BETWEEN BELONGING AND ESTRANGEMENT: INHABITING THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN CIVILIAN AND MILITARY WORLDS

Abstract

This article proposes a sociological reflection on the possibilities for knowledge generated by prolonged immersion in a position situated between the civilian and military worlds, resulting from three decades of work as a civilian faculty member at the Brazilian Air Force Academy (AFA). Drawing on a perspective of self-socioanalysis inspired by Pierre Bourdieu and on Helena Carreiras’s sociology of reflexivity in the military sphere, the article problematizes the boundary position occupied by those who analyze their own professional environment. The empirical material for this reflexive trajectory derives from previous longitudinal research conducted as part of the author’s doctoral research, from the texts resulting from that research, and from observations accumulated after the publication of those works. Familiarity with military routines is denaturalized through the contributions of Gilberto Velho and Celso Castro, while the irreducible sense of estrangement—stemming from the condition of being a woman, a civilian, and a faculty member in the humanities within the military environment—is analyzed through the work of Erving Goffman, Howard Becker, and Jeanne Favret-Saada. By problematizing the researcher’s own position and asking what a position that is simultaneously close to, yet not fully belonging to, the field makes it possible to see, the article concludes that partial belonging and simultaneous estrangement constitute neither methodological obstacles nor privileges. Rather, they configure the very conditions of possibility for a specific sociological understanding of the symbolic boundaries that structure relations among the state, military institutions, and society.