Look What I Wrote On My Shirt

Welcome to my new blog, dedicated to my observations of everyday life in São Paulo.  My name is Jay Sosa, and I am a PhD student in sociocultural anthropology.  I am currently conducting research in São Paulo, Brazil on (1) how LGBT activists and businesses utilize urban space and mass media circulation to generate publicity and (2) how such publicity affects the lives of LGBT people in the city.  In order to conduct this research, I am using a technique called “ethnography,” where I will live in my “fieldsite” (i.e. São Paulo), participate in and observe organizations that charge themselves with generating such publicity.  I will also interview and interact with large swaths of people in São Paulo to see what effects (if any) these organizations have. 

Ethnography has been called by anthropologist Clifford Geertz as “deep hanging out,” and earlier by anthropologist Brosinow Malinowski as an attempt to record the “imponderabilia of everyday life.”  By ‘imponderabilia,’ Malinowski means the innumerable cultural facts, understandings and interpretations that shade any event with a particular meaning.  He calls these underlying understandings ‘imponderabilia’ precisely because they are too immense and too subtle to catalogue and delineate.   For Malinowski, the best way to analyze a social phenomenon is to grasp it in all its detail and adjoining context and witness it as it occurs and where it occurs.  That is, ethnography is something you do in situ, and the ethnographer’s knowledge about impoderabilia is acquired over (or unfolds through) time. 

The real shame of trying to capture everyday life and its imponderabilia is that one ends up observing and thinking about much more than one’s research subject proper.  Or, put another way, one ends up amassing too much contextual information than could ever be fully expounded upon in a research paper or book.  That is where this blog comes in (for me).  I plan to write about things that may seem totally unrelated to the research objectives I outlined above.  Nevertheless, in keeping with the theme of imponderabilia, such details may provide crucial details in trying to explain why my observations of LGBT publicity are ethnographically important. 

And, this is where I will rely on you, dear reader, for your attention and your responsiveness.  During the month or so that I have been here, many everyday minutia have piqued my interest.  And I will be sharing these things in the coming days, weeks, and months.  But I also want to know what piques your interest too.  What should I seek out?  What is worth exploring more?  What do you want to know?

Many of my initial thoughts have to do with the city’s architecture, since a large part of my three weeks here were spent walking around parts of the city.  The next few posts will most likely include:

Sidewalks (I mean, it’s the title of the blog right)

Municipal parks

Shopping Arcades (yes, São Paulo still has a few, and yes, I have pretensions of being Walter Benjamin)

VIP (pronounced ‘veepey’) culture

Bicycles

Subway Expansion

Sound Pollution

Laundry and the Middle Class