More than just forming anthropologists, practicing anthropology: memories, socialization and academic practice based on a professional experience with Roberto Kant de Lima

Abstract

This article takes as its starting point a loss and a collective grieving process to reflect on an anthropological formative experience lived under the guidance and coordination of the anthropologist, professor, and researcher Roberto Kant de Lima, who passed away on May 19, 2025. Without intending to offer a memoriam tribute, we take as our starting point the shared memories we have as students, advisees, colleagues, and friends to understand the work of an anthropologist-professor-administrator whose pedagogical practice integrated intellectual training, research, institutional work, administration, affection, and collective production. By reconstructing lived experiences, conversations, and lessons, we seek to understand how a particular way of practicing anthropology was transmitted beyond texts, classes, and meetings—through practices, relationships, and ways of being and acting within anthropology and the academic field. In this sense, we have attempted to ethnographically document the paths we have traveled alongside Kant in an educational endeavor inevitably shaped by the interaction among students at different stages of their education, professors, staff, and research interlocutors, by research practices and academic administration, and by the transmission of a Brazilian social thought understood and developed through participation in a specific academic way of life. Memories are thus taken as a methodological key to reflecting on his contribution to anthropological training in Brazil and to recognizing, in the practices we carry out today, the traces of a way of doing anthropology learned through shared experiences, projects, his traditional Monday meetings, conversations, conflicts, decisions, doubts, and mistakes. In revisiting the question posed by Kant himself— “How does one become an anthropologist in Brazil?”—we reflect on what one learns from a professor beyond courses, reading lists, concepts, and hierarchies, based on the description and denaturalization of his own practices.