Abstract
This text presents and transcribes an interview with the anthropologist Gilberto Velho, published in 1978 in Rádice magazine. The document provides a unique condensation of some of the main issues that permeated the agenda of the nascent urban anthropology in Rio de Janeiro, with a particular emphasis on its approach to psychological knowledge (psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis) under the aegis of the individual/society problematic. In the interview, conducted a few days after the First International Symposium of IBRAPSI (Brazilian Institute of Psychoanalysis, Groups and Institutions), the anthropologist suggests that the relation between anthropology and psychoanalysis established in this context was far from a pacific alliance. Rather, it was a critical exercise that, from the comparative point of view of the social sciences, destabilized the universalistic assumptions of “psi” knowledge and the individualistic worldview involved in its dissemination.
Keywords
Gilberto Velho; Rádice; urban anthropology; individualism; psychoanalysis
