Sea breeze in the Cerrado: the state as local knowledge, Roberto Kant de Lima, and an anthropology of law at the Universidade de Brasília

Abstract

This article examines Roberto Kant de Lima’s contribution to the consolidation of a research agenda in the anthropology of law at the University of Brasília, approaching his work less as a set of concepts to be applied than as a way of formulating ethnographic problems. Its relevance lies in showing how a perspective originally developed through the ethnography of Brazilian police and judicial institutions traveled to other empirical settings, generating new questions about the state, law, and conflict administration. The article aims to reconstruct this intellectual trajectory and its unfolding in research conducted at the University of Brasília. Methodologically, it combines an analytical reading of Kant de Lima’s work with a reflexive reconstruction of its circulation through research carried out in Timor-Leste and the Federal District, particularly on policing, justice, domestic violence, mediation, and institutional forms of truth production. The analysis shows that one of the most productive effects of this intellectual dialogue was the treatment of the state as local knowledge: rather than taking legal and institutional categories as universal or self-evident, the studies examined ethnographically investigate the practical knowledge, legal sensibilities, and classificatory practices through which agents and institutions administer conflicts. The article concludes that Kant de Lima’s influence at the University of Brasília is expressed primarily in the formation of a research agenda that combines comparison, ethnographic description, and a critical examination of naturalized ways of imagining the state and law.