Walter Benjamin, leitor das cidades: linhagens da antropologia urbana

Abstract

In this dissertation, I analyze, within the scope of Walter Benjamin’s work, what I call urban operators. These are ways through which the author wrote about European cities, where he lived or by which he passed, in his wanderings, journeys or exiles. Thus, the three urban operators identified in his work, the “fragment”, the “flâneur” and the “memory”, are analyzed in the first chapters of this dissertation, through the examination of benjaminians’ texts that has the city as a theme. I argue these operators may serve as epistemological tools to the current studies in the field of urban anthropology, so that in the end of this work, I try to articulate my first analysis with a very recent anthropological literature, in order to demonstrate the potentiality of Walter Benjamin`s work to new reflexions on the ethnographic practice in the big metropolis of the twenty first century