The dissertation of our member Sarah Lempp is now published online. The dissertation ethnographically examines a specific aspect of the Brazilian affirmative action policies: so-called hetero-identification commissions that have to decide whether candidates who applied for a quota vacancy for Black persons should be accepted as such. Drawing on field research conducted between 2016 and 2018, Lempp analyzes how race as a category of difference is enacted in the course of these classification practices as well as in the administrative and legal practices surrounding them. Throughout the thesis, a special focus lies on the idea of the ‘social gaze’ – that is, on the idea that the commissions would have to look at the candidates ‘with the eyes of society’ in order to decide whether a person should be accepted for a quota vacancy. Each chapter of the thesis analyzes a specific aspect of the contradictory and meandering process of operationalizing this social gaze. Chapter 2 shows that there are different versions of Blackness at play in Brazil, which makes the objective of the commissions – namely to produce a clean and uncontested version of Blackness – extremely difficult, if not impossible. And yet, the commissions attempt to do precisely that, as is discussed in Chapter 3 by analyzing the work of an interministerial working group that had the task to regulate the hetero-identification commissions. Chapter 4 analyzes how the ‘bureaucratic ritual’ set up by the interministerial working group played out within the concrete assessment work of the hetero-identification commissions. Chapter 5 examines how three ‘borderline cases’ whose classification as quota candidates became the matter of controversy tried to navigate the specific social/skilled gaze of the commissions and what consequences the rejection as quota candidates had for them. In the concluding Chapter 6, Lempp reflects on the election of right-wing extremist Jair Bolsonaro as president of Brazil and analyzes the open rejection of quota policies as a key element of the ideology of Bolsonarismo. Subsequently, she reflects on the mode of anthropological critique adopted in this thesis. Linking postcolonial approaches within Science and Technology Studies with the research fields of classificatory practices, the anthropology of bureaucracy, and citizenship studies, the thesis provides a dense praxiographic analysis of the doing of race in a specific local context and thus makes an important contribution to the anthropological study of race.

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