was based with the positivist school: the idea of differentiation of human groups in the upper and lower races and attributed to black people innate biological propensity to violence and crime. This biological paradigm was overcome in the 1940s by the culturalist school in which the propensity to criminality of the black population was seen as socially and historically constructed condition. By this way, another discriminatory stance was created. Between differents paradigms", criminology served as the control and discipline of the social body, as a kind of knowledge itself justified by their utility and the alleged mission to keep "social peace” choosing previously what are the dangerous classes and dangerous races. If today many of these theories have been criticized and overcome within the criminal analysis, it is nevertheless true that they had a key role in the criminalization of the black image.