"If You Were a Man, You Would Be a Captain": Observations, Strategies and Experiences Of a Woman Anthropologist Among The Military In Brazil

This presentation aims to explore the relationship between the researcher and the researched perceptions in ethnographic approaches of the military in Brazil, showing methodological features and general practices in this field, together with observations from my own background and experiences of research in military organizations from southeastern and north of the country. The way the military reality is classified and arranged is, to some extent, revealed in contacts between anthropologists and military personnel which are initially marked by the experience of the anthropologists’ perception as "civilians", i.e. “outsiders” of the “military world/environment”.

There are a lot of positions and relations being built and acquired in the development of research, that refer to the poles “military / civilian”, and that, far from being fixed categories, reveal themselves as relational and contextual regarding the role of the researcher (Castro & Leirner, 2009). By addressing issues such as women in the Armed Forces and military families in my studies, this paper aims to compare the entry in the fieldwork into units that are military academies in relation to other garrisons, as border platoons in the Brazilian Amazon. I will present the strategies for approaching and contact, positions acquired in the research context (experience as a researcher, woman and "friend of the Army") and extend the reflection to the gender issue that permeates my research trajectory.