Abstract
The present paper is a reflection on the work of social scientists, and in particular anthropologists, in conducting studies for the environmental licensing of large scale projects in Brazil. The focus is on the relationships established between these professionals, the consultants, and the populations affected by said large developments and listed in the studies carried out for their licensing, the affected populations. I aim to demonstrate that such studies are not ethnographic in nature, since they are characterized by the radicalisation of the mastery and use of temporal categories by the consultant for the classification of the affected populations. It is a relationship marked by a strong power asymmetry, given the presumption of the inexorability of the execution of the project.
Keywords
Ethnography; Fieldwork; large scale projects; environmental licensing