The necropolis and the reinforced concrete: anthropological and historical reflections about apartheids between Brasília and Johannesburg

abstract

This paper compares the development of the cities of Brasília (Brazil) and Johannesburg (South Africa) through the analysis of event and everyday dualisms, as well as life and non-life. Based on a historical methodology and in the light of anthropological theories, we indicate how the constitution of these two apartheid spaces, these events and everyday life, are related through the realization of eugenic utopias that reify people already racialized in colonization. People who still have a dubious function of object and abject. Thus, we point the cement as an actor of the technosphere in the Negrocene, as Malcon Ferdinand suggested and, in the calculation of its transformation into concrete, we see how indispensable people (lives) read by capitalism/colonialism as commodities (non-life), are extracted from the residues of colonial political arrangements. Finally, we conceptualize modern cities as necropolis without forgetting that the alternatives to colonialism, presented by black histories, may indicate different experiences of what body and space are.

keywords
racism; apartheid; event; everyday life; Negrocene