Abstract
This text presents the interviews conducted with two of Anthony Leeds’s principal collaborators and interlocutors: Elizabeth Leeds and Luiz Antonio Machado da Silva. Through their own trajectories and encounters with the anthropologist, the interviews complement each other by discussing the training of social scientists in the United States and Brazil; the work of the international agencies in favelas during the 1960s; and Leeds’s leading role in shaping fieldwork in Brazilian cities and the research agenda of urban anthropology in Latin America. They also foreground his collective and dialogical work methodology, characterized by the exchange of experiences and by the horizontality of labour and social relations with peers and with favela residents. Likewise they stress the contemporary relevance of his questioning of views that emphasize the poverty and victimhood of favela residents, pointing instead to their skills, and that focus on the isolation of the urban question, rather than studying the topic in terms of its interactions as a whole.
Keywords:
Anthony Leeds; ecological interactions; urban studies; urban Anthropology; favela