Law and anthropology

a history of encounters and misencounters — trials for quackery and charlatanism (Brazil — 1900/1990)

Abstract

The text starts from two basic questions: what were the encounters and misencounters, or congruences and incongruences, between anthropology and law in trials for quackery and charlatanism in Brazil this century, and why was there only one great encounter at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, with later paradigms remaining on the margins of the ideas and practices that guided magistrates in their judgments. The exposition demonstrates that the main doctrinal texts, opinions and decisions of higher courts concerning trials for quackery and charlatanism published between 1900 and 1940 frequently relied on socio-anthropological theories still debated in Europe and almost always creatively reinterpreted and adapted to the Brazilian context, and that, from the 1940s onwards, such theories seem to have crystallised. The investigation concludes that the most present anthropological paradigms were those from the French School (rationalist) and the British School (empiricist structural functionalist), with the Historical-Cultural School (culturalist) and, especially, Interpretive Anthropology (hermeneutic paradigm) being absent.