Ethnographic present and “museographic present”

the Museu do Futebol by an urban anthropologist

Abstract

This paper articulates method suggestions formulated from the accumulation of ethnographic experiences during decades in the field of the fan practices with the most recent work of Daniela do Amaral Alfonsi, technical director of the Museu do Futebol (Soccer Museum), who was awarded with a doctoral title in the Postgraduate Program on Social Anthropology at USP, and whose final evaluation I took part. From the notion of anthropological person in urban contexts, which is discussed in the first part of the article, I have extracted the concept of “memory other”. In the second part, I establish kind of dialogue with the thesis taking my argument that was written in the occasion of her defense. Among other things, Alfonsi approaches the locus of the Museum in the context of “museological experiments” in sports, and from my point of consideration, I establish a debate with her research and the professional condition experienced “up close and inside” by the anthropologist - museologist. Such debate about the “Soccer Museum” in the museology scene offers itself critically in relation to the conception that museums would be memory - inducing centers in the invention of what I call here “museographic present”, in analogy to the disturbing implications contained in the current expression of “ethnographic present”.